Exile of Ovid
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The exile of Ovid, Latin poet of the Roman Empire, is one of the most mysterious events of what is now called Classical antiquity. Traditionally, it is known that in the year 8 CE the poet was banished from Rome to Tomis (now Constanţa, Romania), on the shores of the Black Sea, by decree of the emperor Augustus, but for reasons never definitively answered. The whole experience of exile is mentioned only by Ovid himself, except a few words by Pliny the Elder and Stachys. At this time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world, beyond the Danube, loosely under the authority of the kingdom of Thrace (a satellite state of Rome), superficially Hellenized, and where no one, according to Ovid, could understand a Latin word. He wrote that the cause of his own exile was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake", but critics' interpretation of both factors are widely divergent.
Ovid had already established himself as one of the most prolific poets of the time and had already composed his most famous poems — Heroides, Amores, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, his lost tragedy Medea, the ambitious Metamorphoses and the Fasti, although these two latter works were left without a final review and unfinished, consecutively. In exile, however, the poet continued with his production, and wrote works still poignant to nowadays: Ibis, Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, and perhaps other minor poems. This works is dealing with letters to friends, enemies, and the situation in which the poet is among the Scythians, particularly Getae, a nomadic people.
The exile of Ovid — both his persona and his works in exile — has been exploited in many different ways since the later antiquity, serving as a literary influence to Latin writers who also experienced exile, such as Seneca to Boethius, and as a central point of reference for the Middle Ages imaginings of exile, passing through Romanticism and its tendency to theorize about the misunderstood genius, until the modern days, where this topic emerges both as an attempt of the History to evaluate the policy at the time of Augustus as well as investigate in a Academic view the significance of the poems of exile and if this exile is not a farce and merely a literary game.
Background
In 8 CE, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without any participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge, an event which would shape all of his following poetry. Ovid wrote that the reason for his exile was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake", claiming that his crime was worse than murder, more harmful than poetry. The Emperor's grandchildren, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger, were banished around the time of his banishment; Julia's husband, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was put to death for conspiracy against Augustus, a conspiracy about which Ovid might have known. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BCE, which promoted monogamous marriage to increase the population's birth rate, were fresh in the Roman mind. Ovid's writing in the Ars Amatoria concerned the serious crime of adultery, and he may have been banished for these works which appeared subversive to the emperor's moral legislation. However, because of the long distance of time between the publication of this work (1 BC) and the exile (8 CE), some authors suggest that Augustus used the poem as a mere justification for something more personal. The scholars also add that it was no more indecent than many publications by Propertius, Tibullus and Horace circulating freely in that time.
In exile, Ovid wrote two poetry collections titled Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, illustrating his sadness and desolation. Being far from Rome, he had no access to libraries, and thus might have been forced to abandon the Fasti poem about the Roman calendar, of which only the first six books exist — January through June. The five books of the elegiac Tristia, a series of poems expressing the poet's despair in exile and advocating his return to Rome, are dated to 9–12 CE. The Ibis, an elegiac curse poem attacking an adversary at home may also be dated to this period. The Epistulae ex Ponto, a series of letters to friends in Rome asking them to effect his return, are thought to be his last compositions, with the first three books published in 13 CE and the fourth book between 14 and 16 CE. The exile poetry is particularly emotive and personal. In the Epistulae he claims friendship with the natives of Tomis (in the Tristia they are frightening barbarians) and to have written a poem in their language (Ex P. 4.13.19–20). And yet he pined for Rome and for his third wife, as many of the poems are to her. Some are also to the Emperor Augustus, yet others are to himself, to friends in Rome, and sometimes to the poems themselves, expressing loneliness and hope of recall from banishment or exile.
The first two lines of the Tristia communicate his misery:
- Parve — nec invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem; ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!
- Little book — for I won't hinder you — go on to the city without me; Alas for me, because your master is not allowed to go with you!
The obscure causes of Ovid's exile have given rise to endless explanations from scholars studying antiquity. In fact, the mediaeval texts that mention the exile offer no credible explanations as their statements seem incorrect interpretations drawn from the works of Ovid.
Ovid himself wrote many references to his offense giving obscure or contradictory clues. In 1923, scholar J. J. Hartmann proposed a theory that is little considered among scholars of Latin civilization today — that Ovid never left Rome to the exile and that all of his exile works are the result of his fertile imagination. This theory was supported and rejected in the 1930s, especially by Dutch authors. In 1985 a new research paper by Fitton Brown advanced new arguments in support of the theory; the article was followed by a series of supports and refutations in the short space of five years. Among the reasons argued by Brown is: that Ovid's exile is only informed by his own work, except in "dubious" passages by Pliny the Elder, Stachys but no other author until the beginning of the fifth century; that the author of Heroides was able to separate the poetic "I" of his own and real life; that information on the geography of Tomos were already known by Virgil, Herodotus and by Ovid himself in his Metamorphoses. Orthodox scholars, however, are opposed to these hypotheses. One of the main arguments of these scholars is that Ovid wouldn't let his Fasti remain unfinished, mainly because this poem meant his consecration as imperial poet.
See also
