This is the propemptikon, or envoi, to Book I, and its formal valediction, composed about the same time as I.11, and sent to Rome from Tomis shortly after Ovid’s arrival (autumn AD 9). The book, like Corinna’s ring (Am. II.15.9), is to go to Rome in place of its writer, a favourite exilic fantasy. Though addresses by poets to their books were common in antiquity (Catullus and Horace had both anticipated Ovid here) this anthropomorphizing of a text-as-entity remains unique in Latin literature. The poem also introduces all the main leitmotifs characteristic of Ovid’s exilic work. The notion of Augustus as a present deity (19–20, 69ff.) is developed at once. The consciousness of guilt and punishment is stressed (23ff., 55–56, 71ff.); the book is not to defend its begetter (25ff., 101ff.), but the idea at line 30, the prayer ‘that Caesar’s wrath may abate’ — sit mihi lenito Caesare poena leuis — is fundamental: the god’s mercy and compassion are to be invoked. The damage inflicted on the poet’s genius (41ff.) by his rough and dangerous life is submitted both as reason for mitigation and excuse for allegedly bad poetry (45ff.), a recurrent claim, perhaps not wholly sincere. The notion of the bolt from heaven (72, 82) indirectly suggests divine arbitrariness, even injustice. The-Palatine-as-Olympus evokes a slew of pregnant mythical parallels — Phaëthon (79–80), Icarus (89–90), the wrecking of the Greek fleet off Euboea (83ff.), Achilles and Telephus (99ff). The book is ordered to add itself to an œuvre in which the Metamorphoses are emphasized (117ff.) — indeed, assimilated to Ovid’s own changed condition — while an elaborate disclaimer is made in re the AA (111ff.), though this work is not rejected altogether. Pleas for mercy, literary self-promotion, sly hints of irrational severity, emphasis on the dangerous outlandishness of Tomis: the dominant keynotes are all struck right from the start.
5–14 The description of the book contrasts strikingly with Catullus’s clean, bright, cheerful roll (1.1ff.). Literary works in antiquity were written on sheets of papyrus glued together to form a roll, on average between six and ten inches wide, and not less than fifteen, or more than thirty, feet in length. Writing would be restricted to one side, with cedar-oil applied to the backing to preserve the material and discourage moths or mice. The scroll was attached to rollers to facilitate reading, and these rollers were tipped with bosses (umbilici) of various colours. Unrolling the scroll from right to left revealed a succession of written columns with an average width of two to three inches. The outer face of the roll, round the boss, was normally smoothed off and darkened. The title was indicated by a label (sillybos) attached to the centre or boss, and the scroll might be provided with a brightly coloured cover or slip-case (membrana). Rolls were kept in book-bins (scrinia, capsae: cf. line 107). See Williams (1992).
16 Ovid here, as earlier in his erotic poetry, puns on the double meaning of pes, which, like its English equivalent, can be both a physical and a metrical foot. Cf. Am. I.1.4 and 3.18; Ibis 46.
20 The ‘god’, for the first time here, as often later, is Augustus, who is the poem’s implied addressee. Virgil, with a very different tone, had long before (Ecl. 1.6–7) divinized Octavian as the great peacemaker. The appeal, as Kenney (2) p. 444 points out, stresses (here as elsewhere) two main points: ‘the irresponsible, indeed tyrannical, character of Augustus’s authority; and its ultimate inferiority to the power of mind and spirit’.
21 With some misgivings (despite the enthusiastic endorsement of Diggle, p. 401) I accept Luck’s emendation here: quaerent si plura legentes, ‘if people demand more details’. The MSS read quaerenti plura legendum or legendus, ‘anyone who wants to know more must read you’, which is construable, but militates against the sense of what Ovid is saying, since such perusal will provide no more information, while in the very next line the book is warned against any improper revelations.
26 ‘A good (for nothing) case’: not for the first or last time (see, e.g., Tr. I.2.67–8), Ovid plays with sense-reversing linguistic ambiguities. Causa patrocinio non bona maior erit can be translated either in the obvious sense, ‘a not-good case will be beyond advocacy’, or, exploiting enlaced poetic word-order, ‘a good case will not be beyond advocacy’. A neater way of suggesting a miscarriage of justice — while officially praising the judge — it would be hard to imagine.
28 ‘Those poems’: the Amores and, in particular, the Art of Love, which Ovid himself regarded as one of the two reasons for his exile: cf. Tr. II.207 and elsewhere.
34 Romans, like Greeks (in both cases probably because of cults of the dead) abhorred the thought of dying abroad (cf. Tibullus 1.3.54) or of being lost at sea (Tr. I.2.51–6).
39ff. The assumption (not an unnatural one) that the writing of poetry called for peace, leisure and freedom from anxiety was a commonplace: Tr. I.11.37–8, III.14.41, IV.8.27–8, V.12.3; cf. Hor. Ep. 2.2.77; Tac. Dial. 9, and especially Juv. Sat. 7.53–73.
43–4 For the life-threatening dangers in Tomis from raiding tribesmen, a recurrent theme, see, e.g., Tr. I.10.25, IV.1.21; EP IV.5.35.
58 Slyly, Ovid inserts here a reminiscence from his erotic poetry: the book (like a love-letter, Am. III.8.6, or, worse, a ring, Am. II.15.9) can go where the poet cannot.
67–8 ‘Love’s Preceptor’ was the title Ovid arrogated to himself in the Art of Love (A A I.17 and elsewhere). The penalty suffered by this work was to be banned from public libraries (Tr. III.1.59–82 and 14.5–8), and discarded by prudent private owners (EP I.1.11).
69–72 Not only did Rome’s tutelary deities (including Jupiter Victor, Apollo, and the Lares and Penates) have temples on the Palatine; it was, further, the site of Augustus’s palace, a conjunction which Ovid exploits to the full.
75ff. The hawk-and-dove, wolf-and-sheep illustration had a long literary history, going back to Homer and Hesiod (WD 202ff.); Ovid himself had already used it at A A II.363–4, Met. V.627, VI.527–8.
79–80 Phaëthon, in Ovid’s version of the myth (Met. II.377–8) was unjustly struck down by the god’s thunderbolt: cf. below, note to 114. The repeated association of Augustus with Jupiter and his random blasting of mortals is by no means complimentary.
83ff. There is a mythological allusion here: cf. Apollod. 2.1.5; Epit. 6.7–11; Eur. Hel. 766ff., 1126ff.; Prop. 3.7.39–40, 4.1.115–16; Ovid Tr. V.7.35–6, Met. XIII.56ff., Rem. 735–6. Palamedes, the son of Nauplius, had been killed through the machinations of Odysseus; his father, by way of revenge, rigged false navigation lights on the rocky promontory of Caphareus, off southern Euboea, thus luring the Greek fleet to destruction on its return from Troy.
90–91 Ovid was fond of the Icarus myth (cf. A A II.45ff., Ibis 368, Met. VIII.183ff., and below, Tr. III.4.21–4 and 31) because it offered him an easy image for the over-ambitious poet flying too high, with wings secured only by (literary) wax.
92 Another erotic echo: the advice to the book verbally recalls Am. I.4.54.
93ff. The book, personified, is to act as emissary on Ovid’s behalf with the Emperor, a literary forerunner in this role of his patient wife.
111–12 The three books referred to are those of the Art of Love. In the Latin, ‘something everyone knows’ (quod nemo nescit) is, as so often with Ovid’s language, ambiguous: it can refer either to the contents of the books, or to the business of loving. I have tried to preserve this ambiguity in my translation.
114 The examples of parricide Ovid presents in the Latin text are Oedipus, who killed his father Laius (Soph. OT 715ff., 1398ff.; Apollod. 3.5.7), and Telegonus, Odysseus’s son by Circe, who dispatched his father with a spear tipped with a stingray’s spine, the wounds inflicted by which Aelian (NA 1.56) believed incurable (Apollod. Epit. 7.36–7; Proclus p. 57f. Kinkel). It is interesting that in both cases the parricide was unwitting: thus the books, too, destroy their creator not out of conscious malice, but through the will of others.
117–18 For the preservation of copies of the Metamorphoses by friends, and Ovid’s burning of his own working text before he left Rome, see below, Tr. I.7.15ff.
Descriptions of storms were a rhetorical commonplace in ancient literature. Ovid uses this one to present himself as a threatened hero, beset by undeserved perils — but cannot resist the temptation, at the same time, to parody epic conventions. He is serious enough, though, about the ‘threat to his poetic psyche’ (Dickinson, p. 163), and indeed, storms throughout these exilic elegies symbolize the writer’s helpless exposure to the grim rigours of frontier life.
4–10 As so often, Ovid invokes mythological precedent — here for the better persuasion of deities controlling sea and wind — in order to justify or confirm his argument. Examples are taken in turn from the Iliad (5–6), the Aeneid (7–8) and the Odyssey (9–10). The reference to Poseidon picks up the allusion to Palamedes in I.1.83ff., since Poseidon was Palamedes’ grandfather, and Palamedes’ death was one major cause of Poseidon’s resentment against Odysseus. It is possible that Ovid is hinting at support for his cause in high places at Rome; but any attempt to seek specific equations between gods and patrons — let alone to apply mythic incidents of murder or bride-robbing in an immediate historical context — should be avoided. The reference to Augustus’s divinity (11–12) is, nevertheless, characteristically double-edged.
37ff. The first mention of Ovid’s wife, and of her supportive role in Rome during his exile. Nothing so sharply distinguishes the exilic from the erotic poetry as this frequently stressed marital leitmotif.
50 For the Romans the tenth, as for the Greeks the third, wave in a series was supposed to have exceptional size and force. This notion of periodicity may have a certain basis in fact: André Tr., p. 9, n. 1 cites a French authority who claims that ‘ce nombre dix est admis encore par beaucoup de marins méditerranéens’. The storm’s literary antecedents are stressed by Ovidian artifice throughout: there is even a strong hint of parody.
67 Once again, Ovid indulges in ambiguity at the Emperor’s expense. Est illi nostri non inuidiosa cruoris/copia has proved a stumbling-block and, very often, an embarrassment to modern editors. Copia can mean both ‘supply of’ and ‘control over’; inuidiosa, a positively Empsonian epithet, can signify (a) odious (b) enviable (c) envious. The negative can attach itself to either verb or adjective. Augustus has — what? An unenviable quantity of Ovid’s life-blood? A not-odious, i.e. popular, control over the poet’s life? Or does he have no hateful authority, etc.? Possibilities are endless. Only the ambiguity — and the latent resentment — remain constant.
75–80 For Ovid’s youthful Grand Tour in Greece and Asia Minor, cf. EP II.10.21ff.; Fast. VI.417–24. He does not refer to it in his autobiographical elegy, Tr. IV.10; but that poem, as we shall see, offers a calculatedly selective presentation of the facts. The splendour of Asia Minor’s cities was proverbial: see, e.g., Catull. 46.6.
83 ‘The sinister rive gauche of Pontus’: Ovid sometimes exploits the double significance of adjectives such as laeuus or sinister when describing the Black Sea (Pontus). Both epithets can be taken as simple geographical indicators: ‘Pontus-on-the-left’, i.e. the coast west and north of a vessel passing the Bosporus; but they also contain the built-in sense of ‘ill-omened’. Cf. Tr. I.8.39, I.11.31, IV.1.60, IV.10.97; EP IV.9.119 (laeuus), and Tr. I.8.39, II.197, IV.8.42, V.10.14; EP I.4.31, II.2.2, III.8.17 (sinister).
95–100 Ovid, by treating Augustus as a god whose judgments are incontrovertible — indeed, impious to challenge — highlights the arbitrary nature of his own punishment: not least since he then proceeds to restate his standard self-exculpatory defence, with a group of buzz-words that we soon come to recognize. His ‘fault’ (error) was ‘crimeless’, i.e. he did not commit a criminal act (facinus). His mind, too, was not criminal (scelerata) but merely stupid or inept (stulta). Cf. Némethy Tr., pp. 19–21 and Green CE, pp. 206ff. for a collection of further Ovidian passages emphasizing the same points: e.g. Tr. I.3.37–8, III.1.52, IV.4.44; EP I.7.40.
103 For a typical passage of such pro-Augustan propaganda see, e.g., A A I.177–228 (itself not without some sly incidental digs).
104 Ovid’s phrase ‘all the Caesars’ includes (a) Tiberius, Augustus’s adopted son and successor-designate; (b) Tiberius’s son Drusus by Vipsania: (c) Germanicus, son of Tiberius’s brother Drusus, and adopted by his uncle in AD 4. Gaius and Lucius, Tiberius’s sons by Julia, had died in AD 4 and 2 respectively; Agrippa Postumus, Julia’s son by Augustus’s friend and admiral M. Vipsanius Agrippa, had been unadopted and exiled to Planasia in AD 7, and was now very much an unperson. Perhaps Ovid was wise not to name names.
From a storm at sea Ovid moves us back in time — time dominates this poem — to an impressionistic account of his last night in Rome, the prelude to his leisurely journey into exile. He emphasizes, with good reason, his desperate procrastination (7–12, 51–68). The theme of exile-as-death becomes insistent (21–6, 89–100), and Ovid does not hesitate — whether in self-mockery or self-importance — to compare his role to that of Aeneas at the fall of Troy (25–6). It should be recalled that Aeneas had been enshrined by Virgil as a great patriot who, for love of country, abandoned an unbecoming liaison that interfered with his manifest destiny: perhaps no accident that Ovid goes on (37–40) to repeat his insistent claim that his offence was a mistake, but no crime. Let the other gods, he says cattily, put the ‘heavenly man’ (caelesti uiro: surely pejorative or mocking?) right on that point. The role of Ovid’s wife in the drama is stressed and expanded. She is to stay behind — gladly though she would have shared his exile (79–88) — as Ovid’s representative and defender in Rome, working to ameliorate his conditions and protect his interests. (The scene, as so often with Ovid, is visually weak. We know that it is possible to see the Capitol by moonlight from Ovid’s house (27–30), but that is as far as we go in the matter of description. The human predicament, poetic rhetoric — these are what matter.) Her grief is greater even than her husband’s (17–18, 41–6). Ovid’s pangs at parting from her, and hers at losing him, evoke some plangent rhetoric (73ff.).
The parallel of Mettus (see below, note to 75–6) has struck some commentators as out of place: Heinsius and others argue for excising the couplet as an interpolation. I am not so sure. Mettus was a general who, in a crisis, held his troops aloof from battle, waiting to see whether his official allies or the opposition won. Had Ovid’s error been so very different? Had he not been guilty (see Introduction, p. xviii) of failing to report some Julian intrigue, in the silent hope that the Julian cause might yet triumph?
5–6 Ovid was obliged to leave Rome by December AD 8, one reason for the stormy voyages he endured: cf. Tr. I.4,I.11.3 and 13ff., and Green CE, p. 206.
7ff. It has been argued (Shackleton Bailey (2), p. 391) that Ovid’s alleged lack of time to prepare for the journey into exile is incompatible with ‘long procrastination’, and that therefore ‘long’ is the product of textual corruption (he suggests dempta, i.e. the removal of all delay by a sudden fiat, rather than longa); but this is impercipient. It is precisely that mind-numbing sloth which has left the banished poet scant time to prepare himself at the very last moment.
19–20 The reference is to Ovid’s only child, his daughter by his second wife (Tr. IV.10.75), who was married en secondes noces to a senator, Cornelius Fidus, and had accompanied him to Africa, a senatorial province. Apart from his relationship to Ovid, Fidus’s one claim to fame is that he burst into tears in the Senate (Sen. Dial. 2.17.1) when Domitius Corbulo referred to him as ‘that depilated ostrich’.
25–6 Ovid still cannot resist the half-comic, mock-epic effect. No Roman reader here could fail to recall Aeneas’s departure after the fall of his city (Virg. Aen. 2.776ff., 3.1–72), or his famous words (3.11–12): ‘I am borne an exile out to deep sea,/with my companions and son and house-spirits and great gods.’ Ovid’s point is that he has no such companions.
37–40 The clear implication of these lines is that Augustus has been mistaken in his judgment of the poet: once again the error, the mistake, is stressed, and criminality denied.
47–8 The axis of the Bear is almost identical with that of the Pole Star. It is very probable that Ovid’s frequent references to the Bear (Ursa Major, the Great Dipper) were also covert symbolic digs at Augustus who, according to Suetonius (Div. Aug. 80), had a birthmark on his body that exactly duplicated the stars composing this constellation.
55 To stumble while crossing the threshold was regarded as unlucky; thus most people took care not to touch it at all when going out. We are to assume that Ovid took advantage of the superstition as an excuse for further delay. Cf. Her. XIII.87ff., Met. X.452; Tibull. 1.3.19–20.
61 Scythia was in fact an area to the north and north-east of the Black Sea, but came to be used, in a loose generic sense, to indicate any region beyond the eastern frontier (limes) that was cold, barbarous and inhospitable.
66 For Theseus and Pirithoüs see Glossary. As a symbol of fidelity Theseus carries ironic undertones.
75–6 See Livy 1.28–9; Virg. Aen. 8.642ff. Mettus Fufetius was an Alban general in the reign of Tullus Hostilius, the third king of Rome. Called upon as an ally to support the Romans in an engagement against the neighbouring towns of Veii and Fidenae, he pulled out his troops in mid-battle (whether through treachery or cowardice history, or myth, remains uncertain), and the following day, as a punishment, was lashed to two chariots, which then were driven in opposite directions, tearing him apart. Arguments for the deletion of this couplet as inappropriate (why introduce the Roman arch-traitor here?) and therefore spurious, lack cogency and seriously underrate Ovid’s mordant irony.
99–102 These lines have more than their share of textual problems, but I am not convinced of the need to emend 99 (Madvig, Luck) to give the sense ‘and longed, by dying, to lose all consciousness of trouble’. The text as translated (with general agreement of the MSS) is quite forceful enough. On the other hand I agree with Shackleton Bailey ((2), p. 391) that something is badly amiss at 101–2: the repeated uiuat et at the beginning of both lines is a warning signal of possible corruption. His ut for et in 101 is convincing. But where he wants to replace the verb (ploret et), I feel the need for a noun to agree with absentem. Nasonem (cf. EP IV.6.2) at once suggests itself. Ovid’s habit of thus referring to himself in the third person is far more marked in the exilic poems: forty-two instances in the Tr., EP and Ibis as against ten in the rest of the corpus.
At twenty-eight lines this is the shortest poem in Book I. It also recapitulates many of the themes already deployed in I.2. Granted that there is only so much to be written about any storm at sea, and that the properties remain essentially the same, Ovid’s tempests are, as we might expect, highly literary, though perhaps too rumbustious for the proverbial teacup. The waves here (5–8) might have been imported from the earlier poem (I.2.15ff.), along with the helpless steersman (11–12, 15–16 = I.2.31–2). Here, as there, Ovid expresses a pious wish not to be blown back to Italy (19–20 = I.2.91–4), and prays, as one already dead, to be spared destruction (28 = I.2.71–2). The effect is to ‘frame’ I.3, the flashback to Rome, in a Götterdämmerung-like turbulence of perilous and heaving seas, of storm-clouds shot through with lightning. Poem I.4 also looks forward, in a subtle sense, to both I.5 and I.6, since in I.5 the narrator is still at sea (17–18), perhaps clinging to metaphorical wreckage (35–6), but in an expansive, more relaxed mood that suggests calm after storm, while in I.6 that wreckage has already undergone a near-successful attack by wolf-like predators (7ff.).
1–4 The ‘She-Bear’s stellar guardian’ is Boötes (otherwise known as Arctophylax or Arcturus, from the several stars composing the constellation). Since we know from Tr. I.11.3 that Ovid’s stormy passage across the Adriatic took place in December AD 8, he must in fact be referring to the evening setting of Arcturus (and not, as has been oddly suggested, the morning setting of 26 May AD 9). For the association of this setting with stormy weather see Plaut. Rud. 71; Hor. Odes 3.1.27.
8 ‘Painted godheads’: the protective painted figureheads of deities, carried by Greek and Roman vessels at prow or poop as their guardians (tutelae), to whom appeal was made in storms: Hor. Odes 1.14.10; Virg. Aen. 10.171; Pers. Sat. 6.29.
19 ‘On our port side’: since Ovid was sailing south-east from Brundisium (Brindisi) he would have the Illyrian (Albanian) coast on his left.
This long elegy falls into two clear halves (1–44, 45–84), so sharply distinguished that some MSS show them — wrongly, I think — as separate poems. The theme of the first section is loyalty and friendship: the signal failure of most of Ovid’s friends to stand by him (27–34, cf. I.3.15–16); praise of, and exhortations to, the faithful few that remain, in particular (though not exclusively, 35ff.) the addressee, possibly Carus (see below). The section concludes with an appeal to these friends to work for the appeasement of the god’s (i.e. Augustus’s) wrath.
Ovid then turns, his language sliding into the epic mode, to an elaborate comparison of his own situation with that of Ulysses (Odysseus), whose sufferings his own, he claims, resemble, but also outstrip. Ovid has wandered further, suffered worse storms, has no faithful comrades (59ff.: but then neither did Ulysses by the time he was through). Where Ulysses was making for home, Ovid is going into exile (65ff.: disingenuous: Ovid’s aim, too, is to procure recall). The claim (67–70) that exile from Rome is worse than exile from Ithaca will have had, one might guess, a limited urban appeal.
The contrast between Ulysses’ strength and military experience and the poet’s gentlemanly lack of fighting muscle (71ff.) is laying the grounds for a reader’s sympathy when Ovid finds himself exposed, in a frontier town, to barbarian incursions (Tr. II.195, III.10.51ff., IV.1.69–84, V.10.23–6; EP I.2.15–24 and 81–8, I.8.5–10, III.1.25–8), and must, despite age and ill health, arm himself and man the walls with the rest. The epic mode thus both enhances Ovid’s status and enlists support for his plight: after all, he points out (79–80), most of Ulysses’ troubles were fictional, whereas his own are for real (a tongue-in-cheek claim by a habitual gilder of literary lilies).
The last four lines are crucial, and reveal (81–4) Ovid’s underlying forensic strategy. Ulysses got home: to Penelope, understood, and the reader instantly understands why I.6 is addressed to Ovid’s patient wife in Rome. What is more, Ulysses had the help of a goddess; and while Ulysses was, admittedly, harassed by Poseidon, Ovid’s tormentor is Jupiter — Augustus himself. Unless the god’s anger should abate, the poet is doomed to exile. Thus the end of the second section echoes the first (44 = 84): all loyal friends must work for the poet-hero’s recall and reunion with his Penelope. Ovid-Ulysses is now established as the heroic antagonist of a not-quite-omnipotent deity. Like Ajax (but with more devious subtlety and less self-exposure) he has set himself, methodically, to defy the lightning. What, after all, has he to lose? He is, as he himself insists, a dead man already (cf. I.4.28).
1ff. Who was the addressee of this elegy? On the basis of EP I.9 (compare 3–4 with I.9.13ff., 5–6 with I.9.21–4, 34 with I.9.15–16) it is generally assumed to have been Celsus (see below, introd. note on EP I.9, p. 313). But what, then, are we to make of the ‘clues in lieu of your name’ (positis pro nomine signis)? To pun on, or allude to, Celsus’s name would have been easy enough, but Ovid’s text shows no evidence of this. On the other hand, in line 3 the recipient is addressed as carissime; and since we know that one of Ovid’s closest friends, the addressee of EP IV.13, was named Carus, it seems more plausible to identify him, tentatively, as the addressee of Tr. I.5 also.
33 The ‘two or three’ faithful friends seem to have been Celsus, Atticus, Brutus and Carus: little is known about any of them, and that mostly from Ovid himself.
39–42 On the clemency of Augustus cf. Tr. I.9.23–6 and 35, II.41–50. Since Ovid was only born in 43 BC he can hardly be saying here that he never fought against Octavian in the civil wars, as is sometimes supposed; and his reiterated reference to his naïvety (simplicitate) as the cause of his exile makes it clear that he is alluding to something more dangerous and more recent. Suetonius, Div. Aug. 19.1–2, and Dio Cass. 55.27.1–3, cf. Green CE, pp. 215ff., both describe a group of abortive coups against the regime, the most serious in the spring or early summer of AD 8. It is very probable that Ovid was involved in this plot, at least as a non-participating accessory who failed to report what he knew, and that this was the main cause of his exile. In the circumstances he would be only too eager to stress the fact that he never, in an active sense, ‘fostered armed opposition’. Cf. Tr. II.51–2, III.5.45–6; EP I.1.26, II.9.9ff.
45ff. Ovid was required (as he often tells us) to treat the details of his error as a top-level secret: Tr. II.207–12, III.6.32, IV.10.100; EP II.2.59, II.9.73–4, III.1.147.
57ff. The ‘warlord from Ithaca’: Ulysses (Odysseus), with whom Ovid compares himself elsewhere: see, e.g., EP I.3.27–34, III.1.49–56, IV.14.29–42.
72 Ovid describes his strength as being ‘a gentle man’s’: I have tried to catch in my translation the social implications of ingenuae, which implies the kind of physical resources appropriate for an upper-class free citizen, untouched by the stigma of manual labour.
By now we should be well enough attuned to Ovid’s conventions and methods to see that this is no private, let alone romantic, love-letter (something, as Kenney ((1), p. 40) says, it is hard to imagine an Augustan poet even conceiving), but rather a public statement, part of Ovid’s carefully planned forensic-poetic self-defence. Autobiographical elements, to be sure, show through, and it seems clear enough that the attempt (7ff.) to deprive Ovid of his property was real and unpleasant enough. The gratitude he displays on this count is as rare as it is well justified. But the main burden of the poem lies in another quarter altogether, familiar from the erotic works and elsewhere: literary fame, the ability of the poet to confer immortality (see, e.g., Am. I.3.19–26, I.10 passim; A A III.403ff.), and, in particular, the immortality of his own works (Am. I.15.7ff., III.15.7ff., Met. XV.871ff., A A III.341–6). Ovid’s love is measured (1ff.) by that of two famous earlier Greek poets, Antimachus and Philetas, for their mistresses (elegiac wives being in short supply as role-models), and his wife’s virtue by mythical exempla such as Andromache and, inevitably, Penelope (19ff.). Yet even here Ovid is incapable of resisting a not-so-subtle erotic joke, by including Laodameia’s passion for her dead (20) husband Protesilaüs, since the most notorious fact about Laodameia — well known to Ovid — was her intercourse with a wax image of her husband during his absence and after his death (Apollod. Epit. 3.30; Ovid Her. XIII.151–6, A A II.356; Hyg. Fab. 104). The point, Ovid insists, is not so much his wife’s, or Penelope’s, virtue (whether innate, or acquired through contact with Livia herself) as the ability of a poet, Homer or Ovid, to make that virtue live in men’s minds. Despite the damage done to Ovid’s genius by his exile (29–32), despite his condition of death-in-life — note the repetition extincto (20) . . . extinctum (32) — he still predicts immortality for his wife through his poetry. Whatever Augustus could destroy, that remained; and it was a gift that the gods themselves did not possess. The lines of Ovid’s strategy become clearer as he proceeds. If he can save himself, well and good. If he cannot, he will leave his mark on this unjust god (Marg, p. 512) for all time. He could not, and he did.
1–2 Antimachus of Claros (?b. 444 BC) was an early example of the scholar-poet, a pioneer in the genre of narrative elegy, and best known as the author of a work commemorating his inamorata Lyde (wife or, more probably, mistress), whose death left him inconsolable. Thus on all counts he would be a congenial model for Ovid to emulate or excel. The ‘singer from Cos’ on whom, similarly, Bittis lavished her affections was Philetas (b. c. 320 BC), the tutor (c. 300–295?) of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria, though his poems to her do not survive: cf. EP III.1.57–8, and Hermesianax fr. 7.77–8. Elegies and epigrams were his main forte. Propertius refers to him (4.1.1ff., 5.6.8) in association with Callimachus.
7ff. The object of Ovid’s enemies, clearly, was to get his relatively mild relegatio converted to exilium, so that they could profit by the resultant confiscation of his estate. The punning use of the word tabulas, primarily, here, ship’s timbers, but also hinting at Ovid’s account-books, is impossible to reproduce in English with any kind of neatness. Perhaps ‘columns’ would give some idea of its implications. The identity of this malevolent ‘nobody’ (nescioquis, 13) is quite uncertain: we find similar attacks in the Ibis (cf. 9, 641) and elsewhere: Tr. II.77, III.11, IV.9, V.8 passim.
21 There is a superb ambiguity about Ovid’s ‘if you’d had (sortita fuisses) Homer’, since it remains — deliberately, I think — unclear whether he is envisaging the relationship as one of marriage, amitié particulière, poetic representation, or a combination of any of these; though the general thrust both of this poem and of Ovid’s overall outlook suggests that the last-named characteristic had always to be by far the most important.
22/33–4 Luck, following the Editio Veneta of 1486, transposes lines 33–4 to follow 22, where they make excellent sense: I have adopted this transposition in my text. Cf. Luck’s Tr. ii, pp. 60–61. The kind of confusion that resulted from attempts to leave them where they were can be seen from, e.g., Kenney (1), p. 41 and Dickinson, pp. 169–70.
25ff. ‘That princely lady’ (femina princeps) was Augustus’s wife Livia, with whom Ovid’s wife had at least a nodding acquaintance (cf. Tr. IV.10.73), perhaps through her by no means clearly defined position, prior to her marriage, in the household of Paullus Fabius Maximus and his wife Marcia. This was, in all likelihood, how Ovid, Fabius’s client (EP I.2.129–35), came to meet her. No source shows that she was a family blood-relative, and editors (e.g. Della Corte) who confidently name her ‘Fabia’ are going well beyond the evidence. Once again, as in I.3.25–6, Ovid slily compares ‘great things with small’ (28): first he was Aeneas, now his wife is Livia.
Ovid’s statements, here and elsewhere, concerning his wish that the unrevised text of the Metamorphoses should be burnt (e.g. Tr. I.7.15ff., III.14.19ff., IV.1.101ff., V.12.59ff.), have often, and rightly, been taken with a grain of literary salt. To begin with, how unrevised in fact was the work? No more, shall we say, than that of Virgil’s Aeneid — with which Ovid is deliberately inviting comparison. Virgil in 19 BC left Italy for three years’ travel in Greece and Asia Minor, during which he planned to polish his great work (a programme that has sometimes been regarded with incredulity: did the Aeneid in fact need all that extra time spent on it?). Before departure he instructed his literary executors, L. Varius and Plotius Tucca, that if anything happened to him, the MS of the work-in-progress was to be burnt. He died the same year; but the Aeneid, at Augustus’s express command, was preserved, edited, and published, despite its author’s specific wishes (Vit. Donat. 35–40; Aul. Gell. NA 17.10.2).
Thus we see that Ovid is very consciously staking a claim for his own major work, like that of his great predecessor miraculously saved from the flames — but not, this time, as the result of Imperial intervention. Indeed, whereas Augustus had been directly responsible for the Aeneid’s survival, by exiling Ovid he had, per contra, come within a hair’s breadth of destroying the Metamorphoses. The God, in short, not only displayed poor literary taste, but had been, in the last resort, overruled, presumably by some higher divinity who knew what should be preserved for posterity (A. Grisart, ‘La publication des “Métamorphoses”: une source du récit d’Ovide’, ACIO, vol. 2, p. 149).
But the poem also leads us to the solution — a surprisingly simple one — of why Ovid never (as he could so easily have done) polished the Metamorphoses, let alone completed the Fasti, in exile. All those statements equating exile with death, and describing the poet’s obsequies — in which fire, cremation on the funeral pyre, similarly played a central part — are to be taken with the utmost seriousness (cf. Tr. I.1.4, I.3.3 and 21ff., I.8.14, III.14.20, etc.), at least in literary terms. The burning of the Metamorphoses forms part of Ovid’s own exequies; the books are ‘doomed to perish with me’ (19, mecum peritura, cf. 37–8), and only survive by being snatched from the flames (Tr. III.14.20). Ovid in exile is dead (Tr. I.4.28; EP IV.12.44–5), even if he won’t lie down; but what does this death imply? Surely the demise of the pre-exilic poet, together with any work he might, at that moment, have had in progress: the unrevised Metamorphoses and incomplete Fasti were to stand — like those unrepaired temples in Greece after the Persian invasion — as a deliberate reminder of what, and who, had cut short their author’s life-style, if not his life. The lines submitted as an epigraph to the Metamorphoses (35–40), with their reference to post-humous rescue, and the author’s outre-tombe message that he would have worked on the poem longer had he survived, drive this point home with pungent and embarrassing force. Far from grovelling, Ovid is here as bitter as gall.
5 The ‘dear friend’ who is the addressee seems likely to have been Brutus, since he is elsewhere shown as Ovid’s literary editor and (not in the modern sense) publisher (EP IV.6, cf. Tr. III.14, EP I.1, III.9), responsible for all his works. It was Brutus who issued the first three books of the Tristia on their completion.
17–20 The reference to Thestius’s daughter Althaea — whose son Meleager killed her brothers over a quarrel concerning Atalanta and the Calydonian boar, and who, by way of revenge, burnt the log on which Meleager’s life depended, thus proving herself ‘a better sister than mother’ (Apollod. 1.8.2–3, cf. Aesch. Choeph. 604ff.) — is doubly evocative, since Ovid himself had treated the myth at length in the Metamorphoses (VIII.445–525), and uses the same phrase, ‘my very vitals’ (mea viscera) to describe Althaea’s destruction of her son (Met. VIII.478) and Ovid’s supposed burning of his chef-d’œuvre (20).
On the basis of lines 29–34 the addressee of this poem is often identified — plausibly if not securely — as that poet Macer, related to Ovid’s third wife (EP II.10.9–10), and the author of various elegies and epic works (Am. II.18.1–3 and 35–40, EP II.10.13–14, IV.16.6), with whom the young Ovid travelled to Greece, Asia Minor and Sicily (Am. II.18.1–2, Tr. I.2.77–8, EP II.10.13–14 and 21–42, and cf. Green OEP, pp. 26–8). His faithlessness in adversity is contrasted with the loyalty of that other friend (probably Carus) addressed in I.9. Catullus 30 has been seen as a literary model for this elegy, though the circumstances differ; a clearer pattern can be detected in the resemblance to the speeches that Ovid puts in the mouths of various deserted ladies in the Heroides. As so often, his favourite literary source remains himself, however much he may echo others. The same faithless friend is probably the recipient of EP IV.13, in which Ovid shows himself as reproachful of his infidelities as ever.
1–8 The so-called adynaton (‘impossibility’) was a regular rhetorical device in both Greek and Latin literature. It normally envisaged one of two situations: (a) an event of such unnatural outrageousness that after it anything impossible (examples given) is liable to happen; or (b) the asseverance for the future that ‘sooner shall X, Y or Z happen than that’ (the event under consideration). Improbabilities, in short, are illustrated and emphasized by impossibilities. For good instances of the device see, e.g., Archilochus fr. 122, West; Hdt. 5.92, 8.143; Eur. Med. 410. These show that the range of adynata tended to be limited, and that many of them recurred as well-worn literary clichés: rivers running backwards, the sun moving from west to east, fishes flying or at pasture, birds swimming, a general reversal of natural law like that popularly ascribed to witches (cf. Am. I.8.5ff.). Ovid was partial to adynata: cf. also Tr. V.13.21, EP II.4.25–30, IV.5.41–4, IV.6.45–50; Ibis 31–40; Met. XIII.324–6, XIV.37–9.
14ff. Once again Ovid equates his exile with death, so that his departure from Rome becomes a funeral wake.
39ff. These reproaches are as allusively literary as the closing lines of The Waste Land. For the hard-hearted man as rock-born we have references from Homer (Il. 16.33ff.) onward; the entire passage recalls Dido’s savage address to the defaulting Aeneas (Virg. Aen. 4.365ff.), complete with flinty heart and suckling tiger. Ovid himself had already deployed these tired old insults on various other occasions: see, e.g., Am. I.11.9, III.6.59; Her. VII.37ff., X.109; Met. VII.32f., IX.613ff. Cf. Tibull. 1.1.63f., Lygdamus 4.85–92, and below, Tr. III.11.3, Ibis 229ff.
F. W. Lenz suggested (Latomus 28, 1969, pp. 584–5) that the addressee of this poem may have been the poet Sevérus (EP IV.16.9), hinted at by the phrase ‘serious arts’ (artes . . . seuerae, 58); he also, picking up a hint from Merkel, argued that the phrase ‘no enemy’ (non inimicus) in line 1 presumed an acquaintance whose friendship was something less than certain. I find the second proposition more convincing than the first, not least because of the ambiguities lurking in 43–6 (see below); but both remain highly speculative. The friend most often identified as the recipient is, once again, Carus (cf. 41), and in default of more specific evidence this seems the likeliest solution.
Earlier attempts (apparently dictated by structural numerology) to divide the poem into two at line 36 have mostly* been abandoned. The theme of fair-weather friends (5ff.) dominates. To those who fear Augustus’s wrath Ovid explains that the Imperator (23ff.) understands and appreciates loyalty even when it involves his enemies, a thesis backed by the obligatory group of mythical parallels (27–34). The addressee’s success, which helps to assuage Ovid’s grief (39–52), is contrasted with Ovid’s own wretched plight. There follows (59ff.) a new defence of the exiled poet, to be repeated at intervals, most notably at Tr. II.353–4 (cf. Tr. III.2.5–6, IV.10.67–8): that while his earlier poetry may have been wanton, his life was always above reproach, and his Ars was merely a youthful peccadillo — ‘not a good joke, maybe, but a joke’ (ut non laudandos, sic tamen esse iocos, 62). The successful should help those less fortunate: it will earn them renown. *But not by Hall.
21–6 The bolt hurled by Jupiter-Augustus is pictured, in the traditional fashion, as travelling earthwards in a blast of burning air, something like the emanation from an open furnace door (Owen Tr. I, p. 79), that scorches by mere atmospheric contact: cf. EP III.6.17; Livy 28.23.4, 30.6.7, 39.22.3; Virg. Aen. 2.648–9. Servius, discussing the last-named passage, remarks that there are three types of thunderbolt: ‘those that scorch, burn, and split’. The image is well chosen to convey the peripheral rage of an injured party, liable to vent itself on accessories or mere acquaintances of the principal offender. Once again the Emperor stands clearly accused of overkill and indiscriminate violence.
43–6 The compliment is, to say the least, double-edged. Ovid comes out with an unexceptionable opening clause (43–4) as far as the ambiguous word pretium — both price and prize, value and payment. He then follows it with the deadly little phrase nemo pluris emendus erat, which can mean either ‘no one could be prized more highly’ or ‘no one held out to be bought at a higher price’. After this the compliment of telling a friend that his eloquence makes every case he takes on a good one (45–6) begins to look a little tarnished as well.
49–50 ‘Thunder on the left’ etc.: various popular forms of Roman divination: haruscopy, brontoscopy, augury. Cf. Lucan 1.587–8.
If the poems in Book I have any sort of hysteron proteron correspondence (1 balancing 11, 2 10 and so on, with 6 as a central pivot), which I am inclined to doubt, here is the most promising evidence for it. This elegy, with its sunny mood and deliberate echoes of Catullus 4, stands in diametrical contrast to 1.2, where all is storm and despair. Here ships move swiftly through seas untroubled by foul weather: the narrator describes the stages of his journey with a certain neoteric relish, and the reference to his final destination, as well as the by now formulaic phrase ‘to which I’m consigned/by the wrath of an injured god’ (41–2), have an almost casual quality. Ovid-as-Odysseus, at ease for a while on Samothrace, is putting the Horatian carpe diem principle to effective use. We are left with the minor (and probably insoluble) problem of why, after entering the Hellespont, Ovid decided to change his mode of travel and make the overland journey from Tempyra to Thynias, while the Minerva, probably with his personal effects and servants still aboard, continued by way of Cyzicus and the Bosporus (cf. 15ff. and my note below on 15–16).
1–2 The vessel’s name was Minerva: it carried the goddess’s helmet (and perhaps her bust also) as a figurehead (insigne). Ovid elsewhere stresses her blondness: Am. I.1.7, Fast. IV.652.
3–4 These lines recall Catullus’s famous apostrophe to his yacht (4.3–4).
13 ‘Vast Pontus’s entrance-channel’ is the Bosporus, gateway to the Black Sea. Cf. line 31, the ‘jaws of Pontus’ guarded by Byzantium.
15–16 ‘But as soon as she’d brought me into Aeolian Helle’s seaway’ (i.e. the Hellespont) — what? ‘We swung away westward’: the action, if not the motive, is clear. But what else (et) was it that the ship (and her passengers) did before setting course for Imbros? Et longum tenui limite fecit iter. All commentators agree (Luck rather hedgingly) that Ovid is saying something like ‘and left a long narrow wake behind’: cf. Her. XVIII. 133. But why stress so constant a feature at this precise point? Owen (Tr. I, p. 83 with n. 2), though accepting the general theory, also stresses the fact that, for whatever reason, perhaps bad weather, the Minerva seems to have entered the Hellespont (in, not ad) before changing course. Surely the line means something like ‘And embarked on the long journey within narrow compass’, i.e. up the Dardanelles: thus, ‘setting course for the long haul through the narrows’ seems a fair translation. ‘Hector’s city’ was Ophrynion, an unimportant town, but the site of the Trojan hero’s purported grave.
25–6 The ithyphallic garden god Priapus was said to have been born to Aphrodite in Lampsacus, and consequently had an important cult there (Athen. 1.30b; Paus. 9.31.2; Ap. Rhod. 1.983; Virg. Georg. 4.110; Ovid Fast. VI.345).
27–8 The ambiguity of the phrase uectae male uirginis seems not to have attracted attention: it is so constructed that male can be read as qualifying either uectae or uirginis (the latter in its adjectival sense), and the reader who knows the legend of Helle, well aware already that her journey turned out badly, now finds himself wondering about the character of the victim — or, at the very least, reflecting that her virginity did her little good.
35–40 The literary circumlocutions of Greek Hellenistic poets, and their Roman imitators, can be very trying for a modern reader, and I have generally avoided them where possible (for a reductio ad absurdum of the device see Lycophron’s Alexandra, known even in antiquity as the ‘obscure poem’). Here I have retained one or two of them for flavour. ‘Apollo’s city’ was Apollonia, a Milesian foundation famous for its colossal statue of the god, which Lucullus removed to Rome (Plin. HN 34 39; Strabo 7.6.1, C.319). ‘The citadel named for the wine-god’ was Dionysopolis, earlier known as Krounoi (‘the springs’, Strabo, ibid.), situated a little further north up the Black Sea coast. The hilltop site referred to at 39–40 was Callatis, founded by colonists from Heracleia in Bithynia, a town originally established by Megara.
41–2 Tomis itself (see Introduction, pp. xxiiff.) was likewise a Milesian foundation, of the 6th cent. BC, and also (as Ovid reminds us with some relish, Tr. III.9 passim, cf. Apollod. 1.9.25, Hyg. Fab. 13) the purported site of Medea’s dismemberment of her brother Absyrtus.
45 The ‘twin brother-gods’ were the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda by Tyndareus and Zeus respectively (‘Dioscuri’ = ‘Dios kouroi’, i.e. ‘sons of Zeus’). They became a constellation, the Twins (Gemini), and were — appropriately in this context — the tutelary guardians of sailors and travellers. On Samothrace they had a famous cult, syncretized with earlier worship of very similar deities, the Kabeiroi (cf. Cic. ND 1.119, 3.89).
In sharp contrast to I.10, this epilogue stresses the physical hazards with which his journey has afflicted the poet, the handicaps under which he has been forced to write — not, as before, on his peaceful garden day-bed (37–8), but at sea, in storms, with the promise of further dangers to come when he gets ashore at his final destination (31ff.). It is a poem composed with extreme skill at several levels, and has, unfortunately, tempted scholars in the past, with its vivid talk of ‘spindrift spattering the paper as I write’ (40), and so on, to displays of somewhat embarrassing literalism. In fact the entire journey, storms and all, is made to function as an extended metaphor for the poet’s condition, his creative dilemma: he is the steersman who, ‘his art forgotten’ (immemor artis, with — as so often — a subtle allusion to the banned Art of Love), now ‘turns to prayers for aid’. He is also the exile who, like Eliot’s Webster, is ‘much possessed by death’, and sees images of mortality everywhere (23–4), with mixed terror and suicidal self-surrender. Yet he holds out against storms and threats; in the last resort nothing can deter his creative impulse, and we leave him (41–2) ‘still scribbling away’.
What is more, amid this storm of literary artifice that Ovid conjures up, cheerfulness will keep breaking in regardless. ‘A sight, I fancy, that shook the Cyclades’, he observes ironically (7–8) of his putative shipboard efforts at composition, and expresses mild surprise, complete with comic zeugma, that ‘in all that upheaval/of spirit and sea inspiration never flagged’ (9–10). ‘The agitation of these wintry waves’, he asserts, ‘is nothing/to the turbulence in my breast’ (33–4): by the time they reach the reader, in fact, they are one and the same, and — such is the unifying power of creation — are bound to end simultaneously, as Ovid hopefully predicts (43–4). There has been a perfect assimilation of raw material to Ovid’s artistic (not to say artful) self-expression. Despite disclaimers to the contrary (35–6) the old hand has not lost its cunning. More: his creative skill is what keeps Ovid sane. Omnis ab hac cura cura leuata mea est (12): art becomes, in addition to everything else, a most potent therapeutic.
5 ‘The twin gulfs of the Isthmus’: the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs, separated by the Isthmus of Corinth. Sometimes passengers, as in Ovid’s case, changed vessels; sometimes the ship was winched up and hauled across on wheeled trolleys, which ran along a paved way, with sunken tracks, known as the diolkos.
25ff These lines anticipate a theme that will recur again and again in the exilic poems: the physical dangers from marauding tribesmen to which the area of Tomis is exposed (see, e.g., Tr. III.10.51–6 and 67–8; IV.1.79–84; V.10.23–6; EP I.2.81–8, cf. 15–24; III.1.25–8).