Ovid was a Roman poet best known as the author of major works such as the Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria, which are collections of erotic poetry. He also wrote the Metamorphoses, a mythological hexameter poem, the Fasti, about the Roman calendar, and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of poems written during his exile on the Black Sea. Ovid authored several smaller pieces, including the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, and the long curse-poem Ibis, as well as a lost tragedy, Medea.

He is regarded as a master of the elegiac couplet and traditionally ranks alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the canonical Latin love elegists. Ovid's poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, significantly influenced European art and literature, and his work remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.

Although he enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia on the Black Sea, where he spent the last years of his life. Ovid attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has led to much speculation among scholars.