Ovid An Introduction

hello and thank you for watching my video the video you're watching is just a very short introduction to the Roman poet Ovid and my name again is Professor Ryan Paul from Texas A&M university-kingsville so just an overview some of the basic topics I'm going to talk about in this again very short lecture the cultural and historical contexts Ovid the life work and style of Ovid or at least is major work metamorphosis and throughout that I'll be talking about some of the differences that differentiate Ovid from Hesiod and Homer who we've also read this semester so first let's talk about the geographical and political context and how different that was Hesiod and Homer are both living in ancient Greece this is a relatively small area the government that they're living under these are small independent city-states these are not large nations or empires there's frequent conflicts between them and so he sees and homer are really familiar with a rather small area and they're really talking about figures and characters from a rather small area of it on the other hand is living about 800 years later at the height of the Roman Empire which is a centralized government that rules Asia Europe and Africa or parts of it so this is a much larger geographical and political world that of it is living in and the Roman Empire is undergoing constant expansion into new areas and it's a much more cosmopolitan wealthy and sophisticated world by our standards compared to the rather parochial and small world although highly educated of ancient Greece so just to give you a sense of scale here we have Greece ancient Greece and the important Greek city-states Sparta Athens Thebes Corinth etc etc off to the west of the Peloponnesus there is Ithaca where Odysseus lives and this is just Greece and then we see part of Turkey what is modern-day Turkey so they are talking about a very small area relatively speaking and even though Odysseus himself is supposedly travels all around the war roll what Homer knew and Homer really was familiar with was again this very small area on the other hand this is the Roman Empire under the rule of Augustus who is the Emperor during Ovid's life so we see it covers a much much larger area and again it's not that Ovid knew personally all these places or went to them but they were much more real to him they were real places where his government had extended their authority as opposed to these semi mythic places on the ends of the earth that no one really had ever been to so he was aware of a much much larger world so just another map of superimposed the Greek map over the Roman map so you can see in that little circle is the world of Hesiod and Homer whereas this much larger world is the world of Ovid so again just to get a sense of scale the the cultures that they're dealing with the range of experience that they have what the world looks like to them or what the world means to these authors and their readers is very different for Homer and Hesiod than it is from Ovid Roman culture now while Greek culture was very learned of course in Homer and you see it's time it was just starting to become literate whereas Roman culture and abba time as again which is almost a thousand years later is a highly literate sophisticated and cosmopolitan culture rome itself has people from all over the Roman Empire living there many different languages art goods travellers from all over the world so it's a much more worldly sort of place in a certain sense also their culture was especially at the time of Ovid was a very loose what we might say morally speaking divorce and adultery were common and accepted especially among the noble classes they very much enjoyed sexual humor and stories they were not a prudish or they were religious culture but not a highly prudish culture they very much accepted and celebrated the the joys of the flesh and consider themselves to be again very sophisticated and above the simple superstitions of the conquered people's that the Roman Empire as a pet extended its control over the central political figure to consider is Augustus Caesar Caesar who was born Octavian and was I believe the nephew and later adopted son of Julius Caesar who you will know as the man who in stated the Empire of Rome and in 30 BC II Augustus became the emperor of Rome he became the undisputed chief executive we might say of the vast Roman Empire and his reign was marked by what's called pox Romana or the Roman peace the era in which Rome itself was stable and again at peace and flourishing so again the centerpiece of this Pax Romana is the flourishing stability the art the peacefulness the high quality of life at the center of the Empire in Rome itself and other important cities but at the same time there are constant Wars of expansion going on at the borders of the Roman Empire so a Festus was always trying to expand his realm and it's partially that expansion and the exploitation of resources and labor at the margins in newly colonized areas that contributed to the Empire's stability of the central regions and Augustus himself had an early life as a libertine he enjoyed his pleasures was himself divorced and had mistresses and so forth but when he became an emperor he was very much interested in turning back the clock and reinstating traditional Roman family values which he believed in some believed or at least said were crucial to the solidity instability of the Roman Empire so he introduced a number of legislative items when he became Emperor that were meant to reassert traditional values in terms of putting limitations on divorce and so forth and that is perhaps what brought him into conflict with Ovid later in life and that will be our transition into talking about Ovid himself that eventually his career as a poet would bring him into conflict with the Emperor now we can talk about Ovid himself and what you will be most pleased to discover is that here we have a real life that we can talk about as compared to Hesiod and Homer who are almost mythological figures themselves we have no facts almost about their life there's in fact very little even known about their culture the worlds in which they wrote we only have knowledge about them from a couple hundred years after their deaths whereas for Ovid definitely a fairly well-known historical figure we have many facts and documents and connections to major historical figures and he's from a much more familiar culture and time a period that we just know a lot more about so he can be a lot more definite for the most part when we talk about Ovid so Ovid was born to the closest that we can date it March 20th in the year 43 BCE so 13 years before Augustus became emperor but we have an actual date here might not be exactly right mind it be the exact date but we've been able to figure out something pretty close to a date so this is quite remarkable when we compare it to Homer who we don't even know if Homer was a real person and he was born in a small town called solo which was east of Rome and he was born to a rather respected and established aristocratic family and he took his education in Rome he was educated in rhetoric there which meant he studied logic he studied oratory that is public speaking he studied law and he also studied and had a great love of Greek literature and philosophy so here is someone we can see again we have a definite you know actual history a family that we can identify for this man and we know his education and we know that it would have been rather extensive and so that also tells us that he is literate he is writing Ovid's writing down metamorphosis all his poems were written rather than coming from an oral tradition so his education was meant to lead him to a career in law and the Roman government and he did have a minor career for a while as an official in the Roman government but he did not like it and he had been to become a poet and this was something that apparently his father did not like and he enjoyed great success as a poet of money of his verses were erotic he were a lot of love poetry as well as of course the metamorphoses and some other prominent poetry on Roman religious festivals and but some of his most famous and scandalous poems besides the metamorphoses were ones where he celebrated his own erotic exploits and then he and advised others on seduction and I'll talk about those in a slider too and in terms of his poetic career he was a contemporary of Virgil and Horace who are two of the other sort of pillars of Roman poetry particularly Virgil who wrote the epic poem the Aeneid which celebrates the founding of Rome from the survivors of Troy and so one of the things that we noticed this would be if we had more time we'd go into it we actually read the Aeneid being compared but Ovid often conscientiously differentiates himself from Virgil who was again setting out to make himself the epic poet of the Roman Empire that was not offered interest as a poet and in the again if we read the amid we could compare for example those sections of the metamorphosis where of it talks about Aeneas to the sections of the Aeneid where well Gnaeus is the main character so Ovid differentiates himself and so himself not as at all as the poet of the Roman Empire this political historical poet as Virgil did but much more as a poet of art Beauty love eroticism and pleasure and passion and those sorts of things as you heard me mention before Ovid came into conflict with the Emperor Augustus in his career and it is what happened was in the year eighty II Augustus exiled Ovid for the rest of his life to the frontier city of Thomas and so for the rest of his life Ovid was and from Rome living in this what he considered to be a very horrible city on the frontiers of Roman Empire where most people didn't even speak Latin which for him as a literate Roman citizen would have you know been going someplace and no one spoke his language they all were barbarians to him and it was also a very dangerous place because of the wars of expansion and conflict and Ovid wrote from there continued to write wrote of his sadness living on these frontiers and eventually died in the year 17 C II so just to give you a sense of where he went we see here again the Roman Empire he was exiled from Rome there at the center of the Empire all the way out to that red star that's where Thomas was and that was where he lived for the last nine years of his life so it was quite a distance from the center of things and again on the frontiers the wild frontiers of the Roman Empire so the mystery is why was Ovid exiled the exact causes is unknown Ovid wrote that it was due to what he called a poem and a mistake perhaps people have theorized this was his earlier erotic poetry that had been written some years before that Augustus decided finally that he didn't like anymore and wanted to exile Ovid for that some theorized that it was involvement in a personal indiscretion of someone close to Augustus perhaps his niece there are some scholars who even theorized that it never actually happened given the sparse evidence that we actually have that perhaps Ovid didn't really leave but he would just sort of wrote this elaborate literary conceit took on this persona of an exile as a literary experiment to sort of express what it was like not being anymore in with the centers of power so it's it's a mystery a great mystery we'll probably never know but given all things considered we still know a great deal more about Ovid than we do about the others so to talk about his works he had many many popular works including the Amore's or the loves this was a series of erotic elegies about his on and on again off again relationship with his mistress Karina who may or may not have been a real person this may have just been elaborate again literary conceit a few years later he wrote the ARS Amma Toria which is the art of love he taught in which is again erotic poetry teaching the arts of seduction and love to both men and women and he also wrote or began an epic cycle called the fast e or the festivals this is a series of unfinished poems on the months of the Roman calendar on the religious festivals in myths etcetera so is a really another similar to the metamorphosis this great epic sort of combining synthesis of multiple religious and mythological ideas but all under the idea of the Roman camp calendar so these are just some of the popular works that offered was known for his most famous work of course is the metamorphosis and it's his most ambitious and prized work it was the work that Abed believed would make him eternally famous this was his his magnum opus so that right there also tells you something very different Homer and Hesiod are not writing or if they were writing they were not composing these poems necessarily for their own everlasting Fame although popularity and contests were part of it but they were writing you know they were part of a tradition Ovid is a author he is a solitary author who although he's writing within the tradition is also writing for his own glory his own literary Fame so that's a very just a difference in terms of the purpose the overall point of in the context within which these texts were composed and the metamorphosis covers about two hundred and fifty different myths throughout its 15 books so it covers a whole bunch of different stories from many different sources all again synthesized into Ovid's unique whole the narrative of the poem covers all of history from creation to the present day that is to the present day of Rome from Ovid's time and the deification of Emperor Augustus so it goes from creation and we see a lot of similarities perhaps to what we read in he cioud although some noted differences as well and mostly his sources again are romanized versions of greek myths so the greek stories but they've been transformed i'm in various ways the characters given different names or locations some details changed again remember even in homer and hesiod we did not see uniformity between the different stories every area in ancient greece had their own sort of tradition and rome adopted all these different traditions and again what Ovid is doing much like you said is trying to synthesize different stories that don't necessarily agree with each other that don't necessarily go together but trying to synthesize them into one coherent text and here's just a little basic cheat sheet for most of the Greek and Roman names of the different gods and other characters the Greek names on the left the Roman names on the right sometimes Ovid will use both sometimes he'll use the Greek name and the Roman name but for many like Joe Jupiter he pretty much always calls him Jove or Jupiter never uses the word Zeus but Athena might be sometimes referred to as Athena or Minerva Diana might be sometimes referred to as Artemis and so forth so these are the just to keep it straight in your mind because it can be confusing here's some of the most important names they're Greek and Roman names so you can identify that the comparisons between Ovid and what Hesiod and Homer write one thing we might notice about the narrative is that in the early books the transformations are usually the cause and result of the divine figures the gods it's their action their desires that cause all the transformations but as we notice as we move later on after Dante book six or so the later books the transformations while they're enacted by the gods their causes are human passion the extremes of human passion and that Clues us in that really you know while metamorphosis is the narrative theme the narrative trend in this stories it's passion that is the deeper issue that really unites them and the extremes of passion we also note that later in the books later in the poem he overlaps with parts of Homer's Iliad in the Odyssey he tells parts of those stories he also overlaps with Virgil's Aeneid which was again the Latin epic that celebrated the founding of Rome by the survivors of Troy where Aeneas the last survivor of Priam family the royal family of Troy escapes and eventually found Rome so here again and if we read Virgil's Aeneid we could compare the way Ovid presents Aeneas much less sympathetic much less celebratory much less heroic than Virgil's portrayal of Aeneas in terms of the style the metamorphosis is full of a again very diverse and seemingly disconnected narratives these stories really have very little to do with each other most of them so what the genius of it is not the stories because again Ovid's taking these stories from you know these are well-known stories although he might be wreaking his own changes on them but what his genius is is the way he links them in all the creative different ways of linking stories to stories they are connected by shared geography shared characters maybe narrators some are embedded with the others they might be on a similar topic or image so there's all sorts of really creative ways that Ovid is able to link these different stories together and build connections that otherwise we wouldn't be able to put these these texts together he's able to make us see ideas and links between him that we otherwise wouldn't have noticed and again he has the use of the technique of embedded narratives where his stories within stories within stories and multiple shifting narrators in different perspectives so he's able to not only give us you know the entire story of the creation of the world to the present day he's able to show it to us through all these different perspectives all these different visions of the world so we get to see this transformations and our own perspective on those on what we see is transforming with the narrator's and so some of the explicit themes which again are fairly obvious and fairly clearly stated the explicit narrative theme of transformation that is what links pretty much all of these stories together is that they all deal with some sort of transformation but there is a deeper conceptual continuity and that is again the extremes of passion love desire hatred lust all these sorts of desires despair all these emotions we see the extremes we see them in their most violent vehement forms and we see what that does to human behavior human nature so we see how humans are subject to our own transformations our own internal metamorphosis and there's also some political context and so some of scholars have questioned what exactly Abed's attitude towards augustus is there are times when he seems to be very flattering but there are other times when his flattery seems somewhat tongue-in-cheek to be almost you know overly excessive so are there moments when Ovid is subtly maybe critiquing or mocking Augustus's pretensions to divinity and imperial power so the last thing to consider is the purpose of the metamorphosis what a bird is doing with this and while he shares some of his purpose with homer and hesiod his different context in life makes of course the purpose behind metamorphosis is very different again Ovid himself was wanted to live the life of poet he wanted to make a name for himself as a poet so part of this was his attempts to become immortal to make his fame as a poet so he was fulfilling his own poetic expression certainly a large part this was entertainment and pleasure the beauty of the language the beauty of the stories the humor the entertainment perhaps the tragedy and emotions spurred by reading and these stories but also this is definitely a philosophical and artistic consideration of the human experience of human passions these stories are not meant to be taken literally definitely not by Ovid whether or not he believed them to be true I think probably he believes them to be myths that is stories but even though he doesn't believe them to have actually happened they are important for the way they encourage us to think about what it means to be human and the way we experience our passions and our relations with each other and our life in the world and finally I would say that the divine figures building on that the divine figures are not so much gods although the Romans did worship these they did have cults to work towards these various gods they were really more like allegories or philosophical concepts or embodied forces rather than physical real beings that were believed to to exist in some cases at least in many cases so this is not a religious text as much as it is again an artistic and philosophical text that's very important to keep in mind when differentiating between say the metamorphosis and something like the Bible so just to review the context of the Roman Empire in which Ovid lived was a literate sophisticated worldly Empire and so a much larger world than Homer and Hesiod in Roman culture was very sexually permissive and not as focused on martial values as homers and Hesiod was but there was at the same time a movement to restore traditional values Ovid himself was a highly educated and literate author who was very popular and his works shared many common themes including passion and desire that that run throughout most of his works especially the metamorphosis and the metamorphosis is his magnum opus his greatest work that that has both been considered by history and by himself to be the work that that made Ovid who he was so last things you to do there will be one last video posted just my final thoughts on what we've read the last few weeks make sure you review the assigned readings for the metamorphoses those selected stories that i emailed you the final quiz on those stories and the reading journal will be due on Wednesday August 9th at midnight and the final paper is due Thursday August 10th at midnight if you have any questions or concerns please get in touch to me via phone email text or blackboard and otherwise good luck with your work this week

Channel: Professor RSP

Views: 8,625

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Keywords: ovid, roman empire, metamorphoses, literature, poetry, epic poetry, classical literature, mythology, roman mythology, myth, augustus

Id: VjVmHmjKfvU

Length: 25min 52sec (1552 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2017