Ovid (43 BC – AD 17/18)
Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, ranks among the most important poets of the Augustan age of Rome. Born on 20 March 43 BC in Sulmo (modern-day Sulmona in the Abruzzo region), he came from a wealthy equestrian family and received a first-rate education in rhetoric and philosophy in Rome and Athens.
Poet and Thinker Between Desire and Reason
Ovid is best known for his extensive body of poetry — including the Metamorphoses, the Ars Amatoria, and the elegiac Tristia. In these works he reveals himself not only as a virtuoso stylist but also as a perceptive observer of the human psyche. Particularly illuminating with regard to ancient ethics is his famous quotation from the Metamorphoses (VII, 20–21):
"Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor." ("I see the better path and approve it, yet I follow the worse.")
This line, spoken by the sorceress Medea in a moment of inner conflict, precisely describes the phenomenon of akrasia — weakness of will — which had already preoccupied Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle at length. Akrasia denotes the condition in which a person acts against their better judgment: the gap between moral insight and actual behaviour.
Ovid and the Stoic Perspective
Although Ovid was no Stoic and aligned himself more with the pleasure-embracing, life-affirming spirit of his age, his quotation touches on the heart of a central Stoic debate. The Stoics — above all Chrysippus and later Epictetus — denied the possibility of genuine akrasia: for them, every action was the expression of a judgement, an error of opinion rather than a failure of will. Whoever chooses the worse option is, in the moment of acting, mistaken about what is truly good.
Ovid's Medea, however — and with her the poet himself — acknowledges the emotional power of the passions over reason, a view closer to the Platonic-Aristotelian perspective. In doing so, Ovid furnishes a poetic document of the eternal tension between ratio and passio, between philosophical ideal and human reality.
Exile and Late Work
In AD 8, Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea (modern-day Constanța, Romania) — for reasons that have never been fully explained. In exile he composed the melancholy Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he laments his fate and, unwittingly, takes up the Stoic theme of enduring misfortune. He died around AD 17 or 18 far from home, far from the city he had loved so dearly.
Ovid's work remains an indispensable testimony to ancient thought on morality, freedom, and the limits of human self-mastery.