Translated from French
Once upon a time, during the reign of Augustus, there lived a man who could believe himself blessed: Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid. A fashionable poet in the golden age of Latin poetry, lusor amorum (singer of loves), his playful pen had conquered Rome and his facility in verse-making bordered on the prodigious: “I tried to write in prose, but the words came to fit the meter so perfectly that what I wrote was verse.” Fortune, birth, illustrious friends, a house adjoining the Capitol—nothing was lacking for this Roman knight who enjoyed a life more secure and comfortable than ever.
Yet one morning in the year 8 of our era, when Rome awoke, sinister news coursed through the streets: the cherished child of the muses, then fifty years old, had just departed under imperial escort. Not for some golden retreat on a clement shore, but for a relegatio (house arrest) in Tomis, a glacial town at the extreme edge of the empire, on the inhospitable shores of the Black Sea.
The Mystery of His Disgrace
What was the cause of this relegatio without trial, by Augustus’s will alone, and what reason did this prince have for depriving Rome and his court of so great a poet to confine him among the Getae? This is what we do not know and shall never know. Ovid evokes a carmen et error (a poem and an imprudence), murmuring enigmatically:
“Ah! why did I see what I should not have seen? Why have my eyes become guilty? Why, finally, through my imprudence, have I come to know what I should never have known?”
Ovid. Les Élégies d’Ovide pendant son exil [t. I, Élégies des Tristes] (The Elegies of Ovid during his exile [vol. I, Elegies of the Tristia]), trans. from Latin by Jean Marin de Kervillars. Paris: d’Houry fils, 1723.
If The Art of Love, published a decade earlier, was the carmen or official pretext, the error or true fault remains an enigma sealed in the poet’s tomb:
“Ovid’s crime was incontestably to have seen something shameful in Octavius’s family […]. The learned have not decided whether he saw Augustus with a young boy […]; or whether he saw some equerry in the arms of the empress Livia, whom Augustus had married when pregnant by another; or whether he saw this emperor Augustus occupied with his daughter or granddaughter; or finally whether he saw this emperor Augustus doing something worse, torva tuentibus hircis [under the fierce gaze of goats].”
Voltaire. Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 45B, […] D’Ovide, de Socrate […] (Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 45B, […] On Ovid, on Socrates […]). Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010.
So let us forget the numerous and strange hypotheses of those who wish at any cost to divine a secret two millennia old. It suffices to know that, in the throes of exile, in the sobs of isolation, Ovid found no other resource than his poetry, and that he employed it entirely to mollify an emperor whose rancor he had attracted. “The Gods sometimes allow themselves to be moved,” he told himself. From this were born the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto.
Chronicle of an Eternal Winter: The Drama of Tomis
Ovid’s elegies during his exile are the journal of a man lost far from his own, far from a civilization of which he was once the most amiable representative; a long lamentation addressed to his wife, to his friends remaining in Rome, and to an implacable power from which he awaits clemency in vain. Tomis presents itself in the guise of a “land full of bitterness,” forever battered by winds and hail of an eternal winter, and where even wine, “petrified by cold,” freezes into ice that must be cut with an axe. The poet feels himself an absolute stranger there; a prisoner unlearning Latin amid barbarous words and the frightful cries of the Getae:
“they converse with one another in a language common to them; but I can make myself understood only through gestures and signs; I pass here for a barbarian, and [these] impertinent Getae laugh at Latin words.”
Ovid. Les Élégies d’Ovide pendant son exil [t. I, Élégies des Tristes] (The Elegies of Ovid during his exile [vol. I, Elegies of the Tristia]), trans. from Latin by Jean Marin de Kervillars. Paris: d’Houry fils, 1723.
Facing Adversity
Where did Ovid draw the necessary courage to bear such cruel adversity? In writing:
“[If you] question me about what I do here, I will tell you that I occupy myself with studies apparently of little use, and which nevertheless have their utility for me; and if they served only to make me forget my misfortunes, it would not be a mediocre advantage: too happy if, in cultivating so sterile a field, I derive from it at least some fruit.”
Ovid. Les Élégies d’Ovide pendant son exil, t. II, Élégies pontiques (The Elegies of Ovid during his exile, vol. II, Pontic Elegies), trans. from Latin by Jean Marin de Kervillars. Paris: d’Houry, 1726.
Moreover, the former Roman dandy has not entirely disappeared: elegance, refined traits, comparisons more ingenious than solid persist, sometimes to excess. Quintilian already judged him less occupied with his own misfortunes than as an amator ingenii sui (lover of his own genius). According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid knew “what was exuberant in his verses,” but accommodated himself to it: “He said that a face was sometimes made much prettier by a beauty mark.” This constancy in giving some turn to his thoughts, some “beauty mark,” in the French manner—“one would almost say he was born among us,” notes the translator Jean Marin de Kervillars—is the ultimate mark of his personality, the avowed refusal to let distance from the capital annihilate the artist. And after having so often described this remoteness as a kind of death, he ends by finding Rome on the shores of the Black Sea, concluding: “the country where fate has placed me must serve as Rome for me. My unfortunate muse contents herself with this theater […]: such is the good pleasure of a powerful God.”
