Professor Adina Ciugureanu

Yesterday, Professor Adina Ciugureanu from Ovidius University in Constanta, Romania, gave a talk on the legacy of the Roman poet Ovid in the Black Sea. Bwog’s resident Classics majors, Youngweon and Finn, attended the talk and learned some things about Ovid.

The majority of the scholarship on Ovid, as Professor Gareth Williams commented, is centered around Western Europe and America, and his time in Rome; his time in exile in the Greek city of Tomis, present-day Constanta, Romania, doesn’t get as much attention. In this talk, Professor Ciugureanu gave an interesting perspective on Ovid in talking about his influence on the region that he was exiled to, as well as the influence that his exile in itself had on literature and philosophy.

Professor Ciugureanu started the lecture with a brief introduction on Ovid and his life; Ovid, known as Ovidius to Romans, was a poet who lived under the reign of Augustus. He was born to a well-to-do Roman family, and received an elite education in Rome. He traveled to Greece and Sicily as part of his education, as was customary during the time for the children of the Roman elite, and took a job in the public sector afterwards. However, to the disappointment of his father, he discovered that he didn’t like that very much, and instead dedicated his life to writing poetry. His first serious work was the Amores, which is a series of erotic poems about himself and Corina, his imaginary love interest. He then went on to write Epistolae Heroidium (or Heroides, as students of LitHum may know it), a series of imaginary letters from mythological heroines to their lovers; Medicamina Faciei (“The Art of Beauty”), a book about cosmetics; Ars Amatoria (“The Art of Love”), sex advice for Roman lovers; and the Metamorphoses, an extensive collection of mythological stories, all of which involve a kind of metamorphosis, beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the chaos after Caesar’s death and the Augustan peace that followed.

Ovid was exiled by Augustus to Tomis, on the western coast of the Black Sea, in 8AD, supposedly because of Ars Amatoria, which included advice that celebrated extramarital sex. Ovid attributes his exile to “carmen et error” – a song and a mistake. He may have been an involuntary accomplice in the adultery of Julia, Augustus’ granddaughter who was banished from Rome in the same year. It is interesting to note that this was 8 years after Ars Amatoria was actually published. His exile was not, by the standards of his times, harsh; his property wasn’t confiscated, nor his citizenship revoked. Ovid, however, thought his condition to be extremely cruel and miserable, and wrote many (hyperbolic) letters and poems to Rome, complaining and asking to be pardoned. Sadly, he died in exile in Tomis, in 17AD. On his way to Tomis, He wrote the Tristia, in which he berates himself as having been thoughtless and simple, leading to his own exile.

Tomis was indeed a bleak city, but not as much as Ovid described. He complains of winters that are two years long, during which everything freezes over (even wine!), and that he is forced to live amongst barbarians who don’t speak Latin. Tomis, being the northernmost part of the Roman empire of the time, had horrible weather in comparison to the sunny mediterranean climate of Rome that Ovid was used to, but he definitely used a lot of poetic exaggeration; Professor Ciugureanu remarked that Constanta (present-day Tomis) had two-week-long cold wintry periods, but nothing as bad as Ovid described. In addition, although the people who lived in Tomis couldn’t speak Latin, they spoke a hybrid of Greek, Getic, and Sarmatian, and Ovid, as an educated Roman, could speak Greek, so it wasn’t impossible for him to communicate with them. He ends up learning their “barbarian” language and even writes poetry in it, but those poems sadly do not survive. Recent criticism notes that Ovid projected his misery of being exiled on his environment and feeling neglected and forgotten, resulting in the hyperbolically depressing portrayal of his life in the Black Sea; he suffered from bad weather, indigestion, insomnia, fever, etc.

Ovid in exile was forgotten from the local imagination for the most part; a story of a Roman Catholic saint who suffered martyrdom and was locked in a tower for his faith, but offered hospitality to Jesus disguised as a beggar, was passed down through the ages. Tomis was buried and forgotten when it was part of the Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the 19th century, and this story (and others) was linked to Ovid when it was finally excavated.

Exile was an important theme for many writers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Russian poets in exile, for example, were heavily influenced by Ovid’s exile. Alexander Pushkin, when he was banished from Moscow, wrote Ovidesque works about it, although he portrayed himself as more self-contained than the histrionically emotional Ovid. Osip Mandelstam wrote his own Tristia in Crimea while in retreat from the Civil War and the devastation of St. Petersburg. Ovid also influenced the Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, who suffered in a gulag.

In the 20th century, this theme of exile was revived with Nazi Germany and other dictatorial regimes. Ovid became the prototype of the exiled poet, representing the construction of a new self and the struggle for the preservation of important values. Romanian writer Vintilă Horia, who was forced to leave Europe during World War II, wrote a book called God Was Born in Exile (originally in French, later translated), and Bulgarian writer Tzvetan Todorov wrote L’Homme depaysé (“The Exiled Man”), which discusses the concept of exile as a “transculturation” in which as an exile, one lives in two cultures in a bi/trilingual state of mind. For Julia Kristeva, who wrote Le vieil homme et les loupes, exile was a state of mind; she left Bulgaria in 1960 and lived in Paris, and although she could have gone back home to Bulgaria in the 90’s, she chose to stay in exile in Paris. 

Professor Ciugureanu described this as living in simultaneous worlds, and related this to Ovid in that he went through his own metamorphosis and lived a metamorphosis of himself in exile. She noted that a big difference between Ovid’s exile and the exile of a lot of these writers is that many of these writers (Kristeva, for example) lived in exile in places that were better off than their homes; they fled Eastern Europe to Paris, Berlin, etc., while Ovid was banished from Rome to the Black Sea. She finished the presentation with the poem Ovid in Tomis by Irish poet Derek Mahon, to demonstrate how Ovid’s exile influenced the imagination of writers. 

After Professor Ciugureanu’s presentation, Professor Williams noted four points as reasons that he found this presentation fascinating and important. First, the scholarship on Ovid and his exile is focused around America, Great Britain, and Western Europe, so Ovid is often seen as a victim of a totalitarian regime and a rebel at great personal risk. This makes people attempt to take Ovid out of context and make him symbolic of a modern critical agenda, which creates a predetermined agenda through which we see Ovid. Secondly, for classicists who spend a lot of time studying Ovid, it’s easy to get locked in a philological vision of his text, especially connected with the Greek tradition (the myths, the hexameter…) which is now a fundamental way to study him, but a very narrow approach. According to Professor Williams, this opens up narrow lines of linguistic approach and closes ambient paths of poetic possibility, so the sheer force of imagination brought to force by his exile is very exciting. Third, he noted the sheer force the idea of exile and Ovid as an idea, rather than a fixed person. He said that we need to dislodge him from the fixed frame in which we see him and see him rather as an idea to stimulate thought from rich dimensions, and related this to the idea of exile as a prevalent human condition. Fourth, he spoke about metamorphosis as an idea; Ovid was, in some sense, always an exile, and perhaps his exile to Tomis can be seen as a capstone experience of his life. In many ways, he was always a “semi-inhabitant” of Rome, and we must not see Ovid as something fixed, like a museum piece, but an instigator of something still growing.

Image via Harriman Institute