Dr Gail Trimble on Ovid and ‘Human Intelligence’

The transition from the vibrant intellectual centre of Augustan Rome to the desolate frontier of the Black Sea represents one of the most striking ruptures in literary history. In a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 series Human Intelligence, Trinity’s Dr Gail Trimble joined novelist Naomi Alderman to examine the creative mechanisms and eventual displacement of the poet Ovid. Dr Trimble, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity, highlights Ovid’s extraordinary facility, noting that "he uses Latin more fluently than any other Roman writer, you could argue". She points to Ovid’s own claim that whenever he attempted to write prose, "it would come out as poetry".

This innate facility allowed Ovid to explore the real breadth of human experience, moving effortlessly between the domestic and the divine. His masterwork, the Metamorphoses, remains a staggering feat of synthesis. As Dr Trimble observes, Ovid was interested in "all the different kinds of people who might exist in these worlds: men and women, free people and enslaved people, humans and gods, and animals and monsters". Through this lens, he was "pushing at the boundaries of what human experience is". Without his irreverent retellings, the mythological richness found in later writers, most notably Shakespeare, would be significantly diminished.

The trajectory of Ovid’s life changed irrevocably in 8 CE when Emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis. Ovid famously attributed his exile to "carmen et error", or a poem and a mistake. While the poem was likely his provocative Ars Amatoria, the nature of the mistake remains an enduring mystery. Dr Trimble describes how this transition forced a recalibration of Ovid’s voice, replacing his characteristic wit with the haunting beauty of the Tristia.

Ovid’s exile serves as a testament to the resilience of an intelligence that refuses to be silenced by geographic erasure. By recording his displacement, he became a witness to the fragility of intellectual freedom, proving that while power may exile the body, the structures of human thought remain fundamentally resistant to political suppression.

Listen to the episode on BBC Sounds