Book V

BOOK V

V.1

The first couplet of V.1, combined with the sense of finality conveyed by IV.10, has led most scholars to assume that this last book of the Tristia is, in some fundamental sense, distinct from its predecessors: an afterthought, a new venture, the result of a change in attitude. There is certainly a marked difference of emphasis in the types of poem presented here. Ovid’s wife is far more prominent: four of the elegies are addressed to her. No less than eight are similarly directed to friends in Rome. There is only one non-epistolary descriptive poem (V.10, about life in Tomis). In addition to this concentration on personal addressees, there is a narrowing of already restricted subject-matter. Ovid has now reached his third year in Tomis (Tr. V.10.1–2: the collection belongs to late 11 and early 12 AD), and seems to be seriously reassessing his views concerning life, poetry and exile. Disappointed hopes are breeding a new kind of modified realism.

The nagging at wife and friends to put in pleas for a change of venue (we hear less, now, about the chances of recall) has intensified, partly at least on the grounds that harsh conditions lead to poor writing. Ovid’s expectations of a full pardon, i.e. of any return to what for him was a normal existence, in Rome, are clearly almost gone (V.1.45–6, V.2.77–8, V.10.49–50, cf. Evans PC, p. 108). Correspondence is thus seen, more and more, as his one remaining link with civilization: even his poetry is now restricted to a series of verse-letters. Though Ovid’s assertions that his poetic skills are decreasing can confidently be dismissed — these poems remain as technically brilliant as ever — perhaps we should pay more attention than is currently fashionable to his argument that, because of his situation, and the consequent limits on subject (largely self-imposed, but no matter) which this entails, he is condemned, now, to write inferior poetry, that he is simply a versifying propagandist in his own interests. In these circumstances his innate cacoethes scribendi (V.12.59–60), plus his new habit of writing as an anodyne to his miseries (V.1.77–8, V.7.37–40 and 65–8), far from improving matters, contribute, Ovid says, to his literary degeneration. Here he may have had a point: his sense of irony is vanishing, his pleas are becoming more abject, his dangerous anti-Augustanism is progressively eclipsed by grosser and more desperate flattery.

There is an unusual degree of consensus among scholars about the structure of this book. Herrmann’s analysis, accepted by Martini, Froesch (in his dissertation) and Evans (PC p. 107), treats V.1 as a prologue outside the schema, and arranges the rest in a symmetrical ring (single poems to Ovid’s wife interlaced with pairs of poems to friends) round the central V.8 addressed to an enemy. This may well be right, though we should note that there is no matching epilogue, that V.2 is often treated as two poems (the second half being an independent invocation to Augustus), and that V.10, in essence a descriptive elegy, only qualifies as a ‘letter to friends’ because of the apostrophe at line 47.

Poem V.1, prologue and programmatic apologia, has been compared to Am. I.1, II.1 and III.1, where Ovid discusses his choice of elegy as against epic or tragedy (Nagle, pp. 117–19). But for me the tone and technique, in particular the device of the invisible interlocutor (at lines 35, 49–50 and 69) are far more reminiscent of Horace in the Satires (see, e.g., Sat. I.4, I.10 and especially II.1). Further, Ovid not only seeks to justify his relentlessly mournful themes (‘Doleful my condition, so doleful my poems’), but deliberately removes himself (7–8, 15–20) from the erotic mode which in IV.10 he had been claiming as his greatest glory, almost as though in reaction to a stiff warning that if he was ever to hope for alleviation of sentence, flaunting the work that had contributed to his downfall was not the most tactful way of going about it.

Again, too, there is the sense of Ovid staking a claim to immortality in the face of death (11–14). There is also something new: an acknowledgement that his readers are getting bored with these ‘snivelling poems’ (35), that such loud continual complaints lack dignity and restraint (49–50), are un-Roman and, in the last resort, ‘trash’ (68–70). Ovid justifies himself by the argument that screaming eases pain; more interestingly, he tacitly concedes the permanence of his relegation by arguing (73–4) that he should no longer be judged in a Roman, but solely in a Sarmatian context, and justifies his continued dispatch of work to Rome by the old exilic fantasy (first expressed in Tr. I.1): ‘I want to be with you any way I can’ (80).

11–12 The myth of the dying swan that sings in extremis was widespread throughout antiquity, but (like many such myths) its relation to reality remains, at best, tenuous. Whooper swans do sing on occasion: see J. Pollard, Birds in Greek Life and Myth (London, 1977), pp. 144–5. However, evidence does not suggest that they are particularly tuneful prior to dissolution. For the myth in antiquity see, e.g., Aesch. Ag. 1444–5, Plat. Phaedr. 84E, Arist. HA 615 b 1–5, Plin. NH 10.63 (sceptical). Ovid refers to it elsewhere at Met. XIV.429–30, Her. VII.1–2, Fast. II.109–10, cf. Bakker, pp. 42–3. Swans were supposed to congregate in large numbers along the Caÿster River (see Glossary): Hom. Il. 2.449–51; Virg. Georg. 1.383–4; Ovid Met. V.387–8.

23 These ‘more public poems’ (publica carmina) carry various implications. They are both ordinary (i.e. anyone could write them) and non-private (i.e. anyone can read them); they are, further, to justify this latter category, harmless, as the erotic elegies were not, and thus not liable to imperial censorship. Finally, they challenge the Callimachean (and neoteric) principle of rejecting ‘all public things’ (Callim. Epigr. 28.4 Pfeiffer), where ta dēmosia carries social as well as literary pejorative overtones. I see no reason to eliminate the ambiguity by emending ad publica to pudibunda ad (Hall, Goold).

31–4 On the imagery see my note to Tr. IV.1.55–8 above and reff. there cited; for the Field of Mars see Glossary.

44 Luck here accepts Faber’s emendation malo . . . meo, ‘to my loss’ (‘zu meinem Unglück’). Now some MSS read ioco . . . meo (or meo . . . ioco): I suspect that what Ovid really wrote was loco . . . mei, ‘in my stead’, on the principle (as he reminds us at Tr. II. 354) that though his Muse may be wanton, he himself is chaste. Once loco had been misread as ioco, mei would inevitably be corrected to meo to agree with it.

53–4 For Phalaris and Perillus see Glossary.

55–62 Priam went to Achilles to beg for the body of his slain son Hector: Hom. Il. 24.515ff. Cf. also Tr. III.5.37–40 and my note ad loc. Ovid treats the story of Niobe (who challenged Leto as a mother, with unfortunate results) in detail at Met. VI.146ff. The only thing Procne and Halcyone (Met. XI.410ff.) have in common is the fact that they were metamorphosed into birds (on Procne see my note to Tr. III.12.9–10). Philoctetes was abandoned on Lemnos with a suppurating and malodorous foot, the victim of snakebite. Halcyone, daughter of Aeolus, was married to Ceÿx: in their marital infatuation they called each other ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hera’. The real Zeus transformed them into birds for this presumptuous affectation. For the other names, consult Glossary.

V.2

If, as Evans suggests (PC, p. 103), the elegy in each book of the Tristia immediately following the prologue sets ‘a tone or mood for its collection’, then Book V will be marked by irritated exasperation at the failure of friends in Rome, Ovid’s wife above all, to work effectively on his behalf, coupled with increasingly gross flattery of Augustus himself — flattery now devoid of the mocking or critical ambiguity that had hitherto lent ironic edge to its more bizarre excesses. Whether we treat this poem as a genuine appeal or simply one more literary exercise in exilic variatio (or indeed as both at once), the tone remains, like so much of Book V, tetchy, pessimistic, repetitively self-obsessed, with loyalty the sole criterion of others. The quality of the adulation is an index of mounting despair. An improvement in physical health (3–6) — soon to be reversed: see V.13 — is offset by acute metal depression (7ff). Exile is now tacitly admitted to be irreversible: the allusion to Philoctetes’ many years on Lemnos (14–15) is no accident. Yet again Ovid stresses the infinity of his woes (22–30), the perils of Tomis (31–2, 69–72), Augustus’s magnanimity (35–8, 55–60), and begs to be transferred to a less brutal environment (33–4, 73–8). If his near and dear ones fail him, Ovid must, for the first time since Tr. II, make his appeal directly to the Emperor (43ff.) This plea is notably less confident and self-justificatory than its predecessor: almost abject. The urge to score covert points even when on one’s knees has vanished. The proud poet ‘independent of temporal authority’ (Evans PC, p. 24) has been eclipsed by the desperate suppliant.

1–2 It is generally assumed (and on balance, I think, rightly) that this poem is addressed to Ovid’s wife, portrayed here as emotionally concerned (cf. Tr. III.3) about her husband’s health. The reader should take note, however, that Ovid never, as elsewhere, clearly identifies her, and Syme (HO, p. 77) regards the addressee as ‘a man of rank’. Luck (Tr. ii, p. 284) argues that ‘my nearest and dearest’ (39: proxima quaeque) best suits the poet’s wife. This is true; but against the identification we must set the fact that other elegies in Book V addressed to her by name (V.5,11,14) are notably more sympathetic and affectionate. Choppy changes of mood, however, occur frequently in the exilic poems: the last thing we should rely on Ovid for here is consistency.

13–16 For Philoctetes’ long abandonment on Lemnos see my note to Tr. V.1.55–62 above. The point here about Telephus is that, according to the Delphic Oracle, the wound he had received from Achilles could be healed only by Achilles himself (who performed the cure by scraping rust from his spear on to the afflicted part): the application of this episode of sympathetic magic to Ovid and Augustus is clear enough. Only the Emperor could revoke the punishment he had imposed. For the myth in general see Glossary, ‘Telephus’. Ovid several times refers to it: Tr. I.1.99–100, II.19–21, EP II.2.26, and may have had Prop. 2.1.59–64 in mind when composing this passage.

23–8 For Ovid’s repetitive, and stereotyped, images of multiplicity see my note to Tr. IV.1.55–8 (above, p. 256). At 26, however, we expect, after the preceding catalogue, to be told about the number of birds in the sky (Luck (Tr. i, p. 187) in fact so translates the Latin, which, despite Bakker’s talk of hypallage, is syntactically impossible); what we get instead is an ambivalent reference to the number of feathers a bird has to fly with. If this is ‘deliberate asymmetry’ (Shackleton Bailey (2), p. 395) it is interesting: almost as though Ovid were lulling the reader with clichés (like Haydn in the ‘Surprise’ Symphony) only to bang him awake with an unexpected exception. It is also worth noting (a point less often brought up) that the line could refer neither to the bird nor to its feathers, but rather to the whole vast unquantifiable realm of air through which it moves (quot . . . aera).

35–8 Though it is hard not to suspect irony in these lines, the emphasis, now and later, on Augustus’s clementia (Tr. V.4.9, V.8.25–6, EP 1.2.59 and 121, II.2.115–20, III.6.7) suggests rather desperate wishful thinking.

45ff. Some (e.g. Della Corte OT, pp. 323–5, Dickinson, pp. 183–4) treat the invocation to Augustus as a separate poem. This is unnecessary: it forms a natural development of what has preceded it. If my wife and friends cannot, or will not, help me, Ovid says in effect, then I must make a direct appeal to ‘Capitoline Jove’ myself; and does so.

51–2 This couplet nicely illustrates the problems presented by treating a living ruler as a god. Heavenly assumption, with or without catasterism, is a proper perquisite of deity; yet to pray for it might be construed as a wish to see the monarch dead. So, pray that he take a long time about entering on this phase of his glory. Cf. Tr. II.157 and Met. XV.868, both passages perhaps taking a hint from Hor. Odes 1.2.45–6.

55–62 For Ovid’s relegatio and its juridical implications see Tr. II.135–8 (with my note, above, p. 225), and IV.4.37–46.

69–72 To the dangers of Tomis as a barely settled outpost of empire Ovid recurs again and again: see, e.g., Tr. II.198, III.3.6, III.10.51–70, V.10.17–30; EP I.3.57–60, I.7.9–14. At line 72, for the clearly corrupt sic hic of the MSS I read Sintia: cf. Ehwald’s emendation at Tr. IV.1.21 and, in particular, Housman CP, pp. 923–4 on Tr. III.14.49. André’s apparatus attributes this emendation to Luck, who however mentions it neither in his text nor in his commentary.

73–6 There was no special connection between Charybdis and Styx (as myth reported, e.g., between the river Alpheios in the Peloponnese and the fountain of Arethusa at Syracuse): Charybdis is simply treated as a quick, sure source of death (cf. Aristophanes, Frogs 117ff., who similarly treats of various practical ways to achieve ‘the quickest route down to Hades’). The high promontory on the island of Leucas, off the west coast of Greece, besides being the supposed scene of Sappho’s suicide, also witnessed a rather curious annual apotropaic ceremony, in which a criminal was hurled from the rock ‘to avert evil’, but hung about with ‘wings and birds of all kinds’ to break his fall: Strabo 10.2.9, C.452, cf. Ovid Fast. V.630–31 with Frazer’s note.

V.3

The appeal to Augustus is immediately followed by, and contrasted with, a very different plea. Ovid uses the occasion of Bacchus’s feast-day, the Liberalia (17 March; the year will have been either 11 or 12 AD) to adapt the usual hymn in praise of the god (see, e.g., Hor. Odes 2.19 or Prop. 3.17) as an appeal for help, qua poet, to the divine patron of poets and to that literary fellowship of which Ovid himself was, once, a distinguished member. With a nod to the traditional aretalogy singing the deity’s praises (1–4) and listing his accomplishments (19–26), Ovid, somewhat pertly it might be thought, not only contrasts the god’s fate with his own (27–30), but also, in the process of reminding him of the protection he owes his devotee, more or less openly accuses him of casual indifference, of falling down on the job (31–4). The appeal is in fact laced with Ovid’s reminders of Bacchus’s obligations to him: the final address to Ovid’s fellow poets (47–58) is considerably more nervous and conciliatory. Ovid, like his Hellenistic predecessors, had learnt the hard way, and not just by studying Epicureanism, that those on earth (one special present deity not least) could do more to affect one’s life than any number of remote and increasingly symbolic Olympians. For an analysis of the poem’s structure see Dickinson, p. 185.

14 The Fate was ‘clouded’ (nubila) as being both unpredictable and ill-omened, i.e. black or dusky in hue: cf. Tr. IV.1.64 with my note (above, p. 256).

16 Ovid earlier refers to ivy as the proper wreath for Bacchants (Tr. I.6.2–3), and this tradition, with reference to Greek Dionysus, goes back at least as far as the 5th cent, BC (cf. Eur. Bacch. 81, with Dodds’s note, p. 77). Ivy-wreathed maenads frequently figure on red-figure vases. The symbolic value of ivy, as of that other Dionysiac tree, the fir, lay in its evergreen nature.

17–18 ‘Destiny’s bosses’ are the three personified sister-Fates, known to the Romans as Parca, Nona and Decima. No god could countermand their decisions or predictions. See Aul. Gell. NA 3.16.9. Ovid refers to them also at Her. XII.3–4. For their infallibility see, e.g., Catull. 64.306 and 325–7; Hor. Carm. Saec. 25–7. Cf. Luck Tr. ii, pp. 291–2, Bakker, pp. 86–7.

19–26 Accounts of Dionysus/Bacchus vary (see Glossary): the notion that he was obliged — like Heracles, Polydeuces (Pollux) or Quirinus — to earn his place in Olympus may be due to his having been born of a mortal mother, Semele. See Apollod. 3.5.3, DS 4.25.4, Paus. 2.37.5. This aspect of his myth hardly exists outside the Roman tradition: see Hor. Odes 3.3.9–15 (cf. 4.8.34), Ep. 2.1.5–6. For the travels of Dionysus see Apollod. 3.5.1 passim, DS 4.3.1–2, Strabo 15.1.7–8, C. 687–8. The ‘double birth’ is an allusion to Zeus having, after the death of Semele, sewn Dionysus, the child with whom she was pregnant, into his thigh, whence he was in due course born. Ovid treats the episode at Met. III.310–12, cf. Apollod. 3.4.3. This miraculous second birth was known as early as Herodotus’s day in the 5th cent. BC (2.146.2), and is also represented in works of art.

29–30 Capaneus (see Glossary), one of the seven warrior-chiefs arrayed against Thebes, boasted that he would storm the city even against the will of Zeus (Aesch. Sept. 427ff.) and was struck dead by a thunderbolt for his blasphemous presumption. Cf. Tr. IV.3.63.

31–2 Zeus having agreed to grant Semele any wish, she (tricked by Hera) asked to see him in his true full glory: he could not refuse, but the incandescent fire of his thunderbolts killed her, while conferring immortality on her still unborn son. Ovid tells the story at length, Met. III.288–312; cf. also Fast. 715–16. Once again Ovid refers to his exile by Augustus in terms of a fulmination.

35 Elms or stakes of elm-wood were regularly used for training vines, and this conjunction is often referred to by Roman poets: see, e.g., Catull. 62.54, Virg. Georg. 1.2, Hor. Odes 2.15.5. Ovid mentions it again at EP III.8.13.

39–40 Ovid brackets these two enemies of Dionysus (who both met unpleasant deaths as a result of their hostility) elsewhere: see Met. IV.22–3, Fast. III.721–2. For further details see, in Glossary, Lycurgus and Pentheus. Lycurgus is described as ‘axe-wielding’ because, when driven mad by the god, he killed his son Dryas under the impression that he was lopping off a vine-branch (Apollod. 3.5.1), the vine, of course, being sacred to Dionysus as god of wine.

41–2 The wife of Dionysus/Bacchus was Ariadne: Ovid describes the catasterism (heavenly assumption as constellation) of her crown (Fast. III.459–60 and 513–16), the Corona Borealis, which in his day, it has been calculated (Frazer ad loc.), rose about 10 March, i.e. a week before the Liberalia. Cf. Aratus, Phaen. 71–3.

45 The phrase ‘commerce between gods’ (dis inter se commercia) has an ambivalent quality about it. Commentators (Luck Tr. ii, p. 294, Bakker, p. 95) stress the more elevated sense of community and fellowship; but there remain the coarser implications of high-level horse-trading (rather like Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, staking out their spheres of special interest in Eastern Europe). Wheeler’s version, ‘Gods deal with gods’, catches this second sense nicely. One gets the feeling that Bacchus, as senior deity, is being asked politely to pull rank on this new arrival.

50 Ehwald’s labris is an unattractive emendation for lacrimis: the tears are crucial to the sense. The fault lies with the verb. Adponat would be fine for an attendant serving the drinks, but not for a guest making a toast, which is the likeliest sense here. Read attollat, ‘raise’, here of the drinking-cup. A possible alternative would be irroret: ‘bedew [the contents of] the cup with his tears’.

53–6 The ‘honesty’ seems to consist in puffing (or at least not attacking) fellow poets’ work (cf. Tr. II. 563ff.), and in leavening the traditional adulation of ancient classics (Hor. Ep. 2.1.27–9, Vell. Pat. 2.92) with at least a token sprinkling of modern authors. Literary pussyfooting does not seem to have changed much over the centuries.

V.4

The addressee of this poem is often assumed (e.g. by Wheeler-Goold p. xiv) to have been Curtius Atticus, one of Ovid’s close friends and the named recipient of EP II.4 and 7; but the evidence for this identification is skimpy, consisting of no more than allegedly similar conclusions to all three poems (with 49–50 compare EP II.4.33–4, II.7.83–4). On the other hand there is a direct verbal echo here (line 34) of Tr. III.5 (line 8), a poem which, as we have seen (above, p. 239), was almost certainly addressed to Carus. We may also note that here (line 23), as at III.5.17–18, the addressee receives the epithet carus (‘dear one’, ‘beloved’). But certainty is impossible.

As in Tr. III.1, Ovid uses the device of a personified, articulate letter to present his case and describe his condition, with third-person pseudo-objectivity (Luck Tr. ii, p. 295), providing an excuse both to lay on the agonizing more heavily than in propria persona, and to ask for support (cf. 49–50) that Ovid himself might blush to demand. He runs through motifs with which the reader is by now all too familiar: the weight of his sorrows (7–16), Augustus’s clemency (17–20), the non-criminal nature of his error, resulting in relegatio rather than a harsher form of exile (21–2), a declaration of affection for the addressee (23–30), linked to a reminiscence of how the friend stood by him in his hour of need (31–42, cf. Tr. III.5.5–22), and a promise of devotion and loyalty in return (43–50). In short, a routine appeal.

11–12 For these mythological references see Glossary, ‘Priam’, ‘Hector’ and ‘Philoctetes’ (on the last-named cf. my note to Tr. V.1.55–62; also Tr. V.2.13–16).

25–6 For Patroclus, Pylades, Theseus and Euryalus see Glossary. In each case what Ovid is emphasizing is a famous instance of loyal friendship.

30 The honey of Attica, in particular that of Mt Hymettus, was famous in antiquity: see, e.g., Hor. Odes 2.6.14–15, Virg. Georg. 4.177. As visitors to the Kaisariani Monastery on Hymettus will know, the tradition still survives today.

47–8 ‘Ploughing the seashore’ was a Roman proverbial phrase signifying labour in vain, wasted time. Ovid uses the image elsewhere: Her. V.115–16, XVI.139; EP IV.2.16.

1 Neither the addressee nor the exact date of this elegy can be determined. Poem V.3 refers to events in March (but could have been written later); none of the subsequent elegies (4–6) stresses the cold. Even here it rates only one incidental reference (49). Though Ovid did not always arrange the poems of a book in chronological order, sometimes (notably in Book I, partially in Book III) he did. At V.10.1–2 he notes that since his arrival in Tomis winter has closed in three times (i.e. in 9, 10 and 11); the general thrust of the poem suggests (cf. p. 287 below) that it is still winter at the time of writing, i.e. AD 11/12. Further, at V.13.5–6 Ovid complains of what sounds very much like pneumonia or pleurisy, and blames the bitter winter for it. We may therefore place V.7, tentatively at least, in the late summer or autumn of 11. Syme (HO, p. 39), on the basis of V.10.1, dates Book V as a whole to the summer of 12, with Tiberius’s (unmentioned) triumph of 23 October that year as a terminus ante quem. This makes sense if we assume that the writing of the prologue, plus the final editing and arrangement, took Ovid most of the spring.

15–16 Ovid was particularly impressed by these poisoned arrows, to which he makes frequent reference: Tr. III.10.64, EP I.2.16, III.1.26, IV.9.83.

21–4 These lines contain more than their share of textual problems, though, as usual with Ovid, the balanced rhetorical thrust of the argument provides a valuable control over choice of reading or emendation. At 21 I accept, though with considerable misgiving, Ehwald’s nunc, lusorum — ‘Among these he now lives, alas, forgetful of his playful love-poems.’ After a long passage describing the wild natives, one’s immediate reaction to this switch of subject is to ask Who he? Line 22 provides an answer: uates tuus, your poet. This could provide the subject to both lines, though what the Latin seems to demand is a name in 21, to be balanced by its functional description in 22 (Luck tacitly confirms this by printing them as separate sentences). Heu! nunc, ‘alas, now’, is very weak. It is, therefore, very tempting to accept the reading of T, heu Naso suorum, ‘Among these Ovid, alas, lives, forgetful of his love-poems.’ Lines 23–4 have elicited the most remarkable nonsense from editors, who make Ovid say, in effect, ‘May he live, and not die, among them, yet in such a way that [ut tamen] his ghost stays clear of this hated location.’ If he lives, where’s the ghost? The rhetoric, and common sense, make it clear that Ovid in fact is saying precisely the opposite of what editors make him say. What we have here is a restatement of his recurrent death-wish: ‘I don’t want to live here, I’d rather die and get it over.’ But then a Roman thought strikes him: after dissolution the spirit is restricted to the place of death (see Tr. III.3.37ff. with my note, above, p. 237, and EP I.2.60), and the last thing he wants is continued existence in Tomis, even outre-tombe, so he makes the pious caveat. At 23, therefore, read non uiuat et emoriatur — ‘May he not go on living, may he die among them.’

25–8 Ovid is at pains to insist that he has never himself written libretti for pantomimi or ballet-dancers (to be declaimed by an actor as accompaniment to the visual interpretation). Such fabulae were popular and profitable, but (perhaps on that account) regarded as degrading: Sen. Suas. 2.19, cited by Luck (Tr. ii, p. 307). We may assume that in an age without copyright — and not least with an author in exile — Ovid’s material would be available for any entrepreneur to adapt. The most likely texts for such adaptation are some of the Letters of Heroines (Heroides), addressed to absent, and generally delinquent, lovers.

35–6 For the allusion see my note to Tr. I.1.83ff. (above, p. 205).

43–4 Ovid’s feelings about the landscape of Tomis are clear: its hideousness is linked to its bare and barren nature: Tr. III.10.70–76, III.12.14 and 16, EP I.2.23 and especially III.1.17–24.

V.8

The addressee of this poem cannot be determined, and may in fact be no specific individual (see my introductory note to Tr. IV.9 above, pp. 267–8): if the cap fits . . . Ovid could well, in the unsettled conditions of Augustus’s later years, be employing scare-tactics against any potential enemy. The emphasis on the mutability of Fortune (7–20) suggests a political context: perhaps Ovid had set his ultimate hopes on the rising star of Germanicus. Otherwise this poem once more re-emphasizes the non-criminal nature of Ovid’s error (23–4), stresses the Emperor’s clemency (25–30), and indicates that a recall for the poet (33–6) would automatically mean exile for his malicious opponent (37) — an interesting assumption, though I do not think we can infer from it that Ovid actually believed his chances of pardon had substantially increased: in the very next poem (V.9.37) we find him once more hoping for an early death.

7–20 Ovid elsewhere refers to Fortune’s wheel: see EP II.3.55–6, IV.3.31–2. For other reff. and details see Bakker, p. 137 and Glossary, ‘Fortuna’. Nemesis, the goddess who punished hubris, had a famous temple (to which Ovid’s Latin text alludes) at Rhamnous in northern Attica: cf. Glossary and Bakker, p. 138.

38 The first prayer is for Ovid’s own recall, the second for the exile of his enemy.

V.9

At Tr. I.5.33 Ovid refers to the ‘two or three’ friends who stood by him at the time of his downfall. In the present poem (line 19) its addressee is said to have been the only one (solus) to rescue him from shipwreck, the implication being that he took some kind of positive action that the others did not. This lends support to the theory (Wheeler—Goold, p. xiv, Luck Tr. ii, p. 313) that the patron so anxious to keep himself anonymous (cf. Tr. IV.5) was Cotta Maximus. The identification is far from certain: Evans (PC, p. 101) notes similarities with Tr. I.5 (?to Carus, see above, p. 212), while Luck (ibid.) similarly adduces verbal echoes at EP IV.5.31–2 and IV.15.3–4, where the addressee is Sextus Pompeius. Nevertheless, the perceptibly subservient tone still makes Cotta Maximus, in my view, the most plausible candidate: as an adherent of Tiberius (see my note on Tr. IV.5, above, p. 263) he had most reason to avoid public association with this pro-Julian political deportee.

10–14 Luck (Tr. ii, pp. 313–14) argues that Ovid’s error was held ab initio to merit the death penalty, so that his relegatio itself became by definition an act of clemency, ‘Caesar’s gift’, and that this was the reason why no further mitigation of sentence could be considered. The theory is ingenious but unnecessary. Augustus is being flattered (and at the same time covertly criticized) for holding the power of life and death at will over all his subjects.

15–20 The image of observed misfortune at sea inevitably recalls the opening of Book 2 of Lucretius, where, similarly, a shipwreck is watched from safety on shore by a spectator who relishes his own immunity from disaster.

V.10

Like V.7, which in many ways it resembles, this poem not only offers a vivid but impressionistic vignette of life in Tomis — pillaging tribes, barbarous customs, rough frontier justice — but also stresses, again by violent contrasts, its outré, topsy-turvy nature. A popular literary device in antiquity was the adynaton, the impossibility-motif: sooner shall fish fly, the sun turn back, etc. Ovid shows us a world in which the social impossibilities have all come true: law and order are forgotten, the pax Romana is a target for poisoned arrows, shepherds and ploughmen must go armed (so much for pastoral/georgic convention), barbarian peasants mock the educated Latin-speaking poet rather than vice versa. Ovid’s understanding of the local patois fluctuates: at V.7.55–6 he is able to communicate in Sarmatian, whereas here (37–42) he is reduced to sign-language; by the time he comes to write EP IV.13 he is capable of writing a poem in Getic (17–38). The most likely explanation (cf. note to EP III.2.40, below, p. 336) is that Ovid mastered the local Greek-based patois used as a lingua franca, but remained largely ignorant of Getic, Sarmatian or other native tongues. Boredom, danger, frustration are brilliantly evoked. Time crawls; raiders threaten; rough neighbours jeer; communication fails. The rhetorical techniques may be familiar, but the matter carries grim conviction.

1–4 The date of this poem (see my note on Tr. V.7.1, above, p. 284) is probably the late winter of AD 11–12, since raiders (15ff.) can apparently still cross the Danube with impunity. Troy was under siege for ten years.

5–14 The slow passage of time has always been an obsession of prisoners, exiles, and (as I can personally testify) members of the armed services on extended tours of overseas duty. If it is a literary topos, it is one rooted in reality. For the ‘Euxine euphemism’ see my note to Tr. III.13.28, above, p. 252. Ovid regularly plays on the ‘sinister’ (= both ‘left-hand’ and ‘ill-omened’) coast of the Black Sea: cf. above, p. 207, my note on Tr. I.2.83.

33 For the original Milesian settlement of Tomis see above, Tr. III.9.3–4 with my note ad loc. The extensive local assimilation to which Ovid alludes was characteristic of such foundations.

35–42 The inversion is complete: Ovid the cultured sophisticate has here become the barbarian, crippled not only by linguistic incompetence but by failure to understand local conventions, since to nod or shake the head mean widely different things in different societies: see F. Hauben, AJPh 96 (1975), pp. 61–3. The text of line 41 is highly corrupt, and a variety of remedies have been suggested for it. Luck’s perception (cf. Tr. ii.317) that Ovid’s native interlocutors think him dumb (in more senses than one), and that therefore in in the Latin conceals a lost opprobrious epithet, is on the right track: si quid of some MSS will then be a mere repetitive stopgap after me aliquid, put in to make the line scan. Luck suggests insanum, but what the context demands is not insanity so much as stupidity: I therefore read insulsum.

44–6 As in V.9.37, Ovid here again seems to be hoping for an early death.

51–2 For the notion (at once abject and subversive) that any sort of lèse-majesté against Augustus-as-Jove merited, or at least was liable to incur, the death penalty, see Tr. V.9.10–14, with my note, above, p. 286.

V.11

There are times when Ovid’s attitude to his wife (or the literary portrayal of that relationship which he chooses to offer the reader) cannot but grate on modern sensibilities (cf. my introductory note to Tr. V.5, above, pp. 280–81). She is embarrassed at being referred to as ‘the wife of an exile’, much as today some social acquaintances might make life unpleasant for her if her husband happened to be doing a stretch for insider trading. Ovid proclaims himself grieved (1–6), but the best he can offer by way of consolation is, first, the claim that she suffered more when she lost him (7–8), and second (9ff.), a reiteration of the reminder that he was not exiled, but relegated, so that the insult was technically incorrect.

Seldom does Ovid’s self-absorption show to worse advantage. Like Alexander of Macedon, who retired to his tent as a punishment for obstinate or mutinous troops, Ovid can imagine no worse fate for anyone than to be deprived of his incomparable presence; and beyond that it’s the old game of putting the best face on his punishment by stressing nice juridical distinctions. By now the nagging reminders — life, property, civil rights left intact: with 15ff. cf., e.g., Tr. II.129–38 or IV.4.37–46, and my notes ad loc. — are becoming tediously repetitive, and the praise of Augustus’s mercy and divine majesty (19–28) too lacking in irony for comfort.

7 The line embodies a straight translation of Odysseus’s famous apostrophe to himself (Hom. Od. 20.18), which had also been appropriated by earlier Roman poets, e.g. Catull. 8.11, Hor. Sat. 2.5.39, and already exploited by Ovid himself at Am. III.11.7 and AA II.178. Penelope, in effect, is being asked to emulate the character of her husband — another, marginally more subtle, piece of self-flattery.

12–14 The image of Ovid as victim of a storm at sea picks up the same motif in Tr. V.9.15–20. He was fond of so depicting himself: see, e.g., Tr. I.5.36, I.6.7–8, EP I.2.60, I.10.39, II.9.9.

25–8 For the difficulties of treating the Princeps as a god without seeming to wish him dead see my note on Tr. V.2.51–2, above, pp. 276–7.

29–30 There is no evidence for identifying this unknown detractor.

V.12

Luck (Tr. ii, p. 320) points out that we have here a new variant on the rhetorical question ‘Should I go on writing in exile?’ Previously (e.g. in Tr. IV.1) Ovid had defended his writing as the one effective solace and anodyne left to him, whereas now he changes tack and, faced with a friend who urges him to go on writing, spends some time explaining just how impossible a request this is. What Luck and others (e.g. Evans PC, pp. 100–101) fail to see is what really lies behind this reversal. The friend, exactly like the critic apostrophized at Tr. V.1.49–64, has been advocating literary composition of the sort that Ovid practised in happier days, and specifically as an alternative to what, from the vantage-point of Rome, he sees as the obsessional whingeing complaints of the exilic poems. This is the charge that Ovid feels called upon to answer, and at once we realize that his ‘reversal’ is more apparent than real.

‘Sorrow or composition’ (line 9: luctibus an studio) — the alternatives are clear; but since at the end of the poem (59ff.) Ovid admits he is, in fact, still writing, the ‘composition’ must refer exclusively to those ‘real’ poems that demand peace of mind (with lines 1–10 cf. Tr. I.1.39; the theme also surfaces in Tr. V.1 and V.7), whereas the elegies of exile are mere vehicles for the expression of grief or frustration. It is this latter activity that Ovid defends. Just as at V.1.55–8, he invokes Priam and Niobe (7–8) to justify relief through lamentation: calls for manly silence, the stiff upper lip (Tr. V.1.49–50) once more (9–16) fall on deaf ears. But what about Socrates? In my place, Ovid retorts, he wouldn’t have written a thing! (Notoriously, he never did anyway (Cic. De Orat. 3.16.59): one wonders if Ovid was aware of this, and if so, just what effect he was trying to produce.)

This reassessment of the debate between Ovid and his correspondent explains why all the arguments Ovid deploys are familiar: the distinction between ‘glad’ and ‘sad’ poems (cf. Tr. V.1.5–8, EP III.9.35–6); the oblivion that can never bring peace of mind (17–20, cf. V.7.67); the impact of exile upon theme and treatment, restricting both to precisely what his critic is complaining about (with 21–36 compare Tr. III.14.33–6); the lack of a reading public in Tomis (51–8, cf. Tr. III.14.39–40, IV.1.89–94), the implication here being that the exilic poems don’t need this, are mere personal therapeutic exercises. Finally comes the admission that Ovid’s cacoethes scribendi is still strong, yet his talent diminished by suffering: he does in fact write a great deal, but most of it ends in the fire (59–68, cf. Tr. I.7.15–26, IV.1.99–102, Evans PC, p. 101). What we cannot know, and what Ovid carefully refrains from telling us, is the kind of poetry — glad or sad? — he was thus struggling against the odds to produce. We possess the sad stuff, the Tristia. But how much more, and of what sort, went into the flames?

7–8 For the destruction of Priam’s and Niobe’s children see Glossary.

11–16 Socrates was put on trial in 399 BC (after a long and bitterly divisive civil war) for ‘introducing strange gods and corrupting the youth’. Condemned after a vigorous (and provocative) defence, he refused the chance to escape from prison, and in due course died by hemlock: the most famous (not necessarily the most accurate) account of his last days is that given by Plato in the Phaedo (115A–118A). Apollo’s oracle at Delphi declared that no man was wiser than Socrates: Plat. Apol. 21A; Diog. Laert. 2.18.

35–6 The distinction between real (i.e. literary) poems and the cris de cœur which are all Ovid now produces is made very clear in this distich.

37–44 The ‘urge for renown’ had been a stimulus for Ovid (as for many writers, ancient and modern) ever since his earliest days: see Am. I.15.7–8. The rejection of glory here described was not permanent: in his last recorded poem Ovid prides himself on ranking among the great poets of his age (EP IV.16.45–6), and as recently as Tr. IV.10.125–8 he had been proudly proclaiming his supremacy. Indeed, throughout the exilic poems this remains a recurrent motif: see, e.g., Tr. I.1.49–54, II.5, IV.1.3, V.1.75–6; EP I.5.55–8, III.9.55–6, IV.1.105–6, IV.2.35–6.

47 The ‘bronze bull’s fabricator’ was Perillus: see Glossary.

53–8 On Ovid’s supposed shortage of books see my note to Tr. III.14.37, above, p. 254. The absence of an appreciative audience (cf. ibid. 39–40) was a genuine handicap, and the most convincing argument against Ovid’s wish, or ability, to go on producing the kind of work his friends would have wished. ‘Writing a poem you can read to no one’, he wrote later (EP IV.2.33–4), ‘is like dancing in the dark.’ Though the claim to have forgotten his Latin (57–8) — amply disproved by the poem in which it occurs — is, at best, an index to strong emotional feelings, it remains, as always, hard to determine just how much, and what, of the local patois and ‘barbarian’ languages Ovid actually assimilated: see Tr. III.14.47–52, with my note ad loc. and my introductory note to Tr. V.10 (above, p. 286).

66–8 This wish that the Art of Love had perished in the flames we should perhaps take with a fair-sized grain of salt: this, after all, was the same poet who not so long before had staked his title to immortality on his erotic verse (Tr. III.3.73–80). We may compare the similar ineffective (and probably symbolic) claim to have destroyed the Metamorphoses (Tr. I.7.15–26).

V.13

As Davisson rightly observes (CJ 80 (1985), pp. 238–46), this is the most epistolary in form and language of all the elegies in the Tristia, and prepares us for the formal verse-epistles, to named addressees, that go to make up the four books of Black Sea Letters (Epistulae ex Ponto [EP]). The formal greeting and farewell (1–2, 33–4) both emphasize the epistolary convention and pun neatly on the health (salutem, uale: see below, note to line 34) which at both points the poet is at pains to stress that he does not himself enjoy (cf. Tr. III.3). Ovid also sends (mittit) rather than, as convention prescribed throughout the classical period, declares (dicit) his greetings, in order to stress the vast distance separating exile from addressee. As in Tr. IV.7, and like so many anxious correspondents, ancient or modern, he complains about not getting letters, and offers tactful explanations for their non-arrival (15–18: cf. Davisson, op. cit., p. 241 with nn. 17–20 for parallels with Cicero and the younger Pliny). Correspondence, he insists (27–30) forms a crucial substitute for conversation between those whom circumstances have separated. We are made aware — a realization that becomes ever clearer as the later exilic poems evolve — that Ovid is setting up (as he had done earlier in the Heroides) a literary dialogue of which his audience would possess only one half. His controlled irritation (Am. II.18.27–34) when young Sabinus set about producing answers to the Letters of Heroines was patent. In one sense, then, an absence of (published) response here suited him very well.

1–2 It is ironic that, in this carefully constructed verse-epistle, the identity of the addressee should remain a mystery. The usual factitious scholarly method of adducing literary parallels results in at least four candidates (thus incidentally providing a nice refutation of itself): a comparison of line 8 with EP II.3.59–60 led Némethy to suggest Cotta Maximus; 27–8 compared with EP II.4.11–12 suggests Atticus, but compared with EP II.10.35–8 points towards Macer; and the general tone of the letter, much in line with Tr. IV.7, would produce Albinovanus Pedo as a fourth candidate. All we can say with certainty is that Ovid’s addressee was a close friend who could be trusted to recognize a literary allusion and had stood by him in his crisis (for the allusion see my note to 27–8 below).

3–6 The physical symptoms of Ovid’s disease suggest that he was suffering from pleurisy, of which the most characteristic manifestation is, precisely, inflammation producing a sharp and localized pain in the side, against the ribs, and directly associated with breathing. The reference to the cold indicates a date at some point in the late winter of 11/12.

13–14 The emphasis here on the physical (‘person’/corporis; ‘flaw’/naeuus, most commonly a mole or birthmark) reinforces and balances the imagery in a near-chiastic manner: if Ovid’s addressee does not write, this is a blemish in him that matches the sickness from which Ovid now suffers.

20–24 With the comparatively mild geographical adynata here adduced (wormwood vanishing from the local tundra, thyme deserting bee-loud Hybla) compare the parade of grotesque mythical monsters at Tr. IV.7. 11–18 and my note ad loc.

27–8 This couplet is a virtually direct translation of Callim. Epigr. 2.2–3, best known in the famous version by William Cory: ‘I wept as I remembered how often you and I/Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.’ Cf. Williams (1991) 169–77.

34 Letters in the ancient world were intimately bound up with the health of the recipient, as the terms for greeting and farewell (see above) clearly indicate: generic well-being is identified with that of the body — not surprisingly in a culture where medicine remained in so many ways rudimentary, and killer epidemics (not to mention infections or viruses) were both commonplace and inexplicable. Ovid deliberately plays on the convention at both levels.

V.14

Apart from Book II, the special plaidoyer addressed to Augustus, each collection of Tristia prior to Book V contained one poem addressed to Ovid’s wife (I.6, III.3, IV.3). Book V, on the other hand, contains at least two such poems (11, 14), and possibly three (as we have seen above, pp. 275–6, the ascription of 2 remains uncertain: Luck Tr. ii, p. 325, not only includes it but adds 3 as well, surely a slip). The present poem largely echoes I.6: Ovid offers his wife fame, immortality (1–17) in return for loyal devotion (19–30); the praise of later generations will be her ultimate reward (31–4). The usual mythic precedents (35–40, cf. I.6.19–22) are duly cited. Ovid closes by assuring her that he is not questioning her continued activity on his behalf, merely exhorting her to keep up the good work (41–6).

The other poems, as we have seen, all harp in one way or another on the same themes: the degree of active fidelity shown by Ovid’s wife, the rewards (immortalization in her husband’s work and, as a result, through the praise of posterity) that such loyal conduct will confer. On the conventions (social or literary) involved see my notes on the earlier poems, in particular to Tr. I.6 (above, p. 213), IV.3 (above, pp. 258–9) and V.11 (above, p. 287–8). Characteristically, this poem manages to combine ‘literary self-glorification’ (Evans PC, p. 105) with a demand for further support. As usual, his wife is seen solely as an obligated extension of Ovid himself.

29–30 The notion that virtue should not be dependent on fortune was a commonplace of Stoic ethics.

35–40 On Penelope, Alcestis (wife of Admetus), Andromache (wife of Hector), Evadne (wife of Capaneus) and Laodameia see Glossary, and cf. my introductory note to Tr. I.6 (above, p. 213).

44–5 For the oar-and-sail image cf. AA I.367–8, RA 790, EP II.6.37, IV.15.27–8.