14 AD: When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour.
Ovid, the man of mystery
“Why don’t you write about Ovid?” said my publisher, who for some reason didn’t want me to write a novel starring the Roman poet Catullus. I have to say I was hooked. Why hadn’t I thought of Ovid? Roman poet in the right era, wrote the brilliant Metamorphoses and the racy Ars Amatoria (Art of Love), and was suddenly exiled by the Emperor in the biggest scandal of 8CE. Immediately, I knew I would do it.
So I began with a man who had been successful all his life. He wrote poetry, in a culture that loved to recite out loud so that one did not have to be able to read to be familiar with poetry. Ovid had been a celebrity since he was young. He wrote love poetry, rude poetry, light-hearted poetry, serious poetry. He wrote about myths, solemn religious festivals, cosmetics…
He was the only surviving son of a wealthy family, loved, educated, never knew poverty. He was known in the bars on every street-corner, he was invited to be the entertainment at the best parties. And then at the age of 52 he found himself in a small town on the shore of the Black Sea, forbidden from leaving, disgraced, unable to believe what had happened to him, pouring out a stream of poems begging for his return.
This was the poet Ovid in 8 CE, and his downfall has fascinated the Classical world ever since. We can piece together a straightforward story of how it happened from his poems but for one thing - we don’t know why Ovid was exiled. This is roughly what we know: in the autumn of 8 CE, the Emperor Augustus recalled Ovid from the island of Elbe where the poet was visiting a friend. On arrival at Rome, Ovid was immediately told that he was to leave for the Black Sea town of Tomis, a long way from Rome.
He took his time getting there, stopping off at the island of Samothrace for a month, but maybe in the depths of winter this was a sensible idea. If you ask the invaluable Orbis website to calculate a journey sailing to Tomis from Rome in December, the quickest it comes up with is 26.3 days. If you hit a storm – and Ovid tells us he did – then add more! But sometime in the spring of 9 CE, Ovid arrived in Tomis, and his life of misery amongst the barbarians (his words, not mine) began.
I decided to read through Ovid’s exile poetry using Peter Green’s excellent translation and frankly I needed a LOT of chocolate to get through it. Desperate pleading, unctuous flattery, abject wretchedness – repeat ad nauseam. Where was the Ovid I had read at University? Of course, the exile poetry is rarely a set text. Instead we show young people Ovid’s popular work Metamorphoses with its sparkling recital of hundreds of Greek myths, along with a carefully curated selection from the Ars Amatoria. I remember reading this passage from the Ars Amatoria, giving advice to young men on how to pick up women at the chariot races:
Sit next to the lady, there’s nothing to forbid it, press your thigh to hers because you can. The seat divisions force you, you don’t want to! The rule of the place means you must touch her! Now to begin a friendly conversation – a subject fit for public conversation, at first. Ask her earnestly – whose horses are those? Who does she support? Immediately, “Oh I’m a fan too!”, whichever team it is. In the ivory procession of the gods, you clap for Venus. And if a speck of dust falls into her lap, you flick it away. Actually, if there is no speck of dust, then flick away nothing.
When I was sixteen, this was daring stuff. Now I’m sixty, a traditional feminist and slightly depressed that sexism still exists, I find it tiresome and childish but you can see Ovid’s confidence that his male contemporaries - and who knows, maybe some of the women - will find it funny. In the Rome of Augustus, bristling with moral legislation designed to encourage child-bearing within chaste marriage, it is outrageous.
There is no indication of responsibility, and it not-very-subtly challenges the boring old men of the time. But it is also full of energy and people, and it is lively, and the writer thinks he is charming. Incidentally it is a marvellous source for chariot racing at Rome, for example telling us that men and women were not segregated as they were for other entertainments.
Now let’s compare this with an excerpt from Ovid’s poems of exile:
If you’re wondering why this letter is written in someone else’s hand, I’ve been ill. At the far end of the unknown world I was ill and unsure that I would survive. How do you think I feel as I lie in this horrible land among the Sauromatans and Getans? I can’t stand the climate or get used to the water and even the land doesn’t please me, I don’t know why. Here there is no house, no food suitable for a sick man, nobody skilled in the art of Apollo to cure me, no friend to comfort me or while away the dragging hours with conversation.
For Ovid the fun has stopped and he does not have to the resilience to cope. He hates everything in one breath, then complains he has no friends in the next. There are many such passages in the exile poetry. The man who enjoyed the thought of flicking dust from a woman’s dress at the races is now whining because nobody will talk to him. I can remember thinking as I read this, “Gosh, I wonder why?”
When I moved onto the secondary sources, JSTOR and the Ovid scholars, I came across a very interesting theory – that Ovid’s exile was a fiction, a scenario made up by the poet purely so that he could write a different sort of poem. This theory relies heavily on the fact that we have no contemporary evidence for Ovid’s exile, just Ovid’s own words. But then we have no contemporary evidence for so many events in the ancient world - our primary historians for the entire reign of Augustus are Tacitus and Suetonius, both born many years after Augustus’ death. I found the “exile as fiction” theory hard to accept (it would ruin my books for one thing) but was struck by one point - Ovid is not a reliable conveyor of his own real emotions.
To explain this, I turn to Shakespeare and his mysterious Dark Lady. Since I was a teenager, I wanted the Dark Lady from the Sonnets to be a real woman, I wanted Shakespeare’s feelings for her to be true. I discovered I was in the majority and whole books have been written in which scholars try to identify the real woman behind the Dark Lady. But when I looked at the woman in many of Ovid’s poems, Corinna, I was not convinced, and again I am in the majority here. Corinna is not real. She is a useful mannequin and Ovid drapes his poetry around her, but that is all. The question one must always ask with Ovid is: does the poem I am reading betray anything of what the poet genuinely feels? I cannot tell you the answer to this, because Ovid is very good at creating the atmosphere and scene that the poem demands, but also very good at self-contradiction, at teasing the reader, at swerving away from the answer to readers’ questions.
It is quite right that Ovid’s poetry is known, read and loved still. He conjures images out of wisps of verse and his use of language is brilliant. When I decided to write about him, make him the hero of my books, I took an important decision. I would use the poetry, I would research the circumstances of the exile, but I would always remember that I was writing fiction, writing for the reader’s entertainment.
Do I hope that some readers will go on to read some of Ovid’s poetry? Oh yes, please do, and I can recommend Stephanie McCarter’s translation of the Metamorphoses. I want everyone to be as intrigued and infuriated by the man as I am!
Fiona Forsyth
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About the Author
Thanks so much for hosting Fiona Forsyth today, with her intriguing murder mystery, Death and The Poet.
ReplyDeleteTake care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club