Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC - AD 17) was a Roman poet, best known today as the author of the Metamorphoses, a large collection of classical and near eastern myths and legends.

Born at Sulmo, to the east of Rome, into an upper class family, he was sent to Rome to be educated in preparation for an official's life. But his real interest was in poetry and, after a few years in several minor judicial posts, he abandoned that life for poetry.

Success came early for Ovid with a number of books on the subject of love (of which the Ars Amatoria is the most famous today) and by early in what we today call the Christian era, he was considered Rome's leading poet. In the year AD 8, soon after composing his most famous work, the Metamorphoses, Ovid was exiled by Augustus to Tomis (or Tomi, now Costanza), a town on the Black Sea on the extreme edge of the Empire. In spite of numerous pleas to be allowed to return, he would spend the rest of his life there.

Works

Amores

Heroides

Ars Amatoria

Remedia Amoris

Metamorphoses: Composed in dactylic hexameter in the years immmediately preceding his exile, this is a work, in 15 books, detailing around 250 stories of supernatural transformations (or metamorphoses) taken from classical and near eastern mythology and legend. A veritable compendium of ancient mythology, it is set out, albeit rather unsystematically, in semi-chronological order from the creation of the world to the time of Augustus.

Fasti

Tristia