The Homage itself consists of twelve sections, involving (with the exception of three lines from Book 1 and poems 2.1 and 3.16) a reworking of three clusters of poems from Propertius’ second and third books: specifically, poems 10–15 and 28–34 from Book 2 and the first six poems from Book 3.105 Pound’s work treats a number of themes and poems that we have looked at previously, including Propertius’ joyful recounting of night-time struggles with his lover (VII; cf. 2.15) and one of the poems where Cynthia is allowed to rebuke the poet for his spying (X; cf. 2.29b). Even more, his only inclusion of lines from Book 1 allows him to charge his lover with ‘levity’, that fundamental trait of the puella, culminating in a startling modern image encapsulating what it means for the ego to be an example to other lovers: ‘The harsh acts of your levity! / Many and many. / I am hung here, a scare-crow for lovers’ (XI).106 Yet, for as much as he weighs Propertius’ notions of love, Pound continually highlights the theme in Propertius that was for him most pressing: that is, the nature of poetic production itself, including ‘the relation of the artist to society’.107
Pound’s vibrant response to Propertius illustrates the ways in which writers of later eras used ancient poetry as a means for deliberating some of the most pressing issues of their day, as well as their own, at times tormented, place within it. With these themes in mind, we want to turn in our final section to Ovid’s modern legacy in a part of the world where his influence is perhaps less well known, but no less profound.108
Ovid in Modern Exile
Since the early Renaissance, artists and scholars have been fascinated by Ovid’s fate. In eras of political upheaval, massive displacement and banishment, Ovid has become, as we noted previously, an ‘ur-exile’, the archetypal banished poet who embodies the ideals of free-thinking and artistic individualism in the face of absolutism.109 Since ‘banishment, displacement, and the return of the exiled constitute a consistent world-wide modern phenomenon’,110 Ovid provides in the words of one critic a ‘typology of exile literature’.111 From Dante and John Milton to John Masefield and Joseph Brodsky, poets thus ‘have focused on their own sense of identification with a predecessor’s paradigmatic exile’.112 In the twentieth century, when exile became also a political act, the identification with Ovid became even more prominent among those who, for one reason or another, were forced to flee their homeland or suffer major changes while still living in it. So, too, for many eastern European writers Ovid’s example required the balancing of ‘two key personae, the lover and the exile’.113
Returning to Tomi: Ovid in Romania
As we saw in the previous chapter, Ovid expresses unrestrained contempt for Tomi, finding it increasingly difficult to adjust to its culture, language and customs. During the centuries after Ovid’s death, the memory of the exiled poet was forgotten in the actual territory of his exile as it changed rulers and endured various invasions. Indeed, the cultural rehabilitation of Ovid’s legacy in the region did not occur until ‘the humanistic Renaissance of the seventeenth century’;114 from then on, Ovid’s poetry has produced continuous (albeit at times sporadic) responses from modern Romanian authors, who invest Ovid’s exile with meanings ranging from national unity to artistic freedom.115
Published in 1885 by Vasile Alecsandri, a prominent Romantic poet and playwright, the drama Ovidiu expands creatively on the main facts we know about Ovid’s life. In the solid tradition of our ancient poets, the play revolves around love and hate: Ovid is caught up in a complicated romantic situation with Corina and her former lover Ibis, while pursuing a secret love affair with Augustus’ granddaughter Iulia (i.e., Julia), an affair that causes his exile. While in exile, the poet longs for his native land as he reminisces about his past life in Rome, juxtaposing it with his joyless present existence. However, upon his deathbed Ovid has a prophetic vision about the fall of the Roman Empire and the rebirth of a new Rome in Dacia. It is in this last vision that Alecsandri’s national concerns become evident: the author emphasizes Romania’s Latin origin and, in so doing, asserts his country’s legitimate claim to the values of the West, as well as a return to the common cultural source of Western civilization.
Born in 1944, Marin Mincu penned a fictional ‘journal’ by Ovid in Italian: Il diario di Ovidio (1997), published later in a Romanian version. The journal’s fictional entries present Ovid’s meditation on life, art, love and, once again, spiritual discovery. What is especially surprising in Mincu’s rendition is that Ovid’s exile is presented as voluntary: Rome was too corrupt, Augustus was a tyrant and the poet never could find true love until he came to Dacia and discovered the pure love of a local woman, Aia. Andrei Codrescu’s 1990 essay ‘Exile: a Place’ – a work written in English – takes Ovid’s exile as a model for his own departure from his homeland.116 For Codrescu, who escaped from Soviet Romania, Ovid’s Tomi is no longer a miserable place of confinement, but a place of freedom and exploration, one that offers the opportunity of writing in another language and winning over a new audience for his poetry. This new paradigm for thinking about poetic exile as freedom from the confinement of one’s homeland is also especially prominent in another tradition of Ovidian reception, this time in Russia.
Ovid in a ‘Cold Climate’117
Ovid’s exilic plight resonated with Russian poets almost from the inception of Russian national poetry. Unlike their Romanian counterparts, Russian poets were not particularly interested in reimagining Ovid’s discourse of love; rather the dilemma of his exile fascinated and drew them in infinitely more. In the Russian reception of Ovid, we clearly see a tendency also explored in Ovid: the homeland as an unattainable and unresponsive beloved, the source of every hope and every sorrow. Russian poets – ‘homesick and sick of home’118 – developed and honed this theme of their love-hate relationship with their motherland, whose allure and emotional distance fuelled their poetic inspiration.
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), the first Russian poet par excellence, mentions Ovid several times, dedicating a whole poem to him (‘To Ovid’) while in exile himself. In that poem Pushkin, who was exiled by tsar Alexander to Bessarabia (today’s Moldova), a site geographically very close to Tomi, identifies with the Roman poet, but views his exile as a liberation of sorts. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the theme of Ovidian exile was taken up once again by Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938), who perished in Stalin’s Gulag. In several of his poems Mandelshtam returns to Ovid and, following Pushkin’s example, also offers the view of exile as liberation.119 However, the most compelling and modern treatment of Ovid occurs in the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, Russia’s own ‘ur-exile’.
Ovid occupies an important place in Brodsky’s poetry throughout its whole evolution. Following in the footsteps of Pushkin and Mandelshtam, Brodsky – a pariah of the Soviet state – found in Ovid his ancient double, not only in biographical terms but also in terms of poetics. In 1964–1965, during the time of his exile in the north of Russia, Brodsky wrote two poems connected with Ovidian themes, ‘A Fragment’ and ‘Ex Ponto’, the latter with a subtitle ‘The Last Letter of Ovid to Rome’. The former contains traces of Ovid’s own melancholy and equates exile with death through the refrain ‘Naso is not ready to die’ and other persistent references to dying. The poem ends with the rather depressing stanza:
Naso, don’t disturb Rome.
You yourself forgot
to whom you’re sending letters.
Maybe to the dead.
Just a habit. Check again
(don’t take it as offence)
the address and then
cross out Rome please
and insert: Hades.120
For Brodsky the portrayal of Rome is inextricably connected with that of his own unattainable beloved, the city of St Petersburg. ‘Ex Ponto’ continues the Ovidian theme in Russian poetry promulgated earlier by Pushkin and Mandelshtam. However, while both Pushkin and Mandelshtam ‘edit’ Ovid’s sadness and nostalgia and cast it in a more optimistic light, Brodsky stays remarkably close to th
e plight of the original Ex Ponto:
To you, whose pretty features
perhaps do not fear fading
into my Rome, which, like you, has not changed,
since our last meeting,
I am writing from sea. From sea. The ships
strive to these shores after a storm
in order to prove that this is the edge of the Earth
and in their holds there is no freedom.121
In this short poem Brodsky concisely establishes what he has in common with the ancient poet: his abandoned beloved whose features haunt him, the city as a stand-in for that beloved, the proximity of the sea, and his feelings about being on ‘the edge of the Earth’. However, the journey back is seen as a futile endeavour, a thought that permeates several of Brodsky’s early poems.
The theme of exile from Rome reappears several times in his poetry of this period, but especially in the ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’ with the subtitle ‘From Martial’ (1972). In this poem, written on the eve of Brodsky’s permanent departure for the West, the theme of exile is intertwined with the theme of empire also prominent in Brodsky’s poetics. The poem belongs to the ‘genre’ of letters to Rome, which immediately identifies it as an Ovidian allusion. The subtitle, however, ‘From Martial’ introduces the context of invective poetry, irony and satire in relation to empire:
Perhaps, indeed, Postumus, chickens are not really birds,
but there is misery in having chicken brains.
If one’s fated to be born in an empire,
let him live in a remote province, by the seashore.
It is far from the Caesar and the blizzard;
one does not need to fawn, be cowardly or hurry.
There, you say, the governors are thieves?
But thieves are dearer to me than the bloodsuckers.122
In this poem, the ‘joy’ of exile characteristic of Pushkin’s and Mandelshtam’s response to Ovid reappears. The distance from Rome is seen as a liberating experience, an opportunity for creative contemplation and heroic endeavour. In that respect Brodsky’s approach to the fate of exile differs drastically from Ovid’s. Although, for Ovid, Rome represents the Golden Age of civilization – the exile from which equals cultural death and the return to which is the ultimate goal – for Brodsky, exile is yet another moment replete with irony and the conviction that return is not an option. Brodsky indeed never returned to his beloved city.
Conclusion
Indeed, it is harder to see how a picture is painted than it is to see what it claims to represent, which is the first thing that leaps to the eye.
Paul Veyne
IN THIS STUDY, we have aimed to enrich the experience of reading Latin love poetry, poetry that has held its various audiences enthralled for two thousand years. While love poetry may appeal to today’s readers in large part because of its emotional immediacy, at the core of our work is recognition that the distance of several thousand years creates a divide between us and the poets, a gap that can only be bridged by unravelling layer upon layer of these sophisticated works. Clearer understanding of the relationship between the ancient love poets and their poetic personae (love poetry’s ego), the historical surroundings that conditioned their sensibilities, the intended audiences of their texts and the gender dynamics of Roman society contributes enormously to our enjoyment and appreciation of Latin love poetry’s canvas.
Taken together, the love poets remind us that while love is a feeling we may share across the centuries, it is also one patterned uniquely by who we are, where we are, and when we are. So, if the love poets convey different modes for loving in the time of Roman civil war and during the age of Augustus, what does love look like today, in the twenty-first century, with the social structures we have woven, the cities and countrysides (not to mention countries) we inhabit, and the political and economic realities in which we live? It is perhaps because they help open such purposeful examination of life and love that the Latin love poets remain so relevant today.
Notes
Introduction
1 The following Latin texts are used in this study: Kenneth Quinn (ed.), Catullus: The Poems, (2nd edn., London, 1973); Michael C.J. Putnam (ed.), Tibullus: A Commentary (Oklahoma, 1973); S.J. Heyworth (ed.), Sexti Properti Elegos (Oxford, 2007); J. Henderson (ed.), Ovid. Heroides. Amores (Cambridge, 1977); E.J. Kenney (ed.), P. Ovidi Nasonis Amores, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris (Oxford, 1961; repr. 1995); G.P. Goold (ed.), Ovid. Tristia. Ex Ponto (Cambridge, 1988). For the ‘Sulpicia’ poems, G.P. Goold (ed.), Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris (Cambridge and London, 1913). Unless otherwise specified all translations are our own.
2 While some scholars date the start of the Augustan era to Augustus’ victory at Actium (31 BCE), the formal settlement of power and titles that would define his long reign took place in 27 BCE.
3 Tara S. Welch, The Elegiac Cityscape: Propertius and the Meaning of Roman Monuments (Columbus, 2005), p. 153. See also Christopher Nappa, Reading after Actium: Vergil’s Georgics, Octavian, and Rome (Ann Arbor, 2005).
4 Cicero once asserted that every Roman had two homelands, their birthplace and Rome, their ‘shared homeland’ (communis patria) (De Legibus 2.5).
5 See, for example, Brigette F. Russell, ‘The emasculation of Antony: the construction of gender in Plutarch’s Life of Antony’, Helios, 25/2 (1998), pp. 121–137.
6 Reinhold Meyer, ‘The declaration of war against Cleopatra’, Classical Journal, 77/2 (1981–1982), pp. 97–103.
7 For more background, see Robert A. Gurval, Actium and Augustus: The Politics and Emotions of Civil War (Ann Arbor, 1995).
8 See Brian W. Breed, ‘Tua, Caesar, Aetas: Horace Ode 4.15 and the Augustan Age’, The American Journal of Philology, 125/2 (2004), pp. 245–253.
9 See, for example, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The Golden Age and sin in Augustan ideology’, Past & Present, 95 (1982), pp. 20–22.
10 Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton, 1996), p. 91; also Christine Perkell, ‘The Golden Age and its contradictions in the poetry of Vergil’, Vergilius, 48 (2002), pp. 3–39. Predicting the advent of a miraculous child who would change the world, Virgil’s poem was later interpreted in a Christian key by Christian apologists.
11 Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, tr. A. Shapiro (Ann Arbor, 1990), pp. 167–172. The event was commemorated in Horace’s Carmen Saeculare; see Duncan Barker, ‘“The Golden Age is proclaimed?”: the Carmen Saeculare and the renascence of the golden race’, The Classical Quarterly, NS 46/2 (1996), pp. 434–446.
12 Jennifer A. Rea, Legendary Rome: Myth, Monuments, and Memory on the Palatine and Capitoline (London, 2007), p. 131.
13 Zanker, Power of Images, pp. 201–210. On Romulus, Rea: Legendary Rome, pp. 38–42.
14 See Beth Severy, Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire (New York and London, 2003) and Kristina Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life (Oxford, 2005); for the connections to love poetry, see Hunter H. Gardner, ‘The elegiac domus in the early Augustan principate’, American Journal of Philology, 131/3 (2010), pp. 453–493.
15 For possible economic motives behind the laws, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Family and inheritance in the Augustan marriage laws’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, NS 27 (1981), pp. 58–80.
16 For a full discussion of each law, see Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge and New York, 1993), pp. 37–41; also Kristina Milnor, ‘Augustus, history, and the landscape of law’, Arethusa, 40 (2007), pp. 7–23.
17 A.J. Boyle, Ovid and the Monuments (Bendigo, 2003), p. 2.
18 Scholars have difficulty fitting this poem into the actual timeline of when individual laws were introduced, however; see Paul Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton, 2004), p. 143.
19
Cf. Cicero’s account of Rome’s impressive transformations at Laws 2.35.95–96.
20 Boyle, Ovid and the Monuments, p. 35.
21 On Augustus’ extensive urban programme, begin with Diane Favro, ‘Making Rome a world city’, in K. Galinsky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus (Cambridge and New York, 2005), pp. 234–263 and Susan Walker, ‘The moral museum: Augustus and the city of Rome’, in J. Coulson and H. Dodge (eds), Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City (Oxford, 2000), pp. 61–75. For contemporary accounts of Augustus’ aims, see Suetonius, Augustus, 29–31 and Augustus’ so-called ‘Res Gestae’ in Alison E. Cooley (ed.), Res gestae divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge and New York, 2009).
22 Zanker, Power of Images, p. 51; see also Rea, Legendary Rome, pp. 29–38.
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