Ovid(I)
- Writer
- Music Department
Born a year after the notorious murder of Julius Caesar, Ovid passed
his childhood in relative peace despite the civil wars that wracked the
Roman Empire. At last Augustus was crowned emperor and the Pax Romana
began, and Ovid set out to study rhetoric in Rome. Despite a promising
career in government and even a shot at becoming senator, he preferred
writing love poetry and concentrating on his unusual epic,
"Metamorphoses". In 8 A.D. he was exiled by the Emperor Augustus for an
unspecified crime; scholars speculate Ovid was involved somehow with
the scandal of Augustus' daughter Julia's adultery. His erotic and
sexually liberated work was wildly popular before and after his exile,
and both "Metamorphoses" and "Ars Amatoria", his cynically humorous
book on seduction, would greatly influence later writers.
