The original Latin lover

For all you lovelorn Classical scholars out there, the Guardian has a very amusing piece by Charlotte Higgins on the Roman poet Ovid and his advice on how to hook up, Roman style. Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love, was published sometime around the birth of that troublesome Jesus fellow, and may have been the reason Augustus sentenced Ovid to exile in the remote Black Sea town of Tomis, in what is now Romania. There, surrounded by Greek-speaking semi-barbarians, and constantly in fear of getting his head sliced off by one of the bands of real barbarians that frequently raided the area, Ovid wrote to his wife (left behind in Rome), fretted that he was losing his command of Latin, and penned the witty, caustic and frequently sadly beautiful poems of exile that would be his last work.  

The Higgins piece sent me back to the great 1976 BBC series I, Claudius, which was nominally based on the Robert Graves novel but is better remembered as the masterwork of screenwriter Jack Pullman, who added so much fresh dialogue and reshaped the narrative so cleverly that the TV series stands as a separate (and superior) work in its own right.

Though the actual reason for Ovid’s punishment has been lost to history, Pullman cooked up a nicely bitchy aside in which Augustus (played wonderfully by Brian Blessed, unrecognizable without his beard) complains about the smuttiness of Ovid’s poems and says “I wouldn’t have him in the house, quite frankly.”

I’ll bet that by now a couple of generations of budding scholars have laughed knowingly at that in-joke, happy to see that all those years of grad school have finally paid off.