Ovid

Ovid, born Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus and is often ranked with Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. He is most famous for the Metamorphoses, a continuous mythological narrative in fifteen books written in dactylic hexameters, and is also known for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria and Fasti. Although he enjoyed enormous popularity in his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life; Ovid attributed the banishment to a poem and a mistake but never disclosed the specifics. His poetry was widely imitated in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages and greatly influenced Western art and literature, and the Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.