Why was Ovid exiled?

The emperor’s order

In AD 8 Ovid was about fifty and the most celebrated poet in Rome, putting the last touches to the Metamorphoses. Then came a personal order from Augustus, the first emperor. There was no trial before the Senate, Ovid says, only the emperor’s own decree. He was to leave Rome for Tomis, a Greek port at the far edge of the empire, on the western shore of the Black Sea.

Ovid insists on the exact word for his sentence: relegatio, not full exile. A relegated man kept his property and his Roman citizenship. He simply could not come back.

A poem and a mistake

In the long verse letter to Augustus that fills the second book of his Tristia, Ovid names the two charges that ruined him: carmen et error, a poem and a mistake (Tristia 2.207). About the second, he says, he must keep silent.

The poem is no secret. The Art of Love, published about ten years earlier, is a playful handbook on finding and keeping a lover in Rome. It clashed with an emperor who had passed strict laws on marriage and adultery in 18 BC and had already banished his own daughter Julia, in 2 BC, for her scandals. Still, a book a decade old makes an odd reason for a sudden sentence.

The mistake is the real puzzle. Ovid drops hints and never explains. He asks why he saw something, and compares himself to Actaeon, the hunter destroyed for seeing the goddess Diana by accident (Tristia 2.103–106). So he may have witnessed something he should not have. The most common guess ties it to Augustus’s granddaughter Julia the Younger, who was banished the same year; others suspect a political plot. Two thousand years of guessing have produced no proof.

Life at the edge of the world

As he left, Ovid threw his own copy of the Metamorphoses into the fire; friends had copies, and the poem survived (Tristia 1.7). Tomis, today Constanța in Romania, shocked him. He wrote that the wine froze and kept the shape of the jar, and that riders crossed the frozen Danube (Tristia 3.10). He learned the local Getic language and even wrote a poem in it (Letters from the Black Sea 4.13).

For years he sent poem after poem to Rome, the five books of the Tristia and the Letters from the Black Sea, begging for a pardon or at least a milder place. None came. Augustus died in AD 14, and his successor, Tiberius, did not relent either. Ovid died in Tomis around AD 17. A statue of him now stands in the city’s main square.

The poem had the last word

Ovid had already answered the emperor in the epilogue of the Metamorphoses, and many readers hear Augustus in the angry god of these lines:

And now, I have completed a great work, which not Jove’s anger, and not fire nor steel, nor fast-consuming time can sweep away.

He was right. The poem he tried to burn is still read. And in December 2017, Rome’s city council voted to revoke his banishment, a symbolic pardon two thousand years late.