Facts about Ovid
During this time Ovid would count among his friends Tibullus, Horace, and Sextus Propertius.
The Heriodes in many ways foreshadows the psychological nuance found in the soliloquies of Shakespeare, who considered Ovid to be one of his favorite poets.
The first example of this is Ovid's early poem, the Heriodes ("Heroines"), which, borrowing an idea from Propertius, consists of a series of letters written by heroines of various myths and legends.
The letters are really dramatic monologues, in which Ovid applied the lessons learned in his training in rhetoric, particularly the technique of ethopoiea ("character drawing"), to brilliant effect.
Ovid himself makes clear that his error was not a scelus — that is, it was an indiscretion, not a crime.
Emperor Augustus, for reasons that are still unknown, banished Ovid to Tomis in modern Romania, on the Black Sea.
Ovid stands out not only for his gifts as a storyteller and poet in his own right, but as one of the most important sources we have to the literature of the ancient world.
Ovid offers poetry unlike those of his predecessors, incorporating many myths and legends about supernatural transformations from the Greek and Roman traditions, but with a three-dimensionality of character never seen before.
The most common speculation regarding the error is that Ovid was involuntarily involved as an accomplice in the adultery of Augustus' granddaughter, Julia, who was banished at the same time.
Banished far from Rome, Ovid had no chance to research in libraries and thus was forced to abandon his work, Fasti.
By the time Ovid had begun the composition of the Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid had already been canonized as the national epic of Rome.
Ovid was the first poet to demonstrate that the somewhat rigid Latin language could be adapted to dactylic Greek meters.
After Ovid, the elegiac couplet and dactylic hexameter would become widely popular modes of poetic writing.
Most of what we know comes from Ovid's autobiographical poem, the Tristia.
Ovid was born in the small town of Sulmo, a village about 90 miles east of Rome.
Ovid's father sent him to Athens after his graduation, and, after traveling elsewhere through the Mediterranean, he began work as a minor public official.
No one poet did more than Ovid to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity.
The obvious themes of these early poems are love and romantic intrigue, but it is unlikely that Ovid himself was a particularly intriguing or romantic figure.
Ovid is generally considered the greatest master of the elegiac couplet, and, of the great Latin poets, is considered to have the most psychological complexity and depth.
See the website "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text" for many more Renaissance examples.
After nine years of plaintive exile, Ovid died in Tomis at the age of 60.
Ovid himself wrote that he was banished for an error and a carmen — a mistake and a poem.
Following the success of these early poems, Ovid would become a member of Rome's elite circle of poets and socialites.
The rather stiff and antiquated figures of Greek legends are infused with a dynamism and subtlety of conscience never before seen, and entirely unique to Ovid.