Interesting facts about a classic Roman poet

1. Ovid wrote a tragedy about Medea, but it has not survived. This is particularly galling since the Roman rhetorician Quintilian thought this among Ovid’s finest work – and this is a poet who also gave us the fantastic (in more ways than one) catalogue of myths and legends, the Metamorphoses. How much Ovid’s work about the sorceress who killed her own children owed to Euripides’ celebrated play Medea is not known, and now probably never will be.