An Imaginary Life: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The desolate nature of Ovid’s new home shows him new “perspectives.” Winter lasts eight months, and little grows even in the summer. The land feels barren, devoid of cultivated gardens or places created for enjoyment. Ovid lives in exile in an isolated village called Tomis, consisting of a hundred wooden huts with stables in the lower portions and living areas built above, where families huddle together for entire winters. He lives with the village headman and the headman’s elderly mother, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Ovid thinks these people are “barbarian[s],” but they are kind enough, largely ignoring his presence.

Tomis is so remote that there is nowhere for Ovid to escape to, so the villagers allow him to wander. He does not stray too far from them, since “savages” from other tribes often raid the village. All of Tomis is an “armed camp.” As an aging man, unsuited to their harsh lives, Ovid feels that he is the least useful among them. He cannot speak their language and none of them speak Latin. Ovid has not spoken with anyone in over a year, so he is effectively “rendered dumb.” Often he talks to himself or shouts at the wild in his own tongue just to remember the words.

Ovid finds his life in Tomis “terrible beyond description.” At night, he dreams that he wanders into the wilderness and frantically digs in the earth, looking for his own grave—the grave of Publius Ovidius Naso, “Roman of the equestrian order, poet.” As he writes his narrative, Ovid reflects that he is writing to no one in particular. At best, this letter will be read by someone 1,000 years after the Roman Empire falls, after it no longer has the power to “silence” him. Ovid asks the reader if his legacy, his writing, somehow survived, and if thus he himself survived.

Ovid writes at night by candlelight while spiders crawl over him. He wonders if the spiders have their own language, and thinks that learning it would be no more trouble than learning the “barbarous guttural tongue” of his captors in Tomis. Ovid begins to recognize repeated sounds within the villagers’ language, but understands none of it. He reflects that Roman law cast him out of “society” into the world of those not yet “fully human,” since these villagers have not submitted themselves to Roman society and civilization. He longs to hear the sophistication of Latin, which he regards as the perfect language. He longs to know the spiders’ language, and thinks that he would write his New Metamorphoses in it, if only he could understand.

In the village language, Ovid can recognize the tone and mood of words, but no more. Although the village women grind seeds Ovid might recognize the Latin names of, he cannot discern one from the other even by taste, removed from the context of Roman cooking. He wonders if he will have to relearn the world like a child, “with all things deprived of the special magic of the names in my own tongue.”

Ovid thinks there is little to Tomis aside from the huts, separated by narrow paths made of mud and compacted dung. There are a few swaths of grain outside the village walls, which the women occasionally harvest. To one side flows a river. When it is thawed, as it presently is, the villagers can wander freely. However, when the river freezes, everyone must remain within the Tomis’s walls because raiders ride across the frozen river to plunder the village. Compared to the raiders, whom Ovid fears but has not yet seen, he thinks Tomis’s people are only “relatively savage.”

One night, Ovid dreams that he walks onto the river. Horsemen ride out of the sky, whom Ovid recognizes as all the gods he does not believe in. They implore him to let them cross his river and enter. They ask him to “believe.” Ovid starts awake and speaks a word in a language he does not know. He feels that something in the wilderness is waiting for him.

Ovid remarks that he is called Naso “because of the nose.” In Rome, he has a nose for what will find a large audience. Ovid grows up in the Augustan Age, when all wars have ceased and Roman society has grown “soft.” As a poet, he helps form the new “national style,” which is a rejection of patriotism, militarism, and belief in the gods, who no longer seem necessary. Emperor Augustus created a society that was “orderly” but “dull.” In response, Ovid advocates for a society that is “ephemeral” and “fun” and that throws off all sense of duty. Augustus despises Ovid for this and exiles him to Tomis, winning the battle between them. However, Ovid knows that beneath one of the Emperor’s family’s porticos, people are having sex as an act of “public defiance,” because Ovid made it a symbolic act in one of his poems.

Despite his symbolic antagonism, all Ovid can do in exile is rage at his imposed silence. He wanders the empty countryside shouting, hoping his words will somehow make their way to Rome. He reflects that the landscape one feels was “given” by the gods, “ready-made in all its placid beauty,” is in fact only made by men. When one feels the presence of gods in such a place, it is because one summons them out of one’s own consciousness. Ovid thinks such gods are certainly felt, but “have to be recognized to become real.” Such gods are neither purely external nor purely internal, but arise from the relationship between people and their surrounding environments.

Ovid imagines that all creatures can dream new realities for themselves, into which they are then able to enter. The stone imagines itself alive and becomes a toad. The toad imagines itself flying like a bird and takes to the skies, even while still a toad. Ovid remarks, “Our bodies are not final,” but moving from form to form, until men become gods. He imagines the end of all things, “the earth transfigured and the gods walking upon it.” Ovid can imagine this progress because he presently sits amidst the “unmade earth,” so far fallen from the civilization he once knew.

Even in the “utter desolation” of Tomis, Ovid sees the potential for growth. While walking, he spots a scarlet poppy. The bright red is the first real color he’s seen in months. When Ovid speaks the word “scarlet” he is so overjoyed that he dances—which he finds absurd, since his friends know him as a “cynical metropolitan poet”—and feels as if, by speaking the word, he has brought the color back “into being,” as if he is “making the spring.” Ovid’s mind is filled with flowers, and he thinks that just by naming them, he can cause each in turn to appear in the wilderness and open their colors. Ovid feels a renewed sense of purpose, as if his whole life until this point was only wasted time. He decides he will be “transformed.”