Calling Voices
In these long dog days of confinement, with life before a distant memory and life after an unknown, it is only when sitting beside the ocean that any clarity of thought returns to me. As I sit gazing silently through the waves I hear voices calling. While it was the Roman poet Catullus who suggested that a woman’s words to her lover be written ‘on the wind or running water’, the voice I hear most distinctly these days belongs to a later Roman poet by the name of Publius Ovidius Naso, or simply Ovid as we know and love him.
Ovid (43 BC-AD 17) is one of the most famous of the Roman poets. His fifteen volume poem the Metamorphoses, which tells the story of the world from its creation to the deification of Caesar Augustus through a series of mythological tales all linked by the theme of metamorphosis, is arguably his most famous work. At the height of his career he enjoyed the glittering realms of fame, occupied by those artists who had won the favour of the emperor Augustus. However, in AD 8, he was suddenly banished from Rome to the remote frontier town of Tomis, modern day Constansa in Romania, on the Black Sea. The reasons for his exile are shrouded in mystery; Ovid himself obliquely refers to a ‘song and a mistake’. Whatever the cause, Augustus enacted his punishment mercilessly, Ovid was never again allowed to return to his beloved Rome and died separated from all he held dear.
Ovid was not a poet whom I studied in great depth either at school or university. Somehow he eluded the reach of the courses which I chose and in any case, my years studying for Greats at Oxford were spent fathoms deep in the spit and sawdust of the Ancient Greeks, so focused had I become on that aspect of the Classical World. However, when I’m asked about my first true encounter with Ovid’s genius, I have a very definite answer. I first fell in love with his poetry in a small classroom in West London during double A Level Latin Literature lessons around a decade ago, when I taught selections from Metamorphoses Book 8 to two of the most talented students it has ever been my pleasure to teach. In fact, whenever I open the large purple folder which contains my notes from those classes, I am assailed by memories of the hours we spent translating, annotating and analysing the text. I was entirely captivated by his brilliant depiction of the passion driven Scylla and his merciless description of all of her wiles and manipulations and her utterly shameless betrayal of her father Nisus. This tale of treachery culminates of course in the transformation of both characters into birds and comes to a suitably horrifying conclusion. Not without reason does Dylan refer to the Metamorphoses as ‘the scary horror tale’ in Chronicles Vol. 1 when he is cataloguing the books in Ray Gooch’s library in the chapter ‘The Lost Land’.
When I think of the Metamorphoses I am supremely grateful to have come to this poem later in life. My first love was Virgil and his epic poem the Aenied. The Aeneid is a poem whose hero Aeneas understands duty, struggles with the sorrows and the sufferings of life, the ‘lacrimae rerum’ (tears of things) and despite human fallibility achieves greatness while enduring considerable personal sacrifice. It seems to me that the urbane brilliance of Ovid’s fantastically weaved Metamorphoses, with its surprising twists and turns, overwhelming variety of mythical transformations and slyly ironic humour, is a text best read against the backdrop of the Aenied’s steadfast edifice. The one serves to highlight the wonder of the other and both challenge us as readers to be flexible enough to marvel at the minds and achievements of these remarkably different poets and the age which produced both of them.
However with time comes change. Whilst living in Tomis, Ovid wrote the Poems of Exile which comprise both the Sadnesses (Tristia) and the Black Sea Letters (Epistulae ex Ponto). These are poems in which he describes the vicissitudes he is forced to endure: the horrors of the harshly cold climate, the rough barbarian peoples and complete lack of any intellectual content to the culture with which he is surrounded. For the exquisitely refined versifier such a landscape must indeed have seemed a barren wasteland. As he says in Tristia 2 195-96 ‘beyond here lies nothing but chillness, hostility, frozen waves of an ice-hard sea.’ He also spends much time desperately longing for his homeland and instructing his wife in the best ways to plead for an end to his banishment. As Peter Green says in the introduction to his brilliant translations of the Poems of Exile, the body of Ovid’s work from this period ‘is a paradigm of exile that has, in its timeless perceptions, served as a model and inspiration down the centuries, for writers as diverse as Seneca and Pushkin.’
To return once more to those waves and the voices which call, it is less the voice of the poet at the height of his powers and popularity and the more the voice of the exile that I hear. I’m pretty sure that it’s our current state of affairs that permits me to hear the voice at this particular frequency. Repeated listening to Workingman’s Blues #2 from the album Modern Times may also be a coordinating condition! In a normal year at this time, our minds would be busy dreaming of summer in Europe, reunited with family and friends where we can breathe comfortably and experience that elusive yet vital sense of home. Of course such delightful preoccupations are currently an impossibility. So it is with open ears that I hear the voice of the exile calling through water and through time. For he prompts me to open his wonderful works and to read his words both of splendour and sorrow, while I dream by the ocean in California of the day when a jet plane will carry us home.
Image courtesy of Ed Heckerman
