Ovid's Maritime Imagery

Ovid’s maritime imagery is the storm-and-shipwreck material in the works of the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC to AD 17). The Metamorphoses (c. AD 8) gives the Ceyx and Alcyone storm in Book 11, and the Tristia, written after his AD 8 exile to Tomis on the Black Sea, opens with a first-person tempest at sea. These passages became a standard classical source for the literary sea storm, drawn on by later poets including Coleridge and reused in Renaissance and Romantic seascape writing.