In Our Time - Ovid

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43BC-17/18AD) who, as he described it, was destroyed by 'carmen et error', a poem and a mistake. His works have been preserved in greater number than any of the poets of his age, even Virgil, and have been among the most influential. The versions of many of the Greek and Roman myths we know today were his work, as told in his epic Metamorphoses and, together with his works on Love and the Art of Love, have inspired and disturbed readers from the time they were created. Despite being the most prominent poet in Augustan Rome at the time, he was exiled from Rome to Tomis on the Black Sea Coast where he remained until he died. It is thought that the 'carmen' that led to his exile was the Art of Love, Ars Amatoria, supposedly scandalising Augustus, but the 'error' was not disclosed.With Maria Wyke Professor of Latin at University College LondonGail Trimble Brown Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of OxfordAnd Dunstan Lowe Senior Lecturer in Latin Literature at the University of KentProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Obed, the great Roman poet in the Augustine Age, was by his own account destroyed by a poem and a mistake, exiled from Rome to the Romanian coast,

where he remained until his death. His prized works, though, have been preserved, in greater number than any of the poets approved by Emperor Augustus, even Virgil. Many of the Greek and Roman myths we know today are the versions he told in metamorphosis, and together with his works on the art of love, they have inspired and disturbed readers right from the time they were created. With me to discuss Ovid are Dunstan Lowe, senior lecturer in Latin literature at the University of Kent, Gail Trimble, Brown Fellow and Tudor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford,

and Maria Weike, Professor of Latin at University College London. Maria Weik, can you sketch out Ovid's biography? Yes, well, probably no, actually. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome tends to survive in better shape than the biographies of its poets. But we know a little about Ovid, but it's largely what he chooses to tell us in his poetry. So Publius Ovidius Nazo was born in 43 BC,

that's the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar. The Ovidii were a wealthy family from Sulmo, which is in central Italy. His father had ambitions for both his older brother and Ovid to follow the usual career path of the elite that would eventually lead to membership of the Roman Senate. So he studied rhetoric in Roman Athens, held a couple of minor judicial roles, but claimed that whatever he wrote turned from prose into poetry. So he gave up his political ambitions and was already publishing his poetry by the time he was 20. So that implies two things. He'd enough money to set up as an independent poet and he had enough of an audience.

Yes, yes, indeed, because Roman poets were writing for a small elite audience and they were always relatively close to political power. And usually, but not always came from wealthy families because, Horace, one of the greatest Augustan poets, was in fact the son of a freedman, so it wasn't always the case that they were elite, but Horace needed a lot of patronage, a lot of funding to keep him going. But of it not? No, that's right. So we know that Augustus had a literary advisor called Mycenaus, who was the patron of both Virgil and Horace. And this patron, Mycenaeus clearly placed pressure on them to celebrate Augustus as. the founder of a new era of peace after the Civil Wars. And that worked to a degree because in 17 BC, Horace composes a hymn that was sung publicly during a festival to celebrate the Augustine

as a kind of new world order. But they also explicitly decline in their poems to write epics directly on the great deeds of Augustus. So that implies there was some room for them some manoeuvre. Ovid, in contrast, doesn't seem to be close to Mycenaus. He seems not to have had any close patronage, and he certainly keeps Augustus very much on the edges of his poetry. Augustus was the first emperor. His rule is noted for comparative peacefulness, tranquility. He was also a man of high morals, I believe he exiled his own daughter for committing adultery. Can you tell us a bit about him and what it was like being a poet in his reign? Yes, well, literature was very close to political power in that period.

And it's very noticeable that, for example, Virgil and Horace, who were, in a sense, a older generation than Ovid, who had lived through the civil wars prior to the initiation of the regime of Augustus, that even when Augustus takes over, when he has defeated Mark Antony and become the sort of prime mover in Rome, Virgil and Horace still express anxiety about the collapse of the Republic, about the seeming fragility of the new regime. But Ovid, having had very little experience of the Civil War period, seems very confident about the Augustan peace, satisfied with it, not needing to address it or be concerned about it. And that's despite the fact that the period of the consolidation of Augustus's rule, the period when Ovid is writing, penetrated all sorts of aspects of Roman life. So just because the wars are over doesn't mean Augustus is not controlling society in all sorts of ways from taxation to time. So the calendar changes and the festivals in the year change and also even controlling sex because he instated legislation about who could marry.

and criminalised adottery. So Augustus is very much in control of many aspects of Roman society and creates a tighter and tighter grip on it as time goes by, and it's in that environment that Ovid is working. Gail Trembled, can you give us some brief overview of the range of his work in his lifetime?

He starts out working in the genre of love poetry, specifically something called Love Elegy, which is quite a sort of specific, codified kind of Roman love poetry, with the Amores. And he works out from that. He writes the heroides, which are letters of heroines, so sort of exploring a female and a mythological side of love. And he has a go at didactic poetry by writing the Ars Amatoria, the guide to how to love, the art of love. He also, interestingly, writes a tragedy, the Medea, which is the only major work of his that's no longer extant. But then he goes big after that and does write an epic, a very strange kind of

epic, the metamorphoses, and also writes along what we call ideological, so sort of you could say antiquarian, kind of exploring the reasons for religious practices sort of thing, along ideological poem, also elegiac, on the Roman calendar, although it's meant to cover all 12 months, and it only covers six, that's the fasty. And then later at the end of his life, as you mentioned, he is exiled, and writes a large number of further books from exile, mostly lamenting his situation, but also having a go at his enemies as well. Can you tell us about that first collection, about the heroines, the letters from heroines in,

when you tell us about it, the herodies? These, as you say, are letters supposed to be written by heroines of mostly Greek and Roman mythology. They're in elegiate couplets, so sort of associated with the world of love poetry, love elegy. They're all written by women to the men who they are in relationships with, or usually at the end of relationships with, often who have abandoned them. So you get Penelope writing to Odysseus, Medea writing to Jason, Ariadne writing to

Theseus, and so on. And they sort of give this alternative female view, is the idea, on some of these grand male narratives of epic and tragedy. And I think they're quite typically a Vidian as well in sort of having emotion in extreme situations, mix. up with rhetoric and persuasion because all the women are trying to get the men to take them back or to return to them. What's also, I think, very interesting, and again, quite typically Ovidian, is there not just another view on existing myth, they're another view on existing literature. They actually insert themselves very specifically in almost a sort of fan fictional way into great works of the past. So as you read Penelope's letter to Odysseus, you can work out

exactly when in the Odyssey she's writing it. And she mentions that she always gives letters to any stranger who turns up in the palace, you know, who might eventually meet Odysseus and his wanderings and be able to pass the letter on. And you work out that she's actually writing at the stage in the Odyssey where Odysseus himself is a disguised stranger in the palace. And so he's probably going to get this letter and be meant to take it somewhere. So that's one example. There are also, I suppose, variations on a theme, which is quite an avidian thing. And some people criticise some of its poetry collections for being a bit monotonous, but you can also think there's something rather brilliant about being able to write. There are probably 15 letters by individual

heroines, and then he returned to them at the end of his career and wrote some pairs, hero and heroine, and just coming up with that many different poems, exploring different aspects of quite similar situations and different characters too. John Lowe, let's tell to the poetry of blood. There'll be a lot about that in this programme. what was the usual form for Roman love poems briefly before of it? For us, Catullis is an important figure in knowing what Roman love poetry was like in his time. Catullus wrote in a range of styles and first forms, and one of those was elegy. Elegy in Greek in Greek literature, it had expanded to include other personal emotions.

And in the mid to late first century BC, we have a series of poets who fashion what we now call Roman love elegy, Perthus, Tebalas and finally Ovid. But by the time Ovid joins the love elegy genre, there's a formula for it. It's a very big city-oriented situation where the poet is exploring facets of a relationship with a woman who was given a, usually a three-syllable Greek pseudonym. For Cautilus it was lesbian. For Gallus it was Lycoris and for Ovid's Corinna. And she's independent enough that he can't always have access to her. her. And I think it's better to call it relationship drama because it's not all good. Karina is the woman whom Ovid is supposed to be in love with whether that was her real name or not.

How does he portray her? She fits the bill for the elegiac mistress. They're sometimes called the Dr. Puella, the learned girl. She is a connoisseur of poetry. This is why she's interested in Ovid, apart from obvious reasons. He describes her physicality. He talks about the thighs. and the, I think the breasts and the arms and what,

and he said, and you know the rest. That is one of the most interesting poems. He begins by saying, I met with her in a half-lit room and she basically undresses and he describes the body. This is extremely unusual for love elegy. It's not an obscene or particularly boredy genre, but he takes it in that direction with tongue-in-cheek.

What if she strips in front of him in the heart, now? I don't think there's much ambiguity about that, is there? No, indeed, but I think the point where he breaks off So it's not because he's lost interest. I think he's reached the most interesting and least talked about bit, and he has to stop. And the rest is known to all of you. Is it something like that, doesn't he?

Why does he feel he has to stop? Because if he went further, it would go outside the parameter of Roman love energy. It would become something more obscene. Was he being censored? He's wisely self-censoring. Things had changed even since the days of Catullus. There were risks in being too risque. There's actually something a little cheeky in how he says,

as you say, it's Keterra-Kris-Neskitt, who doesn't know the rest? And that's a bit like the first line of the Arsamatoria, where he says, if there's anybody in this city who doesn't already know how to love. So he's sort of implying that there are plenty of people out there, even in Augustine Rome, who know as much about sex already as they need to know. Right, so it's like an in-joke, because the reader is just as experienced as he is. Yeah, I think so. Marieu? One of the key features of his love poetry is that actually it's undercutting the kind of love poetry.

that's gone before that Dunstan was describing, so that the earlier poets might say, for example, Cynthia captured me with her eyes, I've suffered this madness for a year, love is trampling on my head, the lover presents himself as humiliated, impassioned and unable to access his girl. So the whole point of Keterraquinskitt, in my view, that we've been talking about, who doesn't know the rest, is actually that's completely going against the whole idea of romantic poetry because romantic love, as the others have described it, is a humiliation, but also extraordinary, magical, mythical, the woman is like a divinity. She's undescribable. So to say, who doesn't know the rest is to say, well, everyone knows about sex and love is,

you know, reducible to sex. Hence, I don't need to go any further, which of course is also to say there's no point having any love poetry. So that's a joke. I would think, against romantic love. And he does that kind of subversion of love quite a number of times in this poetry. So another key example is the Kipassis poems. And they're called that because in the first of them, the lover in the poem, who we associate with Ovid,

the lover in the poem reassures his girl who is tiresomely complaining about his infidelity. And he says he's absolutely innocent, including the latest accusation, he has absolutely not had an affair with her hairdresser, Kipassis, and says no man would he want to anyway because her back is covered with scars from the lash because she's a slave. Then in the next poem, he speaks directly to the hairdresser Kipassis and says, how did my girl find out? So you stop there and you're really shocked because it means that the first poem,

the I love you, I'm not unfaithful, is a complete lie. It's very hard to imagine these poems being read by Corinna, where he does a big stage whisper to the woman he's cheating on her with. While we've been talking, men have been referred to as men and the women have largely been referred to as girls. When the lover speaks about the beloved in all of Roman love poetry, the beloved is usually, if it's a woman, it's called a Puella, which actually means girl.

When we talk about the way the lover speaks in this poetry, we tend to talk about the lover speaking to his Puella, the lover is speaking to his girl, and that kind of sense that this is not, there is still that ultimate imbalance between them. For a long time, people have been intrigued, Gail, by Obik Blamey's exile on a poem and a mistake. Can you enlighten us?

He's fairly clear in the exile poetry that the poem was the Arsamatoria. Arsamatoro, the art of love. The art of love, exactly, his didactic poem on the sort of things we've been talking about how to engage in the kind of relationship that's typical of Roman love elegy. This poem was, we can date quite precisely to between about 1BC and AD1, but of it isn't exile till AD8,

so how real a cause of his exile could it have been? But there's also the question, what law does it break by simply writing something in the didactic genre? The mistake is even more mysterious. He's keen never to call it a crue. three men or an actual crime. And what's really fascinating is that he says he can't say what it is. And that I think suggests that it may have been a more serious reason for the exile, possibly, than the poem about which he spends an awfully long time in the exile poetry,

including most of his long letter to Augustus called Tristia Book 2, justifying the Arsammatoria and explaining that it wasn't addressed to respectable women for whom adultery would be a crime and so on. There are some hints, that the mistake the error might have involved seeing something he shouldn't have seen. But we can't really go much further than Ovid takes us, even though Augustus' own granddaughter was exiled for adultery about the same time as Ovid. Dunstan, what about the art of love? What is it about it that's transgressive?

Was it really thought of us scandalous at the time? The art of love is a didactic poem in elegiac couplets. And it's as if the poet of the amorase has kind of dragged himself up off the girlfriend's doorstep and got up onto the podium and set himself up to be the instructor for relationships. And it's in three books. The first one is how to find a girl, all the places you can look, the things you should do and say. The second one is how to keep the girl to avoid relationship difficulties. And the third one is addressed to the girls and it's how to find a man. And certainly by the end of the second book, he turns to the matter of sex. I think

it's fair to say, cheeky, playful, and maybe a little bit too scandalous for the type of poetry it sets up to be. I think the crossing of genres is very important from a political point of view because of what didactic was in August and Rome by that point. I mean, by the time Ovid gets to any genre, it's already been done in Rome often. And here you have exactly this ancient genre, which on one level is about teaching you how to do something, but on another level had always had a sort of very serious understanding how the world works kind of aspect to it. So it had begun with Hesiod saying, this is how you farm, but also this is how to understand how Zeus is set up the world so that farming is so hard and so on. And of course, not so long before Ovid has a go

at writing an art of love, Virgil had redone Hesiod in the Georgics and made didactic political and said, this is how to be a farmer, and sort of how the world is organized as it is, and perhaps farming is a bit like being a good citizen in Augustine Rome, or perhaps farming is a bit like being Augustus in Augustine Rome and having to sort of organise your farm, your empire, your world. And so for over to come along and say sexual relationships of the kind that happen in love elegy are worthy of didactic poetry, is sort of make, I don't know, kind of making a step that says sex and high genre political poetry can mix. that you, I suppose you can see a movement against Augustus, having said, and I, Augustus, the great politician, I'm going to start regulating people's sex lives. It's sort of a poetic analogue of that, perhaps. One of the other interesting things about this poem is the way that it focuses all the processes of finding a girl, getting a girl, keeping a girl in the topography of Augustine Rome.

So when buildings that Augustus has created are brought into the poem, there are buildings in which you're going to go to find a girl. And in that respect, he is eroticising what should not be made erotic. And so there's a kind of intimacy with Augustus that I'm sure he would find quite unpalatable one clearly did. Maria, can we now switch to what some think is the greatest work, the metamorphosis? Can you just tell listeners, give them a brief idea of the scale of it? When we get to the metamorphoses, we have got to, the highest genre, epic. This time the metre is the meter in which epic was always written,

the hyksameter, and it's on an epic scale. We're talking about a continuous poem of about 12,000 verses in about 15 books, about bodies changing into new shapes. Usually, but not always, it's a permanent transformation. A human turns into an animal, a bird, a rock, a flower. But Ovid makes it a continuous poem, starting with the creation of the world, moving through myth into history, ending in his own time, and with finally his own claim to immortality because of his achievement. And it's an extraordinary work because within it, scholars like to do have counted about 250 stories

that Ovid has cleverly pieced into this extraordinary hole. Can you give us a couple of examples, say Pygmalian, Narcissus, what's going on there? Narcissus, he's in the third book of these 15. Narcissus rejects the advances of all his fellow nymphs and is punished by being made to fall in love with an object that he cannot win over. So on a hunting trip, he approaches a smooth,

silvery pool of water, bends to quench his thirst, and then Ovid produces the most fantastic wordplay in his account of how Narcissus fell in love with his reflection in the water. The kinds of thing Ovid says is Narcissus loves a hope without a body. He seeks and is sought. He kindles love and burns with it. He has sight but no insight. It's those sorts of games that Ovid loves to play. and he develops a great length, the paradox of narcissus's circumstances.

Narcissus is puzzled why he can't make contact with his beloved, given that when he smiles, his beloved seems to smile back, and slowly we see narcissus working out his delusion to reach the tragic discovery, Istae Egosome, which means I am he. And now he understands his erotic, paradox. He has an abundance. He has his lover right there, but he is poverty-stricken because he cannot have his love. So narcissus turns pale and pines away. His body is replaced by a flower, possibly the daffodil. And the story is really ingenious for its poetic form, but it obviously

has also triggered a sense of a real profound content. You know, it's been understood as on many levels as about desire and the nature of desire, how one can be aroused to love by identifying features of yourself in someone else, and also, of course, as a depiction of a pathology and of an emerging self-awareness so that the disorder of self-absorption is catalogued in the late 19th century, features in the work of Freud and is called narcissism. Dunstan, can you give us one of your examples that leap out at you about the transformations. What Ovid does with Mitamilphosis is new, not just pointing out that it's everywhere in myth, but also his attention to it. It's very different from what you find in, for example, Homer.

So Circe turns men into pigs, but the way it's described, she basically makes a gesture and they become a pig suddenly. Ovid is much more interested in processes. And I think this is very similar to his interest in relationship drama. He likes to see in the Herodes a person talking their way from one state of mind to another. Likewise, we see a person going from one form to another and experiencing that change. In book nine, there's a nymph called Dryope, who's nursing a baby, and she goes to pick some blossom. As she goes to do it, she sees that the stems are bleeding. It turns out that this is lotus, a nymph who had been transformed into the lotus, and then she herself is punished by being transformed into a tree, and the bark climbs up her body.

She gives a long speech in which she entrusts her baby to someone else and says things like make sure he grows up to respect trees and to not to be afraid of them and also not to pick the blossom from them and then she says but the bark is coming up over my mouth then we finally find her swallowed up by it. It's a very graphic and a very melodramatic episode. It's got to be on the edge of horror and humour though, hasn't it?

I mean we perhaps haven't mentioned Ovid's humour quite enough But the way you describe it as if sort of the most important thing she can say is entrusting her baby and he must respect trees and not do anything as silly as I did to sort of break a bit off a tree. I mean, obviously that is a perfectly appropriate thing for her to say, but there is something slightly ridiculous about it. That's not really a rule for life that we can all kind of take away from this story. Where he goes with the humour is actually extremely daring because it makes you laugh and then wonder if you should have laughed. In the same episode, the baby is still nursing. And as she turns into a tree, the breast starts to get too hard to nurse and the baby gets puzzled as to why this is happening. I think it reflects the interest in women's emotions and bodies and perhaps still a very misogynistic way that had Greek poetry in the centuries leading up to Orvid.

So in the third and second centuries BC there was a lot more interest in extreme emotion and the internal lives of women under stress. Quite a few readers and commentators have had problems, as they see it, with Ovid's misogyny. How would you discuss that, Gail, to start with you? One of the ways that I've always thought this is important is to think Ovid, like so many other classical authors, lived in a misogynistic age. Because he chose to write about women so much, you notice it more. And that's not meant to be presented as an excuse because it's obviously there. And that's, I mean, on all sorts of levels in the different kinds of poetry. So the third book of the Ars Amatoria, for instance, in a way, you could sort of say,

Ovid perfectly, sort of fairly has written to the men to advise them how to behave in love relationships. And now he's going to write to the women as well. Except that, whereas he wrote to the men saying, this is how you find a girl, when he writes to the women, he really sort of says, this is how you look after yourself to make yourself attractive to be found by a man. so not really quite as even-handed as you might think. And in other works like the metamorphoses, where so many of the transformations are a result of rape

or of trying to escape attempted rape, you have again this sort of problem that we found with sort of humour and horror coming together, which sounds awful even to say, but to take Apollo and Daphne, for instance, this has presented sort of as high comedy to start with, that Apollo is affected by Cupid's arrow, even though he's a great big epic god, oh no, he's smitten with elegiac love and he wants to pursue

this nymph Daphne. She runs away terrified and this is described as making her more attractive, which we find very hard to read. She is a nymph. She praised her father, who's a river god and gets transformed into a laurel. But of course, once she's a tree, Apollo can actually catch up with her. So she hasn't really escaped him at all. He can't have sex with her, but he can in fact possess her. And he says, if you can't be my wife, can at least be my tree, which on one level is just a bit silly. It's put in this neat rhetorical way. It probably raises a smile. But on another level, yes, I mean, she's the laurel, she's going to be Apollo's specific attribute and sort of laurel wreaths given at his games forevermore.

And she hasn't really escaped him. So sort of it's by looking at particular examples like that that you can kind of gauge what's very hard to read and problematic. And, you know, the way that I think it disturbs us because it's also, Yeah, interesting. Maria. We are given this very elaborate process, as Dunstan was saying earlier, the process of her changing into a tree. And then he embraces the bark and he can still feel the beating heart within.

Now, that's incredibly disturbing. But I think we need to appreciate that on the one hand, that kind of imagery, that kind of sort of painterly detail, has been utilised, you know, like in the 17th century, by Pusanne, but Benini, to create paintings that are effectively rapers' artwork. And that is very disturbing. But I think one of the reasons why people are still interested in Ovid, they still want to read his work, is because there are respects in which you can look at what he's written

and understand it as a kind of sensitivity, oddly, to the condition of women. So, for example, people have noted that Ovid's account, of the way the Daphne becomes insensate, becomes a tree, is paralleled by descriptions by women of the experience of assault who have survived that experience through a process of desensitisation, of withdrawing into themselves until they feel nothing. And in that respect, it's just an example of how modern critics can turn back to all and they can take from him a voice, a perspective, which they can push further.

And I think Ovid would be the first to, well, I don't know, maybe he probably wouldn't. Maybe he'd really resent this. But, you know, one of the things Ovid did was reshape epic, take away the masculine perspective and the heroic values, turn the focus on to women. He might still have been writing all that within a very patriarchal society abusive towards women. but people now can take what he wrote and press it further, change it into other ways, give voice to the women who are in his poetry, because he has sort of started us on that route. And that's why I think women, writers now, really welcome that opportunity to replay Ovid and turn him in new directions. You can compare Ovid to other authors whose attention to female characters is simply largely absent. I think of Lord of the Rings or even the work of Virgil, apart from the profoundly important and compelling portrait of Dido in book four,

there is really one extremely well-examined psychological portrait of a female character in the poem. And beyond that, not very much. This is something that Ovid and Virgil had learned from Hellenistic poetry, but we can find insights into female characters as early as Homer, which seem to contradict our general assumption that there's a lack of interest in, female characters as as full human beings. It's complicated, but there's a great deal of food for thought in Ovid, perhaps more than any other ancient Roman author.

Maria, was it the time when people were prepared to accept that a woman fleeing an over-ardened lover actually trying to escape rape turns into a tree and that somebody could turn into a hind or a stag and so on? These changes. Ovid does write towards the end of the poem a very long disquisition in the mouth of Pythagoras about transformation and people returning in different bodily forms. And to some extent that was at times thought about as a kind of philosophical

explanation of the kind of world that he was presenting in the metamorphoses. But it's, the disturbing world that he's talking about is one that's, It's a sort of unidirectional transformation. It tends to be humans who are translated, and this isn't always the case, and certainly not with the Pelhamelian story, but it tends to be humans who are transformed into some lower level status, usually as a punishment from a guard.

And often, as we're saying, how disturbing this poem is and sometimes amusing, often that the justification of the god seems completely whimsical, and yet this most disturbing and terrifying thing has happened to a human. So in that sense, he offers a kind of theology, a kind of explanation that there are gods, who behave in this way towards humans, but it's not satisfying and it's actually quite unsettling. And again, another place in the poem where this happens,

is when Arachne is making a tapestry. And in her tapestry, it's a whole series of episodes of the abuse of gods towards mortals. And her tapestry is very, very chaotic. And that has often been described as sort of symbolic of the way the poem works, that he's not offering a sense of a world in which we can understand our place and we can understand how the gods treat us and punish us and why we might be transformed. The whole point is that there is no explanation. look that is satisfactory and anything could happen to us at any time. I think what Maria has just described is so fascinatingly un-epic. In epic, the gods are meant to have a plan and something constructive is meant to happen. So Virgil writes the aneared

and Rome is founded and develops into the Rome of Augustus. In the metamorphosis, yes, it starts with chaos and the creation of the world and it ends with the apotheosis of the turning into a god of Julius Caesar and then of Augustus is predicted. but that's sort of incidental. The gods, as you said Maria, just sort of act out of their own desires for sex or revenge.

And there's no sort of one epic plot that gets anywhere, just as there isn't one emotional focus on a particular hero or anything. How did Hobbit's poetry change? Can we move into exile now? Yes, yes. He gets sent way out of Rome onto a Romanian coast, which is thought to be the end of the world, really, or most of the end of the world.

But he's not allowed back. He writes pleading letters. Anyway, how did this poetry, he wouldn't stop writing poetry, it didn't stop writing poetry, is better to say. And how did his poetry change? Yes, exactly. He keeps writing poetry and presents it almost as a pathology that he has to keep writing poetry, even though because of the role that the Ars Amatoria played in his exile, it was poetry who caused him to go into exile. So he writes a further nine books of short poetic letters largely, so five books called the Tristia or Sad Poems, and then four epistemai exponto or letters from the Black Sea,

and also a strange curse poem called the Ibis. And there are a change in that there are a return, a sort of fall from the kind of high genres of epic and ideological poetry, back to personal poetry, which in a way he hadn't written since the Amora's at the beginning of his career, sort of personal short, necessarily elegiac, of course, poems in his own voice, and elegy actually becoming now, as Dunstan had said it was, something Tristice, something sad. But in a way, they're also completely different from everything

that had come in the past, because the persona he adopts is in a lot of ways more realistic. He suddenly presents himself as a perfectly ordinary, respectable Roman of a certain class. He talks about his wife quite a lot, writes to his wife. I mean, actually, she was mentioned once in the Amora's very strangely, but she sort of suddenly pops into the poetry as the kind of person that are a respectable Augustine man has looking after his interests at home. And of course he tries to present himself as very much the loyal follower of Augustus.

He'd actually, he'd written the metamorphoses and said, I'm going to start from the beginning of the world and write all the way Admea tempera to my own times. And in Tristia II, the poem I've mentioned addressing Augustus trying to persuade Augustus to bring him back from exile, he describes the metamorphoses as written ad to her tempera to your times, Augustus, because obviously you're in charge of the current world completely.

and also promises that if only Augustus will only let him back, then he'll write the rest of his calendar poem The Fasti, of which we only have the first six books for six months of the year, and he ought to write the second half of the year. So it changes in all those ways and becomes in a way sort of more serious in a way because sort of the joke is over and Ovid kind of can't write himself out of his situation anymore. But I think that's also a bit problematic,

because there's something very kind of lavellajiaic about writing from a position of being separated from where you want to be and who you want to be with and keeping trying to say please let me in please let me see you which is sort of saying to Rome or even very oddly to Augustus but if if Ovid was ever allowed back the poetry would end and the project would come to an end and so it built into the rhetoric of the whole project that it has to fail even though that's not what the real Ovid wants I hope that paradox sort of makes sense I think it's one of the most fascinating things about the exile poetry. Dunstan, can I come to you? Do we ever get a clear picture of the real Ovid? Sorry about that phrase, but still, it's useful. Do you ever really know he's that sort of man?

Yes, as Gail just said, there's definitely a lot more of Ovid who appears to be setting himself out as an individual rather than a character type in the exile poetry. And historically, people, I think, have been less interested in that later part of his work because they thought the poems were too real, that the person used to be quite fun, is now just complaining and falling and lamenting all the time and not saying anything very different. It seems more monotonous. But as I think it was Gail who said early on about the heroides, there's a certain display of skill in using a fairly consistent formula in inventive ways. And there is variety in the sad poems and in the letters from the Black Sea. And it's important to realise that there actually twists on what Ovid did very well before. We have elegic drama,

just like the amores, and like Gail just said, you just change. the positions of the people and change the names and you've got the same kind of feelings. And also the poetic letters could be seen as an answer to the heroides, which are also poetic letters, except now it's Ovid in his own voice. And there's also a new persona here. Ovid is experienced, he's famous, and he knows he's famous, and he's fallen from grace. So whereas he presented the Amores as a young man's game, he's making himself out to be old before his time. And of course, Augustus is very prominent, and he was marginal before. I think it was Maria who made that point. There's a lot of interesting comparing this with the rest of his corpus

and seeing it as part of the same cycle almost. This is like the winter season after the spring of the love poetry and the summer and the full fruit of his longer metamorphosis and fast. We don't have a very clear timeline, but you could see this as the other end of a cycle. Gail, the metamorphosis, Gail seems to have been the most enduring aspect of it. We know about Shakespeare, we know about Ted Hughes and in painting, Cission and so on. Would you agree with that, that it is the thing that, the piece that has endured most? I think that's probably true. It's, in a way, what shows how important it has become is paradoxically that we think of these stories often, as you say,

or the Jupiter and Europa or Apollo and Daphne, Diana and Actaon, as just stories from Greek mythology, when really it's Ovid's Virgin that we're thinking of, Pyramus and Thysbee that goes straight into Shakespeare, very obscure in classical poetry, not really there elsewhere, and yet becomes canonical with Ovid and becomes part of the range of Greek Roman mythology that the Renaissance and later ages drew on.

And that shows that Ovid really has written in the metamorphosis a universal poem, oddly enough, because you can excerpt bits from it so easily, if that makes sense. Do you think finally, Maria, that the influence of his work goes on and will continue to be exceptional? Absolutely. I think because he became the central classical influence on Western literature and art from about the 12th century, because his Latin was learnt and copied and used in all sorts of social and political discourse, because he was seen as the poet of love and the psychology of the lover's mind, because he wrote about exile and others have found him a useful voice through which to talk about alienation and disgrace and the relation to power. Because he has appeared so often in so much poetry and art over. over the course of centuries.

I think it means now more than ever, people have become interested in turning back to him because they're then positioning themselves not just in relation to his work, but in relation to everything that's happened in between. And there's some very interesting work that's being done in the last few years, particularly by feminists who are picking up

on the Ovidian perspective on women and giving voice, perhaps sometimes fresh perspectives, gives a different voice, more agency to the women who have appeared in his literature. And this is also to position those women writers within this fantastic tradition that was initiated by Ovid himself. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Maria, Maria White, Gail Trimble and Dunstan Lowe,

and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's a brutal Second Baron's War from 1264 when nobles captured the king as they sought more powers for Parliament. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I think the best way to start this is to ask you what you think was missed out that ought to have been in and see where we go from there.

Well, there is one thing I think would be very interesting to mention. And that's something that we have said about of it by somebody who lived in his time. And it gives us an insight into his style because we haven't been able to talk about his actual use of words much. But there's an anecdote told by Seneca the elder who was born before Ovid and died well after him. And he published a work which was part manual, part reminiscence, about people who were good at oratory. And what he says about Ovid is that there was an anecdote that he made a bet with some friends. And they said, we'd like to take three lines out of your poetry. We want to pick three that we think really should be cut out because we just don't like them at all.

and he said, okay, that'll be fine, on one condition that I can choose three lines that I can veto, and if they coincide, then you can't take them out. And according to the story, the lines were exactly the same. They all picked the same three lines. And one of them, I particularly like, se me bohem que wiram, semiwrim quorum, se miwrim quorum, which means a man half bull, a bull half man, is about the minor tour. And I like that one because it's in a bit of interesting wordplay, almost a tongue twister, about a hybrid creature.

And what Seneca says about this story is that it shows that Ovid didn't, it wasn't that he was unable to follow the stylistic conventions. He was perfectly aware of what he was doing. He just didn't want to follow the stylistic conventions. He wanted to do these extraordinary turns of phrase when it suited him. And he knew which ones people didn't like it,

he just did it anyway. I think that says a lot about him. Before he went to exile, how were his poems received by the, and necessarily, I suppose, the elite who heard them or read them. We've got no reason to doubt that he was very admired. And in fact, after Horace and Virgil had died,

he was the premier living poet of Rome. And when he was sent in exile, he was writing back to what he portrays as a pretty much dead literary scene that needs him. Exactly. You mentioned that he's so aware of that in the exile poetry. And I think there's something rather lovely about that, given the sort of more supposedly realistic, nature of the exile poetry, that we get the same persona in a different genre or a different

version of the same persona, looking back on what he said when he was being an epic poet at the very end of Metamorphosis 15, which I said, I think I said Metamorphosis, you know, ends with the predicted apotheosis of Augustus, which it does, except that it then ends with the even more imminent apotheosis of Ovid in his literature. And he just sort of says, as epic poets do, I will live on, you know, in the way people speak my poetry, which is referring to something that Rome's great pre-Vigilian epic poet Ennis had said. And so that is a very kind of high-flown way of saying his poetry is obviously going to be received as something spectacularly wonderful that not even Jupiter's Thunderbolt, and of course in exile Jupiter's Thunderbolt becomes understood

as Augustus sending him into exile, not even Jupiter's Thunderbolt can destroy. And then he turns round perfectly realistically in the epistle Iax Ponto and shows that that is the case. Yes, and he's still protesting that he cannot help but write poetry. He couldn't help but write love poetry in his suffering in the beginning of his career. He couldn't help but write the exile poetry. He even says that he's lived too long and he wishes he could be dead, but he can't. And there's a moment where he says, I wish I could be turned to stone by Medusa, but I can't. And this is clearly not the case. It is possible not to write a poem if you don't want to. And that would silence him, which is the one thing he doesn't want, his one hope of living on. And he talks about

living on in that epilogue to the metamorphoses. And in the exile poetry, he very much presents his exile as death. So the only way he can stay alive is by carrying on writing. And of course, you know, rather wonderfully, we assume he dies in exile because the poetry stops. But that's really all the evidence we have. Yes. And again, not all the evidence is realistic. It's a bit where he says that there are poison arrows flying into the city over the walls every day, and that's probably not true. It's worth bearing in mind that where he was was probably several months' journey from there to Rome and that many months to communicate.

And one of the things we have to remember about his poetry is that part of its strategy was probably to make his presence felt in Rome, to remind Augustus, to remind Roman, of the benefits of having him back. And how disturbing exile is as a punishment for a Roman, it's to take them completely out of everything that they have access to. And his exile was a bit unusual, wasn't it? Because it's called technically a relegation.

So that means he can keep his property and he can keep his citizenship, but his wife stays in Rome. So he's both sort of still Roman and not Roman at all. and wants to be undoubtedly back in Rome and finds where he is barbaric, as you say, the centre of war. He's like an epic hero. He's been turned into a kind of Odysseus

trying to find his way through the wars back to his homeland. And part of his problem is, I mean, I've said realistic, but there's also something very mythical about the way he, as he says, he writes about himself as an epic hero. And that's a bit problematic when you think about, as you said, Dunstan, how close to the heroides the situation of, exile poetry is because the heroines can kind of make this space for themselves to give their view on their myths, but we don't get the impression that they can really change the ends of

their stories. Usually they stay abandoned, right? And if Ovid says something like, oh, I'm Odysseus, and again, the rhetoric sort of takes over and he says, and I've suffered worse than him for sort of one, two, three reasons, and he goes in, he makes all these comparisons, just like he did with lovers are like soldiers because, and he needs to cap it all. He says, and at the end of it, Odysseus got home and I didn't and that's brilliant rhetoric but it's exactly the ending he doesn't want to give himself

and I don't know I mean there are other anecdotes aren't there of ancient readers thinking about Ovid just getting a bit carried away being a bit too much in love with his own genius and I think that shows how that can have an impact on him in the real world even when he doesn't want it to perhaps well thank you all very much

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