Exile of Ovid
At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world; it was loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace (a satellite state of Rome), and was superficially Hellenized.
[3] Ovid was one of the most prolific poets of his time, and before being banished had already composed his most famous poems – Heroides, Amores, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, his lost tragedy Medea, the ambitious Metamorphoses and the Fasti.
These works consist of letters to friends and enemies, and also depict the poet's treatment by the Scythians – particularly the Getae, a nomadic people related to the Dacians or Thracians.
Ovid's poems in exile have been seen as of fundamental importance for the study of the Roman aristocracy under Augustus and Tiberius, furnishing "precious pieces of information about events and persons.
This happened to Ovid in the year 8 AD by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without the participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge,[9] and was the ruin of his ambitious hopes.
[21] Augustus was presenting himself as the restorer of Roman public morality and could not fail to punish an author of such standing who represented himself in the Ars Amatoria as a promoter of adultery in defiance of the Emperor.
They have included: In such a case, objection to Ars Amatoria was a mere pretext, concealing the real cause of Ovid's condemnation, considering the time that had elapsed between the publication of this work and the sentence of Augustus.
[32] Modern authors suggest that Ovid's treatment of Augustus in Tristia, chiefly as a character and only secondarily as the addressee, are a reminder that these letters are literature first and foremost and that one cannot assume that they were intended to obtain an actual recall.
[35] Traditionally, it is argued that in the circumstances of being far from Rome, Ovid had no access to libraries and thus might have been forced to abandon his poem about the Roman calendar, of which only the first six books (January through June) exist.
[38] However, this hypothesis of a lack of scholarly documentation in Tomis does not seem able to stand when one considers the development of a poem so far-fetched as Ibis, with its encyclopaedic cargo of Alexandrian mythological knowledge.
B. R. Nagle suggests the possibility that Ovid conceived the idea of writing this work as early as 8 BC when Augustus, the new Pontifex Maximus, corrected the defects resulting from the introduction of the Julian calendar.
Nagle also argues that political motivations may have caused the poet to link the work with the year 4 AD, when Tiberius was adopted by Augustus and therefore implicitly named his successor.
[41] Ovid made banishment the subject of his last three major works of poetry: the Ibis, a "venomous attack on an unnamed enemy",[6] and the two collections of literary epistles, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto.
Some of these compositions were addressed to Ovid's friends, to his wife, and to the Emperor himself: "Where’s the joy in stabbing your steel into my dead flesh?/ There’s no place left where I can be dealt fresh wounds.
