Volume 18, Number 4 · March 9, 1972
A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés
By Mary McCarthy
First let me say what I think these terms signify in common speech. An expatriate is different from an exile. In early use an exile was a banished man, a wanderer or roamer: exsul. 'For I must to the greenwood go, alone, a banished man.' In ancient Greek times, a man with a price on his head unable to return home until he had ransomed his blood guilt. The Wandering Jew, I suppose, is the archetypal exile, sentenced to trail about the earth until the Second Coming. Or Dante, a fuoruscito, waiting for a Second Coming in the shape of the German emperor who would make it safe for him to return to Florence. Ovid, banished by Augustus and writing his Tristia.
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