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 structural 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 Quellenforschung) 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 strictly 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 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 I owe 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 findings 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, especially those devoted to individual poems and specific points of literary criticism) are listed in the supplementary bibliography. Unfortunately, the only recent bibliographie raisonnée, 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 of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (Claassen 1999c), 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.) Claassen’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, ROMA/AMOR 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 Werk (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 poétique de la rupture,” Les Tristes d’Ovide et l’Élégie Romaine (1991).
About the true cause of Ovid’s relegation we are, I suspect inevitably, no wiser than we were. Verdière 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 of Augustus (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 exul ludens — spent his latter years in Rome toying with ever more elaborate exilic topoi (presumably as an excuse 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 Euxinescared 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 significantly 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.
This eccentric theory apart, arguments for and against the accuracy of Ovid’s account of Tomis (modern Constança) and the Dobruja have now reached a reasonable compromise: Richmond (1995) offers a careful summing-up of the evidence. Yes, of course Ovid exaggerated — often 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 symptoms attributable to enforced exile that he describes match similar modern accounts with uncommon precision (Méthy, 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, Schönbeck,Viarre) has revealed a growing awareness that Ovid’s feelings about Augustus could be subject to a severe internal conflict 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 (107–8) makes out a very persuasive case for Ibis (“Ibis in Euxinum . . . ”) having been 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 coming to the poems of exile without prior knowledge, these two articles offer a well-balanced and informative introductory survey.
Iowa City
June 2004