ABSTRACT
Publius Ovidius Naso is known as one of the most charismatic sensibilities of world literature, rivaling Chaucer and Boccaccio in this respect. He was born in the Italian town of Sulmona but died in dreary exile on the Black Sea at Tomi in modern Rumania, where he was apparently sent because his sometimes licentious works and behavior assaulted the sensibilities of Augustus Caesar and his prudish wife Livia; Augustus gave the poets immorality as the cause of his banishment, but Ovid himself suggested that there was another deeper personal reason. Ovid is well known for his very heterosexual Art of Love and Amores. This chapter brings together the highlights of Book X of his Metamorphoses, a long opus that sought to relate the change-of-shape myths in Greco-Roman mythology. Some anthologists classify the Iphis and Ianthe story as lesbian.
