Ovid

Ovid, in Latin Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet of the age of Augustus, ranked with Virgil and Horace among the three great poets of Latin literature. Famous in Rome for witty love poetry, he is best remembered for the Metamorphoses, a vast poem of mythical transformations that became one of the main sources of classical mythology for later Europe. In AD 8 Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he died nine or ten years later, for reasons that remain a mystery.

Ovid was born on 20 March 43 BC at Sulmo, now Sulmona, in a valley of the Apennines east of Rome, into a well-established family of equestrian rank. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, and he and his brother studied rhetoric in Rome, where Ovid was drawn more to emotion than to argument. After his brother died at 20, Ovid gave up law, travelled to Athens, Asia Minor and Sicily, held some minor public posts, and then turned to poetry, probably in the late 20s BC, against his father's wishes.

He belonged to the literary circle of the patron Messalla and knew poets such as Propertius. He heard Horace recite but, by his own account, scarcely met Virgil. He married three times; his third wife supported him loyally during his exile.

For about 25 years Ovid wrote mainly erotic poetry in elegiac couplets. The Heroides, probably his earliest surviving work, are imaginary letters from mythical heroines such as Penelope and Dido to their absent lovers. The Amores, poems about his affair with a mistress called Corinna, who may never have existed, playfully reworked the conventions of Latin love elegy. His tragedy Medea, much admired in antiquity, is lost.

Around 1 BC to AD 2 came the Ars Amatoria, or Art of Love, a mock instruction manual in seduction for men and women, followed by its comic sequel, the Remedies for Love. These poems sat awkwardly beside Augustus's laws of 18 BC promoting marriage and punishing adultery.

By AD 8 Ovid had finished the Metamorphoses, fifteen books of hexameter verse linking about 250 myths of bodies transformed into trees, animals, stones and stars, from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar. Among its stories are those of Daedalus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Pygmalion. At the same time he was writing the Fasti, a poem on the Roman calendar and its festivals, of which only the six books covering January to June survive.

In AD 8 Augustus personally ordered Ovid to leave Rome for Tomis, a remote town on the Black Sea in the province of Moesia, now Constanța in Romania. Ovid blamed "a poem and a mistake", meaning probably the Art of Love and some offence he never explained. Scholars have linked it to the disgrace of members of the emperor's family banished around the same time, but the truth is unknown. A minority have even argued that the exile was a literary fiction, a view most scholars reject.

In exile he wrote the five books of the Tristia (Sorrows) and the four of the Letters from the Black Sea, pleading with friends, his wife and the emperor for recall, describing the cold and the local peoples, and claiming to have learned the Getic and Sarmatian languages. No pardon came, and Ovid's death came at Tomis in AD 17 or 18.

The Metamorphoses was widely read in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Dante ranked Ovid among the great poets of antiquity, Chaucer drew on him, and Arthur Golding's English translation of 1567 was used in Tudor schools that formed Marlowe and Shakespeare. Painters from Botticelli to Rubens took subjects from his myths. His exile later fascinated writers such as Alexander Pushkin, who compared his own banishment to Ovid's.

Our -1 map shows the Roman world of Augustus in which Ovid wrote, and our 100 map shows the Roman Empire reaching the Black Sea coast where Tomis lay.