A Therapoetics of Exile: The Cure for a Limping Poem

Julia Hawkins (The Ohio State University)

This paper examines Ovid’s poetic project during exile in terms of therapeia—both for his own physical illness, of which he often complains, and for his poetic “illness.”  Out of all the myriad sicknesses that Ovid endures in exile, I shall focus specifically on how Ovid’s complaints about his foot disease, gout (Pont. 1.3.23), correlate to problems with his “metrical feet,” arguing that Ovid’s disease can be read as an organizing principle for his exilic poetry and a metaphor for his poetic project as a whole.  From a close analysis of several passages in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, I shall demonstrate how Ovid manipulates the trope of the exiled poet to exert a new kind of control over his readers at Rome in an attempt to seduce his long-distance audience into understanding Augustus’ punishment as a stepping-stone to a greatness that Ovid could not have achieved without the experience of exile.  For example, at Pont. 1.3.21 Ovid claims that Asclepius himself would not be able to heal his ills.  The fact that Ovid and Asclepius both share the same fate of being hit by the thunderbolt of Jove (who is thinly veiled as Augustus at several points in the Metamorphoses) because of their ars (Tr. 1.1.71; Fast. 6.760; C. Newlands, 1995), suggests that Ovid’s wounding is part of his path to poetic immortality, just as Asclepius’ wound made him a god in Fasti 6 and the savior of Rome in Met. 15.  In this way, exile—envisioned as a bodily wound— is useful for Ovid’s poetic project in his attempt to manipulate the effect he has on Rome, as the distinction between his own body and his body of poetry becomes most blurred in his poetry written in Tomis. 

Joseph Farrell (1999) has discussed the connection between the poet’s physical and poetic corpora in the Metamorphoses, demonstrating Ovid’s vision of the book as the bodily manifestation of the poet’s disembodied voice.  In the exilic poetry, I suggest, the situation is reversed.  It is through Ovid’s frequent references to the bodily and “diseased” experience of exile that his literary Tomis takes shape, and his body’s pained reaction to life in Pontus both determines and is felt through his choice of a poetics of therapeia.  For example, at Pont. 1.3.1-24 Ovid, in his complaints over his gout, compares himself to Philoctetes and describes his body as “wounded by a bitter blow,” acerbo saucius ictu (1.3.7).  The image of the hobbled poet with a wounded foot evokes distinctly Roman and Greek associations.  On the one hand, Ennius says that he can only write poetry when suffering from podagra, “gout” (fr. 20, Courtney), the very disease from which Ovid too suffers (Pont. 1.3.23).  On the other hand, this combination of foot, pedis, and ictus recalls the important topos of the origin of the fount of Hippocrene (the source of poetic inspiration for Hesiod and Callimachus), which is formed ictibus pedis, “by the blows of the foot” of Pegasus at Met. 5.264.  In this way, Ovid’s focalization of diseased feet taps into deep currents of poetic initiation and inspiration.