Death and The Poet
14AD
When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour.
But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman world is uncertain.
Even as far away as Tomis, this political shadow creates tension as the pompous Roman legate Flaccus thinks more of his career than solving a local murder.
Avitius and Ovid become convinced that an injustice has been done in the case of the murdered vegetable seller. But Flaccus continues to turn a deaf ear.
When Ovid’s wife, Fabia, arrives unexpectedly, carrying a cryptic message from the Empress Livia, the poet becomes distracted - and another crime is committed.
Ovid hopes for a return to Rome - only to discover that he is under threat from an enemy much closer to home.
Praise for Fiona Forsyth:
'An absorbing tale of friendship, corruption and murder, shot through with humanity and deep emotion. The remote imperial outpost of Tomis is vividly recreated and Fiona Forsyth’s portrait of the exiled poet Ovid, now joined by his formidable wife Fabia, is a triumph.'
~ R.N. Morris, author
'The setting (Tomis) far from the heart of the nascent Empire - but still close enough to be affected by events in Rome, is brilliantly presented...Grips from the first page'.
~ Peter Tonkin, author
'Beautifully written and utterly absorbing, Forsyth has created a stunning depiction of the end of the republic and birth of the Roman Empire.'
~ Jemahl Evans, author
Ovid and the mystery of himself or How not to base a fictional protagonist on a real person
“He seems to have been a very good fellow; rather too fond of women; a flatterer and a coward; but kind and gentle and free from envy”
~ Macaulay, 19th century historian
The real Ovid is well-known – a Roman poet from over two thousand years ago, whose versions of Greek myths were so popular in medieval and Renaissance times that they became the accepted versions. He wrote scandalous love poetry as well, embarked on a majestic and erudite account of the festivals of the Roman calendar, imagined the grief of myth’s abandoned heroines, even versified recipes for face creams. And he ended his life in exile for an unknown sin, pouring out his grief into poems so woebegone that the modern reader is almost embarrassed.
The real Ovid also took care to ensure that his readers can never be certain that what they read is his true self. He is a master of self-contradiction, swift subject changes, teasing about-turns which leaving the reader confused.
It was Ovid’s exile that hooked me. Over the years, scholars have come up with many theories explaining why Augustus peremptorily banished Ovid at the end of 8 CE. Ovid himself tells us that it was his “carmen et error” (“my poem and my mistake”) that condemned him. His risqué love poem “The Art of Love” is probably the poem referred to, but the mistake? Ovid frustratingly drops hints - “the reason for my disaster is only too well-known”, “everyone knows I did not commit a crime”, “I shall say nothing but that I sinned”. It has been suggested that Ovid impregnated the Emperor’s granddaughter, or joined a conspiracy or saw something he didn’t report to the authorities, but the most extraordinary theory must be the one that states that the poet never was exiled at all. It is true that there is no other contemporary evidence to back up the poet’s many thousands of lines of verse chronicling his unhappy time in Tomis on the Black Sea, but that he never actually went there seems incredible. The theory is that Ovid has made up the whole thing in order to exploit a new and fantastic scenario, one in which his exile persona can be explored in verse, his Ziggy Stardust era.
I find this hard to accept, mainly because it puts the Emperor in a very bad light if true, and I cannot imagine Augustus letting a poet get away with such an elaborate hoax. So I took it as given that Ovid was indeed exiled for some mysterious and unknown reason. My first question was - how would a glamourous and successful celebrity take to living in a small town on the edge of Empire? This is how my version of Ovid was born. I decided to accept most of what the poetry tells me about his life in Tomis, and I also accepted that his autobiographical poem (Tristia 4.4) was likely to be true. And then I had to think about what sort of person wrote that vast output of such varied poetry, and how to present him to the modern reader.
An historical novelist writing about the Romans is faced with the problem that Romans in general are not particularly likeable. We have to confront their militaristic attitude to the world around them, their assumption of superiority – uncomfortable reading for a modern culture already uncomfortable with its own legacy of colonialism and conquest. Roman women were second-class citizens (“Of course they were!” I hear you wearily cry.) with appalling legal protection, and then there is the insurmountable barrier of slavery.
Fortunately for the historical novelist, when one looks at individual cases, personalities of worth and interest come forward – the wife who stood up to brutal leaders in wartime to save her husband, the children whose gravestones show that every day on earth was commemorated by grieving parents, the slaves freed for acts of bravery and loyalty unfathomable to us. Despite a culture of brutality and oppression, an attractive protagonist can be developed.
My only problem – if it is a problem - is that I have not been able to keep the real Ovid and my Ovid separate in my mind. I based my Ovid on his poetry first and foremost and as I have said, there is a great deal of ambiguity and misdirection there. I found a clever, self-centred and charming man who had a singular gift for poetry and worked hard at it because he could not do anything else. He would exasperate people, I decided, but they would still like him.
He has turned out surprisingly like Macaulay’s judgement, though I would defend him on the charge of cowardice, for I saw a man who simply preferred peace to strife. Ovid grew up in a time of civil war and change in Rome but by his seventeenth birthday Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, was firmly in power. For the first time in several generations, young men could expect to enjoy an uninterrupted education and avoid military service. When Ovid began a poem “Every lover is a soldier”, part of the joke was that he had no experience of soldiering, because he was busy enjoying the benefits of peace.
When this Ovid arrived in Tomis in “Poetic Justice”, he arrived devastated by his sudden fall from grace. He came prepared to dislike everything about Tomis and willing to air his grievances frequently. And yet he also came to a warm welcome, because he was one of the most famous Romans of his time, a true celebrity living in a small Greek town as far from Rome as one could get and still be in the Empire. Gradually, someone who basically likes people and life would get through his loss and grief and find a way of tolerating his exile – though he would never give up hope of getting back to Rome. By the time of “Death and the Poet”, my Ovid has been in Tomis for five years and enjoys his status as celebrity visitor. He has never stopped his work as poet – we know he revised many of his older poems as well as writing many new ones, which were sent back to Rome to be circulated as part of his campaign to be recalled. I gave him some good friends, a favourite bar and a bossy housekeeper.
And the reason he was exiled? The mysterious “mistake”? Yes, I have given him that as well, although you won’t find it out until book 3. It’s an absolute cracker and wouldn’t stand up to any sort of scholarly investigation - but then scholarly investigation came up with the “Imaginary exile” theory, so I don’t feel I’m stretching things too far.
Someone once called him “the hero” of my books and he isn’t a hero of anything, I’m afraid. But if you were seated next to him at a dinner party, you’d have a very good evening! Yes, I’m going with Macaulay – Ovid is a very good fellow.
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