Emperor Augustus exiled the poet
Ovid to Tomis, a Black Sea port
and ancient metropolis, first city
of the Scythian Frontier, a day’s ride
from the Danube delta. Tomis –
in ancient Greek ‘to cut’, ‘to sever’, so called,
Ovid wrote, because Medea, Jason’s
sorceress and lover, dismembered
her brother there, threw the pieces in the sea –
now is Constanta, Romania, renamed
for the consort of Constantine,
and where the mutinous crew of the Potemkin,
after the failed revolution, surrendered
the dreadnought to the Romanian navy.
Rumour, however, has it the poet
may have exiled himself from Rome
to this the empire’s then furthest margin,
learning of the Emperor’s prurient wrath
at his Ars Amatoria – ‘Should
anyone here not know the art of love,
read this, and learn by reading how to love.
By art the boat’s set gliding, with oar and sail,
by art the chariot’s swift: love’s ruled by art.’
He thought the journey – south through Messina’s straits,
east across the Ionian Sea,
north through the Aegean and the Bosphorus,
tantalisingly past Byzantium –
seemed to take as long as that of Jason
and the Argonauts. ‘The pine planks thunder,
the rigging is whipped by the wind. The keel
bellows, moaning with my troubles’.
He tells us in his poems from exile –
epistles in rhyming couplets, written
on papyrus, shipped to Rome, to friends,
enemies, and many times to his wife,-
that he fears the barbarians across
the Danube, and complains about the climate
that frequently freezes both river and sea,
and about the citizens of Tomis,
who eschew the toga for Persian trousers,
and mock his Latin. ‘…cano tristia
tristis…sad things I sing in sadness.’
In the late 19th century, almost,
as it were, two thousand years too late,
a square was named after him, a bronze statue
commissioned. The sculptor has him pensive,
observing his feet rather than the sea,
not that – compared with Medea’s doings,
and, in Mare Nostrum, the wanderings
of Ulysses and Aeneas, never mind
the poet’s own modest, bitter travails –
the brief antics of barbarian
sailor boys in stripey jumpers on that
most marginal of seas would have been
of the slightest import.
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By David Selzer