The Poems of Exile (Penguin Classics)

One of the wittiest Roman poets, Ovid (43BC - 17 or 18 AD) was banished in 8AD to Constanza, a remote barbarous outpost on the Black Sea, for an unknown crime against the Emperor Augustus. Pouring out polished verse, appealing for a pardon that never came, and describing the horrors of the land to which he had been exiled, he continued to write there until his death in 17AD. His poems in exile consist of "Tristia" (poems of lamentation) and the "Episulae Ex Ponto" (Black Sea letters) mostly short elegies or poems in defence of his career ("Tristia II"); and the "Ibis", a venemous sustained elegaic curse of an unknown enemy.