Ovid - a Biography

OVID - Timeline and Major Works

Born: 20th March 43 BCE

First recitation - dated to 25 BCE

Exile - 8 CE

Death - ? 17 or 18 CE ?

HEROIDES - The Heroines

AMORES     - The Loves

MEDICAMINA FACIEI FEMINEAE - Women's Facial Cosmetics

ARS AMATORIA - The Art of Love

REMEDIA AMORIS - The Cure for Love

METAMORPHOSES - Transformations

FASTI - The Festivals

TRISTIA - The Sorrows

EPISTULAE EX PONTO - Letters from the Black Sea

Transcript:

Okay, we have got one of my favourite figures from antiquity to talk about today. We're going to have a lot of fun and for this fun we have one of our special expert contributors. Would you like to introduce yourself please? 

Yeah, my name is Alicia Matz. I earned my PhD in Classics from Boston University in 2024. My dissertation research focus is on the goddess Diana in poetry written under Rome's Emperor Augustus, which our figure today was one of the authors that featured quite prominently in that dissertation. But in addition to Diana, I also love finding how the ancient world is used in modern, usually sci-fi and fantasy. I'm a big Tolkien fan and I like to,  even though he did the Anglo-Saxon Norse mythology stuff, he started as a classicist and so that's my fun side project. 

All of the coolest people are classicists. Yeah, every single one. You see a cool person, they end up being a classicist, unless they wrote Harry Potter. But,  we can talk about that later. So who are we talking about today? 

 Today we're talking about the Roman poet Ovid, or as his full name is Publius Ovidius Naso slash O-Widius because in Latin these are pronounced as W's. He was born the year after Julius Caesar unfortunately met his very bloody end. Literally almost a year after he was,  Julius Caesar was the eyes of March, March 15th, 44, and he was March 20th, 43. The way we would consider his family, they weren't top notch, they weren't the highest elite, he was an equestrian. So an equestrian, the term started as you could class yourself as an equestrian if you had enough money to buy a horse, hence equestrian. But then as the Romans grew wealthier, I'm sure equestrians had much more money than needed to buy a single horse.   

His father started him in oratory early because his father really wanted him to be a lawyer and Ovid turns out really did not want to be a lawyer. He went to oratory school, he was doing all of that with his brother. We don't know anything about his brother until at age 20 his brother died and Ovid said, you know what, I don't want to do this anymore. So he takes a gap year, but by gap year, I mean like he just travels around the world for a while, comes back, does some minor government roles, but nothing that was super important. And then drops all of that at around 25 BCE to become a poet. At least according to his own biography, which anyone who studies ancient Roman poetry knows that every poet makes up a persona. And so Ovid's persona tells us all of this. Did it really happen? Who knows? 

Okay, that's good to know. So we can't trust anything he says about himself. It might be partly fictional, might be entirely fictional?

 Yeah, he's working in a tradition where there's a whole bunch of poets who write love poetry to their girlfriends and all the girlfriends have fake names. And so Ovid's like, I'm going to do that too. And there's tropes that he follows. So did he actually have a girlfriend? We don't know. Or is he just writing about a woman because that's what thing to do at the time was. 

So let's assume that what he says is true. I think that there will be quite a few people that have lived under their parents' expectations and grown up with this whole life path planned for them without their consent. And at some point in their lives thought, no, I'm going to do what I want to do. So I think already, I think he's going to have a few fans amongst our listeners already. 

Yeah. And I mean, I will say, we have this whole poetic persona thing, and we'll talk about this later. I know one of the big things that happened to Ovid was he was exiled. And all of this bibliographical information comes post-exile when he's like, look, I'm a good citizen. Please let me back into Rome. And so I don't think he would make up stuff in genuine pleas. 

What do we know about his early career? What kind of genres is he choosing to write? 

So his very early is emulating poets like Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus who are the big names that we have, who are poetry that it's about a girlfriend. You put the girlfriend under a fake name. Catullus' was inspired by Sappho. And because of that, Ovid's girlfriend is named Corinna, who was another female Greek poet, which is yet again like, did he really have a girlfriend then? But I'm getting ahead of myself because his first work was actually one of what I find more interesting is the Heroides, which are 15 letters from the women of mythology to the men who abandoned them. So it's basically taking all these great heroic figures that Romans are being told to emulate for their values and be like, dude, you abandoned me on an island. I could have died. 

One day we will have an episode just on those letters because they are incredible. But for now, let's just summarize them. So what he's doing, right, is he's taking established stories and just flipping who is telling it, right? He's talking about these abandoned women who are complaining,  this isn't fair. Can we see a little bit of early proto-feminism in there, or is that not what he's doing? 

That's a big question. There's like dissertations written about that because the female perspective on a lot of these things was just discounted in ancient Rome. So to have all these letters from a female perspective is great. But we also have to remember that Ovid is a man writing as a woman. So is he writing a true, like what these women would have truly felt or are they like stereotypical abandoned women stories? Because they're so early, some think that, some people think they could even be just like schoolboy exercises that he did. And so that adds another layer to this where with these school exercises, you're told what emotions to put into there. So we don't know much about the composition background for those poems. 

Okay, so that makes it hard to understand why he's writing them. You've just got to speculate a little bit. Does he carry on writing about women for his entire career? Is this something unusual? 

Kind of… so then he moves on to his Amores, which is the set love poetry. These are, of course, from his perspective, now he is writing about a girlfriend. The girlfriend is stereotypical of the poetry, overbearing, kind of mean to him. There's a lot of reversal of roles, power roles when it comes to like who's in charge of the relationship. But Ovid is first of all,  he's the last of these great poets. He's working with all these tropes. And compared to some of them, his actual relationship with this girlfriend who may or may not have existed is kind of just tame. There is unfortunately one implied rape scene. 

Propertius describes himself at one point, he says, when I wrestle with Cynthia naked, I can compose Iliads. And we don't get that same kind of inspiration from Ovid's girlfriend. 

So he's not caught the same muse from his girlfriend as other poets. 

Yeah. 

What are some of the other things that he's writing? 

The next one that we think was written was fragmentary now, something about beauty treatments for women. It's fragmentary right now, we don't know much. We do know from it that the beauty standard was that women be very pale and therefore they use like white lead to make themselves pale. So he wrote about that. Yet again, we don't know the context about why he's writing about cosmetics for women. The next one that is generally considered chronological is the Ars Amatoria, which is a big one for many reasons, which is basically, here's how to get an extramarital affair. It's not a girlfriend. It's not a wife. It's 'here's how to seduce someone else's girlfriend, keep her for a little while, and then move on to the next girl.'

 It has three books. The first two are literally like, here are some places around Rome where single ladies like to hang out. Here's how to, if you have a, if there's a lady at a dinner party and she's accompanied,  here's some tactics to get her attention. And,  maybe go home, like she'll go home with you instead. So that's the first two books. And he literally says in the very first line, this is not for upstanding women. If you are like, upstanding Roman woman, this poem is not for you. Because the third book is actually aimed at the women who are assumed to be high-class courtesans. Here's how to keep your man happy sexually. Here's how to dress a whole very long section on 'here's the best sex position for your type of body.'

 Wow. 

Not so that you will find pleasure, but so that your boyfriend will find pleasure.

 Okay. So maybe not proto-feminist then. Quite a swerve. 

Yeah. It's actually, unfortunately, if you read Donna Zuckerberg's Not All White Men he is used by pickup artists today and not like the good pickup artists… 

The kind of rapey ones. Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Okay. Well, that's unfortunate for his legacy. 

Yeah. And then following up on that, he wrote a poem that's called The Remeda Amoris. So here's how to fall out of love with this lady after you've fallen in love with her. Because the goal is not monogamy and marriage. The goal is sleep with as many women as you can. 

Right. So the first thing that I'm getting about his personality then is that he was a bit of a slut. 

Yeah.

That's a fair assessment? 

I mean, in his biography, we learned that he had three wives. He was divorced twice by the age of 30. Plus this possible fake real girlfriend. 

As for his pickup guide, do we think that he's out prowling through Rome looking for a quickie up against a column somewhere? Is he actually doing this?

 Probably not. And the assumption is based on that third book aimed at high-class courtesans who would already know this stuff. If you're going for a high-class courtesan, they're going to know how to dress. They're going to know where to pick up people. So it's like a weird guide. Yet again, that could be just imaginative male voyeurism onto what the life of these high-class courtesans is versus an actual manual on how to, well, for the women, how to basically have sex. 

Okay. So, I mean, I said in the beginning, didn't I, that it was one of my favorite characters from history. Maybe you're going to change my mind on that one. 

Well, we'll get to the Metamorphoses, which is upcoming. The Metamorphoses is my favorite work of Ovid's. It's a complete, no, I won't say complete 360 from everything else. The Metamorphoses is a 15-book epic poem that claims to tell all of Greek slash Roman mythology from the beginning of time up until the death of Julius Caesar. And by book, I mean, in the ancient world, a book was how much would fit on a papyrus. So it's a 15 papyrus work. It is very different from, thematically, every single epic. So generally, an epic is following one hero and that hero is doing some major long narrative with some end goal. 

The Metamorphoses is a bunch of different stories connected sometimes just by location. So it'll be like, oh, now that we're in this location, let's talk about another myth that happened here. So there's no main set hero. A lot of the heroes who appear, their stories kind of question that heroic masculinity instead of embracing it. But we know it's meant to be an epic because epic had its own meter and this poem is in that epic meter. So he's taking most of the stories, I mean, mythology is full of a lot of unfortunately rape stories and that's what the majority of these stories are. So it's a lot of stories that are like amatory and like the creepy type of amatory that Ovid kind of does. All under the theme of in the end, someone gets turned into something else, which is why it's called The Metamorphoses. But it's not a sustained narrative about one hero. It's a bunch of different stories. 

Okay. And is that what he was best known for in his lifetime? 

The Metamorphoses is one, I think, and yet again we'll get to the exile and the poem why he thinks he was exiled and that one is what he's quite known for as well. We've already talked about it. So I don't want to give away the Carmen just yet. So, we have this epic poem on amatory themes that he was writing at the same time as another could be considered epic poem because it's all about the Roman calendar and the etiology for all the festivals. So it's very official. It still has some wit in it, but we're literally looking at the legal calendar of Rome. But he wrote that in the elegiac meter. So it's not in the epic meter, it's in the elegiac meter. So he's telling us, I'm taking this big serious topic and putting it in the fun meter. 

So he's able to switch genres. 

Yeah. 

Is that an unusual thing for writers at the time or is he just particularly talented? I won't say unusual. I mean, one of the major contemporaries was Virgil. All of Virgil's poetry is in that epic meter, but some are short. The Eclogues are 10 short poems and then we get the Georgics, which is four books and then the Aeneid, which is 12, but all in that epic meter versus his contemporaries who would also be considered peers who write that elegy. They all do varied elegiac meters. 

Is he the only one who's saying both epic and elegy then? 

Yes. At least that we have extant. We don't know if Propertius or Horace could have... In theory, they both say, I've been asked why I don't do epic and here's why I'm not going to do epic. So they have in their poetry said, I don't want to do these big themes. I want to do the fun stuff. And then we have Ovid who does an epic on the love themes. 

So he's writing at quite an important time for literature in ancient Rome, right? Can you tell us a bit more about when he's writing? We've touched upon some of the people that are considered his peers. How does he kind of fit into the literary group at the time? 

So as I mentioned, he was born the year after Julius Caesar was murdered. And after Julius Caesar was murdered, his adopted son, called Octavian at the time, of course started a civil war to avenge his father. So that was a huge thing like Ovid growing up. I did the math and he would have been around 13 when that civil war ended. And what's important about that is Octavian uses this moment in time and slowly shifts Rome from a republic where there were elected officials to what we would consider an empire. He never called himself emperor. He was the first citizen of the Senate after him. There were consuls that were elected, but that was like more of a figurehead because it was the emperor who was in charge. So we're going from republic to sole rule by one very interesting person who at one point was called Apollo torturer because he was so cruel during the civil wars. But one thing, once the civil wars were over and he's establishing his rule, Augustus wanted to, and I'm going to use a phrase that will kind of make clear the type of person I at least think Augustus was, he wanted to Make Rome Great Again.

 Right. 

He wanted to bring back republican morals because the civil war never would have happened if we had not been so immoral. So he passes a lot of moral legislations including one that like says everybody has to be married by a certain age because we're having a birth crisis and we need more babies in Rome. 

Sound familiar? 

There's a lot of parallels, but one thing in this that he really wanted that Augustus did was he sponsored poets. The Augustan age is a golden age for literature because Augustus had his, we'll call him best friend, aide, dude, named Maecenas. Augustus paid Maecenas to pay these authors. But basically Maecenas was in charge of a circle of poets. Those poets included Virgil who wrote the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid which was commissioned by Augustus to be like a new founding of Rome that tied the founding of Rome to Augustus's own lineage. Horace who wrote a bunch of odes but yet again was commissioned by Augustus for political events to write poetry and Propersius who, I don't know if he was ever commissioned but he was part of that circle and Ovid was not. Ovid was in the other circle. Still had some good poets in it but Tibullus who I've mentioned before as another elegist was part of the other circle. But we can clearly see Ovid like he's surrounded by all these big name people and you can see that he really wants, he really wants to be with that Maecenas group and he tries his best. But at the same time, he does something like write a poem about how to do an extramarital affair as legislation is being written about being married and having children. 

By an emperor who sent both his daughter and his granddaughter to live in exile on an island for having affairs. Yeah. I can see that yeah that's maybe not a good time to release that poem if you want to be in their little group. 

One thing I've always thought is like the Metamorphoses. Yes it's an epic but that could have been his like you know look I can actually do the serious poetry you want me to do but then he doesn't do it in the proper way because if you think about it we have one epic from the age of Augustus the Aeneid written by well we have two. We have the Aeneid and we have the Metamorphoses at least extant. And so the Aeneid has been out for years once Ovid is writing his and so if you're writing an epic under Augustus you are immediately putting yourself in competition with Virgil and the Aeneid and the Aeneid widespread love like everyone was like oh my god this Aeneid thing is the best thing in the world. It was used as a school text almost immediately from the time it was published and so Ovid is like immediately setting himself up against Virgil and I can't help but feel if that's because he's like I can do it too please let me into your circle. 

It's crazy I'm feeling sorry for him right now because two minutes ago you had me thinking this guy is an incel arsehole. So who is he writing for? Is he writing for every Roman or is it quite a small select group that he's writing for?

 First of all depends on literacy like to be fair yes recitations were a thing and so people could go hear poetry but if you really wanted to do the nitty gritty like have someone like get really deep into your work they had to be able to read or at least have the resources because we do know that a lot of reading was actually done out loud by a slave to the person wanting to read the text. So you had to have the means to have a slave to be your recitation person. So generally it's aimed at upper-class men because that's Ovid's peers. Like I said with that Ars Amatoria he specifically says upper-class women like moral women this is not for you. He knows that recitations happen and people can buy his poetry and so he puts that warning in there this is not intended for you. 

Which it wasn't, so at least it's nice for him to give a warning I suppose. I mean kind of. So what kind of person was Ovid? It sounds like he was a bit sluttish, maybe not wonderfully politically savvy, or at least not able to reign in his more whimsical notions. Can we tell from his poetry what kind of person he was?

 I like to call him a sassy bitch because there's just certain you know I mean the big thing of 'let's write a poem' because technically the moral legislation about marriage was enacted in 18 BCE and the Ars Armatoria came out in 1 BCE so he is writing this during the heyday when this law is happening and so to me that's just like a sign of like I'm going to do something witty here. The big thing that I always like to point out to students about Ovid's sassiness is in epic poetry the first word of the epic tell you about the theme. Big important word in this history of epic poetry the Iliad the first word is menin, the menin, the rage of Achilles. The first word of the Odyssey is Andra man talking about Odysseus himself you know later described by that which we get you know Emily Wilson's complicated the twisty turning man. Virgil emulates this because the Iliad is the Iliad and the Odyssey shoved together into one like one dude doing both and so his first three words are I will sing of arms and a man so we have big important words and then Ovid's first word of the Metamorphoses is 'in'. And then it's followed by the word Noah - nova meaning new things technically describing bodies which comes later but the Romans didn't actually like newness they thought new things were bad new money was bad new things were bad Noah new things was a word that could mean like revolution and so Ovid literally starts his epic poem within Nova and then it goes on to say other things but it could be like in revolution if you don't have the full sentence. 

So it sounds like he desperately wants to fit into this small group but at the same time he just doesn't give much of a shit about how his work is going to be received. So we've got sluttish, we've got sassy, we've got a little bit rebellious… are there any anecdotes about his life that back this up?

 I mean yet again if we're believing the love poetry so his predecessor Catullus had a bunch of poems about his girlfriend's bird the bird was a sparrow and scholars have come to the theory that the sparrow is his penis… 

Right, okay… 

Ovid's girlfriend has a parrot… so if we're talking about birds as penises…

I mean it's not subtle! 

No it's not subtle it's not subtle at all he also actually has an entire poem that's about the fact that he can't get it up and he's describing his flaccid penis.

 Wow okay I don't know how I've made it this long without reading this.

 I found it because I teach gender and sexuality and I was talking about impotence and I was like my students have to read this entire poem because oh my god!

 Oh my goodness I'm thinking of writing to all of my previous lecturers and saying what the hell why was this not on the reading list? Okay so on one hand his penis is a parrot but on the other his parrot is flaccid… okay.

And like that still plays around because like yet again we're playing with Catullus and in Catullus's sparrow poems the sparrow dies and the theory is that that's a symbol for Catullus being unable to get it up.

 Oh good grief this is not where I thought this episode was going…

 I had to bring up the sparrow penis all the time.

Oh I'm so glad you did, I mean you could bring up the sparrow penis it doesn't sound like Catullus could! 

Especially comparing to Ovid when Ovid's like well my girlfriend's gonna have a parrot.

 So let's talk a little bit more about his potentially fake girlfriend; who is she do we think? Or who does he create her to be? 

So she is basically modeled on all the other girlfriends of elegy - Catullus's girlfriend was actually a real person we can track her in the historical record; we know that her real name was Clodia Mattelli she was technically a high-class lady who decided to become a courtesan so we have a real love interest for Catullus that he's writing this poetry too. All of the others, because of the whole poetic persona thing, we don't know if they're just imitating Catullus and writing to a girlfriend or if they actually had girlfriends and they're giving them fake names and writing about them some people have tried to speculate about Propertius's girlfriend but as far as I know, and I would have to do more research, no one has tried to be like 'here's the real life person behind Corinna' because it's kind of thought that like well Ovid just kind of made her up.

 If you were to get 10 scholars in a room I think that you're saying that the majority would say that she is fictional?

As far as I have interpreted it, yes there could be people out there who think that she was a real person. We do know from his post-exile poetry he was very devoted to his third wife and I don't know where the love poetry in comparison to when he would have married her would have been.

Let's hope it was before yeah because you know… 

When he was exiled his third wife stayed in Rome and so she started advocating for him.

Aww, that's sweet.

And so we actually have kind words about her - my knowledge of the love poetry is not as good as the Metamorphoses but as far as I know it's not  'you know my sweet Corinna' it's more like 'wow she's there she is again bossing me around'. 

I mean if you think about him growing up he's on the lawyer track and his dad's obviously pushing that and then you know he gets this sudden idea that life is short I'm gonna enjoy it, it does sound like he's spending the early portion of his career just having fun and letting loose, defying expectations.

You know with the death of his brother  he definitely like realized like life is short he went to Athens he went to Asia Minor he went to Sicily, he was like 'I'm gonna see the world'... who knows what type of shenanigans he got into as he was traveling, he doesn't tell us.

What evidence do we have for his life apart from his own little biography that he seems to have written for himself?

 I mean that's mostly it in the post-exile poetry, he  goes into his background about how good of a person he is. We do have some anecdotes from later people who possibly would have interacted with him: apparently Seneca the elder at one point, because Seneca the elder was big on rhetoric, not necessarily would have trained Ovid but was the type of person that could have trained Ovid, and apparently Seneca said Ovid was 'more emotional than argumentative' in his rhetoric and so it's not surprising that he went the route he did.

I do get the impression that he was perhaps a guy with Big Feelings.

Yeah and it's hard because you know he really wanted to be with those contemporaries but a lot of them died before him as well so any references we could have had to him and other people's poetry are lost because he was unfortunately the youngster, and so he wanted to be like them. Virgil may not even know that he existed.

 I could understand why he might have a chip on his shoulder.

 I mean even you know in his own circle, like I said, Tibullus was in his own circle and he never actually got to meet Tibullus because Tibullus died before he was able to meet him; we have a whole poem from Ovid at the death of Tibullus being like 'your poetry is really awesome dude, wish I could have met you!" 

Oh, oh bless him… With his writing we've already stated that he's doing things slightly differently to his contemporaries. What are the main things that we haven't talked about yet that really set him apart from the writers of the time?

The big one is the exile as far as we know. I mean, Virgil was never exiled, Virgil was loved by Augustus, most of the others were loved by Augustus, but in 8 CE (so common era) as he was finishing the Metamorphoses, Augustus himself stepped in, so  there was no senate case, there was no judge, Augustus just stepped in and said 'you're out, you're exiled.' 

Do we know why?

Ovid in his post-exile poetry says 'Carmen et Error' so I was exiled for a song and a mistake. He doesn't tell us the song, it's thought by scholars that that is that Ars Amatoria that was like 'hey let's go find out how to do an extramarital affair',  but there are other scholars who think well maybe that was just an excuse Augustus used because the laws were 18 BCE, the poem was 1 BCE, but the exile was not until 8 CE so if he had a problem with the poem, why didn't he exile him when it first came out and not nine years later?

It seems a long time to leave him hanging.

Because Ovid never… I mean he implies it in the Ars Amatoria, because he says in his exile poetry 'I specifically said this was like that poem was not for upper class women. I was not trying to corrupt the women. I wasn't trying to do that,' but with that time gap… you know some scholars have said well maybe because the poem existed it was a good excuse to get him out of there because of whatever that error was and Ovid gives us a little bit more information on the error in this exile poetry. 

He is talking about being exiled and he says 'I was like Actaeon when he accidentally saw Diana naked', and for those unfamiliar with the myth basically Actaeon was a hunter he was wandering the woods one day and happened upon the goddess Diana bathing, and Diana is a virgin goddess and very protective of that virginity and even just seeing her naked could imply that he had had sex with her and her virginity was lost, and so she had to do something to protect her own reputation. So she turns him into a stag and then his dogs tear him apart. 

Ovid tells this story in the Metamorphoses and he ends it with this little 'the populace was divided as to whether or not this was a little bit harsh or okay given her strict virginity' and then Ovid decides to use that same myth later to be like' Augustus is Diana punishing me for something that wasn't my fault.'  And with the fact that Actaeon saw Diana naked the implication is that maybe Ovid saw something he shouldn't have.

Interesting, really tantalizing as well because I'm guessing we're never gonna know what happened right? 

No, no. I mean his poetry says nothing, and unless new poetry is found or like some long-lost biography of Augustus written by Augustus is found we can only speculate because all we get is the Diana Actaeon I saw something I shouldn't have. 

That's frustrating.

 As an interesting side twist he was exiled the same year as Augustus's granddaughter.

 Aha! So for those who aren't aware, Julia the Younger is exiled…  what do we know about her exile, what caused that? 

It was some sort of immoral behavior probably sexual behavior she was exiled to an island and her husband was actually also killed, because it was claimed that he was handing some conspiracy against Augustus, and one theory as to what Ovid saw was something to do with that conspiracy. 

Oh that would make an excellent thriller wouldn't it? Why has that not been turned into a movie? 

But the other thought is because, yet again using Diana and Actaeon as a parallel for his own banishment, Actaeon saw a virginal goddess naked so he saw a woman he shouldn't have naked so the other thing is, there's some sort of was he in the palace or walking around and saw a royal woman, either Julia, or possibly maybe Augustus's wife Livia, doing something they shouldn't have? 

Earlier on in his career we've seen that even when it doesn't serve him and he perhaps should have known better, he's not afraid to shoot his mouth off.

Yep. 

But on this case when he could say Augustus is being really unfair here, he's not, he's choosing to say 'I think it's unfair but I'm still not going to say why.'

He never reveals the reason why probably because Augustus is willing to exile him, so  who knows what he'd do if he actually said it  -  probably kill him. I mean he does point out a lot of hypocrisy in how Augustus approaches literature especially when it comes to you know the Ars Amatoria being the Carmen, he was exiled for all of this information that I'm telling you about this post-exile stuff is from a collection of poems called the Tristia which is just basically literally 'the sad thing', so it's literally I'm sad that I'm not in Rome and so I'm going to write poems about it. 

The second one Tristia 2 is one giant poem addressed to Augustus, so it's like a letter poem to Augustus, and that's where we get the Diana Actaeon comparison in this Tristia. Elsewhere he says the Aeneid, he doesn't say Virgil, but the Aeneid brought its man's arms into another woman's bed and no part of the book is read more enthusiastically than love joined by an illegitimate contract, and so he says Virgil wrote the same thing! Virgil has an extramarital affair, now it wasn't a handbook on how to do it but Virgil had extramarital sex in his big epic poem and nothing happened to Virgil, so why am I being punished? 

Do we know if there is an Ovid poem that was famous at the time and maybe even more inflammatory but we just have lost it, or are we confident that the things that we know about is his entire career?

 We have almost everything. The one thing that is completely missing and that Ovid scholars around the world would rejoice if we ever found, was apparently around the time of the Ars Amatoria he wrote a Medea play that was very well received, and we have nothing of that. None of it exists anymore but it was so popular, that's one thing that drives me crazy! It was so popular and we don't have it, so could there have been something with that that was a problem? We will never know because we don't have the text.

 So going back to my theory that historians are just detectives with less evidence than usual, that's really frustrating! 

Yeah. I for a long time convinced myself that it was the Metamorphoses that got him exiled, because a he finished that in the year that he was exiled so there's actually like a time correlation and I have argued in an article that it's Greek and Roman mythology, there's lots of sexual assault, but as we get to Rome the sexual assault kind of goes away and instead people just start getting turned into gods all the time, and specifically members of Augustus's family. But I have argued that those apotheoses are modeled after rape scenes from the earlier text because a god comes down from heaven and snatches, literally snatches the human to make them into a god, and then at the end of the poem it says 'and one day too this will happen to you Augustus, you will become a god' and if it's framed as a sexual assault he's saying 'one day…'

This is this is a guy who's really not afraid to stick a massive middle finger up at the establishment, even though he kind of secretly wants to be a part of it. He's a conflicted guy! 

He is, and also like so prolific. We have three works from Virgil, one book one collection of poetry from Propertius, I mean I guess Horace might rival him in amount of work… Whenever I think of Ovid I think of Hamilton and 'why do you write like you're writing out of time, like you're running out of time?' because he just puts out… and we have the Heroides and the Amores then the Ars AmaroIA then the Remedia Amoris the Medicamina… and then let's go write a 15 book epic poem while working on a book on the Roman calendar and then a whole Medea play and then… There's other like things that we have very small fragments about but they're so small, they're not super significant, but there's a whole curse poem, there's a poem about an extravagant dinner, and then he goes into exile and even though he was exiled for his poetry, he just continues to write poetry! And write and write and write and write…

Like a compulsion! 

Yeah.

So let's talk about his exile -  where does he go? Where is he sent? 

He is sent to Tomis on the Black Sea, so it's it's very far removed from Rome, it is more northern.  He describes the people as, because they're not Roman, more barbarian - he has to learn a whole language to be able to get along with these people. 

So it's definitely a punishment.

Yeah .

It really is a punishment for a poet who wanted to be part of high society to be sent to the edges of the barbarian world… wow. 

I mean, to be fair, yet again this whole poetic persona thing because you can never trust what a poet says… some scholars have argued that the exile is fake and that he just does this. He got in trouble and fakes an exile and then continues to write poetry… now I don't believe that because he's so secret about what happened.

Something clearly happened, we just can never tell what it is, oh it's annoying! So he's sent to live with barbarians, he's learning a new language, he's still writing, does he ever get to go home?

He dies in Tomis in either 17 or 18 CE, just a few years after Augustus.

Do we know what happened or does he just drop off the face of the earth?

He kind of disappears. The Tristia, the sad things he did in exile, and the other thing is a collection of poetic letters to people in Rome being like 'will you plead my case to let me come back', and I think references to events in Rome… you know Roman history in those… the cut-off date it never mentions anything after 17 or 18. 

These Tristia that he wrote… who was the audience for that, the letters? Are they only supposed to be read by their recipients or is this a public statement that he's making?

 I mean it's a public statement, if we think about Cicero. Cicero wrote private letters but then collected them to publish them, and I think that's the type of thing now, I don't think these poetic letters were actually sent as letters to people. I think it was yet again another collection of poetry that he was just writing and he hoped that… because when you read the Epistulae Ex Ponto, the poetic letters, he doesn't actually name anybody by name. It's always like 'dear friend who has done this this this or this' it's not 'dear Publius' or 'dear Marcus, please go plead my case', it's 'dear friend who has done this' and we can as historians, pick up on events and try to and figure out who some of these addressees are. but  he's anonymized them so that if this were published these people would not face the same scrutiny. 

He did not going to get them in trouble, that's kind of nice. He is a man who started off in a career that he didn't want, he changed his career, he can't quite ever fit in because he just can't… bless him it sounds like he can't stop running his mouth! 

Yeah!

He has a very colorful love life, even if some of it is fictional, he's clearly got an imagination…  and he has this really really sad end. It's a roller coaster of a life! What was his impact after he died, for the rest of antiquity does he continue being read or does he kind of just sink into oblivion?

He was very popular. One way to try and see Ovid's most immediate impact right after his death, what happened especially among common people (not really common people but the masses, not just the elite men who could read, who were like in these poetic circles,) most of the myths Ovid writes about in the Metamorphoses existed in some form already. He may put his own twist on them, but for the most part they existed in some form. So it's always interesting to me, the effect of the Metamorphoses -  how are these myths continued to be used? And one thing that's really interesting is there are so many wall paintings from Pompeii that are the same myths from the Metamorphoses, and it's hard from just wall paintings to guess what the inspiration is, but we have like multiple Diana and Actaeons, multiple Narcissus's. 

As far as I know, and I still have to look into this because there's so much graffiti from Pompeii, there's quite a lot of graffiti of the Aeneid; specific phrases, and as far as I know there's not much of the Metamorphoses. But also, the Aeneid was educationally… it was used to teach, and so school boys had to literally memorize it. So it could just be that it was super well known and ingrained into people's brains and that's why they're graffitiing it, versus Ovid, Ovid was never a teaching text. 

It's significant, isn't it? Because scratching I Sing of Arms and a Man on a wall takes less than a minute, not a lot of thought going into it, it's graffiti! But commissioning a fresco that you want to last for generations, based on the other epic… that's a big signifier of impact I think.

Like I said, we can't ever really know because of these mythward existence but we have, post-Ovid, a ton of wall paintings which luckily enough survive thanks to Vesuvius. I've recently read an article that a lot of the imagery especially in the House of Livia (well what we call the House of Livia) is some of the same myths so it could be that Ovid is picking up on myths used by the royal family and incorporating them into his text, and then they'd be creating popularity because of both Ovid and the fact that the Imperial House likes them. With the evidence we have we can't do a direct correlation/causation type thing but it's very interesting.

Ovid still, as the time went on… In the Middle Ages moralists loved Ovid because it allowed them to talk about sex and stuff without having to bring the Bible into it, and so you could have conversations about sexuality and morality without having to use biblical anecdotes. So we even have an extant old French manuscript called the (and I cannot speak French so I'm going to butcher this) but it's the Ovide Moralise, where it's in French and it says Ovid tells this story and this is what it can tell us about our morals today.

So he is eventually being used as a teaching tool!? 

Yeah, and then we get to the Renaissance. Renaissance painters love Ovidian myths. Shakespeare references Ovid, the play within a play in the Midsummer's Night Dream is Pyramus and Thisbe. That is a story in Ovid that we're pretty sure was more of an Ovidian invention than something that existed, and so Shakespeare then takes this and puts it into his own play within a play, so Shakespeare loved Ovid. the Renaissance painters loved Ovid. I mean painters all up until… I mean artists today love Ovid.

I kind of feel bad for the guy, maybe not as bad as I did before I knew about the whole parrot thing, but it's a shame that he died neglected and rejected and he didn't realize that he was going to have all of this big impact for centuries after.

 If you think of it, if you go to a kid's book of mythology or even just like a book of mythology today, most of it is Metamorphoses toned down (because obviously we're not going to tell rape stories to kids,) but in the end, and I mean there were other people who you know did collections of mythology who influenced these things, but Ovid's Metamorphoses is our first written source for quite a lot of these myths.

Because everything was oral before that, right?

Yeah. Then as you want to teach mythology throughout the years, where are you going to go? You're going to go to Ovid because he has these beautiful stories, he has so many, there's over 250 stories in the Metamorphoses. So he has all these little stories - some like I said invented, but others he's giving the full thing, and with mythology you have to remember there is no real 'myth'. Myth was always in flux because of the orality. People's interpretations. So there are variations that from what was deemed more canonical that we don't know if that was Ovid making it up or if that was another thread of the myth that existed somewhere, and Ovid's like 'I like this one better so I'm just going to choose that.' 

To round things up on this biography of Ovid, God bless him, why do you think that he is worthy of study 2,000 years later? What is it about him that just keeps us coming back?

For me it's the fact that (and I'll be doing another episode on the Metamorphoses later because it's one of my favorites, no it is my favorite work of his,) his theme with that poem is abuse of power through many different means. Of course the main one is sexual assault, but writing in the time he was, when we have government being consolidated into one man, elections still exist but they no longer have meaning…  To have this poem come out that is all about the abuse of power through artistic means, it is beautiful poetry, it's a great way to really drive home to people authority is fucking you over, here's multiple examples…

Ovid got some bad flack in modern politics because technically the whole discussion about trigger warnings came about because of the Metamorphoses students in a general humanities class at Columbia University. 

Why is it always Columbia? 

They had to read the Metamorphoses and they said 'a little bit of warning about what happens in this would have been nice, tell us, give us a trigger warning' and it became a huge thing, like students can't handle sexual assault blah blah blah, and like Ovid entered modern politics as an example of conflicting ideologies about trigger warnings. But then also in the Me Too era, as I've already mentioned Ovid's myths have been used and reused and reused, but since the Me Too movement there have been a huge increase in specifically female authors taking works like the Metamorphoses and writing them from the women's perspective.

Yes, there are a lot of hardbacks on sale right now…

There's one - Nina McLaughlin's 'Wake Siren - Ovid Resung'... she literally took a copy of the Metamorphoses and said 'I'm going to find every single woman,' not even every single woman she's like 'I'm going to take every single story I'm drawn to and write it from the alternate perspective of how Ovid wrote it and see what happens.' 

You know what, I'm going to link that book in the episode description because oh my god everyone needs to read McLaughlin.

It is so good it is a great way to show you know some of the stories that she… it's not just like that she takes them and changes perspective, she modernizes some of them. One of my favorites is Arachne which isn't even a rape story, but it is an abuse of power story and it's about a punished artist, and in Laughlin's rewriting she modernizes it so that Arachne is a lower class woman just trying to work. She becomes really good at it, she becomes a very good skilled laborer to the point where people are saying 'oh you're better than Minerva' and she's like 'I just want to use my skills to get out of poverty'.  She has a father who works, she has a single father who worked, she's like 'I don't really care if you know about my prestige, I just want to use my skills to get out from where I am' and at one point someone in this retelling someone says 'did Minerva teach you?' and she's like 'well why should I say that Minerva taught me, because I'm self-taught!' and that is what becomes the whole central issue. Then Minerva herself shows up and punishes Arachne for not bowing down to her authority as the goddess of weaving.

Just for impact, we can say if someone is really reading and critically engaging with your work from 2000 years ago to write masterpieces right now, I think you'd be quite pleased with that.

We've talked about whether or not he could be possibly proto-feminist or whatever and a former colleague of mine, he actually asked his students once 'do you think of him as a proto-feminist or do you think he's like a chauvinist asshole?' and it's still a debate to this day, but to have all these, especially like I said, female writers/authors taking these myths about this horrible, horrible experience and still using them today to talk about both that horrible experience but also so many other things? 

I think out of everybody he's a writer where you can find things that you're going to love, you can find things that you're going to hate, he's not consistent.

The Ars Amatoria, I read that and I get angry and I'm like oh my god how can I like Ovid? But then I read the Metamorphoses!

Are there any things that we've missed that you think are really essential for people who are reading Ovid for the first time, how should someone fresh to him approach him? 

I would say first of all with every poet, take anything he says with a grain of salt. He's sassy, he likes to exaggerate. I'm pretty sure he didn't have a parrot for a penis type thing but knowing the especially social slash political background to his story where he's writing in a time where it's slowly becoming a one-man rule and this one man is making Rome great again abusing power, that in the background especially with the Metamorphoses but even if you think about the Ars Amatoria, because those marriage laws were considered the first incursion of Roman law into private life, and so here we have Ovid then commenting on that by giving out a handbook on how to basically get around that law type thing, because it's none of Augustus' business who he spends his fun time with. Ovid most blatantly to me of all the Augustan poets speaks truth to power instead of going along with it. I'm not saying that the other Augustans don't have commentary about what is happening in their poems, it's just not as blatant.

I think that's fair to say! Thank you so much for coming to talk to us about Ovid, because he is a fascinating guy but he's clearly not a simple one, so thank you for walking us through everything we need to know. We will be talking to you again in a further episode where we do dig, absolutely do a deep dive into the Metamorphoses and I cannot wait! 

Well thank you for having me!