Ovid

Ovid, in Latin Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet born on 20 March 43 BCE in Sulmona, in the Apennine hills east of Rome. He was trained for a public career in law and politics, but he gave it up for poetry and quickly became one of the most admired writers of the age of Augustus. His early work dealt with love, desire and its comic complications, and he wrote in the elegiac couplet with great wit and polish. His best-known work, the Metamorphoses, gathers hundreds of Greek and Roman myths of transformation into one long poem. In 8 CE the emperor Augustus sent him into exile to Tomis, on the Black Sea. Ovid blamed a poem and an unspecified mistake, and the real reasons remain unclear. He wrote sorrowful poems from exile and died there around 17 CE. His stories shaped later European literature and art, from Dante and Shakespeare to modern painters and novelists.