Ovid: The Poet Who Went Too Far

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 8 AD, Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea — modern Constanța in Romania, the edge of the civilized world as Rome understood it — for reasons he described cryptically as a poem and a mistake. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, a didactic work on the art of seduction published nearly a decade earlier, which Augustus had apparently decided was a contribution to the moral looseness he had spent his reign trying to suppress. The mistake is unknown and has generated scholarly speculation for two thousand years. Ovid spent the remaining ten years of his life on the Black Sea shore writing poems of exile — the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto — that constitute the most sustained literary response to political persecution in antiquity, and he died without recovering the imperial favor he spent those years petitioning for.

Ovid on Ancient Rome

Ovid: The Poet Who Went Too Far