The Poems of Exile: 'Tristia' and 'The Black Sea Letters'
by Ovid, translated by Peter Green
450 pp, University of California Press, £10.90
"Oh what have I done," groaned a British officer to himself one night in the 1830s, "what have I done, that Her Majesty should banish me to this vile and abominable place?"
He was only doing garrison duty on the British Ionian island of Corfu, not all that abominable a place, but nevertheless he was uttering a true cri de coeur of exile. The condition of exile encompasses a wide variety of circumstances, but they are all pathetic in one way or another, and if that unhappy subaltern felt sorry for himself at the start of the Victorian age, he was exactly echoing the responses of the most famous exile of them all 19 centuries before.
Nobody knows for sure why, in 8AD, the Emperor Augustus banished fashionable Ovid to the remote Roman outpost of Tomis, now Constanta on the Black Sea coast of Romania. It seems it was partly because his erotic poetry was considered immoral, partly because his attitude to Augustus was too disrespectful, and partly because he had been involved in some unspecified plot or scandal. Whatever the reason, Ovid was packed off to Tomis in his 51st year, and there he remained until he died in 17AD, aged 60.
The two volumes of poetry he wrote in exile have variously fascinated, bored or disillusioned generations of Ovid's readers, and they constitute a sort of clinical presentation of the exilic condition, demonstrating its debilitating effect upon a man's morale, his talents and perhaps his psychology. I can't judge the quality of this translation of the poems, in Peter Green's scholarly version first published in 1994, but it seems to me that the poetry's messages are more pertinent than ever in our dislocated and uncertain times. Ovid writes for millions of us today, whether we are languishing in Guantànamo Bay or beginning to wish we hadn't bought our retirement home in the Dordogne.
Technically his banishment was not exile but relegation (relegatio), allowing him to retain his Roman citizenship and possession of his properties at home. This meant that he could send his poems back to Rome, receive letters from his wife and friends, and live more or less as a free man in Tomis. The first element of his punishment was probably not deprivation or discomfort, but plain homesickness.
Kipling called P & O "the exiles' line", because it took thousands of Britons away from home to live and work in foreign parts. Such people did not have to go.They earned decent livings, fulfilled ambitions, enjoyed adventures or found husbands in places far from home. Yet they were exiles of a kind, and we know from myriad letters and memoirs how homesick they soon became, creating their own substitute Englands in Ooty or British Columbia or the Kenya Highlands. Even Max Beerbohm, comfortably at home in Rapallo, pathetically walked downtown every morning to get the London newspapers.
The most touching parts of Ovid's exile poems express this basic emotion, the desire to be in one's own country. Spring comes to Tomis, but in his mind it is coming to Italy far away, with its laughing girls picking violets, its budding vines and its swallows - O to be in Italy, in short, now that April's there! It is in the first years of absence, for him and for us, that the homesickness is worst, while those vineyards are still budding in the mind and the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough ...
But if the home-sickness wears off, the place of exile seems to get worse. Vile and abominable, that soldier thought it, after too long on the Corfu station, and Tomis was even more hateful to Ovid. He detested the place with a passion that became almost paranoic as the years of exile passed. As many a Black Sea tourist knows, nowadays the climate of Constanta is pleasant (average annual temperature 54F), but in Ovid's descriptions it was a perpetual wintry nightmare of cold, fog, bitter winds, wine frozen into bottle-shapes and snow allegedly lying all the year round (at the same latitude as Florence!)
Ex-kings and queens, discredited tyrants, defeated rebels, often found themselves banished to perfectly pleasant places - Carlists to Trieste, Napoleon to Elba, Habsburgs to Madeira, Farouk of Egypt to Italy, sundry discontents of the British empire to Mauritius. But were they content with their comfortable surroundings? Were they hell! Either they plotted ceaselessly for their return home, or they moped the years away like King Hussain of the Hejaz, who spent his exile in the sweet suns of Cyprus murmuring melancholy endearments to his favourite mare - "Draw nigh, O cooling of the eyelids ... "
And the people - my dear, the people! Gradually the foreignness of everyone habitually wears the exile down. As the Corfiotes were to our subaltern, as the Bengalis were to many a memsahib, as the Elbans probably were to Napoleon, so the people of Tomis were, but a hundred times worse, to the ageing Ovid in his banishment. They really were wild, of course, barbaric tribesmen of the Dobruja plain at the very frontier of the imperial civilisation, and to Ovid they became devils incarnate, with their tangled snow-flecked beards, their poisoned arrows and their marauding hordes of ponies.
They spoke no language he could understand, just as to this day Spanish is a closed book to many British expatriates in Andalucia. They worshipped no familiar gods. Worst of all, perhaps, they had no idea who he was. Noël Coward, having ventured one day on to the shambled lower deck of a Hong Kong ferry, emerged complaining only that nobody had recognised him, and Ovid was similarly desolate without his fans and groupies. Writing without an immediate audience was, he said, like dancing in the dark. "Here I'm the barbarian, understood by nobody." He thought he was losing his gift, and took to talking to himself.
At least most exiles get home in the end. Napoleon didn't, and nor did King Hussein, but even Alfred Dreyfus was able to say goodbye to Devil's Island before he died. Ovid never did, and as the years go by we find him changed in his style, his outlook, his very character, by the sad obsessions of exile. Gone is the racy elegance of his youth, gone his wittily mischievous attitude to the emperor who was the cause of his miseries, and gradually petulance, grievance and psycho-somatic ill-health sour him. Sometimes we find him reproachfully blaming his friends and even his loyal wife, sometimes he is odiously obsequious in begging Augustus for a reprieve. He seems to have found no relief in the consolations of philosophy, religion or even his old love, gardening.
But he does seem to have discovered some peace in resignation. He learnt something of the local languages. He began willy-nilly to think of Tomis as home. And asking himself why he went on writing and sending his work back to Italy, he admitted that he was no longer scrambling after fame or glory, "those common spurs of genius", but wrote home because "I wish to be with you in any way I can": that is, to be with his family, his friends, his peers, his culture, his country, if not in the fact, at least in the world of the spirit that knows no emperors, and recognises no exile.
• Jan Morris's most recent book is A Writer's World: Travels 1950-2000 (Faber)
