Ovid

Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE) - his full name was Publius Ovidius Naso - is one of the greatest of the Roman poets, famed particularly for his poems about love. His name is pronounced with a short 'o', as in 'pot', and has the stress on the first syllable - IPA: /'ɒvɪd/. The adjective from Ovid is Ovidian, with the stress on the second syllable - IPA: /ɒ ('or əʊ) 'vɪd ɪ ən/.

Ovid was born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), a town in the Abruzzo (i.e., eastern central) region of Italy. His family were members of the minor nobility, belonging to the order of equites or knights, i.e., the second rank of nobility below the senatorial order. Ovid was educated in Rome, where he studied Law and Rhetoric, but completed his education in Athens, and as a young man travelled in Sicily and Asia Minor.

For many years Ovid worked in various positions in the Roman legal system, but he had independent means and was able to devote much of his time to poetry. He was a close friend of the elegiac poets Propertius (?50-?15 BCE) and Tibullus (?54-?19 BCE).

In 8 CE Ovid incurred the displeasure of the emperor Augustus, who banished him to the town of Tomis (modern Costanza, in Romania) on the Black Sea coast. The emperor disliked the eroticism of Ovid's poem Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) - see below - but, more significantly, considered that in some matter Ovid had behaved in a way detrimental to the interests of the imperial family - what it was that Ovid had done or failed to do has remained a mystery. Despite several pleas to Augustus to be allowed to return to Rome Ovid spent the final years of his life in exile in Tomis.

Ovid is the author of four major poetical works:

• Amores, published in 16 BCE, is a collection of love poems.

• Heroides is a collection of 21 poems in the form of letters, almost all of them written by noble women to absent husbands or lovers, e.g., Penelope to Ulysses (Letter I), Phaedra to Hippolytus (Letter IV), Dido to Aeneas (Letter VII), and Medea to Jason (Letter XII).

• Ars Amatoria, published in 1 CE or soon after, is a mock treatise on the 'art' of love, in which Ovid, speaking as an 'expert', gives advice - in Books I and II to men, and in Book III to women - about the ways to find and behave towards a lover.

• Metamorphoses is perhaps the best known and most influential of Ovid's poetical works. It is a collection of stories, most of them based on Greek or Roman myth or legend, but all of them involving changes of shape or bodily form - a theme which is announced in the opening lines of the poem:

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas

corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)

adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi

ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.

(Translation: My mind is set to tell of bodies changed into new forms. Gods, look favourably on what I have undertaken - for you have brought about these changes - and bring my poem down without a break from the first beginning of the world to my own time.)

The Amores, the Heroides, and the Ars Amatoria are written in elegiac couplets, while the Metamorphoses is written in dactylic hexameters.