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Ovid was born in the Paelignian town of Sulmo (modern-day Sulmona, in the province of L'Aquila, Abruzzo), in an Apennine valley east of Rome, to an important equestrian family, the gens Ovidia, on 20 March 43 BC – a significant year in Roman politics.
Numerous accounts of the founding of Rome exist, but the particular one related to the Parilia is described by Ovid in his Fasti. According to this myth, Romulus , upon reaching Rome on the day of the Parilia, took a stick and engraved a line in the ground that defined the boundaries of the new city ( pomerium ) .
No work from classical antiquity, either Greek or Roman, has exerted such a continuing and decisive influence on European literature as Ovid's Metamorphoses. The emergence of French, English, and Italian national literatures in the late Middle Ages simply cannot be fully understood without taking into account the effect of this extraordinary ...
In addition to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto, as well as a 642-line curse poem called Ibis, directed against the unnamed enemy who had apparently caused his downfall. He spent several years in the outpost of Tomis and died in AD 17 or 18 without ever returning to Rome.
Ovid was a witty writer who excelled in creating lively and passionate characters. The Metamorphoses was the best-known source of Greek and Roman mythology throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It inspired many poets, painters, and composers. One of the few female poets of ancient Rome whose work has survived is Sulpicia. [14]
Although the Parentalia was a holiday on the Roman religious calendar, its observances were mainly domestic and familial. [2] The importance of the family to the Roman state, however, was expressed by public ceremonies on the opening day, the Ides of February, when a Vestal conducted a rite for the collective di parentes of Rome at the tomb of ...
[2] [3] Ovid wrote that "the oven was made a goddess, Fornax: the farmers, pleased with her, prayed she’d regulate the grain’s heat." [ 4 ] It was held in early February on various dates in different curiae , [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] which in the period of the Roman monarchy and the Roman Republic were the thirty wards of the city of Rome.
However, lemures is also uncommon: Ovid being the other main figure to employ it, in his Fasti, the six-book calendar poem on Roman holidays and religious customs. [3] Later the two terms were used nearly or completely interchangeably, e.g. by St. Augustine in De Civitate Dei. [4]