What Ovid in exile was missing

A notable recent trend in popular history is the revival of interest in the ancient world. Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Bettany Hughes and Peter Stothard are just some of the historians whose books and television series have cashed in on our thirst for knowledge of distant forebears and their civilisations. Now Owen Rees joins the merry band with a strikingly original take on the subject.

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He argues that our interest in classical history focuses almost entirely on the Graeco-Roman world, specifically on the capital centres of those cultures. We therefore miss much of what was going on at the periphery of empires, with their vibrant cities and peoples.

Rees attributes our indifference to these outposts to our ‘obsession’ with the most commonly translated historians and poets of Greece and Rome – Herodotus, Thucydides, Juvenal, Suetonius, Virgil and Horace. But the particular target of his venom is Ovid, exiled, for unclear reasons, to Tomis (now Constanta, on Romania’s Black Sea coast) by the Emperor Augustus for the last decade of the poet’s life.

We have, Rees contends, too easily absorbed Ovid’s dim view of his new surroundings. He saw Tomis as a barbarous backwater, populated by an aggressive tribe dressed in animal skins and barking and grunting in a foreign tongue he did not understand. All this offended his sensibilities and isolated him from the community to which he had been banished. In what Rees calls Ovid’s ‘bigoted imagination’, Tomis was a bleak place, where wine froze in jars and the ice-bound Black Sea prevented ships from sailing and dolphins from jumping. In fact archaeological evidence reveals Tomis to have been a bustling, thriving city and an important trading hub between East and West.