Local author Michael Solomon will join us on the 15th June to celebrate the launch of his book ‘The Scapegoat’.

Michael V. Solomon was born in Romania. His grandfather, an important political figure between the two World Wars, was detained by the Communist regime for almost two decades. Like Ovid, his punishment had come without even the semblance of a trial. After university, Solomon started his career in Constanta –Tomis, the city where Ovid had been exiled. Years later he could leave Romania, and after working as a civil engineer, travelling throughout Europe, America and the Middle East, he moved to London at the start of the millennium. With new insights, he composed a first version of The Scapegoat. During the pandemic he re-thought and revised it, and this version has emerged into liberty.

Publius Ovidius Naso (43BC – 17/18AD), known as Ovid, was notable as much for his disgrace as for his poetry. By pleasing his contemporaries, befriending patricians and subtly mocking the Emperor Augustus, he was transformed from a provincial outsider to Rome’s darling – and, for some, its corrupter. Banished without trial to a remote port on the Black Sea, he continued to write. The Scapegoat follows Ovid on his fictitious journey out of exile. In the year 14AD, Ovid is in his sixth year of banishment in Tomis, at the Black Sea he resists joining a conspiracy against the Emperor and hopes that his friends in Rome will obtain his pardon. However, when Augustus dies later that year, the conspirators, terrified that their treasonous plan will come to light, move Ovid to a garrison along the Danube where they intend to kill him. He manages to escape, is caught, but instead of being killed, he is sent to Rome and is turned into an outlaw – and a scapegoat. To discover who was Ovid the man, Michael V. Solomon travelled in his footsteps, seeking the same landscapes today that Ovid found two thousand years ago while trying to imagine Ovid’s journey out of exile.