The time has come to publish, nonetheless.
The medics assure me I’m good for another millennium
But my bones ache, my memory’s going,
And I’m not the man I used to be in the sack.
Oh, I still make the occasional conquest.
But my love life will soon be over
And I want to get it out there in public,
To save myself from oblivion while I can.
So here are the poems: my SOS message.
If they get me in trouble so be it – after Rome
I’m used to that. The narrator isn’t me exactly
But he’s a version, a metamorphosis.
Ovid is dead. Long live the new Ovid!
I’ll understand if you don’t care for him
But he’s the man I seem to be stuck with
And his story is the only one I know.
Porn
this fickle obsession (3.11)
There was always the Internet to gorge on.
Daytime meant work, and I worked like a Trojan,
but at six I’d pour a drink and go online.
Watch a bitch take a load! Hear the screams of a slut getting her
ass destroyed! See a milf with big tits meet the cock doctor!
It was like going to executions in the amphitheatre.
Sex is supposed to mean desire, but how could I feel it
when the girl on the screen, however exquisite,
had a cock down her throat that was a damn sight
bigger than mine? Gagged, chained and corseted,
slapped about the face while doubly penetrated,
the women were lambs to the slaughter, paid
to feign euphoria even when some brute was pissing
on them. Whatever turns you on, yeah, but who could find this exciting?
I thought Caligula had plumbed the depths till I watched fisting.
Still, I too had a favourite website, www.classicalbeauties.com,
featuring goddesses like Juno and Venus
with only their breasts naked and a silky gown hiding the mons Veneris.
They were all mine to imagine. And not a single penis.
Soft
There we lay in bed, embracing, and all to no purpose (3.7)
Once I was Zeus, with his Leda.
Now I sit watching birds, at the bird feeder.
Don’t tell me it’s normal – I don’t want to know.
Where the fuck did my libido go?
My prick used to be a relay baton,
Firm in all the hands it passed between.
I was a god, a wolf in swan’s clothing.
Until last night. Now I’m nothing.
There we were, under the duvet.
She couldn’t have been more lovely.
But when the time came, I couldn’t get it up.
Stage fright? All that wine we’d supped?
I lay there imagining the years stretch out –
Bridge, cocoa, the stairlift – while she kept at it
To no end. Taking pity, I thanked her for her time,
Put my clothes on and skedaddled home.
Now I sit here in my backyard,
Watching the water ice over, the earth get hard,
And tits and finches flock to the bird feeder –
How the mighty are fallen, eh, Leda.
20
We don’t get to use Harriet Roque very often. But if there’s a new version of the Odyssey or Aeneid, say, or a book about Sophocles or Plato, we’re straight on to her: she’s the best classicist around – lively, accessible, critically astute. It’s amazing how she finds time to do journalism, along with writing books, running a university department and bringing up her four kids, but she sees it as part of her mission to save the ancient world. At the Essex comprehensive she attended in the 1980s, Latin and Greek were still on the syllabus; now she says they’re taught only at public schools. Even universities are closing down their Classics departments.
My email gave her the background without naming names: the poems were by a friend of mine, who for complicated reasons had to remain anonymous. ‘A friend, eh,’ she said. ‘Bung them in the post. I’ve a train journey to Edinburgh coming up. They’ll help me pass the time.’
She emailed the following week.
‘I’m doing a thing at the BBC tomorrow – could we meet near there?’
I waited in Starbucks, just down from Portland Place, while she pre-recorded a talk for Radio 3 (‘twenty minutes on Medea, to fill a concert interval’). When she arrived – blobby mascara, bright red lipstick, lilac coat, straggly hair – she wouldn’t sit down, saying she needed some air and that no respectable person would use Starbucks anyway. We walked north to the Marylebone Road and across into Regent’s Park, where, somewhere beyond the Outer Circle, we found a bench, though we didn’t sit there for long because Harriet wanted to skirt the zoo and hear the wolves, before passing the boating lake and the building where she’d once talked at an academic conference, all of which we did and none of which halted her monologue, which she punctuated with apologies (‘Sorry if this is boring’, ‘Forgive me for going on’), needless ones, since I was riveted.
‘How much do you know about Ovid?’ she’d begun.
‘Very little.’
‘Brief synopsis. Born in 43 BC. A provincial from Sulmo, in what’s now the Abruzzi – that’s important, I think: he was sent to Rome as a teenager, but he came from elsewhere and at some level he never really understood how things operated in the capital. Not that his family was poor: they were well-to-do, with good connections, and his father had great hopes for him – a training in law and a career at the Forum was the expected path. But Ovid was rebellious. And from an early age, to his father’s dismay, a dabbler in poetry. He married his first wife at sixteen, or even younger. Who she was we don’t know, but he later described her as “useless and worthless”. By the time he was eighteen the marriage was over and he went off travelling for two years. It’s tempting to think that some of the emotions he describes in his love poems – passion, jealousy, suspicion that his Corinna is having an affair – stem from that first relationship. He was an innocent. So, perhaps, was she.
‘When Ovid returned from his travels his father expected him to knuckle down. For a while he seems to have tried. But to be a senator or person of consequence in Rome you needed military as well as legal training, and he stopped short of that. Quite a few of his poems cheekily present lovers as the real soldiers, because of the wounds they receive. The day job he had in his twenties – minor admin work, at a guess – left him plenty of time to write. The first edition of the Amores came out around 15 BC, when he was twenty-eight – in five volumes rather than the three in the second edition some years later, which is all we now have. It’s intriguing to think what kind of poems he dropped – juvenilia? Or poems he thought too risky? We’ll never know.
‘But we do know he married again, probably round the time the Amores came out, doubtless under pressure from his father, who’d have been pushing for an heir. His wife died soon after, probably in childbirth. The child was a girl.
‘So Ovid was single once more. He’d had ten years of being a man about town, between his first two marriages, and now he was back, with further opportunity for affairs and to make use of them in the books he published – The Art of Love, Cures for Love, and the revised Amores. He was part of a thriving literary culture – Virgil, Horace, Propertius, etc. And he had a nice life – a place in town and a villa in the countryside, three miles outside Rome. He liked to write while sitting in his orchard. And he wrote steadily, at a rate of five hundred lines a year. As Rome’s favourite poet, he enjoyed many privileges. There was no suggestion of notoriety or of the emperor being offended by his verse. Even his dad seems to have come round to him.’
Small children went by us every few minutes, asleep in pushchairs, tottering in reins, running ahead of their carers – mostly nannies, by the look of it, mob
ile phones pressed to their cheeks as they chatted to friends while monitoring their charges (‘Do not pick up, Esther, it is dirty’). Marie will be collecting the boys from school, I thought.
‘Is anything known about Ovid’s mother?’ I said. ‘And what he thought of her?’
‘No. Nor what she thought of him. Perhaps she approved of his promiscuity – Go on, my son. Some mothers are like that. Shall I continue?’
‘Of course.’
‘In his mid-forties Ovid married again, for a third and final time: his new wife – previously married, perhaps widowed – came with a daughter. The marriage seems to have been happy. It also made Ovid even more productive. The books he went on to publish – including the Metamorphoses – were the work of an upright citizen, a middle-aged man not a young stud. Feted, lauded, at the peak of his powers, he could look forward to a comfortable old age. Then, disaster! A summons to appear before the Emperor Augustus. Ovid was in Elba at the time. It’s possible he knew there was trouble coming and had gone there to lie low, hoping it would blow over. Augustus was no Caligula, but everyone knew he could be harsh. Even so, when Ovid appeared before him he probably expected no more than an angry dressing-down. Instead, he was banished for life. There doesn’t seem to have been a public trial. Augustus himself would have acted as judge. He didn’t need witnesses or a jury to decide that Ovid was guilty.’
‘Guilty of what?’
‘No one really knows. The only evidence comes from the letters he wrote in exile, pleading for clemency, which suggest two reasons: either his poetry had given offence or he’d committed an error or indiscretion – not a crime but a blunder. He blames a former friend called Ibis for drawing Augustus’s attention to the Ars amatoria, The Art of Love. But Augustus would have known about the poems anyway. And Ovid had so many potential enemies – men whose wives or mistresses or daughters he’d slept with, or who were jealous of his fame – that any number of informers could have been responsible. The surprise was the timing. Augustus’s campaign against licentious behaviour had begun many years before – ethical cleansing, you could call it. But sanctions were rarely invoked and Augustus himself was hardly beyond reproach: there were rumours of incest and pederasty, and of how his wife Livia – whom he’d married after stealing her from a friend – brought him virgins to deflower. Moreover, The Art of Love had been out for ten years. Why ban it from Rome’s public libraries now? And exile its author for life?
‘One trigger might have been the shame Augustus felt because of the two Julias, his daughter and granddaughter. He’d been devoted to the first Julia, carefully supervising her upbringing and arranging her three marriages (the first two husbands died) with the imperial succession in mind. But she became notoriously promiscuous and after separating from her third husband, Tiberius, Augustus arrested her for treason and adultery. Some years later, for the same offence, he exiled her daughter. That was in AD 8, around the same time that he exiled Ovid.
‘Does the timing mean that Ovid was sexually involved with the second Julia? Was his crime witnessing one of her liaisons, but failing to report it? Or did he witness some indiscretion by Augustus himself – catching him in flagrante, with a woman or boy or with his daughter or granddaughter, and then blabbing about it? All have been suggested.
‘He might also have been complicit in some plot against Augustus. Plots were certainly afoot, and while claiming he was innocent – he would, wouldn’t he? – the “error” that had led to his downfall could have been his proximity to people Augustus had come to distrust, with political expediency rather than moral outrage the cause of his punishment. Maybe he simply ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, he was banished for life.
‘The place of exile couldn’t have been better calculated to break his spirit: Tomis, near the mouth of the Danube, on the Black Sea – an outpost of empire, the Roman equivalent of being sent to Siberia. The form of exile imposed on him, relegatio, allowed him to keep his property. But his family remained in Rome, while in Tomis he’d neither friends nor readers. He spent the rest of his life trying to get back – pleading for pardon, writing begging letters, toadying to whoever might help. His Tristia is full of self-abasement. He names all the other poets who wrote risqué verse yet escaped censure. He moans about the weather, the brackish water, the biting cold, the lack of vineyards and orchards. He lists his illnesses: fever, insomnia, delirium. He worries he can’t write any more – yet writes and writes. And he longs for Rome, desperate to return to the society he’d once satirised.
‘Augustus’s death in AD 14 brought no reprieve. Ovid died in exile, at the age of sixty, around four years later.
‘That’s the background. You should read the famous mini-autobiography in Book 4, Letter 10 of the Tristia. In terms of the poems you sent – I am coming to them, promise – there are a couple of questions to think about. One is why anyone today would want to translate the Amores. Many of them are misogynistic. Women as sex objects. And Ovid as a precursor to Henry Miller, full of strategies for getting laid. As though women are dupes or dopes, who have to be tricked into having sex. I exaggerate, but not much. Without knowing your friend, I don’t know why he would take this on.
‘The other question is this: did Ovid really have the experiences he describes? What if he was actually a faithful husband and his mistress Corinna a fiction? And what if instead of stealing wives from husbands, he was merely stealing tropes from fellow poets – not violating moral codes but adhering to literary convention? Some scholars have argued as much. And there’s a good basis for it. “My Muse is wanton,” he says in his Tristia, “but my life is chaste.” Catullus said something similar: “the true poet should be chaste himself/but his poems need not be” – Ovid may have nicked that line. He was working in a well-established tradition. Whether or not the poems are autobiographical, they’re playful about the difference between truth and fiction. My own theory is that the hurt Ovid suffered in his first marriage made him determined never to be hurt again. Which left him two options: either to fuck lots of women but not get emotionally involved, or to be celibate. Either way, my guess is that he wasn’t the cynical seducer he pretends to be.
‘So, forty-nine poems from the Amores survive – fifty-one if you count the two with a second section. Your friend has arranged them in a different order, while also adding a Prologue: there’s Ovid, still alive two thousand years on and living in London, when he receives a message summoning him back to Rome, fears it’s a trick, decides his wife must be dead, and finally gets round to having lots of sex, not having had much when he was married and having been celibate since he went into exile. It’s a way of implying that what follows can’t be trusted – that it might not be true, or as he says in another poem that he’s writing only at the bidding of his wife. All the Ovidian elements are there: pashes, crushes, the exchange of secret messages, and a lot of adultery. But you wonder if they’re just a literary exercise.’
‘Strictly speaking, they’re not translations, then?’
‘Not even loosely speaking.’ She laughed. ‘I’m being unfair. A few of his efforts follow the originals quite closely. The row between Elegy and Tragedy, for instance, which he sets in Caffè Nero. Or take the so-called siesta poem. It’s one of Ovid’s most famous, and your friend sticks to the same scenario: a shuttered bedroom on a hot afternoon and the joys of lovemaking. But in his version, it’s the woman who takes the initiative, not the man. And there are other poems where he just uses a phrase or image and ends up with a poem that’s nothing like Ovid. Perhaps those ones are autobiographical. Your friend seems to get through a lot of women, but keeps coming back to a particular “you”. Or maybe several. I couldn’t tell. Do you know if he has any Latin?’
‘He studied it at school, I think.’
‘Probably not beyond O level, at a guess. It looks to me as if he worked from other translations.’
‘It’s possible.’
We’d paused by a horse chestnut tree where
a woman and her small daughter were feeding a squirrel. The daughter stood motionless and silent, and held the nuts out nervously. I imagined how Noah (about the same age) would be in her place – shouting, jumping up and down, having to be restrained from chasing the squirrel away.
‘So this friend,’ Harriet said. ‘Come on, Matt, there’s no need to be shy. The best of the poems aren’t bad. What’s worrying you – what scholars will say or what your wife will?’
‘They’re not mine, I swear. Like I said, the man who wrote them was a friend.’
‘Was a friend? You mean you fell out? It gets more intriguing all the time.’
‘He died. I’m acting as his literary executor.’
It takes a lot for Harriet to stop talking, but for ten seconds she did.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, touching my arm, ‘I feel bad now.’
‘I’d tell you more, but there are legal issues.’
‘Has anyone else read the poems?’
‘Only his agent, who’s my co-executor. And the editor at his publishing house. And his widow.’
‘Ah, the widow.’
‘Yeah, it’s tricky.’
‘Well, at least you know what I think.’
‘Do I?’
‘They’re spin-offs or remakes, not literal renderings. If you do publish them, you should avoid calling them translations.’
‘They’re worth bringing out, though?’
‘You know me. Anything to stimulate an interest in the Classics! Get a poet to look at them, too. That might help persuade whoever’s stopping you.’
‘Did I say someone was stopping me?’
‘Of course not. Wherever did I get that idea?’
I read the Amores on my Kindle that night, in Peter Green’s Penguin translation, with Rob’s version alongside for comparison – Ovid’s Amores Revisited, he called it on the title page. As Harriet said, Rob sometimes stayed true to Ovid and sometimes veered away. The departures were telling. Where Ovid complains about his lover going through with an abortion, Rob feels relief; where Ovid delights in presenting his lover with a ring, Rob fears it’ll give the wrong signal. Still, the mode was similar, with the poems addressed to an intimate ‘you’ or extolling a sequence of ‘she’s. The inconsistencies were consistent, too: romantic idealism one minute, cynical libertinism the next. I wasn’t writing Rob’s biography, but between the lines I could make out a Life. A late introduction to sex. First love, in Tennessee, for Corinne, ending in disappointment, from which he never recovered. Various short-lived relationships, either in pursuit of the One or from a hunger to experience the Many. Marriage to Jill, whom he might or might not have loved passionately, but on whom he could depend. An affair or series of affairs. Till his libido failed, at a time when his popularity as a poet was dwindling, and he set down a record of his life and loves, including a final poem confessing to impotence (unable to perform in bed, he performed in poems instead). It wasn’t just that he’d needed the Amores to give his own story a shape. At some level he thought he was Ovid. Ovid redivivus. The over-identification was mad. But Rob had sometimes described himself as ‘slightly off my trolley (unlike my sister, who’s completely bonkers)’ and he’d got odder in later years.
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