P. Ovidius Naso
The most naturally gifted poet Rome ever produced
43 BC – c. 17/18 AD
Publius Ovidius Naso was born in 43 BC in Sulmo, in the Apennine hills east of Rome, to a well-established equestrian family. Unlike Virgil and Horace, who came of age during the civil wars, Ovid grew up in the peace of Augustus's new order. He was the first major Roman poet to take that peace for granted — and the last to discover how fragile it was.
His early works — the Amores, the Ars Amatoria, the Heroides — established him as the wittiest and most inventive poet of his generation. The Amores are love elegies of astonishing verbal brilliance and zero emotional depth, playful reworkings of the genre that Tibullus and Propertius had taken so seriously. The Ars Amatoria is a mock-didactic poem offering instructions in the art of seduction, written with the urbanity and irreverence that made Ovid the darling of Roman high society and, eventually, its exile.
The Metamorphoses, his masterpiece, is an epic poem in fifteen books that tells the entire history of the world through the lens of transformation — from the creation of the cosmos out of chaos to the deification of Julius Caesar. It contains over 250 myths, told with inexhaustible invention and a narrative energy that never flags. It is the single most influential work of classical mythology in Western culture: Shakespeare, Titian, Bernini, and countless others drew on it as their primary source.
In 8 AD, Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea — modern Constanța in Romania — for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself says it was 'a poem and a mistake' (carmen et error). The poem was probably the Ars Amatoria; the mistake was likely involvement in a scandal touching the imperial family. He spent the last decade of his life in Tomis, writing the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto — poems of exile that are by turns heartbreaking, self-pitying, and magnificently defiant. He died there around 17 or 18 AD, never having been recalled.
A mock-didactic poem on how to find, win, and keep a lover. Three books of seduction advice delivered with perfect irony. The poem that may have contr...
Four books of verse letters from exile to friends and patrons in Rome. More controlled than the Tristia, but the loneliness and the pleading are the s...
A didactic poem on cosmetics and skincare for women. Fragmentary but showing Ovid's characteristic wit applied to beauty recipes.
Fifteen books spanning the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar, linked by the theme of transformation. Two hundred and fifty myt...
The cure for love, presented as a medical treatise. Ovid advises the lovesick on how to fall out of love — keep busy, travel, focus on her flaws. A co...