The poems of Book III, composed during AD 9 and 10, reveal a sharp change of mood from Ovid’s earlier briskness. By now he has gone through a first winter of discontent in Tomis, enduring both bitter cold and the threat of barbarian raids. Worse, it is beginning to be borne in on him that there will be no quick reprieve, that exile cannot be satisfactorily reduced to a protective literary parlour-game, that Rome may be lost to him for ever. The diversions of the long journey are over. ‘Now I’ve reached the land of my banishment,’ he writes (III.2.18–20), ‘weeping’s my only pleasure, the tears come flooding/fuller than melted snow in spring.’ By now he knows what snow, frozen or melting, is going to mean in his life. The stark contrast between Rome’s sophisticated urban civilization and the rough primitivism of Tomis is driven home again and again. Nostalgia, the exile’s favourite drug, pervades these elegies. The new collection opens (deliberately recalling the first poem in Book I) with a repetition of the book-as-envoy motif — except that this time the book becomes its own narrator, thus giving Ovid the excuse for conducting, in imagination, a guided tour — one of the first in literature — through central Rome, beginning at the Forum Augusti, and proceeding, via the Sacred Way, to the Palatine, the Portico of Octavia, and Asinius Pollio’s Library (a nicely contrived literary climax). That other exilic stand-by, correspondence with friends, also makes its first appearance here, neatly adapted to elegiac requirements from Ovid’s earlier Letters of Heroines (Heroides).
Yet despite its markedly pessimistic mood — the sense Ovid conveys of being already dead, the abandonment of the self-enhancing Ulysses persona — nevertheless the collection is most artfully crafted and structured (Herrmann, pp. 38–47, Martini, p. 52, Dickinson, p. 175, Evans PC p. 72). Ovid tops and tails these elegies with a prologue and epilogue stressing literary themes, and hinges them on a central epistle (III.7) to his stepdaughter Perilla, similarly advancing the claim of poetry to cultural autonomy, and thus, in the widest sense, to immunity from merely personal or political restrictions (e.g. the poem can go where the poet cannot). Within this framework we find one group of poems (III. 2, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13) descriptive of the poet’s hardships and the new world in which he finds himself; and another (III.3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 11) consisting of letters to friends (and one enemy) that stress the personal element of separation and loss created by Ovid’s forcible removal from his natural social or familial context. That classic exile’s syndrome — the progressive alienation of imagination from reality — is already well begun.
9 ‘Nothing here but lamentation [triste]’ emphasizes the title of the work as a whole: Tristia = Desolations or Poems of Lamentation.
11–12 For the elegiac couplet, with its short-stopped pentameter, as ‘limping’ (below, 56) or ‘one foot short’, cf. Tr. I.1.16, Am. III.1.8, EP IV.5.3 and 12.5.
13 On the ancient papyrus roll cf. above, Tr. I.1.7ff., and my note ad loc.
27ff. For the book’s supposed itinerary, beginning in the Forum Augusti (where else?) and continuing along the Via Sacra past Vesta’s shrine and the residence of the Pontifex Maximus (once King Numa’s palace), through the Porta Mogunia and up the Palatine (proceeding to the right of the temple of Jupiter Stator, the ‘Rallier’) to Augustus’s palace and the adjacent temple of Apollo, and thence (69ff.) north-west beside the Tiber to the Capitol, visiting the Portico of Octavia, the Theatre of Marcellus and the ‘Hall of Liberty’ (atria Libertatis), consult the Glossary under individual names.
35–48 The ‘wreath of oak-leaves’ hung on Augustus’s front door, and granted to him in perpetuity, was the ‘civic crown’ (ciuica corona) awarded to any Roman who saved a comrade’s life in battle at risk to his own. Augustus was treated as the generic ‘saviour of his country’: Plin. HN 15.127, 16.8; Dio Cass. 53.16.4; and for the actual decree, CIL I2 231, Res Gest. 6.14. The oak was sacred to Jupiter (Phaedr. 3.17.2), another symbolic reinforcement of the Augustus-Jupiter equation. Augustus’s special veneration for Apollo (42) dated back to Actium, when, before his fleet engaged that of Antony, the young Roman leader invoked Apollo’s aid (Prop. 4.6.27ff.).
60ff. Apollo was habitually represented with long hair: Hom. Il. 20.39, Pind. Isthm. 1.7, Hor. Odes 1.21.2, cf. Met. I.564–5. For the statues of Danaüs and his daughters see Am. II.2.3, AA I.71ff.
63ff. For Augustus’s library in the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, see my note to Tr. II. 419–20, p. 231. The ‘second shrine’ (69) is the Emperor’s other library in the Portico of Octavia: it stood close to the Theatre of Marcellus. The ‘Hall of Liberty’ stood north-north-east of the Capitol, on the Aventine, and had originally housed the first public library in Rome, that built by Asinius Pollio (my note ibid.: cf. Plin. HN 7.115, 35.10).
His journey at last concluded, and the full horror of his allotted place of exile now borne in on him, Ovid toys with the idea of a quick and merciful death — though this relegatio in itself effectively constitutes the death for which he yearns (a notion he will develop further as the slow years pass), so that he finds himself in the paradoxical position of wanting to die as a release from death. Neither gods nor Muses have raised a finger to help him (the former, indeed, turn out to be in league with his arch-tormentor). A blameless life, poetry which, though wanton, is harmless — these prove of no use to him. Ovid’s depression may well have been compounded by the onset of the illness (probably bronchitis, pleurisy or pneumonia) described in III.3. At the same time he remains as bookishly allusive as ever. The persona of Ulysses has now been replaced by that of Aeneas, whose tribulations, as listed by Virgil in the proem to Book 1 of the Aeneid, he reproduces (Drucker, pp. 120ff.) with uncommon fidelity, augmented (19–20) by the rigours of a snowbound winter, and despairing memories of Rome. For Ovid, to travel hopefully was, it seems clear, better than to have arrived. The mood, now, is bleakly pessimistic, unrelieved even by the wry inversion.(23ff.) of a traditional paraclausithyron: the door outside which Ovid waits, and knocks, in vain is no longer a lover’s but that of his own sepulchre.
1–2 Ovid, here as elsewhere (e.g. Tr. I.3.61f., III.4B.1), stresses the northern location of Tomis, referring to it, inaccurately but tellingly, as part of Scythia. In point of fact, despite its undoubtedly inhospitable winters, the city lies on about the same latitude as Florence (cf. Introduction, p. xxiv), and has weather little, if any, worse than that which Ovid would have experienced during January or February in his native Abruzzi.
3–4 Apollo, as patron deity of poets, and the Muses are often addressed as ‘cultured’ or a ‘cultured crowd’ (docta turba) by Roman poets: see, e.g., AA III.411, and above, Tr. II.13. What had been a neoteric compliment inherited from the Hellenistic Alexandrians is now, in Ovid’s hands, acquiring ironic undertones. For the poet as priest of the Muses see Hor. Odes 3.1.3ff.; Am. III.8.23, and below, Tr. III.7.32, IV.1.28–9 and 10.19.
5–6 For Ovid’s reiterated assertion that, while his Muse might be wanton (yet, even so, harmless!) his life was beyond reproach, see, e.g., Tr. I.9.61, II.354.
27–8 The ‘single god’ whose animus the rest of the pantheon shares is, of course, Augustus.
‘In this first letter to an individual within the collection, [Ovid] presents himself to his wife, and his readers, as a man about to die’ (Evans PC, p. 56). There is an obvious parallel — and contrast — with Tibullus’s poem (1.3), also composed in illness, and addressed to his lover Delia. Tibullus writes from ‘Phaeacia’ (i.e. Corfu), where, unlike in Tomis, the worst complaint one has is about interminable rain; he wants to get better, he dreams of his reunion with Delia, whom he sees as a latter-day Penelope (though his persona is very different from the Odyssean one that Ovid wore in Book I above). Ovid, on the other hand, rather ungallantly speculates on his wife’s possible infidelity in Rome, and wonders just what her reaction to news of his death would be (25–8, 47–50). (Even if we treat every line in this elegy as a literary topos, we need not on that account assume it to be total fiction.) Treating himself as a man already dead, Ovid issues brisk instructions concerning his burial and epitaph (the latter rather surprising: see below on lines 73–6). Where Tibullus anticipated being escorted by Venus to Elysium (1.3.57–66), Ovid is scared that his ghost will be doomed to flit miserably among the shaggy spirits of the local dead, frozen and dépaysé (61–4). At the same time he confidently — and, as things turned out, justifiably — predicts (77–8) immortality for his poetic æuvre. The elegy is an odd blend of depression and self-assertion, querulous tetchiness and obstinate pride. We need not doubt the reality of Ovid’s illness (pneumonia? pleurisy? a viral infection caused by bad water?) and the psychological effect this will have produced on him, deepening his despair, increasing his obsession with death, and sharpening the streak of not-so-latent paranoia always detectable in his dealings with his wife and friends in Rome (again, literary formalism and personal obsessions are by no means mutually exclusive). The prospect of death, the implacability of the Princeps combine to make Ovid increasingly concerned with the verdict of posterity.
7–8 Ovid’s complaints about the unhealthy climate (cf. Tr. III.8.23) and the brackish water (EP I.10.35, II.7.74, III.1.17, IV.10.61) clearly had substance. Since he drank little wine (EP I.5.45 and 10.29, IV.2.41), the quality of the water constituted a real hardship for him, and may well have contributed to his ill health.
21 Luck realized that the jingle of the MSS (si(c) iam deficiam) not only set the teeth on edge but made poor sense. His deficiens was a brilliant and palaeographically plausible emendation: cf. EP I.3.9. However, he then ruined the effect by writing sit for sic. Ovid’s hypothetical case is that he, not just his tongue (!), is on the verge of dissolution. Read sim.
37ff. Greeks and Romans both had a peculiar horror of dying, and above all of being buried, in some foreign land rather than their own: we have a famous example at Virg. Aen. 5.871. (Thus death by drowning, as we have seen earlier, e.g. in Tr. I.2 and 4, was viewed with especial horror.) One reason is stressed here by Ovid: the notion, attributed by him to the Pythagoreans (61ff.) that the spirit not only survives the body, but is somehow tethered to the locality of burial. This belief seems to derive from two quite different concepts: first, that the soul is bound to the body as a punishment (soma-séma), and second, that after the body’s dissolution it leads a disembodied existence, floating in air (Arist. De Anima 404a 17; Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 3.17, and Claudianus Mamertus, De Statu Animae 2.3, both cite the Pythagorean Philolaüs). How Ovid’s belief here is to be reconciled with his earlier account (Met. XV.60ff.) of Pythagorean metempsychosis is not at all clear.
53–4 Again, Ovid equates exile with death: cf. above, Tr. I.7.38 and my introductory note, p. 215; III.2.29–30 and 8.39–40, IV.1.86, 3.39 and 6.49–50, V.7.23; EP IV.16.4.
67–8 For Antigone’s defiant burial of her brother Polyneices, and the myth of the Seven against Thebes in general, see Glossary, ‘Antigone’, ‘Eteocles’, ‘Polyneices’.
73–6 This epitaph (cf. Della Corte OT, pp. 264–5) is, clearly, a programmatic declaration as well as (perhaps rather than) a general memorial; as such it cannot fail to astonish. Despite all his earlier disclaimers regarding his erotic æuvre, Ovid now comes out with a flat statement that it is this, and this alone, for which he wishes to be remembered: perhaps the strongest evidence for accepting the historicity of his illness and fear of death, a determination to set the record straight in extremis, an abandonment of all his careful self-exculpatory arguments. His own genius may have destroyed him (74), but he has a very clear notion as to where it lay: no mention here of the Fasti, or even of the Metamorphoses. It is the ‘poet of tender passions’ who is making his bid for immortality, just as Aeschylus, similarly, wished to be remembered, not for his tragedies, but only for his valour in the Persian Wars.
One poem or two? The list of separatists, beginning with Heinsius, is formidable, and unitarian supporters — e.g. Herrmann, or Y. Bouynot (‘Ovide, Tristes III 2, Étude rhythmique et stylistique’, Acta Philologica 3 (1964), pp. 39–51) — do not inspire great confidence. The break between lines 46 and 47, with its shift from a single addressee to a generalized audience, seems decisive. Yet as Evans points out (PC pp. 57–8). Ovid had made a very similar shift in Tr. I.5; and, more important, III.4 falls into five clearly articulated sections: (a) 1–16 (the advantages of keeping a low profile: personal example backed by wave-riding imagery), (b) 17–32 (mythological parallels), (c) 33–46 (central pivot section: direct appeal to the unnamed friend); (d) 47–62 (contrast between the present reality of Tomis and the vivid memories of Ovid’s wife and Rome, now out of reach), (e) 63–78 (general promise not to compromise friends in Rome by association, and an appeal for the quid pro quo of discreet and unidentified support). Thus we have four symmetrical sixteen-line sections arranged round a central fourteen-line core. While this pattern does not per se prove unity, it does increase the structural likelihood of a single concept. Yet thematically the break remains strong and obtrusive. The bet-hedging scholarly compromise of A and B offers a kind of solution to a not overcrucial problem.
1–2 Despite the confident identification of this poem’s addressee by Owen and Wheeler as Brutus, EP I.1, III.9 and IV.6, adduced in support, offer no convincing (or even relevant) evidence. Luck (Tr. ii, p. 184) inclines to believe, on the evidence of lines 1–2 (cf. III.5.1–2) and the clear indication of III.5.17–18 (q.v. with my note), that we should assign III.4 to Carus. I had already arrived independently at the same conclusion: cf. I.5.3–8 and 9.41ff. However, the problem presented by III.6.1–3 and 19 should not be minimized: here too we find an emphatic use of what seems to be an allusion to Carus’s name (carissime, carior), but also the claim, in contrast to what is said at III.5.1 that he and Ovid are old friends (19: o nobis usu iunctissime longo). On the main message of the poem see Introduction, p. xxxvi, and cf. Green CE, passim, especially pp. 219–20.
4ff. The theme of avoiding over-distinguished contacts was (not surprisingly) popular under the empire: see, e.g., Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. The recommendation to ‘live for yourself’, to avoid notice, is a restatement of the Epicurean precept láthe biósas.
11ff. The images of cork and skiff suggest not only private discretion but also lightweight poetry: what Ovid seems to be saying, at one level, is that his erotic verse would have done him no harm if only he had kept clear of politics.
19ff. For Elpenor, Daedalus, Dolon, and Phaëthon, see Glossary.
47–52ff. See above, note on Tr. III.2.1–2.
239Merops was the husband of Clymene, by whom Helios became the father of Phaëthon.
The formula will become familiar: a tribute to the addressee, one of the few who stood by Ovid in his hour of need, coupled with a plea to intercede on his behalf with the all-powerful bolt-wielding deity on the Palatine; a slew of mythological exempla by way of precedent; a nervously assertive best-case minimalization of the poet’s guilt; the hope — slowly fading as time goes on — for a change of exilic residence.
7–8 Again, as in III.4.5–6, the destructive force of Jupiter-Augustus’s punitive missiles is stressed. André (Tr, p. 75, n.3) points out that in Rome those struck by thunderbolts were held to be polluted and refused normal burial rites.
17–18 These lines make it clear beyond any reasonable doubt (cf. Luck Tr. ii, p. 192, Della Corte OT, pp. 267–8) that Carus is, once again, the addressee. Any who share André’s concern that the ‘signum eût été d’une enfantine naïveté’ (Tr. p. xxxi, cf. p. 75, n.2) would do well to refresh their memory of, e.g., Augustus’s letter-writing code (Suet. Div. Aug. 88), not to mention Ovid’s own advice on how lovers should send each other ‘secret’ signals at the dinner-table (Am. I.4.17–34, II.5.15–20; AA I.569–78).
25ff. As Luck points out (Tr. ii, p. 194), it seems clear from what Ovid says here that Carus was in a position to give the exile a truer — and far less optimistic — report on his realistic chances for a reprieve or a transfer. He must have moved in court circles: later we find him appointed tutor to the children of Germanicus (EP IV.13.47ff.)
33–4 For the alleged magnanimity of the lion as a predator cf. Plin, HN 8.48. It is true that as a rule only old or sick lions become man-eaters; but it is also true (and far more in tune with Ovid’s ambivalent attitude to Augustus) that to ancient writers ‘the lion was not a friendly beast; it was a wild and man-eating animal, in Homer, the symbol of bone-crushing force’ (C. W. Fornara, Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay, 1971, p. 53).
37–40 The choice of Achilles and Alexander the Great as instances of compassionate mercy was, as so often with Ovid, two-edged. Both characters had a well-deserved reputation (Drucker, p. 139) for ungovernable rage, not least when their will was crossed. More specifically, Achilles, though he did indeed return Hector’s body to Priam, had earlier dragged it behind his chariot round the walls of Troy — while Hector still lived, according to one tradition (Soph. Aj. 1031, Eur. Androm, 399, with scholia), besides sacrificing a dozen Trojans over Patroclus’s grave (Hom. Il. 23.175–6). Alexander, who modelled himself on Achilles, emulated him (as Ovid’s readers would be well aware) in this too: after the siege of Gaza he had the captured garrison commander, a eunuch named Batis, lashed by the heels and dragged round the city walls at a chariot-tail till he was dead: Q. Curtius Rufus 4.6.25–9, cf. Green AM, p. 267 and p. 541, n.58. By juxtaposing the two examples, Ovid ensured that it was this grisly image (rather than the mercy shown to Porus, or the funeral accorded Darius) that would linger in the reader’s mind.
41–2 The implacable rage of Hera (Juno) against Heracles (Hercules), sired by Zeus (Jupiter) on Alcmena (Apollod. 2.4.8), began with her attempt to have the infant killed by snakes (ibid.) and culminated in her driving him mad (id. 2.4.12; Eur. HF 967ff.; DS 4.11.1ff.). After the hero’s apotheosis and reception into the Olympian pantheon he was reconciled with Hera/Juno and married her daughter Hebe (Hom. Od. 11.602ff., Hes. Theog. 950ff.). The reference here was appropriate, since, as Ovid later (EP IV.16.7–8) makes clear, Carus had composed a poem on Hercules describing the reconciliation.
43–52 For this key passage in Ovid’s self-exculpation, insisting that his ‘error’ was no crime, that he had neither done nor said anything treasonable, that his only fault was having seen (and presumably not reported) a criminal act by others, cf. Introduction p. xviii, and, for a detailed analysis, Green CE, pp. 208ff.
Like III.5, this elegy is an appeal to friendship: the opening couplets echo each other. However, the friend invoked here is no new acquaintance, but one of Ovid’s closest and oldest companions: so despite his invocation as carissime (1), he cannot be Carus (see n. to III.4 A & B.1–2). Various identifications have been made (e.g. by Wheeler, Wheeler-Goold p. xiv, who opts for Celsus, or Della Corte, OT, pp. 269–70, who rather more cautiously picks Atticus); but as Luck saw (Tr. ii, p. 196), the evidence remains inconclusive. The addressee could equally well be Cotta (or even Paullus Fabius) Maximus. As in III.5, Ovid is setting out to minimize his guilt regarding his error; again, from the modern viewpoint, what emerges is a tantalizing series of hints as to that error’s specific nature, in particular that he was a mere witness (26–8) and sought no reward (33–4).
8 The ‘Man’ is Augustus himself (ipsi . . . uiro); the Emperor is also the ‘injured deity’ (23, numinis . . . laesi) familiar from various other similar references: Tr. I.5.84, II.108 and 123–4, IV.10.98, EP I.4.44.
This ‘scribbled letter’ (1–2) is in fact, as Evans (PC, p. 59) and others have pointed out, a most carefully worked literary epistle. It forms the central poem of Book III (precisely central if 4A and 4B are treated separately), and its theme, too, is central: the immortality, eclipsing mere death or political repression, that only poetic fame can confer. It also has special interest for us in that its addressee, Perilla — the sole named recipient of a poem in the Tristia — was almost certainly Ovid’s stepdaughter, i.e. the child of his third wife. Perilla seems to have been a very fair poet herself, whose work Ovid had encouraged in the past (11–18, 23–6) and hopes will continue in the future. He fears (21–2, 27–8) that she may be deterred by his own fate, but reminds her that since her work is not didactic-erotic, she has nothing to be afraid of. Indeed, he urges her to aim for poetic immortality by following him as her poetic role-model, on the grounds that, whereas her beauty will be no less transient than his own good fortune, his work (and, hopefully, hers) will endure for all time. Not even Augustus can take that prospect away from him.
1–2 Despite Luck’s scepticism (Tr. ii, p. 201), for which he gives no reason, Wheeler’s arguments (‘Topics’, pp. 25–8) in favour of Perilla having been the daughter of Ovid’s third wife (not, as Evans (PC, p. 59) oddly supposes, his second), by her first husband, are highly persuasive. Not later than AD 16 she married M. Suillius Rufus — ‘that accomplished but shifty politician’, as Wheeler calls him — and by him had a son, M. Suillius Nerullinus. Using arguments from trends in Roman nomenclature, Della Corte (OT, pp. 273–6) suggests that Perilla’s true name was Nerulla (a Neronian diminutive) and that her father was a Claudius Nero: a seductive hypothesis, but still the merest speculation.
19–20 The ‘Lesbian singer’ is Sappho; this, combined with the allusion at 11–12 to Perilla’s ‘non-Roman style’ (non patrio carmina more) suggests that she may have written in Greek.
27–8 The Latin text is uncertain. As Luck rightly says (Tr. ii, p. 201), though without taking the argument further, the required sense is to the effect that Perilla is frightened lest writing and publishing poetry, love-poetry in particular, may result in her being punished just as Ovid was. The Latin as we have it conveys this meaning well except for two words, facta ruina, which are clearly corrupt. Leaving a blank for them, we have: ‘Perhaps, since my books harmed me, you too — by the example of my punishment.’ Clearly, what is needed here is an adjective or participle (the latter for preference) meaning ‘anxious’ or ‘worried’. Read sollicitata, which I have adopted in my translation. For an alternative suggestion see Shackleton Bailey (2) p. 393.
43–4 This distich, high-minded enough in itself, acquires sexually ironic overtones from its close verbal similarity to Am. I.5.23–4, describing the consummation of a love-affair.
45 By ‘the two of you’ Ovid clearly indicates Perilla and her mother.
While poetry may guarantee immortality, mythic precedent (Ovid says in effect) is less than no use for getting you out of a tight spot. Like a Euripidean chorus, the exile yearns for wings in order to be somewhere else (1–10) — home again, with friends and wife. It is a typical exilic fantasy; but in Ovid’s case it is one he has played with before, for very different ends. In Am. III.6 Ovid is debarred from his assignation with a girl by a swollen river in spate: if only, he muses (13–16), I had winged sandals like Perseus, or Triptolemus’s airborne chariot! But in both cases equally his flight of fantasy is cut short by a brutal couplet, the one dismissing such myths as ‘lies, old poetic nonsense’ (Am. III.6.17–18), the other (Tr. III.8.11–12) castigating Ovid himself as a fool for childishly visualizing something he can never in fact have. Fable and myth are set in stark contrast to reality. Unlike Lee (p. 114) I believe this echoing of the Amores was conscious and deliberate. The contrast reinforces the pathos of Ovid’s present plight: non sum qualis eram.
If you must appeal to a supernatural power, Ovid goes on, then try Augustus: he could provide you with (metaphorical) wings for the homeward journey whenever he pleased. This attitude irresistibly recalls the notorious hymn with which Demetrius Poliorcretes was greeted by the Athenians (Duris ap. Athen. 6.253c) in 290 BC: ‘The other gods are far away, or have no ears, or don’t exist, or pay not the slightest heed to us; but you are present, we can see you, not in wood or stone but in very truth; so to you we pray.’ Euhemerism has triumphed, mythic exempla have all been invalidated by the god-on-earth whose imperial will is law.
So much for miraculous rescue. Ovid spends the rest of the poem describing, not, as elsewhere, the visible bleakness and dangers of Tomis, but rather, in the manner of Conrad, the impact such features have on his health and state of mind. The climate, air, landscape and water are all equally noxious to him, an often-reiterated theme (cf. Tr. III.3.1–19, IV.6.41–4, V.13.3; EP I.2.41ff., I.10.1–14 and 21–36): he is sick in both mind and body, uncertain which of the two is primarily responsible. He suffers from insomnia and depression, has gone off his food and, as a result, has become dangerously emaciated. The state of his mind is dramatically illustrated by the illusion he has that his ill fortune, like a displaced ghost, is a visible entity external to himself (35–6). Though a similar image can be found in Blake, Lee (p. 119) is probably right in claiming that this passage is ‘unparallelled in Latin poetry’. Ovid is quite capable of using the topoi of a by now sizeable literary exilic tradition to enhance his elegies; but this odd phenomenon sounds remarkably like personal experience, and hints eloquently at the stress, both physical and mental, under which he was living. Small wonder that the leitmotif of this poem, often repeated elsewhere, is a plea to have his place of exile commuted for somewhere not quite so appallingly deleterious to body and spirit alike.
1–10 For the wings of Daedalus and Perseus, and the winged chariots of Triptolemus and Medea (all, in one way or another, exiles, but with magical resources of escape), see the Glossary under these entries. As Lee says (p. 114), the dreamlike opening extends its unreality to include Ovid’s wife and friends in Rome. In line 2 I read qui with the MSS rather than Santen’s conjecture quo, accepted by Luck.
11ff. The sharp contrast and change of tone strike violently into the dream-world, like a bell arousing a sleeper. The godhead (numen) of Augustus is the sole reality. At line 12 I read -ue . . . -ue rather than the -que . . . -que of the MSS.
19 ‘Perhaps one day . . . ’ (forsitan hoc olim): the Latin at once recalls a much-quoted line of Augustus’s favourite poet Virgil: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuuabit (Aen. 1.203) — ‘perhaps one day it will give pleasure to recall even this’. A plea for mitigation is thus overlaid with hope for ultimate relief, and put by proxy into the mouth of the greatest spokesman for the Augustan age.
29–30 Virgil is once more evoked in the image of decayed autumn leaves, here as an index of the poet’s complexion, suggesting age and physical decrepitude. But the comparison in Aen. 6.309–10 is to the dead souls gathering on the banks of the Styx. Ovid, as he often emphasizes, is spiritually dead already, and more than once (as here at 39–40) wishes he were dead in the physical sense as well. For Ovid’s deliberate and open use of Virgilian echoes, already recognized in antiquity, see Sen. Suas. 3.7, quoting the rhetorician Junius Gallio, a friend of Ovid’s. Ovid’s near-simultaneous plea for death and alleviation of his place of exile is no contradiction in terms, much less theatrical attitudinizing (so Lee, p. 119), but makes excellent sense, since, as the whole second half of the poem stresses, it is Tomis itself that is directly responsible for his mental and physical deterioration.
36 Luck accepts Postgate’s tegenda, with the implication that Ovid is resolved to keep his error hidden; but as Watt (p. 87) says, that thought is out of place in the context. Watt himself, regarding legenda of the M S S as ‘otiose’ after the previous line, opts for gemenda: Ovid’s fortune is ‘fit for lamentation’. But as Owen (Tr. III, p. 56) pointed out long ago, legenda, though a bold metaphor (here = ‘scan’), is by no means impossible, and I see no reason to reject it: the extraordinary nature of the vision in itself demands emphatic assertion that this ‘spectre’ was, indeed, apparent to the poet’s eye.
Like T. S. Eliot’s version of Webster, Ovid in Book III of the Tristia is indeed ‘much possessed by death’, even (cf. above, p. 235–6) knocking at the door of his own tomb with a plea to the gods to let him in (III.2.23–4). He regards himself as dead from the moment he left Rome (III.3.52–4); he has suicidal moods. Thus it is not perhaps surprising that the first poem to concentrate on Tomis itself, a brief aetiological excursus in the Callimachean mode, should dwell with what seems uncommonly like morbid relish on Medea’s dismemberment of her brother Absyrtus, that desperate and notorious device (for a conspectus of variants on the myth see Della Corte OT, p. 279) designed to delay the vengeful pursuit of their father Aeëtes. This sanguinary murder was, in one ancient tradition, thought to have given Tomis its name. By a typically false etymology, this was derived from tomé, a noun meaning ‘cutting-up’, ‘chopping’, cognate with the verb temno. In other words, ‘Chopville’, it was believed, commemorated, in a very literal sense, the place where Absyrtus got the chop.
Ovid knows very well (1–4) that Tomis was (like Apollonia, Callatis, Istros and other coastal towns of the region) one of Miletus’s Euxine colonies. Why does he go out of his way to emphasize this mythical origin of the city’s name? Clearly to associate his place of exile, ab initio, with violence, barbarism and treachery (cf. Nagle, p. 24, Evans PC, p. 62, Schubert, p. 154, n.3), to discount any illusions about Greek civilization that might have crept into his readers’ minds. On the other hand Schubert’s thesis (pp. 157ff.) that Ovid is hinting obliquely at his own ill treatment by the Emperor (Augustus-as-Medea, cleaver in hand?) has a certain bizarre appeal, but cannot be seriously sustained.
Not that the Medea myth lacked applicability, in ways, to the cutthroat dynastic jockeying of the Julio-Claudians, not least on the distaff side (could Ovid’s lost tragedy on this theme have been à clé, and therefore suppressed?) — and Schubert (pp. 163–4) is quite right to remind us of all the grisly mythic characters with whom Ovid carefully tells us that Augustus, and a fortiori Livia, should not be compared: Atreus, Diomede and Polyphemus the Cyclops for him, Procne, Circe, Medusa, Clytemnestra and, yes, Medea for her (EP I.2.119–26, II.2.113–16, III.1.119–28). The list is certainly suggestive.
1–4 There is, to the best of my knowledge, no full, up-to-date account of Tomis available in English. See (in German) C. M. Danoff, art. ‘Tomi’, PWK S-B ix (1962), cols. 1397–428, or (in Italian) Della Corte OT, ch. v, ‘Il luogo di relegazione’, pp. 121–54 (useful, but hard to come by). Ovid’s point, of course, is that though Tomis has long (since the 6th cent. BC in point of fact) been associated with Greek colonization, it is now a wild, cruel, uncivilized place.
7–8 The Argo was traditionally supposed to have been built by Argos and Tiphys with divine assistance from Athena (Ap. Rhod. 1.109), here equated with Roman Minerva. The juxtaposition has a neat personal touch, since the ship that bore Ovid into exile was itself called the Minerva (Tr. I.10.1).
13 The ‘Minyans’ are the Argonauts: probably (Owen Tr. III, p. 57) so named after the Greek tribal group that dwelt near the Argo’s point of departure on the Gulf of Pagasae (south Thessaly), and later migrated to Orchomenus in Boeotia.
15–17 Medea’s ‘unspeakable acts’ still to come included the murder of both her children by Jason, the dispatch of Jason’s new wife Creusa by means of the inflammatory ‘shirt of Nessus’, and the boiling of Pelias with non-magical herbs, thus occasioning his death rather than (as in the case of Aeson) a miraculous rejuvenation.
After a series of introductory hints (Tr. II.187–99, III.3.5–13, 4 B. 47–52) and the grisly myth recounted in III.9, Ovid now gives his first extended picture of the general rigours of life in Tomis, a theme to which he recurs in later poems also (see, e.g., Tr. V.7.13–20 and 45–54; 10.15–38; EP I.2.13–26, 3.49–56, 8.41–63; III.1.1–30, 8.5–23). It is a winter scene, emphasizing the ice, the frozen snow, the bitter searing gales (no exaggeration, as those who know the Black Sea coast can testify) that form, for Ovid, the most characteristic features of his place of exile. Later, at III.12, we shall be given a glimpse of spring in Tomis, but chiefly to offer a sad contrast with the vernal delights of Italy; similarly here, Ovid uses deliberate, and extended, echoes of Virgil’s Georgics, in particular the so-called ‘Scythian excursus’ (Georg. 3.349–83), to point up the terrible differences between his present surroundings and the land he has left. No fruit, no viticulture, a horrible climate, constant tribal raiding: it is all a world away from the warm vine-clad slopes of Italy, basking in the safety of the pax Augusta (cf. Evans WW, pp. 5–7).
Ovid almost certainly exaggerated the bleakness of Tomis in some respects (modern Constanţa is a popular seaside resort, grows fruit, produces wine), but the central description of the Black Sea winter remains accurate. Fictional improvements do not necessarily imply a total fantasy. It is a mistake to approach this problem with an either/or mentality, to categorize Ovid’s portrait of Tomis as either ‘literary’ or ‘realistic’ as though no middle course embodying elements of both were possible. As Evans says, Ovid’s poetry was his life, and he ‘continually presents his own experience in terms of literary experience’; but the fact that his art permeated his life does not mean that he had no life, nor that the experiences he underwent did not find their way into his art.
The rigours of ‘mid-barbary’ are human no less than climatic, and the two factors intersect in a symbolically effective manner. During the warmer months hostile northern tribes such as the Sarmatians and Getae are held off from Tomis by the barrier of the Danube (Ister); but when the Danube freezes, they can cross with impunity, raid outlying settlements, threaten the city itself. Barbarous man and inclement nature form an unholy alliance. By the time he came to write this poem Ovid had had a year in Tomis, and his spirit is already notably less resilient than it had been during the long voyage out, or even in the extended appeal to Augustus, impudent and sardonic by turns, that comprises Book II. Tomis, in short, was getting to him, sapping his spirit while it undermined his health. From now on he has, essentially, one theme only: Never mind about a reprieve, just get me out of this dangerous frozen hell-hole. Critics often complain that the exilic poems are boring and repetitive (the charge was brought in Ovid’s own lifetime, cf. EP III. 9.1–6). In fact it is remarkable what resources of imagination, rhetoric and technical skill he brings to working endless variations on his obsessional theme, and how subtly he contrives to hold our sympathy in his ordeal to the very end. What we have here is a splendid example of literature being enlisted to give form and meaning to a dreadful existence, and thus making it by that degree less intolerable.
3 The ‘stars that never dip in Ocean’ are the Great and Little Bear. Ovid often alludes to this phenomenon: Tr. I.2.29, IV.3.1–2, Ibis 474, Fast. II.192.
5 For Sarmatians, Bessi and Getae see Glossary.
7–12 Lines 11–12 of the Latin text contain patently corrupt elements. However, the logical structure of the entire passage (7–12) is quite clear: (i) So long as the weather remains warm, we are protected from raiders by the Danube; but (ii) when winter comes, and the land is frozen and icy winds and snow make life up north hard, then — (the most corrupt line follows). Then what? Obviously, the raiders can cross on the ice (cf. 33–4) and trouble follows. Line 11 is easy enough to fix: for Luck’s †dum patet et read dumque (Od) uetant (adapted from Merkel’s uetat) — ‘while the north wind and snow make life under the Great Bear impossible’. What follows in line 12 must mean something like ‘then the Danube makes it possible to cross’. Tum, ‘then’, is in place. The words axe tremente premi, ‘to be pressed with quivering (?) axle’, confirm this: the pressure must be applied to the frozen river, though tremente is odd: read gemente, ‘creaking’ (cf. III.12.29–30). We are left with patet, ‘[something — again, clearly, the Danube] lies wide open’, and the syntactically meaningless has gentes, ‘these peoples’, in the accusative, which I suspect to have been an intrusive scribal gloss. I suggest instead Hister ab his. The complete line will then read: tum patet Hister ab his axe gemente premi — ‘Then the Danube lies wide open to be trodden over by these folk with their creaking wagon-axles’, which at least provides the logical conclusion to Ovid’s statement.
13ff. Owen (Tr. III, p. 59) makes the point that in central and southern Italy snow seldom lies for any length of time except in the mountains. This gives Ovid’s horrified fascination (e.g. with solid wine, 23–4, to which he returns at EP IV.7.8) extra point.
40–2 The mention here of Leander, and of Acontius at 73–4, points up the immeasurable gap between cultures imposed by this alien climate. Leander in Tomis could have walked to his Hero across the ice, and never drowned; Acontius would have found it impossible to work his trick on Cydippe (he carved the words ‘I swear by Artemis to marry Acontius’ on an apple, which Cydippe picked up, and read the message aloud, thus committing herself), since the region did not, says Ovid, produce fruit (cf. EP I.3.51). The sustaining matrix of familiar mythology becomes at one stroke irrelevant.
75 The depressing quality, to a Roman eye, of the Dobruja steppe — bare, treeless plain — is restated by Ovid in even more graphic terms at EP III.1.19ff.
Like Tr. I.8 (cf. I.6.11–16), IV.9, V.8 and the Ibis, this poem is directed against an unnamed enemy in Rome. We have no clear evidence as to whether the same person is the object of Ovid’s vituperation in each case, though this is often assumed. Others disagree. Some would even argue — implausibly, I think, despite line 1 — that he may have been a mere literary invention, a dummy target. A further complication is added to the case by those scholars who see in Ovid’s language here, and especially in his allusions to Busiris and Phalaris (cf. EP III.6.41–2, and my note to III.9 above, p. 245, a covert reference to the cruelty of Augustus himself (Drucker, pp. 187–8, Benedum, pp. 107–8). Earlier conventional images of stony-heartedness (e.g. Tr. I.8.37–46) are rehashed; Ovid reiterates (25–6, cf. I.8. 14ff.) his claim to be dead in all but fact. He also hints, both in the Phalaris myth and more directly (67–8), that his own fate may well overtake his tormentor, a prediction which the vicissitudes of Julio-Claudian court history render something more than mere whistling in the wind.
27–8 For the dragging of Hector’s body behind Achilles’ chariot see Hom. Il. 22.395ff.
39–54 For Busiris and Phalaris see Glossary.
61–2 Ovid earlier compares himself, at greater length, to Ulysses: see Tr. I.5.57–84, emphasizing how much easier a time the mythical hero had of it. Here he limits himself to a reminder that the wrath of Jupiter (= Augustus) outweighs that of Neptune (Poseidon). For other similar comparisons see EP I.3.27–34, III.1.49–56, IV.14.29–42.
The return of spring — here firmly pegged to March (AD 10) — was a popular literary theme for Roman as for later poets: see, e.g., Catull. 46 and Hor. Odes 1.4, 4.7 (cf. also 4.12.1–2). Ovid himself, in his pre-exilic career, had been partial to it: see Fast. I.149ff., III.235ff., IV.125ff., Met. XV.201ff. But here he is doing something a little more subtle. The poem is neatly structured: two main contrasting sections (4–26, 27–50) are topped and tailed by a four-line introduction and envoi (1–4, 51–4), the first heralding the end of winter in Tomis, the second hoping for a transfer to a less grim place of exile. The opening section describes spring and its activities in Rome. The latter half of the poem begins with a few perfunctory words about spring in Tomis (equated with the melting of ice: no further details given, except that this puts an end to wheeled traffic crossing the Danube, 27–30), and proceeds to a detailed account of how the poet will seek out the first post-winter arrivals in Tomis from Rome to learn — what? How his friends and wife are? Perhaps; but for public consumption what he emphasizes is his longing to hear news of official military triumphs, and the Imperial family’s part in them (31–50). This forms the preface to one of Ovid’s regular pleas for mitigation of sentence.
What has never, to my knowledge, been pointed out about this nostalgic and in parts exquisitely beautiful elegy is that only with line 14 do we know for certain that the scene Ovid is evoking comes from memories of Italy rather than being a first-hand picture of the Black Sea coast: up to that point there is no contrast between here and there. (The point is sometimes made, gratuitously, by translators, without reference to the Latin: I have in the past been guilty of this solecism myself.) The ambiguity is deliberate, and carefully set up. It is also possible that the textual corruption of line 2 (see below) added to the confusion, since without emendation it is hard to tell just where, Italy or the Euxine, Ovid is looking in this prefatory quatrain. I believe that here he is, in fact, talking about Tomis, with this introduction balanced symmetrically against the envoi, where, once again, Tomis forms the theme. The lovingly drawn sketch of springtime Rome gains fresh edge and pathos from being narrated by the exile, hungrily waiting for the arrival of the first ship with news from the distant capital.
1 As Kenney ((1), p. 43) points out, this opening could hardly fail to wake Horatian echoes in the Roman reader. It should be noted that the old Roman calendar began not in January but in March, so that ‘the year’s closure’ came with the end of February. Book III loosely chronicles a year’s impressions of Tomis in more or less chronological order.
2 Except for its first and last words, longior . . . hiems, ‘a longer/too-long . . . winter’, this line in the Latin is hopelessly corrupt. Attempts have been made to batter some sense out of †antiquis uisa Maeotis†, but without success: even when construable the result is irrelevant gibberish: ‘The Maeotic winter seemed [or was seen] to be longer than those in antiquity.’ It did? The Maeotic Lake (Sea of Azov) is tucked away behind the Crimea, hundreds of miles from Tomis; the word will not even scan in context unless, by special pleading, granted a wholly irregular short initial syllable followed by synizesis (Mǎeōtis). In context the statement is meaningless. Emendation, as has been generally realized, is the only answer. But how? Solutions vary. Not all of them remember what the general sense of the line, in context, must inevitably be: a wearisomely long winter is over at last. Longer (longior) than what, if anything? For the meaningless antiquis read adsuetis, ‘longer than those I’m used to’. Shackleton Bailey’s suggestion ((2), p. 393) of uersa for uisa is attractive: the year is on the turn. But we need a main verb. What can Maeotis have originally been? Try meauit. The reconstructed line now runs: longior adsuetis uersa meauit hiems — ‘the winter, longer than those I’m used to, has turned [the solstice] and gone its way’.
3 The ram from whose back Helle tumbled into the strait later named, on her account, the Hellespont (Apollod. 1.9.1, Ovid Fast. III.851ff.), and later sacrificed by Phrixus to provide Aeëtes with the Golden Fleece, was catasterized into the constellation Aries, which the sun enters on 22 March, the vernal equinox.
9–10 The mythical ‘bad-mother’ swallow was, primarily in the Roman tradition, Procne, metamorphosed into this form after murdering her son Itys and serving him up, cooked, to her husband Tereus, who had been carrying on with her sister Philomela (Met. VI.474ff.). In the more usual Greek version of the myth, however, it was Philomela (her tongue cut out by Tereus to stop her talking) who, more reasonably, became the swallow, since Procne was then metamorphosed into the sweet-singing nightingale. The Roman role-reversal thus produced a tongueless nightingale, something of a contradiction in terms (see Glossary, ‘Philomela’). In the Fasti (II.853ff.) Ovid follows this version.
17–18 A succession of spring festivals (e.g. the Megalesia, the Floralia, and, on 19 March, the great Quinquatrus Maiores) was marked by, inter alia, the closure of the lawcourts: cf. Fast. I.297–8.
19–22 Ovid had earlier described these various sporting activities at AA III.383–6. Exercises in riding and the use of arms took place in the Campus Martius and were strongly encouraged by Augustus (Suet. Div. Aug. 83); one of the more elaborate was the ‘Troy Game’ (lusus Troiae) commemorated by Virgil in the Aeneid (5.545ff., cf. Suet. ibid. 43). Ball-games and (oddly, to our way of thinking), the bowling of hoops were popular among young adults. Those who exercised in gymnasium or palaestra would rub themselves with oil, and afterwards take the equivalent of a shower. The ‘Virgin Cistern’ is a reference to the outflow of the aqueduct known as the Aqua Virgo, constructed by Agrippa, and opened on 9 June 19 BC, mainly to feed the public baths he was building. Why ‘Virgin’? Frontinus (De Aquae Ductu 1.10) has a nice aetiological tale: the source-spring, near the eighth milestone on the Via Collatina, was revealed to some soldiers by a young girl(!). A more likely explanation is the coldness and purity of the water, much touted in antiquity. The ninth of June was also the feast-day of Vesta; so the Aqua Virgo may in fact have been named in honour of the Vestal Virgins. It entered Rome from the north, and terminated just south of the Campus Martius.
23–4 Not only the lawcourts, but also public business took second place during this period to entertainment. The three theatres were those of Pompey, Balbus and Marcellus (cf. AA III.394); the three public squares were the Forum Romanum, the Forum Iulium, and the Forum Augusti.
41–2 I follow Wilamowitz in placing this distich after line 36, where it makes considerably better sense.
45–8 These lines were written in hopeful anticipation of military successes by Tiberius, who led an expedition against Germany after the crushing defeat of Varus, with the loss of three legions, in the Teutoburger Forest (AD 9). He remained on the Rhine 10–12, achieving comparatively little, though Ovid was to celebrate his campaign (Tr. IV. 2) with the anticipation of a triumph. However, when Tiberius did finally get his triumph (23 October 12), it was for an earlier victory over the Pannonians and Dalmatians. It also post-dated the completion of Tr. IV and V (the latter in the summer of 12). Ovid only gets around to the Pannonian triumph in EP II.1 (cf. Syme HO, pp. 37–41).
The genethliakon or birthday poem was, for obvious reasons, a popular genre in antiquity, with its own rules and topoi: see Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. 112–13, with n.14 (p. 250). As he points out in a discussion of the present poem (ibid. pp. 135–7), Ovid here deliberately inverts all the conventions, so that instead of a celebration of life what he offers is, in effect, a prayer for death, with an echo (1–12) of the sentiment best known from Theognis (1.425ff.) and deployed to memorable effect by Louis MacNeice in Autumn Journal (1938): ‘Never to have been born was best, call no man happy this side death.’ The birthday god or spirit (natalis) will not get the usual tokens of white dress, incense, flowers, cake. The altar, says Ovid, should be funereal, while the prayer — if prayer there must be — should ask for a termination to his exile, ‘which’, as Cairns observes (op. cit., p. 136), ‘in view of the pessimistic tone of the whole poem amounts to yet another wish for death’. The inversion is bitter, violent, and a striking indication of the depth of Ovid’s depression and despair.
1 The date of Ovid’s birthday was 20 March (cf. Tr. IV.10.5–6, with my note), and the year of this poem AD 10. Ovid was now fifty-three.
13–18 For good examples of more normal genethliaka in the elegiac tradition see, e.g., Tib. 2.2 and Prop. 3.10; cf. F. Cairns, ‘Propertius 3.10 and Roman birthdays’, Hermes 99 (1971), pp. 149–55.
20–23 As Owen, with unwonted candour, points out (Tr. III, p. 70), ‘the funeral piles were flanked or dressed with cypress wood that its smell when burning might overpower that of the corpse’.
28 The Black Sea, originally (cf. Pindar, Pyth. 4.203), and most appropriately, known as ‘Axeinos’, i.e. ‘Unkind to Strangers’, ‘Inhospitable’, later had this epithet changed, by apotropaic euphemism, to its opposite, ‘Euxeinos’, ‘Kind to Strangers’, ‘Hospitable’ (hence ‘the Euxine’), much as the Furies came to be known as the Eumenides, or ‘Kindly Ones’. Ovid on several occasions (e.g. Tr. IV.4.56, V.10.13) alludes bitterly to this placatory metamorphosis.
Just as the conducted tour of Ovid’s book-as-envoy in III.1 ends at Asinius Pollio’s Library, so the addressee of III.14 is, almost certainly, C. Julius Hyginus, director of the Palatine Library, patron of young poets, and a close friend of Ovid’s in happier days (Suet. De Illustr. Gramm. 20), though Brutus (see EP I.1, III.9, IV.6) has also been suggested. Prologue and epilogue form, as it were, a pair of book-ends to the rest of Tr. III. They also repeat a motif from Tr. I, the concept of the poet’s works as his children. The hope that these children will not be exiled like their father (11–16 = III.1.65–6), that they may get a favourable reception (51–2 = III.1.79–82), is closely linked with Ovid’s often-repeated belief in poetry as the sole source of immortality. His poems are his only chance of (vicarious) survival, and, more immediately, of an (equally vicarious) return to Rome. This sheds fresh light on his apologies (exile has stunted his talent, he lacks a critical audience, he has no library, no creative solitude undisturbed by external troubles; he has begun to forget his Latin, his verse may contain barbarous solecisms). Scholars have in the past sometimes taken these complaints over-literally — the Latin in which he laments his loss of Latin is in fact as elegant as ever — but the psychological climate they reveal is suggestive. As Evans reminds us (PC, p. 69), the leitmotif throughout the book is the stark contrast between here and there (hic . . . istic). The poems, unlike their author, are free to travel there (and thus provide a lifeline to civilization as well as immortality); but meanwhile here is destroying their begetter both physically and emotionally, to the point (Ovid foresees) where the poems will be irretrievably ruined. A change of venue is his only chance.
5 The verb conficis can mean, on the one hand, ‘assemble’, ‘collect’, ‘complete’, ‘put the finishing touches to’, and so it is taken by scholars in this context. Hyginus (if it indeed be he) is asked, anxiously, whether he is taking all steps to produce a properly edited Complete Works of Ovid (minus the three books of the Art of Love, 6, 17). But a second, equally prominent, meaning of conficio is ‘ruin’ or ‘destroy’. The anxiety achieves an extra dimension. Ovid, that master of ambiguity and the double entendre, cannot have failed to remember this when composing the verse. It suggests, strongly, that his confidence in the loyalty of the Palatine Librarian was equally uncertain, that this Augustan appointee might well (he feared) suppress rather than perpetuate Ovid’s æuvre. I have tried to achieve a matching ambivalence in my translation.
13 Pallas Athena was traditionally believed to have been born (in full armour!) from her father Zeus’s head, after Hephaestus (or according to some, Prometheus) had split open his skull with an axe to let her out: Apollod. 1.3.6. Ovid refers again to this episode at Fast. III.841–2.
19–20 The ‘fifteen books on transformations’ were, of course, the Metamorphoses. For the rescue of the text — or at least one copy of it (Tr. I.7.23–4) — from destruction by burning see above, Tr. I.7.13ff., cf. I.1.117–18, with my notes. Ovid seems to have carried out this ritual destruction at the time of his departure into exile; the references to his funeral obsequies emphasize his recurrent image of severance from Rome as a spiritual death (cf. line 22). The assertion that the Metamorphoses as issued lacked the final polish (21–4) is repeated from Tr. I.7.14, 27–9.
35 The ‘lack of practice’ was more apparent than real; during his exile Ovid produced (if we include the Ibis) a total of 7,370 published lines in about nine years, i.e. an average of 819 lines per annum, a higher rate than he had achieved up to AD 1 (when a period of huge fertility began that included both the Fasti and the Metamorphoses). This is without allowing for his known habit (Tr. IV.10.61–2) of destroying work that failed to satisfy his high standards, a habit he kept up during the years of exile (Tr. IV.1.101ff., V.12.61–2).
37 If Ovid did indeed have a shortage of books, that must have been from choice; they could just as easily travel from as to Rome. In any case, the prodigal allusiveness of the Ibis suggests either that Ovid much exaggerates the lack of library facilities, or else that his well-stocked mind and retentive memory could quite well dispense with such aids. The absence of an appreciative and sophisticated audience, on the other hand (39–40), was almost certainly true, and a very real handicap.
41–2 The constant imminent danger of attack is a regular motif in the exilic poems: cf. IV.1.69ff.; EP I.8.61ff.
47–52 Later (EP IV.13.17–22) Ovid claims not only to have learned Getic, but to have written a poem in it, adapted to Latin metre. In fact this poem probably employed the local lingua franca of the semi-Hellenized population rather than being an exercise in true Getic: cf. Della Corte, ‘Il “Geticus Sermo” di Ovidio’, Scritti . . . Bonfante (Brescia, 1975), I, 205–16. Linguists have, needless to say, found no trace of dilution or localisms in Ovid’s Latin during this period.