The villa was described by the poet Ovid as "like a city".[3] Most notoriously, he kept a pool of lampreys into which slaves who incurred his displeasure would be thrown as food,[4][5][6] a particularly unpleasant means of death, since the lamprey "clamps its mouth on the victim and bores a dentated tongue into the flesh to ingest blood".[7] However, the emperor, Augustus, on visiting Pollio and witnessing the condemnation of a slave, took action against Pollio and saved the slave, an incident widely documented in writings of the era (see Vedius Pollio for more details).