Ovid

Ovid wrote the wittiest poetry in Latin and was exiled to the Black Sea for reasons he refused to state. Born at Sulmo in 43 BC into a wealthy equestrian family, he was sent to Rome and then Athens to train as an advocate, held minor judicial offices, and abandoned public life for poetry against his father's wishes — the elder Ovid pointing out that Homer had died poor. His early work is erotic and comic. The Amores treat a love affair as a military campaign; the Ars Amatoria is a mock-didactic manual on seduction in three books, two for men and one for women, and its tone of amused instruction is the thing his contemporaries and his emperor found hardest to place. The Metamorphoses, finished around AD 8, is his monument: fifteen books of hexameters running from the creation to the deification of Julius Caesar, linked by the single theme of bodies changed into other forms — Daphne into laurel, Actaeon into a stag, Pygmalion's statue into a woman. It is the source through which most classical mythology reached medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Titian all worked from it. In AD 8 Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea, a garrison town at the edge of the empire where nobody spoke Latin. Ovid wrote that the causes were a poem and a mistake, and never explained the second; the poem was presumably the Ars, and the mistake may have involved the scandal around the emperor's granddaughter. He wrote appeals for eight years and died there around AD 17. Rome formally rescinded the exile in 2017, two thousand years late.

• Lived: 43 BCE – 17 CE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: poet, writer