Homer and Ulysses in Ovid’s Poetry of Exile

Matthew M. McGowan (The College of Wooster)

This paper examines why Ovid identifies himself with Homer as poet and Ulysses as exile in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. This identification results, on one level, from the immense degree of suffering the ancients connected with the former’s works of poetry and the latter’s experience in myth, a suffering Ovid claims to outdo in exile. On another level, the prominence of these two figures in the literary tradition of Greece and Rome made them ideal models for a poet intent on making his name within that tradition.

From the opening poem of the Tristia through the final book of the Epistulae ex Ponto Ovid often alludes directly to Homer and Ulysses to shape the poetics of his exile. In Tristia 1.1, for example, Homer appears as the traditional measure of poetic capacity, Tr. 1.1.47-8:

da mihi Maeoniden et tot circumice casus,
     ingenium tantis excidet omne malis.

Let’s take Homer, for example, and cast as many misfortunes about him; all his genius will fall away amid such great ills.

Ovid uses the figure of Homer here to consider poetic capacity in terms of suffering (mala) rather than talent (ingenium). Similarly, in the final book of the Epistulae ex Ponto he adduces the mythical exemplum of Ulysses in order to demonstrate that his own suffering outdoes that of Homer’s hero, Pont. 4.10.9-10:

Exemplum est animi nimium patientis Vlixes
     iactatus dubio per duo lustra mari.

The measure of excessive mental anguish is Ulysses who was tossed about on the treacherous seas for ten years.

Ovid composes this distich as a counterpoise to the one cited above from the poem opening his poetry of exile: both passages punctuate the period of his banishment by defining his experience there in relation to paradigmatic figures of the Greco-Roman literary traditon.

In these and several other passages, Ovid presents himself as a composite of Homer as poet and Ulysses as exile in order to make a claim for the validity of his exile poetry both in relation to the politics of Augustan Rome and within the history of literature. By identifying himself with such paradigmatic figures from the literary tradition, the poet-exile collapses the distance between poetic representation and actual experience. In doing so, he lays claim to the immortality of poetry over against the immediate power of the emperor at Rome and offers an enduring challenge to the historical circumstance that brought about his banishment.