IN 1958 WHEN EZRA POUND WAS RELEASED from the Washington, D.C. mental hospital where he had spent twelve years as an "inmate," the press asked him what the experience had been like. "Ovid had it worse," he said, to almost universal befuddlement. Publius Ovidius Naso, the greatest Latin poet of the Augustan age, spent the last ten years of his life (8–17 CE) banished to the Roman equivalent of Siberia, a city called Tomis on the far eastern edge of the Empire, almost a thousand miles from Rome. (The Latin word for his banishment was relegatio, or relegation; had he suffered exilium or exile, he would have been deprived of both his property and his citizenship.) Tomis was a small port city on the Black Sea, in modern-day Romania, and although not the furthest outpost of Empire in terms of distance from Rome (northwest Africa, northern Germany, Asia Minor, and the Iberian peninsula were farther away), it was definitely what any diplomat today would call a hardship post. It was in the province of Moesia, which had come under Roman subjugation only a half century earlier, and was still exposed to constant attack by various tribes.

Recent scholarship asserts that Ovid may have exaggerated the crudeness and barrenness of Tomis as part of a continuing effort over the course of his exile to be recalled, first by Augustus and, after Augustus's death in 14 CE, by his successor Tiberius. All the same, to an urbane, well-educated, well-off poet who had moved in the highest Roman circles, a colonial town — where Latin was the language of only a small minority, the food and drink atrocious, and literary culture and the book trade nonexistent — must have been depressing and difficult, Cicero's fifteen-month exile in Greece a pleasure trip by comparison. Ovid knew what he was in for when he set out for Tomis. One of his love poems, published sometime between 20 and 1 BCE, describes his hometown of Sulmo (now Sulmona in the Abruzzo, whose main street is the Corso Ovidio) as being like the wastes of Scythia because his lover is not with him. Tomis, while politically not part of Scythia, was just next-door.

Until his still unexplained banishment, Ovid lived a charmed life. He came from a well-to-do equestrian family and was expected to enter law and politics. He chose poetry instead and became famous. The literary world of his day was as cowed by Virgil as the German-speaking music world in the middle of the nineteenth century was by Beethoven; and just as Brahms repeatedly delayed publishing his first string quartet and his first symphony because of the weight of Beethoven's achievements in those forms, so Ovid and his crowd stayed away for the most part from the epic and concentrated of elegiac poetry. Ovid was not by nature at ease in the epic mode in any case, and while his only pseudo-epic work, the Metamorphoses, did employ the dactylic hexameters of epic poetry, it is not so much a narrative as a mosaic of what in another context he called fairy tales for grown-ups. Augustus's support being something of a sine qua non for a poet in imperial Rome, Ovid concluded his book of changes with the advent of his sovereign ruler, Jove's counterpart on Earth, as he calls him. Yet it feels like a mere doffing of his hat, this acknowledgement by Ovid of literature's role in nation-building, and his final words propose that it is poetry that lasts, not the work of emperors no matter how brilliant. "My work will las...