Although the Roman Ovid is known as a sophisticated, “metropolitan poet,” he spends his childhood on a rural farm, living a simple, happy life surrounded by nature. After his irreverent poems earn the ire of the Roman emperor, the government exiles Ovid to the remote village of Tomis, which resembles his childhood home in that it is simple, quiet, and surrounded by nature. As the years in exile pass, Ovid recalls his early years and considers how they shaped his fate of spending the last years of his life beyond Roman civilization. Ovid’s reflections on fate suggest that the past, especially childhood, sets one on a certain, unavoidable trajectory to fulfill their true identity.
Ovid believes that his childhood experiences destine him for a simple lifestyle in close proximity to nature, suggesting that a person’s early life shapes one’s their fate, even though one may try to resist it. Ovid grows up on a farm, living a simple lifestyle close to nature with his father, brother, and family slaves. Often, while his father is away, Ovid and his brother live in the farmhouses with the nurses, who raise them alongside their own children. Looking back as an adult, in exile, Ovid feels as if something “was being revealed” to him during this simple, happy life which should have shaped him to take up that lifestyle himself. Ovid’s recollection of those years, feeling that they were leading him to become a particular person, suggests that a person’s childhood shapes one’s future, putting one on a particular trajectory through life.
Ovid’s eventual exile out of Rome and into a simpler lifestyle in Tomis (despite his efforts to remain a sophisticated poet) suggests that one’s fate, shaped by childhood, is inevitable. One must ultimately fulfill one’s true destiny. In adulthood, Ovid runs from his childhood and becomes a man of the city, a “metropolitan poet.” However, he recounts that at the height of his success, he feels “anxiety and some sense of disgust” at the contrast between his childhood and current identity. Rather than recognize that he is shaped by his simple and pleasant childhood, Ovid the poet sees himself as a “creature of my own impudent views and with no family behind me, no tribe, no country, no past of any kind.” Ovid tries to reject the path that his childhood set before him by by “inventing a hundred false identities,” suggesting that one may try to resist one’s fate by constructing a new, alternate identity for oneself. Although Ovid tries to reject his fate, his exile from Rome ultimately fulfills that destiny by forcing him to live a quiet, simple life in Tomis, once again in close proximity to nature. As Ovid learns to accept his exile, he considers that life in Tomis is the inevitable result of his childhood, the fulfillment of the life from which he ran away. He says, “this place is the true destination I have been seeking, and that my life here, however painful, is my true fate, the one I have spent my whole existence trying to escape.” That is, one’s fate is inevitable, the natural and unavoidable result of one’s childhood experiences.
More than than just inevitable, however, Ovid regards his life in exile as his “second chance” to “become at last the one you intended to be,” suggesting that a person’s fate leads one to embrace one’s real identity and be who one truly is. This idea is mirrored in the Child’s journey as well. Ovid initially fears that, since the Child has grown up in the forest alone and feral, he has no childhood or ancestry to tell him who to be. However, in Ovid’s final days, he sees the Child walking away from him and from human society to return to the wilderness where the Child is happy and free. The sight makes Ovid “unbearably happy,” implying that the Child’s rightful place is in the wilderness, where he came from and where he can be who he truly is. Ovid’s joy at fulfilling his own destiny, embracing his own identity, and seeing the Child do the same suggests that the greatest fulfillment in life comes from one accepting who one is and where one comes from, following the course that fate lays for each individual. Although David Malouf never specifies what force draws a person along toward their fate, he presents it as a nonetheless powerful force in one’s life and the key to one’s personal fulfillment.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Childhood, Fate, and Identity ThemeTracker
Childhood, Fate, and Identity Quotes in An Imaginary Life
As a Roman citizen of the knightly order, the descendant of a whole line of warriors, with the law and the flower of Roman civilization to protect against barbarians, I scoffed at such old-fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world.
I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation.
I too know all the boundary stones of our land, but to me they mean something different. They are where the world begins. Beyond them lies Rome and all the known world that we Romans have power over. Out there, beyond the boundary stones, the mystery begins.
Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back—not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves.
What else should life be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful setting out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become […] What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?
From here I ascend, or lower myself, grain by grain, into the hands of the gods.
