Ovid's prolific poetry includes the Heroides, a collection of verse epistles written as by mythological heroines to the lovers who abandoned them the Fasti, an incomplete six-book exploration of Roman religion with a calendar structure and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of elegies in the form of complaining letters from his exile. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, 'a poem and a mistake', but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars.

He enjoyed enormous popularity, but in one of the mysteries of literary history he was sent by Augustus into exile in a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death.

He was the first major Roman poet to begin his career during the reign of Augustus, and the Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Ovid is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace, his older contemporaries, as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BCE – CE 17/18), known as Ovid (/ˈɒvɪd/) in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, and for collections of love poetry in elegiac couplets, especially the Amores ('Love Affairs') and Ars Amatoria ('Art of Love').

Ovid the art of love translation