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.

Virgil died in 19 BC having asked that the Aeneid be burned. He had spent eleven years on it, had not finished it to his satisfaction, and left instructions that the manuscript be destroyed rather than published incomplete. Augustus overruled the request. Two of Virgil’s literary executors, Varius and Tucca, published what existed. The unfinished poem became the foundational text of Western literature, the work that every subsequent European writer of ambition had to read and respond to, the poem against which Dante measured himself when he chose Virgil as his guide through Hell. The work Virgil thought too imperfect to survive has survived everything.