Author: MJ Porter, author

Here’s an exciting excerpt from Death and the Poet

Ovid gives a recital

July 2, or 6 days before the Nones

The recital took place in the late afternoon at the town’s main square on top of the hill overlooking the harbour. Entertainment in Tomis was infrequent and modest, with maybe a serious theatre performance in the spring in honour of Dionysus, and the occasional touring group performing comedies. There were rumours of a gladiator show, once they were a proper province, but for the moment, poetry was exciting enough to a Greek audience and Ovid was, after all, famous. People drifted into the square carrying chairs, stools and even cushions, unpacked their picnics and handed around pitchers of wine. Fabia was invited to sit in a roped-off area, where three rows of chairs had been laid out for special guests. In the central seat was Apollous, that year’s archon, and the members of the Town Council and their wives all lined up to express themselves thrilled to meet Fabia. Nobody was so indelicate as to mention the fact that Ovid was in Tomis because he had no choice.

Settled with an extra shawl because Flora had been certain that she would feel chilly even on a beautiful summer day, Fabia began to enjoy herself. She looked around the crowd, marking off people as Roman, Greek and Dacian, spotting several men with light coloured hair and beards and wearing leggings – surely they must be from the local tribes mentioned by her husband. It was harder to make any judgement on the female population, for every woman was wrapped up in a long dress, just as she was.

The poet first declaimed a well-known passage from his great poem on mythology, the Metamorphoses. He told the story of the god Apollo’s love of the nymph Daphne:

Just as when a careless dawn traveller has swept his torch too close to the stubble left in the field when the wheat is taken, setting the dry hedges on fire – so the god goes up in the flames of love.

Fabia saw the knowing nods as local landowners remembered threats to their own precious crops, and an audible murmur betrayed the audience’s opinion of firebugs.

Ovid then recited a poem Fabia had not heard before, one with a Tomis setting, but without the criticisms she had grown used to. She was pleased. There had been too many “Woe is me!” moments in Ovid’s poetry recently and he needed to acknowledge to this audience how grateful he was to them.

Ovid finished with a passage from the Fasti, an ambitious work which he planned would cover the major religious festivals of Rome. It was serious and noble and a little boring, though Fabia knew from her mother that Ovid’s work on this poem was considered skilful by those who knew about such things. She was amused to hear a young woman nearby whisper, “I thought he was a famous writer of love poetry?”

“Oh my dear,” thought Fabia, “Ovid will not be reciting any of his love poems here. They got him into enough trouble in Rome. I doubt your father would like you hearing about how a Roman lad goes on the prowl through the arcades of the city or lies wailing at the door of his beloved.”

Here’s the blurb

14 AD.

When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour.

But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman world is uncertain.

Even as far away as Tomis, this political shadow creates tension as the pompous Roman legate Flaccus thinks more of his career than solving a local murder.

Avitius and Ovid become convinced that an injustice has been done in the case of the murdered vegetable seller. But Flaccus continues to turn a deaf ear.

When Ovid’s wife, Fabia, arrives unexpectedly, carrying a cryptic message from the Empress Livia, the poet becomes distracted – and another crime is committed. 

Ovid hopes for a return to Rome – only to discover that he is under threat from an enemy much closer to home.

Triggers: murder, references to slavery, domestic abuse, alcohol, cancer

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https://books2read.com/u/brx0WY

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Meet the author

Fiona studied Classics at Oxford before teaching it for 25 years. A family move to Qatar gave her the opportunity to write about ancient Rome, and she is now back in the UK, working on her seventh novel.

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