Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, was one of the leading poets of Augustan Rome, admired in his lifetime for his wit and technical fluency in Latin verse.

His masterwork, the Metamorphoses, is a sprawling narrative poem in fifteen books that retells hundreds of Greek and Roman myths of transformation, from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar. In AD 8 Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain unclear; he died there without returning to Rome.

This archive presents the Metamorphoses in Henry T. Riley’s 1851 prose translation, long a standard English rendering of the poem, and the Heroides and Amores in Grant Showerman’s 1914 Loeb prose translation. J. H. Mozley's Loeb translation of the Art of Love and other poems (1929) is also included.