Catalina Popescu (independent scholar)
At the end of the Metamorphoses, after celebrating others’ transformations, Ovid envisions himself as a typical Greek hero, defeating toothed creatures— in this case, the monster Time (Biebighauser, 2005). While the Greek heroes finally reach resting places of worship, he completes his apotheosis with a post-mortem fusion with Rome (Met. XV, 870-5).
Despite his optimistic views, his poems of exile show a completely different situation: Bartholomew Natoli (2009) states that much like the characters in his Metamorphoses, Ovid loses his ability of speech: thus, struck by aphasia, Ovid believes that only by regaining this function, can he recover his previous self. Philip Hardie (2002, 63, 284) makes a similar remark when discussing the “semiotization of [Ovid’s] body (as Peter Brook puts it),” in his verses of exile. Poetic logos is in his view, the best way to send a ghostly reality of himself in the city, “an epistolary presence in Rome – qua licet.” (284).
While Hardie and Natoli discuss the poetics of Ovid’s ghostly projection back into urbs through speech, my focus goes towards the material reality of his bodily presence in barbaric Tomis. His tribulations are expressed in the terms of Greek heroic mythos. Symbolically perceiving his poetic “self” as a wounded hero in agony, Ovid becomes both a dead corpus and a sentient locus of scars, in his last verse of Pontica IV, 16. Like Hercules in his death throes, Ovid’s exile expressively translates into somatic laceration. Stuck in a land similar to a Stygian island (Pont. III, 3, 20), his heroic self loses the battle against the most ferocious monster: the “gnawing” serpent of envy and oblivion that Ovid hoped to defeat in Metamorphoses (XV, 872: nec edax abolere vetustas) finally tears him apart through the hate of his enemies (Pont. 1V, 14, 1: Inuide, quid laceras Nasonis carmina rapti?; Pont., IV, 14, 47-8: Liuor, /desine neu cineres sparge, cruente, meos!). Under the teeth of the monster Envy, Ovid’s body devolves into a mush of flesh disfigured beyond recognition (Pont. IV, 16, 50).
Nevertheless, despite being chewed and scattered, a strange somatic intactness forces the poet to endure perpetual agony without being able to transcend his physicality. Ovid feels that he loses his chance to benefic disembodiment and apotheosis. Unlike Hercules who left his earthly skin for a sidereal existence, Ovid is trapped in a biological body which refuses to die or lose somatic sensitivity: Omnia perdidimus, tantummodo uita relicta est,/ praebeat ut sensum materiamque mali. (Pont. IV, 14, 49-50).
While “larger than life” Greek heroes magically stretch over places to cover as much as possible with their bodily prowess, Ovid is ultimately refused any location until he can only inhabit himself. Nevertheless, this land of “selfhood” reveals no locus memoriae, no herōon, but the burial ground of an anonymous corpse. Corpus and locus contract for him into what is essentially a claustrophobic “suit”, an empty shell of his former self. Ovid is reduced to nothingness: Non habet in nobis iam noua plaga locum (Pont. IV. 14.52).