For the modern reader, it should prove a surprisingly relatable work on intimacy from an author of the ancient world. Divided into three books, Ars Amatoria or, The Art of Love was immensely popular-if a little controversial-in its time, and has survived numerous charges of indecency over the centuries. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.' –Michel de Montaigne Ars Amatoria or, The Art of Love (2 AD) is an instructional poem by Ovid. He wrote a lost tragedy, Medea, and mentions that some of his other works were adapted for staged performance.'The first taste I had for books came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. His shorter works include the Remedia Amoris ('Cure for Love'), the curse-poem Ibis, and an advice poem on women's cosmetics. Ovid's prolific poetry includes the Heroides, a collection of verse epistles written as by mythological heroines to the lovers who abandoned them the Fasti, an incomplete six-book exploration of Roman religion with a calendar structure and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of elegies in the form of complaining letters from his exile. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, 'a poem and a mistake', but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars. He enjoyed enormous popularity, but in one of the mysteries of literary history he was sent by Augustus into exile in a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death. He was the first major Roman poet to begin his career during the reign of Augustus, and the Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Ovid is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace, his older contemporaries, as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology.

His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BCE – CE 17/18), known as Ovid (/ˈɒvɪd/) in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, and for collections of love poetry in elegiac couplets, especially the Amores ('Love Affairs') and Ars Amatoria ('Art of Love').

Ovid the art of love book 1