The Lasting Legacy of Ovid

Ovid Banished From Rome - JMW Turner

I was lucky enough to have my attention drawn to a fascinating BBC piece: Ovid: The Poet and the Emperor that immediately brought my prep-school days back to me through the memory of sitting in Mr Jevons's class learning some of Ovid's poems by heart. Astonishingly, not having looked at them for over 60 years, I can immediately bring back the first few lines of Arion VII, such is the power of learning by rote. How sad that this technique is these days apparently decried.


Until I heard the BBC programme, I only had a dim idea that Ovid has been the inspiration behind much great work in the two thousand years since his death, His poems have even been described as the most influential in the Renaissance, when artists strove to capture images of the stories that they contain, and they were certainly much loved by Shakespeare.  His greatest series of poems, the Metamorphoses,, explores myths such as that of Acteon who stumbled upon the goddess Diana bathing, and in her anger he is transformed into a stag - who is then torn apart by his own hunting dogs. 

Titian - The Death of Actaeon

Ovid knew full well that hubris that would lead inevitably to nemesis and that the Gods were implacable and capricious even before his downfall and banishment from Rome. The cause of his downfall seems to have been his early and highly explicit love poems - 'The Art of Love' - as well as a 'mistake' -  but one that he refused to reveal. It may simply have been something he saw accidentally while at the court of the Emperor, Augustus, but like Diana, Augustus was implacable and despite years of entreaty by his wife, his reprieve never came. During his long exile in Romania - then an outpost of the Roman Empire where they didn't even speak Latin, he wrote continuously about exile and the themes in his later poems have been wrought into the works of Neruda, Sheamus Heaney, Becket and Bob Dylan. I'm so glad that Michael Wood has resurrected him for me as well.

See also Favourite Paintings - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus - Peter Breughel the Elder

and Titian at the National Gallery - Love, Desire and Death