Ovid

Ovid was the wit of Augustan Rome, the poet of love and its arts, who was exiled by Augustus in the year 8 to the Black Sea for, he said, a poem and a mistake, and died there without pardon. The Metamorphoses, fifteen books of transformations from the creation to Caesar’s deification, gathered the Greek myths into the form in which Europe received them: Daphne, Narcissus, Pygmalion, Orpheus, Icarus. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Titian and Bernini worked from him, and no book after the Bible supplied more subjects to art. The Amores and Art of Love are the poems that got him into trouble.