Ovid: Exile or Not?

Two works assigned to Ovid, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, have been taken literally to mean that he was exiled from Rome at the height of his fame. This assumes that the attribution is correct and that we know the correct order of his writings. There is no contemporary evidence of exile, nothing by either Tacitus or Suetonius in the Twelve Caesars; they both hated Tiberius; there is a minor reference in Suetonius’s Lives of the Grammarians 20 about Hyginus, who is described as an intimate friend of the poet Ovid. 

Exile was a punishment for aristocrats of rich and influential families, who could afford to fund the exiled member; Tiberius was himself exiled for a while by Augustus. Exile was not used long term and not used for non-aristocrats. If Ovid had committed a crime, the punishment would have been a fine or execution. If it had been a deep insult to Augustus or his family, the outcome would have been Ovid’s murder in a dark alley; after all, Augustus, when young, had had Cicero murdered, and there is some doubt over the death of Virgil.

 There is nothing outside the poems to suggest Ovid died in exile until the fifth century AD, rather too late to be considered credible. We don’t know if the Tristia and Pontic Epistles were written at the end of his career at all. Pontus is in Asia Minor (Pliny the Younger was its governor under Trajan), whereas Tomis is on the south bank of the Danube, hundreds of miles away.

 Books were not ‘published’ as they are today. It is hard to see how two works written by an exile could appear in Rome; there was no copyright, no marketing and no means to ensure that he, or any writer got paid. Any income would have come from subscription and patronage, neither of which were available to an exile; exile was ‘social death’. How too could exiled works be copied? The idea of Ovid as an oppositional figure published in samizdat underground editions is a modern fantasy.

 It is possible that this is a poetic fiction, and that the speaker in these poems is a persona, just as the ‘Juvenal’ who speaks in some of Juvenal’s satires is not the real Juvenal, but a mask. By that, later authors, some centuries later, thought this was a real exile. The same people tell readers that Virgil was a wizard who could create caves with beams from his eyes, and opened his works at random because they thought he was a god who could assist their problems; they also quoted his lines out of context and made centos, collage poems, out of carefully chosen lines.

 Not to labour the point too much, but we have no evidence whatsoever about the biography  of Ovid from his own times. He is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in 79AD, but what’s mentioned is a work on fishing, which is dismissed as a mistake by modern scholarship. That means the only references to him come from Seneca and Quintillian from the reign of Nero, 50 years later.  It is possible that the works of more than one author have been attributed to Ovid, maybe in the ‘Alan Smithee’ model, where works that film directors wished to remain anonymous were claimed for a fictive Alan Smithee.

How Did Romans Obtain Books and What Did They Read?

In a world without printing, how did the Romans obtain books? How did authors get paid? What exactly did the average Roman read? Whilst there have been countless studies of Latin literature and its most famous authors, what did people actually do to obtain and dispose of books?

Bookshops certainly existed in Rome in the centuries after empire, so we might assume that they had already existed. The Anglo-Saxon book Lives of the Abbots of Jarrow and Wearmouth, anonymous but written by a fellow-monk to Bede, tells of a visit to Rome by Benedict Biscop in the 650s AD. He bought books and brought them back to Jarrow. An analysis of Bede’s sources suggest he had a book of poems by Virgil, possibly only a school primer for children to learn good Latin by emulating Virgil’s style and a copy of Priscian’s Institutes of Grammar. Most of what Biscop brought back would have been works of Christian exegesis and saints’ Vitae.

The bookshop quarter of Rome seems to have been on the Vicus Tuscus, once the area in which Etruscans lived. It is tempting to think of London’s Charing Cross Road before it was taken over by coffee shops and other tat. Books were sold from a shop (horreum) and a number of horrea librorum congregated in that area. According to Horace, some books were sold in front of a statue of Vertumnus and one of Janus Geminus as well as in the Roman Forum. Perhaps we should think of stalls selling books on market days, something like the Sunday bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris today. At a guess, they sold second-hand volumines. Horace says they sacrificed to Vertumnus, suggesting that the sellers were Etruscans. The same street was also the centre for male prostitution, indicating that book selling was a marginal trade too. (Interestingly, Charing Cross Road leads up to both intellectual Bloomsbury and to the site of St Giles Rookery, once deemed the worst slum in Europe; Dickens went there with four policemen to guard him.)

Horrea Epagathiana et Epaphroditiana, Ostia

What did the bookshops of Rome sell? What, physically, was a book? Scores of Hollywood movies have portrayed emperors and others reading scrolls. These certainly existed, but weren’t read as they are shown in films. There, they are opened up from top to bottom and read left to right, starting at the top of the scroll, which is then unravelled downwards to reveal more text.

Esther Scroll in Hebrew

However, surviving Roman pictures show the scroll (volumen) was not held with hands positioned at ’12 and 6’, but at ‘9 and 3’. That is, the scroll was opened from the left, the handwritten block of text was read, and then the left side was rescrolled and the right side opened.  When the scroll was returned to its wound position, it was placed in a wooden tube or in a pigeonhole (columbarium) with a tag on it to say what it was. The volumen was often positioned on a desk with side rollers.

The Roman use of a bound book (codex) seems to date from about the time of Augustus and may have been brought back from Egypt. In basic form, it’s a block of text from a volumen, cut up and held at one side. The incipit, the nearest thing Roman books had to a title, would be written on the spine, and books were kept spin-inward on shelves and probably lying down, not upright.

If the stalls which Horace refers to sold second-hand books, they would have been volumines, not codices, as those were the latest thing. This presupposes a book trade, at least for older works, and therefore individuals who knew enough about books to know what buyers wanted and who had the means to source such works. Authors then as now went in and out of fashion, so over time the sort of books sold would change. We can imagine Benedict Biscop paying out for books in such a setting. Although, since England had no coins at that time, the payment must have been gifted locally.

If I can divert for a second, I have always been surprised that the Romans with their extensive empire and thousands of schools teaching a standardised curriculum did not feel impelled to invent printing. The principle of reverse type was well understood, since it underpins the signet ring, known for millennia, the pottery stamp, seen on billions of fragments at sites such as Monte Testaccio, and the woodcut, used for illustrations such as those which accompany the Notitia Dignitatum. We know from recent published research at Herculaneum that metal-based permanent inks existed before AD79. An extensive book trade would have been fuelled by such simple technology, but the only labour it saved would have been that of slaves, so the scriptorium endured.

How did booksellers acquire their stock? Authors, if paid at all, were sponsored, so it’s feasible that sponsors might have copies made of works, which is why so many had dedications to nobles; Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia is dedicated to the emperor Titus, who probably had some copies run off after Pliny died at Pompeii! The large amount of manuscripts of the Aeneid suggests knock-off copies were made.

The proscriptions of the second Triumvirate probably led to the seizure of the offenders’ libraries, which would then be auctioned off to booksellers at so much per pound of scrolls. When rich men left half their estate to the emperor, he probably didn’t want their books, so the heirs might need to sell books in order to maintain some lifestyle. One wonders if Ovid’s books slipped back into the stockroom when (and if) he was exiled, or if they sold better for it, just as the disappearance of Agatha Christie did not harm to her sales a jot.

Other than knock-off copies, would booksellers have any new stock to sell? According to Robert Knapp in his excellent Invisible Romans, there was a vast literature of popular subjects including proverbs, such as the Sayings of Publius Syrus, interpretation of dreams (Artemiodorus Interpretation of Dreams, the Oracles of Astrampsychus), books of fables, astrology, joke books (such as Philogelos, recently discussed by Mary Beard); the only book by Ovid mentioned in the lifetime of people who might have known him is a work on fishing, suggesting he needed to supplement fame with cash; we can imagine Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, dedicated to empress Julia Domna, was a bestseller (it’s about a wonder working conjuror of the first century AD).

Take Marius Maximus, a popular author, author of Caesares, the story of the twelve Caesars from Nerva to Elagabalus, clearly a potboiler sequel to Suetonius.. Ammianus comments of the Roman nobility of his day that ‘Some of them hate learning as they do poison, and read with attentive care only Juvenal and Marius Maximus, in their boundless idleness handling no other books than these, for what reason it is not for my humble mind to judge.’  (28.3.14). His work survived to be criticised by St Jerome, but not a word survives. We can imagine that Suetonius’ Lives of the Famous Prostitutes was a bestseller too, and that hasn’t survived, probably due to wholesale burning of books in the late 300s AD by Christian zealots.

As every new technology seems immediately to lead to a new means to produce pornography, there may well have been a trade in that too (‘Were you looking for something a little stronger, splendissimus? I might have just what you’re after.’). It might well be in Greek, so that the average Roman bigot couldn’t read it anyway. Works like Petronius Satyricon, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (the Golden Ass), novels like Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Tale, Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. The Myriobiblos of Photius (in ninth century Byzantium) references 279 books, most of them lost, but they would have been those worthy of a Patriarch, so thousands of works have been lost and never noted.

Summanus, whoever he may be

Summanus, whoever he may be

Summanus is the god who everyone almost forgot. The tile of this blog comes from Ovid, “The temple is said to have been dedicated to Summanus, whoever he may be" (quisquis is est, Summano templa feruntur): Ovid, Fasti 6, 731, translation by Sir George Frazer.

The temple in question is on the Aventine Hill, which was originally outside the Pomerium, the sacred notional bounds of the city. The cult seems to be from Gallia Cisalpina in what is now north Italy, centred on and around the Mons Summani (today’s Monte Summano) near Vicenza in the Veneto, anciently Vincentia.

Monte Summano Today

Summanus is credited as a god of nighttime thunder. Many years ago I experienced such an event while staying in Como, the loudest thunder and the heaviest rain I have ever experienced; the sudden rise of the Alps and rapid cooling of humid air seem to the reason for such electrical storms.

The cult centre on the Aventine seems to have been an attempt to keep his following confined to the margins of Rome. The Euganei that area seem to have been a pre-Italic people who merged with Gaulish Venetic tribes around 500BC.

Roman authors seem all to have viewed Summanus as a chthonic god, a god of the nighttime and underworld, a god to be propriated. They variously associated him with Jupiter (Iuppiter Summanus), with Pluto and by Martianus Capella as the greatest of the Manes, the divine ancestors (Summus Manium).

Varro in the first century BC thought he was an Etruscan god (De  Lingua Latina 5.74) and Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia 5.23) says ‘The Tuscan books inform us, that there are nine Gods who discharge thunder-storms, that there are eleven different kinds of them, and that three of them are darted out by Jupiter. Of these the Romans retained only two, ascribing the diurnal kind to Jupiter, and the nocturnal to Summanus; this latter kind being more rare, in consequence of the heavens being colder’. Ovid, in his piece on the Fasti, comments that two black wethers (castrated rams) were the designated sacrifice to Summanus, supporting the idea of him being a chthonic god.

Allegedly a statue to Summanus

 From the little that anyone seems to know about this, Summanus seems to be an early version of Pluto. Hades/ Pluton in Greek myth, the god of the underworld, is of course connected with the abduction of Kore, daughter of Demeter. I’ve always thought this odd, as in Mycenaean Greece, Poseidon, their top god, was god of the underworld, not of the sea (that was Proteus); this would make the abduction incest. Poseidon seems to be an avatar of Hades/Pluton; from the local legends about a shepherdess vanishing in a cave on Monte Summano, it is possible that Summanus acquired some of the myth of the abduction very early, and by a landward route.

How did this cult get to Rome? The temple to Summanus on the Aventine, towards the Circus Maximus, was built in 278-6 BC, but fell into disuse after a bigger and better temple to Jupiter was built. It suggests that some of the allies of Rome in the Veneto, probably the earlier Euganei merged with the Gaulish Veneti, ended up living at the margins of Rome. The Aventine was an area under Plebeian authority, and with temples already to Ceres (the bread dole wheat was milled there) and Liber (Bacchus), so a god with an alimentary aspect would be welcomed there. On the day of his festival, 20 June, Summanus was propriated with summanalia, wheel-shaped cakes of flour, milk and honey. This suggests that this was a meal for the god who had been moved – perhaps the shepherds on the Mons Summani ate these while working, and gave some to the god.

Twin Peaks of Monte Summano

 One aspect that has not been mentioned elsewhere is that Monte Summano has twin peaks, one lower than the other, and so does the Aventine Hill in Rome; perhaps the people who chose it for a cult centre did so because it resembles their sacred mountain.