Literature and history

welcome.

Welcome.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 59, Early Ovid.

This is the first of six programs on the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Nasso, who lived from 43

B.C. until 17 C.E. and whose most famous work is the metamorphoses.

In this show, we're going to learn about Ovid's early works,

the Amoris and the Heroides.

Ovid was the youngest of a group of writers

we call the Augustan age poets.

Born the year that Cicero died,

Ovid was almost 30 years younger than Virgil.

And Ovid lived longer than any of his literary contemporaries.

Virgil and Horace lived into their 50s, but Ovid's predecessors in love poetry,

propitious and Tibolis, didn't even make it past their 30s.

Ovid not only had the longest life of all the Augustan age poets,

he was also the most wide-ranging and prolific in what he produced.

Books of love poems, manuals on seduction and coping with heartbreak.

Episillary works, a tragedy, a history of Roman holidays,

an epic catalog of myths, an invective, and at the end of his life,

autobiography and personal letters in verse that bemoaned his exile in modern day Romania. Almost all of these works have survived and from

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