Metamorphoses

Ovid — full name Publius Ovidius Naso — was born in 43 BCE in Sulmo, a small town in central Italy,

and became one of the most celebrated poets in Rome during the reign of Augustus. He was witty,

prolific, and enormously popular, writing with a lightness and elegance that made him the favourite poet

of educated Romans for generations. His early works, particularly the Amores and the Ars Amatoria,

were playful explorations of love and seduction that made him famous and eventually contributed to his

downfall.

In 8 CE, at the height of his fame and just as he completed the Metamorphoses, Augustus exiled him to

Tomis, a remote town on the Black Sea coast, for reasons that remain partially unclear. Ovid himself

cited two causes: a poem and a mistake. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, which Augustus found morally

offensive. The mistake has never been fully explained. He spent the remaining ten years of his life in

exile, writing letters begging to be recalled, and died in Tomis around 17 or 18 CE without ever returning

to Rome.

The Metamorphoses is his masterpiece and his most ambitious work. Where his earlier poetry was

personal and witty, the Metamorphoses is vast and mythological, covering the entire history of the world

from creation to Caesar in fifteen books and over eleven thousand lines. It drew on Greek and Roman

myth, on earlier poets including Homer and Virgil, and on Ovid's own extraordinary imagination. It has

influenced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and countless others, and its myths — Narcissus, Daphne,

Orpheus, Medusa — have become so embedded in Western culture that most people know them without knowing they came from Ovid.