Ovid, in full Publius Ovidius Naso 43BC-AD17
Roman poet

Born in Sulmo (Solmona), in the Abruzzi, he was trained as a lawyer in Rome, but devoted himself to poetry. Later acclaimed as the master of the elegiac couplet, he had his first literary success with a collection of love poems, the Amores ('Loves'), followed by Heroides ('Heroines'), imaginary love letters from ladies to their lords. The Ars Amandi or Ars Amatoria ('The Art of Love'), a handbook of seduction, appeared about 1BC, followed by the Remedia Amoris ('Cures for Love'). While writing his Metamorphoses, a collection of mythological tales in 15 books, he was banished by Augustus (AD8), for some unknown reason, to Tomis (Constanza) on the Black Sea. He also wrote the elegies which he published in five books, the Tristia ('Sorrows'), the four books of the Epistolae ex Ponto ('Letters from the Black Sea'), Ibis, written in imitation of Callimachus, and Halieutica ('Fishing Matters'), a poem extant only in fragments.

Bibliography: H Fr�nkel, Ovid, a Poet between Two Worlds (1945)