Strangulat inclusus dolor: Ovid’s silences and anxietates during the exile

Abstract

Investigating, through the verses of Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, the causes of the suffered silence that marks the relegation of Ovid in Tomi, it is possible to detect the constant weight of the languor and the anxietas that afflict the body and the animus of the poet in his unprecedented role of barbarus. If the Romans entrusted to Diva Angerona the task of helping the afflicted by angores and anxietates, two forms of psychosomatic malaise also distinct by Cicero in his Tusculanae disputationes, in the stationary time of exile the silent goddess seems not to want to alleviate the pains of the poet.