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    The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
    The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
    The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
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    The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

    By Ovid

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    In the year A.D. 8, Emperor Augustus sentenced the elegant, brilliant, and sophisticated Roman poet Ovid to exile—permanently, as it turned out—at Tomis, modern Constantza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. The real reason for the emperor's action has never come to light, and all of Ovid's subsequent efforts to secure either a reprieve or, at the very least, a transfer to a less dangerous place of exile failed. Two millennia later, the agonized, witty, vivid, nostalgic, and often slyly malicious poems he wrote at Tomis remain as fresh as the day they were written, a testament for exiles everywhere, in all ages.

    The two books of the Poems of Exile, the Lamentations (Tristia) and the Black Sea Letters (Epistulae ex Ponto), chronicle Ovid's impressions of Tomis—its appalling winters, bleak terrain, and sporadic raids by barbarous nomads—as well as his aching memories and ongoing appeals to his friends and his patient wife to intercede on his behalf. While pretending to have lost his old literary skills and even to be forgetting his Latin, in the Poems of Exile Ovid in fact displays all his virtuoso poetic talent, now concentrated on one objective: ending the exile. But his rhetorical message falls on obdurately deaf ears, and his appeals slowly lose hope. A superb literary artist to the end, Ovid offers an authentic, unforgettable panorama of the death-in-life he endured at Tomis.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateJan 18, 2005
    ISBN9780520931374
    The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
    Author

    Ovid

    Ovid, or Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom Ovid is often ranked one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature.

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    • 5/5
      It's true that these poems are repetitive, locked in a theme of "get me out of here." At the same time, they capture the obsessive nature of exile, how it blinds one to present surroundings and makes vivid a nostalgia for a different time and a different place. Ovid writes of Rome and mentions Tomis only in passing, exaggerating its faults. Everything here is repellent, all would be well if I could only return.

      It is amazing that a poet writing 2000 years ago can so clearly capture these feelings, and how universal these feelings are. We all want to be at the center of where we feel our life should be lead, and it can twist the mind to be forced to live away from home.
    • 4/5
      Why was Ovid banished to Tomis? No one really knows for sure. Augustus’ daughter Julia had already been banished for her over-the-top promiscuous lifestyle, and we know that Ovid’s poetry definitely promoted that sort of thing. He was even asked by the emperor to clean it up. Of course, he refused. Was his refusal perceived as treason? Did Augustus ultimately blame him for his daughter’s behavior? Or did it come out that he had been one of her paramours? Who knows. Some have said that banishment from Rome during its flowering age was worse than being executed. At least when you’re dead, all of your trials and hardships are dead with you. But they are only intensified when you ponder that all of your friends and family are still in the bosom of Rome, enjoying all it has to offer, and you’re stuck in some faraway hell hole. It would seem Ovid was of this mind. Tomis, modern day Constanţa, Romania, on the Black Sea coast, is now a resort. Look it up. It’s gorgeous! Nice beach, great weather, what’s not to like? But did Ovid see it like that? No, he hated it. And he despised the yokels he was now forced to live amongst. To him, they were little more than animals. But to them, he was a celebrity. They felt honored that he was now living with them, practically worshipped him, and wanted nothing more than to cater to his every whim. Yet he barely tolerated them and ran them down every chance he could in his letters. They weren’t aware of his true feelings about them until someone happened to read one of his outgoing letters to his wife, where, as usual, he is running them down. Word quickly gets around about how he really feels about them, and from then on they want nothing to do with him. He then finds out what it really means to be banished. The stereotypical Roman was supposed to be stoical, practical, tough, etc.. These letters reveal Ovid to be anything but. Instead of accepting his fate, and trying to make the best of his situation, Ovid whines and complains to no end. He begs his wife, who remained in Rome, to plead with Augustus for forgiveness. Did she? I doubt it. She was probably glad to be rid of him. Although I did enjoy reading it (the dude could write, you know), I sometimes found myself shouting at him to just shut up and stop whining already. Just accept your fate and deal with it! You call yourself a roman?! You’re worthless and weak! It’s a pity that someone who possessed such poetic talent was ultimately reduced to being a pathetic, miserable little man.

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    The Poems of Exile - Ovid

    Front Cover

    OVID

    THE POEMS OF EXILE

    Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

    With a New Foreword

    TRANSLATED WITH

    AN INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND GLOSSARY

    BY PETER GREEN

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    Berkeley     Los Angeles     London

    University of California Press

    Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

    University of California Press, Ltd.

    London, England

    © 2005 by the Regents of the University of California

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.

    [Selections. English. 1994]

    The poems of exile : Tristia and the Black Sea letters / Ovid ; translated with an introduction, notes, and glossary by Peter Green ; with a new foreword.

       p. cm.

    Originally published: London ; New York : Penguin, 1994.

    Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-24260-9 (acid-free paper)

    eISBN 978-0-520-93137-4

    I. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.—Translations into English.     2. Poets, Latin—Homes and haunts—Romania—Constança.     3. Epistolary poetry, Latin—Translations into English.     4. Complaint poetry, Latin—Translations into English.     5. Poets, Latin—Correspondence.     6. Constança (Romania)—Poetry.     7. Romans—Romania—Poetry.     8. Exiles—Poetry.     I. Green, Peter, 1924–     II. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D. Tristia. English. 1994.     III. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.

    Epistulae ex Ponto. English. 1994.     IV. Title.

    CONTENTS

    Foreword to the 2005 Edition

    Preface and Acknowledgements

    Map

    Introduction

    Textual Variants

    Abbreviations

    Select Bibliography

    Tristia

    Black Sea Letters

    Notes and References

    Glossary

    Index

    FOREWORD TO THE 2005 EDITION

    It is now a decade since the first publication of this version of the exilic poems. When I originally undertook it, my aim was to produce an English equivalent of Ovid’s elegiacs that captured — as near as was possible in an uninflected language with no fixed vowel-quantities — both the exact sense and the structural rhythms of the original. If it also at any point managed to suggest Ovid’s verbal wit and poetic sharpness, I figured that would be luck over and above the ordinary. I also was very conscious of the need to fill in the essential historical background of the poems for readers unfamiliar with Ovid’s social and cultural world, to explain the allusions, identify the characters, and provide a context for the numerous mythical and literary themes. This was, and remains, the function of my notes and glossary. Though in places the notes fill in details of literary history, I did not, and do not, regard literary criticism in the current sense as any part of my duties as a translator, and (like Housman confronted by Quellenforschung) gladly leave that task, for which I have neither inclination nor aptitude, to those better equipped than myself. My object has always been to clarify and explain: to provide, where possible, that help in trouble which Housman desiderated, but failed to find, in J.E.B. Mayor’s immensely learned commentary on Juvenal.

    This fact proved unexpectedly useful when it came to providing corrections and additions, based on the fairly prolific Ovidian scholarship of the past dozen years or so (though as usual work on the exilic corpus lags far behind the rest), for the present edition. Since the text of this reissue is offset from the original edition, the opportunities for change or insertion have been very strictly limited. In particular, the layout of the notes has made it all but impossible to add material without excising a comparable amount, and I have therefore (except for a small handful of minor additions) left them alone. Since my aim throughout is to explicate (rather than, say, to trace the changes of Ovidian literary theory), the restriction has deprived readers of comparatively little, though in Books I and II of the Black Sea Letters the new commentaries of Galasso (1995) and Helzle (2003) come as welcome additions in a sparse field.

    On the other hand, my pursuit of precision in capturing what Ovid actually wrote can, fortunately, be accommodated, since it involves only minor adjustments to the translation and a few changes and insertions in the list of textual variants. A decade and more of work on the transmission of the exilic poems has, step by slow step — often two back for one forward — brought us appreciably closer to what most scholars regard as the two collections’ likeliest Ur-text.

    The resultant small but crucial additions or modifications to my actual translation, reflected also in the list of textual variants, have all been included in the present corrected reprint. Though I have not (for reasons set out in my preface and acknowledgments) found it possible to replace Georg Luck’s text of the Tristia with Hall’s 1995 Teubner, I am nevertheless very conscious of the debt I owe to his scrupulous work, even while, for one reason or another, rejecting most of his innumerable conjectures. For selfish reasons I would be glad to believe, as he does (p. xviii), that good solutions can sometimes come ex prauis coniecturis, but the evidence to date unfortunately suggests otherwise. Among the other scholars whose textual proposals I have studied to my profit (sometimes through the stimulus of disagreement) are Butrica, Hendry, Heyworth, Kershaw, Liberman, Richmond, Ritchie, Schwind, and Watt.

    I should probably state at this point that I do not in this volume deal directly with either the Fasti or the Ibis. Unlike some scholars (e.g. Barchesi and Boyle) I do not regard the unfinished Fasti, despite its minor cosmetic revisions and dedication to Germanicus, as in any substantive sense part of the exilic corpus; the Ibis, on the other hand, which is indeed integral to Ovid’s traffic of ideas between Tomis and Rome (see Williams 1996, an excellent study), I am translating and annotating in a separate monograph.

    Since I have not been able to incorporate the more general findings of recent Ovidian scholarship in this reprint, and since moreover the past decade has brought no radical changes to the actual sense of the exilic poems, it must suffice here to draw readers’ attention very briefly to what I regard as major works and symptomatic developments. All items to which I refer (and many to which I do not, especially those devoted to individual poems and specific points of literary criticism) are listed in the supplementary bibliography. Unfortunately, the only recent bibliographie raisonnée, Schmitzer (2002), is so selective as to be little help (though Schmitzer does very properly devote a considerable amount of space to Claassen: see below).

    Pride of place must go to Dr. Jo-Marie Claassen’s Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (Claassen 1999c), the culmination of a decade and more of work on Ovid’s exilic poetry. This remarkable (and too little studied) book, from which I have learned a very great deal, has the supreme merit of not only following the sequence of literary influence and intertextual allusion from one exile to the next, but also, much rarer, of never forgetting that what generates the poetry is the emotional stress of (possibly permanent) displacement, with the consequent urgent need for support and sublimation. (For a selection of exilic literature illustrating this point — though it offers only one extract from Ovid — see Simpson 1995.) Claassen’s scrutiny of such things as the form of outreach to others, the slippage from person to persona, or the significance of grammar (e.g. first-person solipsism, or marked concentration on either past, present, or future) is extraordinarily illuminating. While critically perceptive in the formal sense, Claassen’s work is always aware that a painful real-life situation is involved, that the creative ingenuity of an exul ludens is one way of holding despair at arm’s length.

    Even the best of the Anglo-American literary studies, Gareth Williams’s Banished Voices (Williams 1994), which traces with great insight the nuances of Ovid’s polysemic use of theme and language at work in a literary world of paradox, ambivalence, and artful ingenuity (212), holds back from any substantial engagement with that death-in-life which separation from the Urbs meant. For exiles such as Ovid, ROMA/AMOR was a palindrome of more than symbolic force. The same is true, a fortiori, of the recent translation of Niklas Holzberg’s Ovid: Dichter und Werk (Holzberg 2002), which can nevertheless be recommended as offering a useful and up-to-date summation of critical work on the exilic corpus: on this see also Walker (1997). I have also derived much pleasure, and not a few insights, from Anne Videau-Delibes’s discursive, sensitive, and highly erudite investigation of what she nicely terms une poétique de la rupture, Les Tristes d’Ovide et l’Élégie Romaine (1991).

    About the true cause of Ovid’s relegation we are, I suspect inevitably, no wiser than we were. Verdière returns to the old notion of sexual intrigue (very popular in the nineteenth century), casting Ovid’s Corinna, abortion and all, as a former inamorata of Augustus (hardly a scenario that suggests a face-to-face dressing-down of the luckless Peeping Tom). Luisi and Berrino, more plausibly, rehash the political thesis (Ovid as a pro-Julian witness of supposedly treasonous activities), but with no reference to its earlier non-Italian proponents (cf. Green CE 203n6), who had already covered the ground pretty thoroughly.

    The notion that Ovid was never relegated to Tomis at all, but — in a very real sense an exul ludens — spent his latter years in Rome toying with ever more elaborate exilic topoi (presumably as an excuse for not finishing the Fasti and not revising the Metamorphoses, unless we take Ovid’s cessation of work on these cherished projects as part of the fantasy), remains fundamentally bizarre. Just how bizarre can be appreciated when we try to envisage the Realien of such a project and the reaction to it of friends and critics. Ovid’s real exile may not have provoked (surviving) contemporary comment, but so ludicrous a piece of monotonous and obsessional playacting (not to mention the abandonment of the two great works on which the poet had set his heart) most certainly would have done so. In the Black Sea Letters (4.3.51—54) Ovid wrote:

    If anyone had told me, ‘You’ll end up by the Euxine

    scared of being hit with a shaft from some native’s bow,’

    my reply would have been, ‘Take a purge, your brain needs clearing:

    try hellebore, you’re in a really bad way’

    Just so. I suspect that, confronted by the exile-in-Rome theory, his rejoinder would have been even more scathing, not least to Bingham’s recent suggestion that because Ovid’s place of relegation was significantly harsher than any other such location known from the first century CE, therefore it must have been fictional. This flight from reality may be, in essence, a recourse for those scholars of this age who, having systematically removed literature further and further from contact with the real world, found the poet’s Black Sea banishment, with his agonized reaction to it, an intrusive and ongoing embarrassment, best relegated to the safe toyshop of fantasy.

    This eccentric theory apart, arguments for and against the accuracy of Ovid’s account of Tomis (modern Constança) and the Dobruja have now reached a reasonable compromise: Richmond (1995) offers a careful summing-up of the evidence. Yes, of course Ovid exaggerated — often with recourse to well-worn literary stereotypes (Laigneau) — the horrors of the climate, the bleakness of the terrain, the primitivism of the population, and the lack of civilized company and amenities (Tomis was, after all, founded by Greeks); but then he was writing for the express purpose of securing either his reprieve or, failing that, removal to a less hostile environment. At the same time, the psychological symptoms attributable to enforced exile that he describes match similar modern accounts with uncommon precision (Méthy, Claassen 1999c, 182–204), thus further confirming the reality of his relegation. Meanwhile, a great deal of what he writes — despite the difficulties he must have experienced in obtaining information from the local inhabitants (Richmond 1995, 120) — turns out to have been more accurate than critics suspected (see, e.g., Batty, Kettemann, Poulle).

    If there is a common, and welcome, thread in recent research, it is a strong sense of the ambiguities (see Bretzigheimer and Ciccarelli 2001) inherent in Ovid’s reaction, both personal and literary, to his enforced removal from Rome and all that it implied. This is particularly true of his much-debated attitude toward Augustus, to which tidy-minded critics for too long strove to establish a clear solution, for or against. Work on Book II of Tristia in particular (Cutolo, Davis 1999b, Fishwick, Schönbeck,Viarre) has revealed a growing awareness that Ovid’s feelings about Augustus could be subject to a severe internal conflict that could not help manifesting itself in his poetry. As Ovid’s only possible benefactor, the (posthumously deified) emperor not only was the necessary target of his heartfelt appeals but also, as the simultaneous judge and cause of his predicament (Williams 2002a, 239), may well have aroused in him some variant of those odd symptoms of attachment commonly known today as the Stockholm syndrome.

    At the same time, it is inconceivable that Ovid did not also nurse furious suppressed resentment against his ingenious tormentor, which found outlet in mischievous and recondite literary or mythical allusions, coupled with essays in double entendre. Casali (107–8) makes out a very persuasive case for Ibis ("Ibis in Euxinum  .  .  . ") having been a false front for the release of Ovid’s pent-up hatred for the emperor himself. Ovid’s refusal to name his addressees in the Tristia, for fear of getting them into trouble, is subtly suggestive of a reign of terror and very effective at subverting his frequent praise of Augustan clementia. The literary development of this ambiguity of emotion is admirably discussed by Williams (2002a and b) in work that builds on his earlier monographs (1994 and 1996). For the general reader coming to the poems of exile without prior knowledge, these two articles offer a well-balanced and informative introductory survey.

    Iowa City

    June 2004

    PREFACE AND

    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    The vicissitudes of fashion have treated Ovid — his exilic poems in particular — more capriciously than most ancient authors. Best known and loved of all Roman poets save Virgil in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, he reached his apogee in the eighteenth century, which (as a critical public will always do) carefully refashioned him in its own image, one kind of Augustanism making over another. Hence the peculiar habit of translating him into stopped rhyming couplets, on the grounds (Dryden had pointed the way here) that had he been an Englishman, and contemporary with themselves, this is surely how he would have expressed himself. The literary conceit (in all senses) which such a thesis implies was blown to pieces by the Romantic movement, which found both Ovid himself and, a fortiori, his neo-Augustan imitators stuffy, dull, over-formalized and lacking in genuine passion.

    The eclipse of Ovid’s literary fortunes was near-total, and only in the last half-century — with formalism no longer at a discount, irony a rising commodity, and literary (or, better, rhetorical) artifice once more triumphant — has his rehabilitation been achieved. Unfortunately, too many latter-day devotees, adherents of the Dryden principle, have regarded Ovid’s improved status as indissolubly linked with his eighteenth-century vogue, so that once again he is appearing for English-speaking readers decked out, inappropriately, in wooden rhymed couplets or (for the Metamorphoses) flat blank verse, thus creating wholly inappropriate associations in the reader’s mind.

    A translation the primary aim of which is to convey to the Latinless reader not only the sense of its author but also, as far as possible, his basic structure and texture, simply cannot afford such self-indulgent measures. It helps no one but the pasticheur to present Ovid as an inferior epigonos of Pope or Milton. It is, precisely, the alien quality that one must strive to capture. I have set out my principles in this matter elsewhere,a and do not need to repeat them again. In the present volume I have tried to tighten the structural pattern and, in particular, to avoid excessive enjambment; but the stress-equivalents I have developed for the representation of the Latin elegiac couplet — a variable pattern ranging in ictus-ratio from 6:5 to 5:3 — still seem to me the best compromise. As a practising poet I am all too well aware of the hazards involved: all translation, after all (despite post-structural efforts to boost its status), remains in the last resort a pis aller. Those with the original do not need it.

    The hazards of history, too, can sometimes help a text in unexpected ways. A contemporary audience will respond, as earlier and more innocent generations could not, to the grim circumstances of this book’s composition. Exile has once more become, as it was in Augustus’s day, if not a universal condition (though some might argue for that too), at least an all-too-familiar risk. The ruthless demands of two world wars and, worse, a variety of totalitarian ideologies, have made the exile, the stateless person, the refugee, the dépaysé, a common feature of our social awareness. Even those of us who did no more than serve three or four years overseas in wartime, often in remote and unpleasantly exotic locales — the Burmese monsoon could be just as lethal as winter in Tomis — can recognize, and share, the private fantasies of nostalgia, the all-demanding obsessions, the violent mood-swings and psychosomatic disorders so vividly and accurately described in these pages.

    There is, indeed, an archetypal quality about Ovid’s poems of exile: their influence, often unacknowledged, has been enormous. Pushkin, who endured a relegatio very similar in type to Ovid’s, actually called one volume of his own poems Tristia: imitation is, as always, the sincerest flattery. Today the Tristia and the even less well-known Black Sea Letters — even granted their thematic obsessionalism and deliberately restricted range — have a better chance than ever before of being appreciated at their true worth. Indeed, what to earlier generations, without experience of such a world as they described, seemed tedious and (in every sense) frigid literary exercises, now strike us as a unique, and uniquely penetrating, anatomy of the exilic condition and its pathology.

    Because of Ovid’s long period in critical disfavour, scholarship on his work — the exilic poems above all — tends to be patchy. There is, for example, no full and up-to-date commentary on the Tristia in English (though Luck’s German Kommentar of 1977 is both exhaustive and imaginative, and I have gratefully borrowed from it throughout); the Black Sea Letters at present have no readily available modern commentary at all, in English or any other language (Della Corte’s exists only in duplicated typescript, and is extremely hard to come by). In consequence I have written rather fuller notes on both works than I would otherwise have done, in the hope that they may serve at least as an interim stopgap for students as well as helping the general reader.

    The text I have used for the Tristia is Luck’s, published in 1967; that of the Epistulae ex Ponto is J. A. Richmond’s new Teubner edition (1990), based on a thorough re-examination and reorganization of the manuscript tradition. I append below (pp.l ff.) a list of the occasions on which the readings I prefer differ from Luck’s and Richmond’s. The number of these divergences should not be construed as in any way diminishing the great debt I owe to the work of two excellent scholars. I have also regularly consulted the texts of André, Bakker, Burman (edition of 1727, incorporating invaluable notes by Heinsius), Ehwald-Levy, Helzle, Lenz, Owen, Scholte, Staffhorst and Wheeler-Goold (see Abbreviations and Select Bibliography). Among individual textual studies I have derived most benefit from Shackleton Bailey’s. Of general analyses and commentaries those by Evans, Della Corte, Nagle and Némethy deserve special mention. For prosopographical and other background material Syme’s History in Ovid (1978) proved invaluable. What I owe to Ovidian scholarship in general should be readily apparent from my translation and notes alike. I am also grateful to Dr Stefan Stoenescu for much useful advice concerning the climate and geography of Tomis (see p. 367).

    It has taken me a decade, amid innumerable other calls on my time, to complete this book, and I have incurred various further debts while doing so. The rich holdings, and ever-helpful staff, of the Classics Library and the Perry-Castañeda (Main) Library in the University of Texas at Austin made my ongoing researches both easier and more pleasurable than might otherwise have been the case. The latter’s Inter-Library Loan Service, as always, managed to procure me books and articles that I had often despaired of running down, and with a promptness that sometimes seemed to verge on the magical. The graduate students who took part in a seminar I conducted on the exile poems in 1985 taught me at least as much as I taught them: I am especially grateful for the contribution made by Mrs (now Dr) Jo-Marie Claassen of the University of Stellenbosch, who very properly reminded me, at regular intervals, that what we were discussing was primarily literature rather than a problem in historical biography. Her dissertation, ‘Poeta, Exsul, Vates: A stylistic and literary analysis of Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto’ (1986), has given me many insights into Ovid’s rhetoric and methods of composition.

    I must also record my extensive debt to Mr Anthony Turner, erudite copy-editor extraordinaire, whose detailed knowledge of ancient geography is only matched by the punctilio of his punctuational and semantic judgements. If there are (as I fear) misprints and solecisms still lurking in this volume, they cannot be laid at his door when discovered.

    Betty Radice’s untimely death was a tremendous loss to classics, and especially to anyone who had worked in close association with her, as I did. The two volumes in this series that I produced with her unfailing encouragement and invariably diplomatic — but firm — editorial advice stand as a reminder of just how much I owe to her. As I wrote in her memorial volume, The Translator’s Art (1987), ‘like Ovid himself in his exile, I have lost a vital contact with reality as well as a much-loved friend, and the Tristia and the Ex Ponto, as I work on them, are that degree more glacial for her absence’. The work is done now; but I am acutely conscious that for too long it has lacked her civilized guiding hand.

    Last but very far from least, I am happy, once again, to acknowledge the constant joy, stimulus, and enlightenment given me, over the past twenty years and more — regarding Ovid’s exile poetry and so many other matters — by my wife Carin: sweetheart, best friend, faithful ally, elegant Latinist, and now, to my great pleasure and admiration, professional fellow scholar. μάλιστα δέ τ᾿ ἔκλυον αὐτοί.

    P. M. G.

    Austin, Texas

    October 1991

    It will be noticed that in the present corrected reprint I have retained Luck’s 1967 edition of the Tristia as what (to borrow a handy term from computerese) I might call my default text, rather than replacing it with J. B. Hall’s more recent (1995) Teubner recension. This is not because I do not recognize the excellent and meticulous groundwork that Hall has done, superseding the work of Luck and, a fortiori, of Owen, in the collation of MSS and the establishment of a reliable apparatus criticus. Unfortunately, of the roughly 500 places where Hall’s readings differ from Luck’s, no less than 127 consist of his own emendations; and since of these emendations I regard no more than a couple of dozen as viable, it seemed much easier — bearing in mind the constraints imposed on correction by an off-set reprint — to retain Luck’s text, since this imposed so many fewer divergencies that would need to be recorded.

    For invaluable help with the editing involved in the republication of The Poems of Exile, I am especially indebted to Dr. Lisa Carson, to my former student (and doughty bridge opponent) Professor Samuel Huskey, and (as always) to the resourceful and vigilant staff of the University of Iowa’s Inter-Library Loan Service, who once again filled all my ordinarily eccentric requests with remarkable promptness and took only a little longer to find, and deliver, the impossible. My added gratitude to Dr. Jo-Marie Claassen is recorded in the foreword; to my wife I continue to accumulate a debt that I can only hope I acknowledge a little more graciously than Ovid did the help his own wife gave him in absentia.

    P. M. G.

    Iowa City

    June 2004

    a See Essays in Antiquity (1960), pp. 185–215; Ovid: The Erotic Poems (1982), pp. 78–80; Classical Bearings (1989). pp. 223–39, 256–70.

    Map of the Mediterranean Region

    Map of the Mediterranean Region, circa AD 10.

    INTRODUCTION

    I

    Publius Ovidius Naso was born on 20 March 43 BC — the year after Caesar’s assassination — and grew up during the final violent death-throes of the Roman Republic: he was a boy of twelve when news arrived of Octavian’s victory over Antony at Actium (31 BC), and his adolescence coincided with the early years of the pax Augusta. His family was from Sulmo (the modern Sulmona) in the Abruzzi, and had enjoyed provincial equestrian status for generations. As Ovid himself points out with satisfaction (Am. I.3.8, III.15.5–6; Tr. IV.10.7–8; EP IV.8.17–18), they were landed gentry, not ennobled through the fortunes of war or arriviste wealth. He himself was confirmed as an eques in anticipation of subsequent admission to the Senate and an official career (cf. Tr. II.90). But quite early on, when hardly embarked on the sequence of appointments known as the cursus honorum, he was to decide otherwise.

    After the usual upper-class Roman school education in grammar, syntax and rhetoric (Tr. IV.10.15–16), he came to Rome and was taken up, as a promising literary beginner, by Messalla Corvinus (see Glossary, and below, p. 261), the soldier-statesman who acted as patron to such poets as Tibullus, Sulpicia and (initially) Propertius. To his father’s dismay (Tr. IV.10.21–2) Ovid devoted more and more of his time to literature, and correspondingly less to his official duties. From 23/22 BC he did spend a year or two in the study of law and administration, the obligatory tirocinium fori (which, characteristically, left its main mark on his poetic vocabulary), and held one or two minor positions while thus engaged. But very soon — certainly by 16 BC, when he would have been eligible for the quaestorship — he abandoned any thought of a public senatorial career. He had already contrived to avoid the — equally obligatory — period of military training, the tirocinium militiae (Am. I.15.1–4; Tr. IV.1.71). From now on, since he had access to the more-than-modest competence of 400,000 sesterces necessary for equestrian status, he was to devote himself entirely to literature.

    He had already been making a mark for himself as a member of Messalla’s poetic circle even before assuming the toga uirilis of manhood (Tr. IV.10.19–30; EP II.3.75–8, cf. I.7.28–9). Married for the first time c. 27 BC at the age of sixteen (Tr. IV.10.69–70) to a wife who proved ‘neither worthy nor useful’ (cf. Green OEP, pp. 22–5), and divorced some two years later (about the same time as he was finishing his studies with the rhetoricians), Ovid then spent over eighteen months away from Rome, travelling in Greece, Asia Minor, and Sicily (Tr. I.2.77–8; EP II.10.21ff.; Fast. VI.417–24). There is no mention of this episode in his ‘autobiographical poem’ (Tr. IV.10). Soon after his return he began to give recitations, presumably of the erotic elegies which afterwards (c. 15 BC) were published as the first, five-book, edition of the Amores. This event probably followed his decision to renounce a senatorial career: the success of the Amores may conceivably have induced Ovid’s father to acquiesce in his only surviving son’s proposed ‘life in the shade’ (uita umbratilis). About the same time Ovid married his second wife (her name, like those of her predecessor and successor, remains unknown), and his one child, a daughter, was born to her c. 14 BC. This union may have been the occasion of a permanent (and reasonably substantial) settlement on Ovid by his father,a though it proved, like the first, of short duration. However, since Ovid speaks of the lady as ‘a bride you could not find fault with’ (Tr. IV.10.71), it presumably ended in her premature decease (? in childbirth, like so many) rather than as a divorce case.

    Ovid’s independence, even his financial qualification for equestrian status, may also have been supported by Messalla’s patronage; at all events, from now on he became a gentleman of leisure who devoted himself exclusively to writing poetry. He had a house near the Capitol (Tr. I.3.29–30) for social life, and a country villa on a hillside overlooking the junction of the Via Clodia and the Via Flaminia (EP I.8.43–4) for vacations, or when he wanted to concentrate on his work in solitude, free from urban distractions. He enjoyed writing in his orchard (Tr. I.11.37), and, like many literary figures, gardened for relaxation (EP I.8.45ff., cf. II.7.69). In Rome he found a world of brilliant, and intensely felt, literary creativity (Tr. IV.10.41–54). Virgil, as he says, he ‘only saw’, Tibullus died before their friendship could develop; but he heard Horace recite his Odes and became an intimate of Propertius. In his early years his attitude was the not unfamiliar one of adolescent bedazzlement: ‘For me, bards were so many gods.’ He was closely involved with the neoteric movement: Hellenizing poets who wrote in the tradition of Philetas and Callimachus, pursuing the byways of didacticism and mythical aetiologies. At the same time (perhaps having noticed its political exploitation) he held himself carefully aloof from the artificial heroics of literary epic. An incurably irreverent sense of the ridiculous soon set him to parody the didactic, while ironically undermining Augustus’s ambitious programme of social and moral reform, so memorably celebrated by Virgil and Horace, so embarrassingly in the later poems of Propertius (4.6 alone is enough to induce a severe attack of recusatio in the sensitive).

    Ovid also offended against Augustus’s known aims because of his erotic poetry, much of which (despite careful if unconvincing protestations to the contrary) was clearly aimed at Rome’s fashionable beau monde, seeming to assume and, worse, enthusiastically endorse, a world of free-wheeling upper-class adultery and liaisons dangereuses. Such an assumption — which ran flat counter to Augustus’s moral legislation, especially the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis of 18 BC — was almost certainly correct: no legislation otherwise. Thus the enormous popularity of Ovid’s Amores, and his later Art of Love (c. 1 BC/AD 1), which compounded the problem by offering what purported to be practical hints on seduction, ensured that their author incurred lasting resentment at the highest official level (see Green OEP, pp. 71ff.), so that when he committed his fatal error, he could expect no margin of compassion whatsoever.

    To make matters worse, the Art of Love was published in the immediate wake of a scandalous and notorious cause célèbre directly involving the Princeps. In 2 BC Augustus’s only daughter, Julia, was relegated to the island of Pandataria on charges of adultery with an assortment of wealthy, high-born and politically suspect lovers (Vell. Pat. 1.100; Suet. Div. Aug. 19.64–5; Dio Cass. 55.10). The conjunction was unfortunate, and duly noticed. It is interesting that from now on Ovid abandons the erotic genre at which he had worked more or less exclusively since adolescence. But though the time of the change might possibly have been dictated by nervous alarm, the enormous efflorescence that followed during the next eight years, the hugely increased rate of production that achieved the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses and six of the unfinished Fasti (17,000 lines in all) demands a different, more genuinely creative, explanation. What produced Ovid’s gigantic obsession with mythical transformations? Why, having despised antiquarianism in the Art of Love, which displayed an uncompromising taste for the modern (AA III.121–8), did he now launch into an aetiological exploration of the Roman calendar, as full of esoteric folklore and allusive legend (no wonder Sir James Frazer edited it) as anything in Callimachus? This surely constitutes the great unexamined mystery of Ovid’s career. He may (as the subject-matter of the Fasti and flattery of the regime in the Metamorphoses both suggest) have been trying to repair the damage his earlier work had caused; but such a consideration was, it seems clear, no more than incidental. We shall probably never know the answer: all we can do is consider the phenomenon in its personal and public context.

    It may or may not be significant (Green OEP, pp. 40–41) that the death of Ovid’s father and his third marriage both probably fell within the period 2 BC–AD 1. The first meant (Ovid’s only brother having died young) that the poet was now in full possession of his patrimony. The second established a firm and lasting relationship that may have changed Ovid’s fundamental attitude to women, and seems to have survived even the prolonged separation occasioned by exile (but see below, p. xvii).

    We shall become better acquainted with Ovid’s third wife in the poems he wrote her from exile (see Tr. I.3.17ff., I.6, III.3, IV.3, IV.10.70ff., V.2, V.5, V.11, V.14; EP I.4, III.1). She was a widow or divorcee with a daughter, the ‘Perilla’ — perhaps, but not necessarily, a pseudonym — of Tr. III.7: her status in the household of Paullus Fabius Maximus, Ovid’s patron (EP I.2.129–35, etc.) is uncertain (see p. 214). She was related to the poet Macer, Ovid’s companion on the Grand Tour, and through Fabius’s wife Marcia had some kind of acquaintance, however slight, with Augustus’s consort Livia (Tr. I.6.25, IV.10.73). Thus it was natural that after her husband’s relegation she should remain in Rome to petition for his recall and look after his affairs. The absence of poems to her in the final years of Ovid’s exile (AD 14–17/18) has prompted one scholar (Helzle (1) 183–93) to suggest that after the deaths of Augustus and Fabius Maximus (see pp. 358–9) she may have joined her husband in Tomis, and that this would partially explain the drop in urgency of his appeals to Rome, his grudging resignation to life among the Goths. It is an attractive theory, and could well be true (one would certainly like to believe it), but by the nature of things must remain non-proven.

    How far the public verse-epistles addressed to her by Ovid from Tomis are to be treated as in any sense evidence for their relationship, and how far as purely literary artifice, is impossible to determine. What does seem certain is that an extremist argument for either case can confidently be ruled out. The mere fact of Ovid’s relegation will have affected, in a fundamental sense, all aspects of his marriage, communications included, just as it dictated the form his poetry now took. (I should perhaps say at this point that I do not for one moment believe the perverse scholarly thesis, best known from the article by Fitton Brown, according to which Ovid was not relegated at all, but for some impenetrable reason spent the last decade of his life in Rome playing with the topos of exile, and making fictional appeals to real people — a supposition dealt with in short order by Little: see especially pp. 37–9.) At the same time, the poet was exploiting all his very considerable poetic skills of rhetoric and persuasion (Green OEP, pp. 20–21), while drawing on genres previously used for very different purposes (e.g. in the Heroides) to mount a propaganda campaign for his recall, or at least for a transfer away from Tomis. The littérateur’s formal expertise was being deployed now for the amelioration of a real-life situation. Thus while personal circumstances coloured the poetry in an unprecedented manner (the erstwhile praeceptor amoris who had apostrophized a perhaps fictitious and in any case highly literary mistress now became a husband penning domestic admonitions to an absent wife), Ovid’s ars poetica in turn transmuted both the setting in which he found himself and his public appeals, so that his (nameless) wife is made to sound like one of his mythical heroines, the recipient of exhortation and advice from an Acontius, a Leander, a Paris.

    This is not the place to discuss in any detail the still-mysterious circumstances of Ovid’s relegation by Augustus in the early winter of AD 8 (for a full analysis see Green OEP, pp. 44–59 and CB, pp. 210–22). For the reader of the exilic poems it is simply the fact of the poet’s exile, rather than its possible antecedents, that is of primary importance. Briefly, Ovid himself (as readers of the Tristia and the Black Sea Letters are reminded many times) offers two reasons for it (see, e.g., Tr. II.207, IV.1.25–6): an immoral poem, the Art of Love, and a mysterious ‘mistake’ or ‘indiscretion’ (error), the details of which he declares himself forbidden to reveal, but which he clearly regards as the chief occasion of Augustus’s wrath, with the poem as a subsidiary offence and probable diversionary cover (e.g. EP II.9.75–6).

    This error lay not in any specific act on his part, but in his having witnessed something, presumably of a criminal nature, done by others (Tr. II.103–4, III.5.49–50, etc.), and, it seems safe to assume, in having failed to report it to the authorities. The hints of lèse-majesté that he scatters, the relentless hostility to him of Tiberius and Livia after Augustus’s death, his clear partiality for the Princeps’ grandsons and Germanicus, all combine to suggest that he was involved, however marginally, in some kind of pro-Julian plot directed against the Claudian succession (we know of at least two). If this is true, the Art of Love will have been dragged in (almost ten years after its publication!) to camouflage the real, politically sensitive, charge. A sexual scandal could — can — always be relied upon to distract public attention from more serious political or economic problems.

    There was also a certain sadistic appositeness about Ovid’s relegation which suggests the degree of angry resentment that his public attitudinizing had aroused. Enemies had brought his more risqué passages to the Princeps’ attention (Tr. II.77–80), slandered him behind his back (Tr. III.11.20; Ibis 14), and tried to lay hands on his property through the courts (Tr. I.6.9–14), presumably claiming the reward due to an informer. All this, given the climate of Julio-Claudian Rome, was predictable enough. But with the poet’s removal to Tomis his sufferings acquired an ironic aptness that he himself must have recognized better than most. Now the poet who had mocked the moral and imperial aspirations of the Augustan regime, who had taken militarism as a metaphor for sexual conquest, who had found Roman triumphs, Roman law, and the new emphasis on family values equally boring and provincial, was being made to suffer a punishment that in the most appallingly literal way fitted the crime, while at the same time — since the victim of a relegatio retained his citizenship and property — offering a spurious show of imperial clemency.

    The choice of Tomis as Ovid’s place of enforced residence was a master-stroke. It cut him off, not only from Rome, but virtually from all current civilized Graeco-Roman culture. Wherever the intellectual beau monde might be found in AD 8, it was not on the shores of the Black Sea. Such residence rubbed the poet’s nose in the rough and philistine facts of frontier life, the working of the imperium which he had so light-heartedly mocked. Life had caught up with literary fantasy and turned it inside-out: no metamorphosis now could rescue Ovid from the here-and-now of mere brute existence. His erotic exploitation of the soldier’s life that he himself had so carefully avoided was duly turned back against him, in this dangerous outpost where he was exposed to raids from fierce unpacified local tribesmen, and might, in an emergency, be called on to help in the town’s defence himself (see p. xxiii). Though we should take with a fairly large grain of salt his claims that he was forgetting his Latin, that his poetic skills were atrophying, that linguistically he was going native (see p. xxvi), it does remain true that, except through correspondence, he was now deprived of an alertly critical and sophisticated audience for his work-in-progress, such as he had enjoyed (and found essential for the creative process) in Rome. ‘Writing a poem you can read to no one’, he lamented in a famous aside (EP IV.2.33–4), ‘is like dancing in the dark.’

    The charge against Ovid (whatever it may have been) was brought to the notice of Augustus and some of his more highly placed intimates, including Ovid’s friend and patron Cotta Maximus (EP II.3.6ff.) in October or early November of AD 8. Ovid himself describes Cotta’s reactions, and the fraught meeting they had on Elba when the news broke (see pp.138 and 320). The poet was summoned back to Rome for a personal interview with Augustus, during which he was given a severe dressing-down (Tr. II.133–4). Dealing with him in this way avoided a public trial — something, given the sensitive nature of the charge, the Princeps seems to have been very anxious to avoid: secrecy marks the proceedings throughout.

    The sentence pronounced was, as we have seen, relegation sine die to the Black Sea port of Tomis, a Greek colonial foundation, in the barely settled province of Moesia. Little time was lost in forcing Ovid to settle his affairs and be on his way. This meant a December sea-voyage, so that (as we might expect at that time of year) he was exposed to several unpleasant storms during his journey (Tr. I.3.5–6, I.4 passim, I.11.3, 13ff.), as well as being robbed by servants (Tr. I.11.27ff., IV.10.101; EP II.7.61–2) who clearly knew a vulnerable victim when they saw one. His severance from Rome was symbolically emphasized by the banning of the Art of Love from Rome’s three public libraries (Tr. III.1.59–82, III.14.5–8). Sailing from the Adriatic through the Gulf of Corinth he recalled making the same voyage on the Grand Tour (Tr. I.2.77); but then, in more carefree times, his destination had been Athens. From the Isthmus he took another boat to Samothrace, and from there (travelling as slowly as he might) to Tempyra in Thrace. He now (spring AD 9) completed the journey to Tomis overland (see p. 22). Despite his initial optimism — Book I of the Tristia, describing the events of this journey, clearly anticipated a speedy reprieve: perhaps he had Cicero in mind, exiled in the March of 58 BC and back home by August 57 — this remote provincial port was to be Ovid’s home for the rest of his natural life. During the harsh winter of AD 17/18, in his sixtieth year, Publius Ovidius Naso finally gave up the unequal struggle for survival. He was buried — as he had foreseen, and feared — by the shores of the Black Sea.

    II

    Tomis, the modern Constanţa, is situated at the tip of a small peninsula seventy miles south of the main Danube delta, in that area of windswept sandy plain now known as the Romanian Dobruja. In AD 8 it formed part of the still largely unsettled province of Moesia, ruled by imperial legates — one of whom, P. Vinicius (AD 2), is said, ironically enough (Sen. Controv. 10.4.25) to have had a great passion for Ovid’s poetry. The city was a Greek foundation, settled from Miletus in the late sixth century BC as a port, trading centre, and fishery. As various inscriptions confirm (Lozovan RP, pp. 63–4; Pippidi, pp. 250ff.), it remained Greek, in customs and institutions, at the time of Ovid’s residence. By now, however, superficially Hellenized local tribesmen formed a majority of the population (Tr. V.10.28–30): fierce long-haired fur-clad natives, with quivers on their backs and knives in their belts, men who made their own laws and often came to blows in the market-place (Tr. V.7.45–50, V.10.44, cf. III.14.38). Getic and Sarmatian (?Scythian, Vulpe, p. 51) were, according to Ovid, the languages most often heard. The Greek inhabitants had ‘gone native’, he complains (Tr. V. 10.33–4): the Greek spoken in Tomis was a debased and barbarous dialect full of local loan-words (Tr. V.7.52, V. 10.34–6) — though, as we shall see (below, p. xxvii), he may himself have come, in the end, to write poems in it. Latin, he insists (Tr. V.10.37, cf. V.7.53–4), was virtually unknown.

    He also draws a stark and vivid, if somewhat repetitive, picture of the Dobruja. Its treeless, monotonous steppe, he writes (Tr. III.10.75; EP I.3.55, III.1.20), resembles a frozen grey sea, patched — appropriately enough — with wormwood, a maquis of bitter and symbolic associations (EP III.1.23–4). There are no vines, he repeatedly complains, no orchards: spring in the Italian sense does not exist (Tr. III.10.71–4, III.12.14–16; EP III.1.11, cf. EP I.3.51, 1.7.13, III.1.13, III.8.13–14), and few birds sing (EP III.1.21–2). The countryside is ugly, harsh, savage, inhuman (Tr. V.2.63, III.11.7, I.2.83, III.3.5, III.9.2, III.10.4). The water is brackish, and merely exacerbates thirst (EP III.1.17–18, 22). But Ovid’s two great fearful obsessions are the biting cold and the constant barbarian raids (Tr. II. 195, frigus et hostes). Again and again he returns to the snow, the ice, the sub-zero temperatures: bullock-carts creaking across the frozen Danube, wine broken off and sold in chunks, the violent glacial north-easter (today known as the crivat) that rips off roof-tiles, sears the skin, and even blows down buildings if they are not solidly constructed (cf. Vulpe, pp.53–4; Herescu, p. 69, with further reff.). Compared to these wintry hazards, such minor irritations as bad food and water, unhealthy air and living conditions, and a near-total lack of medical facilities (Tr. III.3.7–10; EP II.7.73–4, III.1.17) come almost as an anticlimax.

    There can be no doubt that Ovid’s health suffered in exile, and he himself seems aware that his troubles were at least partially due to emotional stress (see, e.g., Tr. III.8.25ff., IV.6.43–4). He also regularly blames the water and the climate. His first bout of illness occurred soon after his arrival in Tomis (Tr. III.3.1ff.): he refers to his ‘parched tongue’ (86) and to a period of delirium (19–20), which suggests some kind of fever. Insomnia and lack of appetite, resulting in emaciation, are recurrent symptoms (Tr. III.8.27ff., IV.6.39–42; EP I.10.7–14, 23), producing a sallow, unhealthy complexion. In AD 11/12 we hear of a ‘pain in the side’ (Tr. V.13.5–6), apparently brought on by winter cold: this sounds like pleurisy or pneumonia, but consumption cannot be ruled out. Ovid knows all about pulmonary haemorrhages (EP I.3.19–20). There are also signs of premature senility — white hair, trembling hands, chronic lassitude, deep wrinkles — which Ovid attributes, probably with good reason, to the psychological impact of his miserable fate (Tr. IV.8.1ff, IV.10.93; EP I.4.1ff., I.5.4–8, I.10.25–8). During the later years of his exile he feels close to death (EP II.2.45, III.1.69). We have no reason to believe that this does not present a more or less accurate, if perhaps over-emotionalized, picture of Ovid’s physical and mental condition during his years of exile.

    As for the barbarian incursions, Ovid makes it plain that these were no laughing matter: the picture he draws is of a town well enough fortified (Aricescu, pp. 85ff.) but for much of the time virtually under siege, its farms and outlying districts constantly terrorized by wild Cossack-like horsemen from the steppe, who would gallop across the frozen Danube (EP I.2.81–8) and carry off not only cattle, but often the wretched peasants themselves (Tr. III.10.51–6, IV.1.79–84). Many dared not till their fields at all: those who did went armed (Tr. III.10.67–8, V.10.23–6). Again and again the city itself was threatened, and Ovid — ailing quinquagenarian civilian though he was — had to take sword, shield and helmet, and man the wall with the rest (Tr. IV.1.69–84; EP I.2.19–24, I.8.5–10, III.1.25–8: we have no real reason to suppose, as is sometimes suggested, that this was self-serving fiction). Housegables and roofs bristled with the attackers’ poisoned arrows (EP I.2.15–22). It was a bad period for Tomis. Agriculture and commerce were both severely disrupted by these recurrent raids (Vulpe, p. 57), though the city itself successfully defied all attempts at annexation — being, in this, more fortunate than Aegisos (modern Tulcea), which was briefly occupied by the Getae from Moldavia in 12 BC (EP I.8.11–20, IV.7.19–54). In AD 15, the year after Augustus’s death, another serious incursion took place, but was put down, effectively, by the new governor of Moesia, L. Pomponius Flaccus (EP IV.9.75–80), an experienced soldier (Tac. Ann. 2.66) and one of Ovid’s patrons (see pp. 309, 314). From now on we hear no more about native raids: the frontier had been made tolerably secure.

    Thus Ovid’s poems from exile give us a remarkable picture of life in this remote frontier town; but the picture remains, inevitably, both slanted and incomplete. A writer whose idée fixe is to secure either a recall or a transfer to some less rigorous place of exile will paint his present plight in the darkest colours possible. By comparing Ovid’s version of life on the Black Sea coast with reliable external evidence (and, on occasion, with inconsistent statements of his own) we can, to some extent, modify the unremittingly bleak scene that he evokes, and, in the process, watch his creative persona manipulating facts to produce a persuasive imaginary world. This world in fact lies surprisingly close to reality: its most striking feature — like that of Thucydides — is what Lozovan (RP, p. 369) calls ’le péché d’omission’. It also works through a series of well-worn exilic literary clichés, familiar from Cicero, and later redeployed by Seneca (Lozovan ibid., Herescu, p. 57, and cf. below, p. xlvi). Ovid’s taste for rhetoric has sometimes been exaggerated; but his long apologia to Augustus (Tr. II) is, as Owen pointed out (Tr. II, pp. 48–54), a formal prose oration presented in verse, from exordium through proof (probatio) to refutation and epilogue. We should never forget that these poems are not only creative works of art, but also collectively designed to plead a case: both strong motives for selectivity.b

    To begin with, Ovid is misleading about the climate of Tomis. The winters, to be sure, are just as unpleasant as he claims (those in Sulmona, it is worth noting, are not much better); but the summers are Mediterranean, reaching temperatures of over 100 °F, the autumns mild and delightful. The climate generally has been described (Enc. Brit.¹¹ vol. 6, p. 383) as ‘continental-temperate’, and today Constanţa — which lies on about the same latitude as Florence — is a popular seaside resort. Except on one occasion (EP III.1.14), when he remarks that Tomis is frozen all the year round, Ovid does not lie about these warm and pleasant summers: he simply never mentions them, except in casual allusions (Tr. III.10.7, III.12.27–30) to the no longer ice-bound Danube. When he talks about spring (Tr. III.12), it is spring in Italy, recalled with vivid nostalgia, that catches his imagination. It is hard to remember, too, when reading his descriptions of barrenness and infertility (Tr. III.10.67–73, V.10.23–5), presenting the Dobruja as a kind of Ultima Thule on the rim of the known world (Tr. II.200, III.3.3–37, III.14.12; EP II.5.9, etc.), that this area had long been famous for its wheat-harvests (Lozovan RP, p. 367), and that today Constanţa raises not only wheat, but also the vines and fruit-trees which Ovid missed so badly (Tr. III.10.71–4, III.12.13–16). If he had ever travelled in the Dobruja, he would have known that treelessness was a merely local phenomenon: about forty miles north of Constanţa huge forests began (Vulpe, p. 53). But he never seems to have ventured beyond Tomis itself: the terms of his relegatio may have forbidden local travel, and in any case conditions in the hinterland were highly dangerous. Such knowledge as he does reveal about the area (e.g. in EP IV.10) he could easily have picked up from Book 7 of Strabo’s Geography, available in Rome as early as 7 BC (Lozovan RP, p. 357).

    If Ovid overstressed the inhospitality of the climate, he also played up the barbarism of the local population. (For an educated Roman this was virtually inevitable, and Ovid’s earlier work shows him using ‘barbarian’ as a conventional term of abuse.) ‘Crude’, ‘fierce’, ‘savage’, ‘wild’, ‘inhuman’ are among the various epithets he hurls at them. In fact he must have understood very well the fine distinctions that existed between Greek residents, semi-Hellenized native settlers, mostly fishermen or farmers (the region today produces about 70 per cent of Romania’s fish catch: if Ovid did not write the Halieutica it was not through lack of material), and the wild nomads of the steppe; but for his own literary purposes he constantly confuses them. (There are also genuine mistakes, e.g. his regular description of Scythians as ‘Sarmatians’: Lozovan OB, p. 396, RP, p. 361).

    This practice creates odd inconsistencies in Ovid’s work, and after a while got him into trouble locally. The Tomitans had (on his own showing) treated him with great kindness and respect, considering his position, granting him exemption from local taxes (EP IV.9.101–2, IV.14.53–4) and paying tribute to him as a poet.c They were, understandably, both hurt and offended when word got back to them of the way in which their resident foreign celebrity was portraying the country and its inhabitants in his verse dispatches to Rome (EP IV.14.13–16). Though Ovid might protest that it was only the land he hated, not its occupants (ibid. 23ff.), no one reading the poems of exile with an open mind can ever have found this piece of self-justification in the slightest degree convincing (Herescu, pp. 70–71, Lozovan RP, p. 368). His special propaganda had, by accident, got to the wrong audience, through the offices, apparently, of a ‘bad interpreter’ (EP IV.14.41) who was probably also his amanuensis (Tr. III.3.1–2).

    Ovid’s psychological ambivalence concerning Tomis becomes more striking as his exile — and his unacknowledged acclimatization, such as it was — progresses; yet the dichotomy was built into his situation from the start, by its very nature. He wanted desperately to return home; at the same time it was essential that he placate the local authorities. So while his urban persona, the reluctant exile, fulminated rhetorically about illiterate savages, his resident alter ego was already investigating Tomis’s cultural resources. Five centuries of Greek civilization, as we know from the city’s elegant inscriptions (Lozovan RP, pp. 363–4), had left their mark. The steady influx of Thracian or Scythian immigrants had not altered the intrinsically Greek character or social customs of this Milesian colony (Pippidi, pp. 255–6). The level of education and literacy, at least among the cultured few, must have been rather higher than Ovid suggests. It was, precisely, as a poet that the citizens of Tomis honoured this exiled alien in their midst (EP IV.14.55–6, cf. IV. 13.21–2): provincials they might be, but some of them at least were Greek, or Greek-educated, provincials, and (even in Ovid’s account) not wholly indifferent to literary merit. Though few of them, Ovid tells us (Tr. V.2.67), understood Latin, the governor, his staff, and other Roman officials will certainly have done so, and probably a fair number of local Greeks too, in particular those with widespread business interests. Ovid’s intellectual isolation, though indeed debilitating, was not, as he tries to imply, total.d

    Furthermore, after some years in Tomis, Ovid began, almost inevitably, to experiment with the local patois. When, after Augustus’s death, he gave a public recitation, a laudatio of the deceased and deified emperor and his surviving family (EP IV.13.23ff.), his poem for the occasion was, he tells us, composed ‘in Getic’. What in fact did this mean? His attitude to this tongue had at first been one of literate contempt (Tr. V.2.67, V.7.17, V.12.55, etc.), especially when addressing Romans. But just as he claimed that his Latin over the years had become rusty through lack of practice (Tr. III.14.43–6, V.2.67–8, V.7.57–8, V.12.57–8), so he also indicated a slowly developing interest in ‘Getic’ (cf. Lozovan OB, pp. 399ff.), till by about AD 12/13 he is proudly claiming, in some epistles, to have fully mastered it, along with ‘Sarmatian’ (Tr. V.7.56, V.12.58; EP III.2.40). Yet elsewhere (Tr. V.10.35ff.) he is still complaining of his inability to make himself understood except by gestures. How are these statements to be reconciled? By AD 15 he apparently knew ‘Getic’ well enough to compose quantitative elegiac couplets in it (EP IV.13.19–20), a claim which at once arouses suspicion, since it is unlikely in the extreme that Getic would have been a quantitative language. It looks very much (cf. below, p. 336) as though what he in fact learned was the bastardized Greek lingua franca of the area (Tr. V.2.67–8, V.7.51–2, V.10.35), which a poet steeped in Callimachus might well force into the elegiac mould, and which would also — a major attraction for any creative artist in exile — ensure him about as wide a local audience as he could command. If this is true, there is nothing inconsistent about true Getic or ‘Sarmatian’ still reducing him to baffled sign-language.

    The important fact, psychologically, is that he took such a step at all. His willingness to concede his own position in the society to which he had been banished clearly increased with his progressive failure to secure any mitigation of sentence from Augustus. Through his wife and his more influential patrons he had worked, first, to win reprieve and recall (Tr. II.575, III.2.30, IV.4.47–8); alternatively, failing that, to secure transfer to a milder place of exile. The second of these objectives is mentioned far more often than the first. Indeed, by about AD 12/13 he has come to admit (EP II.7.17ff.) that anything else would be ‘excessive’ — which need not imply that in his heart of hearts he had finally given up hope of a pardon.

    But just as his dawning interest in the local scene, the local language, goes hand in hand with a concern over the supposed deterioration of his Latin (Tr. III.14, V.5.7, V.5.12), so his acclimatization to Tomis grows in direct proportion to the increasing elusiveness of imperial clemency. (If it is true that in AD 14 his wife joined him in exile, that too will have been a contributing factor.) As early as AD 12, when he came to write Book I of the Black Sea Letters, he had virtually abandoned all serious hope of recall, and was concentrating on his petition for a change of residence (EP I.1.77–80). Even over this he was pessimistic. There are references, not only to sickness, senility and lassitude, but also to sloth, depression, accidie: the fact that writing has become a mere wearisome chore to kill time (EP I.5.5ff. and 29ff.). There is even talk of suicide (EP I.6.41). These do not sound

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