Who was Ovid?
Publius Ovidius Naso, known better in English as Ovid, came from a family of municipal elites in a region east of Rome. He was educated in Rome and served in several minor administrative and legal posts, but seems to have been unwilling or unable to render military service. After the death of his father, he abandoned a senatorial career to become a poet. Rome’s upper classes had become Hellenized to a large degree by his time, and the civil wars had receded into history. Ovid wrote in a time of carefree and indulgent peace. His poems are erotic in nature. Ovid sees the seduction of women as the highest calling, equal in its own way to military conquest. Ovid has little use for public service or overarching moral schemes, and cares only for the vita umbratalis – the poet’s life of shady pleasures. He ended his days banished from Rome by the moralizing Augustan regime. There were clearly Romans who preferred peace to conquest, pleasure to politics, and poetry to military glory, even if t
