Ovid: A Very Short Introduction
Llewelyn Morgan
Abstract
Ovid: A Very Short Introduction discusses Ovid’s poetry, and the social and cultural context in which it was written. No poet of the Graeco-Roman world has had a deeper impact on subsequent literature and art than Ovid. But he was also a man of his time, and while the poetry he wrote still speaks to us today, it channels the cultural and political upheavals that Rome in his day was experiencing: its public life under Rome’s first emperor Augustus, changing sexual mores, religion, literary debt to Greece, and urban landscape. This VSI introduces Ovid’s poetry on love, heroic women, metamorphosis, Roman festivals, and his own exile by Augustus. It also explores his immense influence on later literature and art, an uninterrupted popularity through the Middle Ages and into modern times. Artists as diverse as Chaucer, Goethe, and Dali are all his heirs. But it focuses on his own poetry. Ovid was the wittiest, most inventive, and least deferential of Roman poets, his poetry a scintillating combination of high intellect and mischief.
Keywords:
literature,
Ovid,
poetry,
Rome,
Greco-Roman poet,
art
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Sep 2020
- Print ISBN-13:
- 9780198837688
- Published online:
- Sep 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1093/actrade/9780198837688.001.0001
