Mare Nostrum

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.