When Ovid boarded ship from Elba and bade his host farewell, it was the last time the two friends would ever see each other. That December, ‘shivering with the bitter cold’, the poet took another ship, ‘out into the waters of the Adriatic’.71 Not for him, though, the short voyage to some island off the coast of Italy. Augustus, who had interviewed the desperate and repentant poet personally before settling his fate, had chosen for him a very different destination. For Ovid, that most urbane, most fashionable of men, the place nominated to serve as his prison could not have been more terrible.
He was bound for the ends of the earth.
Heart of Darkness
‘Nothing lies beyond it except for cold, and hostile peoples, and the frozen waves of an ice-bound sea.’72
Ovid was appalled to find himself in Tomis. It was very much not his kind of town. Planted centuries earlier by Greek colonists on the bleak and gale-lashed coast of the Black Sea, it stood on the outermost limits of Roman power. Even though Ovid was exaggerating grotesquely when he complained that Tomis was one perpetual winter, the reality of its balmy summers did little to ease his mood of depression.*4 It was hard to imagine a town less like Rome. The water was brackish. The food was appalling. No one spoke Latin, and even the Greek spoken by the Tomitans struck Ovid as halfway to gibberish. Surrounded as he was by treeless desolation, the pleasures of the world’s capital shimmered in his memory like hallucinations. ‘Here,’ he reflected mournfully, ‘it is I who am the barbarian.’73
To Ovid, a man as fashionable as anyone in Rome, it came as a shock to live among provincials who did not even realise that they were provincial. Within the low, crumbling fortifications of Tomis, there was no one to share with him his anguished homesickness for metropolitan chic. Beyond its walls, things were even more savage. The Danube, which lay some seventy miles to the north, featured on the maps of Caesar and his strategists as an immense natural frontier, a wide-flowing impediment to the brutes who lurked beyond it; but on the ground things were alarmingly different. During winter, when even the sea beyond the delta might turn to ice, the river would freeze solid; and then, mounted on swift ponies, their beards white with frost, barbarians from the savage wastes beyond the Danube would appear, predacious and unsparing. Plumes of smoke wisping above the sunless horizon would mark villages put to the torch, bodies left twisted by poisoned arrows, the survivors tethered and driven off with their belongings. In his nightmares, Ovid would imagine himself dodging missiles or else shackled in a coffle, and wake to find the rooftops bristling with a stubble of arrows. Looking out at the warbands as they circled the walls of Tomis, he would feel himself penned inside a sheepfold. Rome seemed not merely distant, but impotent. ‘For all her beauties, the vast majority of mankind barely registers her existence.’ It was, for a man as devoted to the metropolis as Ovid, a devastating discovery to make. ‘They do not fear the armed might of the Romans.’74
But there was even greater cause for anxiety. When Ovid looked at the Tomitans, he saw a people barely distinguishable from the barbarians at their gates. The men wore sheepskin trousers and were unspeakably hairy; the women carried water-pots on their heads. No one in Rome had lived like this for centuries. Back amid the gilded sophistication of his former life, Ovid had laughed at the nostalgia of the Princeps for the days of Romulus, and dismissed the first Romans as murderers, rapists, brutes. Now, transplanted to the ends of the earth, it was as though he had been exiled to the distant past as well. On the frontier between civilisation and barbarism, Ovid found himself in a realm where men seemed halfway to beasts – or worse. They were, he complained, ‘more savage than wolves’.75 Stranded on the margins of Roman power, he could gaze into the darkness that stretched far beyond it and feel its immensity, its potency, its colossal disdain for everything that he was. No wonder, marking the degenerate Greek spoken by his fellow townsmen, he began to fret that he might be losing his Latin. A potential for barbarism lurked within Romans too. The founder of their city, after all, had sucked on the teat of a wolf. Once, where now fountains burbled and porticoes offered shade to men of fashion, people had ‘lived like beasts’.76 Rome too, Ovid knew, had been one of the dark places of the world.
Perhaps, though, it was only out on the margins of civilisation, far from the fleshpots of the capital, that a man could properly appreciate just how far the Roman people had come since those distant days – and what the qualities were that had made possible their rise to greatness. Ovid, exiled to ‘a frontier zone just recently and precariously brought under the rule of law’,77 was having his metrosexual nose rubbed by the Princeps in a brutal fact. There could be no arts of peace without a mastery of war. It was not, in the final reckoning, good drains or gleaming temples, let alone a taste for poetry, that distinguished a civilised man from a savage, but steeclass="underline" the steel it took to stand shield to shield in a line of battle, and then advance. Wolf-bred though a Roman was, his proficiency at inflicting slaughter was not that of a wild beast. Training, rigid and relentless, had forged him into a single link in a mighty chain. A soldier was not permitted to marry: his comrades were all he had. A legion was less a pack of animals than it was a killing machine. Soldiers worshipped Mars as Gradivus – the god who gave them the courage to advance, step by measured step, obedient to the blasts of the war-trumpet, no matter what the danger. Against their relentless, heavy tread, there was little prospect of victory. Even the wildest, most bloodthirsty warband, when it charged a legion, was liable to break in the end. Unlike the savages from across the Danube, ‘always descending like birds when least expected’,78 a Roman army was schooled in endurance. Its soldiers had been trained, no matter what, to eviscerate a foe, advance, and then, covered in blood, to eviscerate again. Had they not been, then their aptitude for inflicting slaughter on those who dared to oppose them would never have become so potent. ‘It is discipline, strict military discipline, that is the surest guardian of Roman power.’79
Everything followed from this: the refusal to buckle in the face of setbacks; the dogged pursuit of victory, no matter how seemingly insuperable the odds; the patience to persevere in the face of repeated reversals and revolts. The Balkans, rather than the desolation of untamed menace that Ovid imagined them to be, were in fact, by the time of his arrival in Tomis, almost tamed for good. The process had been long and gruelling. Many years had passed since the future Augustus, eager for martial glory, had proclaimed the pacification of Illyria, and Crassus, a decade later, routed the Bastarnians. The greatest feats of all had been achieved by Tiberius, who in the years before his retirement to Rhodes had subdued what is now Hungary, a savage region infested by wild boars and even wilder tribesmen. The Pannonians, as they were called, were to prove themselves inveterately rebellious. Sporadic bushfires of revolt had combined, in AD 6, into a single terrifying conflagration. Merchants had been slaughtered, isolated detachments wiped out, Macedonia invaded. In the face of this devastating insurgency, even the Princeps had panicked. Unless urgent steps were taken, he had warned the Senate in hysterical tones, the Pannonians would be at the gates of the city in ten days. Fortunately, back from Rhodes, Rome’s best general had once again been his to command. Tiberius, patient and relentless, was ideally suited to the crushing of guerillas. As attentive to the welfare of his own men as he was to the risks of ambush, he had blocked his ears to the shrill demands from the capital for immediate results. Slow and steady did it. ‘The safest course, in the opinion of Tiberius, was the best.’80 Week by week, month by month, he had broken the Pannonians. Their surrender had finally come in AD 8, a mass prostration before the victorious general on a river bank. The following year, even as Ovid was gawping in alarm at his first sight of barbarians, fire and slaughter were being visited upon the final, mountainous strongholds of rebellion in the Balkans. After the young Germanicus, entrusted with his first command, had proved himself as ineffectual as he was dashing, Tiberius moved in to deliver the coup de grâce. The pacification was complete at last. A vast block of territory, stretching from the Black Sea to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Danube, had been secured for good. Tiberius richly merited the gratitude of the Princeps and the approbation of his fellow citizens. ‘Victory, her wings beating as ever above Rome’s great general, had wreathed his bright hair with laurel.’81