Author of the Metamorphoses, master of Roman love poetry and myth
A Roman poet ranked beside Virgil. His Metamorphoses strings Greek and Roman myth into one grand poem from the creation to Caesar, on a single theme: all things are in transformation. This poem became the number-one treasury from which later Western artists drew classical myth — from Botticelli to Picasso, the motifs of countless works come from here. Late in life he was inexplicably exiled by Augustus to the shore of the Black Sea, where he wrote the sorrowful Tristia, never to return to Rome.
In the Metamorphoses Daphne becomes a laurel, Narcissus a flower, Pygmalion’s statue comes alive — Ovid stitched scattered myths together on the single theme of transformation. When a later painter or poet wanted a classical myth, what they opened was often Ovid — almost single-handedly he preserved and shaped this body of motifs for the West.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.