Ovid

Ovid trained for a legal and political career in Rome but abandoned it for poetry, making his name young with erotic, worldly verse: the Amores, and the Ars Amatoria, a knowing manual on seduction that scandalized as much as it delighted.

In 8 CE, at the height of his fame, Augustus banished him abruptly to Tomis on the Black Sea, citing 'a poem and a mistake' without ever specifying either; the emperor's reasons remain one of classical literature's enduring mysteries. Ovid spent his last decade there, homesick and pleading by letter for recall, still writing, including much of Metamorphoses' final polish.

That poem, fifteen books threading hundreds of myths into a single narrative of change, outlasted the political grudge that exiled him: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton all mined it directly, and it remains mythology's most-read single source.