Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17 or 18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who wrote about love, seduction, and mythological transformation. He is 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. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature. The Elegiac couplet is the meter of most of Ovid's poems: the Amores — Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris — are didactic long poems; the Fasti, about the Roman calendar; the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, about cosmetics; fictional letters from mythologic heroines, the Heroides or Epistulae Heroidum; and all of the works written in exile (five Tristia books, four Epistulae ex Ponto books, and "Ibis", a long curse-poem). The two extant fragments of the tragedy Medea are in iambic trimeter and anapest, respectively; the Metamorphoses is in dactylic hexameter, also known as "epic meter," which was used in the Aeneid by Virgil and the Odyssey and the Iliad by Homer. Ovid was born in Sulmo (Sulmona), in an Apennine valley, east of Rome, to an equestrian family, and was educated in Rome. 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, Ovid renounced law and began travelling — to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. He held minor public posts, but resigned to pursue poetry. He was part of the circle centered upon the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He was thrice-married and twice-divorced by the time he was thirty years old; yet only one marriage yielded offspring — a daughter. [1] Originally, the Amores were a five-book collection, circa 20 BC; the surviving, extant version, reduced to three books, includes poems written as late as AD 1. Book 1 contains 15 elegiac love poems about aspects of love. Most of the Amores is tongue-in-cheek, and, while Ovid adhered to standard elegiac themes — such as the exclusus amator (locked-out lover) lamenting before a paraklausithyron (a locked door) — he portrays himself as romantically capable, not emotionally struck by it, (unlike Propertius, whose poetry portrays him under love's foot). He writes about adultery, rendered illegal in Augustus's marriage law reforms of 18 BC. Ovid's next poem, the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love, parodies didactic poetry whilst being a manual about seduction and intrigue.[2] He identifies this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, which was one cause of his banishment. By AD 8, he had completed Metamorphoses, an epic poem derived from Greek mythology. The subject is "forms changed into new bodies". From the emergence of the cosmos from formless mass to the organized, material world, to the deification of Julius Caesar, the poem tells of transformation. The stories follow each other in the telling of human beings transformed to new bodies — trees, rocks, animals, flowers, constellations et cetera. Famous myths, such as Apollo and Daphne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Pygmalion are contained. It explains many myths alluded to in other works, and is a valuable source about Roman religion, because many characters are gods or offspring of Olympian gods. In AD 8, Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis, on the Black Sea, for political reasons. Ovid wrote that his crime was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake", [3] claiming that his crime was worse than murder, [4] more harmful than poetry. [5][6] The Emperor's grandchildren, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger, were banished around the time of his banishment; Julia's husband, Lucius Aenilius Paullus, was put to death for conspiracy against Augustus; Ovid might have known of that. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BC were fresh in the Roman mind. These promoted monogamous marriage to increase the population's birth rate. Ovid's writing concerned the serious crime of adultery, which was punishable by banishment. In exile, he wrote two poetry collections titled Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, illustrating his sadness and desolation. Being far from Rome, he had no access to libraries, thus might have been forced to abandon the Fasti poem about the Roman calendar, of which exist only the first six books — January through June. In the Epistulae ex Ponto he claims friendship with the natives of Tomis (in the Tristia they are frightening barbarians) and to have written a poem in their language (Ex P. 4.13.19-20). And yet he pined for Rome and for his third wife, as many of the poems are to her. Some are also to the Emperor Augustus, whom he calls Caesar and God. Yet others are to himself, to friends in Rome, and sometimes to the poems themselves, expressing loneliness and hope of recall from banishment or exile. The first two lines of the Tristia communicate his misery: Ovid died at Tomis after some ten years. He was allegedly buried a few kilometers away in a nearby town. In 1930 that town was renamed Ovidiu in his honor. Also, a statue commemorates him in the Romanian city of Tomis (contemporary Constanţa). The statue's Latin inscription reads (Tr. 3.3.73-76): See the website "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text" for many more Renaissance examples. Dante twice mentions him in: As Ovid spent the last years of his life and literary work at what is now Romania, Romanian nationalists have adopted him as "The First Romanian Poet" and placed him in the pantheon of Romanian national heroes. Ovidiu (name) is a common male first name in Romania.