Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (8 page)

It is time to turn to the Roman side of the story. This was the eighth year of the Christian era and the thirty-ninth since the battle of Actium had brought peace to the Roman world and Octavian, generally known as Augustus, its first emperor, to unchallengeable power. Ovid, aged fifty-one, with his wife (whose name is unknown to us) was on vacation in the Isle of Elba. She was his third wife and the only one with whom he had found lasting happiness. By rank he was a member of the equestrian order,
17
entitling him to the white toga with a thin, purple stripe. He was proprietor of a fine estate, the Villa Ovidio at Sulmo, the family seat, ninety miles inland from Rome; and a comfortable town house close under the Capitoline Hill. As a young man he had studied law, indeed begun its practice and even held minor office. However, as he put it, ‘no matter what I tried to write, it came out verse'.
18
The Muse beckoned and he followed, abandoning the substance and respectability of a public career. Not that poetry was without respect. Despite his father's warning that ‘even Homer died broke',
19
there was no more propitious moment at which to excel, especially for one who could combine poetry with patriotism. It is a peculiarity of the Augustan Age that its greatest artists were able to reconcile themselves to the political background, matching stirring events with noble song. Here Ovid was a misfit, whose destiny was to be the ancient world's supreme poet of love. His counterpart is surely Byron, with echoes of subject-matter, of attitude, even of place.
20
Both were associated with scandal. Both would end in the loneliness of a Greek exile. And for both, success came early and in a rush. ‘I awoke one morning to find myself famous',
21
said Byron of the publication of
Childe Harold;
and Ovid's first work, the
Amores,
brought much the same response. ‘When pressed to give public recitations', he tells us, ‘my beard had been trimmed but twice.'
22
At a stroke he attracted distinguished patronage and the acclaim of dilettantist Rome. This early reputation would be confirmed, indeed outshone, by the
Ars Amatoria
(Art of Love), published during his early forties: a sparkling essay on seduction, sometimes compared to Pope's
Rape of the Lock
and, it seems to us, as inoffensive. Be that as it may, Ovid would thenceforward choose subjects more suited to his maturity: the less successful and uncompleted
Fasti
(the Festivals), a poetical calendar of the Roman year and its holy days. Then came his central work, the
Metamorphoses:
a series of verse episodes, each concerning a supernatural change; a thesaurus of transmogrification; a glittering amalgam of myth, magic and invention. In all Ovid enjoyed thirty years' homage, first as the
enfant prodige
then as the literary lion of Rome. And yet, during the last decade of this happy and productive time, a cloud began to smudge his sky.

He had never sought the approval of officialdom. In this sense he was the odd man out in the golden quartet of Augustan writers. Livy's
History,
in 142 books, had Rome's greatness as its unswerving theme. Virgil's
Aeneid,
a patriotic epic, climaxed in the birth of Rome and its rebirth under Augustus. Even the hedonistic and satirical Horace reflected, in his
Odes,
the great pageant of the Roman story. These were, in the highest sense, the Augustan apologists. Rome's mission had been their inspiration and they lifted Latin to parity with Greek as the supreme language of civilized mankind. All three were, however, older than Ovid. Theirs was the civil war generation, which had longed for peace and prized the blessings it brought. Ovid's was the post-war generation, which took peace for granted and had heard enough of valiant deeds. Understandably he turned toward less patriotic themes, unrelated to public events. His commitment was total but it was to poetry itself, not to a regime, however glorious. It is of course clear to us that, far from being contrary to the glory of the Augustan Age, Ovid's achievement was a proud part of it; and that his deviations from orthodoxy were refreshing as well as harmless.

Not entirely harmless. The emperor had long been disturbed at the state of morals, behind which lay a genuine concern for the falling upper-class birthrate. Laws were passed to protect marriage and outlaw adultery. Though carrying stiff penalties, these were regarded as unenforceable and something of a joke, especially in view of gossip about Augustus' own peccadilloes and his ability to reconcile them with his position as
praefectus moribus
(corrector of morals). Nor was he exceptionally prolific himself, having produced only one child, Julia, despite four marriages. The birthrate remained low, the morals uncorrected.

Joke or not, Augustus took the matter seriously. Dio has left an account of his harangue, directed toward unmarried or childless knights during the year of Ovid's banishment. It was a long and scathing speech, of which a few sentences give a flavour:

How should I address you? As Romans? You are heading toward the elimination of that name. The truth is you are on a collision course with our national future. What would be left of mankind if everyone behaved like you? You are murderers, in the sense of not giving life to those who should be your descendants; and traitors, in the sense of leaving your country bereft of heirs. For it is people who make a city, not empty houses or deserted squares. How can we preserve the state if we neither marry nor have children?
23

Further laws were passed to penalize the unmarried, both fiscally and in matters of inheritance. These were called the
Papia-Poppaea
laws, after the consuls of that year. To the discomfort of some and the amusement of others, it was then realized that Papius and Poppaeus were bachelors.

Despite severity on this issue, Augustus could hardly be called a figure of fear. On the contrary, with middle age he had become increasingly relaxed and approachable. Unfortunately this was about to change. Events within the imperial family would trigger outbursts of that youthful ruthlessness which had won battles and eliminated opponents. Robert Graves,
24
not without support from Roman historians, would have us believe that Augustus' blood relatives were being disposed of through the bad offices of his fourth wife, Livia, in favour of her son (by her first husband) Tiberius. This is the woman called by Tacitus, ‘a curse to the state as a mother; to the house of Caesar as a stepmother'.
25
Though there is no hard evidence, her alleged methods were either to poison her stepchildren and step-grandchildren, or to poison her husband's mind against them. True or not, public splendours were to be soured by a succession of private griefs. In
AD
2 a scandal broke around the emperor's daughter, Julia, who was accused of adultery and exiled to a tiny and desolate island. Such harshness is explainable only in terms of her father's acute sensitivity to ridicule. Another source of amusement was that the adultery law was part of a code called the
Lex Julia;
named after Augustus' family, the Julians.

The appearance of Ovid's
Ars Amatoria,
only a year or so later, was an all-time publishing gaffe. Here was what appeared to be a philanderer's charter. It would have been less humiliating for the administration had the book flopped. But no, it sold like hot cakes! Ovid argues somewhat lamely that adultery had been far from his thoughts, that the poem was intended as a
divertissement
relating only to affairs with courtesans. In his favour was the fact that his own personal life was relatively blameless. ‘No scandal ever attached itself to my name,'
26
he maintains. ‘My muse was merrier than myself',
27
meaning he had been a playboy in poetry rather than practice. Whatever Augustus' feelings, there was no official rebuke and no action was taken. In any case, Ovid's pen now pursued more seemly subjects. However, to the government's and perhaps the author's embarrassment, that poem on illicit love refused to lie down. On the contrary, its popularity continued to soar.

In
AD
8 there was another hammerstroke to the greying, imperial head: the arrest and banishment of his granddaughter, daughter of his already exiled daughter, also called Julia, again for adultery, complicated this time by an alleged conspiracy to replace Tiberius as heir. Livia, if Graves' theory is correct, was working overtime. It is probable that the same year also saw the death of Ovid's patron, M. V. Messalla Corvinus, distinguished general, statesman and honoured friend of Augustus. Without subscribing to the poet's indiscretions, Messalla's very presence would disarm retaliatory measures. With his passing, a trusty shield had fallen quietly away.

We return to Ovid, unaware of the gathering shadows, on his visit to Elba during this same year. If he had offended Augustus, surely he had by now redeemed himself?
Ars Amatoria
may have been an almighty
faux pas,
but seven years had elapsed since publication and no harm had come. At this juncture, out of the blue, a man (or probably men) appeared at the villa where the happy couple were guests. Perhaps they were plain-clothes officers of what later became known as the
frumentarii
28
(military supply services), a cover-name for the secret police. The poet was staggered. Under arrest … for writing a love poem! But that was not apparently the question. Ovid was party to some knowledge. He had seen something. Something he should have reported.

In the lonely years ahead, Ovid would brood interminably on this fateful moment. He had blundered. An indiscreet poem, certainly; that he would rue, long and deeply. He had erred too in the direction of his work: its disregard for all the age had accomplished. But of the other matter, the last straw which broke the imperial patience, Ovid would never speak. That is to say he would never mention it in his verse. Though the desire for self-justification was obsessional, to speak out clearly on the reason for his banishment could only rekindle the emperor's anger and damage his chance of reprieve. Doubtless the secret was fully discussed in his private correspondence and was common gossip in Rome. Nothing of either has survived; and hints in the
Tristia
are all we have:

Two ‘crimes', a poem and a
faux pas

Have brought me to this pass.

On the latter I must hold my peace

Lest insult to injury be added.

For it is enough, O Caesar,

That you should have been injured

Once already.
29

And again

Why did I get my eyes into trouble?

Why was I so stupid as to cover up

That which I knew?
30

He swears that what he saw was by accident:

And I am punished because my blundering

Eyes beheld a wrong, as if it were a

Sin that I have eyes.
31

Whatever he beheld, his implication in this ‘wrong' seems not to have been deep:

And yet the gods, who see through all

Men do, know that I have

Nothing done which could be called

Great guilt.
32

What was it, this wrong of which he dared not speak? Scholars have speculated endlessly. As the poet implies several times,
Ars Amatoria
was only a contributory cause. It has often been surmised that the true reason concerned the indiscretions of the younger Julia, for both his and her banishments occurred in the same year. Perhaps he knew of those indiscretions. Perhaps, in some peripheral way, he was accessory to them. It is unlikely we will ever know.

Ovid would, however, be let off lightly. Not even
exsilium
(exile): something milder; something called
relegatio
(demotion). He would keep his knighthood, estate and fortune.
Ars Amatoria,
now in all the public libraries, would have to go; but otherwise he could continue to work as he pleased, write as he pleased, correspond with whom he pleased. Only he must return immediately to Rome, pack his bags and take ship for somewhere in Greece; a place called Tomis.

Back in Rome he tried to steel himself for suicide. But there was little steel in Ovid. One thinks of Romans as martial, but here was a quiet man, a meek and on the whole a modest man; physically timid, frail and nervous. Even in boyhood he had shrunk from sport and the mandatory war games. He loved his wife, his home, his work and the adulation it brought. Virgil had died a generation earlier, Horace that very year, leaving Ovid as the language's greatest living poet. Above all he loved Rome herself; the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, talk and endless stimulus of this mother city; queen and crossroads of the world. Now the cup was snatched away. A sudden confrontation by nameless men; a verdict and a sentence pre-imposed.

And yet life among the Greeks might be bearable. Romans of his class saw Greece as a spiritual home. Indeed he had studied in Athens. Neither was this to be
relegatio in insulam;
banishment, like that of the tragic Julias, to some God-forsaken rock. Nor
in oasim;
expulsion to an oven-hot clump of datepalms on Egypt's fringe. At least he was bound for a city, long established, older even than Rome herself. Nevertheless, however packaged, the reality was exile: the destination to which he would be brought by the ‘crooked axle' of his luck, ‘the destiny, knitted at my birth from a black fleece'.
33
Nor was it a comfort to recall that until half a century earlier ‘exile' had been the traditional grace-period during which a citizen condemned to death was allowed to flee Roman territory. This suggests that flight into the
Barbaricum
was scarcely preferable to execution: for where, in that lawless wilderness, might refuge be found? The view was that earth's most felicitous regions by now belonged to Rome and what she did not have was not worth having. Though Ovid was not being sent into barbarian territory (the Pontic cities were already under Roman protection) the point was a fine one, for as yet this protection was largely nominal and in a day-to-day sense the Tomitans were expected to defend themselves. It was a place of which he was soon to write: