Exiled for his sense of humour, poet Ovid has last laugh
12/18/2017 09:00:00 PM
Two thousand years after being banished from Rome, Ovid has been rehabilitated in a victory for the famous poet whose cheek riled one of history's most powerful emperors.
The Rome city 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 the Emperor Augustus to Romania in the year 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.
The poet rather cryptically claims it was due to "carmen et error", or "a poem and a mistake" -- the poem being the Ars Amatoria, a subversively witty poem instructing men how to get and keep a girlfriend.
Read more at
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/12/exiled-for-his-sense-of-humour-poet.html#syop5Tp04UgzeGFg.99
