ed. Vivian Tan and Hong Jun
I lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky-- John Shade
When Ovid wrote that his name would be sung throughout the world [1], one could scantly imagine that he knew that his poems would reach the South Seas and the Nusantara. The earliest accounts of the Nusantara in Roman literature can be traced back to Pliny the Elder in 77 AD, some 70 years after the poet died in exile. Book 6 of the Naturalis Historia briefly mentions the islands of Chryse and Argyre, the respective names of which are derived from their supposed abundance of gold and silver, and likely refer to Java and Sumatra. Oddly enough, the description of two island’s riches coincides with Valmiki’s Ramayama Sarga 40 Verse 30-2 written as early as the 7th Century BC, though no reference to it is made by Pliny the Elder, nor is it certain as to if, or rather, how the ancient Indian epic made its way to Rome. Later descriptions of the South Seas are found in Ptolemy’s Geographike Hyphegesis written in 150 AD, featuring peninsula Malaya as the Golden Chersonese.
Tabula Asia XI. Printed by Arnold Bucknick in 1478 AD.
Moving to the tip of the Malayan peninsula, Pulau Ujong and its surrounding islands bear no existence in Plotemiac maps. Needless to say, Ptolemy never visited the landmass himself. The mathematical and textual data from Book 8 of the Geographike Hyphegesis were based on the theoretical work of various Greco-Roman and Persian geographers, astronomers, and gazetteers, many of whom are unnamed and lost to history. Only when the O Livro de Francisco Rodrigues was published in 1513 AD did navigational charts based on empirical observation verify the location of those islands for the European consciousness.
In other words, even the imagined existence of the islands was not known to ancient Rome, and it would be a great surprise to the Augustan poet, and my pleasure to present a translation of a recently rediscovered fragment of Ovidian poetry from our region, the Epistula Phaonies. The rediscovery of the poem marks a significant moment for Ovidian scholarship, for Ovid’s Phaon and Sappho have now become the first double epistle in the Heroides. Due to prolonged exposure to heat, humidity, salt, and other unfavourable environmental factors, this copy of the Heroides was found in an advanced state of decay [2]. Many of the pages are missing, tattered, and smudged, and the epistles are barely recognisable in the warped writing. Where one would expect Paris’s letter to Helen to come after the end of Her. 15, there was instead the one extant page of the Epistula Phaonies awaiting its rediscovery. The poem’s verses suggest that it was added to the Heroides post-exile, and there is a palpable possibility that the Epistula Phaonies was written by an Ovidian imitator, much like the Epistula Sapphonis which only appears from the 12-13th Century AD onwards. The authentic authorship of the poem is not of paramount concern (but certainly the topic of much curiosity). Rather, I believe that the most important contributions of the poem to scholarship are twofold: first for its refraction of Ovidian themes and motifs, and secondly for prompting a reckoning with theories of literary transmission and influence across the world.
The Epistula Phaonies has a most unusual and remarkable provenance. It was found by an archaeological team from the Department of South Seas and Nusantara Studies as part of an expedition to locate Roman artifacts that had made their way into the region via the Silk Road and sea routes along the coast of India. The team had started from Óc Eo—known as Cattigara to Rome—in South Vietnam, which was a major trading port in antiquity ruled by the Kingdom of Funan around the 2nd Century BC to 12th Century AD. After having no luck in the area, the team was tipped off by an archaeological guide named Châu Vinh to look further south in Malaya. There was much frustration between the team and Châu for a myriad of reasons: errors made in translation; Châu’s thick accent (one teammate joked that his accent was so exaggerated he could not possibly be Vietnamese, an impostor even); and most unfortunately, contact was lost with Châu when he was caught in a typhoon after he boarded the wrong ferry on the journey down south. Nonetheless, Châu speculated before his fateful misadventure that Marco Polo may have traded goods from the Eastern Roman Empire with the inhabitants of the Nusantara on his return from China to Venice in 1291 AD. Orang Laut settlements were assessed to be the most likely sites for such an exchange to have taken place, and an archaeological dig was ordered on Pulau Sekijang Bendera. Other than broken stilts and caerulean glass marbles (the owner must have lost them), no relics were found until the village headman, in a bid to stop the destructive excavation, beckoned the team to the ruins of the boarding school. There, to the astonishment of the team, a dilapidated copy of the Heroides was unearthed from the rubble before them. While the majority of the researchers stood transfixed at their fortune, a sole archaeologist swore he saw the forest flutter with the impossible spectre of a mousedeer escaping into the trees. His vision was quickly dismissed as the aftereffects of a bout of heatstroke.
Orang Laut settlements were assessed to be the most likely sites for such an exchange to have taken place, and an archaeological dig was ordered on Pulau Sekijang Bendera. Other than broken stilts and caerulean glass marbles (the owner must have lost them), no relics were found until the village headman, in a bid to stop the destructive excavation, beckoned the team to the ruins of the boarding school. There, to the astonishment of the team, a dilapidated copy of the Heroides was unearthed from the rubble before them. While the majority of the researchers stood transfixed at their fortune, a sole archaeologist swore he saw the forest flutter with the impossible spectre of a mousedeer escaping into the trees. His vision was quickly dismissed as the aftereffects of a bout of heatstroke.
The school where the Heroides was exhumed from. Photographed by Eng Yi in 2025 AD.
The first verso of the copy revealed a noktah inscription which notes the year as 690 dal [3] when it came into the possession of the Orang Laut. While the archaeological team surmises that the Heroides came into the possession of the village during trade with a peculiar foreign sailor (potentially Marco Polo, but his identity is never confirmed), unfortunately, the village annals provide no substantive answer because they have been lost during the decades long requisition by the mainland. Moreover, interviews conducted with the former villagers find that nobody remembers an oral tale—if there ever was one—of how the Heroides wound up on the island.
I imagine that theory-crafting how the text reached distant islands yields fruitful fictions, but the reality of these textual exchanges often eludes us when the stories of their literary arrival have become one with the wind. I do not think I am making a controversial claim when I posit that the Heroides in Pulau Sekijang Bendera has had absolutely no influence on the literature of the South Seas and the Nusantara for the past 800 years [4]. To prompt otherwise would risk unfairly attributing the literary creations of the region to an unrelated and foreign literary culture. Tracing the trajectory and developments of forms across time and space is indeed an important exercise; by no means am I downplaying the achievements of our most distinguished World Literature scholars, whose statistical analyses have charted out the vast literary geographies the novel form has traversed. The numbers may not necessarily deceive, but they speak to correlations. On the other hand, some texts offer such radical evolutions that little remains of their point of origin. To trace such an obfuscated literary genealogy would be an immense yet rewarding endeavour, but until more substantive records of literary transmission are unveiled, we are amnesiacs sifting through accounts that sink below and resurface from the waves, drawing our own connections where there may or may not be one.
I have supplied my own commentary to guide readers through the many rich eccentricities of the poem, and I highly recommend having Ovid’s other works on hand to fully appreciate the poem’s intra- and intertextual dialogue. Enjoy!
Manu Propria
Nanyang University of Singapore
1446 AH/ 2025 AD/ 4723 年 [5]
Footnotes
[1] See an unpublished translation of the Heroides by Dr Steven Green of the National University of Singapore.
[2] Carbon dating the book has, however, proven inconclusive as of the time of writing
[3] The year corresponds to 1291 AD. The octaval calendar was an Islamic calendar used by the Malay and Javanese peoples in the early 13th Century AD. The most prominent feature of this calendar is a repeating 8-year cycle which makes a significant departure from older Islamic calendars by disposing of Arabic mathematical conventions and astronomy. Time in Malay and Javanese thinking was thought of as a circular phenomenon, and a science of divination is derived from this cyclical conception. See Ian Proudfoot’s Old Muslim Calendars of Southeast Asia.
[4] We can, however, find estranged lovers across the literature of the Nusantara. The following is an excerpt from a Kerinici poem from Sumatra:
The translation is as follows: haku manangis ma / njaru ka'u ka'u di / saru tijada da / tang (I am weeping, calling you; though called, you do not come). See P. Voeorhoeve in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 126 No. 4. To read this Kerinci poem as being influenced by Ovid would be the mark of a rather wayward reader, but the similarity to his work is nonetheless uncanny.
[5]
The End
P.S. To the Margins Editorial Team
You must know I never expected to make it this long. Please forgive my afterthoughts—they have no end. The insinuations if they do are intolerable. [33]
[33] I heard that in Aleppo once…