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Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 CE from Rome to Tomis (now Constanţa, Romania) by decree of the emperor Augustus. The reasons for his banishment are not known.〔Green, 2005, xxiv.〕 Ovid's exile is related to us by the poet himself, and also in a brief reference to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius. At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilised world; it lay beyond the Danube, loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace (a satellite state of Rome), and was superficially Hellenized. According to Ovid, none of its citizens spoke Latin, which as an educated Roman he found trying. Ovid wrote that the cause of his own exile was ''carmen et error:'' ''carmen,'' "a poem", namely the ''Ars Amatoria''; and ''error,'' an indiscretion or mistake of his own.〔OCD (2007), ''Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)''. John Richards (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.〕 Ovid was one of the most prolific poets of his time, and before being banished had already composed his most famous poems – ''Heroides'', ''Amores'', ''Ars Amatoria'', ''Remedia Amoris'', ''Medicamina Faciei Femineae'', his lost tragedy ''Medea'', the ambitious ''Metamorphoses'' and the ''Fasti''. The latter two works were left, respectively, without a final review and unfinished. In exile, the poet continued producing works, and wrote some more that survive today: ''Ibis'', ''Tristia'', ''Epistulae ex Ponto'', and possibly several other, minor poems. These works contain letters to friends and enemies, and also depict the poet's treatment by the Scythians – particularly the Getae, a nomadic people who were actually related to the Dacians or Thracians. The exile of Ovid – both his persona and his works in exile – has served as a literary influence to Latin writers who also experienced exile, such as Seneca to Boethius, and as a central point of reference for the Middle Ages imaginings of exile, passing through Romanticism and its tendency to theorize about the misunderstood genius. Today, Ovid's exile is used by classicists to evaluate the policy and actions of Augustus, and is also used to study whether the exile was merely a farce, a misrepresentation by Ovid, or a rhetorical and literary device.〔Gaertner, 2007, p.155.〕〔Green, 2005, xiv.〕 ==Background== In 8 CE, the year of his exile, Ovid was 50 years old. It is believed that he enjoyed great fame in Rome. With the generation of Virgil (19 BCE) and Horace (8 BCE) having ended, some scholars write that he was then the most famous poet in the city.〔Mirmont, 1905, p.1-28.〕 Thus, the poet who had written in verses the radical change experienced by men in the strange sensation that often accompanies humanity — the eminence of losing everything — between the wonderful Golden Age and the unfortunate Iron Age, left for exile. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Exile of Ovid」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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