Read yesterday's comments, and you'll find a snatch of Ovid's poetry, gorgeously translated into sixteenth-century English. But what follows is the Ovid that I've been reading lately: a prose translation of one of his Epistolae ex Ponto, a series of desperate and despairing verse letters written from the shores of the Black Sea, where, in 8 A.D., Emperor Augustus banished the poet for reasons that are still unclear. The only explanation that Ovid himself offers is carmen et error--a poem and a mistake.

Why then do I write, you wonder? I too wonder, and with you I often ask what I seek from it. Or do the people say true that poets are not sane and am I the strongest proof of this maxim, I, who though so many times deceived by the barrenness of the soil, persist in sowing my seed in ground that ruins me? Clearly each man shows a passion for his own pursuits, taking pleasure in devoting time to his familiar art. The wounded gladiator forswears the fight, yet forgetting his former wound he dons his arms. The shipwrecked man declares that he will have nothing to do with the waves of the sea, yet plies the oar in the water in which but recently he swam. In the same way I continually hold to a profitless pursuit, returning to the goddesses whom I would I had not worshipped.