The reason why Emperor Augustus exiled Ovid, the then most famous poet of Rome, to the Black Sea coast in 8 AD remains unclear to this day. The poet, who had to spend the rest of his life there, only hints at the incident in his "Tristia" (Songs of Sorrow) and "Epistulae ex Ponto" (Letters from the Black Sea). The selected elegies provide a representative impression of the intricate interplay of autobiography and poetic play in which Ovid weaves the struggle for moral self-preservation and the eternal hope for a mitigation of the exile sentence.