Note sull'episodio
At the height of his fame, Rome's most celebrated poet was banished by the emperor Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea without a trial, leaving only a cryptic explanation: a poem and a mistake. This episode builds a narrative biography of Publius Ovidius Naso, born in 43 BC into an equestrian family, trained in performative Roman rhetoric, and pushed by his brother's death to abandon the law for poetry against his father's wishes.
The conversation follows his erotic innovations in elegiac meter, from the Heroides, where mythological heroines argue like prosecutors, to the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, then the epic ambition of the Metamorphoses and the unfinished Fasti. It weighs the exile against the scandal surrounding Augustus's granddaughter Julia the Younger, examines the poetry of exile in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, considers J.J. Hartman's 1923 theory that the banishment was a hoax, and traces a legacy that survived book burnings ordered by the Archbishop of Canterbury to shape Chaucer, Shakespeare and Cervantes.
- How courtroom persona exercises became the secret weapon of a poet
- Was Corinna real? The scholarly case for a fictional muse
- Phaethon to Callisto: the cinematic transitions of the Metamorphoses
- Why a decade-old poem does not explain the timing of the banishment
- The hoax theory, the unfinished Fasti and feminist rewritings after MeToo