Metamorphoses

Around the year 8 AD, a famous Roman poet was ordered to leave Rome forever. His name was Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), and he was then at the height of his fame, the wittiest writer in the city, celebrated for clever poems about love and seduction. The emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis, a cold frontier town on the Black Sea, at the far edge of the empire. Ovid later wrote that the cause was "a poem and a mistake", but he never said what the mistake was, so scholars have argued about it ever since.

The work he was finishing when the order came is the Metamorphoses, roughly 12,000 lines of Latin verse in fifteen books. It gathers about 250 Greek and Roman myths and strings them into one continuous poem that runs from the creation of the world to Ovid's own day. The thread holding it together is transformation: people turn into trees, birds, stones, stars, rivers. That was a bold idea, because Roman epic was supposed to be about war and empire, and Ovid instead wrote an epic about change itself.

He claimed he burned his own manuscript in despair before leaving. It survived anyway, because friends already had copies. That detail is his own account, and we cannot check it, but the poem clearly circulated in Rome while its author sat in exile writing letters home that never worked. He died in Tomis around 17 AD, never recalled.

Afterwards the poem became the single most useful book in Europe for anyone who wanted to know a myth. Medieval readers kept it alive by reading it as coded moral instruction, in versions like the French Ovide moralisé. Arthur Golding put it into English verse in 1567, and Shakespeare mined that translation heavily; the bungled play of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream comes straight out of Ovid. Painters and sculptors used it as a catalogue of scenes, which is why Bernini carved Daphne turning into laurel and Titian painted Ovidian stories for a Spanish king. In 1997 the poet Ted Hughes retold parts of it as Tales from Ovid, and it won prizes. A book by an exile outlasted the emperor who exiled him.