But their poetic form is justified by a second fictive utterance: they
are songs of mourning. Ovid is the new Orpheus sent on a voyage
that brings him not far from Thrace. He thus finds legitimacy as thequi
primus(the discoverer of a genre) on the Greek model of the mythical
singer (3–5):
Hic quoque talis erit, qualis fortuna poetae:
inuenies toto carmine dulce nihil.
Fleblis ut noster status est, ita flebile carmen.(This one, too, will be like the poet’s fortunes:
You will find nothing sweet in the whole of my song.
Pitiable is my state, pitiable therefore is my song.)And in another poem (Trist. 4.1.5–7, 15–19):
hoc est cur cantet vinctus quoque compede fossor,
indocili numero cum grave mollit opus.
cantat et innitens limosae pronus harenae...
fertur et abducta Lyrneside tristis Achilles
Haemonia curas attenuasse lyra.
cum traheret silvas Orpheus et dura canendo
saxa, bis amissa coniuge maestus erat.
me quoque Musa levat Ponti loca iussa petentem.(This is why even the ditch digger in chains sings,
as he lightens his heavy work with untrained meter.
Even the barge hauler sings, straining bent over the slimy sand ...
They say that when Briseis was taken away, sad Achilles
reduced his cares by the Haemonian lyre.
When Orpheus drew forests and harsh rocks to him by his singing
he was weeping for his twice lost wife.
The Muse will lighten my lot, too, as I seek the places commanded
me in Pontus.)A fiction, of course, but one that gives value and legitimacy to the
carminaand that makes Ovid the virtual ancestor of elegies of a new type:
poems of exile (87–88):
et tamen ad numeros antiquaque sacra reverti
sustinet in tantis hospita Musa malis.(And yet to her meters and to her ancient rites
my Muse can bear to return as a guest in such great evils.)But this new hoped-for status requires that the collected book of poems
be published in a recitatio, which is impossible among the ignorant
Sarmates and Getes. He is therefore alone with his poems; and so their
voyage to Rome (89–92):
The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet 159