Antiquitopia

I've been reading Ovid's Tristia and his Black Sea Letters , and this passage struck me in the beauty of its description of Love's decrepitude: Sleep, that common repose from cares, possessed me, my slack limbs were sprawled out the length of my bed-- when, suddenly, the air was vibrant with beating pinions, and the window creaked softly open. In alarm I started up, propped on my left elbow, slumber gone, driven clear from my thumping breast. There stood Love, one hand grasping the maple bedpost, with a sad expression, not how he used to look, no neck-chain, no hair-comb, locks in wild disorder, not neatly pinned back as of old, but hanging loose around his bristled jawline, wing-feathers ruffled (or so it seemed to me) like those on the back of some homing pigeon, fingered by too many rough hands. (Ovid, Black Sea Letters III.3.7-20) His description of sleep as something that possesses rather than a state is what initially drew me into the passage, as if sleep is a spiri...

Ovid, famous in his own day for his Art of Love , but today for his Metamorphoses (Transformations), reflects on his Metamorphoses in his tearful Tristia (Lamentations), which were written after he was banished from Rome, exiled to the Black Sea: There are also fifteen books of Metamorphoses , worksheets lately saved from my exequies: To them I bid you say that the new face of my fortunes may now be reckoned one more among their bodily changes: by sudden transformation what was joyful once is made fit matter for tears. (Ovid, Tristia , I.1.117-22; trans. Peter Green) There is a certain painful, sad commentary here. At the end of his Metamorphoses, Ovid basically says that he (and his book--he equates them) is the only thing that will endure, not change. His exile, his separation from all his friends, from his homeland, changes him physically, psychologically, and emotionally, transforming his joy into tears. His persona in the Metamorphoses has, itself, transformed through dislocat...