Famous myths, such as Apollo and Daphne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Pygmalion are contained.

The stories follow each other in the telling of human beings transformed to new bodies - trees, rocks, animals, flowers, constellations et cetera. 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 subject is 'forms changed into new bodies'. He identifies this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, which was one cause of his banishment.īy AD 8, he had completed Metamorphoses, an epic poem derived from Greek mythology. Ovid's next poem, the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love, parodies didactic poetry whilst being a manual about seduction and intrigue and it refers to the ludus duodecim scriptorum board game, an antecedent of modern backgammon. He writes about adultery, rendered illegal in Augustus's marriage law reforms of 18 BC. 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). Book 1 contains 15 elegiac love poems about aspects of love. 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. He was thrice-married and twice-divorced by the time he was thirty years old yet only one marriage yielded offspring - a daughter. He was part of the circle centered upon the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He held minor public posts, but resigned to pursue poetry. After the death of his brother, Ovid renounced law and began travelling - to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to the emotional, not the argumentative pole of rhetoric.

His father wished him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law. Ovid was born in Sulmo (Sulmona), in an Apennine valley, east of Rome, to an equestrian family, and was educated in Rome.

Poet of metamorphoses