The poems of Book IV were composed in AD 10 and 11. The arrangement is reminiscent of Book III. Once again we have prologue and epilogue directly addressed to the reader, personal in tone, and dealing with the consolations of literature. The epilogue, indeed (IV.10), is a (highly selective) autobiography in verse, and has gained special fame on that account. The collection is shorter than average (ten poems totalling 678 lines, whereas Book I has eleven poems and 738 lines, Book III fourteen and 788), and seems to have been planned originally as Ovid’s final testament to his public, with IV.10 as a kind of apologia pro vita sua. (The opening poem of Book V seems to feel some explanation is needed for adding to the four collections already brought out.)
Why should Ovid have taken this line? Disappointment, perhaps, since his earlier exilic work (Book III in particular) had won him neither a reprieve nor a transfer? A wish to suggest to readers — whether for genuine reasons, or merely as a device to attract sympathy — that ‘his energy and creative powers were flagging’ (Evans PC, p. 75)? Self-pity and boredom, plus that recurrent death-wish? A decision (soon to be abandoned) to stop writing? Hard to tell. The themes are the same as ever (but then in the circumstances there was little scope for variation): appeals for help to faithful or not-so-faithful friends; an attack on an unnamed enemy (matching III. 11 and placed, similarly, late in the collection); there against here (Ovid’s vision of a Roman triumph contrasted with his own end-of-the-world desolation); a growing sense of age and decrepitude, the inexorable passage of time (two years of exile now, no sign of imminent relief).
Ovid has by no means given up, but there is a sense of finality about Book IV, a consciousness of age, a kind of bleak existential despair. My own suspicion is that Ovid had taken ill again, physical symptoms compounded as usual by emotional depression, and had convinced himself (the wish being father to that thought) that he was dying. But he did not die; his wiry constitution pulled him through, and he survived for another seven or eight years, to write (writing being now, if ever, his sole raison d’être) another book of the Tristia and all the Epistulae ex Ponto (Black Sea Letters).
The prologue to Book IV lacks the light touch of its predecessors: no personalized libellus, no nostalgic imaginary visit to Rome (cf. Evans PC, p. 76). There is, indeed, something of a Catch-22 flavour about its central propositions. What got Ovid exiled? His poems. Yet it is, precisely, the writing of poetry that remains his sole consolation in exile. Even so, his physical circumstances are so precarious that to write at all becomes well-nigh impossible (though the dangers also serve as an excuse for literary imperfections). Numerous examples are adduced (5–18) of the way art can beguile the sad or oppressed. Ovid too (18–22) has found the Muse a prime solace, even suggests that she is making up to him for having got him into trouble in the first place (25–6). He is, in any case, fatally addicted to literature, harmful though it may be to him (29–36); such an addiction, crazy or not, is a great anodyne in times of trouble (37–48). From here Ovid turns to the various misfortunes afflicting him, the raids, the danger to life and limb, the need, even at his age, to stand to arms in an emergency (61–78). The sufferings of the peasants beyond the walls are described in graphic terms (79–84), and remind us that Ovid in Tomis was cut off from one of his main pre-exilic pleasures, gardening.
Such is the life of the poet-in-exile, ‘new colonist of a troubled/frontier-post’ (86), with no intelligent audience, writing largely for himself, weeping in despair at the pointlessness of it all, at the dreadful metamorphosis that — supreme irony — the author of the Metamorphoses has undergone, burning draft after draft of his poems in furious frustration (87–103). Few, he tells us, survive; and for those few he now begs indulgence from the reader he does not know, the City to which he cannot — perhaps ever — return (103–6). The points made echo those of the epilogue to Book III, but the tone is now one of harsh and unrelieved pessimism.
15–16 The embassy to Achilles (Horn. Il. 9. 186) found him ‘pleasuring his mind’ by playing the lyre.
17–18 For Orpheus and his wife Eurydice see Glossary. Orpheus’s ability to move rocks and trees by his singing is referred to by Eur. Bacch. 561ff., Ap. Rhod. 1.26ff., and Ovid himself (Met. XI. 1ff. and 44ff., A A III. 321); for his descent to Hades in pursuit of Eurydice see Paus. 9.30.6, and in particular Virg. Georg. 4.454ff., also Ovid at Met. X. 8ff.
19–22 This bouquet to the Muse for services rendered is repeated, in comparable terms, at Tr. IV.10.115–20. For the dangers of sea and wind en voyage see above, Tr. I.2, I.4, and I.10, cf. I.1.43, III.2.7 and 15, III.11.59, IV. 10.107; for ambushes and ‘barbarous swordsmen’, Tr. I.1. 44–5, III.10.51–67; below, lines 69–84, V.10.15–28; EP I.2.12–22, I.3.57–60; I.7.9, I.8. 5–6, III. 1.25–8, IV.7.11–12.
23–4 Ovid frequently insists on the non-criminal nature of his error: see Tr. I.2.97–8, I.3.37–8, III.1.51–2, III.11.33–4, EP I.6.25, II.9.7 and elsewhere.
31–2 For the episode of the Lotus-Eaters see Hom. Od. 9. 82ff. Ovid sees the writing of poetry, similarly, as an addictive drug.
33–6 The almost masochistic relish of loving the source of his wounds gives bite to an image which Ovid repeats elsewhere: see Tr. V.7.34, EP IV.14.40, cf. Tr. II.13ff.
41–2 Insensibility to pain during ecstatic possession is a widespread phenomenon, by no means restricted to ancient maenadism. Mt Ida in Phrygia was associated with the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother: Eur. Bacch. 78ff.; for that cult’s confusion with, and assimilation to, the orgiastic rituals of Dionysiac maenadism see E. R. Dodds’s Euripides: Bacchae (2nd ed., Oxford 1960), pp. 76–7, commenting on this passage.
51–2 For the details of Ovid’s journey into exile — mostly by sea, but in part overland from Tempyra — see Tr. I.10.21ff., with my notes ad loc.
55–8 Ovid was fond of images of multiplicity, not least that invoking sand-grains (see Tr. V.1.31, AA I.254, Met. XI.615), which had already seen service with Virgil (Georg. 2.106–7) and Catullus (7.3–4), and goes back as far as Homer (Il.9.385). Similar catalogues occur at Tr. I.5.47–8, IV.10.107–8, V.1.31–2, V.2.23–8, V.6.37–44; EP II.7.25–30, IV.15.7–100.
60 Once again Ovid dwells on Euxini litora laeua, ‘the “left-hand” [= “sinister”] shore of the Black Sea’, an ambiguity he regularly exploits: cf., e.g., Tr. I.2.83, IV.10.97, EP IV.9.119.
63–4 The Fates were believed to spin a person’s destiny at birth, and while doing so to predict it: see, e.g., Met. VIII.453ff. Black was an ill-omened colour, for the yarn they spun as for other things.
69–78 It is true that Ovid appears to have avoided the military training (tirocinium militiae) which all aspirants to higher office were expected to undergo: Am. I.15.1–4, Tr. IV.1.71, IV.10.105–6. At the same time, ever since Keith Preston’s article ‘An author in exile’, CJ 13 (1917), pp. 411–19, especially pp. 413–14, it has been generally assumed that Ovid’s picture of himself manning the defences during tribal attacks was mere literary attitudinizing, with one eye on Virgil’s portrait of the aged Priam in similar circumstances (Aen. 2.509–11). I am not so sure. While Ovid certainly liked giving himself and his characters recognizable mythic/literary attributes, it is also true that throughout antiquity citizens up to the age of sixty indeed seem to have been liable in emergencies for what Preston refers to as Home Guard service. Tomis was a frontier town in a still barely pacified province (Moesia); Ovid was still in his mid-fifties, and hardly, as an exile who had incurred the Emperor’s personal displeasure, in a position to claim special privileges from a Roman garrison-commander.
This elegy (cf. my note to Tr. III.12.45–8) is anticipatory wishful thinking. When Tiberius did get his triumph, it was not for his largely defensive campaign on the Rhine. But Ovid sets out, as Evans says (PC, p. 20), to celebrate ‘imperial divinity manifest on earth’. The flattery is heavy-handed, and the description of the triumph (19–56) not only achieves a vivid and detailed realism, but was clearly intended to make atonement for the mocking or parodic tone of earlier triumphal set pieces (Am. I.2.23ff., AA I.213ff.). Ovid also, of course, stresses the fact that as an exile the only way in which he can become a spectator of Caesar’s glory is vicariously, through news reports long after the event (17–18, 69–72), or exercise of the untrammelled poetic imagination (57–64). Still, he concludes (72–4), the nature of the news, when he finally hears it, will eclipse his personal sorrow, give him ample reason to rejoice.
The poem is elegantly constructed. An encomium of the imperial family (1–18) leads into a climactic evocation of Rome during the triumphal procession (19–56), following this, diminuendo, with a sketch of the exiled poet (57–74), waiting for news and exercising his imagination (fictionally, as things turned out) in frustrated impatience. Both main sections contain a quick cross-cut to each other: at 17–18 we are reminded that Ovid is not in Rome, not reporting the scene first-hand; at 65–6, amid exilic fantasizing, we get a glimpse of the Roman mob that is there in physical reality, that can see its Leader in the flesh.
2 ‘The Caesars’ here are Augustus and Tiberius: similarly at 7–8 below.
8–10 The ‘youths’ are Germanicus, son of Tiberius’s brother, the elder Drusus; and the younger Drusus, Tiberius’s son by Vipsania. Tiberius had been forced by Augustus to adopt Germanicus himself in AD 4 (cf. Green CE, p. 214 with n. 73).
11–12 The ‘grandsons’ good wives’ are Agrippina, Agrippa’s daughter, married to Germanicus, and the younger Drusus’s wife Livilla, daughter of Drusus the Elder. See Glossary.
16 For Ovid’s equestrian status see Introduction, p. xiii.
33–4 These lines seem to contain a clear, if tactfully oblique, reference to the defeat of Varus and his legions; the long-haired character will then be the German leader Arminius: cf. Tac. Ann. 1.60–61; Vell. Pat. 2.119.2; Strabo 7.1.4, C.291; Suet. Div. Aug. 23.1.
35–6 For the German sacrifice of Roman officers see Tac. Ann. 1.61.3.
39–40 The elder Drusus, Tiberius’s brother, was rewarded for his German campaigns (extending from 12 BC to AD 9) with the bestowal by the Senate of the cognomen ‘Germanicus’: Suet. Claud. 1.3; Vell. Pat. 2.97; Hor. Odes 4.14.10. Ovid refers to the title at Fast. I.597. Drusus was the son of Tiberius Claudius Nero, Livia’s first husband, who was forced to divorce her (when she was six months pregnant with Drusus) to facilitate her marriage to Augustus. Thus the seemingly harmless encomium ‘most worthy scion of a noble sire’ may carry a sting in its tail.
41–6 Since Varus had lost Rome control of all territory between the Weser and the Rhine (which now became the eastern boundary of the empire in Europe), these jingoistic lines might, in the event, be considered, politically speaking, something of an embarassment.
63 The ceremonial chariot for a triumph was inlaid with gold and ivory: see, e.g., DS 31.8.12; Liv. 10.7.10; Prop. 1.16.3; Tib. 1.7.8; and Ovid at Am. I.2.42, EP III.4.35.
This is the third exilic elegy presented in the form of a letter to Ovid’s wife. As with I.6 and III.3, its overriding tone is one of relentless, self-absorbed, and — at least to a modern reader — somewhat distasteful egotism. This lady only exists for her husband, to judge from his literary projection of her, in so far as she can usefully work on his behalf or bask in his reflected glory. Loyalty is the criterion, and in I.6 Ovid seems more confident about it than he does here: two years have passed, and still no relief is in sight. Clearly Ovid judges by results. Later, as we shall see (Tr. V.2.37, EP III.1.114), he reproaches his wife for not lobbying more effectively on his behalf. In the Tibullan-style ‘deathbed poem’ (III.3) her main function (29–46) was to be there so that Ovid could die in her arms (a theme repeated in the present poem, 39–48), and otherwise to register a fitting degree of sorrow on his behalf (31–8 = III.3.25–8, cf. Evans PC, p. 78). Her reward? Fame as a dutiful wife, and immortality by reflection in Ovid’s poetry.
We may note that when her effective influence in Rome was brought to an end by the deaths, in 14 AD, of Augustus himself and Paullus Fabius Maximus, of whose wife Marcia, herself Augustus’s cousin, she was a dependant, it seems very likely (see EP IV.1 and my introductory note ad loc.) that Ovid, putting self-interest first as always, reversed his instructions and ordered her out to Tomis to join him. We may find it hard to sympathize, but nevertheless it is essential to bear in mind that, throughout, Ovid’s behaviour (essentially that of any Roman paterfamilias) would have been taken for granted by his audience.
Ovid opens (1–10) with an appeal to the stars to check on whether his wife is a proper model of marital concern, and to report their findings to him — ‘a fantasy’, as Nisbet (p. 49) remarks, ‘that it is not easy to parallel directly in ancient poetry’, and which (I must confess) puts me irresistibly in mind of the activities of espionage satellites. The heavenly bodies, perfect and eternal, are contrasted with the ‘primal fault’ — almost the Original Sin — of Rome’s foundation, when Romulus (7–8), in egotistical pique, killed his brother Remus for, in a very literal sense, overstepping the bounds, an act of murder carried out (Nisbet, p. 50) ‘in the supposed interest of discipline and religion’. Is there not, Nisbet suggests, a hint here ‘that the new Romulus is destroying a well-intentioned man for his ill-timed mockery of decorum in the Ars Amatoria?’ Perhaps; Ovid seldom lost a chance to snipe at Augustus through a well-placed mythical exemplum. But there are weighty reasons for supposing that it was the mysterious error, not the poem, that sealed Ovid’s fate (cf. Green CE, pp. 202ff).
So Ovid fusses on, even while reassuring himself (17–21), about whether his wife is showing, will continue to show, the proper degree of loyalty, concern, grief, petitioning activity, etc., on his behalf. Does she suffer from insomnia (a good indication of devoted worry)? Yes, he is sure she does. Yet even when he feels anger at being the cause of her grief (33–4) or shame (as an exile’s wife, 49–52), his instinct is to correct her attitude, lecture her, reinforce her proper sense of duty to him (57–74). He ends, as he had done before, with the promise (81–4) of lasting fame in return for loyal self-sacrifice. From start to finish he is thinking only of himself, with his wife as an instrument of alleviation. The mores of his age would, without hesitation, confirm him in this attitude.
1–5 The stars to which Ovid appeals are Ursa Major, the Great Bear (Arctos), and Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, a constellation including the Pole Star. Greeks were conventionally supposed to navigate by the first, Phoenicians by the second (Arat. Phaen. 36ff.). Ovid picked them for two main reasons (cf. R. G. M. Nisbet, ‘Great and Lesser Bear (Ovid Tristia 4.3)’, Journal of Roman Studies 72 (1982), pp. 49–56: they were associated with the far northern (‘Arctic’) sky (cf. Tr. II.190), and, equally important, they never sank in Ocean (see Tr. III.10.3 above, with my note; the phenomenon was referred to as early as Homer’s day, Il. 18.489, Od. 5.275). Thus, while always available to sailors in trouble, they never suffered disturbance themselves.
7–8 For Ilia, Romulus, Remus and the foundation-myth of Rome, sec Glossary.
17ff. Ovid’s obsessional self-absorption operates here, first, through an apostrophe to himself (17–20), and then, without drawing breath, through a direct address to his wife (21–30). The switch of focus during the retention of the second person clearly suggests that Ovid’s wife is, in a very real sense, simply an extension of Ovid himself. The poet appeals to himself to confirm the totality of her devotion; when he tells himself that she’s ‘your prime concern’ the reason for that concern, clearly, is her potential for support and sympathy (decreed adequate at 29–30 by an arrogant and exaggerated comparison with Andromache watching the desecration of Hector’s body by Achilles). The shift of addressee has also, I am convinced, resulted in a small, but significant, textual error in the MSS. At line 20 (21 in my translation) it is Ovid’s own demise, not that of his wife, that is in question: read uiuis rather than uiuit, a logical preliminary to the elaborate death-wish of 39–48.
41 As Shackleton Bailey ((2), p. 394) saw, there is something wrong with per te, ‘through you’, ‘by your agency’. Though he does not elaborate, clearly Ovid’s wife was not in the euthanasia business, and Ovid would not credit her with helping his spirit to leave his body. On the other hand certe, Burman’s emendation, approved by both Shackleton Bailey and De Jonge ad loc., is intolerably weak. As an alternative I suggest periens, i.e. ‘in the moment of dissolution’.
63–70 For Capaneus, Evadne, Phaëthon, Semele and Cadmus see Glossary. As so often, Ovid equates his relegation by Augustus to being blasted by Jupiter’s thunderbolts; see, e.g., Tr. I.1.72, I.9.21–2, II.179–80, III.5.7–8, IV.5.6, IV.8.45, V.2.53–4, V.3.31, EP I.3.7, I.7.50–1, III.2.9. If the Princeps had not got the point by now, one might suppose, he never would.
81–4 It is ironic, as Nisbet (p. 56) observes, that here as later (EP III.1.73ff.), what Ovid professes and upholds is the Augustan ideal of marriage. More ironic still (a point Nisbet does not make), he seems to have been the only Augustan poet who, despite Imperial propaganda and legislation, tried marriage at all, let alone three times.
Though the addressee of this poem is not named, Ovid supplies so much information about him that he can confidently be identified, on internal evidence (De Jonge, p. 122, Syme HO, pp. 121–2, Luck Tr. ii, p. 249, Evans PC, p. 80) as M. Valerius Corvinus Messalinus (39 BC–AD 21), the elder son of Ovid’s former literary patron Messalla Corvinus (see Glossary). Unlike his younger brother, Cotta Maximus (Tr. IV.5, cf. EP II.3.72), Messalinus was never intimate with Ovid. As Syme says (HO, p. 125), ‘the three pieces to his address [Tr. IV.4, EP I.7, II.2] fail to disclose any close personal relationship, common acquaintances, or liking for poetry’. He was, further, a committed supporter of Tiberius, had served with distinction (Vell. Pat. 2.112) under him in the Pannonian campaign of AD 6–9, and on his accession actually proposed to have a gold statue of the new Imperator dedicated in the temple of Mars Ultor (Tac. Ann. 1.8.5, 3.18.3). Not surprisingly, he seems to have received Ovid’s overtures with something less than enthusiasm (cf. EP II.2.19–22), and the poet, desperate though he was for intercession on his behalf by ‘great names’ (magna nomina), mostly appeals, in Messalinus’s case, to the memory of his father, Ovid’s patron (e.g. here at 25–34). There is, indeed, a palpable sense of awkwardness and embarrassment throughout the poem.
Like III.4, this elegy also deals, rather fussily, with the problem of leaving its recipient unnamed (with lines 7–26 compare III.4.63–72). It opens with an encomium of Messalinus both as individual and as courtroom advocate, as a worthy (yet independently brilliant) successor to his distinguished father (1–6). Ovid then goes into nervous contortions while reassuring Messalinus that praise from this tainted source will do him no harm with Augustus, who (like Jupiter) is the common property of poets (9–20). Messalinus, Ovid carefully points out, did not solicit this appeal: Ovid acted entirely on his own initiative (21–2). The real responsibility for offering Ovid friendship and support belonged not to Messalinus himself, but to his father, now deceased (23–4, cf. Syme HO, pp. 122–5). There follows a vindication of Ovid’s life prior to the event that brought about his exile (35–6), and the usual self-exculpation with regard to the offence itself (37–46). Having thus, as it were, cleared the decks, Ovid, kicking off, as once before (III.1.75–6), with an allusion to the Aeneid (line 47 echoes Aen. 1.203), hopes for an eventual recall, and meanwhile for a transfer to a less grim place of exile, prayers which, he suggests, might indeed be fulfilled through a well-placed petition on his behalf (47–54). The poem’s final section (55–83) re-emphasizes the inclement and barbarous nature of the Black Sea littoral, chiefly by retelling a well-known myth (63ff.) — the bloody rites of human sacrifice presided over by a reluctant Iphigeneia in the Tauric Chersonese (Crimea), her reunion with Orestes and Pylades, and her escape, which Ovid hopes to emulate.
15–20 No reader could by now fail to be aware (cf. my note to Tr. IV.3.63–70) that Ovid himself not only treated the ‘two deities’, Jupiter and Augustus, as ‘public matter’ (of which he had rather more than his share), but also identified them in a manner that made the praise accorded them decidedly ambivalent.
37–46 Once again Ovid puts up as good a case as he can in his own defence: his lapse involved no active criminality, but was a mere ‘mistake’, as a result of which he was subjected to the milder form of exile known as relegatio, in which the victim was allowed to retain his property (cf. Tr. II.129–38 with my note ad loc.), a fact to which Ovid frequently alludes: Tr. IV.5.8, V.4.21, V.11.15; EP I.7.47; Ibis 24. The fear that an informer (delator) might get Ovid’s goods sequestrated (Tr. III.11.2 and 20, V.8.3 and 14) proved groundless (Tr. IV.9.11, V.2.57; other reff. in De Jonge, p. 131).
55–8 On the euphemism ‘Euxeinos’—‘Axeinos’ for the (in)hospitability of the Black Sea cf. Tr. III.13.28 and my note ad loc.
63–82 For the myth here described (in essence the plot of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris) see Glossary, ‘Artemis’, ‘Thoas’, ‘Iphigeneia’, ‘Orestes’, ‘Pylades’. A remarkable modern version of Iphigeneia’s reunion and escape with her brother has been written by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos: see The Fourth Dimension, trs. P. Green and B. Bardsley (Princeton, 1993), pp. 103–22.
83–6 How close a neighbour, we may ask? About 300 miles distant, in point of fact: the ‘rites of death’ (if still practised, which is doubtful) were hardly near enough to cause Ovid any kind of practical concern. The rhetorical flourish is purely literary; but it makes nice propaganda.
It is likely (De Jonge, p. 142, André Tr., p. 114, n. 1, Wheeler-Goold, p. xiv, Della Corte OT, p. 294) but by no means certain (Luck Tr. ii, p. 253, Evans PC, pp. 80–1 with n. 10) that the addressee of this letter was Messalinus’s younger brother M. Valerius (on adoption, Aurelius) Cotta Maximus, the recipient of several of the Black Sea Letters (EP I.5, I.9, II.3, II.8, III.2, III.5, III.8). Some correspondences with the present poem (e.g. line 2: EP III.26; lines 3–4: EP II.3.65; lines 5–6: EP II.3.58; lines 23–4: EP II.3.5), plus the juxtaposition with Tr. IV.4 (cf. EP II.2 and II.3), form the basis of the identification.
It is interesting, and revealing, to compare Ovid’s extravagant praise of Cotta Maximus with the unsavoury picture of him drawn by Tacitus and the elder Pliny. For Pliny (NH 10.52) he was an extravagant gourmet; Tacitus (Ann. 6.5–7 passim, cf. 4.20.6, 5.3.4) suggests that he was not only, like his brother, a toadying adherent of Tiberius, but took savage pleasure in suggesting punishments for the Emperor’s victims. Put on trial, he was vindicated (AD 32) by Tiberius’s personal intervention. ‘Though of noble birth,’ Tacitus observes (Ann. 6.7.1), ‘he was beggared by his extravagance and made infamous by his disgusting practices’ (nobilis quidem set egens ob luxum, per flagitia infamis).
What sort of a poet’s friend was this? For Ovid, we may note, it was not just a case of any influential acquaintance being better than none, though Cotta’s intimacy with Tiberius offered an obvious advantage. Cotta, in fact, though some twenty-nine years younger than the poet (b. 14 BC), had been known to him since childhood (EP II.3.72), is referred to regularly, gets more letters in the exilic poems than any other recipient, and is here proclaimed (line 1) as ‘holder of first place among my dear companions’. It was, indeed, in Cotta Maximus’s company on Elba (EP II.3.83–90) that Ovid first learned of Augustus’s wrath against him (cf. Introduction, p. xx). Clearly Cotta’s personal and political habits were no obstacle to a lasting intimacy. Juvenal (5.109, 7.94) provides the explanation: Cotta Maximus was a second Maecenas, the ne plus ultra of a generous literary patron. Not all his money, it would seem, went on food. We even find him sending the exiled poet images of Augustus and Livia for his domestic altar (EP II.8.1ff.). Two years after Ovid’s death he was elevated to the consulship. It is an instructive story.
This poem is, as Evans says (PC, p. 80), perfunctory. There are no specific requests. Once again we have an awkward passage (9–16) explaining why the addressee is not named; offering praise, anxious not to harm. For the rest, good wishes, familial compliments, exhortations to loyalty, and a generalized appeal for succour. In later poems we shall see Ovid’s hopes, as regards Cotta’s ability — or, more likely, willingness — to aid his former literary protégé, steadily dwindle away to nothing. Livia and Tiberius showed Ovid no mercy; their adherents were clearly expected to do likewise.
7–8 For the conditions of relegatio, which allowed Ovid to retain his patrimony, see my note (above, p. 262) to Tr. IV.4.37–46.
27 It cannot but amuse to read Ovid’s tribute to Cotta’s ‘unfailing virtue’ (bonitate perenni) while recalling the animadversions of Tacitus (see above).
29–30 The ‘blood-brother’ is, of course, Messalinus (see above, Tr. IV.4). For the proverbial love between Castor and Pollux see Glossary, ‘Dioscuri’.
31–4 We have no specific information concerning Cotta’s wife and children. Syme (HO, p. 125) argues, on the basis of ‘the common pattern in the nobilitas’, that Cotta ‘was probably quaestor in [AD] 12, having taken a wife when aged about twenty-two’, i.e. in AD 8. This would mean (bearing in mind the composition-date of Tr. IV) that she bore him a son and a daughter between 8 and 11. He had his career to make: the careful progressive distancing from Ovid that the record suggests is (not least in the light of independent testimony as to his character) all too understandable.
For once, we have some reasonably precise dating criteria. Ovid left Rome in December AD 8, reaching Tomis in the late spring or early summer of 9 (cf. Tr. I.10). At the time of writing IV.6 he had passed two autumns (19–20: harvesting, vintage) in Tomis: thus, those of 9 and 10. At IV.7.1–2 he further informs us that he has spent two winters there, which will be those of 9/10 and 10/11. Both poems are therefore almost certainly anterior to the autumn of 11; and since IV.6 does not mention a recent winter, its most likely date will be the October or November of AD 10. It is another ‘inversion’ poem (see above, my introductory note on Tr. III.13, p. 251), and, once again, to do with the passage of time. Just as for Ovid birthdays, far from being happy occasions, are now rather grim reminders of prolonged suffering, so time, instead of acting as the proverbial softener, healer, and ripener in season (1–16), in his case has simply made matters worse (25–8, 37–44), so that once again he finds himself longing for death (48–50, cf. Tr. III.2.29–30, III.8.39–40) as the only viable solution to his mental and physical ills. The deployment of this theme parodies (another trick of inversion) outworn literary topoi and imagery; but the underlying emotions (thrown into sharper prominence by the contrast) are uncomfortably real.
1–16 As a collection of (appropriately) well-worn images to illustrate the impact of time this passage would be hard to beat. Bullock broken to ploughshare, horse to bridle, even elephant to mahout; fierce lion made mild, sharp ploughshare blunted, fat flint or adamant worn thin: Latin poetry has ample precedent for them all, in many cases, typically, from Ovid’s own earlier works. (See, e.g., De Jonge, pp. 152ff., for parallel examples.) The cycle of growth from sowing to harvest is even more common. Ovid here is laying out the comparative platitudes of conventional life and literature in order to demonstrate, by contrast, the appalling singularity of his own position.
At line 7 obtemperat of the MSS cannot be right. Scholars have pointed out that this verb is largely confined to prose, that Ovid uses it nowhere else, that it is metrically awkward, and so on (see, e.g., De Jonge, p. 153). More obvious and much more important, surely, is the fact that it means ‘be submissive to’ or ‘comply with’, the exact opposite of what is needed in this context. Lions rage, but finally become mild. The Indian beast that —s the commands of its trainer comes with time to submit to servitude. How must we fill in the blank? Put like that the answer is clear. If the elephant spoils the trope by submitting ab initio, how can time be said to change matters? What we actually need, of course, is a verb signifying ‘resist’ or ‘struggle against’. Read obnititur. I suspect obtemperat of having been the correction of a scribe or commentator who (like some of his modern successors) looked only to the end of the argument, and had a tin ear for logic and rhetorical balance.
19–20 The images of threshing and wine-treading have attracted less attention than they should, since Ovid is using them here as a measure of time in Tomis. Though they may conceivably be invoked as part of the life he has lost, nevertheless the existence in the modern Dobrudja of both cereal farming and (in contradiction to what Ovid elsewhere asserts, e.g. at Tr. III.12.14) viticulture makes one wonder whether Ovid did not, for once, slip up in his selectively grim portrait of local conditions by admitting features which, in the general way of things, and especially as seasonal markers, he simply took for granted.
26–38 Wrestler, gladiator, ship and exile alike, the cynic might retort, have seen only two years’ active service: why all the fuss? But the tone of Tristia Books I and II, even parts of III, suggests a fundamental optimism, the confidence that this exile will prove no more than an irritating temporary interlude: Ovid has been (in Stephen Hinds’s suggestive phrase: see Select Bibliography) ‘booking the return trip’. By now, however, he has been brought up against a bleaker reality. His ills are now ‘compounded by unending time’ (longa multiplicata die): what he is faced with is months and years of exile with no foreseeable terminus save death, and very probably with no mitigating change of venue either.
39–44 The symptoms — loss of appetite, emaciation, poor complexion, psychological depression — are convincing, and Ovid refers to them elsewhere: see, e.g., Tr. III.3.2ff., III.8.25ff., EP I.4.3–8. At Tr. V.13.5, on the other hand, he seems to be suffering from an attack of pleurisy or pneumonia.
45–8 Absent dream and present reality are contrasted with striking and economic power: here, as so often in the exilic poems, Ovid’s claim that his literary powers are failing receives a scintillating refutation.
The sun enters the sign of the Fish in February, leaves it in March (1–2): we can therefore date this poem to the spring of AD 11. Who was the addressee? We cannot be certain; but there is a suggestive pointer. The elder Seneca, in his Controversiae (2.2.12), tells the famous story of Ovid being asked by some literary friends to excise three of his lines, and agreeing to do so if he, in turn, could name three lines over which they would have no jurisdiction, i.e. those he was most determined to keep. When they, and he, wrote down the lines they had in mind, they of course proved identical. One of them was the notorious ‘half-bull man and half-man bull’ (semibouemque uirum semiuirumque bouem: AA II.24), and all three seem to have involved a similar verbal jingle of some sort (cf. Am. II.11.10 for the second). Seneca had the story from Albinovanus Pedo, one of the friends involved, who is also the addressee of EP IV.10. Twice in the present poem, at lines 16 and 18, Ovid produces just such pentameters, in one case (18) with a direct echo (semibouemque uirum) of one of the original offending lines. It seems at the very least plausible that Ovid’s addressee here is the same Albinovanus Pedo, and that Ovid is tempering a reproach for Pedo not having written with the reminder of a delectable literary joke in which they had both shared.
11–18 For the Gorgon Medusa, Scylla, Gyas, the Chimaera, Giants, Sphinxes and Harpies, see Glossary. The ‘quadrupeds joined at the chest with a human torso’ are Centaurs: the best-known instance of a ‘three-bodied man’ was Geryon; the three-headed dog was Cerberus; the half-bull, half-man was the Minotaur (for all of these see Glossary).
Old age, the passage of time, once more emerges as a dominant theme. At his time of life, Ovid muses, he should, given normal circumstances, be enjoying an honourable home-based retirement. Ships, racehorses, charioteers, old soldiers and gladiators (17–24, 35–6), are all released from servitude after a reasonable time: why not an elderly poet? He describes his whitening hair as ‘swans’ plumage’, hinting at several poetic symbols: the swans as image of poetic creativity — Horace pictured himself metamorphosed into one (Odes 2.20.9–12) — or, appropriately in a memento mori context, source of the dying swan-song, a powerful hint that Ovid, too, may be singing his last.
The second half of the poem (37–52) explains just how, ‘so close to the finishing-line . . . my chariot came to wreck’ (35–6), by provoking the deadly wrath of Augustus-Jupiter, whose bolts bring down even the highest-placed humans. Careful disclaimers as to the man-god’s mildness and mercy (37–40) should be taken with a large grain of salt. At best, Ovid’s approach (like that of sailors to the Black Sea as ‘hospitable’, or, let us say, taking a more modern example, of a burglar to a Dobermann pinscher guard-dog) can be construed as hopefully apotropaic. Ovid is bitter, and the bitterness shows clearly at 15–16, where the phrase ‘the gods decreed otherwise’ echoes a famous line of Virgil (cf. Aen.2.426–8), describing the gods’ destruction of Rhipeus despite his virtues. This god is similarly arbitrary and irresistible: to survive means not only being virtuous, but also serving his unpredictable whims. Did Ovid hope to bring Augustus round to a more reasonable frame of mind by shaming his megalomaniac pretensions to godhead with gentle literary ridicule? If so, he badly mistook his man.
19–20 There is a textual crux at line 19. Luckily the sense, as defined by the preceding and succeeding couplets, is quite clear. Ships after a while are dry-docked to stop them breaking up at sea (17–18). The long-service soldier is given an honourable discharge before he becomes too slow to fight (21–2). The racehorse is turned out to grass to make sure it doesn’t fall/fail and †multas palmas inhonestet adeptus†, i.e. in some general sense, disgrace its previous victories. But both multas, ‘many’, and the positioning and syntax of adeptus, ‘that it’s gained’, are intolerably weak. Several MSS read the latter verb as some variant of adempt-, ‘taken away’, ‘removed’, ‘lost’. If we agree that palmas inhonestet is sound (the verb is unique) and means ‘disgraces its victories’, then †multas . . . adempt-† almost certainly conceals a mangled ablative absolute. What has been lost? Surely the horse’s strength. Read neruis . . . ademptis.
43 For the Black Sea’s ‘sinister’ connotations see my note to Tr. IV.1.60 (above, p. 256). For the oracles of Delphi and Dodona see Glossary.
45–6 For the bolts of Jupiter-Augustus see my note to Tr. IV.3. 63–70 (above, p. 260).
There is a good case (Fränkel, p. 246) for the unidentified addressee of this poem having been the mysterious ‘Ibis’. The line taken (repent your crime, and I won’t name you; otherwise I’ll damn you throughout the world and to all posterity) is identical with that promoted in Ibis 1–61; there are also verbal echoes. (Tr. III.11 and V.8, on the other hand, Fränkel sees as non-specific to-whom-it-may-concern poems, addressing in each case any who may still be speaking ill of Ovid or gloating over his downfall. This is plausible: the poet could well have aimed to neutralize his enemies (some unknown to him) as a group, since, as Fränkel says, anonymity ensured that ‘whoever was guilty of the charge would have to refer the elegy to himself’.) It is not made clear — any more than in the matter of Ovid’s own error — just what the specific offence has been that now provokes the poet’s anger. Further, Ovid here neatly turns the tables on his Olympian tormentor by presenting himself, qua poet, as a kind of literary Jove, full of wrath, delivering ex cathedra judgments, potentially merciful, yet also capable of damning his victims world-wide and for all eternity. Indeed, the one striking difference here between him and Augustus is his readiness — heavily stressed, and not by accident — to forgive the repentant (3–6, 31–2). As Nagle (p. 154) points out, IV.8 and IV.9, read together, offer a devastating exposition of Augustus’s misuse of power, of the strength of poetry, and of Ovid’s own moral superiority in the exercise of anger (ira) and mercy (clementia), qualities that he regularly elsewhere attributes to the Emperor.
3 The reading of some MSS, clementia, is not only correct but (see above) essential to the point Ovid is making. Alton’s conjecture sententia (accepted by Luck) is both unnecessary and disruptive. For justification of clementia semantically and syntactically, cf. De Jonge, pp. 183–4.
11 For Ovid’s retention of civic rights under relegatio see my note to Tr. IV.4.37–46 (above, p. 262).
14 The optimistic attitude expressed here to survival after heavenly fulmination is rare, but not unparallelled: see above, Tr. II.141–4 (again involving an image of natural regeneration).
17–18 On the ‘high and dry’ northern stars (i.e. the Great Bear and Little Bear) see my notes on Tr. III.10.3 and IV.3.1–5 (above, pp. 247 and 260).
25–6 No hyperbole, as the fact of our still reading this elegy today attests. In Augustus’s case we would have known something (though far less) about Ovid’s dilemma without the Tristia; but who — to take another famous example — would ever have heard of Charaxos, let alone of his escapade with a Naucratis call-girl named Doricha (nickname Rhodope, i.e. ‘Rosie’), had not his sister Sappho disobligingly commemorated the fact in one of her poems?
29–30 The stamping, sand-scattering bull offers yet another a echo: cf. Ecl. 3.87, Aen. 9.629.
This is the most famous of all the exilic poems, and indeed among the best-known works that Ovid ever wrote. The fame, however, has stemmed almost entirely from the fact of its being, uniquely, a poetic autobiography, the major source for our knowledge concerning Ovid’s life, and this has fundamentally influenced the way critics have looked at it. Correcting this trend, recent scholarship (Fredericks [Nagle], Evans, Dickinson, Fairweather) has emphasized that, as Fredericks (p. 141) put it, IV.10 should be treated ‘as a poem which happens also to be an autobiography, rather than an autobiography which happens to be a poem’. Such an approach has yielded interesting results, but also much disagreement on detail, especially — and predictably — as regards the poem’s structure, which tends to get over-schematized in incompatible ways. In general we can probably agree on a proem (1–2) and conclusion (131–2) addressed to the reader, with the main body of the poem divided into two halves: the first (3–64) dealing with Ovid’s public career, his choice of poetry over the senatorial cursus honorum, the second (linked to the first at 65–6 by the juxtaposition of amatory poetry and the admission of a romantic heart) being an account of his personal life — marriages, exile, the comfort afforded by his art (67–130), with a clear distinction drawn between literature and life, between the erotic poems and the personally blameless life of their author.
As autobiography the poem is selective, artful, carefully put together to present a persuasive case: in fact, as has recently been pointed out (Fairweather, pp. 182–5), in many ways it resembles a courtroom speech for the defence, an apologia. There is a good deal of chronological emphasis (a boon for modern scholars, but probably designed in the first instance to create a spurious sense of specificity). Ovid is characteristically ingenious in the way he conveys a series of dates by poetic periphrasis and allusion to anything from the consular year or the religious calendar to Olympiads and the official dress code (see below). The recurrent notion of exile-as-death is underscored by deliberate echoes of funerary inscriptions (Fairweather, pp. 186ff., and cf. Tr. III.3, with my notes), suggesting that at one level IV.10 is to be regarded as a self-composed epitaph. Most fascinating of all (Fairweather, pp. 193–6, a brilliant piece of detective work), Ovid appears to have trimmed the account he gives of his life to coincide as far as possible — and some of the coincidences are indeed striking — with Augustus’s own career, as recorded in the Emperor’s lost De Vita Sua, but partially recoverable from the Res Gestae and Suetonius. Fairweather (p. 195) summarizes the ‘secret message’ Ovid may have been sending Augustus in a new bid for sympathy based on community of experience:
I am a man like you. Just how much like you perhaps you have never considered. I too am equestri familia ortus [sprung from an equestrian family]; the year when both consuls fell in battle was important to me too: that was the year I was born. At the age of nineteen, like you, I was bereaved and, like you, I entered public life. I was actually a triumvir. Can you imagine it? What a laugh! And then, consider my private life. I too have been married three times, and it is my third wife who has brought me happiness. I too have a daughter, married more than once. I too have grandchildren.
Was Aristotle’s dramatic theory (if not the Poetics) known in Rome? Ovid’s claim to have erred rather than sinned is oddly like the position of the tragic hero whose sufferings stem not from misdeeds but rather from hamartia (Poet. 1453 a 8ff.); and such ill fortune should cause, not only pity, but also fear that it can happen to a man like ourselves (ibid. a 5). Could Ovid have been applying this argumentum ad hominem to Augustus?
All the emphasis in IV.10 is on Ovid’s creative achievement, justification through his poetic œuvre. The Muse — he repeats — is not merely his companion in exile, a theme picked up (along with several others) from the introductory poem to Book IV, but the linchpin of his entire career, the guarantor of his posthumous immortality. The love-poetry that ruined his life is also his true glory. The omission in this context of any serious mention of what today is regarded as his major work, the Metamorphoses, has caused unnecessary puzzlement. Ovid was not delivering an academic judgment. As Evans saw (PC, p. 86), what he is after here is a maximum contrast between Ovid then and Ovid now, between the erotic elegies and those written from exile. Selectivity applied to more than the details of his life. While we should be grateful for the facts thus revealed, we need to recognize that they are all subsumed to Ovid’s exposition of the poetic vocation as the major obsession of his life. Here even the usual self-exculpatory version of his fall, the hyped-up complaints about Tomis, are replaced by a stoic, almost contemptuous retelling of the facts (97–114), followed by a splendid tribute (115ff.) to the sustaining power of creative art, and a confident prediction of immortality. Almost two millennia later that proud claim has been triumphantly vindicated.
3–4 Sulmo, the modern Sulmona, lies in a flat rich plain among the mountains of the Abruzzi. In Ovid’s day the region was the home of the Paelignians. Cf. Am. II.16.1–10, and in general, for biographical details drawn from this poem, my Introduction, pp. xviff.
5–6 The consuls A. Hirtius and C. Vibius Pansa in 43 BC fought Mark Antony at Mutina, defeating him but losing their own lives in the process: cf. Vell. Pat. 2.61.4, Tac. Ann. 1.10.
7–8 On Ovid’s equestrian status see, e.g., Am. III.8.9, III.15.6, Tr. IV.2.15–16; and above, Introduction, p. xiii.
9–14 The festival alluded to was the Quinquatrus (19–23 March), on the last four days of which gladiatorial combats took place. Ovid places his, and his brother’s, birth on the first of these four days, i.e. on 20 March. The connection with Minerva was early, but fortuitous, linked to the fact that the goddess was traditionally believed (a) to have been born and (b) to have had a temple dedicated to her on that day. The nineteenth of March was originally a festival of Mars. See De Jonge, pp. 194–5 for a full discussion.
29–30 The ‘broad stripe and the purple’ indicated the tunica laticlavia, restricted to the sons of senators and equites, and signifying the wearer’s intention of pursuing a political career. Cf. Suet. Div. Aug. 38, 94; Luck Tr. ii, p. 269.
33–4 The ‘Board of Three’ meant the tresuiri (though an indirect allusion to the triumuiri was also likely): either the tresuiri monetales, who oversaw the public mint, or the tresuiri capitales, in charge of prisons and executions. For no very good reason (except perhaps to further an ironic sense of subsequent rough justice) most scholars have preferred the latter: cf. De Jonge, p. 200.
35–6 The reference to choosing ‘to narrow my purple stripe’ refers to Ovid’s adopting the tunica angusticlavia, the normal dress of an eques without senatorial ambitions.
43–54 For the various members of this Poetic Succession see Glossary, Bassus, Gallus, Horace, Ponticus, Tibullus, Virgil.
57–62 For ‘Corinna’ see Am. I.5, I.11, II.6, II.8, II.11, II.12, II.13, II.14, II.15, II.17, II.19, III.7, III.12; and cf. Green OEP, pp. 22–5.
61–3 Ovid often refers to burning his own inferior work: see, e.g., Tr. I.7.15–16 and 21–2, IV.1.101–2, V.12.61. The fact that such references only occur in the exilic poems suggests that the gesture may have been meant to imply symbolic funereal connotations.
69–74 On Ovid’s marriages see Introduction, p.xiv-xviii, and Green OEP, pp. 21–5, 30–32, 40–43. Cf. notes on Tr. I.6.25ff. (above, p. 214) and IV.3 (above, pp. 258–9).
75–6 For Ovid’s daughter by his second wife, and her two marriages, see note to Tr. I.3.19–20 (above, p. 209).
77–8 Though the evidence does not allow a precise chronology, it seems clear that if Ovid’s father died, at ninety, c. AD 5 (i.e. long enough before Ovid’s relegatio to leave time for his wife to follow him), having thus been born c. 85 BC, then Ovid’s own birth in 43 BC, when his father would have been in his forties, was somewhat late, so that he and his brother may have been the offspring of a second or third marriage on his father’s part.
85–6 Ovid seems (naturally enough, considering his Epicurean leanings) to have had considerable doubts about any kind of survival after death: the concept is almost always introduced, as here, by a conditional. See, e.g., Am. III.9.59–60, EP I.2.111, III.2.98, and especially Tr. III.3.37ff. with my note ad loc. (above, p. 237).
93–6 Ovid was exiled in late AD 8 at the age of fifty-one. The Olympic Games were held quadrennially, i.e. every fifth year by inclusive reckoning, at Olympia near Pisa in the north-west Peloponnese, with a wreath of wild olive as prize; Ovid here, as elsewhere (EP IV.6.5–6), equates the Olympiad with the Roman five-year lustrum.
105–6 Some scholars interpret these arms in a quasi-metaphorical sense as the weapons of patience and equanimity which the times demanded (cf. De Jonge, p. 216), but this is surely wrong: what Ovid is thinking about, here as elsewhere (e.g. Tr. IV.1.69–78, with my note, pp. 256–7), is the need, shared by young and old alike, to man the defences of Tomis against tribal raiders.
123–4 Ovid’s references to Envy (Livor) are suggestive: cf. Am. I.15.39, EP III.4.73–4. Is it possible that Ovid on such occasions is hoping the reader will think, by verbal association, of Livia?