Last updated 09/07/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
What Ovid endured as an ‘exile’ in Tomis is a great unknown—the stuff now of novels and ‘imaginary’ lives. If we take him at his word—the testimony of the exile poetry—literary isolation was the least of his worries. Bordering on the Black Sea, Ovid's frontier town was a place of life-threatening illness (Tr. 3.3.13, 3.8.23f.) and unbearable, limb-numbing cold (Ex Pont. 1.7.11f., 4.12.33f.), a place where inhabitants pass an existence at war, warding off frequent invasions by savage barbarians—so frequent, in fact, that the aged poet is himself conscripted into military service (Ex Pont. 18.7). In many respects, Tomis is constructed in the exile poetry as the antithetical opposite of the world of Rome; for the urbane ‘urban’ persona of the Ars Amatoria, life in Tomis rates as a fate worse than death, and often the poet describes his existence there as death-like (e.g. Tr. 5.9.19, Ex Pont. 1.8.27), his surroundings like the underworld (cf. Tr. 5.7.43f.), and his daily rituals as practice for dying. And although he outlived Augustus—the princeps who exiled the poet to the Black Sea in 7 CE—Ovid would indeed die in Tomis, far from family and home, out ‘on the furthermost limits of the unknown world’ (in extremis ignoti partibus orbis, Tr. 3.3.3).
1. See Malouf, D., An Imaginary Life (London 1978Google Scholar), and Ransmayr, C., The Last World: A Novel with an Ovidian Repertory (New York 1990; orig. publ. 1988Google Scholar). For these and additional fictional treatments of the exilic Ovid, see Barchiesi, A., The Prince and the Poet (Berkeley 1997Google Scholar; orig. publ. Rome 1994 as Il poeta e il principe) and Anderson, W.S. (ed.), Ovid: The Classical Heritage (New York 1995Google Scholar), xxxiii n.35. Finally, it should be noted Ovid was not technically an ‘exile’ but ‘relegated’ to Tomis; cf. Tr. 2.137: quippe relegatus, non exsul, dicor in illo [edicto] (‘for I am called a relegatus and not an exile in your edict’).
2. For additional references and discussion of Ovid’s Tomis, see Williams, G.D., Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge 1994), 10-18Google Scholar.
3. See Thibault, J.C., The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile (Berkeley 1964Google Scholar), passim.
4. William Fitzgerald, (unpublished) response to APA Panel, ‘In Margine Mundi: Psychology and Subjectivity in Ovid’s, Tristia’ (Annual Meeting, American Philological Association, San Diego, December 1995Google Scholar).
5. Elliot, A.G., CW 73 (1979-80), 385-412Google Scholar; additional bibliography on the Metamorphoses is provided by Hofmann, H., ANRW 31:4(1981), 2161-2273Google Scholar.
6. Nagle, B.R., The Poetics of Exile: Program and Polemic in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto of Ovid (Brussels 1980Google Scholar); Evans, H.B., Publico Carmina: Ovid’s Books from Exile (Lincoln NE 1983Google Scholar).
7. Froesch, H.H., Ovid als Dichter des Exils (Bonn 1976Google Scholar); Luck, G. (ed), P. Ouidius Naso, Tristia, 2 vols. (Heidelberg 1967 and 1977Google Scholar).
8. Davisson, M.H.T., ‘Tristia 5.13 and Ovid’s Use of Epistolary Form and Content’, CJ 80 (1985), 238-46Google Scholar (cf. Diss. Berkeley 1979); Claassen, J.-M., ‘Ovid’s Poetic Pontus’, Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 6 (1990), 65-90Google Scholar (cf. Diss. Stellenbosch 1986); Helzle, M., ‘Ovid’s Poetics of Exile’, ICS 13 (1988), 73-83Google Scholar; and Hinds, S., ‘Booking the Return Trip: Ovid and Tristia 1’, PCPS n.s. 31 (1985), 13-32Google Scholar.
9. A. Videau-Delibes, Les Tristes d’Ovide et I’elégie romaine: une poétique de la rupture (Paris 1991); Williams (n.2 above). The first half of this decade also saw the publication by Penguin Classics of an important English translation and commentary by Green, P., Ovid: The Poems of Exile (New York 1994Google Scholar). The Loeb edition of the exile poetry (Ovid, vol. 6: Tristia, Ex Ponto) by A.L. Wheeler (orig. publ. 1924) was revised by G. P. Goold (Cambridge MA and London 1988).
10. Leavis, F.R., Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge 1930), 5Google Scholar, quoted by Easthope, A., Literary into Cultural Studies (New York 1991), 4Google Scholar.
11. However, some recognition of classics’ ‘exclusionary ideology’ is displayed by various contributors to Culham, P. and Edmunds, L. (eds.), Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? (New York 1989Google Scholar).
12. Conte, G.B., Latin Literature: A History, tr. J.B. Solodow (1994; orig. publ. 1987), 4Google Scholar.
13. Barchiesi (n.l above), 29f.; cf. also ‘Insegnare ad Augusto: Orazio, ep. II. 1 e Ovidio, Tristia II’, MD 31 (1993), 149-84Google Scholar.
14. Barchiesi (n.l above), 30.
15. G.D. Williams, unpublished paper; see also P. Rosenmeyer’s essay in this volume.
16. Derrida, J., ‘Différence’, in Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, tr. D.B. Allison (Evanston 1973; orig. publ. 1968), 138Google Scholar.
17. Selden, R. and Widdowson, P., A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory3 (Lexington KY 1993), 189Google Scholar; see also Spurr, D., The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham NC 1993), 1Google Scholar. The fundamental essay by Derrida, is ‘White Mythology’ (1971) in Margins of Philosophy, tr. A. Bass (Chicago 1982Google Scholar).
18. Selden (n.17 above), 188.
19. See Barchiesi (n.l above), 35-39, and Williams (n.2 above), 91-99.
20. Fitzgerald (n.4 above).
