[Sidenote: Life of Ovid.] Publius Ovidius Naso was born at Sulmo, in the country of the Pæligni, in 43 B. C., on the 20th of March. He belonged to a wealthy equestrian family and received, along with his elder brother, a good education at Rome, practising rhetoric under Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro. He also studied at Athens, and at some time traveled with the poet Macer in Asia and Sicily. After assuming the _toga virilis_ he held two of the minor offices incidental to the beginning of the senatorial career, and was employed as arbitrator in private cases. But in spite of his father’s remonstrances, he withdrew from public life and devoted himself to poetry. This decision was, according to his own statement, due in part to his delicate physique, but the chief reason was probably his love of poetry and pleasure, and his aversion to serious affairs. His social position was excellent. He was intimate with Messalla and his circle, and had many friends among the literary men of the capital. Virgil, he says, he only saw, but he was intimate with Tibullus, Propertius, Ponticus, and Bassus. He was married three times. His first wife, whom he married in his early youth, was “neither worthy nor useful,”[78] and he was soon separated from the second also, though he charges her with no fault. His third wife, of the Fabian family, remained faithful to him, and he to her. He had one daughter, who in turn had two children. His life of ease and social pleasure at Rome was brought to a sudden close in 8 A. D. by an imperial edict banishing him to Tomi, on the shore of the Pontus (Black Sea). “Two charges,” he writes, “wrought my ruin, a poem and an error, but I must be silent about the fault of one of these acts. I am not important enough to renew thy wounds, Cæsar, since it is more than enough that thou hast suffered once. The other part remains, in which, as author of a vile poem, I am charged with being a teacher of obscene adultery.”[79] The poem referred to can be no other than the _Ars Amatoria_; but this was published ten years before the poet’s banishment. The real cause of his sentence must be sought in the charge about which he keeps silence through fear of wounding Augustus. Perhaps he was privy to an intrigue between Julia, the granddaughter of Augustus, and Decimus Silanus. Ovid remained in banishment at Tomi until his death in 18 A. D.