Publius Ovidius Naso was a Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid who wrote on many topics, including love , abandoned women and mythological transformations. Traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three 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.

Elegiac couplets are the meter of most of Ovid's works: the Amores, his two long erotodidactic poems , his poem on the Roman calendar , the minor work Medicamina Faciei Femineae , his fictional letters from mythological heroines , and all the works written in his exile . The two fragments of the lost tragedy Medea are in iambic trimeter and anapests, respectively; the Metamorphoses was written in dactylic hexameter.