Exiled by Rome 2,000 years ago for his sense of humour, poet Ovid finally has the last laugh

Two thousand years after being banished from Rome, Ovid has been rehabilitated in a victory for the famous poet whose cheek riled one of history’s most powerful emperors.

Rome council unanimously approved a motion to “repair the serious wrong” suffered by Ovid, best known for his Metamorphoses and ARS Amatoria, or the Art of Love, who was exiled by the Emperor Augustus to Romania in the year AD8.

The reason for his banishment to the town of Tomis on the Black Sea coast is one of literature’s biggest mysteries, as there are no surviving contemporary sources which give details about it, so all historians have is Ovid’s word.

The poet rather cryptically claims it was due to “carmen et error”, or “a poem and a mistake” – the poem being the ARS Amatoria, a subversively witty poem instructing men how to get and keep a girlfriend.

Augustus is assumed to have been less than pleased, having recently passed a series of laws against adultery.

“Although the poem doesn’t overtly advocate adultery, it sails quite close to the wind,” said Rebecca Armstrong, a Fellow in Classics at Oxford University.