Ovid's Ars amatoria, a didactic poem purporting to instruct first men and then women on the arts of seduction, is thought to have been the offensive song (Latin: carmen). Augustus banished his granddaughter Julia and Ovid in the same year, CE 8. It is assumed that the carmen et error had something to do with Augustus' moral reforms and/or the princeps' promiscuous daughter Julia. Ovid says he saw something he should not have seen. Ovid's plaintive appeals in his writing from exile at Tomi, on the Black Sea, are less entertaining than his mythological and amatory writing and are also frustrating because, while we know Augustus exiled a 50-year-old Ovid for carmen et error, we don't know exactly what his grave mistake was, so we get an unsolvable puzzle and a writer consumed with self-pity who once was the height of wit, a perfect dinner party guest.
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