[Quiet Man Cometh]

I'm not entirely sure. It was recommended to me by a classmate while studying Remembering Babylon, which deals with a white man raised by aboriginees in colonial Australia, who then finds his way back into a whilte settlement.

My bad, it's called An Imaginary Life. Here's the inside cover details from Amazon:

"In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it."

I recall from my Ancient Greek Relgion class that Ovid was generally considered a writer of smut at the time. His stuff was considered improper or banned reading for students, which naturally means that everyone had to get their hands on it. ;). Thus, his works still survive and what might have been "proper" or "worthy" reading has disappeared into history.