Ovid

44 BCE–17

Ovid was a Roman poet of the Augustan age. His Metamorphoses became a major source for Greek and Roman myth, while his love poetry and exile works reveal both literary playfulness and the vulnerability of writers under imperial authority.

Ovid was born in Sulmona and died in Tomis. Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 CE for reasons the poet described only as a 'poem and a mistake'; his Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto repeatedly petitioned for recall, but he died in exile.

In Fiona Forsyth’s Death and the Poet, Tomis, AD 14. Ovid has established a reluctant routine in exile when the vegetable seller Dokimos is found beaten to death. In Fiona Forsyth’s Poetic Justice, the poet Ovid has been banished by Augustus to a remote Black Sea town on the empire’s Danube frontier. Ovid is treated fictionally in Fiona Forsyth’s Written in Blood, Ovid’s Fasti, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid’s Heroides, and Ovid’s The Fall of Icarus.

Periods

Periods linked to Ovid

Augustan Age27 BCE–14 CE Augustan Poetry and Roman Mythmaking40 BCE–17 CE Reign of Augustus27 BCE–14 CE

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Ovid (1 series)

The Publius Ovidius Mysteries in Order

by Fiona Forsyth 3 books 4.4(479)

The Publius Ovidius Mysteries reimagine the exiled poet Ovid as an unwilling investigator in Tomis on the Black Sea. His self-importance, literary knowledge and connections to Rome make him both useful and dangerous to Marcus Avitius, the provincial adviser responsible for maintaining order. The frontier setting places local…