Who they were
Ovid was a Roman poet born at Sulmo in 43 BC to an equestrian family. Trained for the law, he chose poetry instead and became, after Virgil and Horace, the last great poet of the Augustan age.
What they did
He made his name with witty love poetry — the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, a mock manual of seduction. His masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, weaves some 250 Greek and Roman myths of transformation into fifteen books. In AD 8 Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea, in modern Romania; Ovid himself named only a poem and a mistake as the cause, and the real reason is still unknown. He wrote the mournful Tristia in exile and died there around AD 17.
Legacy
The Metamorphoses became the standard source of classical myth for later Europe, feeding Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare and giving Renaissance and Baroque painters much of their subject matter. His exile made him a lasting emblem of the poet punished by power.