Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BCE – CE 17/18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, is a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria, and of the Metamorphoses, a mythological hexameter poem.
He is also well known for the Fasti, about the Roman calendar; and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of poems written in exile on the Black Sea.
Ovid is also the author of several smaller pieces, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, and the long curse-poem Ibis.
He also authors a lost tragedy, Medea.
He is considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature.
The scholar Quintilian considers him the last of the canonical Latin love elegists.
His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influences European art and literature and remains as one of the most important sources of classical mythology.
