Death and The Poet

by Fiona Forsyth

14 AD.

When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour.

But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman world is uncertain.

Even as far away as Tomis, this political shadow creates tension as the pompous Roman legate Flaccus thinks more of his career than solving a local murder.

Avitius and Ovid become convinced that an injustice has been done in the case of the murdered vegetable seller. But Flaccus continues to turn a deaf ear.

When Ovid’s wife, Fabia, arrives unexpectedly, carrying a cryptic message from the Empress Livia, the poet becomes distracted – and another crime is committed.

Ovid hopes for a return to Rome – only to discover that he is under threat from an enemy much closer to home.

Guest post – Ovid and his three wives

When you decide to write about the Roman poet Ovid, the place to start is his autobiographical poem Tristia 4.10. This is a poem written in (probably) the second or third year of the poet’s exile in Tomis on the shore of the Black Sea, probably around 10 or 11 CE. There is no way of checking any of the information in it, but equally there seems no reason for the poet to lie, especially as the poem was sent back to Rome to be circulated. In this poem, Ovid devotes these lines to his three wives – I hope you don’t mind some Latin! I have translated it underneath.

paene mihi puero nec digna nec utilis uxor
     est data, quae tempus perbreve nupta fuit.                    
illi successit, quamvis sine crimine coniunx,
     non tamen in nostro firma futura toro.
ultima, quae mecum seros permansit in annos,
     sustinuit coniunx exulis esse viri.

Barely out of childhood I was given a wife who was neither use nor ornament, married to me for a short time. Her successor, while a blameless partner, was not to remain rooted in my bed. The last, the stalwart of my later years, has stuck it out as the wife of a man in exile.

It is startling how swiftly – and dismissively – these three women are listed. In a poem of 132 lines the wives get six lines. None of the three are named and there is no obvious reason for this – other women are named in the exile poetry. And what happened to Wife One and Wife Two?

Wife One, poor woman, is brutally summarised for history as “nec digna nec utilis” (literally: neither worthy nor useful), then is waved away, presumably divorced. Let us hope that this poem, once circulated at Rome, did not reach her or her family. Wife Two is given her brief two lines and it is harder to work out what happened to her. What is the meaning of that curious phrase “non tamen in nostro firma futura toro” (literally: however she was not to be firm in my bed)? Did Wife Two fall out of bed a lot? Were the sheets slippery? Most assume that since she is described as “sine crimine” (literally: without charge / blame), she either died or was divorced through no fault of her own, and the latter is quite possible if Ovid saw a better chance on the horizon. In either case, to describe her as “not firm in my bed” seems callous! Wife Three at least is given credit for her loyalty but gets no more space than the previous two.

So who was Wife Three, the loyal wife who stayed at home and campaigned for Ovid? There is one important reference to this – in a poem to a man called Fabius Maximus, Ovid says “I was given a wife from your house”. If Ovid married into the family of Fabius Maximus, then he was doing well for Fabius was a good friend of the Emperor, from one of the top families in Rome and had held the top job of consul in 11 BCE. If we assume that this woman was a daughter or niece, we at least know a name – she would have been called Fabia.

Ovid’s third wife appears often in his exile poetry and several poems are addressed to her. We are told how she wept in Ovid’s arms as he departed Rome on that fateful December day in 8 CE, and begged to go with him, but he would not let her. I don’t think this was for any noble reason, rather he needed her to stay in Rome and work on his behalf, but he did seem to miss her. In one poem, he tells her how much he thinks of her and that he often talks to her though she is not there. In another poem, Ovid asks Fabia to plead for him to the wife of the Emperor, Livia herself. The work Fabia did in lobbying for her husband in Rome was very important and given her family connections Ovid must have felt optimistic.

In 14 CE though, Fabius Maximus fell out with Augustus and committed suicide. Ovid lost a powerful supporter – and Fabia lost someone close to her, possibly even her father. When in August the Emperor himself died, it may have occurred to both Ovid and Fabia that her power as a lobbyist had diminished considerably. If Ovid missed Fabia as much as he says, then this was a good time for the loyal third wife to make the journey to Tomis. It is hard to date Ovid’s exile poetry with much accuracy, but it is noticeable that he stops addressing poems to his wife long before the poems themselves end.

In “Death and the Poet”, therefore, I decided that Ovid would be joined by his wife Fabia after the death of her father Fabius Maximus. I gave her a dramatic and completely unhistorical reason for her journey, which would have been a considerable undertaking for anyone in those days. And if Ovid missed Rome then I’m sure Fabia did too. I hope her husband appreciated her!

I must end this by recommending the journal repository JSTOR, which along with Academia is one of my research staples. Even their free memberships give generous access to articles and I found the two listed below to be entertaining and helpful in giving me the confidence to go ahead with my ideas. Without them, Ovid’s third wife may never have joined him in Tomis.

References

The family relationships of Ovid’s third wife: a reconsideration

Anne-Marie Lewis

Ancient Society, Vol. 43 (2013), pp. 151-189 (39 pages

Mr and Mrs Ovid

Martin Helzle

Greece & Rome, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Oct. 1989), pp. 183-193 (11 pages)

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Author Bio:

Fiona studied Classics at Oxford before teaching it for 25 years. A family move to Qatar gave her the opportunity to write about ancient Rome, and she is now back in the UK, working on her seventh novel.

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