Augustus Exiles Ovid to Tomis
In the year 8 CE, the emperor Augustus issued a decree of relegatio — a form of exile that stripped Publius Ovidius Naso of his property and dispatched him to Tomis, a remote Roman outpost on the western shore of the Black Sea in what is now Romania. Ovid was fifty years old, at the height of his fame, and would never return to Rome. He died in Tomis around 17 CE, still in exile, still petitioning his successors for recall. The exile of Ovid is one of the most discussed and least fully explained episodes in Roman literary history. Augustus gave two reasons. First, the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a witty, elegantly subversive manual of seduction Ovid had published roughly a decade earlier, which the emperor deemed a threat to his programme of moral renewal and family legislation. Second, an unspecified 'error' — Ovid's own word in his poems from exile — which modern scholars have endlessly speculated about but never resolved. The two causes were, in Ovid's own phrase, 'a poem and a mistake': carmen et error. The poem is clear. The error may have involved accidental witness of some imperial scandal, perhaps connected to the simultaneous exile of Augustus's granddaughter Julia on adultery charges. What Ovid left behind was extraordinary. His early Amores reinvented the elegiac love poem with ironic self-awareness. His Heroides gave voice to mythological heroines — Penelope writing to Odysseus, Dido to Aeneas — in a radical act of literary perspective-taking. His Ars Amatoria and its counterpart Remedia Amoris treated love as a learnable skill with a mock-didactic wit that scandalized precisely because it was so charming. But his masterpiece is the Metamorphoses, fifteen books of Latin hexameter completed just before the exile. The poem recounts over two hundred and fifty mythological transformations from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, weaving them into a continuous narrative of astonishing variety and virtuosity. It is simultaneously an encyclopedia of Greek myth, a meditation on change as the only constant, a subtle political commentary on the transformation of Rome from republic to empire, and a supreme act of literary art. The Metamorphoses became one of the most read texts in European history. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and countless others drew directly from it; Titian, Bernini, and Rubens painted its stories; and it remains the primary Western source for myths of Narcissus, Echo, Actaeon, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Orpheus and Eurydice. From exile, Ovid produced the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, poetic letters of lamentation addressed to his wife, friends, and the emperor himself, pleading for recall and describing the cold, barbarous life on the margins of the Roman world. They are among the most humanly moving documents antiquity has left us: the brilliant cosmopolitan reduced to learning the local Getic language to be understood by his neighbours.
- Year: 8 BCE
- Category: Cultural
