Ovid, first poet of the new age of Imperial Rome, died in A.D. 17 at the Greek settlement of Tomi on the western shore of the Black Sea. Most of what is known of his life derives from his poem Tristia (Sorrows, 4.10) written during the grim final years of his exile. Ovid was born in 43 B.C., the year in which the ancient Republican system of government finally came to an end when both consuls fell in battle against the would-be usurper Antony. The bloody series of civil wars that culminated in Octavian's victory at Actium in 31 B.C. coincide with the years of Ovid's childhood and adolescence: the chilling events that accompanied the emergence of the princeps cannot have failed to leave their mark, but they do not haunt Ovid's early imagination as they do Virgil's or Propertius's. In his hometown of Sulmo--the ancient seat of the...