Who was Ovid? | Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 | The National Gallery, London

Ovid was a poet born in 43BC, the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar. He came from a quite wealthy family and as a young man moved to Rome for his education, as was the standard thing at the time. He toured Greece in a mini Grand Tour, which was another thing that wealthy Roman men would have done. Although he took a few jobs in the judiciary, he decided not to go into public life and instead became a poet, and a very successful poet at that. Very shortly after the Metamorphoses was first published, or perhaps even the first draft was published, we’re not quite sure, Ovid was suddenly exiled from Rome. [Emperor] Augustus made the announcement himself and exiled Ovid to a place called Tomis – in modern-day Romania on the Black Sea – which was frankly a dump. It was awful. No one went to Tomis, it was right on the edge of the Empire. The climate was terrible, there was no culture there, and Ovid was exiled and his books were banned. We don’t know why this happened. The only evidence we have is what Ovid himself tells us, and he tells us there were two reasons. There was a carmen and an error. A carmen is a song, a poem, and an error is ... an error, it’s a mistake, an indiscretion. The carmen he’s referring to is [Ovid’s book] the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), said to induce Roman matrons towards adultery, which of course was rubbish. In fact, it had been published about eight years before he was banished, so that can’t have been the proximate cause. The error we don’t know, he won’t tell us, but he implies that he has seen something he shouldn’t have seen. Clearly it is something scandalous to do with the imperial family and over the years everyone has guessed at what that might be. Did he catch one of the imperial family in flagrante delicto, in an adulterous affair. Did he in fact catch Augustus himself having sex with another man? That theory was very popular in the Middle Ages. Ovid was banned and never ever made it back to Rome. He spent the rest of his life writing letters begging to be allowed back home, and he never was. He died nine years later in Tomis, very sadly.

Channel: The National Gallery

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Keywords: Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, Bernadine Corrigan, Carol Plazzotta, Lavinia Greenlaw, Ovid, Metamorphoses, Titian's First Masterpiece, poesie, National Gallery, curator, Titian, Titian's, Roman, poet, poetry, books, painter, paintings, empire, old master, scandal, banished, London, Renaissance, exhibition, Olympics, 2012

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Length: 2min 55sec (175 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2012