Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BCE – 17 or 18 CE), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria, threemajor collections of erotic poetry, the Metamorphoses a mythological hexameter poem, the Fasti, about the Roman calendar, and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of poems written inexile on the Black Sea. Ovid was also the author of several smaller pieces, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, and the Ibis, a long curse-poem. He also authored a lost tragedy, Medea. Heis considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. The scholar Quintilian considered him thelast of the canonical Latin love elegists. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature and remains as one of the mostimportant sources of classical mythology.
Ovid was born in Sulmo (Sulmona), in an Apennine valley, east of Rome, to an important equestrian family, on March 20, 43 BCE, a significant year in Romanpolitics. He was educated in Rome in rhetoric under the teachers Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro with his brother who excelled at oratory. His father wished him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law.According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to the emotional, not the argumentative pole of rhetoric. After the death of his brother at 20 years of age, Ovid renounced law and began travelling toAthens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. He held minor public posts, as one of the tresviri capitales and as one of the decemviri stlitibus iudicandis but resigned to pursue poetry probably around 29-25 BCE, adecision his father apparently disapproved of. His first recitation has been dated to around 25, when Ovid was eighteen. He was part of the circle centered upon the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla...