Author: OVID
Biography:
OVID (43 BCE-17 CE: OCD)
Publius Ovidius Naso, born into an upper-class family at Sulmo (Sulmona) in the Abruzzo, was educated at Rome, travelled abroad, and returned to become one of the city’s most popular poets with his Amores, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris—all in elegiac couplets—and the irregular epic Metamorphoses in 15 books in heaxameters. He married three times and had at least one daughter. In 8 CE, however, he was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus. Tiberius, successor to Augustus, upheld the sentence. The Fasti, in the form of a calendar, was incomplete at the time and only the first six books have survived. Ovid spent the rest of his life alone in exile in Tomis on the Black Sea, an existence that he complains of in later works, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Of the twelve named translators represented here, five have headnotes of their own: John Jarrard Howard, Edward Dacres Baynes, Francis Arden, Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan, and Richard Whiffin. Two are identified under other authors, William Green under Horace and William Mills under Virgil. James Ewen (fl 1787-97), who also translated from French the works of Du Wicquet (q.v.) in 1797, cannot be identified with confidence. John Fenton may be the man (c. 1773-1840) who graduated from University College, Oxford (BA 1795, MA 1800), and went into the church. William Windsor Fitzthomas (1742-1806) was educated at Eton; joined the 6th Dragoons in 1759, and after leaving the army took an LLB at Oxford (1774) and became a clergyman in Warwickshire, where he also served as J.P. ACAD calls him “a very eccentric character.” Besides his translations of Ovid, Thomas Orger (1777-1853) produced a Greek edition of Anacreon, Sappho, and Alcaeus with a literal prose translation in 1825. A Quaker born in Ware, Hertfordshire, he settled in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and later retired to Oxford. Joseph Guy, Jr. (b c. 1805) was the son of Joseph Guy (1770-1839), professor of geography, who established a long series of school textbooks to which Joseph Jr. contributed several titles. He matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1828 but did not take a degree. He later ran his own academy in Worcester, but the place and date of death have not as yet been found. (OCD 6 Apr. 2025; Alumni Oxonienses; ACAD; CCEd 6 Apr. 2025; ancestry.com 6 Apr. 2025; findmypast.com 7 Apr. 2025) HJ