Ovid in exile

Ovid was with a friend on Elba in the autumn of 8AD when the crisis broke. A summons arrived for him from the emperor, Augustus. Were the rumours true, his friend asked. Ovid equivocated, half confessing, half denying.

Two millennia later, we still don’t know what had happened; we only know what happened next. Following a face-to-face meeting with the furious emperor, and without a trial, Ovid was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea – now Constanta in Romania – at the eastern limits of the empire. He dragged out his departure until the very last day of the emperor’s decree in December, postponing making travel arrangements, prolonging farewells.

He left behind his wife; his home, with his beloved gardens and orchards, where the Via Clodia met the Via Flaminia; and his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, complete but not finished to his satisfaction, he said. It is symptomatic of Ovid’s self-dramatisation in these late poems that he declared that had burned the manuscript of the latter – only to admit that copies survived elsewhere. He later claims his Latin had grown rusty. As if, you want to tell him.

He never saw Rome again, dying in Tomis sometime in the winter of 17/18. He had long complained about the cold there. But then, he had complained about almost everything.

The only reliable evidence about Ovid’s fall from grace is in his poems of exile. Indeed it is to these we owe almost all his extant biographical information, including his date of birth: 21 March 43BC.

Ovid says that he was exiled for carmen et error: a poem and a mistake. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, a guide to the seduction of married` women. It was certainly out of step with the severe, state-mandated private morality of the Augustan age. But it was also nearly a decade old. The mistake? Ovid makes clear that he witnessed something and then kept silent about it. What did he see? He kept silent about that too.

Into the space left by this second silence speculation – if not outright fantasy – has flooded. Perhaps he mocked the defeat of the Roman general Varus in the Teuteburg Forest. Or perhaps he profaned the sacred mysteries of Isis or Eleusis. Had he seen Livia, the wife of Augustus, naked? Had he slept with Livia? Or with Augustus’s daughter, Julia? Had he seen Augustus committing incest with his daughter. Or with his granddaughter? Or seen him having sex with another man?

It remains a mystery. But Ovid’s poems from Tomis have kept alive gossip about the emperor’s family and its peccadilloes for over two thousand years. He would surely have enjoyed the irony of that.

This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the March 2024 issue of History Today. The image above is JMW Turner’s ‘Ovid Banished from Rome’.

Like this? You can read more of Mathew’s History Today Months Past pieces here.