In the year A.D. 8, Emperor Augustus sentenced the elegant,
brilliant, and sophisticated Roman poet Ovid to exile -
permanently, as it turned out - at Tomis, modern Constantza, on the
Romanian coast of the Black Sea. The real reason for the emperor's
action has never come to light, and all of Ovid's subsequent
efforts to secure either a reprieve or, at the very least, a
transfer to a less dangerous place of exile failed. Two millennia
later, the agonized, witty, vivid, nostalgic, and often slyly
malicious poems he wrote at Tomis remain as fresh as the day they
were written, a testament for exiles everywhere, in all ages. The
two books of the Poems of Exile, the Lamentations (Tristia) and the
Black Sea Letters (Epistulae ex Ponto), chronicle Ovid's
impressions of Tomis - its appalling winters, bleak terrain, and
sporadic raids by barbarous nomads - as well as his aching memories
and ongoing appeals to his friends and his patient wife to
intercede on his behalf. While pretending to have lost his old
literary skills and even to be forgetting his Latin, in the Poems
of Exile Ovid in fact displays all his virtuoso poetic talent, now
concentrated on one objective: ending the exile. But his rhetorical
message falls on obdurately deaf ears, and his appeals slowly lose
hope. A superb literary artist to the end, Ovid offers an
authentic, unforgettable panorama of the death-in-life he endured
at Tomis.
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