In Roman mythology, Vertumnus is the god of seasons, change and plant growth, as well as gardens and fruit trees. He could change his form at will; using this power, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses (xiv), he tricked Pomona into talking to him by disguising himself as an old woman and gaining entry to her orchard, then using a narrative warning of the dangers of rejecting a suitor to seduce her. The tale of Vertumnus and Pomona has been called "the first exclusively Latin tale."
Statue of the 1st or 2nd centuries AD.
Vertumnus and Pomona (c. 1618) by Peter Paul Rubens
A rococo Vertumne et Pomone (1760) by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne.
Vertumnus and Pomona (1717) by Francesco Penso, in an allée of the Summer Garden, St. Petersburg.
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
Anonymous 18th-century engraving
Statue of Ovid by Ettore Ferrari in the Piazza XX Settembre, Sulmona, Italy
Ovid Banished from Rome (1838), by J.M.W. Turner
Medea in a fresco from Herculaneum