People/Characters Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso 21 March 43 BC/BCE – AD/CE 17/18), known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.

Today, Ovid is most famous for The Metamorphoses, a continuous mythological narrative in fifteen books written in dactylic hexameters. He is also known for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") and Fasti. His poetry greatly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.

See also LT author page.