Displaced Persons :The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Bothius

At Rome you live - at Rome you love;From Rome that Love may you affright, although you'd leave, you never move, for love and Rome both bar your flight. This book offers a discussion of reactions to exile in the Roman World by five authors, four of whom wrote in Latin, one in Greek. It will in passing touch on many other exiled personages and many aspects of exile, not least being the strong desire evinced by most to be back in Rome. The above little piece of doggerel, culled from a collection of Latin palindromes found on the Internet (Enzinger 1998), although clearly stressing erotic Amor as the complement of Roma, may be taken as the Leitmotiv of this book. The grammatically objective genitive in the phrase amor Romae ('love of Rome') informed almost every page of the literature which I have chosen to treat together as 'the literature of exile'. Love of Rome was experienced subjectively as the overriding reason for discontent at being elsewhere by most of the exiled authors included in this study. To list exceptions to this rather simplistic statement would be to crowd the whole work into this Preface, and therefore I shall leave that aspect to unfold in the body of the work. The book has been long in the making, and has undergone various Teresias-like, if not quite Protean, metamorphoses since its humble beginnings as AD. Litt. dissertation on ovoid's exilic poetry (1986).