Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) was born in Sulmo in 43 BC. From a young age he began studying rhetoric after moving to Rome during the Augustan age, then devoted himself to poetry alongside the greatest writers of his time, in the circle of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. Here he composed works that revealed an acute psychological observation, an openness to the fashions of the time and a well-known ease of expression, which were an example not only for the Latin authors who followed him, but in later periods, too.
As of his first years in the capital, he became part of the most refined cultural society, with compositions intended as a pleasant escape, but in the years that followed this was replaced by the melancholy and sorrowful elegy of exile in Scythia.
Hopes of a return to his homeland vanished after he was forced to stay in Tomis, on the Black Sea, where he died around 17 AD.
