Archive | 2021
Sine finibus
Abstract
This chapter juxtaposes Ovid’s erotic and his exilic elegy. In Rome people could visit and examine Agrippa’s map; expansion and conquest sit hand in glove with powerful fantasies of imposing order, control, and hierarchy. In his early elegiac works Ovid contemplates feminine self-adornment. Luxury goods from foreign places flow to the capital, and the city’s female inhabitants seek out, then display on their bodies, the commodities of empire. Once the Ovidian women cloak themselves in the trappings of empire, however, they become one with their accoutrements. In the second part of the diptych, exilic Ovid, just like his adorned women before him, suffers in the face of absent fines. At the very margins of empire, in Tomis on the Black Sea, when he finds himself contemplating first-hand the permeable fines at the furthest edge of imperium, stable, fixed boundaries evaporate, and hybridization and melange take over. It becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain where imperium ends and the non-Roman world (not-yet-Roman world) begins. The Greeks, the Getans, the barbarians have already mixed together, and ultimately even the one Roman cannot sustain his Romanness.