At a time when the Roman period has been sunk for nearly a thousand years in impenetrable obscurity, Ovid became a popular figure of mythology and the search for his grave resulted in the veneration of several legendary but spurious sites, some of them as far from his original place of exile as central Hungary. The actual date of his death, and its cause, remains mysterious.
To the Renaissance reader Ovid was the most modern of the Latin poets, the most worldly and accessible, the most human, his skepticism balanced by a love of the fabulous, the excessive. It is this modern quality I have tried to recreate, though the fate I have alloted him, beyond the mere fact of his relegation to Tomis, is one that would have surprised the real poet, since it attributes to him a capacity for belief that is nowhere to be found in his own writings. But that is exactly the point. My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of "the changes" live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display.