Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea) is a work of Ovid, in four books. It is a collection of letters describing Ovid's exile in Tomis (modern-day Constanța) written in elegiac couplets and addressed to his wife and friends. The first three books were composed between AD 12 and 13, according to the general academic consensus: "none of these elegies contains references to events falling outside that time span". The fourth book is believed to have been published posthumously.
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👉 Epistulae ex Ponto in the context of Ovid among the Scythians
Ovid Among the Scythians is the title of two oil paintings by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, executed in 1859 and 1862. The less famous second version was painted to integrate the figures and landscape and rectified the problems of scale of the first version, which had an unusual composition and strange scale of the characters, provoking negative criticism, even among Delacroix's admirers such as Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, although artists such as Edgar Degas were deeply impressed.
Delacroix painted this subject first in 1844 as part of the decorations for the ceiling of the Library of the Palais Bourbon in Paris, in a painting there titled Ovid Chez Les Barbares. They depict the life of the Ancient Roman poet Ovid when exiled by the Emperor Augustus to the Black Sea port of Tomis, in what was then part of Scythia and is now south-east Romania, where he spent his last eight years and wrote poems such as Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. The Scythians were an ancient Iranic people whose way of life was described by Herodotus in his Histories as "nomadic"; Ovid himself called them a "wild tribe".
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Epistulae ex Ponto in the context of Exile of Ovid
Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 AD from Rome to Tomis (now Constanța, Romania) by decree of the emperor Augustus. The reasons for his banishment are uncertain. Ovid's exile is related by the poet himself, and also in brief references to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius. At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world; it was loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace (a satellite state of Rome), and was superficially Hellenized. According to Ovid, none of its citizens spoke Latin, which as an educated Roman, he found trying. Ovid wrote that the cause of his exile was carmen et error ("a poem and an error"), probably the Ars Amatoria and a personal indiscretion or mistake.
Ovid was one of the most prolific poets of his time, and before being banished had already composed his most famous poems – Heroides, Amores, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, his lost tragedy Medea, the ambitious Metamorphoses and the Fasti. The latter two works were left, respectively, without a final revision and only half finished. In exile, the poet continued producing works that survive today: Ibis, Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, and possibly several other, minor poems. These works consist of letters to friends and enemies, and also depict the poet's treatment by the Scythians – particularly the Getae, a nomadic people related to the Dacians or Thracians.
Epistulae ex Ponto in the context of Tristia
The Tristia ("Sad things" or "Sorrows") is a collection of poems written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet Ovid during the first three years following his banishment from Rome to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8. Despite five books in which he bewails his fate copiously, the immediate cause of Augustus' banishment of the most acclaimed living Latin poet to Pontus remains a mystery. In addition to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto, as well as a 642-line curse poem called Ibis, directed against the unnamed enemy who had apparently caused his downfall. He spent several years in the outpost of Tomis and died in AD 17 or 18 without ever returning to Rome.
The Tristia was once viewed unfavorably in Ovid's œuvre, but has become the subject of scholarly interest in recent years.