Ovid, one of Rome’s most famous poets, was banished from the country about 2,000 years ago. Now the country has revoked the poet’s exile
Banished by Emperor Augustus
The decision to revoke Ovid’s exile comes on the 2,000th anniversary of the poet’s death in AD 17. Rome’s council unanimously approved a motion to “repair the serious wrong” suffered by Ovid, best known for his Metamorphoses and Ars Amatoria or the Art of Love, who was exiled by Emperor Augustus to Romania in AD 8
The reason for his banishment to the town of Tomis on the Black Sea coast is one of literature’s biggest mysteries, as there are no surviving contemporary sources which give details about it. So all historians have is Ovid’s word, according to AFP
How to get and keep a girlfriend
The poet rather cryptically claims it was due to carmen et error, or “a poem and a mistake” —the poem being Ars Amatoria, a subversively witty poem instructing men how to get and keep a girlfriend. Augustus is assumed to have been less than pleased, having recently passed a series of laws against adultery
It is unlikely to have been the poem alone that angered Augustus enough to drive Ovid out, as it was published several years before he was sent away. But after irritating the emperor, experts believe the poet’s mysterious “error” was the last straw
Emperor’s granddaughter and adultery
“It’s quite often suggested that it might have been something to do with the scandal surrounding Augustus’s granddaughter, Julia, who was exiled in AD 8 for an adulterous affair with a Roman senator,” Rebecca Armstrong, a Fellow in Classics at Oxford University, was quoted as saying by AFP