BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.

There's a reading list to go with it on our website,

and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time. I hope you enjoyed the programs.

Hello, Obid, the great Roman poet in the Augustine age was by his own account destroyed

by a poem and a mistake, exiled from Rome to the Romanian

coast where he remained until his death. His prized works, though, have been preserved in

greater number than any of the poets approved by

Emperor Augustus even virtual many of the Greek and Roman myths we know today are the

versions he told in metamorphosis and together with his works on the art of love they have inspired

and disturbed readers right from the time they were created. We'd me to discuss

obid our Dunstan Lowe senior lecturer in Latin literature at the University of Kent, Gail Trimble, Brown Fellow and

Tutor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford, and Maria Weike, Professor

of Latin at University College London.

Maria Wyke, can you sketch out of its biography?

Yes, well probably no actually.

The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome tends to survive in better shape than the biographies of its poets.

But we know a little about Ovid, but it's largely what he chooses to tell us in his poetry.

So Publius Nazzo was born in 43 BC, that's the year after the assassination of Julius

Caesar. The Ovidii were a wealthy family from Suomomo which is in Central Italy. His father had ambitions

for both his older brother and Ovid to follow the usual career path of the

elite that would eventually lead to membership of the Roman Senate.

...