Ovid: the science of exile

Abstract

The essay is concerned with Ovid’s biography and poetics. The author argues that Latin literature owes this supreme poet of antiquity an unsurpassed debt and suggests that Ovid’s exile may have been a hoax contrived to accommodate his creative agenda. The scholar questions the narrative of an exiled Ovid languishing and ultimately perishing far from Rome, in Tomis, on what is today the Black Sea coast of Romania. Could he have simply devised his ostensibly forced departure, glossing over the veracity of its reasons and circumstances? Exploring this hypothesis, Anikin considers Ovid’s relationship with the princeps Augustus, as well as the poet’s role in Latin poetry. He finds that Ovid outlived Octavian so that the end of Rome’s Golden Age was marked by the death of a poet rather than that of an emperor. Overall, the article is less of a study of Ovid’s biography and more of an attempt to present it as the background of a discourse on art. The paper proceeds to discuss Metamorphoses, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris, supplying each with a concise characterization and pointing out the relevance of Ovid’s poetics in our time.