Ovid's Tristia and Pontica: The Place of Exile as Borderline between Civilization and Barbarity Revisited

[...]our study will try to elaborate, in the light of Ovids own experience, on the particular nuance of barbarity stemming from the poets descriptions and meditations on his life in exile. Keywords: Ovid, exile, civilization, barbarity, Tomis Ovids Tristia and Pontica1 tell the story of the poets abrupt banishment from Rome2, of the trip and of the years spent in exile at Tomis (nowadays Constanţa, Romania), a remote place, located at the edge of the Roman world, a town founded by the Greeks as a colony probably around 600 BC. [...]Ramsby identifies the motif of the "barbarian" as a constant presence throughout Ovid's works, from the "barbarian in the bedroom" as indicated by the love poems to the "mythological barbarians" of the Metamorphoses and the emergence of the motif in the Fasti (Ramsby 2001, v). [...]our study will try to elaborate, in the light of Ovid's own experience, on the particular nuance of "barbarity" stemming from the poet's descriptions and meditations on his life in exile. [...]what Ovid will reveal in his poems in not just a representation, a disengaged portrait of the "barbarian" at the margins of the Roman world somewhat from the perspective of an observer, but a detailed description of his entire experience of exile as well, as a stepping into something different and new.