Biography of Ovid (-43 – 17)
Publius Ovidius Naso, (March 20, 43 BC – AD 17) Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations.
Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with the exception of his great Metamorphoses, which he wrote in dactylic hexameter in imitation of Vergil’s Aeneid and Homer’s epics. Ovid does not offer an epic narrative like his predecessors but promises a chronological account of the cosmos from creation to his own day, incorporating many myths and legends from the Greek and Roman traditions.
Augustus banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious (Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an ‘error’ and a ‘carmen’ – a mistake and a poem). He may have had an affair with a female relative of Augustus, and the ‘carmen’ mentioned by Ovid may be his supposedly immoral Ars Amatoria, which had been available for some time.
Biography By: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Ovid.