Ibis is a curse poem by the Roman poet Ovid, written during his years in exile at the port of Tomis on the Black Sea (AD 8–14).
Noting that the final letters of Tristia 5.8.1–4 read Atei, Verdière suggested that the person anonymously mentioned was the jurist Gaius Ateius Capito.
[10] Subsequently another Belgian scholar, Lucien Janssens, discovered acrostics and a telestic containing the names Ateius Capito in both Tristia 5.11 and in Ibis, which, if correct, would confirm Verdière's conjecture.
[5] Drawing on the encyclopedic store of knowledge he demonstrated in the Metamorphoses and his other work — presumably from memory, as he purportedly had few books with him in exile[15] — Ovid threatens his enemy in the second section of the poem (lines 251–638) with a veritable catalogue of "gruesome and mutually incompatible fates" that befell various figures from myth and history,[16] including laming, blinding, cannibalism, and death by pine cone.
[19] In his annotated translation (1577), Thomas Underdowne found in Ibis a reference guide to "all manner of vices punished, all offenses corrected, and all misdeeds revenged.