Ovid Banished from Rome

The exile of Ovid, Latin poet of the Roman Empire, is one of the most mysterious events of what is now called Classical antiquity. Traditionally, it is known that in the year 8 CE the poet was banished from Rome to Tomis (now Constanţa, Romania) on the shores of the Black Sea, by decree of the emperor Augustus; but for reasons never definitively answered. The whole experience of exile is mentioned only by Ovid himself, except a few words by Pliny the Elder and Stachys. At this time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world beyond the Danube; loosely under the authority of the kingdom of Thrace (a satellite state of Rome), superficially Hellenized, and where no one, according to Ovid, could understand a word of Latin. He wrote that the cause of his own exile was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake", but critics' interpretation of both factors are widely divergent.