Books by Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – 17/18 AD), known universally in the English-speaking world as Ovid, was a Roman poet of the Augustan period celebrated as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature alongside Virgil and Horace. Born into an equestrian family in Sulmo, Ovid abandoned a legal and political career to compose witty, sophisticated elegiac verse exploring the psychology and gamesmanship of love in works such as Amores and Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). His crowning masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, is a colossal fifteen-book epic in dactylic hexameter that chronicles over 250 myths of magical transformation from the creation of the cosmos down to the deification of Julius Caesar. In 8 AD, Emperor Augustus mysteriously banished Ovid to the remote Black Sea outpost of Tomis, where he spent his final decade composing the plaintive elegies of Tristia. Ovid’s dazzling narrative brilliance, psychological insight, and sensual wit profoundly shaped Western art, inspiring Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton.