The Riddle of Ovid's "Relegatio"

Abstract

IN A.D. 8 the foremost living poet of the Augustan age was relegated by imperial decree to the remotest confines of the Roman world. There were two reasons for the sentence: carmen et error (T. 2. 207).1 The carmen was certainly the Ars amatoria but the error has provoked the curiosity and eluded the researches of generations of scholars. According to Ovid it was worse than murder (P. 2. 9. 72) and had done him more harm than his poetry (P. 3. 3. 72). Was it a political or a moral misdemeanor? On this question opinions have long been divided2 but many modern critics consider the latter more likely,3 mainly because of the poet's avowed lack of interest in politics (T. 1. 9. 18) but also because such an interpretation affords a connection between the two charges. It has therefore been proposed, in view of coincidence of dates, that he was associated with Augustus' granddaughter, Julia Minor, who was exiled for adultery about A. D. 8; and ingenious theories have been devised to explain how Ovid, a man of fifty whose life, by his own account, had been stainless (T. 1. 9. 59-60, 2. 353-54) and who was devoted to his wife (T. 1. 6, 4. 3), might have been not a participant in, but an innocent witness of the misconduct of such a grande dame.4 Julia's position and wealth, however, make it unlikely that she would have found it necessary to borrow a villa from Ovid for the conduct of her amours, as one French scholar has suggested.5 If she did, it is even more unlikely that Ovid would have been permitted to see an embrace-such indiscretion, on the part of a woman whose mother had been punished so rigorously for wanton behavior, taxes credulity. Since Ovid himself is deliberately and obdurately reticent about his error we must perforce seek clues elsewhere. The historians of the period are an obvious and yet strangely neglected source of information. Can they not afford us, with their accounts of the setting in which Ovid's tragedy was played, some enlightenment when we turn to his own cryptic allusions? But examine the sources relating to the younger Julia and at once there is apparent an astonishing lack of definite detail. About her mother we are told a good deal: that gay creature readily comes to life for us, with her love of dress, her wit, her mitis humanitas and her circle of flattering young men, many of whose names are recorded.6 Of the daughter no such picture emerges. Suetonius mentions her marriage to Lucius Aemilius Paulus, son of the censor of 22 B.C. (Aug. 19; 64); like her mother she had been given a strict, old-fashioned upbringing (Aug. 64); she and her mother omnibus probris contaminatas7 were exiled by Augustus, who refused to rear the child born after her condemnation (Aug. 65); her magnificent palace he razed to the ground (Aug. 72); he gave orders that she was not to be buried