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Person43 BC – AD 17

Ovid

Also called: Publius Ovidius Naso

Roman poet who wrote the Metamorphoses, some 250 Greek and Roman myths of transformation, and the Fasti on the Roman calendar of festivals; banished by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8, he died there

Born in 43 BC into an equestrian family at Sulmo (Sulmona) in central Italy, he studied rhetoric in Rome and Athens as his father wished and held minor offices, but soon devoted himself to poetry. Love poems such as the Amores and the Art of Love made him popular, and he went on to write the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. In AD 8 Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea; Ovid named the cause only as “a poem and a mistake.” Beyond the Art of Love clashing with Augustus’ moral policies, nothing is known. His pleas to return in the Tristia and the Letters from the Black Sea went unanswered, and he died at Tomis around AD 17.

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1 related event

  1. 1
    AD 2 – AD 8Ovid’s Metamorphosesauthor

    Around AD 8 the Roman poet Ovid completed the Metamorphoses, an epic in fifteen books weaving together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Caesar; its last books lead through Aeneas, Romulus and Numa into Roman history. The same year he was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea.

People who appear alongside

  • Augustus63 BC – AD 14

    First Roman emperor (r. 27 BC – AD 14); as Octavian, Caesar’s adopted heir, he won at Actium and founded the principate

Themes this person appears in

  • The Founding Myths of Rome1200 BC – 1471

    From Aeneas escaping burning Troy to Dido, Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women and Lucretia — the origins the Romans claimed for themselves, in story order, alongside the sites of Lavinium and the Palatine, the Aeneid and Livy’s History, the Ara Pacis and the Capitoline Wolf