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Marble bust in the Uffizi, assumed to be Ovid
Bust of Ovid (assumed), Uffizi Gallery, Florence · photograph by Lucasaw, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Licence · Wikimedia Commons

Historical voices

Ovid

43 BC – AD 17/18

The Roman poet of the Metamorphoses, and the most-read source of classical myth.

Born
20 March 43 BC · Sulmo (modern Sulmona), Italy
Died
AD 17 or 18 · Tomis, on the Black Sea (modern Constanța, Romania)
Nationality
Roman
  • mythology
  • classics
  • Roman poetry
  • exile

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Ovid, their publishers or their estate. Ovid appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmo, east of Rome, into an equestrian family. He wrote love poetry in elegiac couplets for the first twenty-five years of his career, and was famous and popular in his lifetime: a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, and later ranked with them among the three canonical poets of Latin literature.

In AD 8, soon after he completed the Metamorphoses, the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea. Ovid blamed "a poem and a mistake" and never explained the mistake; scholars have been guessing ever since. He spent the last nine or ten years of his life there, writing the poems of exile.

Works

Major works

  1. late 1st century BCAmoreserotic elegies, in an edition of five books and later a revised three
  2. c. AD 2Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)a mock-didactic manual of seduction
  3. by AD 8Metamorphosesfifteen books of mythological stories from the creation to Julius Caesar
  4. c. AD 8Fastia poem on the Roman calendar, left unfinished
  5. AD 9–12Tristiafive books of poems from exile
  6. AD 12–17Epistulae ex Pontoletters in verse from the Black Sea

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 43 BC

    Born at Sulmo on 20 March, the year Cicero was killed.

  2. 25 BC

    Gave his first public recitation, aged eighteen.

  3. AD 2

    About the date of the Ars Amatoria, the poem that may have counted against him later.

  4. AD 8

    Finished the Metamorphoses and was banished by Augustus to Tomis, without a trial or a decision of the Senate.

  5. AD 9–12

    Wrote the five books of Tristia in exile, pleading to be recalled to Rome.

  6. AD 17/18

    Died at Tomis, still in exile.

Why they are here

Ovid and the shelf

Relevance

Ovid's Metamorphoses is the most important single source of Greek and Roman myth for later writers and artists. Anyone who reads folklore, mythology or the retelling of old stories is reading in its long wake.

Influence

His poetry was imitated through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages and has shaped Western art and literature since, from Dante to Shakespeare to every modern retelling of Greek myth.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Ovid, and they are not a recommendation on Ovid’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Ovid is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.