![]() ![]() During this time, Augustus and his praetors had passed several laws trying to clean up Roman morals, probably because of the low birth rate of the middle and upper classes, which many thought was due to the proliferation of adultery. Some scholars make note of the fact that Ovid was exiled in the same year that Augustus' granddaughter, Julia, was driven out of Rome for the crime of adultery. There is very little information about what possible error Ovid might have committed. Ovid writes only that he was exile for a "song" and an "error." The "song" was probably the poem, Ars Amatoria, whose moral flexibility chaffed against the more conservative beliefs of those in power at the time. the Emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to the city of Tomi on the Black Sea. We also know that Ovid was married three times, a fact which may help to explain his cavalier - and sometimes bitter - treatment of love and marriage. Whether that is because a man of his position could not write such poetry, or because he merely chose to pursue poetry instead, no one knows. Many speculate that Ovid was on track for a position in the Roman Senate, but his government career seems to have disintegrated as his writing career began in earnest. Eventually he rose to become a decemviri stlitibus judicandis, a position similar to that of a modern-day judge. Ovid then pursued a career in the government, working in a minor administrative position, probably either as a tresuiri monetales, administrators of the mint, or a tresuiri capitales, administrator of prisons and executions. He came to Rome as a young man and trained as a lawyer, studying under Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro, two famous teachers of Rhetoric. We do know the bare skeleton of Ovid's biography. He was also clearly a person of some power, for his poems contain many references (some of them quite unflattering) to powerful people of his time. Indeed, Ovid's breadth of research and knowledge is constantly on display in his poems, which abound with allusions and intertextual winks. ![]() Ovid's poetry, though very imaginative and inventive, primarily draws its subjects from mythology and Roman history. Many call him the master of the elegiac couplet, a writing scheme frequently used for love poetry in which a line of dactylic hexameter - six feet, where each foot is a dactyl (a long syllable followed by two short syllables) - is followed by a line of dactylic pentameter - five feet, where each foot is a dactyl. Though we know little about his personal life, much of Ovid's verse is extant. Ovid is also the first of the Roman poets to live wholly during the Augustan Empire, a time when literature and art flourished. He is considered one of the important poets of Latin lterature, along with Virgil. Publius Ovidius Naso, called "Ovid" in English, was born in Sulmo (now Sulmona), 90 miles away from Rome.
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