Classics Colloquium with Jinyu Liu

This paper explores how Ovid’s exile to Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 CE alters how he experiences, conceptualizes, and narrates time. I argue that “time” in his exile poetry is just as complex as in the Fasti, but it serves as a different kind of subversive commentary that highlights the limits or absence of universality in “Roman” time and order. If “time” is both a manifestation of order and a mechanism to reinforce that order, Ovid’s life in Tomis at the edge of the Roman Empire is portrayed as a challenge to the Augustan/Roman order. In his exile poetry, “time” is characterized by ongoing tensions between the effort to track time and the various disruptions to its rhythms, between the recollection of collective time linked to public life and the erasure of politically marked time, as well as between the hope for eternal future time and the uncertain, slow passage of time in the present. "Time," therefore, acts as a discursive stand-in not only for the poet’s personal hardship but also for the confined scope of the Roman Empire. Political and imperial time are examined in contrast to natural, agricultural, poetic, and cosmic time.