Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (11 page)

Two things troubled him most. First, had his sentence a limit? Was it to be loneliness and danger without relief and without end? Might he at least be moved to some more peaceful place?

Not just a climate cold,

A soil shrunken under hoarfrost;

Not even a Latinless land, or one of garbled Greek:

But because of how I live, enclosèd by

The thorny hedge of instant war, compared with

Which our little wall gives grudging comfort.

Though peace there sometimes is, belief in peace never.

Such is this place: either under attack,

Or in fear of it. Punishment I accept,

But beg that I may suffer it in safety.
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Second, there was his dread that he would die in Tomis and his troubled spirit find no rest.

Often for death I pray, yet bite my tongue

Lest death one day should come

And to Sarmatian soil my bones belong.
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But spring comes even to Tomis, lifting the winter-long blockade of the Sarmatian shore.

Lucky who may love an unforbidden Rome.

But joy to me is snow made soft by spring

And water in the pond instead of ice.

No longer is the sea fast frozen;

No longer the Sarmatian ox-driver

Coaxes creaking cart across the Danube.

Soon ships will come, even as far as here!

Soon a friendly sail will reach our shore:

How I will run to meet and greet the skipper,

Asking who he is and where he's from.
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Down at the harbour a stir of excitement, a whiff of the world outside. But on the inland side of town, reality was unchanged: rank fields which farmers feared to plough; and beyond, the dour steppe, with no trees to respond to the strengthening sun.

Bare fields and leafless landscape without tree.
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The sour steppe begets the dismal wormwood

And from its bitter lesson do we learn

The land's own bitterness.
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The steppe sprouts wormwood,

Aptest crop for bitterest place.

And fear: the wall slammed by the enemy,

The dart dipped in dripping death.
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We have said much of Tomis and its tense relationship with the surrounding Getans. What of the relationship of both to Rome? By now Greece and most of Asia Minor were in Roman hands. Nominally Tomis was imperial territory, not only through Rome's custody of the mother-city, Miletus, but more directly in that M. Licinius Lucullus had visited the area as early as 72
BC
in support of his brother's campaign in Asia Minor; and had taken the north Pontic cities under the eagle's wing. Getica was regarded as a protectorate, ruled by its own chiefs and after its own customs but in allegiance to Rome. Indeed its king, Cotiso, had been Roman educated and Augustus may even have contemplated marriage with his family.
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It is possible that Cotiso was still being held in Rome in polite captivity as a royal hostage: Ovid's situation in agreeable reverse. In practice, however, Rome's control over the untrustworthy Getans, like her protection of the insecure Pontic Greeks, was still tenuous. During Ovid's time at Tomis the nearest Danubian base was probably a naval station, Ratiaria, 375 miles upstream. Its name, meaning ‘rafts', suggests a lighterage depot. What is more, only two legions were presently allocated to supervise the entire distance from Belgrade to the delta. The fact is that Rome was preoccupied with problems closer to home and Tomis must look after herself. More broadly, the lower Danube had been placed under the guardianship of Rome's ally, King Rhoemetalces of Thrace, whose territory began some 150 miles south-west of Tomis and whose capital was Viza, now a village just north of Istanbul. In the event of a crisis too big for Rhoemetalces to handle, Roman reinforcements would be sent down the Danube, assuming they could be spared, and naval units were available to move them, for no riverside road yet existed.

So, in Ovid, we have a Roman banished to a Greek city surrounded by Getan barbarians, all under nominal Roman rule but presently being looked after by Thracian allies, who were themselves the Getans' ethnic cousins. Doubtless the average Getan cared little for these complexities, continuing to rove and rob as steppe and season dictated.

For thee, fair Rome, they nothing care,

Belief in bow and quiver makes them brave.

Inured to thirst and hunger,

With tireless horses under them,

They know an enemy will fall behind

For want of water.
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In a propaganda sense Augustus' trump card was as peace-bringer to the Roman world. He had consecrated an altar
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to the
pax Augusta;
and three times closed the door of Janus' temple, previously ‘shut but twice since Rome's foundation … signifying peace by land and sea throughout the Roman realm'.
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One of his admiring subjects wrote that the Augustan peace had reached the limits of the known world, ‘preserving every corner of it free from fear of brigands'.
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Even the careful Ovid cannot forgo a hint of sarcasm:

… in the wide world, take my word,

You will hardly find a land more lacking

The Augustan peace.
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Of interest to all who study the Augustan period is the extent of the conviction that the world was Rome's oyster, to swallow as it suited her. This may have gone far beyond popular jingoism; invading top decision-making, colouring Augustus' view of the outside world and boosting his confidence in Rome's ability to take and hold central Europe. Weighty literary sources, like Virgil at his most majestic,
97
can be quoted to support divine ordination as the source of Rome's right to rule. Even Ovid had written, from the safety of the capital:

Gentibus est aliis tellus data limite certo:

Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem.
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(To other nations their allotted place:

Only the globe restricts the Roman race.)

From Tomis he would see this matter differently:

Along the Black Sea's northern shore

The light of Roman day grows dim:

From here begins Basternian and Sarmatian sway.

Perched on the empire's very rim,

This land comes last of all beneath thy law.
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The difference between these two statements implies Ovid's acceptance of a far-reaching truth: that world dominion was not granted by Rome's gods or decided by Rome's poets. It rested on her military arm, whose strength and length were not indefinite. Though we do not know the exact date of the second passage's composition, it is possible that events in Germany were bringing the emperor face to face with the same truth at the same moment. With the passing years Roman public opinion would also begin to recognize this reality, as seemingly endless campaigns beyond the Rhine reached no conclusion.

Reading Ovid's last work, the
Epistulae ex Ponto,
one is aware that something more than the usual steppe gangsterism was in progress. The Getans had stormed and taken two Thracian-manned outposts on the Danube: Aegisos and Troesmis, not far above the delta. In view of the steppe peoples' generally poor showing against fixed defences, it is not clear how they achieved this; but being already inside the lower Danube they were able to attack from the rear in an act of treachery against an ally of Rome. The two strongpoints were retaken by Roman forces, ferried downriver in
AD
12 and 15, when, according to Ovid, the Danube was ‘dyed with barbarian blood'. Though these events were only a hundred miles away, Ovid's anxiety was mollified by the Roman intervention and also by the pleasure of receiving the officers, Vestalis and Flaccus, who presumably visited Tomis in connection with the campaigns. It is, however, possible that Ovid visited
them,
for he writes of ‘verses composed on the battlefield'.
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Flaccus, the commander, was the younger brother of a friend. Here was an opportunity for Ovid to push his case. To Vestalis:
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You see yourself the Black Sea white with ice.

You see yourself the frozen wine stands stiff.

You see yourself the ferocious Iazygian

Steering laden wagon over mainstream Danube.

You see how poison, flying on fast feathers,

Delivers death twice over.
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To Graecinus, another brother of Flaccus, who was about to return to Rome after his tour of duty:

Should you see Flaccus, recently commander

Of this region …
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Ask him of Scythia and its climate.

How it is to live in fear of foes so near.

Whether the slim shaft is dipped in snake venom.

Whether the human head is used as gruesome talisman.

Whether I lie when I say the sea freezes over

Acres at a time.
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The years were passing, Ovid weakening. He complained of brackish water and poor food. He suffered stomach upsets, fever, sleeplessness and a constantly aching side. He was pallid, with hair prematurely white.

Augustus, too, was ageing. He had passed seventy-one when Ovid's exile began. What if the emperor should die first? Would his successor grant a reprieve? Augustus did in fact die first: at seventy-seven, during the sixth year of Ovid's absence. The poet wrote him an elegy, in Getic:

You ask me what I wrote: a song for Ceasar,

Telling of Augustus' earthbound body

But his spirit soaring high in heaven

And Tiberius holding now the reins.
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But no word from Tiberius; and there was little hope of reaching this increasingly reclusive and stone-hearted man. By now Ovid himself had less than three years to live. His sole consolation was an unexpected one. Latterly the city of his exile had begun to seem less hateful. He was touched by the simple kindness of its people. Though no one could read his verse, they honoured him. Perhaps the officers' visit enhanced his standing. He was exempted from taxes. At last Tomis was starting to seem like home!

Dear as Latona
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to the Isle of Delos

Which alone gave haven to her wanderings,

So dear to me is Tomis. From home far exiled

It has become for me a faithful home-from-home.

Would the gods had placed it nearer to some

Promise of peace, further from the chilling pole!
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Tomitans, I have affection for you,

But little for your land.
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Ovid died in
AD
17 or soon after, aged sixty. Buried obscurely, this odd-man-out in the Augustan Parnassus ended as he dreaded most: in cold Sarmatian soil, somewhere between barred gate and bare steppe. So faded a comet, whose returning fire would be hailed in many an age to come. During the resurrection of Pompeii, when the spade uncovered the numerous wall-scrawls of the common man, the lines of poetry would be predominantly his. The cultural movement known as the Twelfth Century Renaissance would call itself
Aetas Ovidiana
(the Ovidian Age). His would be the poetry which most delighted Dante, who made him one of the ‘four great men' encountered in Limbo. Ariosto and Tasso, Gower and Spenser were under his spell. Chaucer would call him ‘Venus' clerke, who wonderfullie wyde hath spread that goddess's grete name'.
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Meres would avow that ‘the sweete and wittie soul of Ovid lives in honey-tongued Shakespeare'.
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His work, especially concerning transformations, would be a treasury of plots and ideas for writers and painters, from the elder Brueghel
111
to Bernard Shaw.
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He was the least awesome and most delightful of the great Romans; a poet to be loved as long as love is loved. ‘Nor fire, nor cankering age, thy wit-fraught book shall once invade.'
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The steppe evoked little wit. Though never losing technical mastery, circumstances turned Ovid toward inwardness and darkness and away from the brilliance and brightness which had been his genius. The gain for history was a loss for literature, which fades markedly during the closing years of the Augustan Age. Regarding the
Poems of Exile:
it is a happy outcome that the fruits of so unpromising a place, shipped from so far, should have been preserved, despite official frost, to survive Rome's long life and painful death, to escape the Dark Ages, to be circulated among Meroving monasteries and Caroling libraries, finally to emerge into the safety of print and the daylight of dissemination. It is lucky, for those who study the edges of the ancient world, that such a man should have gone to such a place. Americans may still comprehend contemporaries like Henry James and Buffalo Bill
114
as contrasting aspects of the same national experience. British people, too, are just able to reconcile differences represented by the view from an empire's centre and from its edges, as in the work of opposites like Wilde and Kipling, Aubrey Beardsley and Robert Service. With Ovid the metropolitan and frontier experiences meet, though uneasily, in one man. It was an accident unlikely to be repeated. The fringes of the Roman world were the abode of backwoodsman, trader and soldier. Only occasionally and in flashes would they again be seen through the eyes of a supreme creative artist. The coincidence of voice and place which is Ovid in Tomis was unique and would not recur.

Banishment to the Black Sea was more than a way to be rid of someone, and the motive was more than plain punishment. Who devised this arrow, dealing double death to person and poetry alike? The style could be Livia's. Despite advice to her husband to treat dissidents leniently,
115
she herself was the last to be lenient in the event of a threat to her son's succession. She was motivated by what Tacitus called ‘stepmotherly spite'.
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If there is truth in the younger Julia's implication in a plot against Tiberius,
117
and if Ovid had knowledge of it, Livia's hate would be assured. All, of course, is guesswork. Only on the question of who gave the actual order are we on firm ground. As Ovid's wife puts it at the beginning of
Tristia,
‘It is Caesar's anger which commands you to quit your native land.'
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Whoever devised the punishment, the order was the emperor's; and it diminishes his august name. State oppression of artists has many a resonance in the 20th century and it is comforting to be reminded that the outcome is the same. Art is in a curious way unpunishable and those who penalize poetry incur the penalty of its augmented power.