Metamorphoses Of The Poet's Mind

John Davie pays homage to the great Roman poet Ovid who died in exile 2000 years ago this year.

It was 2000 years ago that a famous Roman poet died at the age of 60 in exile at a town on the Black Sea called Tomis, now Constanta in Romania. By this time Publius Ovidius Naso, better known as Ovid, had become the leading poet of Rome, admired for the wit and sensuality of his verse. The question why he annoyed the emperor Augustus and found himself in this backwater, subject to attacks from the savage surrounding tribes and a miserable climate, isolated spiritually and culturally, is answered enigmatically by the poet himself: ‘a poem and a mistake’.

The poem was his first published work, Amores, a selection of elegiac love-poetry that stunned and captivated the Roman public by its subversive treatment of the genre, poking fun at serious treatments by earlier love poets. Further poems followed, all treating the subject of love with irony and wit, laced with self-mockery.

One example is his poem about a day at the chariot races with a woman he wants to sleep with, full of amusing advice to young men in a similar situation and frame of mind; or his poem to his mistress, who has been asked together with her husband to the same dinner-party as Ovid, suggesting ways in which they can still have fun as lovers without giving the game away.

For the emperor, concerned about Roman morals deteriorating, and constantly promoting the sanctity of marriage, Ovid was a menace and ripe for a fall. The ‘mistake’ is generally taken to refer to some sexual scandal in which Ovid was implicated, possibly involving Augustus’ daughter, Julia, unhappily married to the emperor’s stepson and determined to have fun outside her marriage, which would explain the cruelty of Ovid’s place of banishment, tantamount to sending someone like Oscar Wilde to spend the rest of his life on the Outer Hebrides.