OVID (AH-vid)
Roman
poet; author of Metamorphoses Common
clues: Roman
love poet; "Metamorphoses" poet; “Tristia"
poet; “Ars Amatoria” poet; Exiled Roman poet;
Contemporary of Horace; “Amores” author Crossword
puzzle frequency:
5 times a year Frequency
in English language:
46751 / 86800 Video: Ovid's
Metamorphoses by Gregory Zorzos
A
new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it
can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown
on the right man's brow. ~
Ovid
Publius
Ovidius Naso, (March
20, 43 BC – AD 17) Roman poet known to the
English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love,
abandoned women, and mythological transformations.
R.
J. Tarrant offers the following assessment for the importance of
Ovid:
From
his own time until the end of Antiquity Ovid was among the most
widely read and imitated of Latin poets; his greatest work, the
Metamorphoses,
also seems to have enjoyed the largest popularity. What place
Ovid may have had in the curriculum of ancient schools is hard to
determine: no body of antique scholia survives for any of his
works, but it seems likely that the elegance of his style and his
command of rhetorical technique would have commended him as a
school author, perhaps at the elementary level.
Ovid
wrote in elegiac couplets, with the exception of his great
Metamorphoses,
which
he wrote in dactylic hexameter in imitation of Vergil's Aeneid
and
Homer's epics. Ovid does not offer an epic narrative like his
predecessors but promises a chronological account of the cosmos
from creation to his own day, incorporating many myths and
legends from the Greek and Roman traditions.
Augustus
banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that
remain mysterious (Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an
error
and a
carmen
– a
mistake and a poem). He may have had an affair with a female
relative of Augustus, and the carmen
mentioned
by Ovid may be his supposedly immoral Ars
Amatoria,
which had been in circulation for several years.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Ovid".
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