How Exilic Is Ovid's Exile Poetry?

Home , Ars Amatoria, Ibis (Ovid), Tristia

CHAPTER EIGHT

OVID AND THE ‘POETICS OF EXILE’: HOW EXILIC IS OVID’S EXILE POETRY?

Jan Felix Gaertner

Of the many ancient exiles and writers on exile, Ovid is clearly the most prominent ﬁ gure: not only have his exilic works inﬂ uenced later Latin writers on exile from Seneca to Boethius,1 but his poetry and his persona have also been a central point of reference for medieval and modern imaginings of exile.2 Banished in AD 8 for the loose morality of his Ars Amatoria and for some obscure error which, according to the poet himself, personally offended the emperor,3 Ovid spent the rest of his life in Tomis (today’s ConstanĠa, Rumania), on the shore of the Black Sea. Largely, but maybe not entirely,4 abandoning other poetic endeavours, Ovid chose his banishment as subject for his last three works of poetry: the Ibis, a venomous attack on an unnamed enemy, and the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of literary epistles centred around the experience of the poet’s exile. There has been a long tradition of viewing Ovid’s exile poetry as fundamentally different from his earlier works. Ultimately, this idea goes

1 Cf. Innocenti Pierini (1980), Fantham p. 191 n. 61 (in this volume) on Seneca, and Claassen (1999a) 248 on Boethius. Cf. also Bouquet (1982), Fo (1989), and Tissol (2002) on echoes of Ovid’s exile poetry in Dracontius and Rutilius Namatianus, and p. 19 above on Ovidian reminiscences in Stat. Silv. 3.3.154–64. 2 On the medieval reception of Ovid’s exile poetry see Hexter (1986) 83 ff., and pp. 209 ff. in this volume; for a survey of some of the modern reception see Froesch (1976) 131–44, Hexter (1986) 83 n. 2 and p. 210 n. 4 in this volume, as well as Claassen (1999a) 252 ff.; von Albrecht (1971) discusses Pushkin’s and Grillparzer’s responses to Ovid’s exile, Willige (1969) an echo in Goethe’s Italienische Reise, Condee (1958) Milton’s reception of Ovid’s exile poetry. 3 Cf. Tr. 2.207: carmen et error, Syme’s detailed discussion ((1978) 215 ff.), and Hexter pp. 212–14 below; the many, often fairly fanciful conjectures on the nature of Ovid’s error have been gathered by Thibault (1964) 125–9 and Verdière (1992). 4 Parts of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti may have been rewritten by Ovid in Tomis, and Heroides 16–21 may have been entirely composed during the poet’s exile: cf. Ov. Tr. 1.7.33–40, Bömer (1969–86) vol. 1, pp. 488–9 (with further literature), and Harrison p. 135 n. 15 above on the Metamorphoses, Bömer (1957–8) vol. 1, pp. 18–19, Gesztelyi (1974/5), Syme (1978) 21 ff., Fantham (1998) 3 on the Fasti, and Tracy (1971), Kenney (1996) 25–6, and p. 161 n. 37 below on the Heroides.

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right back to the author himself, who claims again and again that his relegation to Tomis on the Black Sea has destroyed his former poetic genius.5 Though harsh statements like that of Hosius ((1935) 248–9), in whose eyes the pitiful thing about the exile poetry was the poetic form rather than the plight of the poet, have become rare, Ovid’s situation in exile is still seen as the main reason for differences in style and content between his exilic and his non-exilic poetry: Doblhofer ((1978), (1980)) has interpreted Ovid’s exile poetry along the lines of “Verzweiﬂ ung” and “Selbstbehauptung”, explaining e.g. the motif of continuous weeping and Ovid’s puns in the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto as outpourings of his soul and attempts at self-consolation; similarly, Claassen (1999b,c) has argued for a systematic and deliberate un-punning of elegiac terms from Ovid’s earlier poetry; González Vázquez ((1987), (1997), (1998) 110, 116) has seen redundant expressions and typical features of Norden’s ‘Neuer Stil’ in Ovid’s exile poetry as results of the poet’s fear of being forgotten in Rome and of his tendency towards psychological “interiorisación”; Videau-Delibes (1991) has developed a “poétique de la rupture” which negates ars and has as its sole objective the communication of personal suffering,6 and Malaspina ((1995) 141) has proposed that such a rhetoric has made Ovid adopt a more prosaic and colloquial, even negligent style.7 Such interpretations turn Ovid’s exile into a condicio sine qua aliter for the form and content of Ovid’s Tristia, Ibis, and Epistulae ex Ponto, i.e. they suggest that Ovid’s banishment not only prompted the author to choose his own life in exile as subject for his poetry, but also fundamentally changed his way of writing. But are Ovid’s Tristia, Ibis, and Epistulae ex Ponto really so fundamentally different from the poet’s earlier works?8

I shall begin by taking a closer look at the themes and motifs of Ovid’s exile poetry.9 Many of the typical features of Tristia and Epistulae ex

5 Cf. e.g. Tr. 1.1.45–8, 3.14.33, 5.12.21–2, Pont. 1.5.3–8, 3.4.11, 4.2.15, 4.8.65–6. 6 Cf. Videau-Delibes (1991) 506: “absence d’inspiration et absence d’art, inaptitude à la célébration ou impossibilité de la mettre en oeuvre, incapacité à plaire à un public choisi vu l’imperfection du poème et refus de la gloire conviennent à la situation de l’exil comme lui conviennent aussi la tristesse et l’imperfection de la materia et de l’elocutio”. 7 Cf. also Bernhardt (1986), who has interpreted the catalogues in Ovid’s exile poetry as a means to ward off the threat of losing the mother tongue (see the criticism of Chwalek (1996) 131–2 and Gaertner (2001a) 298 on the literary tradition). 8 Cf. Holzberg (1997) 200: “Die Grundfrage, die sich allen Erklärern der Exilelegien Ovids stellt, ist die nach dem Grad des Einﬂ usses, den die besondere Schreibsituation auf Form und Gehalt dieser Dichtung ausübt”. 9 As the scholarly debate on the ‘exilic’ qualities of Ovid’s exile poetry has been

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