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Publius Ovidius Naso

2008

FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2009 (5:39 AM)

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Publius Ovidius Naso

(I'm feeling okay)

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17 or 18) was a Roman poet who wrote about love, seduction, and mythological transformation.
Ovid was born in Sulmo (Sulmona), in an Apennine valley, east of Rome, to an equestrian family, and was educated in Rome.
In AD 8, Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis, on the Black Sea, for political reasons. Ovid wrote that his crime was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake", [4] claiming that his crime was worse than murder, [5] more harmful than poetry. [6][7] The Emperor's grandchildren, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger, were banished around the time of his banishment; Julia's husband, Lucius Aenilius Paullus, was put to death for conspiracy against Augustus; Ovid might have known of that. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BC were fresh in the Roman mind. These promoted monogamous marriage to increase the population's birth rate. Ovid's writing concerned the serious crime of adultery, which was punishable by banishment.
In exile, he wrote two poetry collections titled Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, illustrating his sadness and desolation. Being far from Rome, he had no access to libraries, thus might have been forced to abandon the Fasti poem about the Roman calendar, of which exist only the first six books — January through June. In the Epistulae ex Ponto he claims friendship with the natives of Tomis (in the Tristia they are frightening barbarians) and to have written a poem in their language (Ex P. 4.13.19-20). And yet he pined for Rome and for his third wife, as many of the poems are to her. Some are also to the Emperor Augustus, whom he calls Caesar and God. Yet others are to himself, to friends in Rome, and sometimes to the poems themselves, expressing loneliness and hope of recall from banishment or exile. The first two lines of the Tristia communicate his misery:

Parve — nec invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:
ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!

Little book — for I won't hinder you — go on to the city without me:
Alas for me, because your master is not allowed to go with you!
Ovid died at Tomis after some ten years; a statue commemorates him in the Romanian city of Tomis (contemporary Constanta), and, in the 1930 renaming of the town of Ovidiu, where he is allegedly buried. The statue's Latin inscription reads (Tr. 3.3.73-76):

Hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum
Ingenio perii, Naso poeta, meo.
At tibi qui transis, ne sit grave, quisquis amasti,
Dicere: Nasonis molliter ossa cubent.

Here I lie, who played with tender loves,
Naso the poet, killed by my own talent.
O passerby, if you've ever been in love, let it not be too much for you
to say: May the bones of Naso lie gently.

Category: Travel & Places

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