Gallus seems to have done much to establish the conventional figure of the poet as the broken-hearted lover the allusions in Vergilâs Eclogue 10 suggest that in one poem he portrayed himself wandering in the woods and carving his and Lycoris' names onto tree-trunks. Almost none of Gallusâ verses survive, but they depicted his affair with a famous actress of the day named Cytheris, whom he calls Lycoris. 70 to 27 or 26 BC), who seems to have written four books of love poetry exclusively in elegiac couplets, probably called Amores. 84 to 54 BC), wrote not only epigrams, but longer poems in elegiac couplets he also gave to many of his poems a unifying story, about a difficult love affair with the woman he called Lesbia. The elegiac couplet (on which see the next section) was originally used, first by the Greeks and then by the Romans, for short epigrams, often on erotic subjects. In writing poems in elegiac couplets about a love affair (or affairs) Ovid was firmly within an established tradition. All his surviving works except the Metamorphoses are in elegiac couplets. Two lost works are a drama, the Medea, and a translation of Aratusâ astronomical poem, the Phaenomena. ![]() During his years of exile he wrote the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. He also wrote the Fasti, concerned with the religious calendar, and the Ibis, an invective against an unnamed enemy. Ovidâs greatest work is the Metamorphoses, an epic poem on mythological transformations. His other early works, all largely concerned with love affairs and/or women, are difficult to date precisely, and no doubt overlapped with the writing of the Amores: the Heroides is a collection of letters written by fictional heroines the fragmentary Medicamina Faciei Femineae concerns female cosmetics the Ars Amatoria is a didactic poem about how to conduct love affairs, and the Remedia Amoris is about how to end them. These poems were originally published in five books, but were subsequently republished in the edition we now have, in three books, sometime after 16 BC. Ovid apparently began writing his Amores in 26 or 25 BC he tells us that he wrote poems about the lover he calls Corinna as a young man of 17 or 18. Despite much pleading Ovid was never allowed to return from Tomis, and died there in (probably) AD 17. According to Ovid there were two reasons for his exile: his Ars Amatoria had given offense, and he had committed a mysterious error, perhaps connected with the imperial house (Augustus' granddaughter Julia was exiled for adultery in the same year). In AD 8 he was banished by Augustus to the remote Greek city of Tomis (modern Constanta), on the Black Sea coast in what is now Romania. 1 Statue of Ovid, in Constanta, Romania (ancient Tomis). Ovid based these tales on Greek myths, albeit often with stylistic adaptations.Fig. ![]() Not unlike many works of classical literature this has been a rich cultural resource ever since including authors from Chaucer and Shakespeare to, more recently Ted Hughes, and composers from Gluck and Offenbach to Britten. The work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.I read this both with the Sunday Morning Group and as the text for a University of Chicago weekend retreat. Apollo comes in for particular ridicule as Ovid shows how irrational love can confound the god out of reason. Indeed, the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated, and made ridiculous by Amor, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon, who is the closest thing this putative mock-epic has to a hero. ![]() The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is love-be it personal love or love personified in the figure of Amor (Cupid). Completed in AD 8, it is recognized as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature. The Metamorphoses is a poem in fifteen books by the Roman poet Ovid describing the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework.
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