Age ~27. The youngest of the great Augustan poets, a generation after Virgil and Horace, Ovid has given up a public career for verse. The Amores — witty, knowing love elegy, the anti-epic of private life — are his arrival.

poem The Loves 16 BC

Age ~38. At the height of his fashion as Rome's poet of love, Ovid writes the Heroides, verse letters from the heroines of myth to their absent lovers — elegy lent the voices of women.

poem The Heroides 5 BC

Age ~42. The Ars Amatoria, a mock-didactic handbook of seduction, appears — brilliant, scandalous, and exactly the sort of thing Augustus's moral legislation was meant to suppress.

poem The Art of Love 1 BC

Age ~44. Ovid adds the Remedia Amoris, the companion antidote to the Ars — how to fall out of love — the love poet still at play.

poem The Cure for Love 1 AD

Age ~45. The slight, fragmentary Medicamina Faciei Femineae, on women's cosmetics, belongs here — the last of the erotic poetry before Ovid turns to far bigger work.

poem Cosmetics for the Female Face 2 AD

Age ~51. The pivotal year. Ovid finishes the Metamorphoses — fifteen books carrying the world from Chaos to the deified Caesar — and the Fasti, his poem on the Roman calendar, when Augustus abruptly relegates him to Tomis on the Black Sea for 'a poem and a mistake' he never explains. He never returns.

poem The Festivals 8 AD poem Metamorphoses 8 AD

Age ~53. In exile at Tomis, on the edge of the empire among a people whose language he scarcely speaks, Ovid writes the Tristia — five books of sorrows pleading for recall.

poem Sorrows 10 AD

Age ~54. The learned curse-poem Ibis, aimed at an unnamed enemy back in Rome, belongs to these bitter exile years.

poem Ibis 11 AD

Age ~56. Still at Tomis, Ovid turns his grief into the Epistulae ex Ponto — named verse letters from the Black Sea, still angling for a reprieve that neither Augustus nor Tiberius ever grants.

poem Letters from the Black Sea 13 AD