One of the great mysteries of Western literature unfolded in AD 8, when the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–c. AD 17) was abruptly banished and forced to flee the city. From his forlorn exile on the Black Sea, Ovid himself never explained what happened—except to acknowledge that he had committed a crime worse than murder.
Before his exile, Ovid was one of the leading poets of ancient Rome, known for his Latin verses about love, seduction, and marriage. In the absence of historical evidence, many critics have wondered if Ovid’s bawdy Ars amatoria (The Art of Love), a love manual published in about 1 BC, may have offended the emperor and played a role in his mysterious exile.
Born Publius Ovidius Naso, Ovid was educated in Rome and traveled widely in the empire as a young man. Although his father wanted him to become a lawyer, Ovid defied his wishes and published his first collection of love poems, Amores, in about 19 BC. The well-researched book—Ovid had already been married three times and divorced twice by age thirty—was later removed from Rome’s libraries on the order of Emperor Augustus (63 BC–AD 14).
Just before his banishment, Ovid completed the work that is generally regarded as his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses. Fifteen volumes in length, the poem is a series of stories inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, all on the theme of changes in shape. The poem would be an inspiration to Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), and many other writers.
The last ten years of Ovid’s life were spent in Tomis, a remote frontier outpost in what is now Romania. Despite repeated appeals from Ovid’s friends, neither Augustus nor his successor, Tiberius (42 BC–AD 37), would allow the poet to return to Rome. He died in exile at roughly age sixty.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Shakespeare referenced Ovid in several of his plays—perhaps most extensively in The Tempest (c. 1611), in which one passage is adapted from a section of the Metamorphoses.
- The city to which Ovid was banished, Tomis, is near the modern-day city of Constanta, Romania.
- Augustus banished his promiscuous granddaughter, Julia, in the same year that he banished Ovid. Some historians have theorized that Ovid was aware of Julia’s indiscretions and that Augustus may have punished him for failing to alert the emperor to her activities.
