Publius Ovidius Naso, known simply as Ovid, was born on the 20th of March 43 BC in the Apennine valley town of Sulmo, now modern-day Sulmona, Italy. He was the son of an important equestrian family, the gens Ovidia, and was destined by his father to study rhetoric and practice law. Yet, Ovid possessed an emotional nature that rejected the argumentative pole of rhetoric, leading him to abandon his legal career after his brother died at the age of 20. He traveled to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily, eventually holding minor public posts such as one of the tresviri capitales, before resigning to pursue poetry around 29 BC. His first recitation occurred in 25 BC when he was 18, marking the beginning of a literary career that would make him one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature, alongside Virgil and Horace. He was part of a circle centered on the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and was friends with poets like Macer, Propertius, and Ponticus, though he only barely met Virgil and Tibullus. Ovid married three times and had one daughter, but his life was about to be upended by a single decree from the Emperor Augustus.
The Art Of Seduction
Ovid spent the first 25 years of his literary career writing poetry in elegiac meter with erotic themes, establishing himself as the fourth member of the Roman love elegists after Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius. His earliest extant work is thought to be the Heroides, a collection of letters from mythological heroines to their absent lovers, published around 19 BC. This was followed by the Amores, a series of erotic poems addressed to a lover named Corinna, which was originally five books but was redacted to three books by 3 BC. The Amores changed the genre by making Love, or Cupid, the leader of the elegies rather than the poet, using love as a metaphor for poetry itself. His next major work was the Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love, a three-book manual on seduction and intrigue published in 1 BC. This didactic poem taught men how to seduce women and how to keep a lover, and then taught women how to seduce men, effectively arming them against his own teaching. The work was so popular that it became a target for the Emperor Augustus, who viewed it as subversive to his moral legislation promoting monogamous marriage. Ovid also wrote the Remedia Amoris, a cure for the love he taught, and the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, a fragmentary work on women's beauty treatments. These works earned him immense popularity during his lifetime, but they also laid the groundwork for his eventual downfall.The Poem And The Mistake
In AD 8, Ovid was banished to Tomis, the capital of the newly organized province of Moesia on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of Emperor Augustus without any participation of the Senate or a Roman judge. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a carmen et error, meaning a poem and a mistake, but he never disclosed the specifics of the crime, leaving scholars to speculate for centuries. The poem likely refers to the Ars Amatoria, which addressed the serious crime of adultery and appeared subversive to the Emperor's Julian marriage laws of 18 BC. However, the long time that elapsed between the publication of the poem and the exile suggests that Augustus used the work as a mere justification for something more personal. Some theories suggest Ovid knew of a conspiracy involving the Emperor's grandchildren, Julia the Younger and Agrippa Postumus, who were also banished around the same time. Julia's husband, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was put to death for a conspiracy against Augustus, and Ovid's potential knowledge of this plot may have been the true cause of his exile. The Emperor's grandchildren were banished, and Ovid was left to die in a remote, barbaric land, far from the libraries and culture he loved.