Ovid was, in fact, exiled by Augustus in 8 A.D. He was sent away from Rome. He was sent to exile in a place called Thomas on the Black Sea, a place that Ovid absolutely hated. He wrote some poetry while in exile, addressed in part to Augustus begging to be allowed to come back home, and in part to Ovid’s own wife in Rome, so Ovid had married at some point.
He was exiled for reasons that we do not precisely know. In the poetry he writes from exile, Ovid himself says that his banishment from Rome was for, as he puts it, carmen et error, a poem and a mistake. Now the poem is almost undoubtedly Arisamatoria. Of all his works, that one, The Seducer’s Art, is the one that would have been most calculated to enrage Augustus. But that poem was written in or around 1 BC and Ovid was not exiled until 8 AD. There’s a gap of nine years.
So there was something else that happened, some catalyst for his exile that must be what he means when he says it was an error, a mistake. About that, what it was, we simply don’t know. It’s one of the great frustrating unsolved mysteries of Roman antiquity. Elsewhere in his poetry of exile Ovid hints that it was because of something he saw or something he overheard and the most common theory about this is that somehow Ovid became privy to some embarrassing or dangerous secret about the imperial family that he found something out of about Augustus or Augustus’ family or Augustus’ plans for the state or something like that that made him dangerous to keep at Rome.
But we don’t know and we probably never will know unless there’s some discovery of some heretofore unexpected diary that Ovid wrote or something like that which I don’t think we can really hope for. In any case, ovid died in exile it’s a very sad ending to the story of this extremely urbane sophisticated city person if ever there was a city person ovid loved rome and he hated his place of exile.
But even after the death of augustus ovid lived another four years or so he was still not allowed to come home augustus’s successor tiberius also did not allow ovid to return to rome and he died in exile now like ovid’s other works Metamorphoses is a highly polished, very literary, and self-consciously ironic production. This has profound implications for our using metamorphoses as a source of classical myth.
We do this a great deal. Anytime anyone teaches a course on classical mythology or anyone writes about classical mythology, they very probably are using Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a source for at least some of the myths they discuss. And yet that is a proceeding that’s absolutely fraught with danger because of the tone, the presentation, and the kind of work that Metamorphoses is.
First of all, we can’t ever assume that ovid is giving us the straight version so to speak of any myth as opposed to altering the myth significantly for effect his overall tone is playful and almost always ironic so for instance as i mentioned a few moments ago the anthropomorphism of the gods is pointed out and used for comic effect, or at least for, how can I put it, the effect of making it clear that nobody could really believe in such anthropomorphic gods. Let me give you just one example.
In the story of Phaeton, which I already mentioned, when Phaeton is trying to drive the chariot of the sun, the horses are entirely out of control and at one point the chariot of the sun comes much too close to the earth over the continent of Africa. That, Ovid says, is when the deserts appeared in Africa and when the peoples of Africa became dark-skinned because the sun was so close to the earth.
But the point I want to concentrate on here is the description of Earth herself, Gaia in Hesiodic terms, Terra in Latin. We’re told that she, Earth herself, looks up towards Jupiter and shading her brow with her hand cries out to Jupiter and asks why she’s being burned to death, what she has ever done to deserve so terrible a fate.
Now, when we were discussing Hesiod, I talked about the problems of trying to picture Gaia the difficulty in having an entity that is the great mother goddess who gives birth to other gods but is at the same time the earth the ground that we walk on and I talked about the fact that this is difficult to say Gaia is either one or the other she’s both and yes Hesiod says that she has a body she has bodily parts bodily appetites and so forth but Hesiod does not force you to contemplate the implications of that in as direct a sense as Ovid does.
Hesia doesn’t talk about Gaia’s hands. Hesia doesn’t talk about Gaia raising a hand to shade her forehead from the light of the sun. When Ovid does this, I think he is intentionally forcing his readers to look at anthropomorphism and see how silly a concept or how unworkable a concept it is when you’re talking about actual sublime gods. Or forcing his readers, sounds like I think his readers didn’t want to do this, perhaps asking his readers to share the joke would be a better way of putting it.
Assuming that his readers are witty and sophisticated and urbane as he is and will agree that these traditional stories of the gods are there to have fun with more than to show respect and belief to. Another problem with using the myths in Metamorphoses is, as I’ve already mentioned, there are many unusual sexual permutations throughout them. Ovid may have added some of those for his own purposes. When we have no other version to compare with, we can’t ever be sure what Ovid has put into the story and what was there in the story to begin with.
Secondly, we can’t assume that all of the myths Ovid mentions in Metamorphoses were well-known or important myths. Some of them were. Again, Niobe is an example. And we can be pretty sure that the myth of Niobe was indeed quite important because her name pops up and little snippets of her myth are mentioned in so many ancient Greek writers.