Turning Tricks: The Go-Between in Western Europe

Abstract

These verses describe the loneliness of the exiled Roman poet Ovid, who was banished by the Emperor Augustus to the cold northern city of Tomis on the west coast of the Baltic Sea.¹ Ovid characterizes Tomis as a strange land whose language he does not understand and whose people mock him. These sentiments are similar to those expressed by Judeo-Andalusi exiles in Christian Iberia such as Ibn Gabirol and Moses ibn Ezra. It was in such an exilic environment that we witnessed the Andalusi go-between pass from the Arabic to the Hebrew tradition in chapter 3; in this chapter we will examine how in thirteenth-century Western Europe a clerical author recreates in medieval Latin the exilic landscape of Ovid’s Tristia in order to provide a new space for the Andalusi go-between—an ancient but recognizably familiar space in Western culture and literature, which the Andalusi go-between can inhabit and in which she can put on the garb of Roman culture and adopt the Latin that medieval clerics attributed to Ovid. The Roman poet may not have been able to communicate with the Getae in the Tristia, but in De vetula, a thirteenth-century Latin elegiac comedy composed of some two thousand four hundred lines of rhymed prose dactylic hexameter, he has no problem understanding the Andalusi go-between. The anonymous author of De Vetula resuscitates the exilic Ovid of the Tristia as author-narrator of this unusual treatise that combines observations on the newest trends in science and philosophy with fictionalized accounts of key episodes of the Roman poet’s life, chief among them his encounter with a deceptive, old go-between.

barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli et rident stolidi uerba Latina Getae; meque palam de me tuto male saepe loquuntur, forsitan obiciunt exiliumque mihi

Here I am the barbarian, understood by no one, and the stupid Getae mock my Latin words; often they malign me openly in safety, perhaps they reproach me with my exile.

—Ovid, Tristia 5.10.37–40