Pathos, Passion and Music in Ovid’s Exile Book Tristia

Abstract

Part of the Ovidesque legacy is his last book written in exile, Tristia in which the poet grippingly portrays the insuperable conditions of his exile both materially and psychologically. However, beyond the notion of pathos which permeates Ovid’s poems, written in exile in the Black Sea, with their elegiac tone, bleak landscapes and ubiquitous anguish, the speaker’s appraisal of the experience of exile in his flesh and bones remains ambivalent. On many occasions throughout the poems, written as both complaintive and contemplative letters, Ovid evokes his exile as a kind of a prerogative he “earned.” He sets out his exile journey with the perspective to “sing [his] sadness.” As a matter of fact, pathos in Ovid’s poetry equally resounds with passion, not only of exacerbated perceptions, but also a passion for words and their music. Exiled in the farthest North of Italy, In Tomis, Ovid carved the experience of his exile with letters of “blood,” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would say. The paper proposes to analyse the interactive triad of pathos, passion and music in Ovid’s exile poetry book Tristia with a particular interest in the power of the music of language to echo pathos.