Many writers in history have fallen foul of power.
But only one became a legend.
Exactly 2,000 years ago, in the year 17,
the most famous poet in Rome
died here in exile on the shores of the Black Sea
in what's now Romania.
He'd been sent here as punishment by the Emperor himself, Augustus,
the most powerful man in the world.
His crimes, he said, were a poem and a mistake.
But though his works were condemned,
he would become one of the most influential writers in the whole
story of Western culture -
the inspiration for Chaucer and Shakespeare,
for Botticelli and Titian.
Not to mention, believe it or not, Bob Dylan.
This is the story of Publius Ovidius Naso -
- Ovid.
# Well my ship is in the harbour
# And the sails are spread... #
And Dylan's exile songs are just the latest in a 2,000-year tale of
creation and reinvention, all inspired by Ovid.
# Beyond here lies nothin'
# Nothin' done and nothin' said. #
MUSIC: Beyond Here Lies Nothin' by Bob Dylan
This is Sulmona in central Italy, Ovid's hometown.
Every year, they hold a festival here to celebrate his life and work.
But this year is special.
It's the 2000th anniversary of the poet's death.
And in the square, by his statue,
the crowds are waiting for the President of Italy himself.
APPLAUSE
And if you're wondering why all the fuss,
you just have to remember that Ovid
is one of the world's greatest poets.
He's one of the immortals.
He mined the ancient myths and gave them modern meanings.
And ever since, his books, like The Art Of Love or The Metamorphosis,
have been the most influential works in European literature.
APPLAUSE
And it's not just the great and good who are gathered here.
Students have come from all over the world to celebrate him.
And there are leading Ovid scholars, too.
Ovid is probably the only ancient author who is really part of the
creative discourse today.
There are exhibitions, there are art works, there are ballet, films,
music, theatre plays, which actually feed on Ovid,
recreate Ovid in a completely imaginative
and completely vital way,
and that is really something that you can't say about some other
enormously important ancient poets like Virgil, for instance.
It just doesn't happen.
The poet of love, the poet of change.
More than any of the ancients, Ovid still feels like one of us.
And the things he wrote about seem almost more relevant now than at any
time since his own.
In his poems, he left us an autobiography.
And with the help of actor Simon Russell Beale,
we're going to tell Ovid's life story in his own words.
"So, who was this I that you read?
"This trifler in tender human passions.
"You want to know who I was, posterity?
"Then listen.
"Sulmona is my homeland.
"Where ice cold mountain streams make lush pastures.
"Just 90 miles from Rome.
"I was born here to an ancient family.
"It's no great place,
"but the streams make health-giving
"land where the grass grows green in fertile soil.
"The acres are rich in corn and
"fruit from the vineyards and silvery olive groves.
"It's just a little town, whose
"walls enclose no great domain of ground.
"A place where one day, some
"traveller may rest or some tourist take time to look around.
"I'm reminded that a poet came from here, say, oh, little town, oh,
"small estate, however unimportant you appear,
"because of him, I'll call you truly great."
Ovid was born here in 43 BCE.
The son of a noble equestrian family,
he had an idyllic childhood and a charmed youth.
An upper-class Roman with land and wealth,
his career was mapped out for him.
A life of privilege, born to serve the state.
And to do that, as Ovid tells the story, all roads led to Rome.
"We began our education young,
"sent by our father to study under the best teachers in Rome.
"My brother was the gifted one.
"Eloquent, born for a career in politics.
"But me, even as a boy I held out for higher things."
Ovid's father planned for him to get a government job in the Board of
Prisons or the Treasury, and then the Senate itself.
But Ovid was in love with words.
Even as a boy, he dreamed of being a poet.
And for an aspiring poet, too, there was only one place to be.
"Rome - the city that from its seven hills scans the world's orbit.
"Rome - centre of Empire, seat of the gods.
"And now my home."
In Ovid's teens, Rome was recovering from a savage civil war.
The victor was Julius Caesar's nephew, Octavian,
now the Emperor Augustus the majestic.
Abroad, his legions would create a Pax Romana, a Roman peace.
At home, wealth flowed into Rome,
which Augustus transformed with huge building projects.
And the poets saluted him as the founder of a new golden age.
When Ovid first came to Rome, the world was his oyster.
He was a young man with private means.
He had a town house near the
Palatine for his social life, which was busy,
and a lovely villa out in the hills with a garden and an orchard,
where he could work without distractions if he needed to.
And as for the city itself, the palindrome, Roma - Amor -
was of more than casual significance to his youthful post-war generation.
What a time to be young, gifted and Roman.
CLASSICAL VIOLIN SOLO
It was also the golden age of Latin poetry,
when a string of brilliant poets
explored the very heart of the human condition.
"The muse of poetry seduced me.
"My father kept asking, why study such useless stuff?
"I put on the striped toga, dressed for a life of privilege,
"started on the ladder to a government job.
"But that way lay a burden I could not bear.
"The stress of ambition left me cold, but the muse,
the creative spirit, urged me on."
Poetry then was a performance art
recited to music in the private houses of the rich.
The Emperor himself had shed tears at Virgil's Roman epic The Aeneid.
THEY RECITE IN ITALIAN
Ovid was 16 when he first recited in public.
RECITATION CONTINUES
"The poets of those days were like gods to me.
"Horace held us spellbound with his verses.
"I saw Virgil, but I was next.
SHE SINGS
"When I first recited my poems in public,
"my beard had only been shaved once or twice.
"And she was the one who fired my genius.
"She who is now a byword in Rome because of my verses.
"The girl to whom I gave the pseudonym Corinna."
"Hot noon,
"and I was lying on my bed,
"the window half open and the light
"the way it is in woods when sun has fled.
"Just the right kind of light.
"And there, Corinna entered with her gown loosened a little,
"and on either side of her white neck, the dark hair hanging down.
"So soon she stood there naked and I saw perfection.
"Beauty without flaw.
"Naked I took her, naked till we lay worn out, done in.
"Grant me, O gods, the boon of other sultry afternoons like this."
APPLAUSE
Ovid's audiences loved his youthful take on sex and passion.
The self-deprecating jokes, the male bravado.
And copies of his poems began to sell like hot cakes -
readers avid for his words, burning with the fire of love.
Today, we find the young Ovid's predatory view of sex shocking.
But just when you think you know him, he gives us women's voices.
He writes a book of imaginary letters from literary heroines.
And the playboy of the love elegy
becomes the poet of female suffering.
In his early life, he writes about sex in a rather casual, ironical,
man about town, male-gaze way, but this is different, isn't it?
This is putting yourself in the shoes of the woman and a woman of
experience and emotional depth.
And to give the woman that intellectual agency
is quite exciting.
You know, a lot of the modern
writers have missed a point there when they
go back and take these Greek heroes, these women,
that they tend to reduce them in size, where his scope is so vast.
"O! How I wish that when Paris
"sought Sparta with his ships, he had drowned in the angry seas.
"Then I would not have had to lie here,
"cold in an empty bed.
"I have imagined dangers worse than any reality.
"Love is a thing full of anxious fears.
"I fear everything.
"Insanely.
"I don't know whether the sea holds the danger or the land,
"but such long delays make me think that you want to stay away.
"Could you be captive now in some foreign beauty?
"Maybe you tell her that your wife is an innocent,
"who stays at home spinning."
When you go back and you read these gorgeous passages that are so
fluid and bright and confident and
intellectually sound and emotionally sound, you wonder -
what are these later writers playing at here?
What frightens them so?
Ovid soon became a celebrity.
He recited before the Emperor himself.
But the Emperor had a very different view of what poets should do.
Augustus' rule was becoming more and more dictatorial,
and like other authoritarians, he wanted to create a moral society
with conservative family values -
to return to an idealised past.
Recently, the houses of Augustus and
his wife Livia have been excavated and restored.
And now you can walk into the plain, austere rooms where Augustus lived,
next door to the house of Rome's mythic founder, Romulus.
The tiny bedroom where he slept for 40 years.
He was in his 60s during the period of Ovid's fame and Ovid's fall.
Clear-eyed, hard-bitten, experienced,
ruthless when he needed to be.
He was a man who believed in the old-fashioned virtues of strength
and order, and believed that a
strong man was best positioned to deliver them.
Augustus thought morals and sexual
behaviour should be controlled by the state.
And not for the first or the last time,
the dolce vita became a target for the moralisers.
The Emperor Augustus was basically setting up a monarchy,
and to try and distract attention from this, he had a whole programme
of returning to traditional morals.
Above all, traditional sexual morals.
Augustus looked to people like Ovid,
who was from the old Italian aristocracy,
who were supposed to preserve the old values,
to enter the Senate and to bolster these values.
But Ovid wasn't having any of this.
He was not interested in returning to older morals.
Ovid refused to become a senator, actually gave up the career path,
and wrote highly irreverent poetry,
so when Augustus made adultery illegal, Ovid responded by writing
a poem called The Art Of Love,
which is entirely dedicated to teaching men how to seduce women.
ACCORDION PLAYS
The Art Of Love was a self-help seduction manual.
But it was doubly subversive, because it satirised the Emperor's
architectural vision for Rome,
with his showpiece monuments now recommended in the poem as the best
pick-up places.
It's a poem about love and sex and seduction,
with witty and practical tips on how and where to find and to consummate
your dangerous liaisons.
Places like this, the portico of Octavia,
or the theatre of Marcellus.
In Ovid's pages,
the Emperor's grand design for the
city becomes a kind of erotic memory map.
And the immortal is turned into the immoral.
"When the heat hits, seek shade and comfort under Pompey's colonnade.
"And don't avoid Livia's portico,
"adorned with the emperor's new tableau.
"You pray for love, then this is fertile ground.
"Whether you want to love or just to play,
"you'll find a one-night stand or one who'll stay.
"And remember, discreet sex pleases woman just as man.
"She merely hides it better than he can.
"They don't need provoking to their pleasure.
"Women and men feel joy in equal measure.
"Call me a prophet, young men.
"Sing my praise, let my name be proclaimed in every place.
"Conquer wherever you go, and if you win an Amazon with my sword,
"mark on the spoils that Ovid is my lord."
To speak to men in that way is not unusual, then or now.
But Ovid addresses the next
instalment of The Art Of Love to women.
"Girls, take this lesson while I have still the wit,
"if modesty or laws or rights permit.
"Remember that old age arrives in haste.
"Years like streams quickly flow to waste.
"Youth is for using.
"Soon it will run.
"Nothing that follows it will be such fun."
And with a growing number of women readers,
why wouldn't you talk about their desires, too?
That's very typical of Ovid.
So there are two books addressed to men,
then he writes a book addressed to women.
He also writes the Remedia Amoris
for the person who's followed the advice of those books,
has fallen in love and realises they're totally miserable because
elegiac love is miserable - it's about NOT getting the girl,
NOT having a good time, being denied what you want.
So Ovid writes a didactic manual on how to fall out of love as well.
And I think that gives you some idea of how he's really keen to rework
material to see new angles on it, to do something different.
He just... He's endlessly inventive.
Later, Ovid tried to persuade the Emperor that the art of love
was only a bit of fun.
But everyone could see the thinly veiled digs at the sex life
of the Emperor's family.
The Art Of Love was published here in Rome in the immediate aftermath
of a sensational sex scandal which, embarrassingly,
involved the Emperor himself.
In the year 2 BCE, his only daughter Julia
was exiled on charges of immorality.
She'd had numerous affairs
with several highborn and politically suspect lovers.
For Ovid, whose poetry, after all, had condoned -
well, encouraged - that kind of thing,
the timing couldn't have been worse.
That same year, the Senate had
proclaimed Augustus Father of the Nation,
the guardian of morals.
Ovid's love lessons were increasingly out of step.
He was Rome's star poet, but in the streets,
people were starting to talk.
He was making enemies.
"Maybe you should turn to a more serious subject,"
he wrote to himself.
"Ovid, it's time to grow up."
He started off as a love elegist.
He wrote poems in which he professed his love for one woman,
and later on, a series of women.
And he wrote three books of the Amores.
And then, I think he wanted to do something different.
There's a real hierarchy of genres
in antiquity, with epic right at the top.
If you are an ambitious poet
and you want your name to be known,
you write an epic poem.
Ambition probably is one of the things
that led him to write the Metamorphoses.
The Book Of Changes.
It was six years in the writing,
and it's one of the world's great poems.
It's easy to forget what an
incredibly ambitious book the Metamorphoses is.
It's nothing less than the history of the cosmos in 15 books of poetry.
It begins with the timeless pre-creation void
and takes us to the making of the world.
It goes from primordial mythology to human history.
It tells all the great myths that every one of us should know.
It's expressed in some Ovid's most beautiful poetry and he tells it
with that characteristic confiding, playful voice.
"I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms.
"You gods, since you are the ones
"who alter these and all other things,
"inspire my attempt and spin out a continuous thread of words
"from the world's first origins to my own time.
"Now, since the sea's great surges sweep me on,
"all canvas spread, hear me!
"In all creation, nothing endures.
"All is in endless flux.
"Each wandering shape a pilgrim passing by.
"And time itself glides on in ceaseless flow,
"a rolling stream and streams can never stay.
"And each pursued, pursues the wave ahead.
"So time flies on and follows, flies and follows.
"Always forever new.
"What was before is left behind - what never was is now,
"and every passing moment is renewed."
In Ovid's poetic universe, nothing dies.
Human beings are turned into
animals, trees, flowers, constellations.
And now, as we know, that all life is change.
That everything that exists is connected.
That creatures grieve and trees feel.
Ovid speaks again to a new generation.
There is no other poem in Latin, and very few poems in eastern literature
which combine fantasy,
creativity and intellectual originality to the same degree.
The visual imagination of Ovid in the Metamorphoses,
as well as the philosophical complexity of the poem,
together are really unique.
And I think they are a constant source of fascination
for me, of course, but I think for generations of people before.
One of the stories in the Metamorphoses is Actaeon,
the young hunter who accidentally sees
the goddess Diana, the Huntress, naked in her bath.
For this innocent transgression, he's cruelly punished.
The goddess turns him into a stag,
and he's torn to pieces by his own hounds.
Titian had a copy of Ovid by his side
as he painted the very moment of transformation.
It's an image of divine anger and human fate
which has fascinated poets,
painters and film-makers ever since.
Well, many of the stories he tells
deal with issues that one can see were not as popular perhaps
50 years ago or 100 years ago, but they're crucial for us today.
The issue of identity, the issue of the body,
the issue of the relationship between
the female and a male elements in the world and in society.
Things like the transformation of nature, entropy,
these are all topics that perhaps were not as popular in a different
culture, in a post-romantic culture,
immediately post-romantic culture,
but they resonate with us today.
Some of the de-structuring of the world that he describes
is something that resonates with our imagination very well today.
To the last horrible detail,
Ovid asks us to imagine how the goddess changed Actaeon into a stag.
Giving him horns, but leaving him with his human mind.
And last of all, injecting him with dread.
"Actaeon bolted, fleeing from the dogs who had served him faithfully,
"longing to shout to them, 'Stop, it is I,
"'Actaeon, your master. Do you not know me?'"
"But no words followed.
"All the sound he produced was a moan,
"as the tears streamed down his strange new face."
GUNSHOT
The Metamorphoses fascinated Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
and in Ovid's anniversary year,
the RSC are staging some of the famous plays
inspired by Ovid's tales.
It has to be the most influential book of the entire Renaissance.
If you think of all the artists that were influenced by it,
from Titian to Bernini, to Cellini,
to Rembrandt, and of course,
Shakespeare right at the centre of it,
it must have been his favourite book.
I can't think of another
book at all that appears twice in Shakespeare's plays as a prop!
It actually appears in the plays.
His tone of voice, almost alone among the ancients,
still sounds really kind of modern, doesn't it?
I think in some ways, and in some ways rather sadly,
Ovid's Metamorphoses do chime and resonate with the modern era because
their experience of violence is so particular.
And I suppose it's about the extreme nature
of attraction and obsession.
He takes a human life and pushes it to the extreme
and takes it beyond that.
I mean, in the story of Apollo and Daphne,
Daphne is turned into a laurel tree
in order to escape the ravages of the gods.
I mean there's no Christian consolation in any of these stories,
is there? The gods are implacable, aren't they?
They're implacable. Maybe this is why Shakespeare loves them.
The gods are capricious, they're childish.
And I think the violence is a really key element of those tales and,
indeed, of their understanding that human nature
contains that violence within it.
Not content with controlling morals,
the Emperor reformed time itself with a new calendar.
Imperial festivals were inscribed on steles and Egyptian obelisks.
August is named after him.
And in response, Ovid writes a poem about the calendar,
about Rome's festivals and myths, the Fasti.
In it, he asks the gods themselves
for the true story of time and its reasons.
Ovid's muse now is Flora, the goddess of the good times.
Her festival was for the common people.
She stood for their rights and pleasures, not imperial propaganda.
So what was Ovid up to?
Flattering the now ageing Emperor, but still undermining him?
Ovid seems to me very untrustworthy,
very slippery throughout all of his works.
I think there's a lot of subversion of the Emperor
and the Emperor's ideas about what Rome should be like in there.
And it's hard to take Ovid as
sincerely singing the praises of Augustus a lot of the time.
Not least because he gets in various unpleasant little digs at Augustus.
So though Ovid, in the Fasti,
appears to celebrate the Emperor's new calendar,
he's also being subversive,
and there's a clue even in his title.
Well, the word Fasti has a curious ambiguity.
In its root it means, "the things that are permitted."
And through the poem,
there are many references to the curtailment of freedom of speech.
And in the year 8,
when Ovid was just halfway through writing the poem, disaster struck.
The cause of his downfall, Ovid wrote later, was twofold.
A poem and a mistake.
"And on the latter, my lips are sealed forever."
The poem, we know, is the art of love.
The mistake, we are not sure what it was.
There are many theories.
He perhaps was involved with adultery
with Augustus's granddaughter.
The most likely explanation is that he was somehow
caught in the dynastic jostling to succeed Augustus.
Perhaps there was a conspiracy and Ovid knew about it,
and he'd failed to tell.
All Ovid does tell us is that it was something he saw,
just like the story of Actaeon.
"Why did I see what I saw?
"Why make my eyes guilty?
"Why was mischief made to known to me unwittingly?
"Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked,
"but still was torn to pieces by his hounds.
"Among the high gods, even accidents demand atonement.
"When a deity is outraged, mischance is no excuse."
There was no Senate hearing, no court case, just a private meeting.
But Ovid's enemies had primed the Emperor
with the most offensive passages in Ovid's Art Of Love
to underline his guilt.
You can just imagine the scene.
Who does he think he is?
He's undermining the state.
For the Emperor Augustus, that was enough.
And he pronounced the sentence of relegatio,
permanent banishment from Rome.
Ovid says he was so numbed with shock
that he delayed sorting out his affairs
right up to the December deadline to leave the country.
"I was dazed.
"As if struck by lightning.
"Nagging reminders of the black ghost vision
"of my final night in Rome.
"The night I left behind all the things I treasured,
"the whole house in grief, like a noisy funeral.
"My wife embraced me, cheeks rivered with tears.
"She threw herself down before the family shrine and touched the cold
"hearth with her trembling lips.
"And our little household gods turned a deaf ear."
He had a married daughter who was living in North Africa.
She didn't know what had happened.
His wife was here. She wanted to go with him,
but he couldn't bear the thought of her suffering
all the hardships of exile.
And, at this point, his enemies were trying, through the courts,
to get hold of his wealth, his treasure, his land.
So they decided that his wife would stay here
to fight the family's corner,
and maybe even try to get a reprieve.
But that was to underestimate the visceral hatred of his enemies.
Ever since, for poets and artists,
Ovid has become the archetypal exile.
Turner's painting shows soldiers dragging him away to his ship.
A lurid farewell to his beloved Rome.
Sadly recalling a youthful trip to Greece on the grand tour,
he set sail, praying for a calm sea and a good wind.
But he ran into a Shakespearean tempest.
"You gods of sea and sky, what's left now but prayer?
"The waves tower up,
"mountains of heaving water touch the highest stars.
"The lightning cracks the clouds, the crash shatters the heavens,
"the seas pound our timbers like artillery hitting a city wall.
"The steersman is at a loss.
"We are surely done for.
"No hope of safety."
And out of the tempest, Ovid crossed the boundary
into a new life.
Prevented by winter storms from sailing into the Black Sea,
he landed in North Greece and went on over land.
He found it a poor country after his native Italy.
Wherever you look, it's the same flat, uncultivated landscape.
No fruit from orchards and vineyards,
just huge vistas of empty steppe.
"If anyone had told me I'd end up here, I'd have said,
"'You need to see a doctor.'"
His place of exile was a small port on the Black Sea called Tomis.
It's now Constanta in Romania,
up near the Danube border with the Ukraine.
He'd been banished to the very edge of the Roman world.
In the poems he sent home from exile,
Ovid paints a bleak picture of Tomis...
..a small provincial town which had seen better days.
Tomis had been a Greek colony,
founded over 500 years before Ovid's day.
He portrays it as an isolated backwater.
But surviving tombstones from his time,
with their pious tags from Greek poetry,
show that it wasn't uncultured.
There are still Greeks here today.
In his time, the spoken Greek was a kind of patois,
mixed with the local dialect, and no one spoke Latin.
Ovid tells a strange dark myth about how Tomis got its name.
The myth connects with the famous story of Medea,
the barbarian sorceress who fell in love with the Greek hero Jason,
and helped him steal the Golden fleece
from the land of Colchis, across the other side of the Black Sea.
And as they were being chased by the people of Colchis,
to delay the pursuers, Medea killed her young brother,
the boy prince of Colchis,
and cut his body up and threw the pieces into the sea.
But writing in exile, Ovid says the story took place here in Tomis.
Hence its name means, as it does in modern Greek,
to cut, to slice,
to dissect.
And so, perhaps in Ovid's mind, this became the place of dismembering.
Just as with the story of Actaeon, then, here in exile,
Ovid is reworking the myth to reflect his own story.
And so he began his new life.
He was even forced to join the local militia, as he was living in a
fortified border zone, subject to constant raids by barbarian tribes.
To the north of Tomis were the Roman frontier forts along the Danube.
Among them, Aegyssus, which Ovid describes in his Black Sea poems.
Today, it's the port of Tulcea.
From here, Roman galleys supplied the garrisons
which kept the fragile Roman peace.
And from this viewpoint,
Ovid got a new perspective on the reality
of the Augustan Empire on the ground.
Just across the River Danube,
they were fighting wars with Pannonians and Scythians and Celts.
"This is our bridgehead against the barbarians," Ovid wrote,
sarcastically.
"Our latest and shakiest bastion of law and order,
"only marginally adhering to the very rim of the Empire."
So he begins to write about his exile to plead his case in Rome,
hoping for a reprieve,
maybe to stave off despair.
"I'm sending my greetings from the Danube's seven-armed delta,
"where I shiver under the dead weight of sullen northern skies.
"Here, only the river lies between me
"and the numberless barbarian hordes."
"Beyond here lies nothing."
He was 50 now, a shipwrecked man, as he called himself,
the lifelong celebrity poet, cut off from home and family,
but also from his public, his readers.
"Writing a poem with no one to read it to," he said,
"is like dancing in the dark."
Even an exchange of letters could take up to a year.
Inland from Tomis was the wilderness of the Dobruja,
a shifting frontier land,
still now with a dozen languages,
and a linguistic border zone then, too.
In the local speech, Scythian or Getic,
Ovid says he never got much beyond sign language.
All her ancestors came from Ukraine.
And they settled here.
Before that,
no Ukrainian or nothing.
But he learned to speak the native Greek creole and, pining for an
audience, he even composed an epic poem in it,
and recited it to the locals.
Life here was basic at the best of times,
and very harsh in the winter.
And then there was the food.
Thank you! Merci!
Back home, Ovid had had cooks and pastry chefs,
with slaves at his beck and call.
He dined at the imperial table.
But now deprived of Italian cuisine,
he turned his nose up at the local food.
"I detest mealtimes," he wrote.
Everything in the table comes from
the immediate neighbourhood, doesn't it?
But he came to respect and admire the people.
"The local people here like and support me,
"though they know I wish I were elsewhere.
"They are ever loyal and hospitable to this exile from his native land."
I will have some of this.
"Kindly souls,
"you could not have been more compassionate to my woes.
"Though I loathe your land,
"you, I love."
So, Ovid throws himself into work,
writing poems to his wife and friends back home.
Compulsively revising his manuscripts,
determined that exile wouldn't mean the end of Ovid the poet.
And in our times, Ovid's exile has generated a vast,
fictional literature in novels and poetry,
in which some have imagined that out here he discovered his true self.
2,000 years ago,
this was the last frontier of the Roman Empire.
Only here. That's it.
The border. From here on out, the barbarians.
Right, right. It's very tough, very rigid, dangerous, who knows?
Not on the map, you know?
The last frontier. As you can see, it's an amazing nature.
There are amazing sounds, amazing people,
and it's an amazing territory,
and this poet will find here a beautiful source of inspiration.
He don't need something more.
It's nice to be here.
No, don't get up.
Fantastic. Nice to see you.
Ovid, you'd have to say, is one of the most inventive of all poets.
He creates a new genre with almost everything that he touches.
And now in the poems that he sends from the Black Sea,
back to his friends and family in Rome, he creates another.
One with a special resonance for us today in our world where so many
millions of people have been turned into refugees,
and that's the poetry of exile.
Born of his own bitter and painful personal experience,
he writes about displacement,
but he also writes about loss.
The loss of one's history,
of one's social and cultural identity,
and indeed loss of one's self.
The winters were hardest when the Danube froze over,
as its still does.
And even the Black Sea congealed with ice.
"And if, in the crowds, there's someone who remembers me,
"who should chance to ask how I am,
"tell them I live, not that I'm well.
"For here I only survive.
"Look at me. Stripped of my home, country, friends -
"tossed up like flotsam on the Black Sea shore.
"There's no more dismal land than this beneath either pole.
"I'm in the last outback at the world's end."
In the 20th century,
countless writers have been inspired by Ovid's exile poems.
Mandelstam, Neruda, Seamus Heaney.
For Samuel Beckett, another exile,
such displacement would become his great theme.
Actor Lisa Dwan is Beckett's foremost interpreter.
That tension creates a journey,
where the poet must go on a pilgrimage into the self
to find that home.
And that transcends nationalism.
It transcends time and sex.
It's genderless.
Exile is part of the human condition.
What I adore about these poets,
these tortured people who failed to find solace
in their immediate world, or were allowed to find solace,
has been our gift.
How their pain has meant that they have had to,
in order to exist and understand themselves, and to communicate,
have to kind of weave these wounds into work,
into great works of art,
that have become our vehicles to understand ourselves.
But he says his powers are declining,
and he's been ruined by having been sent into exile,
that he has no one to read his poetry to,
nobody understands Latin...
And yet he is so productive. He's just writing, writing, writing.
There are other candidates, potentially,
for the role of the icon of exile,
so Dante could have performed that role,
Pushkin could have performed that role, but they don't.
It's Ovid, and it's Ovid that they look back to.
Bob Dylan, in some ways,
is the most famous Ovidian exile,
because he casts himself in that tradition.
In his album, Modern Times,
he's quoting again and again
from Peter Green's Penguin translation of the exile poetry.
# Ain't talking
# Just walking
# Up the road Around the bend
# Heart burning Still yearning
# In the last outback at the world's end. #
Dylan might not have been exiled literally,
but if you want someone to express alienation,
a way of feeling at odds with the culture you're living in,
Ovid is the perfect person to look to.
Ovid was in poor health now and, back in Rome,
his wife and friends were still working to get him a reprieve,
but their pleas fell on deaf ears -
for the Emperor, after all, was a deity like Jupiter himself.
He talks a lot in the exile poetry about the anger of Augustus,
which is linked to the anger of Jupiter,
a sort of massive wrath of an all-powerful God.
So how do you talk to an all-powerful god
whom you've desperately offended?
That's a really tricky question - how you engage with power anyway,
but when it happens to be the god you've offended,
I think that makes things even more difficult for Ovid.
So he's definitely picking up on that idea
of the writer and the tyrant, isn't he? Absolutely.
And that real power imbalance there,
that you're one writer and all you have is words.
And there's this huge power ranged against you.
Absolutely, Ovid is this real icon of the writer
who is punished for his writing.
"Until now, when I've reached my 50s,
"all my muse's poetry has been harmless,
"and my books have hurt no one but myself.
"It was the author's own life that was ruined by his art.
"But one person won't grant me the title of an honest man.
"He won't let me hide myself away in exile,
"but rubs salt into the wound of a man seeking peace.
"While I cling to the shattered fragments of my boat,
"he fights for the planks from my shipwreck.
"May you who violently trample on me and my fall
"be made wretched for it.
"I'll be your dearest enemy."
So the anger of Jupiter was answered by Ovid with his pen.
Words were his weapon, as they always had been.
And today, we only know the story because he wrote it.
As he said, "I am the author of my own narrative."
So in the end, you could say that Ovid won.
Though, still today, no one knows the truth
of what happened back in Rome when he was sent into exile.
The poem and the mistake on which his lips were sealed forever.
The reprieve never came.
Ovid died here in Tomis in the winter of AD17,
exactly 2,000 years ago.
And of course he always wanted the last word,
so he made sure that we've got his epitaph.
"Here I lie, the poet of tender passions, sweet Ovid,
"I was ruined by my talent.
"You who pass by, if you have ever been in love, don't grudge me this.
"Let Ovid's bones lie softly."
"So much for an epitaph.
"My books make a more enduring and greater monument.
"They, I feel confident, though they have hurt me,
"will yet win their author a famous name and years of renown."
He never lost faith in his own genius -
Augustus couldn't take that from him.
And you'd have to say he was right.
He is one of the greats.
Our 21st-century contemporary,
as a new generation is discovering.
My sense of Ovid now
is his importance because of his influence.
Because of the way that so many
artists and writers have drawn upon him,
and because those stories are iconic,
they are archetypal stories which explain us to ourselves.
He talks about gender fluidity, he talks about identity,
he talks about love, exile,
all of these things matter to us,
and one of the greatest literary talents
of the world has written extensively about them.
Why would you not want to read Ovid's poetry?
So, there's the story of Ovid,
a poet who lived 2,000 years ago,
but whose words still have the power to move us
over that great gap of time.
And if we are still to read the classics, the works of the ancients,
then they have to be not just objects of study, but living texts,
still working themselves out in our world.
And in our world,
what's not to like about a poet who speaks for our
humanity despite our egotism, our cruelty and violence?
A poet who celebrates the mysteries and beauty of the universe.
A poet who affirms the importance of the artist,
and the transcendent value of the written word.
Not to mention, the enduring power of love.