OVID 

The noted historian Peter Brown recently had this to say about the ancient world, specifically about the sexual practices of the ancients, which have never ceased to scandalize the Western world: 

 

One of the most lasting delights and challenges of the study of the ancient world, and of the Roman Empire in particular, is the tension between familiarity and strangeness that characterizes our many approaches to it. It is like a great building, visible from far away, at the end of a straight road that cuts across what seems to be a level plain. Only when we draw near are we brought up sharp, on the edge of a great canyon, invisible from the road, that cuts its way between us and the monument we seek. We realize that we are looking at this world from across a sheer, silent drop of two thousand years.

 

Antiquity is always stranger than we think. Nowhere does it prove to be more strange than where we once assumed that it was most familiar to us. We always knew that the Romans had a lot of sex. Indeed, in the opinion of our elders, they probably had a lot more than was quite good for them. We also always knew that the early Christians had an acute sense of sin. We tend to think that they had a lot more sense of sin than they should have had. Otherwise they were very like ourselves. Until recently, studies of sex in Rome and of Christianity in the Roman world were wrapped in a cocoon of false familiarity. Only in the last generation have we realized the sheer, tingling drop of the canyon that lies between us and a world that we had previously tended to take for granted as directly available to our own categories of understanding.

 

[New York Review of Books, December 19, 2013]

 

The play attempts to “bridge that gap,” to transport you across that “great canyon.” It is inevitable and fair that we will “see” the scenes with our own eyes, with our modern eyes, and judge it according to our sensibilities. But it is my hope that the play will also allow our “mind’s eye” to recapture, for a brief moment, a world now forever cut off from us. Ovid has inspired generations of poets and artists since ancient times. This author, too, has found an inspiration in both the Roman poet’s life and achievements, and with this play he has attempted to give his own modest contribution to that illustrious lineage which sees in Ovid its spiritual heir. 

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