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Rome revokes ancient poet Ovid’s exile – 2,000 years on

Rome's city council has called for Ovid to have his exile from the Italian capital revoked -- 2,000 years after the ancient poet died.

Published: 15 December 2017 11:56 CET
Rome revokes ancient poet Ovid's exile – 2,000 years on
A statue of poet Ovid in the city where he was exiled. Photo: Kurt Wichmann/Wikimedia Commons

The Five Star Movement (M5S), which has the majority in the council and has said it is committed to correcting mistakes made by previous administrations, put forward the motion to rehabilitate Ovid.

Doing so, it said, would “repair a grave wrong”.

The council unanimously approved the motion, which calls for “necessary measures” to be adopted to repeal the exile order, Repubblica reported. However, only the M5S took part in Thursday afternoon's vote. 

Rome's deputy mayor and councillor for culture Luca Bergamo said the decision was “an important symbol because it's about the fundamental right of artists to express themselves freely in a society in which the freedom of artistic expression is more and more repressed”.

Ovid has previously been acquitted by a court in Sulmona, the Abruzzo town where he was born, which passed its verdict onto Rome authorities. 

READ ALSO: Mythbusting Ancient Rome: Did all roads actually lead there?

Ovid was banished to Tomis, modern-day Constanța in Romania, in 8 AD, on the direct orders of Emperor Augustus. The poet himself said his exile was due to 'carmen et error' – “a poem and a mistake”. 

This vague statement has led to much academic debate over the real causes, and on Thursday Bergamo pointed out that “the real reasons never went on historical record”.

Ovid wrote several poetry collections describing the pain of banishment and begging to be allowed to return; however, he remained in Tomis until his death around ten years later.

Renaissance poet Dante had his exile revoked by his hometown of Florence in a similarly belated fashion in 2008. Seven hundred years after he was banished from the city on pain of death, the author of the Divine Comedy was posthumously rehabilitated by the Tuscan capital.

READ ALSO: Ten strange things you never knew about Dante

 

TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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