Are they and welcome to Emperor of Rome. The only podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire where you can hear a Latin greeting in a broad

Australian accent. I'm your host Matt Smith and with me as always is Dr.

Eannen Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode XX VII, Ovid.

Before we delve into the Civil Wars of Rome and the Flavian emperors, we turn over this episode to examine the life and work of the Roman poet of it.

During his life, his work might not have been appreciated by the right people, but in later years it's come to be admired in particular by

his biggest fan Rianna Evans. Ovid was born in 43 b.C. which is the year after Julius

Caesar's murdered which is something I always Julius Caesar's murdered,

which is something I always like to think about

because of course that is the beginning of the end of the republic.

That leads to the rise of Octavian,

who's going to be Augustus, who's going to be Augustus is going to be the first emperor and really of it is growing up through all of that through the well he's not going to remember the civil war with Caesar's assassins He's one year old when that happens, but he will remember the

Civil War between Octavian and Mark Antony, which ends in 31, so of its 12. But really throughout his teenage years and his adult life,

there is an emperor, there's the beginning of an empire, the principal is coming into being. So he's sort of growing up through the

development of that system which is an interesting time to be alive. He's also

though not really been at the center of a civil war as such, certainly not the

Civil Wars of Caesar and the Assassins.

And he's the generation after the great Roman poet Virgil, who did experience all of that. Virgil probably lost his land as part of the civil wars.

Obid seems to have been sort of insulated from that and I think that leads him in a way or it helps with the fact that he is a much more playful poet.

He hasn't had to live through the deprivations of civil war.

So what do we know about his family and where he was born?

He was born in a place called Solmo, which is now Solmona, in Central Italy. So it's not very close to Rome, but not that

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