The Pannonian triumph of Tiberius that Ovid had hopefully anticipated in Tr. IV.2 (see introductory note, above, p. 257; cf. also the note on III.12.45–8, p. 251) actually took place on 23 October AD 12, and Ovid, all too conscious of his earlier mockery of triumphal pretensions in the erotic poems (Am. I.2.23ff., AA I.213ff.), made the best of the occasion, clearly being aided in this by a detailed descriptive account (acknowledged simply as fama, 19) from some correspondent or visitor, even down to mention of a providential change of weather just in time for the celebrations, and the shortage of accommodation for visitors (21–8). Yet even in this celebratory account Ovid cannot resist (39–40) an oblique reference to Varus’s disastrous defeat in the Teutoburger Forest (cf. note to EP I.2.89–90, above, p. 299), or a tactlessly long eulogy (49ff.), not of the triumphator, but of his far more popular nephew.
Tiberius may have triumphed, but it was Germanicus, in effect, who received Ovid’s congratulatory accolade (see below, introductory note to EP II.5). Handsome, brilliant, cultured and affable, Germanicus — grandson on his mother’s side of Mark Antony, and, through his uncle Tiberius’s adoption by Augustus, himself a legal member of the Julian gens, and in the direct line of succession — was consul in AD 12 (aet. twenty-five!), and went on to take part in a series of successful (if costly) campaigns against the German tribes, from 14 to 16 as C.-in-C. He was also, in contrast to the dour Tiberius, extremely popular. Ovid seems not to have known him personally, but it was inevitable that he should try to win patronage from so ascendant, and congenial, a star, primarily through the various literary figures on the great man’s staff whom he did know: Albinovanus Pedo (probably a relation of Celsus: EP IV.10), Salanus (EP II.5), Carus (EP IV.13), to whom we may add Suillius Rufus, who married Ovid’s stepdaughter Perilla (EP IV.8). After the death of Augustus Ovid rededicated the Fasti to Germanicus. But Germanicus, for all his popularity, was not Princeps, and Ovid’s public cultivation of him can have had no effect on his uncle Tiberius (the one person who could have mitigated Ovid’s sentence) except to irritate and arouse suspicion.
1 The reference to the south wind (harbinger of warm weather) suggests a date in spring: if so, this will be one of the latest poems in Book II, written c. April or May AD 13 (Syme HO, p. 41, who also remarks that ‘the exordium suggests a lapse of time since the pageantry’). This conclusion supports the chronology established in the next note.
31–4 EP III.6.24–6 makes it clear that the reference is to the cult of Justitia Augusta, the ‘Justice of Augustus’, allegorized as a goddess, and recently established by the Princeps ‘in her own marble temple’. By great good fortune the Fasti Praenestini record the exact date of this event: 8 January AD 13 (Syme HO p. 42 with n. 1).
45–6 Ovid’s account is confirmed by Suetonius (Tib. 20), Velleius Paterculus (2.114), Strabo (7.5.3, C.314), and Dio Cassius (55.29). Bato, the leader of the Pannonian tribe known as the Daesitiatae, was captured; but instead of being executed he was presented with rich gifts and relegated to a comfortable retirement in Ravenna, presumably pour encourager les autres, this being a far cheaper way of dealing with recalcitrant native chieftains than sending out legions against them. The gesture of course also provided Ovid with a splendid opening for optimism: if a mere enemy receives such lenient treatment, surely the God will ease up on me too?
49ff. At last comes the direct appeal to Germanicus (perhaps a shade tactless in a poem ostensibly celebrating Tiberius’s triumph: cf. below, p. 342), with a plethora of apostrophes in the second-person singular (Evans PC, p. 139) creating a false mood of intimacy: flattery (49–54) is followed by an assertion of Ovid’s prophetic powers qua poet (55–6), and as an example of that power, the prediction that Germanicus, too, would enjoy a triumph. The prediction was fulfilled: decreed in 15 for victories over an assortment of German tribes, Germanicus’s triumph was finally celebrated on 26 May AD 17 (Tac. Ann. 1.55, 2.41). But Ovid, alas, did not survive to make this triumph into a poem. He wrote nothing, so far as we know, after the summer of 16; and some time in the winter of 17/18 he died. It did not, in the end, take a ‘Scythian’ arrow (65–6) to finish him off: despair, ill health, and premature old age will have sufficed.
The addressee is once more Messalinus (cf. EP I.7 and Tr. IV.4, with notes ad loc.), and the poem settles into what is by now a routine appeal: nervous, anticipating rejection (5–6, 19ff., 39–40), seeking no more than a change of venue (65–6, 95–100, 109–10), self-exculpatory (no armed rebellion, 9–14, mere timid stupidity, 15–18); frozen (cf. note to EP I.6.71–4), sick, and spiritually dead (45–6); conceding the justice of the Princeps’ anger (19–20, 109–10, 119–20) while flattering his godlike munificence and clementia (61–92, 109, 113–18); prepared to throw himself on the mercy of one who may be actively hostile (23–38), but whom Ovid is still ready to praise for eloquence and compassion (49ff., 95ff.), while also reminding him of Ovid’s still-valid claims as a former client (101–2).
The tone is one of quiet desperation; the general approach much resembles that of EP I.2 (to Fabius Maximus) and III.1 (to his wife). The one hint of optimism is the belief (perhaps with some basis then, but frustrated by subsequent events) that ‘the time’s ripe for petitions’ (67: cf. below, EP IV.6.15–16, and p. 359). What grounds were there for this hope? Military successes (cf. EP III.1.133–6 and note ad loc.)? The rise of Germanicus? The cult of Justitia Augusta (see above, EP II.1 with note to 31–4)? Very probably (cf. Evans PC, pp. 27–8, with reff.). But we also know (Dio Cassius 56.27.2–3) that Augustus was, at this precise time, cracking down on exiles, especially those who lived too extravagantly and were lax about where they resided. Though the passage concerns only those fully exiled (rather than the merely relegated, like Ovid), and restricts itself to the Aegean, I cannot believe (pace Evans, ibid.) that Ovid would find this kind of news encouraging for his case. The date of the poem (79–80, 89–92) is after c. January AD 13.
1 For Ovid’s relations with Cotta, Messalinus and their father Messalla Corvinus, see EP 1.7 above, with introductory note and note to 27–30.
2 For Ovid’s frequent play on the west = left (sinister) = unlucky coast of the Black Sea see Tr. I.2.83 and II.197ff., with notes ad loc.
9–14 The common factor, and significance, of these mythical examples is that each of them involves violent lèse-majesté against a deity. The ‘Giants’ insane commando’ piled the mountains of Thessaly (Pelion, Ossa) on top of one another in an attempt to scale the heavens and dethrone Zeus (Apollod. 1.7.4; Ovid Met. I.151–62); Diomedes, in the fighting before Troy, wounded Aphrodite (Hom. Il. 5.329–51). The latter allusion carries sly overtones, since it might well be argued that the author of Am. and AA, a declared combatant in the wars of love, had certainly never taken up arms against Aphrodite (or her son): quite the reverse.
25–8 Achaemenides, son of the Ithacan Adamastus, was abandoned (according to Virg. Aen. 3.588ff., where the legend is first found) by Odysseus/Ulysses when escaping from Polyphemus, and rescued by the Trojan Aeneas (cf. Ovid Met. XIV.154–222). For Telephus being cured by rust from the spear that had inflicted the injury see Glossary (Telephus) and note on Tr. V.2.13–16 (above, p. 276). The notion of the blasphemer seeking sanctuary at the altar of the deity against whom he has offended likewise finds prior formulation in the same poem: see Tr. V.2.43–4.
33–4 Of the better MSS A transmits these lines with three lacunae (printed thus by Richmond): qui rapitur . . . . /porrigit . . . spinas duraque saxa . . . B and C omit them altogether. Various minor MSS fill out the pentameter convincingly by the addition of ad and manus: ‘clutches with [his] hands at thorns and rocks’. Two 13th-cent. hands (L, Erfurt.) complete the hexameter thus: . . . spumante salo [or freto] sua brac[c]hia tendens: ‘the man who’s whirled away by the scummy brine, arms outstretched . . .’ Reasonable enough, one might have thought; but Housman (CP, pp. 930–31) objected that a man drowning at sea (salo, freto) would find neither rocks nor thorns to clutch at, and invented a supplement (praeceps torrenti fluminis unda) to locate him in a river. Most editors have followed him. But this is to ignore the famous precedent of Odysseus, who on two occasions (Od. 5.428ff., 12.431ff.), both very much spumante salo, clings, once to rocks that strip the flesh from his hands, and once to the gnarled branch of a fig-tree, to save himself from drowning. Throughout Book I of the Tristia, and at intervals thereafter (see, e.g., Tr. 1.5 passim, I.6.21–2; V.5.3–4, 51–2 and 57–84; EP IV.10.9–30) Ovid draws parallels between his own case and that of Odysseus (cf. above, p. 211). The couplet as reconstituted offers one more oblique reminder of the comparison. It may or may not be what Ovid wrote — fill-ins for such lacunae are by their very nature suspect — but there is nothing illogical about it, and the literary allusion is apposite.
41ff. The ‘Tarpeian thunderer’ is Jupiter Capitolinus — and also, by extension, Augustus (cf. Evans PC, pp. 13ff.).
49–52 The tradition of oratorical distinction in Messalla Corvinus and his family is attested by the Corpus Tibullianum (Paneg. Mess. III.7 [IV.1]), Quintilian (1.7.35; 10.1.113) and Tacitus (Ann. 3.34.1–2): cf. Syme HO, pp. 131–2.
57–8 Cf. above, EP I.3.1–16, and notes ad loc.
69–70 Livia was born in 58/7 BC, and was thus now a septuagenarian. André (Pont, p. 46, n.3) regards the reference to tending the imperial couch as a mere ‘formule affaiblie’; but it is hard not to suspect Ovid of a covert sexual gibe at the elderly, rather in the style of W. S. Gilbert. Cf. EP III.1.117, and note ad loc.
71–2 Germanicus, son of the elder Drusus by Antonia, and Tiberius’s adopted son, was now twenty-eight (b. 15 BC); Drusus the Younger, Tiberius’s own son by Vipsania, was twenty-six (b. 13 BC).
73ff. Richmond (despite the evidence he considers in STP, pp. 112–14) and Wheeler-Goold read nurum . . . neptemque: one daughter-in-law, one granddaughter, rather than the plural nurus . . . neptesque. Goold (p. 328, n. 2) identifies them as Livilla — wife, first, of the short-lived Gaius Caesar (d. AD 4), and then of the younger Drusus — and Agrippina I (daughter of Agrippa by Julia I), who married Germanicus. But André (Pont, pp. 164–5, n. 6), pointing out that in law (Digest 23.2.14) nurus = a son’s or a grandson’s wife (for the plural elsewhere with reference to the Imperial family cf. Tr. IV.2.11–12, EP II.8.46), lists in this category, besides Livilla, (a) the elder Drusus’s widow Antonia, Tiberius’s sister-in-law; and (b) Agrippina I, wife of Livia’s grandson Germanicus. Augustus’s granddaughters in the direct line, through Julia I, were Julia II and, again, Agrippina I; Livilla was the granddaughter of Livia and her first husband Claudius Tiberius Nero. In AD 13 the great-grandsons in the direct line were Germanicus’s trio by Agrippina: Nero (not the future emperor), Drusus III, and Gaius (Caligula). Thus the plural seems on all counts preferable. There may, indeed, be yet another covert dig at Livia here, since — in striking contrast to this catalogue of general fecundity — Livia’s long-enduring marriage to Augustus was childless: not a small factor in the unacknowledged power-struggle over the succession.
75–8 A somewhat oblique reference to what is normally described by historians as the Pannonian campaign of AD 6–9. Ovid was lax in his geography, not least over Paeonia (in fact roughly coextensive with the present Slav republic of Macedonia, but here spread as far north as the Danube). He also seems to confuse Illyria with Roman Illyricum (divided after the Pannonian Revolt into Dalmatia and Pannonia), which covered roughly the same area as what was (until recently) Yugoslavia. See Vell. Pat. 2.115.
80 An allusion to a well-known myth (prominently treated by Ovid himself: see Met. I.452ff.). The nymph Daphne, pursued by Apollo, was metamorphosed by Zeus into a laurel-tree (daphne in Greek). Hence the title of James Bridie’s play Daphne Laureola.
81–4 The triumphal escort (for the triumph itself see introductory note to EP II.1, above, p. 314–15) included Messalinus and Cotta Maximus; the ‘joint loyal offspring’ were Drusus II and Germanicus, the ‘twin brother-gods’ Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces), whose temple in the Forum Romanum was close to that of the divinized Julius Caesar. (There is a discreet piece of flattery here, since in AD 6 this temple was rebuilt by Tiberius and dedicated in his and his brother Drusus’s names: Suet. Tib. 20; Dio Cass. 55.27.4; Ovid Fast. I.707–8; cf. Platner-Ashby, pp. 102–3.)
97–8 On Ovid’s relations with Messalla Corvinus cf. Tr. IV.4, with introductory note (above, p. 261).
113–14 Both allusions are to the Odyssey: for Polyphemus and his cave see Hom. Od. 9.216–542. The ‘cannibal king’ was the Laestrygonian Antiphates: Od. 10.114–32. Both characters made a practice of eating human flesh. The reference, while once more casting Ovid as Odysseus/Ulysses (see above, p. 211), manages to suggest bloodthirstiness in Augustus while officially repudiating it.
Once more Cotta Maximus is the addressee: while honoured as a friend in time of need, unswayed by profit or expedience (1–24, 29ff.), he is at the same time urged (‘if you’re still the man you once were/today’) to maintain his record in this respect (49ff). The length of the relationship is once again stressed (69–74), and the patronage of Cotta’s father, Messalla Corvinus, recalled (75–78). The initial flattery is somewhat overshadowed by Ovid’s bitter account of human self-interest and venality in personal relationships (7–24), which anticipates the diatribes of Juvenal. Twice again (3–4, 41–4) life in Tomis is equated with death, and the image of shipwreck duly reappears (25–8, 57–8) as a metaphor for Ovid’s troubles, followed (logically enough) by that of the drowning swimmer (39ff.). What gives this otherwise humdrum appeal its special interest is the seemingly autobiographical vignette of Ovid breaking the news to Cotta on Elba, and Cotta’s interesting reaction (61–6, 83–90).
19–20 The best MSS (A, B, C) read numen, and I see no reason (pace Richmond, Goold, André, Luck, et al.: Lenz and Owen are a shining exception) not to prefer this reading to the inevitable nomen of the minor MSS. It is not the name of friendship that is being prostituted, but its divine essence, its inner power: a name does not offer itself like a courtesan, but a goddess, shockingly, might do so. The uses of the phrase ‘name of friendship’ that André cites are irrelevant, and he betrays his real motivation in the last sentence of his note (Pont., p. 50, n. 1): what also militates against numen is ‘le fait qu’on peut difficilement admettre qu’une divinité se prostitue’. Some of us may find the admission relatively easy.
33 Richmond unnecessarily obelizes the text here (†exacto nisi†). Both he and André have got the line almost right (I spare the reader numerous variants and over-imaginative emendations). What is the contextual sense? Cotta admits, on the evidence, that Ovid was guilty of no more than an error. Read ex actu (B has exactu): the noun actus (OLD §§7, 9, 10, 11) embraces just the conspectus of meanings needed: activity, episode (‘in the drama of life’), moral conduct, behaviour, deed, exploit: te nihil, ex actu, nisi nos peccasse fatentem.
41–6 For these pairs of famous friends see Glossary.
56 The ‘goddess perched on her globe’ was Fortune: cf. Glossary, ‘Fortuna’, and Tr. V.8.7–20 with note ad loc.
83 Cotta’s presence on Elba in November is something of a puzzle (cf. Green CB, p. 298, n. 20), and no convincing explanation for it has been offered (Rutgers’ emendation Aethalis Ilva, adopted by all recent editors, is a virtual certainty).
Nothing certain is known about Atticus except what Ovid tells us (cf. Syme HO, p. 72). He was the recipient of Am. I.9 (on love as military service). From the present poem we learn that he criticized Ovid’s literary work (13–18), that in Rome they were close friends who went everywhere together (19–20), that the relationship was one of long standing (33: also clear from Am. I.9), and, probably, that Atticus had, since Ovid’s exile, been less attentive than Ovid felt was justifiable (23–30: the adynata have a somewhat strained air). Atticus is also the addressee of EP II.7, which treats him in a singularly offhand manner (below, p. 324). The common assumption, that he is to be identified with the Curtius Atticus mentioned by Tacitus as a companion of Tiberius (Tac. Ann. 4.58.1, 6.10.2) rests on no positive evidence; nor does the equally popular belief that he is the addressee of Tr. V.4 (cf. introductory note, above, pp. 279ff).
15–18 I accept the transpositions, corrections and interpretation offered here by Shackleton Bailey (2), p. 397.
22 The son of Nestor for whom Achilles nursed an affection second only to his love for Patroclus was Antilochus: cf. Hom. Od. 24.78–9; Apollod. 1.9.9.
28 The roses of Paestum, and of Campania generally, were famous in antiquity: Plin. HN 21.16; Virg. Georg. 4.119; Ovid Met. XV.708; Prop. 4.5.61; Mart. 12.31.3.
Little is known about the rhetorician Cassius Salanus (Plin. HN 34.47) except the one important fact that Ovid provides (41–56): he was tutor in oratory to Germanicus, whom the poet had now begun to cultivate, through various associates, with some assiduity. Hence this letter to Salanus, despite the fact (7–8) that Ovid’s prior acquaintance with him had been slight. In the later poems Germanicus becomes increasingly prominent, while earlier patrons disappear. By the end of Book III we have seen the last of the old big names, in particular the family of Messalla Corvinus: appealing to them had got Ovid nowhere. Paullus Fabius, who might have helped, died (see below, p. 359). In Book IV we find a new group, with Germanicus as its central figure (below, p. 350). Yet Ovid had had him in view as early as EP II.1 (above, p. 315), not entirely to his own advantage. His too-eager adulation of Tiberius’s dangerously brilliant nephew (and reluctantly adopted son) was unlikely to improve his already compromised standing with Tiberius himself, whose ‘umbrageous nature might well take offence when finding a long laudation of Germanicus obtruded on his Pannonian triumph’ (Syme HO, pp. 44, cf. EP II.1.49ff.). Not surprisingly (friends had, we may surmise, tipped Ovid off) there were no more such direct laudations; but the damage had been done. The ‘Germanicus gambit’ had as little success in getting Ovid out of Tomis as any of his earlier campaigns.
1 The unexpected emphasis on ‘long—short couplets’ (i.e. Ovid’s status as a writer of elegiac verse) here foreshadows the distinction between him and the rhetorician Salanus (67, and note ad loc.). It also recalls the various times in his early erotic poetry (Am. I.1 passim, II.1.11–22, 18.1–18) when he backed off from the idea of writing epic (i.e., given the climate of the times, Augustan propaganda), using the stock rhetorical device known as recusatio — not least since he does exactly the same (25–32) in the present poem.
15ff. Salanus had (it would seem) written to Ovid with compliments on his exilic poems, and polite hopes that Augustus would relent. Ovid, while acknowledging these gestures, is in effect putting words into Salanus’s mouth: what he wants is a protest against the intolerable conditions imposed by Tomis on any writer. The claim that this area saw little of the pax Augusta was plausible, though the German frontier was probably worse.
19ff. The verses Ovid claims to have composed ‘amid fierce fighting’ (inter proelia) stand on a par with those of Tr. I.2 (especially 14–36) or I.4 (especially 5–16) supposedly written at sea in the middle of a storm. The claim that the poet’s talent has run dry is a regular argument (above, p. 273), amply contradicted by the exilic poems themselves.
27–30 The reference here may be to EP II.1, with its description of Tiberius’s Pannonian triumph; but both lines 33–44 and the terms Ovid uses suggest rather a separate formal laudatio, and the encomium of II.1 is (on its own terms) sustained quite adequately — unless the switch to praise of Germanicus (49ff.) constitutes a recusatio of a different sort, with Ovid saying, in effect, that while he doesn’t mind lauding Germanicus, a tribute to Tiberius (which is what at this point we might reasonably expect) would stick in his throat (cf. above, p. 316).
35–6 ‘I know you’d do this even if I hadn’t asked you’, Ovid says, and then (by virtually unanimous MS reading): accedat, cumulus, gratia nostra, leuis (Richmond, thus punctuated; André; Wheeler-Goold). What does this mean? Wheeler-Goold: ‘To you. . .let our favour to me contribute as a slight incentive.’ I am not sure I can construe this, let alone extract any sense from it. André (‘que s’ajoute le modeste tribut de ma reconnaissance’) at least sees that gratia nostra here means ‘my gratitude to you’ rather than ‘your favour to me’, but fudges cumulus, which in this context could only mean (OLD s.v., §4) the ‘finishing touch, consummation’. But this doesn’t make sense: from the context it is clear that Ovid, as so often, needs some extra appui to make his correspondent do what he wants: a spur, an incentive. Read stimulus: the corruption from cumulus in a semi-uncial hand would be all too easy.
41 ‘Prince of the Youths’ (princeps iuuenum or iuuentutis), an old equestrian honorific title under the Republic, had been taken over by Augustus to mark out an imperial heir-presumptive. Germanicus and Drusus received this accolade at the same time.
49 Since Germanicus was only a member of the gens Iulia by a double process of adoption (see above, p. 315), Ovid, whose Julian sympathies had always been clear (Green CB, pp. 215ff.), is (as so often) tactlessly, or perhaps deliberately, snubbing Tiberius by implication.
55–6 The ‘skilled utterance’ (facundia) is ‘worthy of a Prince’ — or of a Princeps: the same word does duty for both. The hope that Germanicus may succeed to the throne, ambiguously stated here, forms the open prayer that concludes the poem (75–6).
67 The text of this line is a mess, but the context controls the rhetorical sense of it. From the beginning of the poem, Ovid and Salanus are presented as men who, while contrasted at every step with one another, still both ‘pursue liberal arts’ (65–6). Ovid is a private poet, Salanus the rhetorician-in-waiting to (and probably speechwriter for) a distinguished public figure, Germanicus. As is made clear by line 68 (‘yet both of us need that spark’, sed tamen ambobus debet inesse calor), the contrast is once more repeated in the previous line. Richmond prints the mangled version of A, and obelizes: Thyrsus †sublestate† gustata est laurea nobis. André and Wheeler—Goold both print Rothmaler’s reconstruction (tentatively approved — ‘fortasse recte’ — by Richmond in his apparatus criticus): Thyrsus abest a te gustata et laurea nobis — ‘The thyrsus is foreign to you, and the laurel tasted by me.’ One correction is easy: read gestata (B, C and some minor MSS): ‘carry’, ‘wield’, ‘wear’. But why should both thyrsus and laurel be foreign to Salanus? Ovid’s whole thrust is that the two of them are in the business of words together, even if for different purposes. Thyrsus and laurel must therefore be in contrast. Ovid is the wild poet: thyrsus for him. Laurel (OLD s.v. ‘laurea’, §2.a) is the emblem of military victory, worn by a triumphator, and dedicated to Jupiter: what could be more appropriate for Germanicus and his speechwriter? The laurel is worn, not chewed. Wilkinson (p. 10) long ago saw what this line was about, even down to the confusion of nobis and uobis. Read: Thyrsus enim nobis gestata est, laurea uobis — ‘My business is with the thyrsus, yours with the laurel.’
For Graecinus see introductory note to EP I.6 (above, pp. 308–9). It is tempting to speculate that the earlier appeal had elicited a reply criticizing Ovid for his notorious error (5–8). Too late, says Ovid: what’s the point of lecturing me on navigational hazards when I’m wrecked and struggling in the water? What I need is a lifebelt (9–14)! A stock prayer for Graecinus’s well-being (15–18) is followed by a ringing denunciation of him should he fail to honour the duties of friendship (19–24). The usual mythic examples of unswerving personal loyalty (25–6) are duly trotted out, and the usual promise of literary immortality (33–4) hopefully dangled.
For Atticus see introductory note to EP II.4 (above, pp. 320–21). The concern for him (line 3) is perfunctory, and instantly followed by the usual nagging inquiry as to whether he is properly concerned for Ovid, the number and intensity of whose troubles are once more paraded (31–48), complete with the usual adynata (25–30). Ovid, it is true, concedes a certain exaggeration in his fears (5–20), but explains this as over-sensitivity induced by excess of suffering, an acclimatization to the endless blows of Fate (37–45). Ovid, in fact, is playing the old record, and in a lackadaisical way. Others, he asseverates, made their name through the liberal arts: him they have destroyed (47–8). His prior life was blameless (49), his friends have failed to make sufficiently urgent representation on his behalf (51–2), he was not on the spot when the storm broke (53–4), he was forced to take ship at the worst time of year (57–60: yet another comparison with Ulysses), his travelling-companions robbed him (61–2), his place of exile is a hell-hole on the furthest frontier of the empire, where enemies — despite the pax Augusta — constantly threaten life and property, even making agriculture impossible (63–70). There are the usual complaints of endless cold and undrinkable water (71–4). What keeps Ovid going is the hope for some mitigation of Augustus’s anger (79–80). Then, apparently forgetting Atticus, he addresses his ‘few friends’ (81–4), exhorting them to continue the battle on his behalf. None of this is new, or even particularly striking: one gets the feeling that Ovid is, rather desperately, going through the motions with as many potential backers as possible, on the principle of safety in numbers. The tone does not suggest that he found many takers.
24 The sense is clear, the variant readings distract. The two undisputed words are nostris casibus — ‘[in] my position’. The line is parenthetical, and clearly intended to strengthen Ovid’s claim, in the previous line, to veracity. ‘Nor [nec] in my position can you [or someone: potes, potest are variants] be [esse]—’ Well, be what? Clearly, deceptive: some MSS read fraus in for the meaningless planis or planus of the best tradition: ‘nor can there be deceit in my position’ (nec fraus in nostris casibus esse potest). This gets the sense, but leaves the problem of how fraus got elbowed out by planus, -is: fraus must be a rational gloss, behind which the real reading remains hidden. Rothmaler, Ellis and Postgate saw the answer: what Ovid wrote was not fraus but planus (short rather than long a, the Latinized form of the Greek πλάνος, a cheat, deceiver or impostor. It was almost inevitable that this unusual word should be mistaken for planus, ‘level’, and the line then mangled to restore (as the scribe saw it) not only some kind of sense, but also the correct scansion.
77–8 To sustain a heavy load, Ovid says, you must toil (according to the MSS) uertice pleno or recto, i.e. with the crown of your head full or upright. The second epithet is a clumsy attempt to correct the palpable nonsense of the first. What is needed is something to match line 78 — relax your muscles, and you’ll fall. This. as we might expect, only makes sense if you are carrying the load on your back. Thus Schenkel’s plano (printed by Richmond) is equally inapposite. At STP, p. 114 Richmond tries to get round this by (a) citing a personal experience, helping a ‘small Roman woman’ to hoist a large sack on her head (the woman then walked off uertice plano, head held upright), and (b) pooh-poohing the use of the back as ‘a tiring and dangerous way to carry heavy loads’. But in antiquity as today it was women who carried loads on their heads, not men; and though the use of the back may have been tiring and dangerous, it was also universal (see, e.g., Xanthias at the beginning of Aristophanes’ Frogs). Wheeler-Goold solves the problem by mistranslation: ‘You must take the strain with shoulders level’ (whatever that means). With palmary common sense, Shackleton Bailey ((2), p. 397) saw that under such a load the head would be bent forward: what Ovid wrote was prono, and I translate accordingly.
For modern sensibilities this is a hard poem to stomach. Evans (PC, p. 26) does not exaggerate when he claims that Ovid has ‘collected and reworked all the conventional elements of imperial flattery to construct the most elaborate panegyric of Augustus and his family in the books from exile, and perhaps in all Augustan literature’. Can the man be serious? we ask ourselves, hopefully. Isn’t this a characteristic case of mockery by overkill, akin to John Skelton’s famous remark when summoned before Cardinal Wolsey: ‘My lord, let me lie down and wallow, for I can kneel no longer’? Unfortunately, it is, in all likelihood, a serious appeal made by a desperate man, and, as Evans says, ‘there is no reason to believe that Ovid’s contemporaries would have thought his prayer grotesque’.
That is a disconcerting insight. E. R. Dodds once remarked, in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951: p. 242), that ‘he who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal’, and explained the phenomenon as a manifestation of ‘helpless dependence’. Ovid’s attitude is the end-product of three centuries of imperial power-politics and euhemeristic ruler-cults. It tells us more about the moral climate of the empire than it does about Ovid himself, who was simply going with the prevailing fashion in the forlorn hope of ameliorating his lot. There are parallels with Tr. V.2, but the flattery is more extreme.
1–6 Cotta’s gesture was diplomatically astute, honouring the obligations of friendship while at the same time making a gesture of obeisance to the divine pretensions of the Imperial family. Ovid does not say what kind of images these were, except that they were made of silver (5). Syme (HO, p. 127) refers to them as statuettes: I think it much more likely that they were medallions, or some similar kind of high-relief portrait, akin to those ex-voto images popular both in classical antiquity and in some modern Catholic or Greek Orthodox shrines.
19–20 The sentiment reminds us of that proposition in Roman Stoicism which virtually equated the Roman Empire (symbolized in the person of the Princeps) with the eternal divine cosmos controlling the world: cf. A. Erskine, The Hellenistic Stoa: Political Thought and Action (London/Ithaca, NY, 1990), ch. 8, pp. 181ff.
21–2 Ovid never got over the terrible dressing-down to which he was subjected by Augustus prior to his relegation: cf. Tr. II.133, and EP II.7.55–6.
29–34 For Livia’s role as the sole woman capable of sustaining Augustus’s greatness cf. Tr. II.161–2. The son (only by adoption, despite the supposed resemblances of character, 32) is Tiberius; the grandsons are Germanicus (also by adoption) and Drusus II.
37–42 Ovid now addresses Tiberius (‘Caesar closest to Caesar’), reemphasizing what, in the case of Augustus, was a merely fictive paternity. Nestor lived through three generations of men (cf. Hom. Il. 1.250–2; Tr. V.5.62), and the Sibyl of Cumae for not less than a thousand years (Met. XIV. 130–53: she was already seven hundred when she prophesied to Aeneas!). At the time of their deaths Augustus was seventy-seven, Livia eighty-six.
43–50 A direct appeal is made to Livia (we are to imagine the poet apostrophizing each image in turn (55ff.) as the symbolic icon of the ‘deity’ portrayed). Drusus I (Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus), Tiberius’s younger brother and father of Germanicus, had died on active service in Germany, AD 9, either through illness or as the result of a fall from his horse (Livy, per. 142; Suet. Div. Claud. 1.4; Val. Max. 5.5.3).
53–4 Suetonius (Div. Aug. 45) reports that Augustus banned gladiatorial fights to the death.
63ff. These lines offer the best chance (a slim one even so) that Ovid may here be indulging his taste for tongue-in-cheek humour. If the Imperial ‘deities’ are immanent (even symbolically) in their images (one may compare the English crime of ‘defacing a coin of the realm’), then clearly they will not choose to stay, however vicariously, in an unpleasant location (63–4). But Ovid will cling to his protective amulets through thick and thin (65–70); ergo, he has a chance to win himself a better place of exile by piggybacking, so to speak, on the wings of his guardian gods. Thus the final hopeful claim (71–6) to find the Divine Countenance lightening may depend, not so much on the iustitia Augusta as on the God’s own sense of circumstantial comfort.
In AD 12 Augustus divided the kingdom of Thrace between two client rulers: Cotys IV (Della Corte OP, p. 104) and his uncle Rhescuporis (on this episode see Tac. Ann. 2.64–6 and Vell. Pat. 2.129), Cotys getting the lion’s share. The present poem was probably written to celebrate Cotys’s accession — welcome to Ovid, since Thrace could form a buffer state between the Hellenized colonies of Moesia and the savage tribes of the hinterland (André Pont. pp. xxiv–v). Cotys was a humane, ‘Westernized’ ruler, with literary pretensions (he wrote poems in Greek, praised in an epigram by Antipater of Thessalonica, Anth. Pal. 16.75, cf. lines 49–54 below). Culture, however, proved no defence against mere vulgar intrigue: in AD 19, a year or so after Ovid’s death, his kingdom was invaded by his ambitious uncle, and he himself (despite protests by Tiberius) put to death.
1–2 The phrasing of the address would inevitably remind any educated reader — the addressee included — of Horace’s similar flattering invocation of the royally descended Etruscan Maecenas: see Odes 1.1, Maecenas atauis edite regibus, etc. Cotys’s own supposed pedigree is interesting. Eumolpus (Apollod. 1.5.4; Paus. 1.38.2; schol. Eur. Phoen. 854; Isocr. 4.68) was the son of Poseidon by Chione (daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia), and thus descended from Erichthonius and Erechtheus, legendary heroes of Attica (19–20). His son Ismarus married the daughter of Tegyrius, king of Thrace; after the deaths of Tegyrius and Ismarus, Eumolpus himself succeeded to the throne, and it was through his line that Cotys’s ancestors asserted their royal claims.
9–10 For the recurrent image of exile as shipwreck cf. above, p. 206.
23–6 This briskly businesslike attitude to the mutual bestowal of favours is as characteristic of the Mediterranean today as it was in antiquity (a fact that often leads to embarrassing misunderstandings when Nordic or American visitors are involved): Romans summed it up with the pithy phrase do ut des (‘I give that you may give’), i.e. a balance of trade-offs, and it applied equally to relations between mortals and with the gods. It was not in the least sentimental, but strictly pragmatic, a profit-and-loss account that offered a much-needed safety-net in a society that had no real notion of insurance. Utility, as Ovid stresses, was the key motif.
29–30 Ovid refers elsewhere (Fast. V.671–3 with Frazer’s note ad loc.) to the practice of sacrificing a gravid sow to Ceres.
31–2 The goat was sacrificed to Bacchus (Dionysus) ostensibly because of its (?impious) habit of nibbling vine-shoots (Met. XV.114, Fast. I.354; André Pont., p. 70, n. 3); but it seems clear that its proverbially lustful nature was also a factor.
41–4 For these mythical and historical villains, see Glossary.
51–4 The patronizing quality of these lines disconcerts precisely because of its complete unconsciousness. The attitude that so justifiably infuriated the Tomitans (cf. pp. xxv, 375) extended even to this highly educated native potentate whose protection and favour Ovid was engaged in soliciting. Orpheus, as the son of Oeagrus, king of Thrace (Apollod. 1.3.2: other genealogies were known), was generally considered a Thracian.
60 The line is indicative of relaxation. Ovid has just listed Cotys’s military activities: he can at need play the warrior, slaughter his enemies, ride, shoot. But when such public duties have been attended to, and, ‘with luck, aque suis/tuis humeris/numeris work has come to a stop [forte quieuit opus]’, then, instead of idling away his time, he devotes himself to literary pursuits. The general sense is clear. The problem lies in the words dependent on quieuit. Does Cotys’s work-schedule take a rest suis numeris, i.e. from its various aspects or stages (OLD §12)? Or does it ease off from ‘your [Cotys’s] shoulders’ (tuis humeris)? This latter reading is that of the MSS; numeris is an emendation by Heinsius, there being doubt concerning the elegance of the Latin in the received text. (Some minor MSS also read onus, ‘load, burden’, rather than opus, ‘work’.) Ever since Burman, conceding the difficulties, argued that ‘nothing better comes to mind than Heinsius’ emendation’, most editors have agreed. But Ehwald retained humeris, and I too do not find the supposed inconcinnity sufficient to reject the MS tradition.
67–70 For the significance of these charges that Ovid rejects in his own case see Green CB, p. 214 with nn. 39 and 40.
75–76 This couplet should long ago have laid to rest the often-repeated argument that the Art of Love was, in fact, the main reason for Ovid’s relegation.
Who is the Macer addressed here? It has become traditional to identify him with M. Pompeius Macer, the naturalized Roman son of Pompey’s Greek adviser Theophanes of Mytilene; but the evidence (cf. Green OEP, introduction, pp. 26–8) will not support this ascription. Nor was he Aemilius Macer, the author of didactic poems on snakes and herbs (Tr. IV.10.44), since this person had died in 16 BC. The cognomen Macer is extremely common, and the travelling-companion of Ovid’s youth must perforce remain anonymous: an old friend (Am. II.18), a fellow poet (11–14), a relative (9–10) of Ovid’s wife, but, it would seem (1–8), among those who had kept their distance — or had at least been lax in communication — since Ovid’s relegation. Cf. below, EP IV.3, and introductory note (p. 353).
13–14 It would seem that Macer, in emulation of various Greek epic poets after Homer, aimed to round off the events of the Trojan Cycle: cf. the fragments of the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium (Iliupersis), Returns (Nostoi) and Telegony, most conveniently available for non-specialists in H. G. Evelyn-White’s Loeb Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (1914, rev. ed. 1982), pp. 489–533.
21ff. Further details concerning this Mediterranean Grand Tour can be gleaned from Ovid elsewhere. Apart from Sicily, where they spent the best part of a year (22–30), they also visited Athens (Tr. I.2.77), Troy (Fast. VI.417–24) and the cities of the Ionian coast (Tr. I.2.78, probably corresponding to line 21 here).
23–4 Etna had been volcanically active for some while when Ovid and Macer visited: cf. Virg. Georg. 1.471, with Servius ad loc.; App. BC 5.114, 117; Dio Cass. 50.8.3.
25ff. Enna, scene of the rape of Persephone (Proserpine) by Hades, lord of the underworld, is in the centre of Sicily. Its lake (the modern Lago di Pergusa) still survives, as do the ‘mephitic pools of Palicus’, now the (well-named) Lago di Naftia, between Catania and Caltagirone, notorious (André Pont. p. 74 n. 5) for ‘ses émanations gazeuses et ses projections de naphte’, cf. Met. V.405–6. Its ancient name commemorated twin local deities, the Palici, whose shrine was an asylum for runaway slaves. Enna, too, was famous as the scene of the First Sicilian Slave War (135–132 BC, cf. Green SP, pp. 193–215). The connections intrigue. Enna drew Ovid for its mythic associations, perhaps; but why the Palici? The Anapus (modern Anapo) and Cyane rivers converge to the south of Syracuse, a little inland from the Great Harbour. The nymph Cyane was an attendant of Proserpine’s, transformed into a spring or well by Pluto (Hades) at the time of her mistress’s rape: Met. V. 409–37.
27–8 Ovid’s version of the Arethusa legend (Met. V. 487–508 and 572–641) relates how this nymph was caught bathing in the river Alpheius in Arcadia by the river-god himself: Artemis took pity on her as she fled his attentions, and turned her into a spring, which flowed under the sea to the island of Ortygia, off Syracuse in Sicily. Pausanias, however (5.7.2), has Arethusa get to Syracuse on her own, and turn herself into a spring there (the famous Fountain of Arethusa, still extant), whereat the river-god Alpheius, resourceful as ever, went subterranean and pursued her, uniting his waters with hers.
45–6 For the (erroneous) belief that the Great and Little Bear constellations never sank below the horizon see Tr. III.10.3, with note ad loc. (and cf. note to Tr. IV.3.1–5).
Despite ingenious speculation (recorded by Syme, HO, pp. 78–9) we know nothing whatsoever about this Rufus (one of the half-dozen most common cognomina) apart from what little Ovid chooses to tell us, i.e. that he was a native of Fundi, a city of southern Campania about seventy-five miles from Rome on the Appian Way (27–8) and bore the same relationship to Ovid’s wife (15–16) as Castor did to Hermione or Hector to Iulus, i.e. uncle to niece (or nephew): Castor was the brother of Hermione’s mother Helen, while Hector’s sister Creusa bore Ascanius-Iulus. We may note that the addressees of Book II are becoming more peripheral, literary and familial as time goes on: Salanus, Graecinus, Cotys, Macer and now Rufus. How Ovid’s wife reacted to this poem’s blandly patronizing assumption (17–22) that she did better when carrying out someone else’s instructions than when operating on her own initiative we can only surmise. From the opening lines it would seem that Ovid has till now paid relatively little attention to this kinsman-by-marriage: his list of potential advocates, one suspects, is finally coming down to its last, least influential names.
Richmond, following Froesch OEP, pp. 136–9, transposes this poem to a position after EP III.5. Even granted the hysteron proteron pattern on which Books I–III seem to be organized (cf. introductory note, p. 293), I remain inherently suspicious on principle of such violent changes when their object is to remove anomalies from a previously conceived structural pattern (ring-composition generates its own circular arguments); and in this case we also need to consider II.11 as a lead-in to III.1 (Evans PC, p. 148 with n. 47, p. 191). Besides, if a transposition be conceded, either II.9 (to Cotys) or II.10 (to Macer) could equally well be the displaced item: there is nothing to make Rufus the inevitable choice. Such radical arbitrary revision is wholly unjustified in a standard text.