thumb|right|Billede af Ovid i [[Nürnbergkrøniken]]
'''Publius Ovidius Naso''', på dansk forkortet til '''Ovid''' (20. marts 43 f.Kr. - 2. januar 17 e. Kr.) var en romersk digter.

Ovid skrev en række kærlighedsdigte samlet i værket metriske kærlighedsbreve i mytologiske kvinders navne, Heroides.

Hans hovedværk er Metamorfoserne, et epos i femten sange, hvor hele verdens historie fortælles med særlig fokus på det mytologiske stof og i særdeleshed de myter, der involverer en eller anden form for forvandling. Det mytologiske stof bliver også behandlet i Fasti, en metrisk festkalender.

Ovid døde i landsforvisning i Tomis ved augustæiske kejserdømme, der arbejdede for en moralsk oprustning blandt borgerne ikke mindst på ægteskabsområdet. Fra eksilet blev han ved med at sende digte hjem til Rom, Tristia og Epistulae ex Ponto, sikkert til kejserens store fortrydelse.

Virgil, Horats og Ovid er, hver på deres måde, den klassiske latinske digtnings mest betydningsfulde repræsentanter.

== Bibliografi ==
*Amores
*Heroides
*Ars amatoria
*Remedium amoris
*Metamorphoses
*Fasti
*Tristia
*Epistulae ex Ponto

== Trivia ==
*roman af samme navn som et billede på samfundssystemet under Edderkoppesagen i slutningen af 1940'erne.

{{Infobox Writer <!-- for more information see :Template:Infobox Writer/doc -->
| name = Ovid
| image = Publius Ovidius Naso in the Nuremberg chronicle XCIIIv.jpg
| caption = Ovid as imagined in the ''Nuremberg Chronicle'', 1493.
| birthdate = March 20, 43 BC
| birthplace = Sulmo
| deathdate = 17 AD
| deathplace = Tomis
| occupation = Poet
| genre =
| movement =
| influences = Virgil
| influenced = Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, William Shakespeare
| signature = 
| website =
}}
'''Publius Ovidius Naso''' (Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as '''Ovid''' who wrote on many topics, including love (he is the medieval '''''magister amoris''''', "master of love"), abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Traditionally ranked alongside canonical poets of Latin literature, Ovid was generally considered a great master of the elegiac couplet. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, had a decisive influence on European art and literature for centuries.

''Metamorphoses'' was written in dactylic hexameter. (Dactylic hexameter is the meter of Virgil's ''Aeneid'' and of Homer's epics.)

== Life and work ==
Ovid was born in Apennines, east of Rome. He was born into an equestrian ranked family and was educated in Rome. His father wished him to study Athens, Asia Minor and Sicily. He also held some minor public posts, but quickly gave them up to pursue his poetry. He was part of the circle centered around the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He was married three times and divorced twice by the age of 30. From one marriage, he had a daughter. <ref>http://www.jstor.org/view/00173835/ap020138/02a00070/0</ref>

The ''Amores'' were originally published as a five-book collection, probably some time in the 20s BC. The version which has survived, reduced to three books, includes poems written as late as 1 AD. Book 1 of this collection of love elegy contains 15 poems, which look at the different areas of love poetry. Much of the ''Amores'' is tongue-in-cheek, and while Ovid initially appears to adhere to the standard content of his elegiac predecessors — such as the ''exclusus amator'' (locked-out lover) lamenting in a paraklausithyron (in front of a locked door) - he actually portrays himself as more than capable at love, and not particularly emotionally struck by it (unlike, for example, Propertius, who in his poems portrays himself as crushed under love's foot). He writes about adultery, which had been made illegal in Augustus's marriage reforms of 18 BC. 
Ovid's next poem, the ''Ars Amatoria'', or the ''Art of Love'', was a parody of didactic poetry and wittily focused on the arts of seduction and intrigue. It contains the first reference to the board game ludus duodecim scriptorum, a relative of modern backgammon. <ref>http://www.jstor.org/view/00173835/ap020010/02a00040/6?frame=frame&userID=c101aca6@ucd.ie/01c0a8346900501d717b8&dpi=3&config=jstor</ref> Ovid identifies this work in his exile poetry as the ''carmen'', or song, that was one of the causes of his banishment. 
 
By 8 AD, Ovid had completed his most famous work: ''Pygmalion. It offers an explanation to many alluded myths in other works. It is also a valuable source for those attempting to piece together Roman religion, as many of the characters in the book are Olympian gods or their offspring. 

Lucius Aenilius Paullus, was executed after a conspiracy against Augustus. Ovid may have had knowledge about this conspiracy.  Because Julia the Younger and Ovid were exiled in the same year, some suspect that he was somehow involved in her alleged affair with monogamous, marital sexual relations in Rome to increase the population, but Ovid's works concerned adultery, which was punishable by severe penalties, including banishment.

It was during this period of exile that Ovid wrote two more collections of poems, called ''Caesar and sometimes God, to himself, to various friends left behind in Rome, and even sometimes to the poems themselves, expressing his heart-felt loneliness and hoping for a recall or a relocation in exile. The famous first two lines of the ''Tristia'' demonstrate the poet's misery from the start:

:''Parve – nec invideo – sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:''
::''ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!'' 
thumb|right|200px|Ovid's statue in Constanţa/Tomis, the city where he died
:''Little book – and I won't hinder you – go on to the city without me:''
::''Alas for me, because your master is not allowed to go!''

Ovid died at Tomis after nearly 10 years of banishment. He is commemorated today by a statue in the Romanian city of Tomis (modern day Constanţa) and the 1930 renaming of the nearby town of Ovidiu, alleged location of his tomb. The Latin text on the statue says (''Tr.'' 3.3.73-76): 
:''Hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum''
::''Ingenio perii, Naso poeta, meo.''
:''At tibi qui transis, ne sit grave, quisquis amasti,''
::''Dicere: Nasonis molliter ossa cubent.''

:''Here I lie, who played with tender loves,''
::''Naso the poet, killed by my own talent.''
:''O passerby, if you've ever been in love, let it not be too much for you''
::''to say:  May the bones of Naso lie gently.''

(Ovid's nickname was ''Nasus'', "The Nose" &mdash; a pun on his cognomen, ''Naso''.)

== Assessment ==
<!-- Unsourced image removed: thumb|right|150px|Ovid's statue in Constanţa (''Tomis'') -->
R. J. Tarrant offers the following assessment for the importance of Ovid:
<blockquote>From his own time until the end of Antiquity Ovid was among the most widely read and imitated of Latin poets; his greatest work, the ''Metamorphoses'', also seems to have enjoyed the largest popularity. What place Ovid may have had in the curriculum of ancient schools is hard to determine: no body of antique scholia survives for any of his works, but it seems likely that the elegance of his style and his command of rhetorical technique would have commended him as a school author, perhaps at the elementary level.<ref>R. J. Tarrant, "Ovid" in ''Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics'' (Oxford, 1983), p. 257.</ref></blockquote>

==Works==
thumb|right|Engraved frontispiece of [[George Sandys' 1632 London edition of ''Ovids Metamorphoses Englished.'']]
===Extant works generally considered authentic (with approximate dates of publication)===
* ''Amores'' ("The Loves"), five books, published 10 BC and revised into three books ca. 1 AD.
* ''Metamorphoses'', ("Transformations"), 15 books. Published ca. AD 8.
* ''Medicamina Faciei Feminae'' ("Women's Facial Cosmetics"), also known as ''The Art of Beauty'', 100 lines surviving. Published ca. 5 BC.
* ''Remedia Amoris'' ("The Cure for Love"), 1 book. Published 5 BC.
* ''Heroides'' ("The Heroines"), also known as ''Epistulae Heroidum'' ("Letters of Heroines"), 21 letters. Letters 1–5 published 5 BC; letters 16–21 were composed ca. AD 4&ndash;8.
* ''Ars Amatoria'' ("The Art of Love"), three books. First two books published 2 BC, the third somewhat later.
* ''Fasti'' ("The Festivals"), 6 books extant which cover the first 6 months of the year, providing unique information on the Roman calendar. Finished by AD 8, possibly published in AD 15.
* ''Ibis'', a single poem. Written ca. 9 AD.
* ''Tristia'' ("Sorrows"), five books. Published 10 AD.
* ''Epistulae ex Ponto'' ("Letters from the Black Sea"), four books. Published 10 AD.

===Lost works, or works generally considered spurious===
* ''Consolatio ad Liviam'' ("Consolation to Livia")
* ''Halieutica'' ("On Fishing") — generally considered spurious, a poem that some have identified with the otherwise lost poem of the same name written by Ovid.
* ''Medea'', a lost tragedy about Medea
* ''Nux'' ("The Walnut Tree")
* A volume of poems in Getic, the language of Dacia where Ovid lived in exile, not extant (and possibly fictional).

==Works and artists inspired by Ovid==

See the website [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/ovidillust.html "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text"] for many more Renaissance examples.
* (1100s) The troubadours and the medieval courtoise literature
* (1200s) The Roman de la Rose
* (1300s) Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer
* (1400s) Sandro Botticelli
* (1500s-1600s) Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Marston, 
* (1600s) John Milton,Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Luis de Góngora's La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 1613, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe by Nicolas Poussin, 1651, Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis by Peter Paul Rubens, c.1620
* (1820s) During the days of his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin liked to compare himself with Ovid, whose place of exile seems to have been nearby. This feeling is most memorably expressed in the large verse epistle ''To Ovid'' (1821). The exiled Ovid also makes appearance in Pushkin's long poem ''Gypsies'', set in Moldavia (1824).
*(1916) Ulysses''.  
* (1920s) The title of the second collection of poems by Osip Mandelstam, ''Tristia'' (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. Mandelstam's collection is rooted in his experiences during the hungry and violent years immediately following the October Revolution.
*(1951) ''Six Metamorphoses After Ovid'' by Benjamin Britten, written for solo oboe, was written to envoke images of Ovid's characters from ''Metamorphoses''.
* (1978) Australian author David Malouf's novel ''An Imaginary Life'' is published. It is a powerful novella that provides a fictional account of Ovid's exile in Tomis.
* (1998) In ''Pandora'', by Anne Rice, Pandora cites Ovid as one of her favorite poets and authors of the time, and quotes him vividly in front of her lover Marius.
* (2006) American musician Bob Dylan's album ''Modern Times'' contained several songs that "borrowed" lines from Ovid's ''Poems of Exile'', specifically Peter Green's translation of the text. Dylan failed to give the poet credit in the liner notes of the record. The tracks that contain lyrics which stem from Ovid's writings are "Workingman's Blues #2", "Ain't Talkin'", "The Levee's Gonna Break" and "Spirit on the Water".
* (2007) Russian author Alexander Zorich's novel ''Roman Star'' is published in Moscow. This novel takes a special view on last years of Ovid's life.

Dante mentions him twice:
* ''Lucan, Virgil and Statius as one of the four ''regulati poetae'' (ii, vi, 7) 
* ''Inferno'' ranks him side by side with Lucan and Virgil (''Inferno'', IV,88).