matthias-rex: historyfilia: Ovid Eugène Delacroix - Ovide chez les Scythes (Ovid among the Sc

matthias-rex:historyfilia:OvidEugène Delacroix - Ovide chez les Scythes (Ovid among the Scythians)Ovid was truly a man of letters. Sophisticated and technically brilliant, he wrote poetry effortlessly. Although not wealthy, he was sufficiently well-to-do to dispense with a patron and he remained outside the circles of Maecenas and Messalla. He began as an elegiac poet of love. His collection known as the Amores (Love Affairs) follows the examples of Tibullus and Propertius, for they tell of romantic encounters, but whereas the loves of those two writers probably existed, Ovid’s lover, Corinna, probably did not exist outside literature. While he was writing the Amores he was working on a more ambitious work, the Heroides (Heroines), letters in verse by women of mythology addressed to their husbands or lovers. Among others, he imagines Dido writing to Aeneas, Ariadne writing Theseus from Naxos where he had abandoned her, and Medea writing Jason after she has learned of his plans to jilt her and marry the king of Corinth’s daughter. Ovid then turned to didactic poetry, but his subject was not a respectable one like agriculture. Ovid wrote the Art of Love in three books, the first two instructing men in the art of seduction and the third showing women who planned to be courtesans how to make the most profit from their husbands. He followed this up with a fourth book, the Remedium Amoris, on how to fall out of love. Ovid’s greatest work is undoubtedly his Metamorphoses (Changes of Shape). No one believed in the ancient legends anymore, but they were still subject matter for literature, and Ovid decided to string them together on the common theme of changes of shape. He retells myths that told how heroes and heroines changed their shapes, like Actaeon who was changed into a stag, or Alkyone who was changed into the halcyon bird. The resulting epic is a tapestry of myth, told with wit and all the tricks that an author versed in rhetoric could muster. Then came his exile. Augustus relegated him to Tomis, modern Costanza in Rumania, for reasons unknown. He burned his Metamorphoses, but fortunately copies were already in circulation and so it survived, though unfinished. Exile did not break Ovid, though he never saw his beloved Rome again. He wrote five books of Tristia (Poems of Sorrow)—the first book was complete before he reached Tomis. He continued these with his Letters from Pontus; “Pontus” was the name for the Black Sea. He wrote Ibis, an attack on an imaginary figure which was probably written as a psychological release, and a poem on the fish in the Black Sea. The major work of his exile was the Fasti, a versified Roman calendar of religious festivals. Ovid finished the first six months of the year and may have hoped that his interest in Roman religion would soften Augustus’ heart. If that was his intent, he must have been disappointed in the result. Ovid died in exile.Ovid was truly one of the greatest writers of all time. Truly a master of language. The Metamorphoses is without a doubt a testament to the literary power of the human spirit, especially in the original latin. One of the great works of all history.I agree! Metamorphoses is one of my favourite roman pieces of literature! -- source link

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