Ovid Born: Mythology's Master Storyteller

Publius Ovidius Naso was born on March 20, 43 BC, in Sulmo, a small town in the Apennine Mountains roughly ninety miles east of Rome. He became the most widely read Roman poet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and his Metamorphoses shaped Western art, literature, and imagination more profoundly than any single work of classical literature except the Aeneid. Ovid's father sent him to Rome to study rhetoric and law, the traditional preparation for a political career. Ovid excelled at rhetoric but abandoned the legal path almost immediately, declaring that whatever he tried to write turned into verse. He studied under the leading rhetoricians of the Augustan age and began publishing poetry in his late teens, gaining fame with the Amores, a collection of love elegies that was witty, irreverent, and sexually explicit by Roman standards. His early works established him as Rome's most entertaining poet. The Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a mock-didactic poem offering instruction on seduction and romantic relationships, scandalized conservative Roman society and may have contributed to his eventual exile. The Heroides, fictional letters from mythological women to their absent lovers, invented a literary form that influenced epistolary fiction for centuries. The Metamorphoses, completed around 8 AD, was Ovid's masterwork: a continuous narrative poem of approximately 12,000 lines recounting over 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar. The poem's scope, wit, and narrative energy made it the primary channel through which Greek mythology passed into Western European culture. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, and virtually every major Western writer drew from it. In 8 AD, Emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis (modern Constanta, Romania) on the Black Sea coast, citing the Ars Amatoria and an unspecified "error" that scholars have debated for two millennia. Ovid spent the remaining decade of his life in exile, writing mournful poems begging for recall that never came. He died around 17 or 18 AD in Tomis, his Metamorphoses already becoming the book that would outlast the empire that banished him.