Ovid to his wife
    The Roman poet Ovid, born in 43 B.C., wrote his best work during the reign of the emperor Augustus. Little is known about his third wife, a woman he truly loved and from whom he was separated forever when he was sent into exile. But his many letters to her, including the one extracted here--written in the form of public appeals to raise sympathy for his release--provide an insight into some of the earliest surviving "love letters".
    Exactly why Augustus ordered the most famous poet of the time into exile is not known. But there is no doubt that Ovid's sophisticated handbook on the art of pursuing another man's wife--his poem The Art of Love (Ars amatoria; published in about 1 B.C.)-- would have made the emperor extremely angry. Augustus was determined to transform the scandalous morals of roman society, and to this end passed laws inflicting severe penalties on adulterous couples. He had even banished his own daughter, Julia, from Rome--a woman notorious for her adulterous affairs--as an example to others.
    Exile to distant and usually unpleasant parts of the Roman Empire was a regular punishment in ancient Rome, and this happened to the 51 year old Ovid in the winter of A.D. 8. He was sentenced to live in Tomis (present-day Constanta), than a bleak spot near the mouth of the Danube River in Romania. The rough sea passage by shop across the Mediterranean and Black Sea left him with bitter memories. His letters from exile to friends and dignitaries made it very clear that he always hoped to be granted a reprieve by the emperor. Meanwhile, back in Rome his third wife devoted her time to campaigning hard for his release and the protection of his property.
    A valuable piece of first-hand information about Ovid's three wives comes from a few line in his Sorrows (Tristia), five books of poems that he wrote during the early years of his exile (C. A.D. 8-12):

"I was hardly more than a boy when I was given a wife, unworthy and useless; the marriage lasted only for a short time. To her succeeded another, and she was blameless, but she was not to remain in union with me. The last, who has stayed with me throughout the many years, had the courage to be an exile's wife."
    Like so many of Rome's best writers, Ovid came originally from the provinces. He decided at an early age that he was going to be a poet. Although poetry played an important part in Roman life--used as a medium to teach moral lessons--men with ambition went into business, farming, the army, or the law. The young Ovid's first marriage failed. There was an early divorce, and he than became a "man about town" in the society that emerged as Augustus brought peace and prosperity to Rome. His first poems, the Love (Amores), were something new in Roman literature: a collection of verses that taught not the arts of war or statesmanship but the art of love and seduction. Here is how he treated the subject of love letters at this stage in his life, before his exile:

"If she asks how I am, say I live in longing. My letter provides all the details. Quick, do not let's waste time talking. Catch her at a free moment, give her the note--and make sure she reads it at once. Watch her face and eyes as she does so, expressions can be revealing of things to come. And take care she replies on the spot, with a good long letter. Half-blank tablets drive me mad, so get her to crowd up her lines, and fill the margins from side to side. But wait--Why should she weary her fingers with all that scribbling? One single word is good enough: 'Come'. Then I would wreath my victorious writing tablet with laurel, and hang it in Venus' shrine."
    Exile was bitter for this sophisticated Roman. in Tomis, a semi-Hellenized port subject to attacks from surrounding barbarian tribes, little Latin was spoken and the climate was severe. The verse letters to his wife back in Rome--Letters from the Black Sea (Epistulae ex Ponto), of which the letter extracted is one, were written during the later years of his exile rom C A.D. 12 to 16. They were "public" poems intended to be seen by the emperor, in which Ovid movingly expressed his loneliness and feelings for his wife: love, sorrow at their separation, and guilt at doubting her constancy. He praised her virtues, and the fortitude of true love. In Elegy VI he wrote:

"Not so much was Lydè beloved by the poet of Claros...as you, my wife, are endeared to my heart...By you, as though a beam for my support, was my fall upheld."
He thought of his wife receiving his letters:

"Do you turn pale when a fresh letter comes from Pontus, opening it with a trembling hand?"
And in Elegy III, a letter in which he told her he had suffered ill health, he wrote:

"I am lying here worn out, among the remotest tribes and regions...And...you, my wife... occupy more than your equal share in my heart. My voice names you only; no night, no day comes to me without you...your name on my wandering lips...Tears sometimes have the weight of words."
    Ovid died during his ninth year in exile, at the age of 60. His brilliant early poems captured the hearts and influenced the writing of later ages, but only in exile did the poet himself come to understand the full range and meaning of the subject with which he had been so long preoccupied: love.





Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin