Driving with Ovid 
Sam Magavern
Published in the Buffalo News, April 2, 2024

Several years ago, I was making frequent trips to Ithaca to teach a class. As I drove down Route 89, enjoying the beautiful views of Cayuga Lake, I liked to ruminate on the names of the towns that I was passing through—towns like Ovid, Romulus, and Ulysses. So many places in New York have names drawn from Greek and Roman history and legend. There is something comical about the fact that you can emulate Ulysses and travel from Troy to Ithaca; but while it took that “much-enduring” man ten years and many battles to make his voyage, you can drive it in three hours and 14 minutes. It seems funny—but also weirdly poignant— for someone to be working at an insurance agency or convenience store in a town called Homer, Virgil, or Brutus.

The classical names cast a tragic shadow, too. They replaced the indigenous names that places had carried for centuries before colonizers used force and fraud to displace the native inhabitants. Many of the old names persist, of course—even if mangled and misspelled. The name Cayuga, for example, means “people of the wetlands,” and the Cayuga are one of the five founding nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which was practicing democracy long before the United States. But too many are gone. The European settlers chose classical names because they admired Greek democracy and the Roman republic, but they also admired the fact that ancient Greece and Rome were powerful empires. The United States, too, is a bold experiment in participatory government that rests on foundations of enslavement and brutal conquest. All those histories saturate and shape our present-day realities.

For me, there are a few things as poetic as the way that mythology and history penetrate everyday life. While I drove, I began thinking about writing a book that could reflect some of this comingling. As I started drafting poems, the figure of Ovid loomed larger and larger. Ovid was a small-town boy born in Sulmo, about 90 miles east of Rome, in 43 BCE. His first book of poems, The Loves, made him famous. He was just finishing his masterpiece, The Metamorphoses, when his own life suffered a crushing change. Rome's first emperor, Augustus, became angry at him and banished him to Tomis, a distant colonial outpost on the Black Sea. Ovid spent nine years in Tomis before he died—still yearning to return to Rome. 

Ovid experienced his life in the Roman Empire as saturated by a Greek past. In The Metamorphoses he retells dozens of Greek myths—in which gods are constantly changing into people, animals, even showers of gold, and humans are being changed into flowers, spiders, and constellations. I didn't want to write poems about the real Ovid, exactly, but I wanted an alter ego who could move easily from past to present, from the humdrum to the uncanny. I didn't think Ovid would mind me taking liberties, given his own passions for transformation and artistic license. And I still enjoy the thought of Ovid paying a visit to the town near Cayuga Lake that bears his name. Sitting down over a cup of coffee in the local diner, what strange beasts and divine presences—what tragic, comic, and tragicomic stories—might he discern in the people around him, which is to say, in me and you?