Ovid is not exactly the proper example for Roman greatness. He is the author, after all, of famously lascivious love manuals and erotic poetry, teaching in his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) how to pick up girls outside the Forum and generally mocking the pretensions of early imperial Rome, which caused Augustus to exile him in late middle-age. For generations of schoolboys (myself included), Ovid was excluded from the usual high-school cursus authorum romanorum of Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil. Along with the equally off-color Catullus, Ovid had to wait for the supposed maturity of college.

And yet there is no question that Ovid belongs in the first rank of Roman poets. In the closing lines of the Metamorphoses, he predicted that his fame would live on whatever his end, and so it proved to be. His influence was already evident shortly after his death; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries he surpassed Virgil and Horace as the Roman poet of choice. By the seventeenth century, as Gian Biagio Conte writes in his magisterial history of Latin literature, Ovid had become “thoroughly absorbed within European culture.” This interest continues; Mary Zimmerman’s experimental retelling of the Metamorphoses was recently a hit on Broadway, and in 1994 Michael Hoffman and James Lasdun published After Ovid, a collection of retellings of Ovid’s tales.

Along with the equally off-color Catullus, Ovid had to wait for the supposed maturity of college.

The standard account divides Ovid’s work into three broad stages. There is the early Ovid, the love poet who composed the Amores (Experiences of Love), the Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris (Love Therapy), and the stylized letters of mythological women to their lovers, Epistulae Heroidum. Ovid then moved on to more serious works with his Metamorphoses and Fasti (Festival Calendar). His final years are reflected in the Tristia (Elegies of Lament) and the Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), which describe his journey from Rome and accommodation to his new surroundings.

Of his life we know little, other than what he himself tells us. That source may not be completely trustworthy, as Ovid was adept in creating and recreating his poetic persona as needed. Publius Ovidius Naso was born of minor nobility in the town of Sulmo, about ninety miles from Rome, lived roughly from 43 B.C. to A.D. 16 or 17, and died in exile. As a young man, Ovid received the rhetorical training traditional for those of his background. Rather than embarking upon the usual political career of a wealthy Roman, Ovid devoted himself to poetry. Ovid attached himself to the literary circle of the Roman aristocrat Valerius Massella but was apparently wealthy enough so as not to need the support of a patron.

When Ovid was about fifty years old, the Emperor Augustus exiled him to the town of Tomis on the Black Sea coast, at the very edge of the Empire, in what is now Romania. The reasons for the exile remain mysterious. Augustus seems to have been displeased with Ovid’s love poetry, specifically the Ars Amatoria, and ordered them removed from the public libraries in Rome. Ovid himself only obliquely refers to his error as some unidentified culpa (fault) he learned of by accident. It did not help that, as the evidence suggests, the culpa somehow involved Augustus’ granddaughter Julia, who was busily, and notoriously, violating her grandfather’s renewed emphasis on moral virtue. Despite Ovid’s entreaties, neither Augustus nor his successor Tiberius granted him pardon.

Along with his near-contemporaries Propertius and Tibullus, Ovid was heir to the poetic tradition of Callimachus, whose allusive, witty, and complex style suited the jaded sophisticates of the early days of the Empire. The complexity also served as convenient political covering. Augustus achieved full control of Rome only in 31 B.C., after defeating Marc Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium. Augustus then began transforming himself from the princeps (first in rank) of the Republic to Emperor. His position was far from secure, however, and the years of Ovid’s adulthood were wracked with political and domestic threats. Poets especially needed to be careful, as the Emperor freely used literature to establish his Rome as a “Golden Era.” Ovid’s exile was only another installment in the imperial drama that continued until after Augustus’ death in A.D. 14.

Niklas Holzberg, a distinguished scholar and Professor of Classics at the University of Munich, in this readable and comprehensive contribution to the Ovidian revival, examines each of the major works individually and as part of what he sees as Ovid’s larger poetic project. His Ovid “intended systematically to develop possibilities for literary expression that Ovid’s predecessors among the poets of antiquity exploited only rarely, if at all.” First, Holzberg maintains, the rules and inner logic of elegy remained with Ovid in all his works, concealing at times political themes, and second, that the concept of “metamorphosis” is used deliberately as a literary device from the very beginning. While erudite, the book is accessible to non-specialists and does not require knowledge of Latin.

Elegiac poetry depicted the erotic enslavement (servitium amoris) of a Roman male citizen to a female slave or prostitute, and represented a reversal of both traditional Roman mores and the Augustan morals program. The roles in such poetry were sharply defined: “the unwavering devotion of an upright, poetically talented, young upper-class Roman stands over against the infidelity of a hetaera [courtesan];” because of her inconstancy, the male amator suffers for his love. Moreover, he is cast out of society for his subjugation to a faithless dura puella (tough chick) of an unacceptable social rank. The elegists employed political and military imagery to illustrate the amator’s attempts to win the loyalty of the puella, as further examples of the reversal of social roles.

Holzberg portrays the early Roman elegists as reactionaries against what they saw happening to their upper-class Roman society under Augustus’s elimination of the Republic. They retreated into the world of love poetry, where the usual rules were turned upside down. There was some of this in Ovid as well, but what makes him worth reading now is how he adapted the forms of elegiac poetry for his own purposes. As Holzberg explains by the example of Amores 3.7, Ovid “intertwines the speaker’s chronologically unfolding lament with the chronology of his recollections of each particular act.” The love poetry transcends the formalism of elegy into a real narrative of characters whose psychological and emotional development we can follow. In a section entitled “Amor, Roma and the Moral of the Novel,” Holzberg makes a case of Ovid not only as an accomplished parodist of his predecessors, but also as an innovative poet who was exploring what Holzberg calls the novelistic possibilities of Latin verse.

Holzberg convincingly argues that the rules of elegy became a constituent part of Ovid’s work, even when his subject matter turned to myth or exile. The best example of this is perhaps the appeals to Augustus throughout the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which the Emperor is placed in the position of the dura puella, coldly refusing to favor her distressed lover. Using the language common to the amator, Ovid unrealistically imagines the Emperor heeding his laments:

His inventiveness with the rules of elegy also informs Holzberg’s second theme. In Ovid’s poetry, everything is changing: gods and mortals take different forms, men and women assume new roles, and mortals are made divine. The Epistulae Heroidum, for example, set up the women as amatores and the long-lost men as the puellae who have abandoned them for war or adventure. Not even Rome, he implies, is safe; it too will pass away. In the Amores, Ovid describes his own transformation into a poet of elegy:

The “foot” (pedem) stolen by the god of love is the length of meter that transformed the intended poem from epic hexameter to elegiac couplet. Ovid was now to write about love, not war. This is the first of many indications for Holzberg of Ovidian metamorphosis, both poetical and personal. The proem to the Metamorphoses transforms Ovid yet again. He asks the gods to look on his project with favor, which they themselves have also “metamorphosed” from something not described into a perpetuum carmen, a term for epic.

The experiences Ovid endured as an exile complete his transformation. Holzberg summarizes Ovid’s exilic works as those of “a seafaring, patient Odysseus learning the ways of a remote land [who] becomes, after undergoing a living death, a new member of a barbaric people,” which “is something unique in ancient literature.” With this study, Holzberg provides ample reason for revisiting, and enjoying, Ovid’s immediacy, literary skill, and psychological insight.