4. Metamorphoses

'Metamorphoses; focuses on the Metamorphoses, widely considered Ovid’s masterpiece. The Metamorphoses is a collection of transformation stories, but the principle of change characterizes every layer of the poem. The Metamorphoses is Ovid’s only epic poem, thus in form a departure from the elegiac tradition he otherwise champions. But Ovid’s epic is devoted to destabilizing the order and certainties that conventional epic, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, was designed to uphold, and metamorphosis as a theme is well adapted to advance that end. The metamorphic character of the Metamorphoses is not restricted to explicit descriptions of shape-shifting, but affects its narrative form, even its generation of meaning. The Metamorphoses is thus Ovid’s most ambitious exploration of the nature of poetry, an astonishingly sophisticated performance, but it is better known as a collection of brilliantly memorable tales, Midas’ golden touch, Narcissus, Icarus, Pygmalion, a tour de force in storytelling. The poem has in fact served as the authoritative encyclopaedia of Graeco-Roman folklore. The freshness and vibrancy of Ovid's storytelling has a lot to do with the irreverent and self-conscious approach he adopts to writing an epic poem.

6. Exile poetry

In 8/9 CE Ovid was sent by the emperor Augustus to the town of Tomi in modern Romania, at the time at the far edge of the Roman Empire. 'Exile poetry' focuses on the Tristia (Sad Songs) and the Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), in total nine books of laments in which Ovid begs to be restored to Rome, or at least to be moved to a more congenial location. The main development between Tristia and ExPonto is Ovid's formal adoption in the later series of a letter format natural to poems sent over a long distance. The circumstances of this poetry, and particularly the identification of the addressee in the Ex Ponto, allows a degree of poignancy rare elsewhere is his poetry. Certainly, for all his claims to the contrary, Ovid’s poetic powers do not abandon him on the Black Sea, and what has made Ovid's exile poetry one of the most influential parts of his oeuvre is the rarity of a classical poet offering an intimately personal account of estrangement and alienation. In turn, these poems provided perhaps unexpected inspiration for modern writers exercised by themes of separation.

5. The Fasti

‘The Fasti’ is a study of the Fasti, Ovid’s poetic version of the Roman calendar. Each book of this poem corresponds to a month of the Roman calendar, and the books, like the Roman calendars they imitate, detail the religious observances associated with individual days. The Fasti is Ovid’s most topical poem, indirectly inspired by the great calendrical reform of Julius Caesar, from which our modern calendar derives. Of all Ovid’s poetry, then, this brings him closest to the concerns of Augustus, heir to Caesar, and his reformist regime. It is the most Roman of his poems, too, directly engaged with the religious, and hence political, culture of the city, and its sacred and secular topography. At the same time, this chapter explains, Ovid reverts to elegiac form from the epic form of the Metamorphoses, and while the poem contains much in the way of celebration of Augustus’ Rome, Ovid’s trademark wit and self-awareness are undiminished, and hints of a more dangerous irreverence are to be found.

1. Introduction

'Introduction: P. Ovidius Naso' provides a background to the poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, describing the political circumstances of his life, a momentous shift from civil war to autocracy, and his own elevated social origins in the Italian elite. Ovid inherited a rich literary tradition and the conventions of genre and metre of Roman poetry. Contemporary poets such as Propertius, Horace, and Virgil, had a huge influence on Ovid, as did the earlier Greek poet Callimachus. There are many important themes in the story of Ovid’s life and poetry, his restless commitment to innovation, complex relationship with the emperor Augustus, and his irrepressible wit to be studied. In poetry and in life, Ovid courted controversy, which both brought him celebrity and contributed to the banishment from Rome that he suffered at the height of his popularity.

3. Letters of the heroines

'Letters of the heroines' eplores Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum (Letters of the Heroines) or Heroides (Heroines), love letters sent by famous mythical women to their errant lovers. The Heroides is still love poetry, and the women are often reminiscent of the lover in the Amores, but the women and their lovers are in most cases figures from the heroic age, and this makes the collection an important link between the Amores and the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s most ambitious fusion of the erotic and the mythological. The epistolary form of these poems is vitally important, as is the influence of the rhetorical training that Ovid and his fellow Romans had undertaken, an experience that encouraged a taste for memorable turns of phrase. The debt to Hellenistic literature, Callimachus in particular, is especially clear when Ovid returns to the format, probably at the end of his career: the ‘Double Heroides’ are exchanges of letters between a male and female correspondent, and the dynamic of the form is interestingly transformed. The legacy of the Heroides is worth a mention, it is less consistently popular than Ovid’s other poetry, but was his most celebrated work in the 18th century, and an important model for female self-expression that carried with it the heft and authority of classical antiquity.

2. Love poetry

'Love poetry' examines Ovid’s ventures into the sub-genre of love-elegy and describes the development of this exclusively Roman literary form over the previous two generations, and the conventions that Ovid had inherited. Ovid wrote three books on the subject of love, these are Amores (Loves), Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), a meeting of love-elegy and the popular ancient tradition of didactic poetry. The Amores was the collection that launched Ovid’s poetic career, and it set the terms for the rest of it, marking him out as the leading proponent of elegiac verse in Rome. In his approach to love-elegy we also see a style that will characterize much of his later work, playful and intensely self-aware. The Amores is less poetry about love than poetry about love poetry, its primary appeal lying in witty manipulation of poetic convention. Meanwhile, the Ars Amatoria teaches men and women how to find and keep a lover, and then the Remedia Amoris explains how to ‘unlearn’ the lessons of the Ars.