Ovid was the most popular poet in Augustan Rome — witty, irreverent, and spectacularly talented. Then Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea, and Ovid spent the last decade of his life in frozen exile, begging for a pardon that never came. The official reason was a poem and a mistake, but neither Ovid nor Augustus ever explained what the mistake actually was, and the mystery has puzzled scholars for two thousand years.

This episode traces Ovid from his golden career in Rome through the Metamorphoses and the Art of Love, the sudden banishment, and the desperate exile poetry that became some of the most moving literature in Latin.

• Ovid’s early career and the erotic poetry that made him Rome’s most fashionable writer
• The Metamorphoses — the epic poem that retold Greek mythology and influenced Western art for centuries
• The banishment — “a poem and a mistake” — and the two-thousand-year mystery of what he actually did
• The exile poetry from Tomis and the pardon he begged for until his death on the Black Sea