Legacy of Ovid

In Classical antiquity, Ovid’s influence on later Latin poetry was primarily technical. He succeeded in the difficult task of adapting the intractable Latin language to dactylic Greek metres, and thereby perfected both the elegiac couplet and the hexameter as all-purpose metres and as instruments of fluent communication. Ovid’s verse is remarkable for its smoothness, fluency, and balance. The elegance of his verse masks its extreme artificiality, and the casual reader may overlook the quiet ruthlessness of Ovid’s linguistic innovations, particularly in vocabulary. Ovid’s hexameters in the Metamorphoses are a superb vehicle for rapid narrative and description.

To that technical facility Ovid added an unrivaled power of invention that enabled him to exploit ideas and situations to the utmost, chiefly through the use of vivid and telling details. His undoubted rhetorical gifts have caused him to be dubbed insincere and even heartless, and he seems indeed to have lacked the capacity for strong emotion or religious feeling. Judged, however, by his gift for fantasy, Ovid is one of the great poets of all time. In the Metamorphoses he created a caricature of the actual world, the setting for a cosmic comedy of manners in which the endless flux and reflux of the universe itself is reflected in the often paradoxical and always arbitrary fate of the characters, human and divine. Pathos, humour, beauty, and cruelty are mingled in a unique individual vision. Ovid’s talent is not of that highest order which can pierce the outward semblance of people and things and receive intimations of a deeper reality; but what he could do, few if any poets have ever done better.

Influence

Ovid’s immense popularity during his lifetime continued after his death and was little affected by the action of Augustus, who banned his works from the public libraries. From about 1100 onward Ovid’s fame, which during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages had been to some extent eclipsed, began to rival and even at times to surpass Virgil’s. The 12th and 13th centuries have with some justice been called “the age of Ovid.” Indeed, he was esteemed in that period not only as entertaining but also as instructive, and his works were read in schools. His poetry is full of epigrammatic maxims and sententious utterances which, lifted from their contexts, made a respectable appearance in the excerpts in which medieval readers often studied their classics. Ovid’s popularity was part, however, of a general secularization and awakening to the beauties of profane literature; he was the poet of the wandering scholars as well as of the vernacular poets, the troubadours and minnesingers; and when the concept of romantic love, in its new chivalrous or “courtly” guise, was developed in France, it was Ovid’s influence that dominated the book in which its philosophy was expounded, the Roman de la rose.

Ovid’s popularity grew during the Renaissance, particularly among humanists who were striving to re-create ancient modes of thought and feeling, and printed editions of his works followed each other in an unending stream from 1471. A knowledge of his verse came to be taken for granted in an educated man, and in the 15th–17th centuries it would be difficult to name a poet or painter of note who was not in some degree indebted to him. The Metamorphoses, in particular, offered one of the most-accessible and most-attractive avenues to the riches of Greek mythology. But Ovid’s chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing: its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality. It is those things that have recommended him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.