Ovid

Born 20 March 43 BC, Publius Ovidius Naso came of age under Augustus, a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace. He made his name with elegiac love poetry, including the Ars Amatoria, and became enormously popular. Then came the Metamorphoses: fifteen books of myth in dactylic hexameter, a continuous narrative that would outlive the empire itself. But in AD 8, Augustus exiled him to Tomis on the Black Sea - a carmen et error, Ovid said, "a poem and a mistake" - and he refused to say more. He spent the last nine or ten years of his life there, writing from the frontier. The Metamorphoses became one of the most imitated works of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and remains the single most important source of classical mythology in the West.