Ovid

Ovid (the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso) was born in 43 BC in Sulmo, a mountain town east of Rome. He was supposed to become a lawyer. His well-off family paid for the best rhetorical training in Rome, and his teachers praised him. But Ovid later joked that everything he tried to write came out as verse, so he gave up public office for poetry. He quickly became the most fashionable poet in Rome with witty love poems like the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, a playful handbook on flirting. His greatest work is the Metamorphoses, a sweeping poem of about 250 Greek and Roman myths. One idea links them all: transformation. Bodies are changed into trees and birds, into stones and stars. Then disaster struck. In AD 8 the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis, a remote port on the Black Sea. Ovid himself gave only a vague reason: a poem and a mistake. He never learned to love the cold frontier town. He wrote sorrowful letters begging to come home until he died there around AD 17. His voice matters because it is quick, humane and mischievous. It also matters because the Metamorphoses became Europe's great storehouse of myth, feeding Shakespeare (the English playwright), Dante (the Italian poet) and countless painters.