![]() ![]() When the villagers take him along on a hunt, he thinks he sees the boy of his imagination. I see myself - I might be three or four years old - playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance.” “When I first saw the child I cannot say. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile.”Īs a boy, he had an imaginary friend, a boy, the child referred to in the opening quotation. ![]() “But they are, even so, of our species, these Getae. Nobody understands him, and he understands nobody. The village called Tomis consists of a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud, with roofs of thatch and floors of beaten mud covered with rushes.”įor man with a love of words, this is severe punishment indeed. “I am describing a state of mind, no place. This is an imagined life of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished by Emperor Augustus to a village unlike anything he’d known. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us.” We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. ![]()
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