The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters 9780520931374

Table of contents :
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

Citation preview

The Poems of Exile

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.-I7 or 18 A.D. [Selections. English. 19941 The poems of exile: Tristia and the Black Sea letters I 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) I. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or I 8 A.D.-Translations into English. 2. Poets, Latin-Homes and haunts-Romania-Constan~a. 3. Epistolary poetry, Latin-Translations into English. 4. Complaint poetry, Latin-Translations into English. 5. Poets, Latin-Correspondence. 6. Constan~a (Romania)Poetry. 7. Romans-Romania-Poetry. 8. Exiles-Poetry. I. Green, Peter, 1924II. Ovid, 43 B.C.-I7 or 18 A.D. Tristia. English. 1994. III. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D. Epistulae ex Ponto. English. 1994. IV. Title. PA 6522.A2 2005 871'.0I-dc22 Manufactured in the United States of America 15

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The paper used in this publiqtion meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Pcnl1Qtlence of Paper).

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CONTENTS

Foreword to the

2005

Edition

Preface and Acknowledgements Map

V11

xiii xvw

Introduction

xix

Textual Variants

lvi

Abbreviations

lxii

Select Bibliography

Tristia Black Sea Letters

lxxvii 1 107

Notes and References

201

Glossary

382

Index

42 7

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 strucrural 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 Quelletiforschung) 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 stricdy 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 Vll

FOREWORD TO THE 2005 EDITION

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 lowe 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 fmdings 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, espeviii

FOREWORD TO THE 2005 EDITION

cially those devoted to individual poems and specific points of literary criticism) are listed in the supplementary bibliography. Unfortunately, the only recent bibliographie raisonnee, 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 if Exile from Cicero to Boethius (Claassen I 999c), 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.) Cla!lssen'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, ROMAIAMOR 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 rnrk (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 poetique de la rupture," Les Tristes d'Ovide et I'Elegie Romaine (1991). ix

FOREWORD TO THE

2005

EDITION

About the true cause of Ovid's relegation we are, I suspect inevitably, no wiser than we were. Verdiere 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 ofAugustus (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 exulludens - spent his latter years in Rome toying with ever more elaborate exilic topoi (presumably as an ex~use 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 significandy 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. x

FOREWO·RD TO THE 2005 EDITION

This eccentric theory apart, arguments for and against the accuracy of Ovid's account ofTomis (modern Constan~a) and the Dobruja have now reached a reasonable compromise: Richmond (1995) offers a careful summing-up of the evidence. Yes, of course Ovid exaggeratedoften 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 symptOIns attributable to enforced exile that he describes match similar modern accounts with uncommon precision (Methy, 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, Schonbeck,Viarre) has revealed a growing awareness that Ovid's feelings about Augustus could be subject to a severe internal confiict 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 (I07-8) makes out a very persuasive case for Ibis ("Ibis in Euxinum ... ") having been xi

FOREWORD TO THE

2005

EDITION

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 corning to the poems of exile without prior knowledge, these two articles offer a well-balanced and informative introductory survey. Iowa City June 2004

XlI

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 Xlll

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

set out my principles in this matter elsewhere, * 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 depayse, 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

* See Essays in Antiquity (1960). pp. 185-2.15; Ovid: The Erotic Poems (1982). pp. 7880;

Classical Bearings (1989). pp. 223-39. 256-70. XlV

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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 (ppJ 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 lowe to the work of two excellent scholars. I have also regularly consulted the texts of Andre, Bakker, Burman (edition of 1727, incorporating invaluable notes by Heinsius), Ehwald-Levy, Helzle, Lenz, Owen, Scholte, StafIhorst 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 Nemethy deserve special mention. For prosopographical and other background material Syme's History in Ovid (1978) proved invaluable. What lowe 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 xv

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

the Classics Library and the Perry-Castaneda (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 lowe 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 XVl

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

pleasure and admiration, professional fellow scholar. €KAvov

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Austin, Texas October 1992

P.M.G.

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 mo.re 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 ofIowa's Inter-Library Loan Service, who once again ftlled 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.

Iowa City June

2004

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INTRODUCTION I

Publius Ovidius Naso was born on 20 March 43 Be - 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 Be), 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.IS.S-6; Tr. IV.IO.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. 1I.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.IO.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.IO.21-2) Ovid devoted more and more of his time to literature, and correspondingly less to his official duties. From 23/22 Be he did spend a year or two in the study of law and administration, the obligatory tirocinium Jori (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 Be, 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.I.71). From now on, since he had access to the more-than-modest competence of 400,000 xix

INTRODUCTION

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 11.3.75-8, cf: 1.7.28-9). Married for the first time c. 27 BC at the age of sixteen (Tr. IV.IO.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. 1.2.77-8; EP II.IO.2Iff.; Fast. VI.4I7-24). There is no mention of this episode in his 'autobiographical poem' (T,. 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,* 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.IO.7I), it presumably ended in her premature decease (? in childbirth, like so many) rather than as a divorce case. Ovid's independence, even his fmancial 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. 1.3.29-30) for social life, and a country villa on a hillside overlooking the junction of the Via Clodia and the

* For the evidence supporting this thesis -

and, in general, for a longer and more detailed account of Ovid's life prior to his exile - see Green OEP, pp. IS-59, especially pp. 30-32.

xx

INTRODUCTION

Via Flarninia (EP 1.8.43-4) for vacations, or when he wanted to concentrate on his work in solitude, free from urban distractions. He enjoyed writing in his orchard (Yr. I.II.37), and, like many literary figures, gardened for relaxation (EP 1.8.45ff., cf. 11.7.69). In Rome he found a world of brilliant, and intensely felt, literary creativity (Yr. IV.IO.4I-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 Propert ius. 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 oj Love (c. I Bcl AD I), 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. 7Iff.), so that when he committed his fatal error, he could expect no margin of compassion whatsoever. To make matters worse, the Art oj Love was published in the immediate wake of a scandalous and notorious cause dlebre directly XXI

INTRODUCTION

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 (Veil. Pat. I. 100; Suet. Div. Aug. 19.64-5; Dio Casso 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 efHorescence 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 111.121-8), 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 subjectmatter 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 mayor 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 r. 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 Yr. 1.3. I 7ff. , 1.6, III.3, IV.3, IV.IO.70fT., V.2, V.5, V.II, V.I4; EP 1.4, lIb). She was a widow or divorcee with a daughter, the 'Perilla' - perhaps, but XXII

INTRODUCTION

not necessarily, a pseudonym - of Yr. II1.7: her status in the household of Paullus Fabius Maximus, Ovid's patron (EP 1.2.12935, 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 (Yr. 1.6.25, IV.IO.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 (I) 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-episdes 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 confidendy 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 1 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 litterateur'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 XX111

INTRODUCTION

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 tum 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 theJact 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.I.25--6): an immoral poem, the Art oj 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 11.9.75--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 lese-majeste that he scatters, the relentless hostility to him of Tiberi us 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 oj Love will have been dr~gged 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 risque passages to the Princeps' attention (Tr. 11.77-80), slandered XXIV

INTRODUCTION

him behind his back (Tr. III.II.20; Ibis 14), and tried to lay hands on his property through the courts (Tr. 1.6.9-14), 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 xxv

INTRODUCTION

brought to the notice of Augustus and some of his more highly placed intimates, including Ovid's friend and patron Cotta Maximus (EP 1I.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. 11.133-4). 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. 1.3.5-6, 1.4 passim, 1.11.3, 13ff.), as well as being robbed by servants (Tr. 1.11.27ff., IV.lo.lol; EP 11.7.61-2) 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. 1I1.1.5!)-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. 1.2.77); 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 ToInis 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.

xxvi

INTRODUCTION

II

Tomis, the modern Constan~a, 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.IO.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.IO.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.IO.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.IO.75; EP 1.3.55, III.I.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. IILIo.71-4, III. 12. 14-16; EP III. I. I I , cf. EP 1.3.51, 1.7.13, III. I. 13, III.8.I3-I4), and few birds sing (EP III.I.2I-2). The countryside is ugly, harsh, savage, inhuman (Tr. V.2.63, III.II.7, 1.2.83, III.3.5, III.9.2, III. 10.4). The water is brackish, and merely exacerbates thirst (EP III. I. 17-1 8, 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 XXVll

INTRODUCTION

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 (Yr. 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., Yr. 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 (Yr. III.3.rff.): 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 (Yr. III.8.27ff., IV.6.39-42; EP I. 10.7-14, 23), producing a sallow, unhealthy complexion. In AD II/I2 we hear of a 'pain in the side' (Yr. V.r3.5-6), 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 (Yr. IV.8.lff., IV.IO.93; EPI.4.lff., I.5.4-8, I. 10.25-8). During the later years of his exile he feels close to death (EP 11.2.45, 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 XXVlll

INTRODUCTION (Tr. III.IO.SI-6, IV. I. 79-84). Many dared not till their fields at all: those who did went armed (Tr. III.IO.67-8, V.IO.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.I.69-84; EP 1.2.19-24, 1.8.5-10, III.1.2S-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 1.2.15-22). It was a bad period for Tomis. Agriculture and commerce were both severely disrupted by these recurrent raids (VuIpe, p. 57), though the city itself successfully defied all attempts at annexation - being, in this, more fortunate than A!!gisos (modern Tulcea), which was briefly occupied by the Getae from Moldavia in 12 BC (EP 1.8.11-20, IV.7.19-54). In AD IS, the year after Augustus's death, another serious incursion took place, but was put down, effectively, by the new governor ofMoesia, L. Pomponius Flaccus (EP IV.9.75-8o), 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 idee 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 'Ie peche d'omission'. It also works through a series of well-worn exilic literary cliches, 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 (T,. II) is, as Owen pointed out (Tr. II, pp. 48-S4), a formal prose oration XXIX

INTRODUCTION

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.* 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 of, the autumns mild and delightful. The climate generally has been described (Ene. Brit.1t vol. 6, p. 383) as 'continental-temperate', and today Constanta - which lies on about the same latitude as Florence - is a popular seaside resort. Except on one occasion (EP III. I. 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. 1I1.10.7, I1I.12.27-30) to the no longer ice-bound Danube. When he talks about spring (Tr. I1I.I2), 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.IO.67-'73, V.IO.23-5), presenting the Dobruja as a kind of Ultima Thule on the rim of the known world (Tr. 1I.2oo, I1I.3.337, 111.14.12; EP 11.5.9, etc.), that this area had long been famous for its wheat-harvests (Lozovan RP, p. 367), and that today Constanta raises not only wheat, but also the vines and fruit-trees which Ovid missed so badly (Tr. 111.10.71-4, I1I.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 Constanta 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.IO) 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

* For a perceptive analysis along

these lines of the 'autobiographical poem' (Tr.

IV. 10) see Fredericks, pp. I 39ff.

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INTRODUCTION

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.I01-2, IV.14.53-4) and paying tribute to him as a poet.* 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 ruspatches 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. 111.3.1-2). 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

* Herescu. p. 72 (followed by Andre. Pont. p. 117. n. S and others) argues that Ovid was given the great honour of presiding over the local religious games as agonothetes. but the minimal evidence (EP IV.I4.SS) does not sustain his interpretation: the wreath placed on his head was one of Apolline laurel. See below. p. 376. XXXI

INTRODUCTION 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-Q). 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-Q, 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.* 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.SS, 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-Q, V.2.67-8, V.7.S7-8, V.I2.S7-8), so he also indicated a slowly developing interest in 'Getic' (cf. Lozovan DB, 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.IO.35ff.) he is still complaining

* He was, however, cut off from free access to books and libraries (though as far as we know there was no ban on his receiving books from Italy). For the function of libraries in Rome and their possible manipulation by Augustus as an indirect instrument of censorship or patronage, see Marshall, pp. 252ff. XXXl1

INTRODUCTION of his inability to make himself understood except by gestures. How are these statements to be reconciled? By AD IS he apparently knew 'Getic' well enough to compose quantitative elegiac couplets in it (EP IV.I3.19-20), 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 (Yr. V.2.67-8, V.7.SI-2, V.IO.3S), 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 batHed 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 (Yr. II.S7S, 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 (Yr. III.!4, V.S.7, V.S.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 1.1.77-80). 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.S.Sff. and 29ff.). There is XXXlll

INTRODUCTION

even talk of suicide (EP 1.6.41). These do not sound like mere literary topoi. We have a prelude to final capitulation: let me be a poet among the Getae, he muses, let Tomis be my Rome (EP 1.5.6 5-'70 ).

And yet, in his heart of hearts, Ovid still nursed hopes of somehow stirring Augustus's compassion: as he admitted (EP 11.7.79), it was what kept him going. The young and popular Germanicus, he felt, might intercede on his behalf (EP 11.1,11.5.75, IV.S.SS-S). But what becomes increasingly clear is that - for obvious political reasons connected with his Julian sympathies and the error that had got him exiled in the first place - one major obstacle to his return was the implacable hostility of Augustus's wife Livia and of her son Tiberius. In a long, detailed brief to his wife (EP III. I. II 4-66) , Ovid instructs her as to how Livia should be approached: the effect is to make the Empress appear a dangerous and unpredictable monster. A propitious moment, probably in the mood of public euphoria following Tiberius's Pannonian triumph (23 October AD 12), must be chosen (cf. EP 1I1.3.S3-4 and 92). Ovid's wife is encouraged not to be scared of the Empress (II9ff.). But only in the most favourable circumstances should any approach be made (129ff.), and even then no justifications should be offered. She is, not to put too fme a point on it, to grovel and weep (14Sff.), begging only that her husband may be granted a less inclement place of banishment. Meanwhile Ovid goes on to prophesy fresh triumphs for Tiberius ~EP III.4.S7ff.), and even asks Livia, rhetorically, why she does not ready the triumphal chariot for her son (95-6). News must have reached him of a disquieting sort: in an epistle to Cotta Maximus he exclaims (EP 111.5.57-8): 'And if my fight to escape goes against Fate's prohibitions,! then strip me, Maximus, of my useless hopes!' It was surely the failure of the appeal to Livia which provoked that heart-rending poem of capitulation, EP 111.7. Here Ovid formally releases his friends (9-10) and his wife (II-I2) from any further effort on his behalf. He apologizes for the endless stream of complaints and admonitions they have received from him (I-S). Hope is good, but there comes a point at which it is best to face, steadfastly, the knowledge of defeat (21-4). Some wounds are exacerbated by treatment, and it is better for a shipwrecked man XXXIV

INTRODUCTION

to drown than hopelessly to prolong the struggle (2S-8). As I have come to the Getic shore, Ovid says, so let me die there - with dignity, if Caesar does not deny me even that crumb of comfort (19-20, 39-40). There we glimpse a flash of the old spirit. Resignation brings with it a sense of proportion: how bored everyone must be, he admits to Brutus (EP III.9.3-4), with poems that do nothing but complain about the natives and pester Augustus for an easier exile! Of course, it was not long before Ovid's indomitable hopes began to stir a~ain, encouraged doubtless by the rumours that Augustus was now more kindly disposed towards him (EP IV.6.IS-16). But on 19 August AD 14 the ageing Princeps died, and Ovid's last lingering hopes for reprieve died with him, as the poet himself had foreseen (Tr. IV.9.II-I4; EP IV.6.16). From Livia and Tiberius he could expect no compassion. He was a sick, elderly man who had suffered irreparable damage (EP IV.2.19-22) to his mind and natural talent. Much of his zest for composition was gone (EP IV.2.23ff.), a sad fate for the young enthusiast who had once versified everything he wrote (Tr. IV.IO.2S-6). He still looked to Germanicus, though without any real expectation, for a move away from Tomis (EP IV.8.8S-8), and when the news of Augustus's deification reached him, he set up a shrine to the new god in his house (EP IV.9.10Sf£) and promoted the imperial cult with sedulous public zeal. But he also made his final peace with the citizens of Tomis, to whose admiration for him - as well as his own reciprocal gratitude and affection - he now makes reference (EP IV.9.89 and 97-104, IV.14.47ff.); these were the circumstances in which he delivered his celebratory poem (above, p. xxvi) on the apotheosis of Augustus, the nobility of the Imperial house. An exercise in futility, and surely recognized as such by its author. Against it we can set, as a fmal apologia, that splendid and ringing tribute, one of the finest passages Ovid ever composed, to the immortality conferred by poetry (EP IV.8.43ff.). At least he had the comfort of believing rightly, as things turned out - that his place in literature was secure.

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III

The two volumes of poetry, the Tristia ('Sadnesses', 'Lamentations') and Epistulae ex Ponto (Black Sea Letters) that Ovid published during his years of exile have not, on the whole, had a good press from posterity. It is easy enough to see why. The brilliant literary prestidigitator who found imperial moralizing a dreary bore was now compelled, in his obsessional determination to escape from the barbarous backwater to which Augustus's fiat had doomed him, to grovel before the instrument of his downfall, and suck up to powerful patrons who represented the antithesis of everything in which he believed. Augustus's death left him at the mercy of two still more implacable enemies in Livia and Tiberius. The fashionable flt1neur whose nearest approach to reality had been a fantasy-manual of seduction, whose most sustained creation was centred on outre metamorphoses and the ironic mockery of traditional myth, now found that Life, in its crudest form, had invaded his library and at one stroke deconstructed his lovingly fashioned literary persona. He became querulous, repetitive, self-pitying and self-obsessed, humourless. The egotism that had been a lightweight joy in Rome's enfant terrible of the boudoir became an embarrassing aberration when exercised, without elegance or proportion, at the expense of his wife. Tomis no longer let him be funny. The praeceptor amoris with his mask of myth, wit and literary allusion was now an all-too-human husband in a real-life situation. The poet was forced to adapt old genres and techniques to new uses for which they had never been intended. This, in the event, he did with remarkable resourcefulness. Granted the fact that his poetry became the vehicle for an idee fixe, it is astonishing how much variatio he contrived to work into it. Nor, even more surprisingly, was his subservience always quite what it seemed. Despite everything, he fought back. The sardonic oblique shafts aimed - even from exile, even while ostensibly buttering up his tormentor - at Augustus's divine pretensions and moral revivalism astonish by their sly ferocity. Grovelling, Ovid still contrived to insult. More important, and a truth less often realized, the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto offer an extraordinary paradigm of the xxxvi

INTRODUCTION

fantasies and obsessions that bedevil every reluctant exile: loving evocations of the lost homeland, the personification of letters that are sent to walk the dear familiar streets denied to their writer, the constant parade - and exaggeration - of present horrors, spring here contrasted with spring there (Yr. III.I2), the wistful recall of lost pleasures once taken for granted, the slow growth of paranoia and hypochondria, the neurotic nagging at indifferent friends, the grinding exacerbation of slow and empty time, the fear of and longing for death. It is of extraordinary interest (and something seldom done, since readers of the exilic poems most often dip selectively rather than going through the two collections in sequence) to trace the graph of Ovid's emotional preoccupations during his decade of exile, as revealed to us by the testimony of his published poetic discourse. This remains true however we choose to characterize such testimony: somewhere between the two extremes of literary fiction and autobiography the truth must lie (Ovid's exile was, after all, not only a fact, but his sole theme from the moment he left Rome), and the current fashion for evaluating the poems exclusively in literary and rhetorical terms is no less partial, and no less misleading, than the earlier practice of seeing the corpus as disiecta membra of a factual record, an exile's diary and correspondence in verse. Of course we should be alert to the selectivity, suppressio veri, rhetorical artifice, conventional topoi, and carefully misleading implications that abound in these poems, just as we would in studying any forensic speech for the defence - which, indeed, is the main function that the Tristia and the Black Sea Letters are, cumulatively, designed to perform: they make a calculated appeal, not only to Augustus, but to literary readers at large. Ovid is presenting his case, as persuasively as he knows how, at the bar of public opinion. Yet he is also a consummate poet, who can no more help investing his brief with verbal elegance and images of haunting beauty than he could stop himself versifying as a boy (cf. Green OEP, pp. 18-19); and ifhe mythicizes himself, it is in terms that spring directly from his own unhappy dilemma. The result is a paradigm of exile that has, in its timeless perceptions, served as a model and inspiration down the centuries, for writers as diverse as Seneca and Pushkin. xxxvii

INTRODUCTION

Book I of the Tristia - dispatched to Rome in the autumn of 9 as a surrogate (1.1) for the poet himself, now recently arrived in Tomis - portrays a protagonist shaken by disaster yet still fundamentally confident that, with the right approach and appui, things can be put right (as they had been for Cicero) in reasonably short order. Besides a harrowing account of his last night in Rome (1.3), the reader is invited to share the dangers and tribulations of Ovid's slow, reluctant journey into exile, including some spectacular storms at sea (1.2, 1.4, I. 10, I. II). He also is offered public perusal of several supposedly private epistles: two (I.S, 1.9) thanking loyal friends; one (1.8), couched in bitter terms, upbraiding an old acquaintance who has expeditiously dropped him; one to his wife (1.6), praising her love and support; and one (1.7), probably addressed to Brutus, his literary editor and agent in Rome, describing how, before departure, he had burnt the Metamorphoses (and perhaps the unfinished Fasti too), but on reflection - and knowing copies had been made - hoped now that this work would be widely read, while appealing to readers to forgive its lack of fmal polish. It is an intriguing collection. The first thing that strikes one is how skilfully - and at very short notice - Ovid has adapted his elegiac conventions to deal with this new and unprecedented situation, redeploying both the autobiographical mode of the Amores and various epistolary techniques developed in the Heroides. This of course creates, inter alia, a constantly recurring sense of ironic inappositeness, as erotic echoes sound, sotto voce, in the protagonist's self-projected image of tragic suffering. You can never be certain when this narrator is slyly teasing the powers that be in the midst of his tribulations. He is not slow to compare himself with Ulysses/Odysseus (I.S.S9ff.), to borrow epic plumes: the mythic hero's sufferings, he asserts, were not a patch on his own. His wife, it becomes apparent, is being cast as a second Penelope, while Ovid himself must battle a hostile deity (and one more dangerous than Ulysses faced, not Neptune but Augustus-Jupiter) in order finally to achieve his return home. Ovid's allusions to Augustus - treated here and throughout the poems of exile as a vengeful and arbitrary avatar of Jupiter, hurling random bolts from on high against his enemies - form one of the most initially surprising elements in an /EUvre that had, as its AD

XXXVlll

INTRODUCTION

main objective, the winning of a reprieve, since just as Telephus could only be cured by the spear of Achilles that had wounded him (Tr. V.2.ISff.), so it was the Princeps himself, and no one else, who had the power to revoke Ovid's sentence. Ovid stresses the arbitrariness; he also, again and again, hints at its ultimate impotence in the face of spiritual resolution and the indestructible power of true art. His art, indeed, he sees, right from the beginning (Tr. 1.11.12), as his one therapeutic in adversity, the exercise of which can at least keep him tolerably sane amid the shipwreck of his fortunes (a favourite metaphor in these poems: see, e.g., Tr. 1.5.17-18 and 356). Physical and psychological dangers merge. 'Wherever I look,' he writes (Tr. 1. I 1.23), 'there's nothing but death's image'; what awaits him on dry land, he insists, is more hazardous even than the stormy sea: 'a barbarous coast, inured to rapine,jstalked ever by bloodshed, murder, war'. Exile from Rome in itself he also, at the deepest literary level, equates with death, something he emphasizes again and again: the poet of Tomis is a mere simulacrum when set against the author of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, works that could not be finished because of their maker's premature demise (Tr. 1.4.28, 1.7 passim; EP IV.12.44-5). Yet though the poet may be dead, his fame resides in the ability to confer immortality through song, not least on his own reuvre (see below, p. xxxvi). To puzzle us further, this elusive masker, sorrows notwithstanding, still retains his taste for sly jokes (1.6.20,11.7-8).

IV As soon as Ovid reached Tomis, he began work on Tristia II, a single book-length poem conceived as a kind oflegal and rhetorical brief addressed to Augustus, and combining self-justification with an eloquently encomiastic appeal for clemency. This ambiguity of approach is underscored by an increasing groundswell of illdisguised anger, mockery and resentment as the poem develops. Jupiter's noisily random fulminations (33ff.) are scathingly portrayed. There are snide hints (e.g. at 161-4) about the embarrassing circumstances of Augustus's marriage to Livia (she was in an xxxix

INTRODUCTION

advanced state of pregnancy by her previous husband at the time), not to mention his youthful tendency to go sick just before crucial battles (219), his indiscriminate sexual habits (287, cf. p. 226), his cruelty (335-6, cf. p. 229), his promotion of dubious literature in Rome's libraries (419-20, 509££.), his addiction to the illegal pursuit of dicing (471-82), his habit of supporting, and himself watching, plays stuffed with the kind of action (adultery in particular) to which he took such exception in Ovid (497-518). Even granted that much of this was adduced to illustrate Ovid's main argument in justification (,Everyone else did it with impunity, why pick on me?'), the fury, contempt and seething sense of injustice are unmistakable. If his appeal was to clementia, it was presented in singularly tactless terms. But then tact had, right from the beginning, been a quality conspicuously absent from his self-defining literary world, which always treated reality, officiai reality in particular, as a kind of joke in the worst possible taste. Such fantasies breed delusion: did he perhaps believe, in those early days of exile, that he could shame the Princeps into releasing him? If so, he judged posterity better than he did his contemporaries: the notion of the pen as mightier than the sword has always been a strictly long-term investment, with a poor track-record on immediate returns. Though recent modern opinion scores Ovid highly in his literary battle against the regime (especially considering the handicaps under which he operated), Augustus and Tiberius remained deaf to his elaborate apologia, just as they did to the various exercises in pathos, harsh realism, thinly veiled hostility, flattery, neoteric erudition and allusiveness which followed. That immortality which Ovid identified with poetic achievement, and anticipated for his own work, is safely his; but there was to be no word from Rome taking him out of the life-in-death limbo that exile meant for him, above all for his delicate creative spirit. I suspect that this reaction came as a considerable shock to him: the sovereign magic of art had failed to persuade. From now on we can watch the cold of Tomis - more metaphorical than physical - slowly eating into his bones, slowly chilling his human responses. He knows himself in a prison where games-playing is meaningless, and Rome becomes a mere backdrop for nostalgic dreams. The sole autonomy left to him is that of xl

INTRODUCTION

the (severely threatened) creative act, the genesis of poetry, which forms the sustaining leitmotif in Book III of the Tristia (AD 9-1O). It is stated as theme in the prologue (III. I, Ovid-as-book again in Rome, cf. IlLS. 1-10), repeated da capo, along with the claim for his work's immortality, at III.3.73-S0, also in the epilogue (III.I4, apologies for impossible circumstances leading to ostensible diminution of talent), and fully developed in the central poem of the collection, III. 7, addressed to his stepdaughter Perilla: ' ... there's nothing we own that isn't mortal/save talent, the spark in the mind ... my talent remains my joy, my constant companion:/over this, Caesar could have no rights' (43-4, 47-S, cf. III.3.77-S0). The more his hopes of reprieve fade, the more marked the dichotomy, in poem after poem, between here and there, between the wormwood-ridden Black Sea littoral and the City of his dreams (III.2.15-26, 4.47-5S). Sickness of heart (III.2.9ff.) metastasizes into physical illness: climate and water are both intolerable, leading to loss of appetite, emaciation and accidie (III.3.Iff., S.23ff.). Ovid knows very well that his emotional state may well be the cause of this decline (III.S.25-6, 33-4). He longs for death, faults Augustus for failing to execute him, switches (within a couplet!) to offering his poor state of health as a reason for commuting his place of exile (III.S.37-42), this last emerging as a regular plea from now on. His tears match the melting snow in springtime (III.2.19-20); his birthday elicits miserable reflections on his fate (III.I3); even the advent of spring, and (once again) the melting of winter's snow, are used as mere foils against poignant memories of spring flowers and nesting swallows in Italy (III.I2). We also get the first of many vivid allusions to the horrors of life in Torrus: searing cold, necessitating furs and leather breeches, frozen wine, barbarian incursions across the rock-hard winter Danube, poisoned arrows, absence of vines and orchard trees, neglect of agriculture (III.JO). Book III of the Tristia is thus an intriguing mixed bag, its emotional tone see-sawing like a sick man's temperature, its view ofTomis embracing both winter and spring, its addressees ranging from the poet's wife to an (unnamed) enemy who is pointedly reminded (III. I 1.39ff.) of the fate suffered by Perillus, an ingenious inventor roasted by the tyrant Phalaris in his own brazen bull xli

INTRODUCTION

(Augustus as Phalaris? yet another oblique insult). There is even a little aetiological exercise in neoteric style on the supposed origin of Tomis's name (III. 9) , based on a (typically fantastic) piece of Greek pseudo-etymologizing. One friend is given a warning based on bitter personal experience (III.4.I-6): live a quiet private life, steer clear of great names. Yet perhaps, given the circumstances, the most remarkable claim comes in the poem Ovid addresses to his wife, when the illness and depression from which he is suffering lead him to anticipate his own immediate death (IIL3.29ff.). The epitaph he writes for himself, and the comment he adds to it (71-80), at one stroke cancel out all his excuses and apologies for his erotic poetry: it may have been his downfall, but (he proudly declares) it is what will bring him fame and immortality. No mention there of the Metamorphoses, any more than Aeschylus, when composing his epitaph, listed his plays. Nescit uox missa reuerti: did Ovid mean to set the record straight before he died? And what kind of embarrassment did the declaration create for him when he recovered from his illness, and once more began to justify and explain his past record in the hope of winning some kind of reprieve for the future? Or did he (as I suspect), like so many creative writers, live entirely in the present, so that yesterday's dramatized mood, so intensely felt then, would be not only irrelevant but forgotten tomorrow? By the time (AD II) the poems of Tristia Book IV had been assembled, Ovid, as he twice reminds us (IV.6.1!)-20, 7.1-2), had spent over two years in exile. Resentfulness and resignation advance pari passu, recurrent bouts of self-pity (creative failure, creeping old age, chronic boredom and lassitude, ill health) interspersed with professions of stoic endurance, sustained, always, by the comfort of poetry (see in particular the prologue, IV.I.1-48, and epilogue, IV.IO.I03ff.). Hopes of a full reprieve are fading though not yet extinct (IV.9. 13-14). A sense of exhaustion predominates: thoughts of death as welcome release mingle with a sour awareness that 'sick though my body is, my mind is sicker! from endless contemplation of its woes' (IV.6.43-4). Local dangers are stressed; it is now we hear of the poet's obligation, whatever his physical condition, to take part in the city's defence - with an xlii

INTRODUCTION

ironic allusi9n to his youthful anti-militarism (IV.1.7I-Z), perhaps recalling the cheeky not-quite-metaphorical assertion (Am. 1.9. I) that 'every lover's on active service' (militat omnis amans). Poems are tossed into the fire; self-disgust and lack of an immediate audience take their toll (IV.1.93-102). The old panacea of a mind's-eye visit to Rome now comes only as a perfunctory appendage (IV.Z.57ff.) to Ovid's frigid anticipatory celebration of Tiberius's triumph. A new appeal to his wife (IV.3) sees this longsuffering lady as little more than an extension or echo of himself, existing solely to work for, and dutifully 'lament, her absent husband. An appeal (ignored in the event) to Messalla Corvinus's eldest son (IV.4) describes the barbaric rites of Tauric Artemis (hundreds of miles distant, and from the mythic past) as though they belonged to the here-and-now of Ovid's exile (61-86). Time (IV.6) heals nothing, brings no solace. Friends fail to write, and are assaulted with elaborate adynata from the poet's literary arsenal (IV.7); enemies receive threats of exposure (IV.9). The book concludes with Ovid's famous quasi-autobiographical poetic testament (IV. 10, cf. pp. 268ff.): it is almost - once again - as though he assumed his own imminent death, and wanted to leave an apologia behind for posterity. The tone throughout this book is one of almost unrelieved pessimism. The proem to Book V is presented, literally, as a swan-song (V. I. II-14), and the collection, taken overall, shows certain changes of emphasis. Ovid is now in his third year of exile (V.IO.I-Z), and the poems can be dated between the latter part of AD II and the first half of AD 12. Except for V.lO, describing the grim conditions of Tomis, and the introductory prologue, we find nothing here but verse-epistles, direct appeals for help, no less than four of them addressed to Ovid's wife. For the first time there is an admission (V.1.35) that the unrelenting self-absorption and selfpity of the work reaching Rome from Tomis is beginning to bore Ovid's readers. One friend advises (V.II) a return to his old modes of composition as an anodyne to exile. Take me out of this hellhole, the poet replies, and I'll be as cheerful as you like. 'I'll even write official propaganda (V. 1.39-46). Till then, expect more tristesse: 'a dirge best fits a living death' (47-8). Hope of return home is now virtually abandoned (V.Z.77-8, 10.49-50, and elsewhere); xliii

INTRODUCTION

a change of venue has become Ovid's major obsession - that, and the carefully established network of correspondence (so precious to exiles in all ages) that becomes his surrogate lifeline to the world (increasingly Edenic in memory) from which he has been banned. He is uneasily aware that his loud grumbling is unrestrained, undignified, un-Roman (V.I.3S, 49-SO and 68-'70). But a scream, he argues, eases pain; and anyway (forgetting, for the moment, the conditions of relegatio!) he is a Roman no longer, but a Black Sea native, so that the old rules no longer apply. Even so, the continued dispatch of poems to Rome remains a key element in his sustaining exilic fantasy, his yearning somehow, anyhow, to be in his old haunts, and with his friends (V.I.80: uobiscum cupio quolibet esse modo). Once again a personified letter (V.4) travels to Rome on its author's behal( Details intrigue. Ovid's physical illness (whatever it may have been) is now, we learn, over {V.2.3-6), though, he hastens to add (7ff.), his mind remains sick ('mens tamen aegra iacet'). He urges his wife to appeal to Augustus (V.2·37-40), then makes an appeal himself (35-'78) - in both cases, again, simply for removal from Tomis. Fellow poets, even Bacchus himself, are exhorted to join the campaign on his behalf (V.3). A celebration of his wife's birthday (V.S) is scanned for hopeful omens (29-40). Enemies again receive threats (V.8), while forgetful friends are nagged (V.6), and helpful ones receive praise (V.9) - or a run-down on local conditions (V.7.9-24 and 43-64) to keep them up to the mark. When his better half complains of being called 'an exile's wife' (V.II), the response is legalistic: I wasn't exiled, I was relegated. The news that his work is being adapted for the stage (V.7.2S-30) provokes a disclaimer - he's never written 'theatre libretti' or sought 'clapping hands' - but still, if it keeps his name before the public, well and good. The collection closes with the poet, physically sick once more (V.I3.3-6), in the grip of his chilly winter of discontent, offering his wife eternal fame in return for selfless service as a Penelope, an Alcestis, an Andromache, an Evadne, a Laodameia. These fmal poems, unsympathetic in tone to the modern reader, show more of the formal epistolary techniques used in the Heroides than their predecessors, and prepare us for the xliv

INTRODUCTION

new mode - verse-letters to named addressees - explored by the Epistulae ex Ponto. From now on Ovid's work offers a still more concentrated appeal ad hominem (and, occasionally, ad feminam). Despite ingenious variatio, the focus is narrower than ever.

v During AD 12-13, with Books I-III of the Bpistulae ex Ponto (Black Sea Letters), Ovid once more - as he had done in the years immediately preceding his exile - achieved a remarkable level of creativity, virtually tripling the production rate indicated by the Tristia. The verse-epistle is now his regular form, and his addressees are almost all identified: an interesting innovation which suggests, at the very least, some degree of confidence in a less hostile reaction to his case at Rome. This optimism seems, at least as far as the circle of his acquaintances was concerned, to have been' largely justified. Ovid records only one friend (EP III.6) who still found it safer to remain anonymous - though we have to consider the possibility that the poem was aimed at several such, and indeed that he kept silent about a fair number. Covert or subconscious malice is still prominent. It is characteristic of Ovid's approach that he inserts highly ambivalent references to Augustus's clementia into this poem (see below, pp. 344-5) in the very midst of bidding for a less harsh place of exile (37-8), while negative comparisons (Augustus is no Busiris, no Phalaris) are brought to a fine art, and frequently repeated (EP 1.2. II 9-20, 11.2. II 3-14, III. I.I 19-24), the 'rejected' parallels for Livia including Scylla and Medusa! The simmering hostility is unmistakable, and for the alert reader does much to leaven Ovid's endless reworking of his narrow, though obsessional, group of themes. Variatio can only do so much, and an unrelenting emphasis on boredom, frustration and misery (whether in pursuit of clementia or not) can hardly fail, sooner rather than later, to produce identical symptoms in the reader. As we have learned from too many modern French texts, artists with an idee fixe tend to wind up in a dead end. The poems in this three-book collection confirm both the limited range of topics Ovid allows himself, and the less-thanxlv

INTRODUCTION

flattering subtext permeating the whole. Once again the poems themselves are made to act as the exile's surrogate in Rome (EP 1.1.3-12): 'If an exile's/offspring observe the law,' he writes, 'why should they not/enjoy the City?' (21-2). This prologue touches most of the dommant themes: appeals for help and sympathy, selfjustification, flattery of the Princeps, complaints about the 'canker of anguish' eating away at the exile's mind (67-'76, a strikingly graphic passage), the usual pleas for a transfer. At the same time Ovid draws a subtly contemptuous picture of the elderly Augustus, qua Aeneas's descendant (if only by adoption) piggybacking on the poet's book (33-6), and compounds the insult by likening himself to a bearer of holy relics ('the hallowed names of the Julian race', 46), in competition with the mendicant priests of Isis and Cybele (40ff.), the first of whom Augustus had twice banned from Rome, and who was identified in everyone's mind with Cleopatra VII. It is pOlVer we respect in deities (43-4); and where they get their pleasure from (50-56) is the spectacle of blinded, abject, grovelling and repentant sinners, whom they strike down or forgive according to their own arbitrary fiat. Indeed, it is precisely such demonstrations of power that deities most enjoy (55-6), as an object-lesson to the faithful. What official Rome, let alone the Princeps himself, made of such outbursts one can only surmise. It certainly gives a twist to any overkill flattery, which can then be read as the pathetic utterance of a victimized toad crushed by that proverbial iron harrow. Ovid's seeming access of optimism in AD 12-13 will also have owed a good deal to the conviction he had (whether justified or not) that his powerful patron Paullus Fabius Maximus could effectively intervene with Augustus on his behalf (EP 1.2.67ff.), and indeed - as he tells us later (EP IV.6.IS-16) - in fact did so, with apparent success, a move only frustrated by the deaths (summer AD 14) both of Maximus himself and of the Princeps, who (Ovid claims) had before the end substantially modified his hard-line position on Ovid's relegatio. At the same time the optimism remains (as always) far from constant: in EP 1.3 the best outcome hoped for is a cicatrizing of the raw wound (II-16), and mental distress (1.4.1-20) has brought on premature old age. Though hope springs eternal, the here-and-now of Tomis must xlvi

INTRODUCTION

not be lost sight of. There is a tendency (not entirely surprising in the circumstances) to see life and literature, at times, as both in some sense unreal (1.5). Ovid still has a poor appetite, still complains about the water (1.10.7-14 and 29-32), still suffers bad dreams (1.2-4lff.). The pattern of addressees in EP I-III (most conveniently schematized by Wheeler-Goold, p. 490) makes it strikingly clear, by both emphasis and repetition, just where the thrust, the message of this collection is directed. Brutus, Ovid's literary representative in Rome, and Fabius Maximus, his most distinguished and influential patron, open and close it. Atticus stands at the centre. Spaced at regular intervals between them, the recipient of no less than six epistles, we frod Cotta Maximus. How are we meant to read this arrangement? In the opening and closing pairs of poems, claims for Ovid's Muse (and reasons for her woebegone nature) are juxtaposed with prayers for support in begging a more benign place of exile, the rig ours of Tomis being adduced as a direct cause of the poet's psychosomatic collapse - and, hence, of the monotony, misery and alleged technical failure of his verse. The two letters to Atticus recall old friendship, but can do no more than speculate on present loyalty: were they ever answered? We cannot tell. 'Sooner shall long summer days attend the winter solstice,' Ovid writes (II.4.2S£f.), amid other hyperbolic adynata, 'than you shall be touched by oblivion of our friendship.' Was his faith justified? The question - deliberately, one feels - is left unanswered. In his second address to Atticus, bleak pessimism ('My fate, it's plain, will keep to the course it started', 11.7.17), exemplified by a catalogue of the exile's sufferings (25£f.), is scarcely alleviated by a far-from-hopeful final prayer for continued support (81-4). In his friends at large, in fact, Ovid seems by now to have virtually no confidence left: or if he does, it is not something he chooses to commemorate in verse. Then what about Cotta Maximus, patron of long acquaintance and dubious reputation (see pp. 262-3), whose name recurs like a tolling bell through this collection? Ovid sends him a long, depressed account of how he still struggles to write ('it suffices if I manage/to be a poet among the uncultured Goths', 1.5.65--6); thanks him for sending news of the death of Celsus, upheld here as xlvii

INTRODUCTION

the model friend whose loyalty should be emulated (1.9); thanks him again, at some length, for not rejecting Ovid's claims on him altogether (11.3); thanks him, effusively, for the gift of medallions (?: see p. 326) of the Imperial family, affecting to discern clemency in the expression of Augustus's portrait (11.8, especially 7Iff.); offers him fame through his own posthumous literary renown, coupled with a retelling of the legend of Orestes and Iphigeneia among the Taurians, as an example of how loyal friendship exists even in barbary (Ub, especially 97ff.); and while flattering Cotta's oratorical skills (his patron had sent him a bundle of speeches to read), now asks no more for himself than to be remembered (IlL5.37ff.), and, finally, to know the hard truth: 'If my fight to escape goes against Fate's prohibitions,/then strip me, Maximus, of my useless hopes!' (57-8). The lowered expectations (compare Ovid's optimism even a year or so earlier) are striking, even bearing in mind that this is a carefully planned literary collection designed for public (and official) consumption. We should not forget that both Cotta Maximus and his elder brother Valerius Messalla Messalinus (who gets two letters, 1.7 and Il.2: nervous, distant, anticipating rejection) were both strong adherents of Tiberi us. Thus we should not be surprised by the incipient cultivation of individuals in the service of Germanicus, whose star now seemed in the ascendant (e.g. Salanus, the prince's tutor in oratory, II.5), or, indeed, by the poet's somewhat brash direct appeal (II.r) to Germanicus himself -less than tactful, and, wisely, not repeated. The collection is completed with routine epistles to literate career officers (mostly Tiberian) such as Rufinus (I.3, III.4) and the Pomponius brothers, Graecinus and Flaccus (1.6, 1. ro, 11.6), or rhetoricians and men of letters (Severus, Macer; 1.8, II. 10). The poet's wife gets two poems, one depressed (1.4), the other tetchy and peremptory (III.r): his petition drive is not going well. The Thracian prince Cotys is solicited for local support (II.9); a hitherto disregarded kinsman-by-marriage, Rufus, is, not very hopefully, approached (II. II). Was there ever, Ovid asks (quite reasonably, on the record), an exile 'dumped in a more remote or nastier spot' (L3.83-4)? He fantasizes about turning his hand to farming (1.8.49ff.), recalls happier days on the Grand Tour (III. 10.2 Iff.), complains (again) of ill health (1. 10), of premature xlviii

INTRODUCTION

senility (1.4.19-20). We get a clear overall picture of Weltschmerz, of ebbing determination, of hopes rejected and options running out. If this is pure poetic invention it is done most convincingly. This sense of bleak finality is epitomized by 111.7, addressed generally to the poet's friends. His own hopelessness, he admits, is matched by their boredom: they've heard it all before. So, an end to these undignified pleas, these demands on his shy wife, the mistaken hopes he had of his friends: 'I have come to the Getic land: then let me die here,llet my misfortunes run out as they began!' (19-20). Why did he suppose he could ever win a reprieve, or even transfer to a less exacting place of exile (29-.J2)? It sounds, on the face of it, as though Ovid (at least qua public poetic persona) had finally given up the struggle: the despair certainly rings true. Yet - as so often - things are not quite what they seem, and the poem's conclusion (35-40) puts a new twist on these professions of resignation. The onus of responsibility is shifted (one had almost said mischievously) from Augustus to the circle of friends now being addressed: had they kept up their efforts, instead of turning their backs on Ovid out of boredom and indifference, then the clementia of the Princeps was ready to oblige them. Ovid's willingness to face death in exile, he now concludes, is strengthened by the fact that his predicament is due, not (as he had previously argued) to the unassuageable wrath of the Princeps, but to failure on the part of his friends to present an effective case on his behalf! It is possible that this volte-face was something more than a bitter joke. As we have seen, Ovid had already begun to sound out Germanicus and those aligned with him. In the last resort he was far from having given up. But even Germanicus, as things stood, could do no more than Paullus Fabius Maximus had done to help Ovid: that is, intervene on his behalf with the supreme authority. To paint that authority as implacable was, in the circumstances, bad diplomacy. Hence the shifting of responsibility to various unnamed friends, the reassertion of imperial clementia. What 111.7 really constitutes is a farewell to the old guard, to Cotta Maximus and the rest of Ovid's pro-Tiberian supporters. From now on any hope still sustaining Ovid behind his recurrent bouts of black and melancholic accidie was centred on these new potential friends at court. (However much allowance we make for xlix

INTRODUCTION

literary artifice in these poems, the pattern of mood-swings remains totally credible.) The mere existence of such a reseau, on which he could, over a long period -leisurely mail-services helped - exercise all his elaborate powers of rhetorical persuasion, was enough to keep his spirits, if not up, at least above permanent and total depression. Book IV of the Black Sea Letters shows us the last venture of this kind in action. It also reminds us of its limitations. Whatever the relationship, in any writer's work, between life and literature, the two inexorably intersect at the end. The last datable reference in this fmal collection is to the suffect consulship of Ovid's old friend Graecinus (?midsummer AD 16, IV.9.S). An allusion to the restoration of the temple of Janus (Fast. I.223-{j) suggests that Ovid may have survived till AD 18, though the restoration had been begun much earlier. StJerome (Euseb. Chron., ed. Schoene, p. 147) places the poet's death and burial at Tomis in the 199th Olympiad and Ann. Abr. 2033/4, i.e. AD 17/18, and that winter seems the likeliest date. The poems of Book IV, less tightly edited than their predecessors (and thus often regarded, in their present form, as a posthumous collection), range in date between AD 13 and 16. There may have been an interval - perhaps a last illness - during which Ovid wrote nothing. But with our hindsight it is impossible not to be constantly aware of the collection's terminal nature, and there is (whether it was, or was not, the last thing Ovid actually wrote) a triumphant finality about the closing poem (IV.16), with its proud, and vindicated, claim of literary immortality. The likelihood of Book IV being a posthumous round-up is increased both by its length (at 880 lines, divided between sixteen poems, it is by some way the most substantial collection in the exilic corpus) and the apparent lack of overall structuring (efforts to detect patterns anything like the balanced ring-composition evident in I-III have not been successful). The only hold-overs from earlier addressees are Brutus (IV.6) and Graecinus (IV.9), the latter, seemingly, on personal rather than political grounds. Ovid's wife gets no poems (for a possible explanation see above, p. xvii). New recipients, some public figures, some private, include several individuals (e.g. Severus (IV.2), Gallio (IV. II), Tuticanus (IV.I2» to whom Ovid apologizes, in some embarrassment, for not having

INTRODUCTION

written earlier. Sextus Pompeius, consul in AD 14 and a strong adherent of Germanicus, gets four separate epistles (IV.I, 4,5, IS), and Ovid clearly sees him as taking over the intercessionary role that had previously belonged to Fabius Maximus and Messalla Corvinus's two sons. Albinovanus Pedo (IV.IO), Carus (IV.I3) and Ovid's son-in-law Suillius (IV.8) certainly, Tuticanus (IV.I2 and 14) very probably, were also attached to Germanicus. The new line of approach is both clear and predictable: there was now no one else at court to whom Ovid could turn with any reasonable hope of success. The only known Tiberian, Graecinus apart, who figures in this final list is Junius Gallio (IV.n), and he is almost certainly included on the basis of personal friendship and shared literary interests. In some ways these private epistles are the most interesting. To Severus, an epic poet and former member of Messalla Corvinus's literary salon, Ovid describes the ennui that saps his writing: 'It's an arid shore I'm ploughing, with sterile share' (IV.2.16). The creative process, not least with no appreciative audience in view, has become tedious. It is here that we find his most famous aphorism on the condition ofliterary exile: 'Writing a poem you can read to no one/is like dancing in the dark' (33-4). Yet how else to fill the time? Drinking and dicing hold no attractions for him. Extramural gardening, given the conditions of Tomis, is dangerous. Poetry ('a frigid consolation') is all that remains (3946). It has been the guiding star of his life: this depressed description of it as a mere pis aller (not least when we consider the sustained brilliance of imagination and technique that Ovid shows, despite disclaimers, right to the end) fails to convince, and should not be taken seriously except as evidence for the depression itsel£ Some oddities give one pause. Ovid several times (IV.I.27-36, 5.39-40, 15.39-42) describes himself as Sextus Pompeius's slave, his possession, indeed his creation, citing as parallels, inter alia, the statues made by Pheidias. It turns out that Pompeius helped him during the overland section of his journey into exile (IV.5.33-8), which makes Ovid's prior neglect of him (IV. I. 11-22) in the exilic poems almost as surprising as his present determination to be regarded as a chattel or (even more improbably) an artistic (£uvre. What did he mean by this? Was the conceit merely excess of self-

Ii

INTRODUCTION

abasement to a prospective patron? If so, why did Ovid never employ it elsewhere? Its oddity has attracted less attention than it deserves. Did Ovid imagine, even subconsciously, that as a piece of literary luggage he could travel with the same freedom as his own poems - including the two (IV.4 and 5) he devoted to Pompeius's consulship? Now it is certainly true that IV.4 offers an unusually vivid exercise of Ovid's literary imagination. News of Pompei us's forthcoming inauguration reached him (he tells us) personified as Rumour, who obligingly passed on the information to him as he was strolling on the beach (13-18). As the poet fantasized this occasion 'the iniquitous/harshness of this place just fell away' (212). He 'seems to see' the attendant crowds (27); a moment later he does see (uideo, cf. below, p. 356) the oxen being sacrificed. But all too soon the illusion is shattered (43ff.): 'My bad luck that I won't be seen in that crowd, that my eyes won't/be able to feast on the sight!' What he can do, he goes on (45-6), is 'visualize a mental image of you' - which pictures Pompeius (all too plausibly) asking, in a casual aside amid more important matters, 'Poor man,/what's he up to these days?' (48--9). When Graecinus gets his consular poem (IV.9), Ovid again talks of 'the pleasure/that now I have to catch with my mind alone' (37-8). In IV.5 the poem is, as earlier, requested to act as surrogate and petitioner. Fantasy and reality have slipped apart again: the condition of exile is unchanged. Then what about the much-touted comforts of philosophy, Stoic philosophy in particular, which - in an age when exile for the upper classes (as opposed to a life sentence in the mines for a common-or-garden working man) was a commonplace - produced a whole series of stock platitudes for the alleviation of the well-todo depayse? It is interesting, but in the circumstances perhaps not surprising, that Ovid, well-read though he was, should have shown no interest whatsoever in the consolatory exilic literature popular from the Hellenistic period onward, and of which we have numerous specimens, mostly (but not exclusively) from after Ovid's death. Since the aim of this literature was to reconcile the exile to his lot, Ovid, whose agenda (except in brief moments of depression) never envisaged capitulation, is unlikely to have taken it seriously. Iii

INTRODUCTION

The likelihood is decreased still further by its bromidic nature. The tone is set by Teles (third century BC), a Cynic philosopher who wrote a treatise on exile (ed. Hense, 1909) preserved in epitome. In Teles' view, exile harms one neither physically. nor spiritually, nor does it bring disgrace: to leave one's country is no worse than walking out of one's house or off a ship. It is not hard to imagine Ovid's reaction to stuff of this sort. The same set of platitudes is still being exploited, with variations, by later writers such as Musonius Rufus (born c. AD 30: fr. ix, Hense), Plutarch (Moral. 599A-607F), Seneca (Dial. 12), or Favorinus (II€pl CPvy~" ed. Barigazzi 1966); they are conveniently collected by B. Hasler, Favorin uber die Verbannung (1935), pp. 29ff. (§4, 'Die Topoi und ihre Ausgestaltung'). The grandiose notion of being a citizen of the world (kosmopolites) is advanced as sufficient compensation for the loss of one's country: Ovid doubtless noted that Cicero, while advancing similar theoretical arguments (Tusc. Disp. 5.36.I05f[), showed himself at least as frantic as Ovid over his own immediate plight (cf. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero (1971), pp. 64-'72), indeed displaying, or at least laying claim to, several similar symptoms (weight loss, nervous prostration, etc.). The same was true later of Seneca (Dial. 12 = Consolo ad Helv. 5.6.2ff., cf. M. Griffin, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (1976), pp. 59ff.). Cicero, moreover - another fact that would not have been lost on Ovid - spent little more than a year in exile, and got no further than Macedonia, just as Seneca was relegated to Corsica, today a Club Med paradise. The total silence of Ovid speaks volumes as to his opinion of such easy don't-do-asI-do-do-as-I-say philosophical panaceas. It is noteworthy that Seneca, during his eight-year stretch overseas, begins to imitate Ovid (Griffin, p. 62): if anything it was Ovid who set the philosophers an example. If Ovid could only dream of a no-more-than-metaphorical return to Rome, he could also, after the autumn of AD 14. play with the (equally metaphorical) translation of Augustus to heaven, perhaps encouraging himself with the thought that this essay in politico-religious catasterism (the deification decree was ratified on 17 September) had nothing more implausible about it than did his own exilic fantasies - might, indeed, offer a chance to appease the liii

INTRODUCTION

new deity's heirs. He duly composed an encomiastic poem celebrating Augustus's apotheosis, and sent it to Brutus (IV.6.I7-18, 9.131-2). Prayers to the Princeps took on a new force and appropriateness when directed heavenwards rather than towards the Palatine (IV.9.I27ff.). In his pious zeal the poet even reports himself as having assumed the role of missionary, spreading the gospel message of Augustus's ascent to godhead - duly translated into 'Getic' for the occasion - among the heathen tribes of the Black Sea (IV.I3.17ff.), and praising Livia, Tiberius, Drusus and Germanicus as a kind of Holy Family on earth. Genuflection allies itself with rhetoric: both fail in the face of that stonily hostile indifference. There are attempts to deflect criticism. Ovid spends a sizeable portion of his epistle to Albinovanus Pedo (IV.I0.35ff.) proving that he is not a liar, that the Black Sea does freeze (cf. IV.9.8S-6: he was clearly touchy on this point). Though he is at pains to stress the honour in which the population of Tomis holds him (IV.9.97ff.), he also admits, to Tuticanus (IV.14.ISff.), that his attacks on Tomis (which he tries, unsuccessfully, to separate from animadversions on the local inhabitants) have caused much local resentment against him. 'Shall I never stop being injured/by my verse,' he exclaims, 'will I always be taking knocks from this/too tactless talent of mine?' (IV.14.I7-19). The answer, alas, is no to the first question, yes to the second. Even the closing poem (IV.I6), Ovid's proud autobiographical testament to his achievements 'when I was alive still' (4), forms an angry answer to some anonymous enemy, and its final six lines make an agonized appeal to Malice to 'sheathe your bloody claws', asking 'What pleasure do you get from stabbing this dead body?/There is no space in me now for another wound' (51-2). The bulk of the poem is taken up with a catalogue (5-46) of Roman poets, with whom Ovid compares himself. Whether the placement of this poetic valediction was Ovid's or the work of some posthumous editor, the sense it provides of a last ghostly admonition is both moving and effective. The close echoes in the mind with uncomfortable force. What is more, even in extremis Ovid brings off a really lethal literary joke, one that only time could - and did - validate. Of all the poets he lists (some, like Varius Rufus, highly rated in their day), not a single one,justifiably liv

INTRODUCTION

or not, has survived intact. We possess one poem by Grattius, and, for the others, at best, a handful of brief testimonia and random fragments, and more often nothing except an obscure name. Ovid's epitaph thus also becomes his triumphant vindication: as he says (45-6), he was 'fit to be read'. Two millennia later, his trendy contemporaries all forgotten, he is still read. Dying and in exile, he nevertheless contrived to have the last word.

Athens-New Orleans-Austin 198HZ

TEXTUAL VARIANTS

The texts used for making this translation are Georg Luck's Tristia (1967) - on which see the Foreword - and J. A. Richmond's Ex Ponto (1990). Below I list those occasions on which I have preferred different readings to theirs. Justification for these preferences will be found (in those instances where it seems necessary) at the appropriate page in the Notes. (a) Tristia

Book I 1.12 LIS

1.17 1.90

1. 124 2·54 2·55 2.101 3.2 3·52 3·83 3·99 3. 101 3. 102 4. 13 4.25 5·7 7.6 7·8 7·33 8.18 8·35 8.38

Luck sparsis sentiat illi aequoreis UIae solita [solida 1963] aliqua quod licet et quae festinas facta mali . . . sensum et uiuat ut cervicis ... equo uos saltem CUI refersque quae prima alloquii ... tuo aerios pedi

lvi

Green passis sentiet illic Icariis morae solida reliqua quamlibet in quod festines secta mon ... sensus ut Nasonem cervici ... equi uos parcite quem ferasque qua pnnu adloquiis ... mali Aeolios pede est

TEXTUAL VARIANTS

9.41 10.6 10.8 10·35 11.15

ego uenturum quamlibet uieta ab his per Atlantidos

Book II

Luck Green meo mihi per tertia praestantia tenetur reliqui nimium erudeliter crudelior omnibus quondam tandem dum respieis Urbem res respieis Urbis leeto falsus quaedam uitio quasdem uitiat multis quam saepe quam multis saepta Iunonia Iunonis illa ipsa qua quo sed honesta uoluntas sed, honesta uoluptas quae qui Metelle, tuo Metella suo denique nee uideo tot deque (nee inuideo) tot describentibus de scribentibus unum unus hoc hos tecta orta rite citatus irreprehensus sceptrum ... tyrannis scriptum ... eothurnis

6 53 63 77 86 175 211 277 281 291 302 305 357 418 43 8 495

501 528 542 553 Book III

1.18 1.53 1.63 2.23 3.21 4·6 4.41 4B·72

euenturum qualibet icta praeter Azanidos

Luck scribebat uereorque locum cepere quo sit igne arnico amabit

lvii

Green scribebar uenerorque locum seripsere quod Slm arce amicum amauit

TEXTUAL VARIANTS

9·34 10.11 10.12 10.65 11·49 11.55 11.61 11.62 12.2 12·40

Irae uelandaue facta ruina quo fertque feretque tegenda soror ... sui dum patet et has gentes tremente abducere praesens Cizigasque si sit Neptuni leuior tantiquis uisa Maeotist erit

Ira uiolentaue sollicitata qui fertue feretue legenda sui ... soror dumque uetant Hister ab his gemente abscondere praestans Scythicosque felix Neptunique minor adsuetis uersa meauit ero

Book IV 1.21 1.102 3·12 3.20 3.41 3·57 3·83 3·84 4·53 6·7 6.23 6.48 8.19 8.31 8·33 9·3

Luck nec Sinti rogos iacet uiuit per te probae facta est et quantaque in Augusto obtemperat saeua me ... mouent fmultas ... adeptust tempora prima omru sententia

Green nec iter nec focos labat

Book V 1.29 1.44 1.58

Luck et malo ... meo non

Green at loco ... mei num [+?]

5·31 5·47 7.28 8.2 8.12 8.36

lviii

UlUlS

periens proba functa es en tantaque in Augusto est obnititur saepe mala ... nocent nerius ... ademptis tempore primo ? ullo or uitae clementia

TEXTUAL VARIANTS

3·35 3.50

albida adponat labris

6·37 7. 23 7B.65 8·9 9·28 9·35 10.19 10·41 11.13 12.11 12.56 12.63 13·1 14.31

celantur uiuat non et moriatur sensum at dignas luctantem si non ... putarer auis insanum mersa licetinualido tomnia quae possintt possum et cupio rnittit tibi pretii ... petiti

Book I 1.75 2.64 3. 8 3-3 8 4·31 4·36 5.21- 2 5.37,40 6.12 6.13 7. 12 7·66 8.20

altam attollat [or irroret?] lacrimis celebrantur non uiuat et emoriatur mentem a dignis latrantem nisi me ... putares aues insulsum fracta liceat ualido omnia barbarici possum, ut cupio tibi litor.! pretium ... petitum

(b) Epistulae ex Ponto Richmond Green relinquet relinquent mutato munito confusae ? contusae ista iDa Sinistro sit Histro sacra densa parum,nisi parum? si [add! qfter Atho] et ... et at ... at attoniti ... mea attonito ... rnihi fortunam fortunae pugnet pulset causa a ... dati tcausa ... darit omitted audaces animos contuderat populi

lix

TEXTUAL VARIANTS

Book II 1.43 2·5 2·32 2·33

Richmond captiuos quod euentu qui rapitur ... [lacuna]

Green captiuis SI euentus qui rapitur spumante freto sua brac[c]hia tendens ad ... manus nurus neptesque arte ... qua, quae illuc ? habenda ignoscas

3·15 3·19 3·33 4. 16

[lacuna] ... [lacuna] nurum neptemque ante ... quam qua istuc blanda Ignosces sed nomen texactot recentis

4. 18

non

5.3 6 5. 67

cumulus tsublestatet gustata ... nobis suum lasso tpIanis ... potest uerear quo plano frena igna gentiue Pheraeae suis numeris olentis quamque

numen ex actu monentis [and exchange with line 18] nec [and exchange with line 16] stimulus enim nobis gestata est, ... uobis tuum lapso planus in ... potest uereor quod pro no lora ut mea signa genitorue Pheraeus tuis humeris olentia quique

Richmond habe.nt nisi siluis onus

Green habet siluis nisi opus

2·34 2·73 2.89 2·95 2.96 2.126

6.24 6·35 7.24 7·35 7·77 8.24 8.70 9·43 9·60 10.25 10.26

Book III 1.14 1.21 1.46

Ix

TEXTUAL VARIANTS I.II3 1.I26 1.143

OpUS est tulit Onlnta ...

I. 153 2.23 2·44 2.63 2. 109 3.9 1

sunt turbata signentque

4·4 4·64 4. 84 4. 89 6.51 8.6 8.14 9·4 9·47

[lacuna] sub nube per aera lasso tempus in uestras uenit suo tAeneidost uotorum poetae ilia suos loqui quam qUlS

tibi opus luit [curia cum fuerit patribus stipata uerendis] conturbata sileantque Pontus et Hister tuto super aequora lapso numen ? uenerit in uestras tuo Aeneadum motorum sodali arua suo queri quamuis

Book IV

Richmond

Green

1.25 4.3 1 4·33 6.15 7. 1 7·15 8·33 8.71

clementia ntueos ODllles deceptae undas tenditur facient

constantia uideo ores decepti oras tendisti faciant maUlS deeretis Moesas situs hie nee lapso te euncter sequar Passer reuoearet

9·44 9·77 9·93 12.II 12·37 14·4 14·19 14.20 16·33

malUS

seeretis Mysas

tsict hie et lasso me cunetor sequor Passerque rediret !xi

ABBREVIATION S

ACIO

Ael.

Aesch.

Atti del Convegno Internazionale Ovidiano, Sulmona, maggio 1959, Rome, 1959 Claudius Aelianus (2nd-3rd cent. AD), rhetorician and moralist NA De Natura Animalium

Aeschin.

Aeschylus, son of Euphorion (525/4-456 BC), Greek tragedian Ag. Agamemnon Choeph. Choephori Myrmid. Myrmidones Sept. Septem contra Thebas (Seven against Thebes) Aeschines (c. 397-C. 322 BC),Athenianorator

AJPh AndrePont.

American Journal of Philology J. M. Andre, Ovide: Pontiques, Paris, 1977

Andre Tr. Anth. Pal.

J. M. Andre, Ovide:

Apollod.

Apollodorus, Greek mythographer of ?Antonine period, author of Bibliotheca, compendium of myths Epit. Epitome

App.BC

Appianus of Alexandria (2nd cent. AD): Roman-naturalized Greek historian and procurator Augusti; the Bellum Civile = Books 13-17 of his Romaika Apollonius Rhodius, Hellenistic (3rd cent. BC) Greek epic poet and scholar

Ap.Rhod.

Tristes, Paris, 1968 Anthologia Palatina, the 'Greek Anthology', a late loth-cent.-AD collection of epigrams, based on earlier anthologies, e.g. that of Meleager ofGadara (fl. C.lOO BC.)

lxii

ABBREVIA nONS

CA

Apuleius Madaurensis (2nd cent. AD), African,.Roman writer and rhetorician: his Apologia is also known as Pro se de magia. Aratus of Soli (c. 3I 5-240 Be), Greek Hellenistic poet, author of a Stoicized star-guide in verse, the Phaenomena A. Aricescu, 'Le mur d'enceinte de Torni l'epoque d'Ovide', Ovidianum, pp. 85-90 Aristoteles (Aristotle) of Stagira (384-322 Be), Greek philosopher HA Historia Animalium Poetica Poet. Athenaeus ofNaucratis (fl. c. AD 200), author of discursive treatise on food (and literary dinner-table chat), the Deipnosophistae Augustus (63 Be-AD 14), first emperor of Rome, in his Res Gestae wrote a (carefully slanted) record of his achievements AulusGellius, (c. AD 13Q-C. AD 180), Roman writer, author of Noctes Atticae J. T. Bakker, Publ. Ovid. Nasonis Tristium Li V, Groningen, 1946 Jost Benedum, Studien zur Dichtkunst des spaten Ovids, Giessen, 1967 Bulletin oj the Institute oj Classical Studies oj the University oj London P. Burman, Publii Ovidii Nasonis Tristium Lib. IV Ex Ponto Lib. IV ... Tom . .. III. Pars II, Amsterdam, 1727 Classical Antiquity

Caes. BC

C. Julius Caesar (100-44 Be), Roman

Apu!.Apol.

Arat. Phaen.

Aricescu Arist.

Athen.

Aug. Res Gest.

Au!' Gell. NA Bakker Benedum BICS

Burman

a

general and Dictator: wrote the De Bello Civili to justify his part in the civil wars Callim.

Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 305-c. 240 Be), Alexandrian scholar-poet lxiii

ABBREVIATIONS

Epigr. H.

Epigrammata Hymni

Catull.

C. Valerius Catullus (?84-?54 elegiac and lyric poet

Cels.

A. Cornelius Celsus (1st cent. AD), Roman encyclopaedist

Cic.

M. Tullius Cicero (106-43 writer, orator and statesman

Alt. Brut. De Orat. Pam.

ND Phil. Rep. Tusc. (Disp.) CIL

BC),

BC),

Roman

Roman

Epistulae ad Atticum Brutus De Oratore Epistulae ad Pamiliares De Natura Deorum Philippicae De Republica Tusculanae Disputationes

Cj

Corpus Inscriptionum 1863Classical Journal

Claassen OPP

J.-M.

Claassen PEV

J.-M.

Coiakis

M. Colakis, 'Ovid as praeceptor arnoris in Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1', CJ 82 (1987), pp. 210- 1 5 Classical Quarterly

CQ

Latinarum, Berlin,

Claassen, 'Ovid's poetic Pontus', Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar, vol. vi (1990), pp. 65-94

Claassen, 'Poeta, Exsul, Vates: A stylistic and literary analysis of Ovid's Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto', D.Litt. dissertation, Univ. of Stellen bosch, 1986

Davisson DCE

M. T. Davisson, 'Duritia and creativity in exile: Epistulae ex Ponto 4.10', CA 1 (1982), pp.28-42

Davisson MPO

M. T. Davisson, 'Magna tibi irnposita est lxiv

ABBREVIA TIONS

Davisson SSO

nostris persona libellis: playwright and actor in Ovid's Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1', C] 79 (1984), pp. 324-39 'Sed sum quam medico notior ipse mihi: Ovid's use of some conventions in the exile epistles', CA 2 (1983), pp. 171-82

Della Corte GSO

T. J. De Jonge, Publ. Ovid. Nasonis Tristium liber IV, Diss. Groningen, 1951 F. Della Corte, 'II Geticus sermo di Ovidio', Scritti in onore di Giuliano Bonfante (Brescia, 1975), i, pp. 205-16

Della Corte OP

F. Della Corte, Ovidio: I Pontica, Genoa, 1974

Della Corte OT

F. Della Corte, Ovidio: I Tristia, Genoa, 1973

Della Corte, Fasce

F. Della Corte, S. Fasce, Ovidius Opere, II: Tristia, Ibis, Ex Ponto, Halieuticon liber, Turin, 1986 [not seen by me]

Dickinson

R. J. Dickinson, 'The Tristia: poetry in exile', in Ovid (ed. J. W. Binns, London, 1973), pp. 154-90

Diggle

J. Diggle, 'Notes on Ovid's Tristia, Books HI', CQ ~o (1980), pp. 401-19

Dio Casso

Cassius Dio Cocceianus of Nicaea (2nd-3rd cent. AD), Roman statesman and historian

Diog. Laert.

Diogenes Laertius (? early 3rd cent. AD), Greek philosophical writer and biographer

Dian. Hal.

Dionysius Halicamassensis (1St cent. Be-1st cent. AD), Rome-based Greek rhetorician and historian Ant. Rom. Antiquitates Romanae

Drucker

M. Drucker, Der verbannte Dichter und der Kaiser-Gott: Studien zu Ovids spiiten Elegien, Diss. Heidelberg, 1977

DS

Diodorus Siculus (.fl. 1St cent. Be), Greek historian

Dejonge

lxv

ABBREVIA TIONS

Ene. Brit. 11

Encyclopaedia

Britannica,

I

nh

ed.,

Cambridge/New York, 1910 Enn.

Q. Ennius (239-169 BC), of Rudiae Calabria, Roman epic poet Ann.

Eur.

Annales

Euripides (c. 485-(.406 BC), Athenian tragic playwright Androm. Bacch. Hel. HF Med. Orest. Phoen.

Euseb. Chron.

In

Andromache Bacchae Helena Hercules Furens Medea Orestes Phoenissae

Eusebi Chronicorum canonum quae supersunt,

ed. A. Schoene, 2 vols., 1866, 1875, repro Dublin/Zurich, 1967 Evans PC

H. B. Evans, Publica Carmina: Ovid's Books from Exile, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983

Evans WW

H. B. Evans, 'Winter and warfare in Ovid's Tomis (Tristia 3·10)', CJ 70 (1975), pp. 1-9

Fairweather

J.

Florus

Publius Annius Florus (late 1st to early 2nd cent. AD), Roman historian and poet

Focardi

G. Focardi, 'Difesa, preghiera, ironia nel II libro dei Tristia di Ovidio', SIFC 47 (1975), pp. 86-129

Frankel

H. Frankel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 18), Univ. of California Press, 1945

Fredericks (= Nagle, q.v.)

'Tristia 4.10: Poet's autobiography and poetic autobiography', TAPhA 106 (1976).

Fairweather, 'Ovid's autobiographical poem, Tristia 4.10', CQ 37 (1987), pp. 181-96

PP·139-54 lxvi

ABBREVIA TIONS

Froesch OEP

H. Froesch, 'Ovids Epistulae ex Ponto 1III als Gedichtsammlung', Diss. Bonn, 1968

Froesch ODE

H. Froesch, Ovid als Dichter des Exils, Bonn, 1976 L. Galasso, 'Modelli tragici e ricodificazione elegiaca. Appunti sulla poesia ovidiana dell'esilio', MD 18 (1987), pp. 83-99 Greece and Rome

G&R

Goold (see also Wheeler-Goold) GreenAA

G. P. Goold, 'The cause of Ovid's exile', Illinois Class. Stud. 8 (1983), pp. 94-107 Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age, Berkeley/London, rev. ed. 1993.

Green AM

Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 Be: A Historical Biography, Harmondsworth, 1974, repro Univ. of California Press, 1991 Peter Green, Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture, London/New York,1989 Peter Green, 'Carmen et Error. 'lJ'poc/>acns and alTl.a in the matter of Ovid's exile', CA 2 (1982), pp. 202-20 Peter Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems, Harmondsworth, 1982 Peter Green, The Shadow of the Parthenon: Studies in Ancient History and Literature, Univ. of California Press, 1972 J. B. Hall, P. Ovidi: Nasonis Tristia. Stuttgart & Leipzig (Teubner) 1995.

Green CB

Green CE

Green OEP Green SP

Hall Hdt.

Herodotus Halicarnassensis (c. 485-c.425 Greek historian

Helzle (I)

M. Helzle, 'Mr and Mrs Ovid', G&R 36 (1989), pp. 183-93 M. Helzle, 'Ovid's poetics of exile', Illinois Class. Stud. 13 (1988), pp. 73-83

Helzle (2)

lxvii

BC),

ABBREVIA TIONS

Helzle (3)

Herescu

Herrmann Hes.

M. Helzle, Publii Ovidii Nasonis Epistularum ex Ponto liber IV: A Commentary on Poems 1-7 and 16, Hildesheim, 1989 N. I. Herescu, 'Ovide, Ie Getique (Pont. IV.13.18: paene poeta Getes)', ACIO vol. i, pp. 55-80 [ef. Orpheus 7 (1960), pp. 1-26] K. Herrmann, De Ovidii Tristium libris V, Diss. Leipzig, 1924 Hesiodus (.ft. 8th-'7th cent. Be), early Greek didactic poet Theog. Theogonia WD Works & Days (Opera et Dies)

HH

Hymni Homerici

Hom.

Homerus (.ft. 8th cent. Be), Greek epic poet II. !lias Od. Odyssea

Hor.

Q. Horatius Flaccus (65-8 Be), Roman lyric poet and satirist AP Ars Poetica Carm. Saec. Carmen Saeculare Ep. Epistulae Odes (Carm.) Odes (Carmina) Saturae, Sermones Sat.

Housman CP

J. Diggle & F. R. D. Goodyear, The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman, vol. iii, 19151936, Cambridge, 1972

Hyg.

Hyginus (?2nd-3rd cent. mythographer Fab. Fabulae

Isocr.

Isocrates (436-338 Be), Athenian educationalist D. Iunius Iuuenalis (c. AD 55-(. 130), Roman satirist Sat. Saturae

Juv.

lxviii

AD),

Roman

ABBREVIA TIONS Kenney (I)

E.J. Kenney, 'The poetry of Ovid's exile', (1965), pp. 37-49 E. J. Kenney, 'Ovid', Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. ii, Cambridge, 1982,pp. 42Q-57,esp. pp. 44 I ff. PCPhS

Kenney (2)

II

Kenney (3)

E. J. Kenney, art. 'Ovid' in OCIY, pp. 763-5

Labate

M. Labate, 'Elegia triste e elegia lieta: un

caso di rinconversione letteraria', MD 19 (1987), PP: 9 1- 129 Laus. Pison.

Laus Pisonis, Latin panegyric (?Ist cent.

AD), author unknown A. G. Lee, 'An appreciation of Tristia III.8', G&R 18 (1949), pp. 113-20 D. Little~ 'Ovid's last poems: cry of pain from exile or literary frolic in Rome?', Prudentia 22 (1990), pp. 23-39 T. Livius Patavinus (?59 BC-?AD 17), Roman historian

Lee Little

Liv(y)

per.

Lozovan OB Lozovan RP

Lucian

periochae

E. Lozovan, 'Ovide et Ie bilingualisme', Ovidiana, pp. 396-403 E. Lozovan, 'Realites Pontiques et necessites litteraires chez Ovide', ACIO vol. ii, PP·355--'70 Lucianus Sophista (b. c. AD 120), of Samosata, Greek satirist Adv. Indoct. Tox.

Adversus Indoctum Toxaris

Luck Tr. i

G. Luck, P. Ovidius Naso, Tristia, vol. (Text), Heidelberg, 1967

Luck Tr.

G. Luck, P. Ovidius Naso, Tristia, vol. ii (Commentary), Heidelberg, 1977

Lucr.

jj

T. Lucretius Carus (?94-?55 BC), Roman didactic poet ~xix

ABBREVIA TIONS

Marchesi

C. Marchesi, 'n II libro ovidiano dei Tristia', Atene e Roma 15 (1912), pp. 159-67

Marg

W. Marg, 'Zur Behandlung des Augustus in den Tristien', ACIO vol. ii, pp. 345-54

Marshall

A. J. Marshall, 'Library resources and creative writing at Rome', Phoenix 30 (1976), PP·25 2-64

Mart.

M. Valerius Martialis (c. AD 4crc.104), Spanish-born Roman epigrammatist

Martini

E. Martini, 'Zu Ovids und Kallimachos' Ibis', Phil. Woch. 52 (1932), pp. 1101-8

MD

Materiali e discussioni per I'analisi dei testi classici (Pisa)

Meiser

R. Meiser, 'Ueber Ovids Begnadigungsgesuch (Trist. II)', SBAW (1907), pp. 171205

Mnemos.

Mnemosyne

Nagle

B. R. Nagle, The Poetics of Exile: Program

and Polemic in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto of Ovid (CoIl. Latomus, vol. 170), Brussels, 1980 Nemethy EP

G. Nemethy, Commentarius exegeticus ad Ovidii Epistulas ex Ponto, Budapest, 1915

Nemethy SC

G. Nemethy, Supplementum commentariorum

ad Ovidii Amores Tristia et Epistulas ex Ponto, Budapest, 1922 Nemethy Tr.

G. Nemethy, Commentarius exegeticus ad Ovidii Tristia, Budapest, 1913

Nep.

Cornelius Nepos (c. 99-c. 24 Be), Gallicborn Roman biographer

Them. OCIY

Oxford

Themistocles Classical

Oxford,1970

lxx

Dictionary,

2nd

ed.,

ABBREVIA nON'S

OLD

Ovid

Ovidiana Ovidianum

Owen Tr. I Owen Tr. II Owen Tr. III Paneg. Mess. Paus. PCPhS

Pers. Sat. Phaedr. Phil. Woch Pind.

Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P, G. W. Glare, Oxford, 1968-82 Publius Ovidius Naso (43 Be-AD 17/18), Roman poet and exile AA Ars Amatoria Am. Amores EP Epistulae ex Ponto Fast. Fasti Her. Heroides Met. Metamorphoses Rem. Remedia Amoris Tr. Tristia N. 1. Herescu, ed., Ovidiana: Recherches sur Ovide, Paris, 1958 N. Barbu, E. Dobroiu, M. Nasta, eds., Ovidianum: Acta conventus omnium gentium ovidianis studiisfovendis, Bucharest, 1976 S. G. Owen, Tristia Book I, 2nd rev. ed., Oxford, 1890 S. G. Owen, P. Ovidi Nasonis Tristium Uber Secundus, Oxford, 1924 S. G. Owen, Ovid: Tristia Book III, Oxford, 188 9 Panegyricus ad Messallam Pausanias Periegeta (?of Lydia), fl. AD ISO, Greek travel-writer Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Aulus Persius Flaccus (AD 34-62), Roman author of Saturae Phaedrus (c. 15 BC-C. AD 50), freedman of Augustus, fabulist Philologische W ochenschrift Pindarus Lyricus (518-438 BC), Boeotian lyric poet Isthm. Isthmian Odes Pyth. Pythian Odes

lxxi

ABBREVIA nONS

Plat.

Platner-Ashby

Prosopographr'a Imperii Romani Saeculi I, II, III, 1st ed., ed. E. Klebs, H. Dessau, Berlin, 1897-8 Prosopographia Imperii Romani Saeculi I, II, III, 2nd ed., ed. E. Groag, A. Stein, Berlin & Leipzig, 1933Plato, son of Ariston (C.429-347 BC), Athenian philosopher Apol. Apologia Crit. Crito Phaedr. Phaedrus Rep. Republic S. B. Platner & T. Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary oj Ancient Rome, Oxford, 1929

Plaut.

Titus Maccius Plautus (fl. 3rd cent. Roman cornie playwright Rud. Rudens

Plin. Ep.

C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus (c. AD 6112), Roman lawyer and administrator, Epistulae (his public and literary correspondence)

BC),

C. 1

Plin.HN

C. Plinius Secundus (AD 23/4-'79), uncle of the foregoing: administrator and scholar, published a Historia Naturalis in 37 books

Pluto

Mestrius(?) Plutarchus of Chaeronea in Boeotia (c. AD So-c. 120). Greek philosopher and biographer Aem. Paul. Aemilius Paullus Ant. Antonius Arist. Aristides Caes. Julius Caesar Cato Major Cat. Maj. Lucullus Lucull. Marcell. Marcellus Mar. Marius Mor(aQ. Moralia lxxii

ABBREVIA nONS

Pomp. Rom. Sullo Them. Timol.

Pompeius Romulus Sulla Themistocles Timoleon

Priap.

Priapea: collection of Augustan date: 'priapic' poems, one at least by Ovid

Prop.

Sextus Propertius (54/47 ?a. 2 BC), from Assisi in Umbria: Roman elegiac poet

PWK

Real-Encyclopiidie d. klassischen Altertumswissenschajt, ed. A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, W. Kroll, K. Ziegler, Stuttgart-Miinchen, 1893-1972 [S-B = Supplement-Band)

Res Gest.

See 'Aug. Res Gest.'

Richmond

J. A. Richmond, P.

Richmond STP

J.

SBAW

Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschajten, Phil.-Hist. Klasse

schol.

scholium or scholiast

Scholte

A. Scholte, Ex Ponto Uber I, herausgegeben und erkliirt (Diss. Groningen), Amersfoort

Schubert

W. Schubert, 'Zu Ovid, Trist. 3.9', Gymnasium 97 (1990), pp. 154-64

Sen. (I)

1. Annaeus Seneca [the Elder] (c. 55 BC-C. AD 40), Spanish-born Roman historian and rhetorician Controv. Controversiae Suas. Suasoriae

Sen. (2)

1. Annaeus Seneca [the Younger] (c.

Ovidi Nasonis Ex Ponto Libri Quattuor, Leipzig, 1990

A. Richmond, 'Some textual problems in Ovid's Ex Ponto', BICS Suppl. 5 (1988), pp.III-I7

1933

lxxiii

AD

ABBREVIA TlONS

1-65, son of the foregoing, Roman philosopher and tragedian Benef De Beneficiis Cons. ad Helv. Consolatio ad Helviam Dial. Dialogi Epigr. Epigrammata Ep. Epistulae Servo

M. Servius Honoratus (4th cent. author of a Commentary on Virgil

Shackleton Bailey (I)

D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 'Ovidiana', CQ 48 (1954), pp. 165-'70

Shackleton Bailey (2)

D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 'Notes on Ovid's poems from exile'. CQ 32 (1982). pp. 39098 Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica

SIFC

AD),

Soph.

Sophocles, son of Sophilos (496-406 Be), Athenian tragedian Aj. Ajax OT Oedipus Tyrannus Trach. Trachiniae

Staffhorst

U. Staffhorst, Publius Ovidius Naso: Epistulae ex Ponto III, 1-3 (Kommentar), Diss. Wiirzburg, 1965

Strabo

Strabo of Amaseia (64/3 Be-AD 25?), Stoic historian and geographer

Stud. Ovid.

F. Arnaldi & others, Studi Ovidiani, Rome, 1959

Suda

Title of Greek encyclopedic lexicon (c. AD 1000): formerly supposed to have been written by 'Suidas'.

Suet.

C. Suetonius Tranquillus (a. AD 69-'. AD 130), Roman imperial administrator and biographer Calig. Caligula De [Illustr.] De [Illustribus]

lxxiv

ABBREVIA TIONS

Gramm. Div. Aug. Div. Jul. Div. Claud. Tib. Vitello

Grammaticis Divus Augustus Divus Julius Divus Claudius Tiberius Vitellius

SymeHO

R. Syme, History in Ovid, Oxford 1978

Tac.

Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 56-c. 120), Roman historian Ann. Annales Historiae Hist.

TAPhA

Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association

Tibull.

Albius Tibullus (b. C. 50 Be), Roman elegiac poet Valerius Maximus (fl. 1St cent. AD): Roman historian and rhetorician

Val. Max. VeIl. Pat.

Virgo

Velleius Paterculus (c. 19 BC-AD 30/35): Roman soldier and author of Historiae Romanae P. Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC), Roman pastoral and epic poet Aeneid Aen. Eel. Eelogues Georgics Georg. (Vit. Donat.) Vita Donati (the Life of Virgil by Aelius Donatus)

Vulpe

R. Vulpe, 'Ovidio nella citta dell' esilio', Stud. Ovid., pp. 41-62

Watt

W. S. Watt, 'Notes on Ovid's poems from exile', Illinois Classical Studies 13 (1988), pp. 85-93 A. L. Wheeler, 'Topics from the life of Ovid', AJPh 46 (1925), pp. 1-28

Wheeler, 'Topics'

lxxv

ABBREVIA TIONS

Wheeler-Goold

A. L. Wheeler, Tristia, Ex Ponto (London, 1924): 2nd ed., rev. G. P. Goold, London/ Cambridge, 1988

Wiedemann

T. Wiedemann, 'The political background to Ovid's Tristia II', CQ 25 (1975), pp. 264-'7 1

Wilkinson Witt

L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled, Cambridge, 19S5 R. E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World, London/Ithaca, NY, 1971

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Note: The following bibliography does not include items already listed under "Abbreviations," nor does it attempt a full survey; it merely aims to present the reader with a short list of useful recent work - primarily, but not exclusively, in English - on the exilic poems and Ovid in relation to them. Argenio, R. 'Retorica e mitologia nelle poesie ovidiane dell'esilio,' Pons Perennis: Saggi critici di jilogia classica raccolti in onore di Vittorio d'Agostino. Turin 1971,51-79. Barchiesi, A. The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse. Berkeley 1997. Barsby, ]. A. 'Ovid' in Greece & Rome: New Surveys in the Classics no. 12, Oxford 1978. Batty, R. M. 'On Getic and Sarmatian shores: Ovid's account of the Danube lands,' Historia 43 (1994) 88-II1. Bingham, S.]. 'Life on an island: a brief study of places of exile in the first century A.D.' Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History I I (2003) 376-400. Birnbaum, R. 'Fatum and Fortuna in Ovid's exile poetry,' in Commentationes ... in memoriam B. Katz, eds. M. Rozelaar, B. Shimron. Tel Aviv 1970, 18-25. Block, E. 'Poetics in exile: an analysis of Epistulae ex Ponto 3.9,' CA I (1982) 18-42.

Bouynot, Y. 'Ovide, Tristes IIb: Etude rhythmique et stylistique,' Acta Philologica 3 (1964) 3!r51. Boyle, A.]. Ovid and the Monuments:A Poet's Rome. Bendigo 2003. - - - . 'Postscripts from the edge: exilic Fasti and imperialized Rome,' Ramus 26 (1997) 7-28. Bradford, G. 'Ovid among the Goths,' Yale Review 4 (191 5) 544-59. Broege, V. 'Ovid's autobiographical use of mythology in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto,' Classical News & Views 16 (1972) 37-4 2 . lxxvii

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bretzigheimer, G. 'Exul ludens: zur Rolle von relegans und relegatus in Ovids Tristien,' Gymnasium 98 (1991) 39-76. Butrica, ]. L. 'Ovid Ex Pont. 1.2 and I1L8 (notes on two elegies to Paul. Fab. Max.): Museum Criticum 32-35 (1997-2000) 167-179. Casali, S. 'Quaerenti plura legendum: on the necessity of "reading more" in Ovid's exile poetry,' Ramus 26 (1997) 80-112. Ciccarelli, I. '''Citra necem tua constitit ira": Ie ambigue manifestazioni della "clementia" di Augusto verso Ovidio,' Aufidus 15 (2001) 23-32.

- - - . 'Ovidio, Tristia 4.10 e i topoi della sphragis,' Aufidus II (1997) 61--92.

Citroni Marchetti, S. '11 potere e la giustizia. Presenza della tragedia greca nelle elegie ovidiane dell'esilio,' MD 43 (1999) 1 II-I 56. Claassen, ].-M. Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius. Madison, Wisconsin, 1999. - - - . 'Exile, death and immortality: voices from the grave: Latomus 55 (1996) 571-590. - - - . 'Exulludens: Ovid's exilic word games,' Classical Bulletin 75 (1999) 23-35·

- - - . 'Ovid's exilic vocabulary,' Akroterion 43 (1998) 67--98. - - - . 'Ovid's poems from exile: the creation of a myth and the triumph of poetry,' Antike und Abendland 34 (1988) 158-169. - - - . 'Ovid's wandering identity: personification and depersonalization in the exilic poems,' Latomus 49 (1990) 102-116. - - - . 'Structure, chronology, tone and undertone: an examination of tonal variation in Ovid's exilic poetry,' Akroterion 37 (1992) 98- 11 3.

- - - . 'The singular myth: Ovid's use of myth in the exilic poetry,' Hermathena 170 (2001) 11-64. - - - . 'The vocabulary of exile in Ovid's Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto,' Glotta 75 (1999) 134-171. - - - . 'Une analyse stylistique et litteraire d'Ovide (Epistulae ex Ponto 3.3): praeceptor amoris ou praeceptor Amoris?' Les Etudes Classiques 59 (1991) 27-41. Cucchiarelli, A. 'La nave e l'esilio (allegorie dell'ultimo Ovidio),' MD 38 (1997) 215-224. Cutolo, P. Politica, poetica, poesia nel II libro dei Tristia. Catania 1995 [not seen]. lxxviii

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, P.]. , "Since my part has been well played": conflicting evaluations of Augustus,' Ramus 28 (1999) I-I 5. - - - . 'Instructing the emperor: Ovid, Tr. 2,' Latomus 58 (1999) 799-809·

- - - . 'The colonial subject in Ovid's exile poetry,' A]Ph

123

(2002) 257-273. Davisson, M. T. 'Tristia 5. 13 and Ovid's use of epistolary form and content,' C] 80 (1985) 238-246. Debloois, N. A. 'Ovid's Remedia Exilii,' Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 10 (2000) 232-246.

Di Martino, M. G. I. 'Ovidio e la poesia,' Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale 23 (1981) 63-108. Ehlers, w.-W. 'Poet und Exil: zum Verstandnis der Exildichtung Ovids,' Antike und Abendland 34 (1988) 144-157. Ehwald, R., Levy E (eds.) Tristia, Ibis, Epistulae ex Ponto. Leipzig: Teubner, 1992. Fantham, E. 'Ovidius in Tauris: Ovid Tr. 4.4 and Ex P. 3.2,' in The Two TMJrlds oj the Poet, eds. R. M. Wilhelm, H. Jones. Detroit 1992, 268-280.

Fishwick, D. 'Ovid and Divus Augustus,' Classical Philology 86 (1991) 36-41.

Fitton Brown, A. D. 'The unreality of Ovid's Tomitan exile,' Liverpool Classical Monthly 10 (1985) 18-22. See also "Litde" in the Abbreviations. Forbis, E. P. 'Voice and voicelessness in Ovid's exile poetry,' Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 8 (2000) 245-267. Gahan,].]. 'Ovid: the poet in winter,' CJ 73 (1978) 198-202. Galasso, L. Epistularum ex Ponto Liber II. Firenze 1995. Geyssen,]. 'Sending a book to the Palatine: Martial 1.70 and Ovid,' Mnemosyne 52 (1999) 7 18-'738. Gibson, B. 'Ovid on reading: reading Ovid. Reception in Ovid Tristia n,']RS 89 (1999) 19-37. Gordon, c.]. Poetry of Malediction: A Commentary on the Ibis of Ovid. Diss. McMaster Univ. 1993 [not seen]. Grasmiick, E. L. Exilium. Untersuchungen zur Verbannung in der Antike. Paderborn 1978. Griffin, A. H. E 'Ovid's Tristia 1.2 and the tradition of literary sea storms,' Pegasus 28 (1985) 28-34.

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Griffin, ]. 'Genre and real life in Latin poetry,' Journal of Roman Studies 71 (1981) 39-49. Habinek, T. N. 'Pannonia domanda est: the construction of the Imperial subject through Ovid's poetry from exile,' in The Politics if LAtin Literature: Writing, Identity and Empire in Ancient Rome. Princeton 1998, 151-169. Hall,]. B. 'Notes on various passages in Ovid's Tristia,' Euphrosyne 16 (1988) 125-128 .

- - - . 'Observations on the text of Ovid's Letters Ex Ponto,' BICS Suppl. 51 (1988) 39-43. - - - . 'Problems in Ovid's Tristia,' PCPhS Suppl. 15 (1989) 20-38. - - - . 'More notes on Ovid's Tristia,' Euphrosyne 18 (1990) 85-98. - - - . 'Ovid Tr. 2.77-80 and 5.11.25-28,' Liverpool Classical Monthly 16.3 (1991) 37-38. - - - . 'Seven notes on Ovid's Tristia,' Liverpool Classical Monthly 16.6 (1991) 83-87.

- - - . 'Additional notes on Ovid's Tristia,' Euphrosyne 20 (1992) 13 1-148.

Harzer, E '''Iste ego sum?": Ovids poetische Briefschrift zwischen Dichtung und Wahrheit,' Poetica 29 (1997) 48--'74. Helzle. Ovids Epistulae ex Ponto: Buch I-II Kommentar. Heidelberg 2003·

Hendry, M. 'Ovid Ex Ponto III.8.6,' Museum Criticum 30/31 (1995/6) 249-252.

Heyworth, S.]. 'Notes on Ovid's Tristia,' PCPhS 41 (1995) 138-152. Hinds, S. 'Booking the return trip: Ovid and Tristia I,' PCPhS 21 I (n.s. 31) (1985) 13-32. - - - . 'First among women: Ovid Tr. 1.6 and the traditions of "exemplary" catalogue,' PCPhS Suppl. 22 (1999) 123-142. - - - . 'Generalizing about Ovid,' Ramus 16 (1987) 4-31. HolIeman,A.W.]. 'Ovid and politics,' Historia 20 (1971) 458-466. Holzberg, N. 'Playing with his life: Ovid's "autobiographical" references,' LAmpas 30 (1997) 4-19. - - - . 'Exile as an elegiac world out of joint: the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto,' in Ovid: The Poet and His VVtlrk, trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca, New York 2002, 176-198. Huskey, S. 'Ovid and the fall of Troy in Tristia 1.3,' Vergilius 48 (2002) 88-104.

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Johnson, P.]. 'Ovid's Livia in exile,' Classical World 90 (1996/7) 403-420

Johnson, WA. 'The desolation of the Fasti,' C] 74 (1978) 7-18. Kershaw, A. 'Exclamatory particles in the Tristia, ' in Schubert (1999) 2·775-785·

Ketteman, R. 'Ovids Verbannungsort - ein Locus Horribilis?' in Schubert (1999) 715--'735. King, R. 'Ritual and autobiography: the cult of reading in Ovid's Tristia,' Helios 25 (1998) 99-II9. Klodt, C. 'Verkehrte Welt: Ovid Trist. 1.4,' Philologus I40 (1996) 257-276.

Kroener, H. 0. 'Aufbau und Ziel der Elegie Ovids Trist. 1.2: Emerita 38 (1970) 163-197.

Laigneau, S. 'Le poete face aux barbares: l'utilisation rhetorique du theme du barbare dans les oeuvres d'exil d'Ovide: Revue des Etudes latines 80 (2000) I I 5-128. Lechi, F. 'La palinodia del poeta elegiaco: i carmi ovidiani dell'esilio,' Atene e Roma 23 (1978) 163-197. Lenz, F. W P Ovidii Nasonis Epistulae ex Ponto. Turin 1939. Lenz, L. 'Eis und Exil (zu Tr. m.IO),' in Antike Texte in Forschung und Schule, ed. C. von Neumeister, Frankfurt a.M. 1993, 147-166. - - - . 'Tibull in den Tristien,' Gymnasium I04 (1997) 301-317. Liberman, G. 'Positions et propositions sur Ie texte des Tristes d'Ovide,' Revue de Philologie 70 (1996) 71-88. Luck, G. 'Notes on the language and text of Ovid's Tristia,' Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65 (1961) 243-261. Luisi, A., Berrino N. F. Culpa Silenda: I.e Elegie dell'Error Ovidiano. Bari 2002. Masselli, G. M. rancore dell'esule: Ovidio, l'Ibis e i modi di un' invettiva. Bari 2002 [not seen]. Methy, N. 'Les Tristes ou la metamorphose d'Ovide,' Euphrosyne 21

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(1993) 217-226.

Millar, F. 'Ovid and the Domus Augusta: Rome seen from Tomoi,' ]RS 83 (1993) 1-17. Miller,].F. 'Ovid on the Augustan Palatine (Tristia 3.1),' in Vertis in Usum: Studies in Honor of Edward Courtney, eds.]. F. Miller, C. Damon, K. S. Myers. Munich 2002, 129-139. Nageotte, E. Ovide: sa vie, se~ oeuvres. Paris 1872.

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Newlands, C.E. 'The role of the book in Tristia 3.1,' Ramus 26 (1997) 57-'79·

Nicolai, W 'Phantasie und Wirklichkeit bei Ovid,' Antike und Abendland 19 (1973) 107-116. Oliensis, E. 'Return to sender: the rhetoric of nomina in Ovid's Tristia,' Ramus 26 (1997) 172-193. Owen, S. G. 'Ovid's use of the simile,' CR 45 (193 I) 97-ro6. Pippidi, D. M. 'Tomis, cite geto-grecque a l' epoque d'Ovide?' Athenaeum 55 (1977) 250-256. Posch, S. P Ovidius Naso, Tristia I, Interpretationen, I: Die Elegien 1-4 [ = Commentat. Aenipont. xxviii]. Innsbruck 1983. Poulle, B. 'Le regard porte par Ovide sur les Getes,' in Le Regard des Anciens sur l'Etranger. Dijon 1988, 103-II3. Ramsby, T. R. Barbarians in the Early Empire: Representations of Otherness in Ovid. Diss. Indiana Univ. 2001 [not seen]. Richmond,]. 'The latter days of a love poet: Ovid in exile,' Classics Ireland 2 (1995) 97-120. Ripert, E. Ovide, poete de l'amour, des dieux et de l'exil. Paris 1921. Ritchie,A.L. 'Notes on Ovid's Tristia,' CQ 45 (1995) 512-516. Rosati, G. 'Laddio dell esule morituro (Trist. 1.3): Ovidio come Protesilao,' in Schubert (1999) 2.787-'796. Rosenmeyer, P 'Ovid's Heroides and Tristia: Voices from exile,' Ramus 26 (1997) 29-56.

Rudd, N. Lines oj Enquiry. Cambridge 1976, 1-31. Schmitzer, U. 'Neue Forschungen zu Ovid,' Gymnasium 109 (2002) 143-166.

Schonbeck, H.-P' 'Augustus als pater patriae und pater jamilias im zweiten Tris(ienbuch des Ovid,' Hermes 126 (1998) 454-465. Schubert, W, (ed.) Ovid, T{trk und Wirkung: Festgabe for Michael von Albrecht zum 65 Geburtstag. 2 vols. Frankfurt a.M. 1999. Schwind,]. 'Noten zum Text von Ovids Tristien,' Emerita 68 (2000) 279-289.

Scott, K. 'Emperor worship in Ovid,' TAPhA 61 (1930) 43-69. Seidel, M. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven 1986. Shaw, D. B. The Power of Assumptions and the Power of Poetry: a Reading of Ovid's Tristia IV. Diss. UC Berkeley 1994 [not seen]. Simpson,]. (ed.) The Oxjord Book of Exile. Oxford 1995.

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Stroh, W. 'Trostende Musen. Zur literarhistorischen Stellung end Bedeutung von Ovids Exilgedichten,' Aufsteig und Niedergang der romischen f#lt ii, 31.4 (1981) 2638-2684. Thomsen, M. H. Detachment and Manipulation in the Exile Poems of Ovid. Diss. UC Berkeley 1979. Tola, E. 'El imaginario de las lagrimas y del cuerpo: Tristia y Epistulae ex Ponto 0 la ultima metamorfosis de Ovidio,' Argos 24 (2000) 157-18].

- - - . 'A metafora de la nave en Tristia y Epistulae ex Ponto, 0 La identidad fluctuante en la escritura ovidiana del exilio,' CFC (L) 21 (2000) 45-55· Verdiere, R. Le secret du voltjgeur d'amour, au, Le mystere de La relegation d'Ovide. Brussels 1992. Viarre, S. 'La passion d'Ovide pour la poesie dans les poemes de l'exil,' in Schubert (1999) 701-'713. - - - . 'Ovide, Tristes II: l'hhitage greco-latin,' LAtomus 59 (2000) 552-563.

Videau-Delibes,A. Les Tristes d'Ovide et l'elegie romaine: une poetique de la rupture. Paris 1991. Walker, A. D. 'Introduction' [to a special Ovidian issue], Ramus 26 (1997) 1-6; 'Oedipal narratives and the exilic Ovid,' ibid. 194-204.

Watt, W. S. 'Notes on Ovid,' Classica et Mediaevalia 50 (1999) 167-178.

Wilkins, E. G. 'A classification of the siIniles of Ovid,' Classical World 25 (1932) 73-'78, 81-86.

Williams, G. Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Republic. Berkeley 1978, 52-IOI. Williams, G. D. 'Conversing with the sunset: a Callimachean echo in Ovid's exile poetry,' CQ 41 (1991) 16fj-177. - - - . 'Representations of the book roll in Latin poetry: Ovid Tr. 1.1.3-14 and related texts,' Mnemosyne 445 (1992) 178-189. - - - . Banished JIOices: Readings in Ovid's Exile Poetry. Cambridge 1994·

- - - . The Curse of Exile: A study of Ovid's Ibis. Cambridge 1996. - - - . 'Ovid's exile poetry: Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Ibis,' in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. P. Hardie. Cambridge 2002,233-245.

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- - - . 'Ovid's exilic poetry: worlds apart: in Brill's Companion to Ovid, ed. B. W Boyd. Leiden 2002. Willige, W 'Ovidius relegatus: Der altersprachliche Unterricht 12 (1969) 5 1-'7 2 .

Willige, W, Holzberg, N. Publius Ovidius Naso: Briife aus der Verbannung. Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto. Zurich 1995.

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BOOKI I

Litde book - no, I don't begrudge it you - you're off to the City without me, going where your only begetter is banned! On your way, then - but penny-plain, as befits an exile's sad offering, and my present life. For you no purple slip-case (that's a colour goes ill with grief), no tide-line picked out in vermilion, no cedar-oiled backing, no white bosses to set off those black edges: leave luckier books to be dressed with such trimmings: never forget my sad estate. No smoothing off your ends with friable pumice - appear for inspection brisdy, unkempt. And don't be embarrassed by blots. Anyone who sees them will sense they were due to my tears. Go, book, and bring to the places I loved my greeting let me reach them with what 'feet' I may! And if, in the throng, there's one by whom I'm not forgotten, who should chance to ask how I am, tell him I live (not 'he's well'!), but emphasize I only survive by courtesy of a god. For the rest, keep silent. If people demand more details take care not to blab out any state secrets: a reader, once reminded, will remember the charges against me, I'll be condemned in public, by popular vote. Though such accusations may wound you, make no defense. A good (for nothing) case stands beyond any advocacy. Find one who sighs at my exile, who can't read those poems dry-eyed, and who prays (but in silence, lest the malicious hear him) that Caesar's wrath may abate, my sentence be lightened. Anyone gets my prayers for happiness, who prays the gods to bestow 3

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a benison on the unhappy. May his hopes be fulfilled, may ebbing Imperial anger give me the chance to die on my native soil! Yet, book, though you follow all my instructions, you may still be dismissed as falling short of my genius. Any judge must unravel not the act alone, but also its context - if context is what's stressed, then you're in the clear. But poems come spun from serenity; my heart is clouded with sudden troubles. Poems demand for the writer leisure and solitude: I'm tossed by sea arid wind, savaged by winter. Terror chokes off creation. My hapless throat cringes every moment in fear of a sword's edge slicing through it. Your fair-minded critic will be amazed that I achieve even this much, will peruse my work with indulgence. Put even Homer amid dangers like mine, his genius would fail when faced with such troubles. Lastly, remember to go unbothered by public opinion: if you leave a reader cold don't worry - I'm not favoured enough by Fortune for you to keep tally on your praise! While I walked safe still, I yearned for recognition, was on fire to make myself a name; but now, let it suffice me not to detest the poems, the pursuit that undid me: it was my own wit brought me to exile. So go in my stead, you have licence, be my eyes in Rome (dear God, how I wish I could be my book!) - but don't assume just because you've reached the Big City from abroad you'll be incognito. You may lack a title: no matter, your style will still betray you; dissimulate all you like, it's clear you're mine. Slip in unnoticed, then: I wouldn't want my poems to do you harm. They're not so popular as they were. If you meet someone who refuses to read you because you're mine, who thrusts you away, 'Look at the title,' tell him, 'I'm not Love's Preceptor; that work has already paid 4

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the penalty it deserved.' Perhaps you thought I'd send you up the Palatine, bid you climb to Caesar's home? Too august. The site - and its incumbent gods - must excuse me, but the bolt that struck my head came from that citadel. The Beings up there are forgiving (Shall I ever forget it?), but I still fear the gods who did me harm. A dove, once raked, hawk, by your talons takes fright at the faintest whirr of wings. A ewe lamb that's been dragged from the fangs of a hungry wolf won't dare to stray far from the fold. Had Phaethon lived, he'd have steered clear of those horses he once was crazy about, kept out of the sky. What scares me is Jove's weaponry, I've been its target: whenever there's thunder I'm sure the lightning's for me. Any Greek who's avoided shipwreck off the rocks of Euboea steers clear of those waters thereafter; my small skiff, once beam-ended by a fierce hurricane, shudders at sailing back into the eye of the storm. So be watchful, unassuming: seek no readers beyond the common sort. Look at Icarus: flew too high with that rickety plumage, gave his name to the !carian Sea. Should you row, or hoist sail to the breeze? It's hard, at this distance, to decide: you must improvise as occasion dictates. Catch him when he's at leisure, when his mood's all mellow, when his temper has lost its edge; fmd someone to murmur a few words of introduction and present you (hesitant still, still scared to appro~ch him): then make your bid. On a good morning and with better luck than your master's, you might just get in there and ease my suffering. None but the person who himself inflicted my wounds can, like Achilles, heal them. Only take care your helpful efforts don't hurt me instead - in my heart hope runs well behind fear - or rewake that quiescent fury, make you an extra occasion of punishment. When you've won admission 5

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to my inner sanctum, and reached your proper domain, the book-bins, there you'll find your brethren, all in order, all worked through and through with the same vigilant care. Most of these will display their titles openly, have a label for all to read; but three you'll find skulking in an obscure corner; even so, they teach, something everyone knows, how to go about loving. Avoid them, or, if you have the courage, berate them as parricides! At least if you still feel respect for your father, don't treat anyone of this trio (though it teach you the way itself) with love. There are also fifteen books of Metamorphoses, worksheets lately saved from my exequies: To them I bid you say that the new face of my fortunes may now be reckoned one more among their bodily changes: by sudden transformation what was joyful once is made fit matter for tears. I meant (if you're curious) to give you still further instructions, but I fear I've been holding you up besides, little book, if you took all my afterthoughts with you your bearer would find you a heavy load. It's a long trek: make haste. Meanwhile my habitation remains the world's end, a land from my land remote.

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'You gods of sea and sky' - what's left me now but prayer? 'Don't break up our storm-tossed ship: don't, I beseech you, endorse great Caesar's fury!' Often when one god's hostile another will bring help: Hephaestus stood against Troy, on Troy's behalf Apollo; Venus was pro-Trojan, Athena pro-Greek, Juno hated Aeneas, had more sympathy for Turnus Yet because of Venus' power Aeneas stayed safe. Time and again Poseidon made savage assaults on prudent Odysseus; time and again 6

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Athena deflected her uncle's wrath. Though I lack such heroic stature, who says I can't get heavenly aid when a god's angry with me? But my words are all wasted, spindrift stings my lips as I speak, the waves tower up, these fearful storm-winds scatter my message, stop my prayers reaching the gods to whom they're addressed, and (to cause me double trouble) are driving both sails and entreaties heaven knows where. Ah misery! what great mountains of heaving water up, up, about (you'd think) to touch the summit stars: ah, what yawning liquid valleys down, down, about (you'd think) to plumb the black abyss. Look where I may, there's only sky and water, here swollen waves, there menacing clouds: between, howl and vast ground-bass of winds: the sea-swell cannot decide which master to obey, for now from the red east the tempest gathers momentum, now veers round from the twilit west, now blasts with chill fury from the ice-dry Pole Star, now from the south flings its cold front into the fray. The steersman's at a loss, can't work out when to close-haul her, when to run with the wind. His expertise is foxed by such four-way troubles. We're surely done for, no hope of safety. As I speak, a wave drenches my face. The sea will overwhelm my spirit, I'll gag down the killing water, all my prayers frustrated. My loyal wife grieves only for my exilethe one misfortune of mine she knows and laments. She has no idea I'm being tossed around the ocean, no idea that I'm wind-whipped, at death's door. What good luck that I didn't allow her to board ship with me that would have meant (poor me!) enduring a double death. As it is, though I perish, her freedom from danger guarantees my demi-survival. Ah, see that swift lightning flicker amid the clouds, hear the crash shatter the heavens! Those seas now pounding at our timbers slam home like artillery-stones in a city wall. 7

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Here surges a huge wave, overtopping all waves before it, the proverbial tenth. It's not death as such that I fear, but this wretched way of dying only spare me shipwreck, and death will come as a blessing. Whether you're caught by cold steel or natural causes, it's something, when dying, to lie on solid ground, to bequeath your remains to your kinsfolk, in expectation of a proper tomb, not to be fishes' food. Even suppose I deserve such an end, I'm not the only passenger aboard: why should my punishment drag down the innocent? 'You gods in heaven, you sea-green gods of the deep (I implore both groups), stop your threats, let me lug to its appointed destination this life that Caesar's most merciful anger spared! If you want me to pay the penalty I deserve, remember my judge himself has rated my fault as short of a capital sentence: if Caesar had wished me across the Stygian lake, he could have dispatched me without your aid. He owns no invidious quantity of my life-blood: what he gave he can withdraw again at will. But you, whom surely - I think - no crime of mine has injured, rest content, I beseech you, with my present woes! Yet even so, mpposing you're all agreed to save my wretched life, how can the me that's dead achieve salvation? Give me calm seas, a following wind - though you spare me, I'm an exile still. It's not with goods to trade, and in avid pursuit of unbounded wealth that I plough the vasty deep; nor am I now, as once, a student bound for Athens or the cities of Asia, sites I saw long ago, or travelling to far-famed Alexandria to sample the fleshpots of wanton Nile; The reason I'm begging a wind is - oh, who'd believe it?to sail for Sarmatia: that's the land I seek! I'm forced to coast up the sinister rive gauche of Pontus, and still I complain that my voyage from home is so slow; 8

TRISTIA: BOOK I

To see the men ofTomis in their nowhere backwoods I actually pray for a shorter route! If you love me, restrain these monstrous billows, use your powers to save our ship - but if I've incurred your hatred, then speed me to my landfall: part of my punishment is in its chosen place. Blow, winds! Belly my canvas! Here I have no business why do my sails strive back towards Italy's shore? Such was not Caesar's purpose: why hold back one who's banished? Time for the Pontic shore to glimpse my face. Such his command. I deserved it. Besides, it's wrong, it's impious to defend any case he's condemned. Yet if you gods are never deceived by mortal actions you must know my fault was no crime; so if you do know, if I was misled by my own error, if my mind was not criminal, just inept, if (though in minor matters!) I supported his house, accepted Augustan public fiat, spoke out in praise of the Happy Age with him as Leader, offered pious incense for Caesar, for all the Caesars - then if such was my record, gods, then grant me deliverance; if not, maya mighty wave crash down and overwhelm me!' Am I wrong? Aren't those heavy storm-clouds beginning to clear? And isn't the sea's wrath subsiding? 'No accident: I invoked you on oath: you cannot be deceived - it's you who are bringing me this aid!'

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3 Nagging reminders: the black ghost-melancholy vision of my final night in Rome, the night I abandoned so much I dearly treasured to think of it, even now, starts tears. That day was near dawning on which, by Caesar's fiat, I must leave the frontiers ofItaly behind. I'd lacked time - and inclination - to get things ready, long procrastination had numbed my will: 9

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Too listless to bother with choosing slaves, attendants, the wardrobe, the outfit an exile needs, I was dazed, like someone struck by Jove's own lightning (had I not been?), who survives, yet remains unsure whether he's dead or alive. Sheer force of grief unclouded my mind in the end. When my poor wits revived I had one last word with my friends before departurethose few friends, out of many, who'd stood firm. My wife, my lover, embraced me, outwept my weeping, her undeserving cheeks rivered with tears. Far away in north Africa, my daughter could know nothing of my fate. From every side, wherever you looked, came the sounds of grief and lamentation, just like a noisy funeral. The whole house mourned at my obsequies - men, women, even children, every nook and comer had its tears. If! may gloss the trite with a lofty comparison, such was Troy's state when it fell. By now all was still, no voices, no barking watchdogs, just the Moon on her course aloft in the night sky. Gazing at her, and the Capitol- clear now by moonlight, close (but what use?) to my home, I cried: 'All you powers who dwell in that neighbour citadel, you temples, never more to be viewed by me, you high gods of Rome, whom I must now abandon, accept my salutation for all time! And although I assume my shield so late, after being wounded, yet free this my exile from the burden of hate, and tell that heavenly man what error beguiled me, let him not think my remissness a crime - so that what you know may likewise be discerned by the author of my expulsion: with godhead appeased, I cannot be downcast.' Such my prayer to the powers above; my wife's were countless, sobs choked each half-spoken word; she flung herself down, hair loose, before our familial shrine, touched the dead-cold hearth with trembling lips, poured out torrential appeals on behalf of the husband she mourned in vain. Our little household gods 10

TRISTIA: BOOK I

turned a deaf ear, the Bear wheeled round the Pole Star, and ebbing dark left no room for further delay. What to do? Seductive love of country held me back - but this night was decreed my last, tomorrow came exile. The times friends said 'Hurry!' 'Why?'l'd ask them, 'Think to what place you're rushing me - and from where!' The times I lied, swearing I'd set up an appropriate departure-time for my journey! Thrice I tripped on the threshold, thrice turned back, dragging lethargic feet, their pace matched to my mood. Often I'd make my farewells - and then go on talking, kiss everyone goodbye all over again, unconsciously repeat identical instructions, eyes yearning back to my loved ones. In the end 'Why make haste?' I exclaimed, 'it's Scythia I'm being sent to, it's Rome I must leave: each one a prime excuse for postponement: my living wife is denied her living husband for evermore: dear family, home, loyal and much-loved companions, bonded in brotherhood that Theseus might have envied - all now lost to me. This may well be my fmal chance to embrace themlet me make the most of one last extra hour.' With that I broke off, leaving my speech unfinished, and hugged all my dear ones in tum but while I'd been speaking, and amid their tears, the morning star (so baneful to me) had risen high and bright in the heavens. I felt myself ripped asunder as though I'd lost a limb; a part of me seemed wrenched from my body. So Mettus must have suffered when the horses avenging his treachery tore him in two. Now my family's clamorous weeping reached its climax, sad hands beat naked breasts, and my wife clung to me at the moment of my departure, making one last agonized tearful plea: 'They can't tear you from me - together', she cried, 'we'll voyage together, I'll follow you into exile, be II

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an exile's wife. Mine, too, the journey; that frontier station has room for me as well: I'll make little weigh~ on the vessel of banishment! While your expulsion's caused by the wrath of Caesar, mine springs from loyal love: this love will be Caesar for me.' Her argument was familiar, she'd tried it before and she only gave it upstill reluctant - on practical grounds. * So I made my exit, dirty, unshaven, hair anyhow -like a corpse minus the funeral. Grief-stricken, mind whirling-black, she fainted (they tell me), fell down half-dead, and when she came round, hair foul with dust, and staggered back to her feet from the cold floor, wept now for herself, and now for hearth and household bereft of their lord, cried her lost husband's name again and again, groaning as though she'd witnessed her daughter's corpse, or mine, on the high-stacked pyre; longed to expunge, by dying, all sense of hardship, yet through her regard for me could not succumb. Let her live, then, ever to support her absent husband's living lot, since this is what fate has willed.

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Dipped now in Ocean, the She-Bear's stellar guardian is stirring up stormy seas: yet here am I constrained, not by my will, to plough the Adriatic, bold only out of necessity - and fear. Ah misery! Gale-force winds black-ruffle the water, sand, scoured from the bottom, boils up in waves that crash, mountain-high, on prow and curving stem-post, batter our painted godheads. The hull's timbers resound to their pounding, wind whines in the rigging, the very keel groans at my woe. The steersman's pallor betrays his icy fear: no longer

* She remained behind in Rome to safeguard Ovid's interests and property, and to work for his recall. See Introduction, p. xvii. 12

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does his skill control the ship; he gives her her head, and just as a weak rider will let fall the ineffectual reins on his horse's stubborn neck, so not where he plans, but where the sea's force takes it, I see our pilot let the vessel ride, and now (unless Aeolus issues winds from a fresh quarter) I shall be carried where I may not go: for Illyria's far away now on our port side, while forbidden Italy's clear in view: may the wind, I pray, cease striving towards precluded territory, join me in obedience to the mighty God! While I speak - in equal hope and fear of being driven back - with what fierce strength the waves pound at our beam! Enough that Jove is angered at meshow mercy, you gods of the blue deep, rescue this weary spirit of mine from a fearful death - if one dead already may not die!

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5 Friend, henceforth to be reckoned the foremost among my comrades, who, above all others, made my fate your own, who first, I recall, when the bolt struck, dared to support me with words of comfort - carissimo! -, who gave kind counsel, the will to live, when in my wretched heart all I yearned for was death - such clues in lieu of your name must tell you whom I'm addressing, and you know, very well, the debt of friendship I have to discharge. These things will remain for ever deep-fixed in my very marrow, I'll owe you for my life in perpetuity, my spirit shall blow away into empty wind, desert my bones on the tepid pyre, before oblivion clouds my mind to your high merits and the long day sinks such loyalty out of sight. May the gods go easy with you, grant you a fortune in need of no man's aid, and unlike mine!

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Yet were this vessel being driven by friendly breezes your loyalty might well remain unknown: Pirithoiis would never have valued Theseus's friendship so highly had Theseus not gone down alive to the waters of Styx. Your Furies, unhappy Orestes, were what made Pylades the model of true friendship: had Euryalus not fallen fighting Rutulian foes, then Nisus would have no renown. Just as red gold is assayed by fire, so in times of trouble loyalty, too, should be tested: while Fortune smiles serenely on our endeavours, and lends us her assistance, all things pursue our undiminished luck; but the first thunderclap scatters them: no one recognizes the man who just now was enringed by fair-weather comrades. Time was, I gathered this from ancient instances: now my own troubles prove it true. Of all my friends, only you two or three stay faithfulthe rest were Fortune's followers, not mine. The more cause, then, being few, to succour my exhaustion, to offer this shipwreck of my hopes a friendly shore! And don't, please, get unduly nervous, scared lest such devotion might offend the God: Caesar has often praised loyalty, even in those who fought him, loves faith in his own, approves it in a foe. My case is better: I never fostered armed opposition, my exile was earned by mere naIvety. Be vigilant, then, I beg you, over my misfortunes, see if the deity's wrath can in any way be appeased! To demand my full dossier, though, is asking for more than circumstances permit. The total sum of my misfortunes matches the stars that shine in heaven, the grains of a dust-storm. Much that I've suffered defies credibility, and although it happened in fact, will not sustain belief. A part, too, should die with me; I only wish my silence might guarantee its suppression. If I had an untiring voice, a more-than-brazen larynx, multiple tongues and mouths, not even then

TRISTIA: BOOK I

could my words encompass the whole, so far does the subject outreach my powers. Instead of the warlord from Ithaca our educated poets should write about my misadventures: I've undergone worse troubles than he did. He wandered for years - but only on the short haul between Ithaca and Troy; thrust to the Getic shore by Caesar's wrath, I've traversed seas lying beneath unknown stars, whole constellations distant. He had his loyal companions, his faithful crew: my comrades deserted me ~t the time of my banishment. He was making for his homeland, a cheerful victor: I was driven from mine fugitive, exile, victim. My home was not some Greek island, Ithaca, Samos - to leave them is no great loss but the City that from its seven hills scans the world's orbit, Rome, centre of empire, seat of the gods. He was physically tough, with great stamina, long-enduring; my strength is slight, a gentle man's. He spent a lifetime under arms, engaged in savage warfare I'm accustomed to quieter pursuits. I was crushed by a god, with no help in my troubles: he had that warrior-goddess at his side. Andjust as Jove outranks the god of the rough ocean, so he suffered Neptune's anger, I bear Jove's. What's more, the bulk of his troubles are fictitious, whereas mine remain anything but myth! Finally, he got back to the home of his questing, recovered the acres he'd sought so long; but I, unless the injured deity's wrath diminish, am sundered for everlasting from my native soil!

6 Not so dear was Lyde to the Clarian poet, not so truly loved was Bittis by her singer from Cos as you are deeply entwined, wife, in my heart: you merit a less wretched if not a better man.

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You are the underthrust beam shoring up my ruin: ifI am anything still, it's all due to you. You're my guard against stripping and despoliation by those who went for the timbers of my wreck. Just as the ravening wolf, bloodthirsty and famine-driven, prowls in search of unguarded sheepfolds, just as a hungry vulture will scan the wide horizon for corpses still above ground, just so that nobody, bad faith battening on our bitter troubles, would (if you'd let him) have seized my remaining goods. Your courage, those influential friends - I can never thank them enough - put paid to his tricks. So accept this tribute from a poor but honest witness - if such a witness carries weight: In probity neither Hector's wife excelled you, nor Laodameia, who clove to her husband even in death. If you'd had Homer to sing your praises, Penelope's renown would be second to yours, you'd stand first in the honoured rollcall of heroines, pre-eminent for courage and faithwhether this quality's inborn, produced by your own nature, devotion that owes nothing to a master's words, or whether that princely lady, for years your honoured patron, has trained you to be a model wife, by long inurement, assimilation to her own example (if great things may properly be compared with small). Alas, my verses possess but scanty strength, your virtues are more than my tongue can proclaim, and the spark of creative vigour I once commanded is extinct, killed offby my long misfortunes. Yet in so far as our words of praise have power you shall live through these verses for all time.

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7 Reader, if you possess a bust made in my likeness, strip off the Bacchic ivy from its locks! Such signs of felicity belong to fortunate poets: on my temples a wreath is out of place. This is for you, dear friend: disown me in public, acknowledge my words in your heart - you who wear (and long may you!) my gold-framed image on your fmger, makeshift memento of an ~xile's dear features: perhaps when you look at it you're prompted to muse: 'How far from us friend Ovid lies!' Your devotion's a comfort, yet my poems will furnish a larger portrait: read them, such as they are, those verses that tell of human transformations, the work, cut short by its author's unhappy flight, which, like so much else of mine, on my departure I sadly consigned to the flames with my own hand. Andjust as Althaea (a better sister than mother) is said to have cremated her own son in the guise of a log, so I flung my books, doomed to perish with me, my very vitals, upon that raging pyre whether through hate of the Muses (who'd wrought my downfall) or because the opus was still unfinished, still in rough draft. Several copies, I think, were made: the poem was not destroyed outright, remains extant. And now it's my wish to preserve it, let it enhance my readers' far-from-idle leisure, remind them of me Yet no one will be able to peruse it and keep patience who doesn't know that it lacks my final hand: a job snatched from me half-done, while still on the anvil, a draft minus the last touch of the flle. What I seek is not praise but pardon, I'm praised in abundance if, reader, I contrive to avoid your scorn. And here are six lines more for you, to be placed in the first book's frontispiece (if that honour's what YOll think they deserve): 17

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'All you who touch these rolls, now orphaned of their father, grant them at least a place in your City! He didn't publish them (that's in their favour); they were, in a manner of speaking, snatched from their master's funeral. So whatever faults this unfInished poem reveals, he'd have mended ifhe could.'

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Back from the sea now, back to their sources shall deep rivers flow, and the Sun, wheeling his steeds about, run backward; earth shall bear stars, the plough cleave heaven, fIre shall give forth water, and water flames, all things shall move contrary to the laws of nature, no element in the world shall keep its path, all that I swore impossible will happen now: there's nothing left that one can't believe. This I foretell after my betrayal by that person who, I'd trusted, would aid me in my distress. False friend! Did you consign me to such utter oblivion, were you so scared to come near affliction, that you gave not a look, no crumb of comfort you stone! - to my downfall, did not follow my bier? Does the sacred and venerable title of friendship lie, mere trash, beneath your feet? What trouble to visit a comrade crushed by such weighty disaster, to help cheer him with kind words, and even if you couldn't shed tears at my misfortunes, at least pretend to be sorry, offer a few polite cliches, like a stranger - 'What a rotten business'parrot stock phrases, conmlOn turns of speech; finally, gaze your last, while you could, at those grief-stricken features you'll not behold again, hear, and return in kind, the never-to-be-repeatedin-a-lifetime word, 'Farewell'? Others did this, not close friends, the merest acquaintances, their feelings proved by their tears 18

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But weren't you linked to me by the strong bonds of a lifetime's association and friendship? Hadn't you been privy to all my moods, both serious and light-hearted, as I was privy to yours? Were we merely urban companions? Didn't you travel everywhere with me, see the world? Has all this gone for nothing, blown away on the God's windblasts, swallowed by Lethe's waters, forgotten, lost? No, you surely weren't born in Rome, that civilized cityin which I can never again set foot but there, by the Black Sea's sinister rocky shoreline, on the wild Scythian or Sarmatian hills, heart cradled with veins of flint, an iron seeding to stiffen your breast; and she who once gave your soft mouth her full and milky udder was a tigress - else you'd not be so alienated today from my misfortunes, or stand accused by me of hard-heartedness. But since, to crown these other fated troubles, my early days have failed of their hope, work hard, now, to ensure that I forget your shortcomings; straighten up, win praise where you garnered blame.

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9 Reader. should you peruse this work without malice, may you cross life's finishing-line without a spill! For you, I hope, my prayers may fmd fulfllment, though for me they failed to move the obdurate gods. So long as your luck holds good, your friends will be legion: if clouds gather, then you're on your own. You've seen how pigeons flock to a white dovecot, while a dirty habitat attracts no birds; ants likewise never make for an empty granary, and not one friend will come round 19

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to visit the bankrupt. As a shadow dogs walkers in sunlight, but vanishes when the sun is overcast, so the inconstant crowd pursues the light of fortune, yet as soon as a cloud blocks it, will take off May this formulation, I pray, always ring hollow and false to you: for me events proved it all too true. Before my house's downfall visitors thronged the place, I was la mode if not ambitious. The first tremor sent them running a prudent mass exit, scared of being caught in the collapsing ruins. Small wonder if men dread lightning, since it bums up everything around yet friendship that remains constant through tribulations wins Caesar's approval, even in a foe that's earned his hatred. Nor is he prone to angernone more restrained than he! - when true devotion persists in adversity. Even Thoas, learning the story of Pylades, we're told, approved: the unswerving friendship ofPatroclus for Achilles elicited Hector's praise. When loyal Theseus followed Pirithoiis down to Hades they say that the Dark God shared his grief; when Turnus learnt how Euryalus and Nisus kept faith, the tears (it's fair to assume) poured down his cheeks. There's trust even among the wretched; in a foe it wins praise. Alas, how few are moved by these words of mine! My present state and fortune are such that my tears should know no bounds, yet my heart, though overwhelmed by grief at its own disaster, has still found serenity in your success. Long ago, dear friend, I must tell you, I saw this coming when the wind in your sails was still the merest breeze; if moral integrity or a life without blemish carry a price-tag, no man could command a higher figure; if anyone's climbed to prominence through the liberal arts, it's you; is there any cause your eloquence can't make good? That's why I told you, right from the start, 'My friend, a major stage

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awaits your talents.' This I learnt not from thunder on the left, or sheep's guts, or the cry or flight of a bird: reason's my aUK-ury, my prediction for the future: thus I divined, thus got my knowledge. And since it's come true, whole-hearted congratulations to you (as well as to me!) that your talents have not remained hidden - though I wish my own had, and in blackest darkness: best if no light had shone on my creations! Andjust as your eloquence has been aided by serious arts, so an Art of another kind hurt me. But my life's well known to you - the author's own morals had no truck with these 'arts'; you know that this poem was written for fun, a product of my youth: not a good joke, but a joke. Thus though my offence can't be camouflaged or defended, at least it has some excuse. So, as far as you can, excuse it: don't desert your friend's cause; so may you ever advance as well as you've begun!

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I have (may I always keep!) blonde Minerva's protection: my vessel bears her painted casque, borrows her name. Under sail she runs well with the slightest breeze; her rowers speed her along when there's need for oars. Not content with outstripping any companion vessel she'll somehow contrive to overhaul any craft that's set out before her: no storms will spring her timbers, she'll ride tall waves like a fiat calm; first met at Cenchreae, harbour of Corinth; since then the faithful guide and companion of my flight, kept safe by the power of Pallas through countless hazards, across endless gale-swept seas. Safe still I pray! - may she thread vast Pontus's entrance-channel 21

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and enter the waters of the Getic shore. But as soon as she'd brought me into Aeolian Helle's seaway, setting course for the long haul through the narrows, then we swung away westward, leaving Hector's city, and made harbour at Imbros. Thence with a light following breeze our wearied vessel rode over to Samothrace, from where it's a short haul to Tempyra on the Thracian coast, and a parting of the ways between master and ship: I planned an overland journey through Thrace, while she was to sail back into Hellespontine waters, coasting along the Troad, past Lampsacus, home of the country god Priapus, through the straits between Sestos and Abydos scene of not-quite-virgin Helle's fatal flightto Cyzicus in the Propontis, barely linked to the mainland, Cyzicus, Thracian colony of renown, and so to Byzantium, guarding the jaws of Pontus, great gateway between twin seas. May she win past all these, I pray, and with a strong following south wind wing her way through the Clashing Rocks, skirt Thynias' bay, set course by Apollo's city under Anchialus' lofty walls, and thence sail on past the ports of Mesembria and Odeson, and that citadel named for the wine-god, and the hilltop where Megarian exiles (we're told) made their home from home; cruising thence may she safely reach the Milesian foundation to which I'm consigned by the wrath of an injured god. If she makes it, I'll sacrifice to Minerva a lamb for services rendered: I can't afford anything larger. You too, twin brother-gods of this island, sons ofTyndareus, watch over our separate paths with propitious power (one craft is to thread the Symplegades, the other's for Thracian waters). Make the winds, though we're bound for diverse destinations, favour this vessel and that alike!

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II

Every word you've read in this whole book was written during the anxious days of my journey: scribbling lines in mid-Adriatic while December froze the blood, or after we'd passed the twin gulfs of the Isthmus and transferred to another ship, still verse-making amid the Aegean's savage clamour (a sight, I fancy, that shook the Cyclades). In fact, I'm surprised myself that in all that upheaval of spirit and sea inspiration never flagged. How to label such an obsession? Shocked stupor? Madness? No matter: by this one care all cares are relieved. Time and again I was tossed by wintry tempests and darkly menacing seas; time and again the day grew black with storm-clouds, torrents of wind-lashed rain; time and again we shipped water; yet my shaky hand still kept writing verses - of a sort. Now winds whistle once more through the taut rigging, and massy-high rears up each hollow wave: the very steersman, hands raised high to heaven, his art forgotten, turns to prayer for aid. Wherever I look, there's nothing but death's image death, that my split mind fears and, fearing, prays for. Should I come safe to harbour terror lurks there too: more hazards on dry land than from the cruel sea. Both men and deep entrap me, sword and wave twin my fear: sword, I'm afraid, hopes to let my blood for booty, wave wants the title of my death. Away on our left lies a barbarous coast, inured to rapine, stalked ever by bloodshed, murder, war the agitation of these wintry waves is nothing to the turbulence in my breast. All the more cause for indulgence, generous reader, if these lines fall short - as they do 23

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of your hopes: they were not written, as formerly, in my garden, while I lounged on a favourite day-bed, but at sea, in wintry light, rough-tossed by fIlthy weather, spindrift spattering the paper as I write. Rough winter battles me, indignant at my presumption in ignoring its fierce threats, still scribbling away. Let the storm have its will of the man - but let storm and poem reach their end, I pray, each at the same time!

BOOK II Books, my unlucky obsession, why do I stay with you when it was my own talent brought me down? Why go back to those fresh-condemned Muses, my nemesis? Isn't one well-earned punishment enough? Poetry made men and women eager to know me that was my bad luck; poetry made Caesar condemn me and my life-style because of my ;.trt, put out years before: take away my pursuit, you remove my offencesI credit my guilt to my verses. Here's the reward I've had for my care and all my sleepless labour: a penalty set on talent. If I'd had sense I'd have hated the Learned Sisters, and with good reason, divinities fatal to their own adherents. But now, such madness attends my disorder, I'm bringing my bruised foot back to the rock I stubbed my toes on, exactly as a defeated fighter returns to the lists, or a wrecked ship sails out again into rough seas. Perhaps the same object may (as with Telephus) cure the wound it caused, and the Muse, having stirred that wrath, may now assuage it: poetry often moves the gods on high. Caesar himself bade Italy's mothers and married daughters to hymn Ops, goddess of plenty, with her turret crown, just as he'd done for Apollo at the celebration of those Games that are viewed but once in any lifetime. On such precedents, merciful Caesar, let my poetic skills now soften your wrathjust wrath indeed, I'll not deny I deserved it: I haven't become that shameless - yet unless I'd sinned, what could you have forgiven? My plight afforded you the chance to show mercy. If each time a mortal erred, great Jupiter fired offhis thunderous batteries, he'd soon be out of bolts; 25

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as it is, once he's thundered out, scared the world with his salvoes, then he disperses the rain-clouds, brings back clear air. Truly, then, is he termed the gods' sire and ruler, truly the wide world holds none mightier than Jove. You too, being styled your country's guide and father, should emulate, now, the god whose name you shareas indeed you do: no man has handled the reins of power with greater moderation; many times you've granted a beaten foe the clemency he would never have conceded to you had the victory been his. Many I've seen, too, loaded with wealth and honours who'd taken up arms against you; your cold rage for warfare ceased with the day the war was over, and both sides brought their gifts to the temples together; your troops rejoiced at having beaten the enemy, while the enemy had good cause to celebrate his defeat. My cause is better: no one can claim that I ever took up arms against you. By sea, by earth, those preeminent powers, by your present and manifest godhead, now I swear that my heart, 0 most lordly of men, has ever favoured you, that in spirit (all I could do) I've been yours. I've prayed to delay your assumption to starry heaven, one more voice among many all offering up the same petition; I've burnt loyal incense, I've supported all public prayers on your behal( And need I say that my books - even those that form the charge against meare crammed with countless allusions to your name? Inspect that major work, which I've still left uncompleted, on fabulous bodily changes, and you'll fmd much trumpeting of your name there, manifest pledges of my loyal devotion. Not that your glory's enhanced by verses, or possesses scope for even further inflation: Jove has renown in abundance - yet still derives pleasure from the recital of his deeds, from providing a theme for poets, and when they recount his battles with the Giants 26

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it may well be that he purrs at praise of himself. Others may celebrate you in loftier, more appropriate language, and sing your praises with more wealth of talent; and yet a god's not only won by, the slaughter of a hundred bulls: a pinch of incense will do. A brute, and most cruel of all to me, was that unnamed person who read you frivolous extracts from my work when passages that offer you reverent homage are there to elicit a kinder verdict! Yet who could have been my friend, when you were angered? Why, I almost began to detest myself. When a quakestruck house begins to subside, the heaviest pressure falls where the framework's bulging, and eventually that first random fissure spreads outwards, the whole gaping structure collapses under its own weight. So what my verse has brought me is general hatred: the public borrowed its attitude (as was proper) from yours. Yet, I recall, your scrutiny passed my life and morals witness the annual ride-past, me on the knight's horse, your own gift! But if that honour profits me nothing, leaves me no glory, at least I'd incurred no blame. As a prison commissioner I justified my appointment, in the probate division too: not one complaint about my judicial verdicts in private actions - even the losers conceded my good faith. Such bad luck - ifit hadn't been for my recent disaster, I'd have had your official endorsement, and more than once. These latest acts are my ruin, one hurricane plunges deep-seasunder a craft that had ridden out the storm so often before - no local tide either, the totality of ocean broke in a great wave on my head. Why did I see what I saw? Why render my eyes guilty? Why unwittingly take cognizance of a crime? Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked, but still was torn to bits by his own hounds. Among the high gods even accidents call for atonement: when deity's outraged, mischance is no excuse.

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On the day that my fatal error misled me, disaster struck my modest yet blameless house: modest perhaps, but (it's said) oflofty ap.cestral lineage, second to none in distinction, notable neither for poverty nor for riches, breeding knights of the middle road, and however lowly a house Gudged by means or derivation), still raised to prominence through my renown. They may say I misused my talent with youthful indiscretion but my name's still known world-wide; the world of culture's well acquainted with Ovid, regards him as a writer not to be despised. So this house that was dear to the Muses now has fallen under a single (though far from exiguous) charge; yet its fall is such that it can recover, if only time mellow affronted Caesar's wrath, whose leniency in the punishment that he assigned me has undercut all my fears! My life you gave me, your wrath stopped short of executionthat, sire, was to use your power with true restraint! In addition, as though mere life were too small a present, I kept my inherited wealth: this you did not confiscate, nor condemn my deeds by decree of the Senate, nor order my exile through a special court. No - as a sovereign should, yourself, with stern invective, avenged your own wrongs. What's more, your edict, however severe and threatening, showed mercy when, naming my punishment, it described me not as 'exiled' but as 'relegated', with sparing treatment of my fortune. Indeed, there's no punishment Worse for anyone in his right senses than the displeasure of so great a man: yet godhead may, from time to time, be placated, clouds scatter, the day grow bright. I've seen an elm that fierce Jupiter's lightning-bolt had riven thick-laden with sprouting vines. Though you yourself forbid hope, yet I'll hope for ever this one thing I can do against your will.

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Great hope, most merciful sovereign, stirs in me when I look to you: but at the consideration of my deeds hope sinks. Andjust as the winds whipping up the ocean don't rage in a non-stop gale, but subside at times, have lulls, dwindle to stillness, so that you'd think they'd shed their violence - so my fears fluctuate, now swell, now vanish, now promise, now deny the hope of your appeasement. So by those gods on high who may grant you, and will grant you yet, long life - if so be they love the Roman race -; by our country, under your parental care so safe and secure (and of which I too was so lately a part): I pray that the City's grateful love may ever embrace you as you deserve for your noble achievements; that Livia your consort may grow old with you (she deserved no other husband; without her, a bachelor existence should have been yours; whom else could you have married?); that your son, like you, may flourish and one day rule this empire, an old with an elder statesman; may those stars of your brave youth, your grandsons, still emulate your, and your father's, deeds!that your camp may now once more behold its erstwhile attendant Victory seeking the standards she knows so well, poised on familiar wings above Rome's commander to set the laurel-wreath on his bright hair who wages your wars, in whose person you do battle, to whom you entrust the high auspices, and the gods; yourself divided, half guarding the city's affairs. half far away, engaged in a fierce campaign: so may he quell the foe, return victorious, dazzle on high above his laurelled steeds! Show mercy, I beg you, shelve your cruel weapons, the bolts that - to my loss - I know too well: Show mercy, our fatherland's father, remember that title, don't kill my hopes of one day placating you. 29

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I do not ask for return - though common observation shows the high gods have often granted such petitions, and more -: a milder, less distant exile would remit the worst of my sentence. Here is the ultimate torture for me, exposed amid foes - what banished person lives more remote from home? I alone have been dispatched to the Danube's sevenfold outflow, to shiver beneath the dead weight of northern skies: only the river (scant barrier!) lies between me and countless barbarian hordes. Although other men have been exiled by you for graver offences none was packed further off: beyond here lies nothing but chillness, hostility, frozen waves of an ice-hard sea. Here, on the Black Sea's bend sinister, stands Rome's bridgehead, facing out against Scyths and Celts, her latest, shakiest bastion oflaw and order, only marginally adhesive to the empire's rim. So I beg you, as a suppliant, withdraw me to safety, do not rob me of peace of mind as well as of my country - do not leave me to risk tribal incursions across the Danube, don't let me be exposed, your citizen, to capture - no man of Latin blood should ever wear barbarous shackles while Caesar's line survives. It was two offences undid me, a poem and an error: on the second, my lips are sealed my case does not merit the reopening of your ancient wounds, Caesar: bad enough to have hurt you once. But the first charge stands: that through an improper poem I falsely professed foul adultery. If so, Divine minds, it's clear, must be sometimes prone to error; besides, there are many trifles lie beneath your notice. Just asJupiter, watching both gods and high heaven, lacks leisure to care for lesser things, so while you gaze around on your dependent empire some minor matters will escape your eye. Should you, the Imperial Princeps, desert your station to peruse my limping verse? 30

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The weight of Rome's name is not so casual, your shoulders do not sustain so light a load that you can direct your godhead to my inept frivolities and examine, in person, my leisure work: now Pannonia needs a touch of the whip, now lliyria; now Thracian or Alpine insurgents give you cause for alarm; now Armenia's seeking peace, now the nervous Parthian horseman surrenders his bow and those captured standards; now Germany in your offspring senses your youthful power, now for great Caesar a Caesar wars! In this vastest of all empires no part of the body politic is at risk. City matters exhaust you too - enforcing laws and morals in the hope that they'll emulate yours; no share for you in the peace you bestow upon nations you're too busy fighting all those endless wars. No wonder if amid such weighty matters you never found time to read my frivolous works! Yet if (as I would wish) you'd chanced to fmd the leisure, your perusal of my Art would have revealed no indictable matter. It's not (I admit) a serious poem, nor worthy to be read by so great a prince; yet not, on that account, in conflict with your statutes or a handbook for Rome's young wives! What's more - to allay your doubts about my intended audience one of the three books has these four lines in it: 'Respectable ladies, the kind who wear hairbands and ankle-length skirts, are hereby warned off. Lawful sex, legitimate liaisons form my sole theme. This poem breaks no taboos.' So did I not strictly debar from my Art all ladies who were placed out of bounds by snood and robe? 'Nevertheless,' you may say, 'a married woman can profit from skills intended for others, audit the class in allurement she can't take for credit -' Then let her read nothing: 31

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all poems can increase her delinquent skills! Whatever she touches, if wrongdoing's her bent, will furnish matter that turns her character towards vice. If she picks up the Annals - no text more roughly bristling she'll read how Ilia got in the family way; let her try Lucretius, and straight off she'll be asking by whom kind Venus became head of Aeneas' line. See below for my demonstration (if such argument is in order) that every type of poem may harm one's morals - which doesn't damn each volume by defInition: what heals can also hurt. There's nothing more useful than fIre: yet fIre's what your arsonist uses to burn down a house. Medicine likewise can kill and cure by turns, its pharmacopoeia sorts healing from deadly drugs. Footpad and wary traveller both carry weapons but the first for assault, the second for self-defence. Eloquence is learnt to plead a just cause: yet we fmd it protecting the guilty, oppressing the innocent. SO with my poem: approach it in the proper spirit and you'll fmd there's none it could harm. 'But some women it does corrupt -' Who thinks thus is in error, blames too much on my writings. Yet even suppose I admitted this charge, public shows likewise contain the seeds of corruption - pull every theatre down! Think of the crowds that exploit the Enclosure for transgression when the Mars Field arena's sanded down! Abolish the Circus! The Circus's licence is not conducive - to safety - there a girl sits jammed against any unknown male. In the hope of encountering lovers some women cruise the arcades; then why is any arcade left open? Nothing's more august than a temple yet the girl with a gift for indulging her vice should be kept away from there too: Jove's shrine is sure to remind her just how many girls Jove put in the family way. While she's next door, busy offering up prayers to Juno, 32

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she'll recall all those mistresses who made the goddess so angry. She'll wonder, while contemplating Pallas, just why that virgin deity undertook to bring up a bastard. Let her visit Mars' great temple the temple you built - she'll fmd Venus there, inside, wrapped around Mars, while her husband's kept out. In the shrine ofIsis she'll ask herself why Juno drove that poor cow overseas to the Bosporus. Venus suggests Anchises; the Moon, Endymion; Ceres, Iasion. Perverted minds can be corrupted by anything that in its own proper context does no harm: a woman who bursts in where the priest forbids her assumes all responsibility and guilt; and the first page of my Art, composed for courtesans only, warns free-born ladies to drop it on the spot. Yet it's no crime in itself to tum out wanton verses: the chaste can read much they mustn't do. Very often your eyebrow-arching matron sees street-girls, undressed, game for every kind of sex the very Vestal's eye observes prostitutes' bodies, yet incurs no penalty as a result. But why, it's asked, is my Muse so excessively wanton, why does my book encourage everyone to make love? Now that, I confess, was all wrong: error manifest, cUlpable: the choice, the perverted skill - I regret them both. Why didn't I rather chum out yet another epic poem on how Troy fell to the Greeks? Why not write about Thebes, and her fratricidal brothers, and the champions at each of her seven gates? No lack of material, either, from warlike Rome - and a worthy labour, to chronicle her patriots' deeds! Finally, since you've filled the world with your meritorious achievements, Caesar, couldn't I find one theme out of such plenty? Your deeds should have attracted my talents as the sun's radiance attracts the eyeAn unfair reproof: the field I plough is scraIme1, whereas that task called for the richest soil. 33

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Pleasure boats may be fine on small lakes - but that's no reason for their braving the open sea. I might - should I doubt even this? - have a knack for lighter measures, be up to minor verse; but if you bid me tell of the Giants blasted by Jupiter's firebolts, my efforts are bound to wilt under such a load. It would call for a rich talent to wrap up Caesar's fearsome acts, to prevent the subject eclipsing the work still, I made the attempt. No good. I seemed to belittle and (oh, abominable!) actually to harm your prowess. So I turned back to my lightweight youthful poems, stirred my heart with a false loveWould I had not! but my fate was drawing me onward, my very brilliance worked to my own hurt. Ah, why did I ever study? Why did my parents give me an education?Why did I learn so much as the ABC? It was my Art's wantonness turned you against me, because you were convinced it encouraged illicit sex. But no brides have become intriguers through me: no one can teach what he doesn't know. Yes, I've written frivolous verses, erotic poems - but never has a breath of scandal touched my name. There's no husband, even among the lower classes, who questions his paternity through any fault of mine! My morals, believe me, are quite distinct from my versesa respectable life-style, a flirtatious Museand the larger part of my writings is mendacious, fictive, assumes the licence its author denies himsel£ A book is no index of character, but, a harmless pleasure, will offer much matter to delight the ear. Else were Accius homicidal, Terence a reveller, and all war-poets firebrands. Lastly, it's not as though I were the only composer of erotic verses yet I, and I alone, have paid the price for producing such things. What was old Anacreon's message but 'Make love and drink your fill'? What did Lesbian Sappho teach her girls but passion? 34

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Yet both the one and the other remained unscathed. Confessing those frequent affairs, Callimachus, in poems for all to read - that did you no harm at all. No play by delightful Menander lacks a love-interest, yet he's read in school, by boys and girls alike. What's the Iliad but an adulteress, battled over by husband and lover? How does it open? That flaming quarrel about Brisels' seizure, angry feuding between the chiefs! What's the Odyssey but the wooing of one woman, in her husband's absence, by a crowd of men and all for love? Who but Homer relates how Venus and Mars were snared and bound in their illicit bed? How should we know, except for great Homer's witness, what heat one traveller aroused in two goddesses? Tragedy, now, eclipses all other genres in seriousness: yet it too always presents erotic themes. Take Hippolytus: a stepmother blinded by passion. Why's Canace famous? Her love for her brother. Was it not lust that pricked on ivory-shouldered Pelops to drive those Phrygian mares away with his Pisan bride? What roused Medea to kill her children? The agony of rejection. It was desire transformed into instant birds King Tereus and his mistress, the mother who still mourns for Itys. If that bad brother of hers had never loved Aerope, we shouldn't read, today, how the horses of the Sun turned back in their course. If Scylla had never severed her father's lock of hair, she wouldn't now be a tragic theme. When you read of Electra and crazed Orestes you're reading Aegisthus' and Clytemnestra's crime. \Vhat about Bellerophon, fierce conqueror of the Chimaera, so nearly done to death at a lying word from his queenly hostess? What about Hermione, Atalanta, or Cassandra, King Agamemnon's prophetic love? The list is endless - Danae, Andromeda, Semele, Haemon,Alcmena (WIth her two nights in one),

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Admetus, Theseus, Protesilaiis (first warrior ashore from the Achaean fleet at Troy), lole, De'idameia; Heracles' wife Delaneira, Hylas and Ganymede - I'll run out of time ifI chase every tragic passion, my booklet will scarcely have room for their names alone. Then there's the kind of drama that's laced with ribald laughter, full of words that transgress all decent bounds yet the playwright who drew an effeminate Achilles suffered no penalty for verse that undercut his manly performance. Aristeides' Milesian connection didn't get Aristeides run out of town: no exile for Eubius, master of risque matter, despite his tales of abortion; nor for the author of the latest gay-sybaritic novel, nor for the bed-hopping kiss-and-tell-all brigade. Such works are shelved beside great poets' masterpieces in the public libraries our leaders have endowed for all to read. Let me not list foreign titles only in my defence: Rome's literature, too, is full of frivolous matter. Though grave Ennius sang of warfare Ennius, all talent and no technique though Lucretius sets forth the causes of devouring fire, and foretells the doom of sea, land, sky, yet wanton Catullus wrote many poems for that mistress he called by the false name 'Lesbia', and not content with her, noised abroad his many other liaisonsinfidelity public and self-confessed. Equal and similar licence was shown by diminutive Calvus who revealed his furtive intrigues in various measures; there's Cinna, and - more daring than Cinna - Anser in the same group, and frivolousjeux d'amour by Cato and Cornificius. Why bring up Ticidas' verses, or Memmius's, where things are openly named and the names raise a blush, or the circle that wrote of 'Perilla' (known in books today as Metella, her real self)? Take Varro of Atax, who epicked the Argonauts' voyage-

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he couldn't keep quiet about his intrigues; Hortensius, Servius - both wrote verse no whit less scabrous than these: who'd hesitate to follow the trend such great names set? Sisenna translated Aristeides after history, risque jokes: he suffered no harm. Celebrating Lycoris wasn't what brought down Gallus, but indiscreet talk when drunk. Tibullus balks at believing his mistress's sworn denials since she repeats them, to her husband, about him: he admits having taught her how to outwit hall-porters, but now, poor wretch, asserts that his own tricks are being turned against him. Often, on the pretext of appraising her ring or its gem he remembers touching her hand, tells how his fingers traced messages on the table for her, how he gave her the nod; instructs us which liniments draw out the bruises produced by a lover's bites; finally begs her indifferent husband to watch him closer, give her less chance to sin. He knows who the dogs are barking at, that lonely figure pacing outside the house, and why he coughs so often at shut doors; he gives numerous precepts to further such intrigues, reveals the tricks by which wives can deceive their husbands. This caused him no trouble: Tibullus is read and approved, was already well known at your accession. You'll fmd identical instructions in seductive Propertius: yet no hint of disgrace ever touched him. I appeared as their successor (kindness forbids me to name the living great), and where so many vessels had sailed, I confess, I had no fear that with the rest surviving one only would come to wreck. Others have written handbooks on the art of dicing (to our ancestors no light offence): how to score with the knucklebones, which combination will get you most points, how steer clear of the disastrous 'Dog'; how dice are numbered, what the best throws and moves are if you look like being huffed at draughts, 37

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the straight-line 'raiding' gambit when a piece is cornered by two of your opponent's, just how to counter-attack, to rescue the outflanked victim, the perils of an unescorted retreat; and that other game played on a small board, with three marbles run off in a row to win, and all the rest - I don't propose to pursue them that waste that most precious commodity, our time. X writes about types of balls, and the ways they're handled, Y teaches swimming, Z how to bowl a hoop. Yet others have written works on the art of cosmetics, or etiquette-manuals for dinners and parties; one describes the type of clay from which cups should be moulded, shows which jar is the best for storing wine. Such trifles afford us amusement in smoky December; their composition has caused no harm to anyone. So, misled by the genre, I wrote non-serious poems; but serious the penalty visited upon my jests! And out of this crowd of scribblers - no hard feelings - the only one destroyed by his Muse turns out to be me. Suppose that I'd been the author of indecent farces, which always (a stock charge) portray illicit love, in which the lead constantly goes to some smart seducer, and stupid husbands are conned by their artful wives? Everyone watches these shows - wives, husbands, sons, just-nubile daughters (and most of the Senate, come to that). On top of outraging our ears with improper words, they accustom the eye to put up with pudendal matter galore. When the lover deceives the husband with some new trick, he's applauded, and the play carries off first prize: the less improving his work is, the greater the poet's profits such filth commands top rates from official sponsors: run over your own Games' expenses, August One: you'll find you spent massive sums on many such items. You watched them yourself, and (as always

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bounteous by nature) underwrote them time and again for the public, and with your eyes followed, all cool attention, what the whole world watches - their staged adulteries. If it's proper to scribble farces that act out such gross matter, the penalty my stuff incurs should be far less. Or is this kind of writing safeguarded by performance? Do farces earn their licence via the stage? Well, my poems too have often been danced in public, have often, indeed, beguiled your eyes. Why, your very palace, though refulgent with portraits of antique heroes, also contains, somewhere, a little picture depicting the various sexual positions and modes: there too you will find not only the seated Ajax, all fury in his expression, and savage Medea, eyes meditating crime, but Venus too, still damp, wringing out her sodden tresses, scarce risen from the waves that gave her birth. Others sound forth the clash of war and its bloody weapons, some hymning your race's exploits, some your own, but grudging nature restricted me to a narrower sphere, gave my talent scant strength. Yet even the fortunate author of your own Aeneid brought his Arms-and-the-Man into a Tyrian bedIndeed, no part of the whole work's read more often than this union of illicit love. When young, Virgil also depicted the passions of Amaryllis and Phyllis in pastoral eclogues. I too gave offence, though long ago, with this kind of composition now myoid fault incurs a new punishment. Yet I'd already issued these poems when with my fellow knights I passed in review before your stern tribunal unfaulted. So the writings I thought harmless in my wild youth harm me now in myoid age. Retribution comes late and heavy for that early squib, the penalty's remote from the time of the sin. But don't think all my work so lightweight -

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