In Time of Lockdown: Reflections on Locks, Lockdown, Isolation

(C)Ovid and Isolation Mr J F Lloyd (CR, Head of Classics) Covid-19 has raised many fascinating questions about our ability to cope with isolation. Throughout history writers, artists and composers have actively sought isolation and withdrawn themselves from the bustle of civilisation to improve their creative powers, while some have been forced into such circumstances against their will. The differing reactions to adversity pose questions about the ideal conditions for creativity, and the ancient world provides one such example. In ad 8 the Roman poet Ovid was sent into exile for offending the emperor Augustus. There was no trial in the Senate or in a court. He was simply banished by imperial decree to Tomis (modern Constanta in Romania), a backwater on the Black sea, where he lived the rest of his days in isolation and misery far from civilisation.

Writing poetry in the reign of Augustus (27 bc to ad 14) was something of a balancing act. Horace and Virgil received the patronage of Maecenas, a wealthy friend of the emperor, because their poetry was a powerful tool of propaganda for a ruler who wanted to restore the mos maiorum (‘custom of our ancestors’) after the upheaval of civil war. In his epic poem the Aeneid Virgil creates a hero (Aeneas) who embodies the ideals which had guided Romans to greatness in the past, and could do so once more. Virgil found ways to glorify Rome and its ruler without descending into mere sycophancy, most notably by eliciting sympathy for those who are the victims of the Roman juggernaut, but many scholars still find that his praise of Augustus, however oblique, sits uneasily with their ideal of unfettered poetic creativity.

Ovid was nearly 30 years younger than Virgil and the leading poet of Rome at the time of his banishment, but his relationship with the establishment was more problematic. Though the precise nature of Ovid’s offence against Augustus remains a mystery, he refers to two causes: carmen (a poem, his Ars Amatoria) and error (an indiscretion, possibly a scandal involving the imperial household). The Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), published around 1 bc, had become a long-standing thorn in Augustus’ side. It is a didactic poem instructing the reader in the arts of courtship and erotic intrigue. Whereas in Ovid’s earlier Amores (Loves) the reader was observing the poet’s love affairs, now the roles were reversed, and the poet was encouraging the reader’s love affairs. It was the didactic and irreverent nature of the work rather than any erotic content per se, that made it morally subversive in the eyes of Augustus. When the poet was exiled to Tomis, the Ars was removed from public libraries and placed under a ban.

Ovid left his wife behind in Rome to work for an imperial pardon, but they were never reunited. While in Tomis he wrote two books of poems, the Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea) which paint a bleak picture of life far removed from the bustling metropolis of the Roman empire. The inhabitants were half-breed Greeks and full-blooded barbarians. They dressed in skins, wore their hair and beards long, and walked around armed. Some spoke a hybrid Greek, but Latin was rarely heard, so Ovid was forced to learn the local languages, even writing a poem in Getic. The area around Tomis was flat and treeless, and winters were harsh, with the Danube icing over. Wine would freeze in the jar and be served in broken pieces, and there was the constant threat of raids by wild tribes across the Danube. It was like some frontier town in the Wild West.

Ovid was not cut out for the tough life. The most strenuous activity he had enjoyed in Rome was gardening, which was impossible in exile. For Ovid, separation from his family and from the cultural centre of the Roman world was the aching void which he tried to fill with his poems, which he dispatched (along with letters which do not survive) to maintain contact with the home he had lost. Of course, he has an agenda, to elicit sympathy from those (including the emperor) who might take pity on his plight, but his sufferings were real enough, and no amount of technical virtuosity in his verse can conceal the gradual erosion of his spirit, as the barren and icy landscape becomes a metaphor for his own frozen creativity.

Ovid died in Tomis in ad 17 and would go on to enjoy a flourishing afterlife. His mythological masterpiece Metamorphoses was among the greatest influences on Western art and culture, including the poetry of Shakespeare, while his poems of exile would provide a major inspiration to Alexander Pushkin, the founding father of Russian literature. In 1820 the young Pushkin had allied himself to the radical movement opposed 86