Sorrows of an Exile: Tristia

In AD 8 Ovid's brilliant career was abruptly blasted when the Emperor Augustus banished him, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, to Tomis (Constanta) on the Black Sea. The five books of Tristia (Sorrows) express his reaction to this savage and, as he clearly regarded it, unjust sentence. Though their ostensible theme is the misery and loneliness of exile, their real message, if they are read with the care they deserve, is one of affirmation. Ovid repeatedly asserts, often with a wit and irony that borders on defiance, his conviction of the injustice of his sentence and of the preeminence of the eternal values of poetry over the ephemeral dictates of an earthly power. These elegies are throughout informed by Ovid's awareness of and continuing pride in his poetic identity and mission. In technical skill and inventiveness they rank with the Art of Love or the Fasti. This is poetry as accomplished as anything he had written in happier days and demands no less critical respect.