In Young Ovid, the late Stanford professor Diane Middlebrook attempts a reconstruction of the early life of the Roman poet whose great work, the Metamorphosis, has transmitted much of what we know about Greek and Roman mythology.
The Metamorphasis is full of stories of abrupt and violent change, and Middlebrook’s book itself is an example of life’s sudden and painful transformations. When she began the book, it was meant to be a full biography of the poet, but Middlebrook unexpectedly became ill and died before it could be completed. The resulting volume does not merely tell us about Ovid’s life: We also get, in a foreword by Middlebrook’s daughter and an afterward by her husband, a brief life of Middlebrook.
We read about Middlebrook teaching Ovid’s poetry for 30 years at Stanford, planning to make his biography her life’s achievement. When she discovers she is ill, her first response is to throw herself into the work, but she realizes that time will not allow her to finish it. At first, she despairs, but then her husband convinces her that what she has already written could be reworked into a book on the poet’s early life--his childhood, education, and the love affairs that inspired the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, love poems so explicit that they helped get Ovid exiled for immorality in 8 A.D., at the height of his fame.
This decision reawakens her: Middlebrook worked on Young Ovid, dictating notes to her research assistants from her hospital bed, until the final days of her life.
In writing a biography of Ovid, even of only his early years, Middlebrook faced an enormous problem: Historically, we know very little about Ovid’s life outside of clues buried in his poems. But, the "genre of biography," she says, "offers a template for investigating just such mysteries about a work of art." Middlebrook believes that Ovid’s poetic descriptions of relations between men and women, parents and children, or Gods and mortals, contain information about what Ovid’s actual life "might or must have" been like.
This is naturally very subjective work. Instead of being a traditional biography, Young Ovid is a blend of Roman history, literary criticism and historical fiction. A chapter will start with a discussion of life in ancient Rome: on childrearing, education, or military history. It will then mine Ovid’s poetry for sections where he talks about these things, drawing conclusions about Ovid’s real experiences from his poetic descriptions. Finally, Middlebrook will end the chapter by writing out fictional scenes from Ovid’s life. They show us, she says, what Ovid could have been like, based on his historical circumstances and the mind of the man Middlebrook intuits from his poems.
All three parts: the tales of life in ancient Rome, the sections on Ovid’s poetry, and the fiction, are engaging. But while Middlebrook is a bewitching storyteller, the reader is never quite convinced about the "facts" she weaves for us about Ovid’s world. A section in which Middlebrook claims that Ovid’s descriptions of the goddess Minerva are based on Ovid’s mother comes across as exceptionally fanciful. She only cites one place where Ovid describes Minerva in "maternal" terms—and that is a description of a boat named Minerva. Otherwise, information about the poet's mother seems to be nearly absent from the poems.
Her descriptions of Ovid in adolescence are more compelling. For these she relies heavily on the love poems (where the narrator speaks in the first person, mostly about a woman named Corinna). Middlebrook’s examination of whether Corinna (whose relationship with Ovid ends badly) is the "worthless and useless" first wife Ovid mentions in his late poems is even-handed, and displays a comfort with letting the ambiguous remain ambiguous.
Elsewhere, Young Ovid strays too far into speculation, leaving the reader unconvinced. Some of this might be attributed to the fact that Young Ovid is an unfinished work. And yet it seems possible that some of the problematic sections would have remained even if Middlebrook had completed the whole project, inasmuch as her approach to biography holds as a premise that a close reading of poetry can give the reader clues about the life and the psychology of the poet.
But assuming we can know anything certain about the poet’s life by looking at his poems is a kind of denial of creativity: it rejects his ability to write poems that have little to do with his own experiences.
We do know this of Ovid’s experience: his life saw its own cruel transformations. To steal a phrase from Middlebrook, Ovid’s sudden banishment from Rome to the far-off barbarian backwater of Tomis (now Romania), "might or must have" felt to him like the work of capricious and unfeeling gods. Ovid continued to write poetry in exile, even when he accepted that he will never be recalled home. His consolation was, once again, the idea that his work would endure, without him, keeping his name alive. He wrote to his step-daughter:
In brief, there’s nothing that we own that isn’t mortal
Save Talent, that spark in the mind.
Look at me— I’ve lost my home, the two of you, my country,
They’ve stripped me of all they could take,
Yet my talent remains…
What if some savage’s sword should cut short my existence?
When I’m gone, my fame will endure…I shall be read.
Ovid was correct. "His work," Middlebrook tells us, "has never been out of circulation since he first began reading it in public," around 25 BC. The poetry of Ovid has been "steadily transmitted," to us, "for more than two thousand years." We may never know for sure what Ovid’s parents were like or whether "Corinna" was real. But we know Ovid’s poetic voice, and we know his name.
We don’t know how Young Ovid would have looked had it been finished. It is a rough work, "caught in midtransformation"—as a colleague of Middlebrook’s puts it—written as a bulwark against despair and "devouring time." It is an engaging introduction to a poet whose days are over but whose work remains.