tangentially P: Q of All Plisters who know their Ovid

[Dave Monroe]

On 5/9/10, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hayden Carruth in a poem addressed to Ovid writes this:
>
>  "You tell me how you cannot name your crime because you only
>              suspect what it is
>  and to name it would make it true."
>
>  Anyone fill in anything here?
>
>  I am, of course, reminded of Lew B.'s unnamed crime in AtD.....

>From E.J. Kenney, "Introduction" to Ovid, Sorrows of an Exile (Trans.
A.D. Melville. Â New York: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. xiii-xxix:

{sorrows = Tristia]

Ovid, banished in disgrace by his emperor at the age of 51 .... The
duration of his exile was at the pleasure of Augustus, an ageing and
irritable autocrat whom he had somehow managed to give bitter personal
offence. Hence, it would seem, the choice of a place of exile: ... a
barbarized Greek colony on the farthest confines of the Roman
dominion. Tomius, now Constanta in Romania .... In one respect
Augustine's sentence had been lenient: Ovid was not legally exiled but
'relegated', hence not deprived in property or citizenship. Otherwise
it meant the loss of everything that had made life worth living, the
brilliant cosmopolitan society of Rome. Ahead lay nothing but
solitude, boredom, discomfort, and danger--a living death.

"What had Ovid done to deserve this? The secret has been well kept,
and all we know is what he chose to tell us in his poetry. It is
perhaps natural to assume that the real cause of the offence was what
he calls his indiscretion (error), an involuntary involvement in some
scandal intimately affecting the imperial house. The other count
against him, a poem (carmen), the Ars Amatoria, looks at first sight
like a pretext .... True, Ovid had in it administered more than one
pinprick to official Augustan myths, but can Augustine really thought
it so subversive of contemporary morals ... to deserve such draconian
punishment?" (p. xiv)

[....]

>From Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal
System (Trans. Kevin Repp. Â Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), Ch. 1,
"An Epoch of the Postal System," pp. 4-19:

In order to curb extensive corruption in the imperial postal system,
which always was
tantamount to conspiracy against the empire, Diocletian created an
imperial secret service, the scola agentum in rebus, and placed the
postal administration under its authority. Eventually, under
Theodosius and Honorius, the use of the postal system by private
persons was even punished by death. Since the network of the cursus
publicus was coextensive with the orbis terrarum, banishment to Pontus
meant being transported beyond the limes of the world for Ovid. While
the Tristia are laments over the loss of postal connections, the
Epistulae ex Ponto use the medium of literature to decry the
catastrophe in the postal system.
  "Postal systems are instrumenta regni....." (pp. 6-7)

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?isbn=0804732388
http://books.google.com/books?id=bz_1hEm_y84C

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