Publius Ovidius Naso (Latin: [ˈpuːbliʊs ɔˈwɪdiʊs ˈnaːsoː]; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid (/ˈɒvɪd/ OV-id),[2][3] was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus.

[4] Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life.

Ovid was born in the Paelignian town of Sulmo (modern-day Sulmona, in the province of L'Aquila, Abruzzo), in an Apennine valley east of Rome, to an important equestrian family, the gens Ovidia, on 20 March 43 BC – a significant year in Roman politics.

[9] He held minor public posts, as one of the tresviri capitales,[10] as a member of the Centumviral court[11] and as one of the decemviri litibus iudicandis,[12] but resigned to pursue poetry probably around 29–25 BC, a decision of which his father apparently disapproved.

His earliest extant work is thought to be the Heroides, letters of mythological heroines to their absent lovers, which may have been published in 19 BC, although the date is uncertain as it depends on a notice in Am.

Ovid's next poem, the Medicamina Faciei (a fragmentary work on women's beauty treatments), preceded the Ars Amatoria (the Art of Love), a parody of didactic poetry and a three-book manual about seduction and intrigue, which has been dated to AD 2 (Books 1–2 would go back to 1 BC[20]).

This corpus of elegiac, erotic poetry earned Ovid a place among the chief Roman elegists Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, of whom he saw himself as the fourth member.

In AD 8, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus without any participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge.

Ovid wrote that the reason for his exile was carmen et error – "a poem and a mistake",[24] claiming that his crime was worse than murder,[25] more harmful than poetry.

However, in view of the long time that elapsed between the publication of this work (1 BC) and the exile (AD 8), some authors suggest that Augustus used the poem as a mere justification for something more personal.

Being far from Rome, he had no access to libraries, and thus might have been forced to abandon his Fasti, a poem about the Roman calendar, of which only the first six books exist – January through June.

[29] The five books of the elegiac Tristia, a series of poems expressing the poet's despair in exile and advocating his return to Rome, are dated to AD 9–12.

[44] The first fourteen letters are thought to comprise the first published collection and are written by the heroines Penelope, Phyllis, Briseis, Phaedra, Oenone, Hypsipyle, Dido, Hermione, Deianeira, Ariadne, Canace, Medea, Laodamia, and Hypermnestra to their absent male lovers.

The first tells of Ovid's intention to write epic poetry, which is thwarted when Cupid steals a metrical foot from him, changing his work into love elegy.

Throughout the book, Ovid playfully interjects, criticizing himself for undoing all his didactic work to men and mythologically digresses on the story of Procris and Cephalus.

[52] The Metamorphoses, Ovid's most ambitious and well-known work, consists of a 15-book catalogue written in dactylic hexameter about transformations in Greek and Roman mythology set within a loose mytho-historical framework.

The ways that stories are linked by geography, themes, or contrasts creates interesting effects and constantly forces the reader to evaluate the connections.

Like the Metamorphoses, the Fasti was to be a long poem and emulated etiological poetry by writers like Callimachus and, more recently, Propertius and his fourth book.

The Ibis is an elegiac poem in 644 lines, in which Ovid uses a dazzling array of mythic stories to curse and attack an enemy who is harming him in exile.

The laments of the city of Rome as it greets his funeral procession and the gods are mentioned, and Mars from his temple dissuades the Tiber river from quenching the pyre out of grief.

Like the other canonical elegiac poets Ovid takes on a persona in his works that emphasizes subjectivity and personal emotion over traditional militaristic and public goals, a convention that some scholars link to the relative stability provided by the Augustan settlement.

[67][68] However, although Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius may have been inspired in part by personal experience, the validity of "biographical" readings of these poets' works is a serious point of scholarly contention.

[83] Writers in the Middle Ages used his work as a way to read and write about sex and violence without orthodox "scrutiny routinely given to commentaries on the Bible".

According to Serafim Leite [pt] (1949), the ratio studiorum was in effect in Colonial Brazil during the early 17th century, and in this period Brazilian students read works like the Epistulae ex Ponto to learn Latin grammar.

[89] John Dryden composed a famous translation of the Metamorphoses into stopped rhyming couplets during the 17th century, when Ovid was "refashioned [...] in its own image, one kind of Augustanism making over another".

[90] The picture Ovid among the Scythians, painted by Delacroix, portrays the last years of the poet in exile in Scythia, and was seen by Baudelaire, Gautier and Edgar Degas.

[94] They have enjoyed a resurgence of scholarly interest in recent years, though critical opinion remains divided on several qualities of the poems, such as their intended audience and whether Ovid was sincere in the "recantation of all that he stood for before".

Ali Smith's novel Girl Meets Boy (2007), published as part of the Canongate Myth Series, reimagines the lesbian relationship between Iphis and Ianthe in Book 9 of the Metamorphoses.

In Fiona Benson's Forward Prize-winning poetry anthology Vertigo and Ghost (2019),[100] the poet experiments with different forms to represent Ovid's depictions of the female victims of Zeus' rape and sexual violence in the Metamorphoses, including Danäe, Semele, Cyane and Io.

[101] Nina MacLaughlin likewise focused on the theme of sexual assault in Ovid's Metamorphoses for her collection of short stories, Wake Siren (2019).