OVID 

The poet Ovid (43 B.C.-7 A.D.), author of the Metamorphoses, was one of the supreme love elegists of Augustan Rome. He has had an immense influence on the artistic heritage of the West, and there is hardly a major figure of European literature—Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Boccaccio, the list is endless—that has not owed some debt to his achievements. The broad outlines of Ovid’s life and career are fairly well documented. However, the dramatic centerpiece of the poet’s life—his sudden and inexplicable exile from Rome to the furthest reaches of the Empire, the Black Sea—is shrouded in mystery, and it constitutes one of the great unsolved mysteries of world literature. What “event” could have precipitated the poet’s banishment from Rome at the height of his fame and glory?

 

In her biography of the emperor Augustus, the historian Pat Southern gives us the following description of the circumstances surrounding Ovid’s mysterious banishment: 

 

There was much to try [Augustus’] patience in his last years. Family discord broke out again in AD 6 and seems to have continued sporadically until AD 8. First Agrippa Postumus abdicated from office and was exiled from Rome, eventually being relegated to the island of Planasia in AD 7. The following year saw the banishment of his sister, the younger Julia, and of her lover Iunius Silanus. For some reason her husband L. Aemilius Paullus was accused of treason and exiled as well, though at what date is uncertain. It used to be thought that he was executed, but Syme revealed that he survived.

 

Julia’s crime was said to have been adultery, and the child born to her in exile was not allowed to survive. Augustus ordered her house to be destroyed, which indicates either an explosion of passionate anger, or that her adulteries were not the only problem. Whether there was any connection between the exile of Agrippa and Julia is not known. Attempts have been made to detect a convoluted plot involving all the main characters, and sometimes outsiders unconnected to the family except by their designs of revolution.

 

The exile of OVID is dated to AD 8, and often allied to the scandal of the younger Julia. Ovid gives tantalizing clues in his later works, declaring that the causes of his banishment were a poem and a mistake. Obviously he knew very well what the problem was. Sexual scandal may have been at the root of it, and his Ars Amatoria may have been one of the factors that tipped the balance. His books were banned, which is of course an excellent way of ensuring that they would be read and would survive.

 

Rejecting the conspiracy theory, some authors interpret the episode from AD 6 to 8 as a long-term domestic squabble, or indeed two domestic squabbles not necessarily related. Agrippa Postumus is often dealt with as peripheral and unimportant, but it has been pointed out that he possessed quite considerable political worth. It was said that there were plots to liberate both Agrippa and Julia, though there is some confusion as to whether Agrippa’s sister or his mother is meant. There was also a story that Augustus visited Agrippa on his island in AD 14.

 

The remarkable point about the conspiracy, if such it was, is that no one among Augustus’ contemporaries seemed to know the truth. He never made a statement, and was not called upon to do so; there can be no clearer indication of autocratic rule. The official verdict on Agrippa was that he was brutish and not socially acceptable, but that begs the question as to why he was adopted and promoted from AD 4 and then dropped in AD 6. His transgression may have been simple discontent, too blatantly expressed. He had not been adopted as a young child, like his brothers Gaius and Lucius, and it is not certain what position he would have held if they had both survived. He had never known his father, and from the age of ten he had been deprived of his mother in scandalous circumstances. Little more could have been done to convince him that he was an outsider, and much the same could be said of his sister Julia. It is possible that they both suffered from suspicion on Augustus’ part about their true parentage after the adulteries of their mother became public property.

 

On the whole the affair, or affairs, are perhaps best judged as domestic, internal problems rather than attempts at revolution. Some men were punished and exiled, but there was no witch hunt, and nothing like the proscriptions of the Triumverate. Revolutions and depositions generally do not take place via so few people, and it seems certain that Augustus’ life was not endangered. It has been pointed out by more than one author that it was Tiberius who profited from the removal of Agrippa, and that as soon as he came to power he had Agrippa killed or someone kindly took care of it for him…

 

[Pat Southern, Augustus (London 1998), pp. 185-86.]