Life & Wisdom Quote by Ovid

Astonishingly blunt for a civilization that treated piety as public infrastructure, Ovid’s line reduces the divine to a social technology: gods are useful, therefore we’ll keep them. The force of it is the cool pivot from metaphysics to pragmatism. He doesn’t argue that gods exist; he argues that belief performs a function, and in a world held together by ritual, omens, and civic sacrifice, function can be enough.

The subtext is more barbed than it first appears. “Convenient” carries a whiff of stagecraft, as if religion is a costume the city agrees to wear because it flatters order. Ovid’s genius is to phrase that agreement without fully owning it: “let us believe” sounds communal, almost democratic, while quietly admitting the belief is a choice, not a revelation. He’s giving you the wink without writing “wink.”

Context matters. Ovid lived through Augustus’ moral renovation of Rome, when restoring “traditional” values and religious observance was part of an imperial brand. A poet who later found himself exiled for an unspecified “error” understood how power and piety intertwine. Read against that backdrop, the line can sound like a survival strategy: if the state wants gods, it’s convenient to provide them. It also reads as a poet’s manifesto. Myth, in Ovid’s hands, is pliable material; belief is less a verdict on truth than a decision to keep stories potent. The gods endure because they’re narratively and politically functional, not because they’re philosophically proven.