A carmen and an error, An Emperor and a poet, and a 2000 year old enigma.

More than any other classical poet, Ovid has had the longest and most far reaching influence on western literature. His 'Metamorphoses' , a fifteen book mythological narrative written in epic metre, and ' Amores' and ' Ars Amatoria' his collections of erotic poems,are his most famous, if not infamous works. How did the first major Roman poet end his life in a banishment by the inclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without the participation of the Senate, or of any Roman judge? Which poem did Augustus never forgive him for? Why did he end his days in Tomis on the Black Sea without revealing the nature of his error and the identity of the 'carmen' (poem)? What was it about his writing that caused the Goliards, those wandering scholars of medieval Europe , to claim him as their patron? The man, who influenced Chaucer, Bernini, Cervantes, Montaigne. Shakespeare, and the Romantics, was unable to use his considerable linguistic dexterity to sway the heart and mind of Augustus, a fellow writer. Or was his crime too serious for words to remedy?Perhaps, the answer lies hidden in the lines of the very poems he was banished for. Was it fear or superstition that silenced him? Was it something otherworldly?Or is there substance to the most recent thesis that Ovid's exile was not real, and that the gap between biography and invention that Roman poets talk about is in Ovid's case true? I believe the answer may lie in his first book of poetry, and in Ovid's breach of something that was dearer to Augustus' heart than any of his moral reforms.

The 'Amores' was Ovid's first book of poetry, and it was published in 16 BCE It was originally published in five books, but was later edited by the poet into its surviving three book form. It follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, involving the possibly fictitious Corinna, the name Corinna being a pun on the Greek word for maiden, 'kore'. Although Ovid followed the popular model of the erotic elegy, he is often subversive with its tropes, exaggerating common motifs and devices. He makes extensive use of humour and parody to celebrate the elegy as a creative mode as deserving of immortality as the Virgilian epic.Reading it now all these years later, Ovid surprises in his modernity. Few poems address abortion as directly as he does in Book 2 Elegy X111 and X1V, named The Abortion and Against Abortion. In Elegy X111, he writes:

'Corinna lies there exhausted in danger of her life,
after rashly destroying the burden of an unborn child.
I should be angry; she took that great risk
and hid it from me:but anger's quelled by fear'.

This is then countered in Elegy X1V with;

'But tender girls do it, though not unpunished:
often she who kills her child, kills herself..'
This is a typical Ovidian two-scene sequence. Augustus imposed penalties on those who failed to marry, or who married but remained childless. From this and from the references to abortion in the literature, the frequent occurrence of abortion in Imperial Rome can be deduced. The legislative opposition, though, came much later. Was it then his promotion of adultery that caused offence?  Did the lines written in Elegy 4 in Book 2 provoke Augustus' rage? 'He's so provincial who's hurt by his wife's adultery/and he's not observed the ways of Rome enough..'Many commentators have insisted that as Augustus was determined to restore Roman public morality he could not fail to punish an author who represented himself as a promoter of what Augustus had made a civil crime instead of a personal one, the penalties of which did include punishment. However, if that were the case, surely writers would have commented on it in the years subsequent to the demise of both Ovid and Augustus. The absolute silence of the next four centuries-and indeed of such extant authors as Tacitus-argues strongly against such ex post facto knowledge. The balance of probability is that the secret was indeed well kept, that few were privy to it, and that for all practical purposes the truth died with Ovid, as he said it should, but there is a mischief in Ovid, a kind of Midsummer glee, that hides in plain view clues to the real subversiveness of his art, a mischief that demands we re-read the text of The Amores in the cultural context of his day. A cultural context that we have been reading in the language of the flesh, and by so doing, we may have mistranslated the language of the spirit.. The first clue lies in augury.

Augury was the practice from ancient Roman religion of  interpreting omens from the observed flight of birds. When the individual known as the augur interpreted these sign, it was referred to as 'taking the auspices'. There were five different types of auspices;ex caelo (from the sky),ex avibus(from birds), ex tripidus (from the 'dance' of birds feeding, ex quadrupedibus (from quadrupeds) and ex diris (from portents). Ovid gives us a portent of an ominous sort, disguised in humour in The Death of Corinna's Parrot in Elegy 6, Book 2. In a grove of dark holm oaks beneath the Elysian slopes 'Parrot gaining a place among those trees/translates the pious birds in his own words'. As the Roman Empire came to prominence, talking parrots, apparently Psittacula parrots from India, were all the rage among the upper classes. Professional parrot teachers were employed to teach the birds to speak Latin. The death of Corinna's parrot presages a much more serious assault on the very fabric of meaning in Augustus' Rome. It is one thing to poke fun at the belief system of augurs, but what he did in the subsequent book would have, I believe, rattled Augustus to his very core.
                                                                                               

Then a light-winged crow slid from the air
and settled cawing on the green turf,
and three times poked the snowy heifer's front
with impudent beak, tearing away a tuft of white hair.
Lingering a long time, she abandoned bull, and meadow-
but carrying on her chest a black bruise;
and seeing bulls grazing the pasture far away-
she hurried to them, and joined her herd,
and looked for earth with greener grass.
                                                                                                                      Elegy 5, Book 3.

In Ovid's dream a white heifer leaves her sleeping mate, a bull, after being pecked three times by a light-winged crow, to join bulls grazing a pasture far away.The interpreter of midnight dreams is consulted by the poet, who identifies the heifer as the adulterous wife and the crow as an old procuress. Some commentators have insisted that this elegy isn't even written by Ovid, which is strange because it is as typical of Ovid as any of his two-scene sequences. The major clue as to how this scene is to be interpreted comes in the preceding elegy, named 'Adultery'. The line 'Argus had a hundred eyes, at front and back' is a reminder for the reader as to which deity the white heifer in the dream represents-Juno. Juno is an ancient Roman goddess, the protector and special counsellor of the state. She also looked after the women of Rome. In Greek mythology, ravens are associated with Apollo, the god of prophecy. They are the god's messengers in the mortal world. According to the mythological narration, Apollo sent a white raven, or crow to spy on his lover: Coronis. Here, we suddenly have a possible reference point for the identity of Corinna. Is Corinna a play on Apollo's Coronis? When the raven brought back the news that Coronis had been unfaithful to him, Apollo scorched the raven in his fury, turning the animal's feathers black. Argus was Juno's faithful servant, whom she sent to spy on her husband's mistress, Io, whom Jupiter changed into a white cow to escape his wife's wrath. So all of a sudden this dream's significance casts a different light over the whole of The Amores. If gods engage in adultery who is Augustus to defy them? Romulus and Remus,who are mentioned in the previous elegy, founded the city of Rome after receiving divine signs at their hills. Remus first saw six vultures, Romulus later saw twelve.Dreams in antiquity were thought to offer access to the will and knowledge of the gods, and dream interpretation was widespread. According to the ancient theory of dream interpretation, the time of night determines whether a dream is false or true. Ovid says 'It was night', but places the dream in the 'dense grove of holm-oaks', the same place Corinna's parrot goes to when it dies. This place is the realm of the gods, and is it night because the gods are not being propitiated properly in Augustus' Rome? The interpreter of dreams is the midnight interpreter, so does this position the dream at midnight? Augustus believed so strongly in the prophetic nature of dreams that he created a new law requiring every citizen who had a dream about the empire to talk about it on the market in their town. In 17 BCE he reintroduced the Secular Games. The last games had been played a century before. Augustus' Secular Games was a Roman religious celebration, involving sacrifices and theatrical performances, held in Rome between May 31 and June 2. The games Augustus revived took place the year before the publication of Ovid's 'The Amores'.On June 1 white bulls were sacrificed to Jupiter, a white heifer to Juno before theatrical representations were offered to Apollo, the three gods that hover over The Dream. By celebrating these games, the Romans were taking out a new 'lease' with the gods. The name Augustus means 'blessed by the gods', but Ovid is implying that he isn't. In 133 BCE, Rome was a democracy. Little more than a hundred years later, it was governed by an Emperor. By the time Augustus dies, popular elections had all but disappeared. Power was located in the imperial palace. The idea of the 'free republic' was just the romantic pipe dream of a few nostalgics and poets, one of whom Ovid, devised an allegorical map in 'The Amores' that a careful reading will uncover as a direct assault on mortal Augustus' appropriating the will of the gods. One of my favourites is -
'The gods too have eyes: the gods have hearts!
If I were a god, I'd let girls with lying lips
deceive my divinity without punishment..'          Elegy 3, Book 3.
Of course Corinna is fictitious.As the paramour of a god, she is protected. No-one can pin an identity on to her, that could cause her to be prosecuted. She lives in the grove of holm-oaks. And it is the power of those gods that protects him from death. Augustus may not have been afraid of what would happen to him in that 'grove of holm oaks', but he would have feared revolt from those who remembered the old freedoms granted by gods, no less.
In 'Ars Amatoria' Ovid provides us with a tantalising insight into the manner of his poetic vision.
'Art works when it is hidden: discovery brings shame
and time destroys faith in everything of merit.'
                                                                     Book 2 Part 8
It is no surprise that several years after the games and the rise of Ovid, that Augustus had The Sibylline Books moved to the Temple of Apollo, where a new copy was made. The Sibylline Books were consulted on the order of the Senate at times of crisis and calamity, in order to learn how the wrath of the gods could be allayed. They were accidentally burned in 83 BCE, and envoys were sent all over the known world to collect a set of similar utterances. Augustus had the new collection put in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill. This served to strengthen his position as representative of the gods, a position that religious leaders from all faiths have copied ever since, and then, and only then, did he banish Ovid to the Black Sea. In a final burst of melodrama, before leaving Rome, Ovid flung his 'Metamorphoses' in the fire, declaring it unfit for publication. Ovid knew there were other copies of his work in circulation.His banishment was of the type known as 'relegatio', in which the victim retained his property and citizenship, but had his place of exile specified. In Ovid's case, his books were banned from Rome's three public libraries. The poet who had so cleverly mocked imperial aspirations had been outmanoeuvred by a lesser poet, a powerful Emperor who believed in his version of the gods. And it was those very gods and their overweening presence in the hearts and minds of the Roman people that saved his life. The curse poem Ibis that he wrote in exile was probably directed at the person who divulged to Augustus the satirical intent of 'The Amores'. In this case, Augustus made a huge error, because had he ignored the opus, Ovid would not have attracted the attention of subsequent ages. Today, as writers face execution for their work, our present day Emperors would do well to remember the tale of the poet Ovid, whom the gods blessed for his championing of them against those who tried to garner all their gifts unto himself, and to whom they too gifted with an immortal influence on the affairs of present day man, whether we are quite aware of it or not. The grove of the holm-oaks continues to shelter all her poets, especially when their errors are seen as virtues by the inhabitants of that sylvan place.The poet, who died in present day Constanta in Romania, who has been dubbed The First Romanian poet, who had a town 'Ovidiu' named after him, and whose name is a common first name in Romania remains with us still to guide all poets as they traverse all sides of the moon.

The Sentence

 This year sees the centenary of the 1916 Rising. My grandfather was a friend of Patrick Pearse, and was one of those, being revisited by revisionists, who fought in the G.P.O. After sentence had been passed on the signatories of the Proclamation, he spent time on the run, delivering love letters to my grandmother, that were hidden under milk churns, and arrived with the dawn. Years later, his administration of medical aid to a downed British pilot during World War Two resulted in the loss of his post as Army Doctor. Sentences and their aftermath hang like theatrical backdrops in the landscapes of much literature and family lore, not just in Ireland, but all over the world. The beginning of this year has witnessed a death sentence passed on the Saudi artist and poet, Ashraf Fayadh.,on charges of apostasy.
  I had just submitted a poem to a magazine. that has The Rising as a theme, and was in a state of pleasant relief as I surfed the net. The request from Amnesty to sign a petition to release an imprisoned poet seemed a little too synchronous. Unusually for me, I then received a request to read at an event that PEN had called for.
 Over the Christmas period, a copy of Robert Jay Lifton's 'Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide-The Nazi Doctors' had fallen into my hands in the rather excellent Universal Books, the second hand bookshop in the town in which I live. Authors disseminated the anti-principle of euthanasia in published works such as 'The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life'. Two distinguished German professors jointly published the latter,and turned out to be prophets of direct medical killing. Freedom of expression became synonymous with expression of a terrifying world view, but one that resulted in The Holocaust, or The Devouring, as gypsies call it. In this new century, there are words and views that are deemed politically incorrect and most countries in the West have laws that legislate against Incitement to Hatred. Admittedly, these laws are rarely if ever acted upon, but they exist. I have always believed that the words that drum up hatred are as much emotionally incorrect as politically, in that they create borders that the heart can be afraid to ever cross.
Apostasy is a loaded word. It could be argued that all the disaffected are apostates, if not in a religious sense, then in a metaphorical sense. My grandfather was an apostate of sorts. He wanted change, and he was prepared to engage in direct action for it. In the sense that the Shariah law of Saudi defines apostasy I do not see Ashraf Fayadh as an apostate. And, it is in the construct of that law that his defence must be lodged. The terms of reference demanding his release are using 'freedom of expression' as their catch call. Ashraf Fayadh himself is a poet in his infancy. The philosophical turns he attempts in the poems that I have read are reflective of the internal anguish the pursuit of faith can bring, and are not a rallying call to atheism, although many here would prefer if that were the case. I think of him in a cell in a country I have never visited and have only imagined facing his death. I find it difficult to sleep thinking of his terror. Last year I had a cancerous tumour removed from my breast, and death and my fear of it hovered like the Halloween ghost over my days. I think of the signatories of The Proclamation, and of the school trip to Killmainham Gaol when I was eleven, and the prickles of terror that ran along my spine. Saudi Arabia has the right to is self determination, and Ashraf Fayadh never expressed a wish to leave. He hasn't advocated for change. The way in which we read a story very often has nothing to do with the story itself. We, in the West, are taking these poems of his, and placing our definitions of freedom of expression onto them. If I were he, I'd be tearing my hair out. It seems to me that it is the twisted words of a begrudger that placed those lines in a different light to the ears of the Judge. And unless we defend him in the language that is culturally appropriate to that place and mindset, we may make things worse.
Kahlil Gibran is best known for The Prophet(1920), a spiritual best-seller translated into more than twenty languages. He is now recognised as one of the founders of modern Arab literature and the Arab Renaissance.When he died in 1931, he left all of his book royalties to his village in Lebanon. He was buried there, and a museum was erected in his honour. Some of his gift was stolen to buy arms in the Lebanese civil war, which would have appalled the poet, as he hated factionalism. The same fate may happen to the Fayadh line, unless we poets go out of our comfort zones to try and reach across the cultural divide to add our voices to a chorus that clamours for another different reading of the Fayadh line, one that will free him from the executioners sword. The Middle East are appalled at our 'freedoms of expressions'. That we know. Why then make the case against him worse by reading in venues all over the world the poems that are going to have him executed? Would it not be better to show our solidarity by writing detailed defences for those poems, in a culturally appropriate way? It is 'the road less travelled' but the aim must be, surely, his freedom, even if that freedom means we have to temper our own mouths in some way.
The angel Gabriel dictated some of the verses in the Quran. The angel Gabriel features strongly in Judeo-Christianity. This is a meeting point. I have never written a blog before, and I am not sure whose ears this will reach. In the years I spent advocating for clemency in the courts for Travellers, I won more often than I lost. It often necessitated breaking away from the jargon of a party line. This case too is one that I believe needs to be aware of the pitfalls of antagonising those to whom we are appealing. I offer this ghazal, the first that I have ever written, as a plea for clemency. A call to let this man answer his own case in the lines of future poems. I do not believe it is anyone's interests, let alone his, to not have time to develop his thoughts. I do not know that he and I would like one another, were we to meet, and as I am female, I cannot enter the court, but perhaps someone who reads this blog will tranlsate it into Arabic and enter it as my contribution to this appeal. Our humanity is measured in the end by how we treat those we deem unfit to exist, or how we treat those we have been told to hate.

The Sentence

All light moves in waves. All sentences are calligraphies of line,
are two dimensional, but their subjects breathe off the line.

In the prejudices we eat, all Ali Babas have bad ends.
A post about a poet and a sword is almost standard line.

I am friends on Facebook with humans who think freedom is free.
Like them, I've read about but not faced the firing line.

Do falcons fly through the gaps that lie between words?
Or does Gabriel drop his feathers to soften hard line?

All religions were birthed by nomads looking up at stars
from hills of desert sands carrying worlds in caravans of line.

Some poets move energy from one place to another
in simple harmonic motion around the ways to read a line.

All poets are called, but few see the dark side of the moon.
These sentences of Deirdre Hines ask time to grow the Fayadh line.