Ovid wrote the poem in dactylic hexameter, the metre of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, having previously worked almost entirely in elegiac couplets on erotic subjects. The metre announces epic, and almost nothing else about the poem does: no single hero, no unified action, no national purpose, and a narrator who intrudes with jokes. It is best read as a deliberate provocation, an epic-scale work that declines the epic's job, produced in the decades when Virgil's poem had defined what Roman epic was for.
In 8 CE, with the Metamorphoses substantially complete, Augustus relegated Ovid to Tomis on the western coast of the Black Sea, a Greek-speaking outpost far from Rome, where he remained until his death around 17 CE. Ovid says in the Tristia that the cause was a poem and a mistake, carmen et error. The poem is generally taken to be the Ars Amatoria, his manual of seduction, which sat badly with Augustus' moral legislation, though it had been published years earlier. The error he never explains beyond saying he saw something he should not have; the endless guesses, from involvement in the disgrace of the emperor's granddaughter to knowledge of a conspiracy, remain guesses.
He also reports burning his own manuscript of the Metamorphoses in distress before departing, adding that copies were already in circulation. The poem survives; the gesture, like Virgil's, may be a literary posture as much as an act. He describes it in the same breath as unfinished, lacking a final revision, which is the standard explanation for the few rough edges editors have identified.
Relegation was the milder form of banishment: Ovid kept his property and his citizenship, and kept writing, producing the Tristia and the Letters from Pontus, five and four books of verse complaint addressed to Rome. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius recalled him.