ABSTRACT
Ovid Ovid was born into a well-to-do equestrian family on March 20,43 B.C. E. in Sulmo, a town in the Apennines, about eighty miles from Rome. This was the year after Julius Caesar was assassinated; almost a year before Cicero was murdered; and twelve years before the battle of Actium brought an end to the civil war between Antony and Octavian. At about the time of Actium, Ovid, like others from his class, was sent to Rome for an education in rhetoric and law. To a large degree, then, he missed the century of civil wars that played such an important role in the experience of our other poets, and he reached his maturity in the new, peaceful, and urbane Rome of Augustus. He continued his education in Athens, toured Asia Minor, spent a year in Sicily. Then at twenty-five he prepared to stand for the quaestorship. This public office was the first office in the cursus honorum, or "course of offices," leading ultimately to the consulship. It would have meant admission to the Senate and would have made Ovid the first senator from Sulmo. He decided, however, not to stand for the office, but rather to write poetry, "a useless task," his father called it. He became a member of Messalla's circle of poets.
