The Mystery of Ovid's Exile

The Mystery of Ovid's Exile

Author: John C. Thibault

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-06-14

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0520414845

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Toward the end of the year A.D. 8, the emperor Augustus publicly sentenced the poet Ovid to exile in remote and barbaric Tomis on the Black Sea. The action presumably followed a secret hearing before the emperor, and the official reason given for the sentence was Ovid's authorship of a licentious work, the Ars amatoria, ten years earlier. The Mystery of Ovid's Exile is both a survey and an analysis of the literary detective work that has been devoted to explaining the cause of Ovid's banishment from Rome. In poems composed during his exile, Ovid laments having written the Ars amatoria, but he obviously considers the poem to be merely a pretext for his punishment. His downfall appears to have been caused by his having witnessed, or in some fashion been implicated in, a crime committed either by the emperor himself or by an immediate member of the imperial family. However, it’s possible that Ovid's banishment may have been ordered merely because he was unwittingly in possession of the key to an embarrassing secret, the importance of which he might have realized had he remained in Rome. John C. Thibault examines more than one hundred available hypotheses that have been advanced by inquisitive scholars from the Middle Ages to our own day. He demonstrates the unsoundness of each hypothesis in turn, and suggests that a solution to the problem of Ovid's exile is not possible given the available evidence. The Mystery of Ovid's Exil treats a controversy that will fascinate classical scholars as well as general readers interested in Roman manners and morals of the period. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.


Two Thousand Years of Solitude

Two Thousand Years of Solitude

Author: Jennifer Ingleheart

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-10-20

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0191619132

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Banished by the emperor Augustus in AD 8 from Rome to the far-off shores of Romania, the poet Ovid stands at the head of the Western tradition of exiled authors. In his Tristia (Sad Things) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), Ovid records his unhappy experience of political, cultural, and linguistic displacement from his homeland. Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid is an interdisciplinary study of the impact of Ovid's banishment upon later Western literature, exploring responses to Ovid's portrait of his life in exile. For a huge variety of writers throughout the world in the two millennia after his exile, Ovid has performed the rôle of archetypal exile, allowing them to articulate a range of experiences of disgrace, dislocation, and alienation; and to explore exile from a number of perspectives, including both the personal and the fictional.


Ovid before Exile

Ovid before Exile

Author: Patricia Johnson

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2008-02-05

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0299224031

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The epic Metamorphoses, Ovid’s most renowned work, has regained its stature among the masterpieces of great poets such as Vergil, Horace, and Tibullus. Yet its irreverent tone and bold defiance of generic boundaries set the Metamorphoses apart from its contemporaries. Ovid before Exile provides a compelling new reading of the epic, examining the text in light of circumstances surrounding the final years of Augustus’ reign, a time when a culture of poets and patrons was in sharp decline, discouraging and even endangering artistic freedom of expression. Patricia J. Johnson demonstrates how the production of art—specifically poetry—changed dramatically during the reign of Augustus. By Ovid’s final decade in Rome, the atmosphere for artistic work had transformed, leading to a drop in poetic production of quality. Johnson shows how Ovid, in the episodes of artistic creation that anchor his Metamorphoses, responded to his audience and commented on artistic circumstances in Rome.


Ovid's Poetry of Exile

Ovid's Poetry of Exile

Author: Ovid

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Someone clever, passionate, and heartbroken comes very near us, and I think it is Ovid. I found it impossible to stop reading these poems. And poems they are."--Richard Wilbur.


The Poems of Exile

The Poems of Exile

Author: Ovid

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-01-18

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 9780520242609

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This is no small achievement. For the language-lover the translation provides elegant, flowing English verse, for the classicist it conveys close approximation to the Latin meaning coupled with a sense of the movement and rhythmic variety of Ovid's language"—Geraldine Herbert-Brown, editor of Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium "This book fills a gap. There is no similar annotated English translation of Ovid's exile poetry. Thoroughly grounded in Ovidian scholarship, Green's introduction and notes are helpful and informative. The translation is accurate, idiomatic, and lively, closely imitating the Latin elegiac couplet and capturing Ovid's changing moods."—Karl Galinsky, author of Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects


Silenced Voices

Silenced Voices

Author: Bartolo Natoli

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0299312100

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines speech loss across all of Ovid's writings and the ways that motif is explored, developed, and modified in the poet's work after his exile from Rome.


Banished Voices

Banished Voices

Author: Gareth D. Williams

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994-10-20

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780521451369

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This study examines the literary complexities of the poetry which Ovid wrote in Tomis, his place of exile on the coast of the Black Sea after he was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus in A.D. 8 because of the alleged salaciousness of the Ars Amatoria and a mysterious misdemeanour which is nowhere explained. Exile transforms Ovid into a melancholic poet of despair who claims that his creative faculties are in terminal decline. But recent research has exposed the ironic disjunction between many of the poet's claims and the latent artistry which belies them. Through a series of close readings which offer a new analytical contribution to the scholarly evaluation of the exile poetry, Dr Williams examines the nature and the extent of Ovidian irony in Tomis and demonstrates the complex literary designs which are consistently disguised under a veil of dissimulation. Gareth Williams aims to counteract traditional scholarly antipathy to the exile poetry, which could be said to represent the last frontier in modern Ovidian studies. Scholars working in the field will welcome his insights.


Ovid: Ars Amatoria, Book III

Ovid: Ars Amatoria, Book III

Author: Ovid

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 8

ISBN-13: 9780521813709

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is a full-scale commentary devoted to the third book of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. It includes an Introduction, a revision of E. J. Kenney's Oxford text of the book, and detailed line-by-line and section-by-section commentary on the language and ideas of the text. Combining traditional philological scholarship with some of the concerns of more recent critics, both Introduction and commentary place particular emphasis on: the language of the text; the relationship of the book to the didactic, 'erotodidactic' and elegiac traditions; Ovid's usurpation of the lena's traditional role of erotic instructor of women; the poet's handling of the controversial subjects of cosmetics and personal adornment; and the literary and political significances of Ovid's unexpected emphasis in the text of Ars III on restraint and 'moderation'. The book will be of interest to all postgraduates and scholars working on Augustan poetry.