In the Heroides, a book of imaginary letters from famous heroines to their lovers, he took the monologue out of classical drama and made it lyrical and contemporary, creating a form - the unhappy woman alone, analysing her feelings - which has conditioned literature and art ever since. Yet though he lived as a sensualist, he was centred as a poet by his knowledge of what it is like to suffer - to be helplessly, ferociously in the grip of some frustrated or denied emotional need. He made his name not with epic flattery of the vanities of the regime, like Virgil, or graceful, moralising essays, like Horace, but with two notorious poems devoted to seduction and adultery, the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, which preached that sex was the only thing really worth doing and poked malicious fun at the plain-living Roman values of military achievement and chastity within marriage promoted by the emperor. He was too young fully to appreciate the peace and stability which the emperor Augustus wrested from the war-torn ruins of the old Republic. Ovid was born shortly after Julius Caesar's assassination, and died before Christ grew to manhood.
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