The principal climactic situation in his life was his banishment, by the imperial mandate of the Emperor Augustus, to the desolation of Tomis, on the Black Sea. He had to abandon his wife and home—he had been married three times—, his literary friends, and his social circle. It was a kind of living death, a spiritual and intellectual cataclysm. At Tomis, a wild, barbaric, inhospitable spot, Ovid spent the remaining years of his life, in regret and supplications fruitlessly addressed to the Emperor, and in writing, particularly his _Tristia_, Sad Themes. The reason for the banishment is still obscure, although Ovid himself hints at a ‘poem and a blunder.’ The poem was his Art of Love, which was frowned upon imperially and excluded from the public libraries in the Roman capital. The blunder of which Ovid was apparently guilty was associated, as he declares, with his possession of eyes—that is, he may have been a spectator or observer of some adulterous act involving the imperial family. Whatever the factual reason, the Emperor remained obdurate to the poet’s pleas, and Ovid died in exile. In the voluminous corpus of poetic accomplishment, Ovid produced many major contributions to erotic literature. His _Ars Amatoria_ is a universal handbook to love and its manifestations. His _Amores_ is a sequence of amorous vignettes. His _Remedia Amoris_, Remedies for Love, constitutes a body of amatory expiations that in spite of their negative tone are as voluptuously and cynically libidinous as his forthright prescriptions. In all, here is a body of themes, views, techniques that expound the most intimate secrets of the boudoir and the salon, of the entire range of erotic manifestations. Among his known contemporaries Ovid became a kind of arch-consultant in love, the ultimate arbiter of dalliance, the poetic confessor of sensual delights. And continuously through the ages his poetic presentations, descriptions, enumerations, his almost legalized counsel in debauchery, translated into most European languages, have served as a final, authoritative, cynical and libidinous source book. Ovid probes into both normal and perverted forms of amatory experience, and reveals in vivid and not infrequently lurid detail, the sophisticated gallantries, the urbane wantonness, the suave and polished salaciousness, and the cultivated prurience of the Roman capital during the first century before the Christian era. In respect of the means of inspiring and promoting amatory activity, both in men and women, Ovid has many pointed things to say about potions. In Latin, the _poculum amatorium_ is the common expression used to designate the potion, that is, the love-goblet.