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Augustus exiled me to Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 AD, for a poem and a mistake — carmen et error. I was fifty-one years old. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, a witty guide to seduction written a decade earlier. The mistake he never specified. Scholars have speculated: I may have witnessed something compromising involving Augustus's granddaughter Julia, who was exiled the same year.

I died in Tomis ten years later without being recalled. The Metamorphoses, which I had just finished when the exile decree came, survived and became one of the most influential books in Western literature. Every Renaissance painter who painted mythological transformation was using my imagery. Every poet who wanted to describe change reached for my language. I died in exile. My work did not.