The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ovid · five books of elegiac poems written in relegation at Tomis on the Black Sea · fifty-one poems, 3,530 lines of Latin elegiac couplets in the text measured, begun on the voyage out in the winter of AD 8 to 9 · scored on Ovid’s Latin, read from knowledge, with Latin quoted only where its words are certain; Green’s Poems of Exile and Wheeler’s Loeb, revised by Goold, for sense
Mode
Elegiac collection as letters home; lament, petition, apology, ethnography, epitaph and autobiography in one measure
Mythos
The exiled poet at the edge of the world, built as a figure; Ulysses outdone in wandering; the man struck by Jupiter’s thunderbolt; the book as Phaethon and Icarus; Tomis named by Medea’s crime
Phase
From the last night in Rome and the winter voyage, through the apology to Caesar, to the years at Tomis, the frozen river and the loss of Latin
Presentation
Poems; five books, fifty-one poems, 3,530 lines of elegiac couplets, the second book a single poem of 578 lines, about 23,600 words of Latin
Register
Plaintive and level for long stretches, rising to the night of departure, the storm and the cold; wit kept alive in grief; the petition that flatters the man it accuses
Scale
One man’s ruin seen from one window: the sovereign, the law, a marriage, friendship, literature, language, a people and a winter
Governing Proposition
A poet sent by the emperor to the edge of the empire writes back to the city that will not have him, in the measure he once used for love, and sends his book where he cannot go. The wager of the book is that a writer is made of his audience and his language, that exile takes both, and that the self which survives can exist only as text sent home, petitioning the power that ruined it and answering the charge before the judge who made it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Parve (nec invideo) sine me, liber, ibis in urbem”
“Little book, you will go to the city without me; I do not grudge it” (1.1.1). The first line of the book is addressed to the book. The poet who wrote it has been sent by Caesar to Tomis, a town on the Black Sea at the edge of the empire, and the book is to go where he may not. The form of the whole is in that line. These are letters, and the letter is now the only way this poet reaches Rome; the book stands in for the man, and everything in it is written to be read in the city that will not have him.
The book is scored here as one work: the five books of the Tristia, as transmitted and as Ovid ordered them, begun on the voyage out in the winter of AD 8 to 9. The first book, eleven poems and 737 lines, is the journey. The second is a single poem of 578 lines, the apology to Augustus, and alone makes up sixteen per cent of the whole. The third, fourth and fifth, of fifteen, ten and fourteen poems, are written from Tomis. In the text measured there are fifty-one poems and 3,530 lines, about 23,600 words of Latin, every line in elegiac couplets. The poems run from 26 lines to 132 outside the second book, and average 69. The Epistulae ex Ponto, which continue the matter, are a separate work and are not part of this one.
The words the book returns to are its map. Caesar stands fifty-five times; the name Augustus never once. Patria comes forty-three times, words of the root barbar- twenty-seven, Roma twenty-six, exul and its forms twenty-five, Musa nineteen, error fourteen, the poet’s own name, Naso, thirteen, the Danube, Ister, eight. The wife, to whom many of the poems are written, is never named. The book is a petition to one man, written in the vocabulary of a lost country, by a poet who keeps saying who he is.
Movement II
“Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago”
“When the picture of that saddest night comes over me” (1.3.1). The third poem of the first book goes back to the last night in Rome, and it is the book’s summit and its origin. The household weeps as at a funeral. The moon stands over the Capitol. The poem moves as narrative inside the couplet without strain, and it gives the departure a pathos that Latin elegy, the measure of the lover’s complaint, had not reached on its own account before. No poem in the book could be cut with greater loss, because everything after it is the memory it begins.
The wife would follow him: “te sequar et coniunx exulis exul ero”
“I will follow you, and be an exile, an exile’s wife” (1.3.82). The line turns on its own repetition, exulis exul, the condition doubled in one place in the verse, as the couplet habitually does; here the habit is the meaning. Marriage enters the book at this line and stays in it, in poems to a woman the book never names, whose loyalty it returns to again and again.
Then the sea. The second poem of the first book is a storm, written as if in the waves; the eleventh, which closes the book, says that its verses were composed on deck in winter. Both reach a dreadful grandeur, and both make the writing part of the event: the poem is not about the voyage from a safe shore, it claims to be what the voyage left. Against these the poet sets the old stories and claims to surpass them. His wandering is greater than Ulysses’ (1.5); his book, like Phaethon and Icarus, is warned off the heights (1.1.79, 1.1.90); he is the man Jupiter’s thunderbolt has struck, and the thunderbolt is Caesar’s anger.
Movement III
“perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error”
“though two charges ruined me, a poem and a mistake” (2.207). The second book is one poem, an apology addressed to Augustus, and it answers the charge before the judge who made it. The book names both. The mistake, the error, is named here and withheld, here and through the whole book; what it was, the book does not tell.
The defence is a defence of literature. “vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea”
“my life is modest; my Muse is playful” (2.354). The poem’s licence is not its author’s life: this is the first extended defence of a poet against the state in Roman verse, and it is made in the couplet of the love poems themselves, so that the measure is part of the argument. The book then runs through Greek and Roman writers of love, and the catalogue turns the charge against the canon: if love and adultery are the offence, the Iliad itself is a poem of adultery (2.371). The wit of the catalogue is the wit of the earlier Ovid, put to work in a case on which his life depends.
The poem had to flatter the man it accused. The book calls him Caesar, never Augustus, and treats him as a god whose anger is the god’s thunder; it draws the line between the poet’s relegation and exile (2.137). Whether the praise is sincere, servile or ironic is unsettled, and it is not settled here. The book holds flattery and accusation as one condition, the petitioner’s, and the uncertainty is part of what it discloses: what speech becomes before absolute power, written to that power and sent to it.
Movement IV
From Tomis the book is sent where its author cannot go. In 3.1 it speaks in its own voice as it arrives in Rome, and it is refused by the public libraries: the exile of the man is repeated as the exile of his text. The place he writes from is named by a crime: Tomis, the book says, is where Medea cut up her brother (3.9.6). The people are Getae and Sarmatians, and the book records their dress, their weapons and their speech, and a natural order of treeless plain and frozen rivers.
The cold is the third sublime of the book. In 3.10 the Danube freezes so that wagons cross it, and the wine, the jar broken or gone, stands on its own: “nudaque consistunt, formam servantia testae”
the wine stands bare, “keeping the shape of the jar” (3.10.23). It is ethnographic report made into verse of exact physical detail, and it is an image of the book’s own state, a form that keeps its shape after what held it has gone. Earlier, in 3.3, the poet lies sick and dictates his epitaph, and the stone names him by what he was: “hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum”
“I who lie here, the player of tender loves” (3.3.73).
The second loss is of Latin. Near the end of the third book the poet says it outright: “verba mihi desunt dedidicique loqui”
“words fail me, and I have unlearned how to speak” (3.14.46). The claim is made in a pentameter that does not falter. The book insists that its verse decays among barbarians, and the verse refutes it, keeping the antithesis, the placed last word, the wit. A poet is not charged for a fiction of decline his verse disproves, and the fiction is itself made with craft. How far it is performance is one of the questions the book keeps open.
Movement V
“Ille ego qui fuerim, tenerorum lusor amorum”
“Who I was, that player of tender loves” (4.10.1). The last poem of the fourth book is an autobiography written for posterity, a hundred and thirty-two lines, the longest poem in the book outside the second. It begins on the words of the epitaph, and it compresses a life into the couplet with every date and name in place: the birthplace, Sulmo, in its third line; a daughter, absent (4.10.75). Of Virgil it says only “Vergilium vidi tantum”, “Virgil I only saw” (4.10.51). The self the book has been building is closed here, as the record of a man who can now exist only as what he wrote.
The fifth book returns to language. Among the Getae and Sarmatians the Roman’s word turns on him: “barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli”
“here I am the barbarian, understood by no one” (5.10.37). The line holds the book’s disclosure in one turn. A writer is made of his audience and his language, and exile takes both; at the edge of the empire the Roman is the one whose speech means nothing, and the only audience left is the city that has shut him out. Every poem in the book obeys this one law, the grief of the last night, the case before Caesar, the report from the frozen river and the epitaph alike.
The book is narrow by its nature. Fifty-one poems turn on a short set of moves, and many of the shorter poems of the last three books could go singly with little loss; the range is the range of one voice in one situation, seen from one window. What it holds against that is the figure it built. The exiled poet at the edge of the world, writing back to a city that will not answer, became the archetype: Du Bellay took the posture, Pushkin wrote to Ovid, Mandelstam took the title for his Tristia of 1922, and the literature of exile and of the poet under a tyrant has gone back to it since. The legend has travelled further than the poems. The poems are where it was made.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites, and the book half admits it. Fifty-one poems turn on a short set of moves: the voyage, the cold, the barbarians, the wife’s loyalty, the friend’s silence or kindness, the plea that Caesar’s anger soften, the claim that the verse has decayed. Many of the shorter poems of Books 3 to 5 could go singly with no loss of argument, perhaps a fifth of the lines. Against this the large pieces are required: Book 2 is compelled by the situation, 1.3 is the book’s origin, 4.10 closes the self the book has built. The monotony is in part the subject, exile as the same day repeated; what holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the book uses repetition more often than it needs it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a writer is made of his audience and his language, and exile takes both, so that the self that survives exists only as text sent back to the city. “barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli” (5.10.37) inverts the Roman’s word: among the Getae the Roman is the barbarian. “verba mihi desunt dedidicique loqui” (3.14.46) names the second loss, of Latin itself. The book also shows what speech becomes before absolute power: the petition that must flatter the man it accuses. Held at the gate and not above it because much of the yield is a mood, grief, cold and longing, rendered many times, and because the flattery sometimes blurs whether the book discloses the condition or enacts it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Height is real and comes at a handful of places. The summit is 1.3, the last night in Rome: the household weeping as at a funeral, the moon over the Capitol, the wife who would follow, told with a pathos Latin elegy had not reached on its own account before. The storm of 1.2, written as if in the waves, and 1.11, verses composed on deck in winter, reach a dreadful grandeur. 3.10 is the cold sublime, the Danube frozen so that wagons cross it and the wine standing in the shape of its jar. 3.3, the epitaph dictated from a sickbed, and 4.10 rise in another key. Between these the register is plaintive and level, and the plea to Caesar is not an elevated mode: the height is high, the frequency moderate.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Here the book builds rather than evokes. Ovid makes of himself the figure of the exiled poet at the edge of the world, and the figure is load-bearing: the whole book is made to produce it, and it has stood as the archetype since. He sets himself against Ulysses and claims the greater wandering (1.5, 3.11.61); he is the man struck by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, Caesar’s anger as the god’s; his book is warned off the heights by Phaethon and Icarus (1.1.79, 1.1.90); Tomis is the place where Medea cut up her brother (3.9.6), a landscape named by a dismemberment. The poet of the Metamorphoses has become a metamorphosis. Held below the top because the comparisons are often a rhetorical register piled in catalogue, and the archetype is one figure, not a world of them.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the Latin love elegy of Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid’s own Amores: the couplet, the first person, the lover shut out at the door, the servitude to a hard mistress. The turn takes that apparatus whole and points it at exile and the state. The lover at the door becomes the exile at Rome’s shut door, the mistress becomes Caesar, the servitude of love becomes the subject’s petition, and elegy, which took its name from lament, is returned to lament for a living man’s lost world. Book 2 is a second swerve: a defence of literature’s licence in 578 lines, addressed to the emperor who punished it, turning the charge against the canon (2.371). The stake was mortal: the poems went to a ruler who could worsen the sentence.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The form is much of the knowledge. The book is a book of letters, and the letter is the only way this poet now reaches Rome: 1.1 sends the book in his place, and 3.1 has the book speak as it arrives and is refused by the public libraries, so that the exile of the man is repeated as the exile of his text. The couplet, the measure of love play, carrying grief, is itself the argument of 2.354, that the Muse and the man can differ. Withholding names is a formal act with knowledge in it: naming would endanger the named. Held off the top because the collection is additive, the poems of Books 3 to 5 able to stand in other orders with little change in what they know, and because Book 2 would say most of what it says in prose.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over two millennia, most of it from the last century. Long read as a sad decline from the Metamorphoses, the book has been reread since the mid twentieth century as one of the subtlest of Ovid’s works, and the rereading has not exhausted it. Whether Book 2’s praise of Augustus is sincere, servile or ironic is unsettled. The error the book names it also withholds. How far the claimed decay of the verse and the loss of Latin are a performance, by a poet whose couplets do not decay, stays open. Each answer changes the book. Held at this figure because a large share of the shorter poems yields its whole on first reading, and the return is concentrated in Book 2, 1.3, 3.3, 4.10 and the poems of language.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is Latin poetry of the Augustan age and the elegiac tradition it closed. The intrinsic force: the book founds a kind, the poetry of exile in the first person, in which the poet’s displacement and his language are the subject; nothing in Greek or Latin before it does this at length. In Book 2 it makes the first extended defence of a poet against the state in Roman verse. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the later Latin exile poems, the medieval reading of the exiled Ovid, Du Bellay’s Regrets, Pushkin’s verses to Ovid, Mandelstam’s Tristia (1922), which takes the title, and Brodsky, Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt. Much of the reach runs through the legend of Ovid at Tomis rather than the text, and is credited at a discount.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over two millennia, and the text survives whole: all five books and every poem, carried through the medieval manuscript tradition and printed since the fifteenth century, with only the variants usual for a classical author. Form carries no charge. Presence is continuous but narrower than the Metamorphoses: the book was read in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as part of Ovid, taught in Latin schools, translated steadily, and returned to wide attention in the twentieth century by the poets of exile. For a long stretch it was read mainly as a lesser Ovid, and that is a charge on presence. The charge holds the axis a step below a text read whole without break; the presence was narrowed, never broken.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on the Latin, as a reader of Latin verse judges it, not with a native ear: the metre can be scanned, its music judged only in part. The command of the elegiac couplet is as fluent as anything in Latin: the antithesis balanced across the pentameter, the closing word placed as a turn, the wit kept alive in grief. 1.3 moves as narrative inside the couplet without strain; 3.10 makes ethnographic report into verse of exact physical detail; 4.10 compresses a life into a hundred and thirty-two lines with every date and name in place, the birthplace, Sulmo, named in its third line. The book claims its own decay (3.14.46) and the verse refutes the claim, which is part of the craft. The charges: facility, the couplet’s habit of saying a thing twice, and a sameness of cadence across the shorter poems.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs: the poet exists now only as text, and every poem is that text’s attempt to reach the city it cannot enter. Take the most distant elements, the grief of 1.3 and the wit of Book 2’s literary catalogue, or the frozen ethnography of 3.10 and the self-epitaph of 3.3. They obey the one law: the memory the text must carry, the case it must win, the report from where it is written, the stone it will leave. The tension between flattery and accusation is held as one condition, the petitioner’s, not as a contradiction. Held at this figure because the range, though real, is the range of one voice in one situation, and the claim of failing Latin sits uneasily, by design or not, against the polish everywhere.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a book of exile elegies holds. The state and its sovereign, as absolute power over one man. Law, in the distinction the book draws between relegation and exile (2.137). Marriage, in the poems to the wife. Friendship and its failure. Literature, its history and its licence, in Book 2. Language itself, its loss and its replacement. A people at the edge of the empire, their dress, weapons and speech; a natural order of frozen rivers and treeless plain. One man’s life, in 4.10. These are held together by the single situation, which is the book’s strength and its limit: everything is seen from one window, the family is one wife and an absent daughter (4.10.75), and the sacred is Caesar as god. Much for an elegiac collection; one order of experience, seen widely.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, The Made at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7. A text that survives whole after two millennia, its presence narrowed for a time but never broken; a command of the elegiac couplet as fluent as anything in Latin, wit kept alive in grief and a claimed decay the verse refutes; and the love elegy turned whole on exile and the state, written to the ruler who could worsen the sentence.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6: fifty-one poems turn on a short set of moves, and many of the shorter poems of Books 3 to 5 could go singly without loss of argument; the book uses repetition more often than its subject needs. Next above it, The Encompassed at 7.7: the state, the law, marriage, friendship, literature, language, a people and a winter are held, but all seen from one window, the family one wife and an absent daughter, the sacred Caesar as god.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, The Unconcealment at 8.5 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two exactly at it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below The Inevitable at 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.4.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ovid’s Tristia, scored as one book: the five books of elegiac poems as transmitted and as Ovid ordered them, written in relegation at Tomis and begun on the voyage out in the winter of AD 8 to 9. The Epistulae ex Ponto are a separate work and are not scored. The text survives whole, carried through the medieval manuscript tradition and printed since the fifteenth century. For measurement the Perseus Digital Library text of A. L. Wheeler’s Latin was counted by script: fifty-one poems, 3,530 lines (737, 578, 788, 678 and 749 by book), about 23,600 words; the word counts given on this page are from that text, and every Latin quotation was checked against it. The whole was not reread for this page; the poems that carry the book are known well, the shorter poems of Books 3 to 5 in outline. Every axis is judged on the Latin, as a reader of Latin verse hears it and not with a native ear; nothing is charged to the poem for that limit. Translations · Peter Green’s The Poems of Exile (Penguin, 1994; revised, University of California, 2005), for its notes as much as its verse, and Wheeler’s Loeb, revised by G. P. Goold, for sense. Neither is quoted; English set beneath or after a Latin phrase is the page’s own close rendering, and no translation is charged to the work. Matters not verified are not given: among them the date by which the book was finished, which poems of the later books restate earlier ones, and the course of the critical argument over the irony of Book 2. Citations are by book, poem and line, and by poem and line for Book 2.