Ovid

Born Publius Ovidius Naso on March 20, 43 BCE, in Sulmo (present-day Sulmona), a town in the Apennine mountains about ninety miles east of Rome, he was the son of a prosperous equestrian family that intended him for a legal and political career. He studied rhetoric in Rome under the great teachers Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro, and his father’s exasperated complaint that even Homer died poor did nothing to deter his passion for verse. He held minor judicial offices before abandoning public life entirely for poetry , as he later wrote, "whatever I tried to say turned into verse." His early love elegies, the Amores (c. 16 BCE), established him as the wittiest and most irreverent of the Augustan poets, a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace who replaced their gravity with erotic sophistication and playful irony. The Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love, c. 2 CE), a mock-didactic manual on seduction, may have contributed to the disaster that overtook him: in 8 CE, the Emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis (modern Constanța, Romania), a remote outpost on the Black Sea, for what Ovid cryptically described as a "carmen et error" , a poem and a mistake , whose exact nature scholars have debated for two millennia. His masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, a continuous mythological narrative in fifteen books and nearly twelve thousand lines of dactylic hexameter, traces the history of the world from primordial chaos to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar through some 250 transformation myths, rendered in verse of such fluency and imaginative daring that it became the single most influential source of classical mythology for Western art and literature. From Tomis he wrote the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, elegies of exile suffused with longing. He died there around 17 or 18 CE, never having been recalled to Rome.