Ovid (PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO), born March 20, 43 B.C., at Sulmo, the present Solmona, in the Abruzzi, was the younger of two sons, both of whom were brought early to Rome by their father, a well-to-do eques, who placed them under the most famous rhetoricians of the day, to be trained for the bar. His brother Lucius died in his twentieth year, and Publius, in spite of extraordinary forensic aptitude, gave up his whole time and energies to poetry. He filled, indeed, a few legal posts, but soon abandoned them, and, like other young Romans of his class, repaired to Athens, whence he crossed to Asia Minor, and on the return journey lingered a while in Sicily. While still a youth he married, but almost immediately separated from his wife, only to take another, with whom he lived scarcely more happily. By her he had a daughter, Perilla, herself a poetess. He married yet again, and this, his third wife, Fabia, gained and returned his best affections, and, unlike her two predecessors, survived him. His life at his country-seat, among congenial friends and in correspondence with the most distinguished of his contemporaries, was an enviable one. Messala Corvinus, a highly cultured poet, exercised on his rapidly developing powers a salutary influence, reinforced by that of the younger Macer, author of the Ante-Homerica and Post-Homerica, of Propertius, the epic poet Ponticus, and others. He had no acquaintance personally with Tibullus or Virgil, both of whom died 19 B.C.
His first literary success was his tragedy Medea, of which Quintilian had a high opinion. Then came his Epistolæ or Heroides, imaginary love-letters from ladies of the heroic foretime to their lords; but in his next publication he touched the sphere he has made peculiarly his own—his Amores, so called from their subject-matter. Here he had Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius for exemplars, and in wit and wayward fancy, less often in soul and passion, he excelled them all. His Medicamina Faciei (a practical poem on artificial aids to personal beauty) seems to have been preliminary to his true master-work, the Ars Amandi, or Ars Amatoria, in three books, which appeared about 1 B.C., followed by a subsidiary book entitled Remedia Amoris—the former teaching how to win and preserve the love of woman, the latter how to relieve the rebuffs and disappointments encountered in the attempt. These publications close the first period of the poet's activity: the second opens with the Metamorphoses, in fifteen books, and with the Fasti, designed to be in twelve, of which six only were completed. The Metamorphoses, according to Bernhardt, surpasses all that antiquity has to show in brilliant and felicitous metrical narration. The Fasti, a contemporary work, forms in elegiac distichs a poetic commentary on the calendar, wherein the origin of Roman feast-days, divinities, and religious observances is set forth. Midway in its composition he was banished (8 A.D.); but shortly before he died he worked at a revised version of it in order to dedicate it, thus recast, to Germanicus—the original having been inscribed to Augustus. But he did not carry out this project. As it stands the Fasti seeks to ennoble the policy of Augustus, and, by revivifying their forgotten religious ceremonies, to re-awaken in the Roman people the sentiment out of which these ceremonies sprung.
Posterity has failed to fathom the true ground of Ovid's banishment—the poet himself refraining studiously from all but the vaguest allusions to it. He admits that he deserved to be so punished, but he also declares that he was more the witness than the author of the offence. Whether he was concerned in some intrigue of the licentious Julia, or in one of the many scandals connected with Agrippa Postumus, will never be cleared up. Nothing could move Augustus to a reprieve of the sentence; so in the late autumn, 9 A.D., he left Rome, as 'relegatus, non exul,' for Tomi, on the Euxine (close to the present Kustendji). There, at the outskirts of Roman civilisation, severed from wife, daughter, relatives, and friends, with only the nomadic Scythians for neighbours, he languished out the last years of his life. Tiberius remained as deaf to his appeals for mercy as Augustus, and there he died in 17 A.D. This period constitutes the third of his poetic activity—in which his genius, bereft of its gaiety, responds to his invocation only in the minor notes of melancholy. Already on his last journey from Rome he began the elegies which he published in five books, by name the Tristia. Similar in tone and theme are the four books of the Epistole ex Ponto, differing only in this from the Tristia that they are addressed to a particular friend in Rome—a step he did not venture on in the composition of the latter. His Ibis, written in imitation of Callimachus, in which he invokes destruction on an enemy unknown, and his Hali-eutica, a poem, extant only in fragments, on the fish of the Euxine, complete the list of his remains.
In mastery of metrical form and in creative fecundity Ovid outsoars all the poets of the Augustan cycle. From his youth up he was so favourably circumstanced that he passed quickly through the successive stages of his development till he reached the highest perfection of which he was capable. The struggle between the new poetry and the old had issued in the subjection of the latter, and he entered immediately on the inheritance prepared for him by others. This he carried to its culmination, in finish as in form. He stands at the limit of the Augustan without by a hair's breadth encroaching on the Silver age. The poetic circle in which he lived, the beau monde of Rome in which he moved, the favour of the court in which he basked, all contributed to mould his genius and stamp its products with the hall-mark of 'society.' In that world he has always been a favourite, contriving as he did to combine learning with lightness of touch, force with finish, variety with order. He knew the vie intime of the contemporary world, in its real as in its conventional forms, and he could sweep the collective chords of human passion, from love to hate, with the assured boldness of a master. He is the most voluminous of Latin poets, and in this characteristic may be found the cause of his chief defects—his self-repetition, his too frequent echoings of former felicities, the monotony of his cadences, particularly in the elegiac distich. In this metre, where the thought rarely overflows the two-line limit, he has developed a sententiousness in which Quintilian traces his forensic education.
There are old translations of the Metamorphoses by Golding (1565), and Garth (q.v.), and others; and an admirable one by King (1871). Complete editions of the text are by Merkel (1853) and Riese (1872-74); of the Heroides, by A. Palmer (1874), Ibis, by Robinson Ellis (1882), and Tristia, by S. G. Owen (1890). See the judgments of Bernhardt, Teuffel, and Ribbeck; also Zingerle's Ovid und sein Verhältnis zu den Vorgängern (3 vols. 1869-71), and Rev. A. Church's study in 'Ancient Classics for English Readers' (1876).