INTRODUCTION

I

Publius Ovidius Naso was born on 20 March 43 Be - the year after Caesar's assassination - and grew up during the final violent death-throes of the Roman Republic: he was a boy of twelve when news arrived of Octavian's victory over Antony at Actium (31 Be), and his adolescence coincided with the early years of the pax Augusta. His family was from Sulmo (the modern Sulmona) in the Abruzzi, and had enjoyed provincial equestrian status for generations. As Ovid himself points out with satisfaction (Am. I.3.8, III.IS.S-6; Tr. IV.IO.7-8; EP IV.8.17-18), they were landed gentry, not ennobled through the fortunes of war or arriviste wealth; He himself was confirmed as an eques in anticipation of subsequent admission to the Senate and an official career (cf. Tr. 1I.90). But quite early on, when hardly embarked on the sequence of appointments known as the cursus honorum, he was to decide otherwise. After the usual upper-class Roman school education in gram• mar, syntax and rhetoric (Tr. IV.IO.15-16), he came to Rome and was taken up, as a promising literary beginner, by Messalla Corvinus (see Glossary, and below, p. 261), the soldier-statesman who acted as patron to such poets as Tibullus, Sulpicia and (initially) Propertius. To his father's dismay (Tr. IV.IO.21-2) Ovid devoted more and more of his time to literature, and correspond• ingly less to his official duties. From 23/22 Be he did spend a year or two in the study of law and administration, the obligatory tirocinium Jori (which, characteristically, left its main mark on his poetic vocabulary), and held one or two minor positions while thus engaged. But very soon - certainly by 16 Be, when he would have been eligible for the quaestorship - he abandoned any thought of a public senatorial career. He had already contrived to avoid the - equally obligatory - period of military training, the tirocinium militiae (Am. I.15.1-4; Tr. IV.I.71). From now on, since he had access to the more-than-modest competence of 400,000

xix INTRODUCTION sesterces necessary for equestrian status, he was to devote himself entirely to literature. He had already been making a mark for himself as a member of Messalla's poetic circle even before assuming the toga uirilis of manhood (Tr. IV. 10. 19-30; EP 11.3.75-8, cf: 1.7.28-9). Married for the first time c. 27 BC at the age of sixteen (Tr. IV.IO.69-70) to a wife who proved 'neither worthy nor useful' (cf. Green OEP, pp. 22-5), and divorced some two years later (about the same time as he was finishing his studies with the rhetoricians), Ovid then spent over eighteen months away from Rome, travelling in Greece, Asia Minor, and Sicily (Tr. 1.2.77-8; EP II.IO.2Iff.; Fast. VI.4I7-24). There is no mention of this episode in his 'autobio• graphical poem' (T,. IV. 10). Soon after his return he began to give recitations, presumably of the erotic elegies which afterwards (c. 15 BC) were published as the first, five-book, edition of the Amores. This event probably followed his decision to renounce a senatorial career: the success of the Amores may conceivably have induced Ovid's father to acquiesce in his only surviving son's proposed 'life in the shade' (uita umbratilis). About the same time Ovid married his second wife (her name, like those of her predeces• sor and successor, remains unknown), and his one child, a daughter, was born to her c. 14 BC. This union may have been the occasion of a permanent (and reasonably substantial) settlement on Ovid by his father,* though it proved, like the first, of short duration. However, since Ovid speaks of the lady as 'a bride you could not find fault with' (Tr. IV.IO.7I), it presumably ended in her premature decease (? in childbirth, like so many) rather than as a divorce case. Ovid's independence, even his fmancial qualification for eques• trian status, may also have been supported by Messalla's patronage; at all events, from now on he became a gentleman of leisure who devoted himself exclusively to writing poetry. He had a house near the Capitol (Tr. 1.3.29-30) for social life, and a country villa on a hillside overlooking the junction of the Via Clodia and the

* For the evidence supporting this thesis - and, in general, for a longer and more detailed account of Ovid's life prior to his exile - see Green OEP, pp. IS-59, especially pp. 30-32.

xx INTRODUCTION

Via Flarninia (EP 1.8.43-4) for vacations, or when he wanted to concentrate on his work in solitude, free from urban distractions. He enjoyed writing in his orchard (Yr. I.II.37), and, like many literary figures, gardened for relaxation (EP 1.8.45ff., cf. 11.7.69). In Rome he found a world of brilliant, and intensely felt, literary creativity (Yr. IV.IO.4I-54). Virgil, as he says, he 'only saw', Tibullus died before their friendship could develop; but he heard Horace recite his Odes and became an intimate of Propert ius. In his early years his attitude was the not unfamiliar one of adolescent bedazzlement: 'For me, bards were so many gods.' He was closely involved with the neoteric movement: Hellenizing poets who wrote in the tradition of Philetas and Callimachus, pursuing the byways of didacticism and mythical aetiologies. At the same time (perhaps having noticed its political exploitation) he held himself carefully aloof from the artificial heroics of literary epic. An incurably irreverent sense of the ridiculous soon set him to parody the didactic, while ironically undermining Augustus's ambitious programme of social and moral reform, so memorably celebrated by Virgil and Horace, so embarrassingly in the later poems of Propertius (4.6 alone is enough to induce a severe attack of recusatio in the sensitive). Ovid also offended against Augustus's known aims because of his erotic poetry, much of which (despite careful if unconvincing protestations to the contrary) was clearly aimed at Rome's fashion• able beau monde, seeming to assume and, worse, enthusiastically endorse, a world of free-wheeling upper-class adultery and liaisons dangereuses. Such an assumption - which ran flat counter to Augustus's moral legislation, especially the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis of 18 BC - was almost certainly correct: no legislation otherwise. Thus the enor• mous popularity of Ovid's Amores, and his later Art oj Love (c. I Bcl AD I), which compounded the problem by offering what purported to be practical hints on seduction, ensured that their author incurred lasting resentment at the highest official level (see Green OEP, pp. 7Iff.), so that when he committed his fatal error, he could expect no margin of compassion whatsoever. To make matters worse, the Art oj Love was published in the immediate wake of a scandalous and notorious cause dlebre directly

XXI INTRODUCTION involving the Princeps. In 2 BC Augustus's only daughter, Julia, was relegated to the island of Pandataria on charges of adultery with an assortment of wealthy, high-born and politically suspect lovers (Veil. Pat. I. 100; Suet. Div. Aug. 19.64-5; Dio Casso 55.10). The conjunction was unfortunate, and duly noticed. It is interesting. that from now on Ovid abandons the erotic genre at which he had worked more or less exclusively since adolescence. But though the time of the change might possibly have been dictated by nervous alarm, the enormous efHorescence that followed during the next eight years, the hugely increased rate of production that achieved the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses and six of the unfinished Fasti (17,000 lines in all) demands a different, more genuinely creative, explanation. What produced Ovid's gigantic obsession with mythical transformations? Why. having despised antiquarian• ism in the Art of Love, which displayed an uncompromising taste for the modern (AA 111.121-8), did he now launch into an aetiological exploration of the Roman calendar, as full of esoteric folklore and allusive legend (no wonder Sir James Frazer edited it) as anything in Callimachus? This surely constitutes the great unexamined mystery of Ovid's career. He may (as the subject• matter of the Fasti and flattery of the regime in the Metamorphoses both suggest) have been trying to repair the damage his earlier work had caused; but such a consideration was, it seems clear, no more than incidental. We shall probably never know the answer: all we can do is consider the phenomenon in its personal and public context. It mayor may not be significant (Green OEP, pp. 40--41) that the death of Ovid's father and his third marriage both probably fell within the period 2 BC-AD r. The first meant (Ovid's only brother having died young) that the poet was now in full possession of his patrimony. The second established a firm and lasting relation• ship that may have changed Ovid's fundamental attitude to women, and seems to have survived even the prolonged separation occasioned by exile (but see below, p. xvii). We shall become better acquainted with Ovid's third wife in the poems he wrote her from exile (see Yr. 1.3. I 7ff. , 1.6, III.3, IV.3, IV.IO.70fT., V.2, V.5, V.II, V.I4; EP 1.4, lIb). She was a widow or divorcee with a daughter, the 'Perilla' - perhaps, but

XXII INTRODUCTION not necessarily, a pseudonym - of Yr. II1.7: her status in the household of Paullus Fabius Maximus, Ovid's patron (EP 1.2.129- 35, etc.) is uncertain (see p. 214). She was related to the poet Macer, Ovid's companion on the Grand Tour, and through Fabius's wife Marcia had some kind of acquaintance, however slight, with Augustus's consort Livia (Yr. 1.6.25, IV.IO.73). Thus it was natural that after her husband's relegation she should remain in Rome to petition for his recall and look after his affairs. The absence of poems to her in the final years of Ovid's exile (AD 14-17/18) has prompted one scholar (Helzle (I) 183-93) to suggest that after the deaths of Augustus and Fabius Maximus (see pp. 358-9) she may have joined her husband in Tomis, and that this would partially explain the drop in urgency of his appeals to Rome, his grudging resignation to life among the Goths. It is an attractive theory, and could well be true (one would certainly like to believe it), but by the nature of things must remain non-proven. How far the public verse-episdes addressed to her by Ovid from Tomis are to be treated as in any sense evidence for their relation• ship, and how far as purely literary artifice, is impossible to determine. What does seem certain is that an extremist argument for either case can confidendy be ruled out. The mere fact of Ovid's relegation will have affected, in a fundamental sense, all aspects of his marriage, communications included, just as it dictated the form his poetry now took. (I should perhaps say at this point that 1 do not for one moment believe the perverse scholarly thesis, best known from the article by Fitton Brown, according to which Ovid was not relegated at all, but for some impenetrable reason spent the last decade of his life in Rome playing with the topos of exile, and making fictional appeals to real people - a supposition dealt with in short order by Little: see especially pp. 37-9.) At the same time, the poet was exploiting all his very considerable poetic skills of rhetoric and persuasion (Green OEP, pp. 20-21), while drawing on genres previously used for very different purposes (e.g. in the Heroides) to mount a propaganda campaign for his recall, or at least for a transfer away from Tomis. The litterateur's formal expertise was being deployed now for the amelioration of a real-life situation. Thus while personal circumstances coloured the poetry in an unprecedented manner (the erstwhile praeceptor

XX111 INTRODUCTION amoris who had apostrophized a perhaps fictitious and in any case highly literary mistress now became a husband penning domestic admonitions to an absent wife), Ovid's ars poetica in tum trans• muted both the setting in which he found himself and his public appeals, so that his (nameless) wife is made to sound like one of his mythical heroines, the recipient of exhortation and advice from an Acontius, a Leander, a Paris. This is not the place to discuss in any detail the still-mysterious circumstances of Ovid's relegation by Augustus in the early winter of AD 8 (for a full analysis see Green OEP, pp. 44-59 and CB, pp. 210-22). For the reader of the exilic poems it is simply theJact of the poet's exile, rather than its possible antecedents, that is of primary importance. Briefly, Ovid himself (as readers of the Tristia and the Black Sea Letters are reminded many times) offers two reasons for it (see, e.g., Tr. II.207, IV.I.25--6): an immoral poem, the Art oj Love, and a mysterious 'mistake' or 'indiscretion' (error), the details of which he declares himself forbidden to reveal, but which he clearly regards as the chief occasion of Augustus's wrath, with the poem as a subsidiary offence and probable diver• sionary cover (e.g. EP 11.9.75--6). This error lay not in any specific act on his part, but in his having witnessed something, presumably of a criminal nature, done by others (Tr. II. 103-4, III.5.49-50, etc.), and, it seems safe to assume, in having failed to report it to the authorities. The hints of lese-majeste that he scatters, the relentless hostility to him of Tiberi us and Livia after Augustus's death, his clear partiality for the Prin• ceps' grandsons and Germanicus, all combine to suggest that he was involved, however marginally, in some kind of pro-Julian plot directed against the Claudian succession (we know of at least two). If this is true, the Art oj Love will have been dr~gged in (almost ten years after its publication!) to camouflage the real, politically sensitive, charge. A sexual scandal could - can - always be relied upon to distract public attention from more serious political or economic problems. There was also a certain sadistic appositeness about Ovid's relegation which suggests the degree of angry resentment that his public attitudinizing had aroused. Enemies had brought his more risque passages to the Princeps' attention (Tr. 11.77-80), slandered

XXIV INTRODUCTION him behind his back (Tr. III.II.20; Ibis 14), and tried to lay hands on his property through the courts (Tr. 1.6.9-14), presumably claiming the reward due to an informer. All this, given the climate of Julio-Claudian Rome, was predictable enough. But with the poet's removal to Tomis his sufferings acquired an ironic aptness that he himself must have recognized better than most. Now the poet who had mocked the moral and imperial aspirations of the Augustan regime, who had taken militarism as a metaphor for sexual conquest, who had found Roman triumphs, Roman law, and the new emphasis on family values equally boring and provin• cial, was being made to suffer a punishment that in the most appallingly literal way fitted the crime, while at the same time - since the victim of a relegatio retained his citizenship and property - offering a spurious show of imperial clemency. The choice of Tomis as Ovid's place of enforced residence was a master-stroke. It cut him off, not only from Rome, but virtually from all current civilized Graeco-Roman culture. Wherever the intellectual beau monde might be found in AD 8, it was not on the shores of the Black Sea. Such residence rubbed the poet's nose in the rough and philistine facts of frontier life, the working of the imperium which he had so light-heartedly mocked. Life had caught up with literary fantasy and turned it inside-out: no metamorphosis now could rescue Ovid from the here-and-now of mere brute existence. His erotic exploitation of the soldier's life that he himself had so carefully avoided was duly turned back against him, in this dangerous outpost where he was exposed to raids from fierce unpacified local tribesmen, and might, in an emer• gency, be called on to help in the town's defence himself (see p. xxiii). Though we should take with a fairly large grain of salt his claims that he was forgetting his Latin, that his poetic skills were atrophying, that linguistically he was going native (see p. xxvi), it does remain true that, except through correspondence, he was now deprived of an alertly critical and sophisticated audience for his work-in-progress, such as he had enjoyed (and found essential for the creative process) in Rome. 'Writing a poem you can read to no one', he lamented in a famous aside (EP IV.2.33-4), 'is like dancing in the dark.' The charge against Ovid (whatever it may have been) was

xxv INTRODUCTION brought to the notice of Augustus and some of his more highly placed intimates, including Ovid's friend and patron Cotta Max• imus (EP 1I.3.6ff.) in October or early November of AD 8. Ovid himself describes Cotta's reactions, and the fraught meeting they had on Elba when the news broke (see PP.138 and 320). The poet was summoned back to Rome for a personal interview with Augustus, during which he was given a severe dressing-down (Tr. 11.133-4). Dealing with him in this way avoided a public trial - something, given the sensitive nature of the charge, the Princeps seems to have been very anxious to avoid: secrecy marks the proceedings throughout. The sentence pronounced was, as we have seen, relegation sine die to the Black Sea port of Tomis, a Greek colonial foundation, in the barely settled province of Moesia. Little time was lost in forcing Ovid to settle his affairs and be on his way. This meant a December sea-voyage, so that (as we might expect at that time of year) he was exposed to several unpleasant storms during his journey (Tr. 1.3.5-6, 1.4 passim, 1.11.3, 13ff.), as well as being robbed by servants (Tr. 1.11.27ff., IV.lo.lol; EP 11.7.61-2) who clearly knew a vulnerable victim when they saw one. His severance from Rome was symbolically emphasized by the banning of the Art of Love from Rome's three public libraries (Tr. 1I1.1.5!)-82, III.14.5-8). Sailing from the Adriatic through the Gulf of Corinth he recalled making the same voyage on the Grand Tour (Tr. 1.2.77); but then, in more carefree times, his destination had been Athens. From the Isthmus he took another boat to Samothrace, and from there (travelling as slowly as he might) to Tempyra in Thrace. He now (spring AD 9) completed the journey to ToInis overland (see p. 22). Despite his initial optimism - Book I of the Tristia, describing the events of this journey, clearly anticipated a speedy reprieve: perhaps he had Cicero in mind, exiled in the March of 58 BC and back home by August 57 - this remote provincial port was to be Ovid's home for the rest of his natural life. During the harsh winter of AD 17/18, in his sixtieth year, Publius Ovidius Naso finally gave up the unequal struggle for survival. He was buried - as he had foreseen, and feared - by the shores of the Black Sea.

xxvi INTRODUCTION

II

Tomis, the modern Constan~a, is situated at the tip of a small peninsula seventy miles south of the main Danube delta, in that area of windswept sandy plain now known as the Romanian Dobruja. In AD 8 it formed part of the still largely unsettled province of Moesia, ruled by imperial legates - one of whom, P. Vinicius (AD 2), is said, ironically enough (Sen. Controv. 10.4.25) to have had a great passion for Ovid's poetry. The city was a Greek foundation, settled from Miletus in the late sixth century BC as a port, trading centre, and fishery. As various inscriptions confirm (Lozovan RP, pp. 63-4; Pippidi, pp. 250ff.), it remained Greek, in customs and institutions, at the time of Ovid's residence. By now, however, superficially Hellenized local tribesmen formed a majority of the population (Tr. V.IO.28-30): fierce long-haired fur-clad natives, with quivers on their backs and knives in their belts, men who made their own laws and often came to blows in the market-place (Tr. V.7.45-50, V.IO.44, cf. III.14.38). Getic and Sarmatian (?Scythian, Vulpe, p. 51) were, according to Ovid, the languages most often heard. The Greek inhabitants had 'gone native', he complains (Tr. V. 10.33-4): the Greek spoken in Tomis was a debased and barbarous dialect full of local loan-words (Tr. V.7.52, V. 10.34-6) - though, as we shall see (below, p. xxvii), he may himself have come, in the end, to write poems in it. Latin, he insists (Tr. V.IO.37, cf. V.7.53-4), was virtually unknown. He also draws a stark and vivid, if somewhat repetitive, picture of the Dobruja. Its treeless, monotonous steppe, he writes (Tr. III.IO.75; EP 1.3.55, III.I.20), resembles a frozen grey sea, patched - appropriately enough - with wormwood, a maquis of bitter and symbolic associations (EP III. 1.23-4). There are no vines, he repeat• edly complains, no orchards: spring in the Italian sense does not exist (Tr. IILIo.71-4, III. 12. 14-16; EP III. I. II , cf. EP 1.3.51, 1.7.13, III. I. 13, III.8.I3-I4), and few birds sing (EP III.I.2I-2). The countryside is ugly, harsh, savage, inhuman (Tr. V.2.63, III.II.7, 1.2.83, III.3.5, III.9.2, III. 10.4). The water is brackish, and merely exacerbates thirst (EP III. I. 17-1 8, 22). But Ovid's two great fearful obsessions are the biting cold and the constant barbarian raids (Tr. II. 195, frigus et hostes). Again and again he returns to

XXVll INTRODUCTION the snow, the ice, the sub-zero temperatures: bullock-carts creaking across the frozen Danube, wine broken off and sold in chunks, the violent glacial north-easter (today known as the crivat) that rips off roof-tiles, sears the skin, and even blows down buildings if they are not solidly constructed (cf. Vulpe, PP.53-4; Herescu, p. 69, with further reff.). Compared to these wintry hazards, such minor irritations as bad food and water, unhealthy air and living condi• tions, and a near-total lack of medical facilities (Yr. III. 3 .7-10; EP II. 7.73-4, III. 1. 17) come almost as an anticlimax. There can be no doubt that Ovid's health suffered in exile, and he himself seems aware that his troubles were at least partially due to emotional stress (see, e.g., Yr. III.8.25ff., IV.6.43-4). He also regularly blames the water and the climate. His first bout of illness occurred soon after his arrival in Tomis (Yr. III.3.rff.): he refers to his 'parched tongue' (86) and to a period of delirium (19-20), which suggests some kind of fever. Insomnia and lack of appetite, resulting in emaciation, are recurrent symptoms (Yr. III.8.27ff., IV.6.39-42; EP I. 10.7-14, 23), producing a sallow, unhealthy complexion. In AD II/I2 we hear of a 'pain in the side' (Yr. V.r3.5-6), apparently brought on by winter cold: this sounds like pleurisy or pneumonia, but consumption cannot be ruled out. Ovid knows all about pulmonary haemorrhages (EP I.3.19-20). There are also signs of premature senility - white hair, trembling hands, chronic lassitude, deep wrinkles - which Ovid attributes, probably with good reason, to the psychological impact of his miserable fate (Yr. IV.8.lff., IV.IO.93; EPI.4.lff., I.5.4-8, I. 10.25-8). During the later years of his exile he feels close to death (EP 11.2.45, III. 1.69). We have no reason to believe that this does not present a more or less accurate, if perhaps over-emotionalized, picture of Ovid's physical and mental condition during his years of exile. As for the barbarian incursions, Ovid makes it plain that these were no laughing matter: the picture he draws is of a town well enough fortified (Aricescu, pp. 85ff.) but for much of the time virtually under siege, its farms and outlying districts constantly terrorized by wild Cossack-like horsemen from the steppe, who would gallop across the frozen Danube (EP I.2.81-8) and carry off not only cattle, but often the wretched peasants themselves

XXVlll INTRODUCTION

(Tr. III.IO.SI-6, IV. I. 79-84). Many dared not till their fields at all: those who did went armed (Tr. III.IO.67-8, V.IO.23-6). Again and again the city itself was threatened, and Ovid - ailing quinqua• genarian civilian though he was - had to take sword, shield and helmet, and man the wall with the rest (Tr. IV.I.69-84; EP 1.2.19-24, 1.8.5-10, III.1.2S-8: we have no real reason to suppose, as is sometimes suggested, that this was self-serving fiction). House• gables and roofs bristled with the attackers' poisoned arrows (EP 1.2.15-22). It was a bad period for Tomis. Agriculture and com• merce were both severely disrupted by these recurrent raids (VuIpe, p. 57), though the city itself successfully defied all attempts at annexation - being, in this, more fortunate than A!!gisos (modern Tulcea), which was briefly occupied by the Getae from Moldavia in 12 BC (EP 1.8.11-20, IV.7.19-54). In AD IS, the year after Augustus's death, another serious incursion took place, but was put down, effectively, by the new governor ofMoesia, L. Pompon• ius Flaccus (EP IV.9.75-8o), an experienced soldier (Tac. Ann. 2.66) and one of Ovid's patrons (see pp. 309, 314). From now on we hear no more about native raids: the frontier had been made tolerably secure. Thus Ovid's poems from exile give us a remarkable picture of life in this remote frontier town; but the picture remains, inevi• tably, both slanted and incomplete. A writer whose idee fixe is to secure either a recall or a transfer to some less rigorous place of exile will paint his present plight in the darkest colours possible. By comparing Ovid's version of life on the Black Sea coast with reliable external evidence (and, on occasion, with inconsistent statements of his own) we can, to some extent, modify the unremittingly bleak scene that he evokes, and, in the process, watch his creative persona manipulating facts to produce a persua• sive imaginary world. This world in fact lies surprisingly close to reality: its most striking feature -like that of Thucydides - is what Lozovan (RP, p. 369) calls 'Ie peche d'omission'. It also works through a series of well-worn exilic literary cliches, familiar from Cicero, and later redeployed by Seneca (Lozovan ibid., Herescu, p. 57, and cf. below, p. xlvi). Ovid's taste for rhetoric has sometimes been exaggerated; but his long apologia to Augustus (T,. II) is, as Owen pointed out (Tr. II, pp. 48-S4), a formal prose oration

XXIX INTRODUCTION presented in verse, from exordium through proof (probatio) to refutation and epilogue. We should never forget that these poems are not only creative works of art, but also collectively designed to plead a case: both strong motives for selectivity.* To begin with, Ovid is misleading about the climate of Tomis. The winters, to be sure, are just as unpleasant as he claims (those in Sulmona, it is worth noting, are not much better); but the summers are Mediterranean, reaching temperatures of over 100 of, the autumns mild and delightful. The climate generally has been described (Ene. Brit.1t vol. 6, p. 383) as 'continental-temperate', and today Constanta - which lies on about the same latitude as Florence - is a popular seaside resort. Except on one occasion (EP III. I. 14), when he remarks that Tomis is frozen all the year round, Ovid does not lie about these warm and pleasant summers: he simply never mentions them, except in casual allusions (Tr. 1I1.10.7, I1I.12.27-30) to the no longer ice-bound Danube. When he talks about spring (Tr. I1I.I2), it is spring in Italy, recalled with vivid nostalgia, that catches his imagination. It is hard to remem• ber, too, when reading his descriptions of barrenness and infertility (Tr. III.IO.67-'73, V.IO.23-5), presenting the Dobruja as a kind of Ultima Thule on the rim of the known world (Tr. 1I.2oo, I1I.3.3- 37, 111.14.12; EP 11.5.9, etc.), that this area had long been famous for its wheat-harvests (Lozovan RP, p. 367), and that today Constanta raises not only wheat, but also the vines and fruit-trees which Ovid missed so badly (Tr. 111.10.71-4, I1I.12.13-16). If he had ever travelled in the Dobruja, he would have known that treelessness was a merely local phenomenon: about forty miles north of Constanta huge forests began (Vulpe, p. 53). But he never seems to have ventured beyond Tomis itself: the terms of his relegatio may have forbidden local travel, and in any case conditions in the hinterland were highly dangerous. Such knowledge as he does reveal about the area (e.g. in EP IV.IO) he could easily have picked up from Book 7 of Strabo's Geography, available in Rome as early as 7 BC (Lozovan RP, p. 357). If Ovid overstressed the inhospitality of the climate, he also

* For a perceptive analysis along these lines of the 'autobiographical poem' (Tr. IV. 10) see Fredericks, pp. I 39ff.

xxx INTRODUCTION

played up the barbarism of the local population. (For an educated Roman this was virtually inevitable, and Ovid's earlier work shows him using 'barbarian' as a conventional term of abuse.) 'Crude', 'fierce', 'savage', 'wild', 'inhuman' are among the various epithets he hurls at them. In fact he must have understood very well the fine distinctions that existed between Greek residents, semi-Hellenized native settlers, mostly fishermen or farmers (the region today produces about 70 per cent of Romania's fish catch: if Ovid did not write the Halieutica it was not through lack of material), and the wild nomads of the steppe; but for his own literary purposes he constantly confuses them. (There are also genuine mistakes, e.g. his regular description of Scythians as 'Sarmatians': Lozovan OB, p. 396, RP, p. 361). This practice creates odd inconsistencies in Ovid's work, and after a while got him into trouble locally. The Tomitans had (on his own showing) treated him with great kindness and respect, considering his position, granting him exemption from local taxes (EP IV.9.I01-2, IV.14.53-4) and paying tribute to him as a poet.* They were, understandably, both hurt and offended when word got back to them of the way in which their resident foreign celebrity was portraying the country and its inhabitants in his verse ruspatches to Rome (EP IV.14.13-16). Though Ovid might protest that it was only the land he hated, not its occupants (ibid. 23ff.), no one reading the poems of exile with an open mind can ever have found this piece of self-justification in the slightest degree convincing (Herescu, pp. 70-'71, Lozovan RP, p. 368). His special propaganda had, by accident, got to the wrong audience, through the offices, apparently, of a 'bad interpreter' (EP IV. 14.41) who was probably also his amanuensis (Tr. 111.3.1-2). Ovid's psychological ambivalence concerning Tomis becomes more striking as his exile - and his unacknowledged acclimatiza• tion, such as it was - progresses; yet the dichotomy was built into his situation from the start, by its very nature. He wanted desper• ately to return home; at the same time it was essential that he

* Herescu. p. 72 (followed by Andre. Pont. p. 117. n. S and others) argues that Ovid was given the great honour of presiding over the local religious games as agonothetes. but the minimal evidence (EP IV.I4.SS) does not sustain his interpretation: the wreath placed on his head was one of Apolline laurel. See below. p. 376.

XXXI INTRODUCTION placate the local authorities. So while his urban persona, the reluctant exile, fulminated rhetorically about illiterate savages, his resident alter ego was already investigating Tomis's cultural re• sources. Five centuries of Greek civilization, as we know from the city's elegant inscriptions (Lozovan RP, pp. 363-4), had left their mark. The steady influx of Thracian or Scythian immigrants had not altered the intrinsically Greek character or social customs of this Milesian colony (Pippidi, pp. 255-Q). The level of education and literacy, at least among the cultured few, must have been rather higher than Ovid suggests. It was, precisely, as a poet that the citizens of Tomis honoured this exiled alien in their midst (EP IV.14.55-Q, cf. IV. 13.21-2): provincials they might be, but some of them at least were Greek, or Greek-educated, provincials, and (even in Ovid's account) not wholly indifferent to literary merit. Though few of them, Ovid tells us (Tr. V.2.67), understood Latin, the governor, his staff, and other Roman officials will certainly have done so, and probably a fair number of local Greeks too, in particular those with widespread business interests. Ovid's intellec• tual isolation, though indeed debilitating, was not, as he tries to imply, total.* Furthermore, after some years in Tomis, Ovid began, almost inevitably, to experiment with the local patois. When, after Augus• tus's death, he gave a public recitation, a laudatio of the deceased and deified emperor and his surviving family (EP IV.13.23ff.), his poem for the occasion was, he tells us, composed 'in Getic'. What in fact did this mean? His attitude to this tongue had at first been one of literate contempt (Tr. V.2.67, V.7.17, V.12.SS, etc.), espe• cially when addressing Romans. But just as he claimed that his Latin over the years had become rusty through lack of practice (Tr. III.14.43-Q, V.2.67-8, V.7.S7-8, V.I2.S7-8), so he also indicated a slowly developing interest in 'Getic' (cf. Lozovan DB, pp. 399ff.), till by about AD 12/13 he is proudly claiming, in some epistles, to have fully mastered it, along with 'Sarmatian' (Tr. V.7.56. V.12.58; EP III.2.40). Yet elsewhere (Tr. V.IO.35ff.) he is still complaining

* He was, however, cut off from free access to books and libraries (though as far as we know there was no ban on his receiving books from Italy). For the function of libraries in Rome and their possible manipulation by Augustus as an indirect instrument of censorship or patronage, see Marshall, pp. 252ff.

XXXl1 INTRODUCTION of his inability to make himself understood except by gestures. How are these statements to be reconciled? By AD IS he appar• ently knew 'Getic' well enough to compose quantitative elegiac couplets in it (EP IV.I3.19-20), a claim which at once arouses suspicion, since it is unlikely in the extreme that Getic would have been a quantitative language. It looks very much (cf. below, p. 336) as though what he in fact learned was the bastardized Greek lingua franca of the area (Yr. V.2.67-8, V.7.SI-2, V.IO.3S), which a poet steeped in Callimachus might well force into the elegiac mould, and which would also - a major attraction for any creative artist in exile - ensure him about as wide a local audience as he could command. If this is true, there is nothing inconsistent about true Getic or 'Sarmatian' still reducing him to batHed sign-language. The important fact, psychologically, is that he took such a step at all. His willingness to concede his own position in the society to which he had been banished clearly increased with his progressive failure to secure any mitigation of sentence from Augustus. Through his wife and his more influential patrons he had worked, first, to win reprieve and recall (Yr. II.S7S, III.2.30, IV-4.47-8); alternatively, failing that, to secure transfer to a milder place of exile. The second of these objectives is mentioned far more often than the first. Indeed, by about AD 12/13 he has come to admit (EP II.7.17ff.) that anything else would be 'excessive' - which need not imply that in his heart of hearts he had finally given up hope of a pardon. But just as his dawning interest in the local scene, the local language, goes hand in hand with a concern over the supposed deterioration of his Latin (Yr. III.!4, V.S.7, V.S.12), so his acclima• tization to Tomis grows in direct proportion to the increasing elusiveness of imperial clemency. (If it is true that in AD 14 his wife joined him in exile, that too will have been a contributing factor.) As early as AD 12, when he came to write Book I of the Black Sea Letters, he had virtually abandoned all serious hope of recall, and was concentrating on his petition for a change of residence (EP 1.1.77-80). Even over this he was pessimistic. There are references, not only to sickness, senility and lassitude, but also to sloth, depression, accidie: the fact that writing has become a mere wearisome chore to kill time (EP I.S.Sff. and 29ff.). There is

XXXlll INTRODUCTION even talk of suicide (EP 1.6.41). These do not sound like mere literary topoi. We have a prelude to final capitulation: let me be a poet among the Getae, he muses, let Tomis be my Rome (EP 1.5.65-'70 ). And yet, in his heart of hearts, Ovid still nursed hopes of somehow stirring Augustus's compassion: as he admitted (EP 11.7.79), it was what kept him going. The young and popular Germanicus, he felt, might intercede on his behalf (EP 11.1,11.5.75, IV.S.SS-S). But what becomes increasingly clear is that - for obvious political reasons connected with his Julian sympathies and the error that had got him exiled in the first place - one major obstacle to his return was the implacable hostility of Augustus's wife Livia and of her son Tiberius. In a long, detailed brief to his wife (EP III. I. II 4-66) , Ovid instructs her as to how Livia should be approached: the effect is to make the Empress appear a danger• ous and unpredictable monster. A propitious moment, probably in the mood of public euphoria following Tiberius's Pannonian triumph (23 October AD 12), must be chosen (cf. EP 1I1.3.S3-4 and 92). Ovid's wife is encouraged not to be scared of the Empress (II9ff.). But only in the most favourable circumstances should any approach be made (129ff.), and even then no justifications should be offered. She is, not to put too fme a point on it, to grovel and weep (14Sff.), begging only that her husband may be granted a less inclement place of banishment. Meanwhile Ovid goes on to prophesy fresh triumphs for Tiberius ~EP III.4.S7ff.), and even asks Livia, rhetorically, why she does not ready the triumphal chariot for her son (95-6). News must have reached him of a disquieting sort: in an epistle to Cotta Maximus he exclaims (EP 111.5.57-8): 'And if my fight to escape goes against Fate's prohibitions,! then strip me, Maximus, of my useless hopes!' It was surely the failure of the appeal to Livia which provoked that heart-rending poem of capitulation, EP 111.7. Here Ovid formally releases his friends (9-10) and his wife (II-I2) from any further effort on his behalf. He apologizes for the endless stream of complaints and admonitions they have received from him (I-S). Hope is good, but there comes a point at which it is best to face, steadfastly, the knowledge of defeat (21-4). Some wounds are exacerbated by treatment, and it is better for a shipwrecked man

XXXIV INTRODUCTION to drown than hopelessly to prolong the struggle (2S-8). As I have come to the Getic shore, Ovid says, so let me die there - with dignity, if Caesar does not deny me even that crumb of comfort (19-20, 39-40). There we glimpse a flash of the old spirit. Resigna• tion brings with it a sense of proportion: how bored everyone must be, he admits to Brutus (EP III.9.3-4), with poems that do nothing but complain about the natives and pester Augustus for an easier exile! Of course, it was not long before Ovid's indomitable hopes began to stir a~ain, encouraged doubtless by the rumours that Augustus was now more kindly disposed towards him (EP IV.6.IS-16). But on 19 August AD 14 the ageing Princeps died, and Ovid's last lingering hopes for reprieve died with him, as the poet himself had foreseen (Tr. IV.9.II-I4; EP IV.6.16). From Livia and Tiberius he could expect no compassion. He was a sick, elderly man who had suffered irreparable damage (EP IV.2.19-22) to his mind and natural talent. Much of his zest for composition was gone (EP IV.2.23ff.), a sad fate for the young enthusiast who had once versified everything he wrote (Tr. IV.IO.2S-6). He still looked to Germanicus, though without any real expectation, for a move away from Tomis (EP IV.8.8S-8), and when the news of Augustus's deification reached him, he set up a shrine to the new god in his house (EP IV.9.10Sf£) and promoted the imperial cult with sedulous public zeal. But he also made his final peace with the citizens of Tomis, to whose admiration for him - as well as his own reciprocal gratitude and affection - he now makes reference (EP IV.9.89 and 97-104, IV.14.47ff.); these were the circumstances in which he delivered his celebratory poem (above, p. xxvi) on the apotheosis of Augustus, the nobility of the Imperial house. An exercise in futility, and surely recognized as such by its author. Against it we can set, as a fmal apologia, that splendid and ringing tribute, one of the finest passages Ovid ever composed, to the immortality conferred by poetry (EP IV.8.43ff.). At least he had the comfort of believing - rightly, as things turned out - that his place in literature was secure.

xxxv INTRODUCTION

III

The two volumes of poetry, the Tristia ('Sadnesses', 'Lamenta• tions') and Epistulae ex Ponto (Black Sea Letters) that Ovid published during his years of exile have not, on the whole, had a good press from posterity. It is easy enough to see why. The brilliant literary prestidigitator who found imperial moralizing a dreary bore was now compelled, in his obsessional determination to escape from the barbarous backwater to which Augustus's fiat had doomed him, to grovel before the instrument of his downfall, and suck up to powerful patrons who represented the antithesis of everything in which he believed. Augustus's death left him at the mercy of two still more implacable enemies in Livia and Tiberius. The fashionable flt1neur whose nearest approach to reality had been a fantasy-manual of seduction, whose most sustained creation was centred on outre metamorphoses and the ironic mockery of tradi• tional myth, now found that Life, in its crudest form, had invaded his library and at one stroke deconstructed his lovingly fashioned literary persona. He became querulous, repetitive, self-pitying and self-obsessed, humourless. The egotism that had been a lightweight joy in Rome's enfant terrible of the boudoir became an embarrassing aberration when exercised, without elegance or proportion, at the expense of his wife. Tomis no longer let him be funny. The praeceptor amoris with his mask of myth, wit and literary allusion was now an all-too-human husband in a real-life situation. The poet was forced to adapt old genres and techniques to new uses for which they had never been intended. This, in the event, he did with remarkable resourcefulness. Granted the fact that his poetry became the vehicle for an idee fixe, it is astonishing how much variatio he contrived to work into it. Nor, even more surprisingly, was his subservience always quite what it seemed. Despite everything, he fought back. The sardonic oblique shafts aimed - even from exile, even while ostensibly buttering up his tormentor - at Augustus's divine pretensions and moral revivalism astonish by their sly ferocity. Grovelling, Ovid still contrived to insult. More important, and a truth less often realized, the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto offer an extraordinary paradigm of the

xxxvi INTRODUCTION fantasies and obsessions that bedevil every reluctant exile: loving evocations of the lost homeland, the personification of letters that are sent to walk the dear familiar streets denied to their writer, the constant parade - and exaggeration - of present horrors, spring here contrasted with spring there (Yr. III.I2), the wistful recall of lost pleasures once taken for granted, the slow growth of paranoia and hypochondria, the neurotic nagging at indifferent friends, the grinding exacerbation of slow and empty time, the fear of and longing for death. It is of extraordinary interest (and something seldom done, since readers of the exilic poems most often dip selectively rather than going through the two collections in sequence) to trace the graph of Ovid's emotional preoccupations during his decade of exile, as revealed to us by the testimony of his published poetic discourse. This remains true however we choose to characterize such testi• mony: somewhere between the two extremes of literary fiction and autobiography the truth must lie (Ovid's exile was, after all, not only a fact, but his sole theme from the moment he left Rome), and the current fashion for evaluating the poems exclu• sively in literary and rhetorical terms is no less partial, and no less misleading, than the earlier practice of seeing the corpus as disiecta membra of a factual record, an exile's diary and correspondence in verse. Of course we should be alert to the selectivity, suppressio veri, rhetorical artifice, conventional topoi, and carefully mislead• ing implications that abound in these poems, just as we would in studying any forensic speech for the defence - which, indeed, is the main function that the Tristia and the Black Sea Letters are, cumulatively, designed to perform: they make a calculated appeal, not only to Augustus, but to literary readers at large. Ovid is presenting his case, as persuasively as he knows how, at the bar of public opinion. Yet he is also a consummate poet, who can no more help investing his brief with verbal elegance and images of haunting beauty than he could stop himself versifying as a boy (cf. Green OEP, pp. 18-19); and ifhe mythicizes himself, it is in terms that spring directly from his own unhappy dilemma. The result is a paradigm of exile that has, in its timeless perceptions, served as a model and inspiration down the centuries, for writers as diverse as Seneca and Pushkin.

xxxvii INTRODUCTION

Book I of the Tristia - dispatched to Rome in the autumn of AD 9 as a surrogate (1.1) for the poet himself, now recently arrived in Tomis - portrays a protagonist shaken by disaster yet still fundamentally confident that, with the right approach and appui, things can be put right (as they had been for Cicero) in reasonably short order. Besides a harrowing account of his last night in Rome (1.3), the reader is invited to share the dangers and tribulations of Ovid's slow, reluctant journey into exile, including some spectacu• lar storms at sea (1.2, 1.4, I. 10, I. II). He also is offered public perusal of several supposedly private epistles: two (I.S, 1.9) thanking loyal friends; one (1.8), couched in bitter terms, upbraiding an old acquaintance who has expeditiously dropped him; one to his wife (1.6), praising her love and support; and one (1.7), probably addressed to Brutus, his literary editor and agent in Rome, describ• ing how, before departure, he had burnt the Metamorphoses (and perhaps the unfinished Fasti too), but on reflection - and knowing copies had been made - hoped now that this work would be widely read, while appealing to readers to forgive its lack of fmal polish. It is an intriguing collection. The first thing that strikes one is how skilfully - and at very short notice - Ovid has adapted his elegiac conventions to deal with this new and unprecedented situation, redeploying both the autobiographical mode of the Amores and various epistolary tech• niques developed in the Heroides. This of course creates, inter alia, a constantly recurring sense of ironic inappositeness, as erotic echoes sound, sotto voce, in the protagonist's self-projected image of tragic suffering. You can never be certain when this narrator is slyly teasing the powers that be in the midst of his tribulations. He is not slow to compare himself with Ulysses/Odysseus (I.S.S9ff.), to borrow epic plumes: the mythic hero's sufferings, he asserts, were not a patch on his own. His wife, it becomes apparent, is being cast as a second Penelope, while Ovid himself must battle a hostile deity (and one more dangerous than Ulysses faced, not Neptune but Augustus-Jupiter) in order finally to achieve his return home. Ovid's allusions to Augustus - treated here and throughout the poems of exile as a vengeful and arbitrary avatar of Jupiter, hurling random bolts from on high against his enemies - form one of the most initially surprising elements in an /EUvre that had, as its

XXXVlll INTRODUCTION

main objective, the winning of a reprieve, since just as Telephus could only be cured by the spear of Achilles that had wounded him (Tr. V.2.ISff.), so it was the Princeps himself, and no one else, who had the power to revoke Ovid's sentence. Ovid stresses the arbitrariness; he also, again and again, hints at its ultimate impo• tence in the face of spiritual resolution and the indestructible power of true art. His art, indeed, he sees, right from the beginning (Tr. 1.11.12), as his one therapeutic in adversity, the exercise of which can at least keep him tolerably sane amid the shipwreck of his fortunes (a favourite metaphor in these poems: see, e.g., Tr. 1.5.17-18 and 35- 6). Physical and psychological dangers merge. 'Wherever I look,' he writes (Tr. 1. I 1.23), 'there's nothing but death's image'; what awaits him on dry land, he insists, is more hazardous even than the stormy sea: 'a barbarous coast, inured to rapine,jstalked ever by bloodshed, murder, war'. Exile from Rome in itself he also, at the deepest literary level, equates with death, something he emphasizes again and again: the poet of Tomis is a mere simulacrum when set against the author of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, works that could not be finished because of their maker's premature demise (Tr. 1.4.28, 1.7 passim; EP IV.12.44-5). Yet though the poet may be dead, his fame resides in the ability to confer immortality through song, not least on his own reuvre (see below, p. xxxvi). To puzzle us further, this elusive masker, sorrows notwithstanding, still retains his taste for sly jokes (1.6.20,11.7-8).

IV

As soon as Ovid reached Tomis, he began work on Tristia II, a single book-length poem conceived as a kind oflegal and rhetorical brief addressed to Augustus, and combining self-justification with an eloquently encomiastic appeal for clemency. This ambiguity of approach is underscored by an increasing groundswell of ill• disguised anger, mockery and resentment as the poem develops. Jupiter's noisily random fulminations (33ff.) are scathingly por• trayed. There are snide hints (e.g. at 161-4) about the embarrassing circumstances of Augustus's marriage to Livia (she was in an

xxxix INTRODUCTION advanced state of pregnancy by her previous husband at the time), not to mention his youthful tendency to go sick just before crucial battles (219), his indiscriminate sexual habits (287, cf. p. 226), his cruelty (335-6, cf. p. 229), his promotion of dubious literature in Rome's libraries (419-20, 509££.), his addiction to the illegal pursuit of dicing (471-82), his habit of supporting, and himself watching, plays stuffed with the kind of action (adultery in particular) to which he took such exception in Ovid (497-518). Even granted that much of this was adduced to illustrate Ovid's main argument in justification (,Everyone else did it with impunity, why pick on me?'), the fury, contempt and seething sense of injustice are unmistakable. If his appeal was to clementia, it was presented in singularly tactless terms. But then tact had, right from the begin• ning, been a quality conspicuously absent from his self-defining literary world, which always treated reality, officiai reality in particular, as a kind of joke in the worst possible taste. Such fantasies breed delusion: did he perhaps believe, in those early days of exile, that he could shame the Princeps into releasing him? If so, he judged posterity better than he did his contemporaries: the notion of the pen as mightier than the sword has always been a strictly long-term investment, with a poor track-record on immedi• ate returns. Though recent modern opinion scores Ovid highly in his literary battle against the regime (especially considering the handicaps under which he operated), Augustus and Tiberius re• mained deaf to his elaborate apologia, just as they did to the various exercises in pathos, harsh realism, thinly veiled hostility, flattery, neoteric erudition and allusiveness which followed. That immortality which Ovid identified with poetic achievement, and anticipated for his own work, is safely his; but there was to be no word from Rome taking him out of the life-in-death limbo that exile meant for him, above all for his delicate creative spirit. I suspect that this reaction came as a considerable shock to him: the sovereign magic of art had failed to persuade. From now on we can watch the cold of Tomis - more metaphorical than physical - slowly eating into his bones, slowly chilling his human responses. He knows himself in a prison where games-playing is meaningless, and Rome becomes a mere backdrop for nostalgic dreams. The sole autonomy left to him is that of

xl INTRODUCTION the (severely threatened) creative act, the genesis of poetry, which forms the sustaining leitmotif in Book III of the Tristia (AD 9-1O). It is stated as theme in the prologue (III. I, Ovid-as-book again in Rome, cf. IlLS. 1-10), repeated da capo, along with the claim for his work's immortality, at III.3.73-S0, also in the epilogue (III.I4, apologies for impossible circumstances leading to ostensible dimin• ution of talent), and fully developed in the central poem of the collection, III. 7, addressed to his stepdaughter Perilla: ' ... there's nothing we own that isn't mortal/save talent, the spark in the mind ... my talent remains my joy, my constant companion:/over this, Caesar could have no rights' (43-4, 47-S, cf. III.3.77-S0). The more his hopes of reprieve fade, the more marked the dichotomy, in poem after poem, between here and there, between the wormwood-ridden Black Sea littoral and the City of his dreams (III.2.15-26, 4.47-5S). Sickness of heart (III.2.9ff.) metasta• sizes into physical illness: climate and water are both intolerable, leading to loss of appetite, emaciation and accidie (III.3.Iff., S.23ff.). Ovid knows very well that his emotional state may well be the cause of this decline (III.S.25-6, 33-4). He longs for death, faults Augustus for failing to execute him, switches (within a couplet!) to offering his poor state of health as a reason for commuting his place of exile (III.S.37-42), this last emerging as a regular plea from now on. His tears match the melting snow in springtime (III.2.19-20); his birthday elicits miserable reflections on his fate (III.I3); even the advent of spring, and (once again) the melting of winter's snow, are used as mere foils against poignant memories of spring flowers and nesting swallows in Italy (III.I2). We also get the first of many vivid allusions to the horrors of life in Torrus: searing cold, necessitating furs and leather breeches, frozen wine, barbarian incursions across the rock-hard winter Danube, poisoned arrows, absence of vines and orchard trees, neglect of agriculture (III.JO). Book III of the Tristia is thus an intriguing mixed bag, its emotional tone see-sawing like a sick man's temperature, its view ofTomis embracing both winter and spring, its addressees ranging from the poet's wife to an (unnamed) enemy who is pointedly reminded (III. I 1.39ff.) of the fate suffered by Perillus, an ingenious inventor roasted by the tyrant Phalaris in his own brazen bull

xli INTRODUCTION

(Augustus as Phalaris? yet another oblique insult). There is even a little aetiological exercise in neoteric style on the supposed origin of Tomis's name (III. 9) , based on a (typically fantastic) piece of Greek pseudo-etymologizing. One friend is given a warning based on bitter personal experience (III.4.I-6): live a quiet private life, steer clear of great names. Yet perhaps, given the circumstances, the most remarkable claim comes in the poem Ovid addresses to his wife, when the illness and depression from which he is suffering lead him to anticipate his own immediate death (IIL3.29ff.). The epitaph he writes for himself, and the comment he adds to it (71-80), at one stroke cancel out all his excuses and apologies for his erotic poetry: it may have been his downfall, but (he proudly declares) it is what will bring him fame and immortality. No mention there of the Metamorphoses, any more than Aeschylus, when composing his epitaph, listed his plays. Nescit uox missa reuerti: did Ovid mean to set the record straight before he died? And what kind of embarrass• ment did the declaration create for him when he recovered from his illness, and once more began to justify and explain his past record in the hope of winning some kind of reprieve for the future? Or did he (as I suspect), like so many creative writers, live entirely in the present, so that yesterday's dramatized mood, so intensely felt then, would be not only irrelevant but forgotten tomorrow? By the time (AD II) the poems of Tristia Book IV had been assembled, Ovid, as he twice reminds us (IV.6.1!)-20, 7.1-2), had spent over two years in exile. Resentfulness and resignation ad• vance pari passu, recurrent bouts of self-pity (creative failure, creeping old age, chronic boredom and lassitude, ill health) inter• spersed with professions of stoic endurance, sustained, always, by the comfort of poetry (see in particular the prologue, IV.I.1-48, and epilogue, IV.IO.I03ff.). Hopes of a full reprieve are fading - though not yet extinct (IV.9. 13-14). A sense of exhaustion predominates: thoughts of death as welcome release mingle with a sour awareness that 'sick though my body is, my mind is sicker! from endless contemplation of its woes' (IV.6.43-4). Local dangers are stressed; it is now we hear of the poet's obligation, whatever his physical condition, to take part in the city's defence - with an

xlii INTRODUCTION

ironic allusi9n to his youthful anti-militarism (IV.1.7I-Z), perhaps recalling the cheeky not-quite-metaphorical assertion (Am. 1.9. I) that 'every lover's on active service' (militat omnis amans). Poems are tossed into the fire; self-disgust and lack of an immediate audience take their toll (IV.1.93-102). The old panacea of a mind's-eye visit to Rome now comes only as a perfunctory appendage (IV.Z.57ff.) to Ovid's frigid anticipatory celebration of Tiberius's triumph. A new appeal to his wife (IV.3) sees this long• suffering lady as little more than an extension or echo of himself, existing solely to work for, and dutifully 'lament, her absent husband. An appeal (ignored in the event) to Messalla Corvinus's eldest son (IV.4) describes the barbaric rites of Tauric Artemis (hundreds of miles distant, and from the mythic past) as though they belonged to the here-and-now of Ovid's exile (61-86). Time (IV.6) heals nothing, brings no solace. Friends fail to write, and are assaulted with elaborate adynata from the poet's literary arsenal (IV.7); enemies receive threats of exposure (IV.9). The book concludes with Ovid's famous quasi-autobiographical poetic testa• ment (IV. 10, cf. pp. 268ff.): it is almost - once again - as though he assumed his own imminent death, and wanted to leave an apologia behind for posterity. The tone throughout this book is one of almost unrelieved pessimism. The proem to Book V is presented, literally, as a swan-song (V. I. II-14), and the collection, taken overall, shows certain changes of emphasis. Ovid is now in his third year of exile (V.IO.I-Z), and the poems can be dated between the latter part of AD II and the first half of AD 12. Except for V.lO, describing the grim conditions of Tomis, and the introductory prologue, we find nothing here but verse-epistles, direct appeals for help, no less than four of them addressed to Ovid's wife. For the first time there is an admission (V.1.35) that the unrelenting self-absorption and self• pity of the work reaching Rome from Tomis is beginning to bore Ovid's readers. One friend advises (V.II) a return to his old modes of composition as an anodyne to exile. Take me out of this hell• hole, the poet replies, and I'll be as cheerful as you like. 'I'll even write official propaganda (V. 1.39-46). Till then, expect more tristesse: 'a dirge best fits a living death' (47-8). Hope of return home is now virtually abandoned (V.Z.77-8, 10.49-50, and elsewhere);

xliii INTRODUCTION a change of venue has become Ovid's major obsession - that, and the carefully established network of correspondence (so pre• cious to exiles in all ages) that becomes his surrogate lifeline to the world (increasingly Edenic in memory) from which he has been banned. He is uneasily aware that his loud grumbling is unrestrained, undignified, un-Roman (V.I.3S, 49-SO and 68-'70). But a scream, he argues, eases pain; and anyway (forgetting, for the moment, the conditions of relegatio!) he is a Roman no longer, but a Black Sea native, so that the old rules no longer apply. Even so, the continued dispatch of poems to Rome remains a key element in his sustaining exilic fantasy, his yearning somehow, anyhow, to be in his old haunts, and with his friends (V.I.80: uobiscum cupio quolibet esse modo). Once again a personified letter (V.4) travels to Rome on its author's behal( Details intrigue. Ovid's physical illness (whatever it may have been) is now, we learn, over {V.2.3-6), though, he hastens to add (7ff.), his mind remains sick ('mens tamen aegra iacet'). He urges his wife to appeal to Augustus (V.2·37-40), then makes an appeal himself (35-'78) - in both cases, again, simply for removal from Tomis. Fellow poets, even Bacchus himself, are exhorted to join the campaign on his behalf (V.3). A celebration of his wife's birthday (V.S) is scanned for hopeful omens (29-40). Enemies again receive threats (V.8), while forgetful friends are nagged (V.6), and helpful ones receive praise (V.9) - or a run-down on local conditions (V.7.9-24 and 43-64) to keep them up to the mark. When his better half complains of being called 'an exile's wife' (V.II), the response is legalistic: I wasn't exiled, I was relegated. The news that his work is being adapted for the stage (V.7.2S-30) provokes a disclaimer - he's never written 'theatre libretti' or sought 'clapping hands' - but still, if it keeps his name before the public, well and good. The collection closes with the poet, physi• cally sick once more (V.I3.3-6), in the grip of his chilly winter of discontent, offering his wife eternal fame in return for selfless service as a Penelope, an Alcestis, an Andromache, an Evadne, a Laodameia. These fmal poems, unsympathetic in tone to the modern reader, show more of the formal epistolary techniques used in the Heroides than their predecessors, and prepare us for the

xliv INTRODUCTION new mode - verse-letters to named addressees - explored by the Epistulae ex Ponto. From now on Ovid's work offers a still more concentrated appeal ad hominem (and, occasionally, ad feminam). Despite ingenious variatio, the focus is narrower than ever.

v

During AD 12-13, with Books I-III of the Bpistulae ex Ponto (Black Sea Letters), Ovid once more - as he had done in the years immediately preceding his exile - achieved a remarkable level of creativity, virtually tripling the production rate indicated by the Tristia. The verse-epistle is now his regular form, and his addressees are almost all identified: an interesting innovation which suggests, at the very least, some degree of confidence in a less hostile reaction to his case at Rome. This optimism seems, at least as far as the circle of his acquaintances was concerned, to have been' largely justified. Ovid records only one friend (EP III.6) who still found it safer to remain anonymous - though we have to consider the possibility that the poem was aimed at several such, and indeed that he kept silent about a fair number. Covert or subconscious malice is still prominent. It is character• istic of Ovid's approach that he inserts highly ambivalent references to Augustus's clementia into this poem (see below, pp. 344-5) in the very midst of bidding for a less harsh place of exile (37-8), while negative comparisons (Augustus is no Busiris, no Phalaris) are brought to a fine art, and frequently repeated (EP 1.2. II 9-20, 11.2. II 3-14, III. I.I 19-24), the 'rejected' parallels for Livia including Scylla and Medusa! The simmering hostility is unmistakable, and for the alert reader does much to leaven Ovid's endless reworking of his narrow, though obsessional, group of themes. Variatio can only do so much, and an unrelenting emphasis on boredom, frustration and misery (whether in pursuit of clementia or not) can hardly fail, sooner rather than later, to produce identical symptoms in the reader. As we have learned from too many modern French texts, artists with an idee fixe tend to wind up in a dead end. The poems in this three-book collection confirm both the limited range of topics Ovid allows himself, and the less-than-

xlv INTRODUCTION flattering subtext permeating the whole. Once again the poems themselves are made to act as the exile's surrogate in Rome (EP 1.1.3-12): 'If an exile's/offspring observe the law,' he writes, 'why should they not/enjoy the City?' (21-2). This prologue touches most of the dommant themes: appeals for help and sympathy, self• justification, flattery of the Princeps, complaints about the 'canker of anguish' eating away at the exile's mind (67-'76, a strikingly graphic passage), the usual pleas for a transfer. At the same time Ovid draws a subtly contemptuous picture of the elderly Augustus, qua Aeneas's descendant (if only by adoption) piggybacking on the poet's book (33-6), and compounds the insult by likening himself to a bearer of holy relics ('the hallowed names of the Julian race', 46), in competition with the mendicant priests of Isis and Cybele (40ff.), the first of whom Augustus had twice banned from Rome, and who was identified in everyone's mind with Cleopatra VII. It is pOlVer we respect in deities (43-4); and where they get their pleasure from (50-56) is the spectacle of blinded, abject, grovelling and repentant sinners, whom they strike down or forgive accord• ing to their own arbitrary fiat. Indeed, it is precisely such demonstra• tions of power that deities most enjoy (55-6), as an object-lesson to the faithful. What official Rome, let alone the Princeps himself, made of such outbursts one can only surmise. It certainly gives a twist to any overkill flattery, which can then be read as the pathetic utterance of a victimized toad crushed by that proverbial iron harrow. Ovid's seeming access of optimism in AD 12-13 will also have owed a good deal to the conviction he had (whether justified or not) that his powerful patron Paullus Fabius Maximus could effectively intervene with Augustus on his behalf (EP 1.2.67ff.), and indeed - as he tells us later (EP IV.6.IS-16) - in fact did so, with apparent success, a move only frustrated by the deaths (summer AD 14) both of Maximus himself and of the Princeps, who (Ovid claims) had before the end substantially modified his hard-line position on Ovid's relegatio. At the same time the opti• mism remains (as always) far from constant: in EP 1.3 the best outcome hoped for is a cicatrizing of the raw wound (II-16), and mental distress (1.4.1-20) has brought on premature old age. Though hope springs eternal, the here-and-now of Tomis must

xlvi INTRODUCTION not be lost sight of. There is a tendency (not entirely surprising in the circumstances) to see life and literature, at times, as both in some sense unreal (1.5). Ovid still has a poor appetite, still com• plains about the water (1.10.7-14 and 29-32), still suffers bad dreams (1.2-4lff.). The pattern of addressees in EP I-III (most conveniently schema• tized by Wheeler-Goold, p. 490) makes it strikingly clear, by both emphasis and repetition, just where the thrust, the message of this collection is directed. Brutus, Ovid's literary representative in Rome, and Fabius Maximus, his most distinguished and influential patron, open and close it. Atticus stands at the centre. Spaced at regular intervals between them, the recipient of no less than six epistles, we frod Cotta Maximus. How are we meant to read this arrangement? In the opening and closing pairs of poems, claims for Ovid's Muse (and reasons for her woebegone nature) are juxtaposed with prayers for support in begging a more benign place of exile, the rig ours of Tomis being adduced as a direct cause of the poet's psychosomatic collapse - and, hence, of the mon• otony, misery and alleged technical failure of his verse. The two letters to Atticus recall old friendship, but can do no more than speculate on present loyalty: were they ever answered? We cannot tell. 'Sooner shall long summer days attend the winter solstice,' Ovid writes (II.4.2S£f.), amid other hyperbolic adynata, 'than you shall be touched by oblivion of our friendship.' Was his faith justified? The question - deliberately, one feels - is left unanswered. In his second address to Atticus, bleak pessimism ('My fate, it's plain, will keep to the course it started', 11.7.17), exemplified by a catalogue of the exile's sufferings (25£f.), is scarcely alleviated by a far-from-hopeful final prayer for continued support (81-4). In his friends at large, in fact, Ovid seems by now to have virtually no confidence left: or if he does, it is not something he chooses to commemorate in verse. Then what about Cotta Maximus, patron of long acquaintance and dubious reputation (see pp. 262-3), whose name recurs like a tolling bell through this collection? Ovid sends him a long, depressed account of how he still struggles to write ('it suffices if I manage/to be a poet among the uncultured Goths', 1.5.65--6); thanks him for sending news of the death of Celsus, upheld here as

xlvii INTRODUCTION the model friend whose loyalty should be emulated (1.9); thanks him again, at some length, for not rejecting Ovid's claims on him altogether (11.3); thanks him, effusively, for the gift of medallions (?: see p. 326) of the Imperial family, affecting to discern clemency in the expression of Augustus's portrait (11.8, especially 7Iff.); offers him fame through his own posthumous literary renown, coupled with a retelling of the legend of Orestes and Iphigeneia among the Taurians, as an example of how loyal friendship exists even in barbary (Ub, especially 97ff.); and while flattering Cotta's oratorical skills (his patron had sent him a bundle of speeches to read), now asks no more for himself than to be remembered (IlL5.37ff.), and, finally, to know the hard truth: 'If my fight to escape goes against Fate's prohibitions,/then strip me, Maximus, of my useless hopes!' (57-8). The lowered expectations (compare Ovid's optimism even a year or so earlier) are striking, even bearing in mind that this is a carefully planned literary collection designed for public (and offi• cial) consumption. We should not forget that both Cotta Maximus and his elder brother Valerius Messalla Messalinus (who gets two letters, 1.7 and Il.2: nervous, distant, anticipating rejection) were both strong adherents of Tiberius. Thus we should not be surprised by the incipient cultivation of individuals in the service of Germani• cus, whose star now seemed in the ascendant (e.g. Salanus, the prince's tutor in oratory, II.5), or, indeed, by the poet's somewhat brash direct appeal (II.r) to Germanicus himself -less than tactful, and, wisely, not repeated. The collection is completed with routine epistles to literate career officers (mostly Tiberian) such as Rufinus (I.3, III.4) and the Pomponius brothers, Graecinus and Flaccus (1.6, 1. ro, 11.6), or rhetoricians and men of letters (Severus, Macer; 1.8, II. 10). The poet's wife gets two poems, one depressed (1.4), the other tetchy and peremptory (III.r): his petition drive is not going well. The Thracian prince Cotys is solicited for local support (II.9); a hitherto disregarded kinsman-by-marriage, Rufus, is, not very hopefully, approached (II. II). Was there ever, Ovid asks (quite reasonably, on the record), an exile 'dumped in a more remote or nastier spot' (L3.83-4)? He fantasizes about turning his hand to farming (1.8.49ff.), recalls happier days on the Grand Tour (III. 10.2 Iff.), complains (again) of ill health (1. 10), of premature

xlviii INTRODUCTION senility (1.4.19-20). We get a clear overall picture of Weltschmerz, of ebbing determination, of hopes rejected and options running out. If this is pure poetic invention it is done most convincingly. This sense of bleak finality is epitomized by 111.7, addressed generally to the poet's friends. His own hopelessness, he admits, is matched by their boredom: they've heard it all before. So, an end to these undignified pleas, these demands on his shy wife, the mistaken hopes he had of his friends: 'I have come to the Getic land: then let me die here,llet my misfortunes run out as they began!' (19-20). Why did he suppose he could ever win a reprieve, or even transfer to a less exacting place of exile (29-.J2)? It sounds, on the face of it, as though Ovid (at least qua public poetic persona) had finally given up the struggle: the despair certainly rings true. Yet - as so often - things are not quite what they seem, and the poem's conclusion (35-40) puts a new twist on these professions of resignation. The onus of responsibility is shifted (one had almost said mischievously) from Augustus to the circle of friends now being addressed: had they kept up their efforts, instead of turning their backs on Ovid out of boredom and indifference, then the clementia of the Princeps was ready to oblige them. Ovid's willingness to face death in exile, he now concludes, is strengthened by the fact that his predicament is due, not (as he had previously argued) to the unassuageable wrath of the Princeps, but to failure on the part of his friends to present an effective case on his behalf! It is possible that this volte-face was something more than a bitter joke. As we have seen, Ovid had already begun to sound out Germanicus and those aligned with him. In the last resort he was far from having given up. But even Germanicus, as things stood, could do no more than Paullus Fabius Maximus had done to help Ovid: that is, intervene on his behalf with the supreme authority. To paint that authority as implacable was, in the circumstances, bad diplomacy. Hence the shifting of responsibility to various unnamed friends, the reassertion of imperial clementia. What 111.7 really constitutes is a farewell to the old guard, to Cotta Maximus and the rest of Ovid's pro-Tiberian supporters. From now on any hope still sustaining Ovid behind his recurrent bouts of black and melancholic accidie was centred on these new poten• tial friends at court. (However much allowance we make for

xlix INTRODUCTION literary artifice in these poems, the pattern of mood-swings remains totally credible.) The mere existence of such a reseau, on which he could, over a long period -leisurely mail-services helped - exercise all his elaborate powers of rhetorical persuasion, was enough to keep his spirits, if not up, at least above permanent and total depression. Book IV of the Black Sea Letters shows us the last venture of this kind in action. It also reminds us of its limitations. Whatever the relationship, in any writer's work, between life and literature, the two inexorably intersect at the end. The last datable reference in this fmal collection is to the suffect consulship of Ovid's old friend Graecinus (?midsummer AD 16, IV.9.S). An allusion to the restora• tion of the temple of Janus (Fast. I.223-{j) suggests that Ovid may have survived till AD 18, though the restoration had been begun much earlier. StJerome (Euseb. Chron., ed. Schoene, p. 147) places the poet's death and burial at Tomis in the 199th Olympiad and Ann. Abr. 2033/4, i.e. AD 17/18, and that winter seems the likeliest date. The poems of Book IV, less tightly edited than their predeces• sors (and thus often regarded, in their present form, as a posthu• mous collection), range in date between AD 13 and 16. There may have been an interval - perhaps a last illness - during which Ovid wrote nothing. But with our hindsight it is impossible not to be constantly aware of the collection's terminal nature, and there is (whether it was, or was not, the last thing Ovid actually wrote) a triumphant finality about the closing poem (IV.16), with its proud, and vindicated, claim of literary immortality. The likelihood of Book IV being a posthumous round-up is increased both by its length (at 880 lines, divided between sixteen poems, it is by some way the most substantial collection in the exilic corpus) and the apparent lack of overall structuring (efforts to detect patterns anything like the balanced ring-composition evident in I-III have not been successful). The only hold-overs from earlier addressees are Brutus (IV.6) and Graecinus (IV.9), the latter, seemingly, on personal rather than political grounds. Ovid's wife gets no poems (for a possible explanation see above, p. xvii). New recipients, some public figures, some private, include several individuals (e.g. Severus (IV.2), Gallio (IV. II), Tuticanus (IV.I2» to whom Ovid apologizes, in some embarrassment, for not having INTRODUCTION written earlier. Sextus Pompeius, consul in AD 14 and a strong adherent of Germanicus, gets four separate epistles (IV.I, 4,5, IS), and Ovid clearly sees him as taking over the intercessionary role that had previously belonged to Fabius Maximus and Messalla Corvinus's two sons. Albinovanus Pedo (IV.IO), Carus (IV.I3) and Ovid's son-in-law Suillius (IV.8) certainly, Tuticanus (IV.I2 and 14) very probably, were also attached to Germanicus. The new line of approach is both clear and predictable: there was now no one else at court to whom Ovid could turn with any reasonable hope of success. The only known Tiberian, Graecinus apart, who figures in this final list is Junius Gallio (IV.n), and he is almost certainly included on the basis of personal friendship and shared literary interests. In some ways these private epistles are the most interesting. To Severus, an epic poet and former member of Messalla Corvinus's literary salon, Ovid describes the ennui that saps his writing: 'It's an arid shore I'm ploughing, with sterile share' (IV.2.16). The creative process, not least with no appreciative audience in view, has become tedious. It is here that we find his most famous aphorism on the condition ofliterary exile: 'Writing a poem you can read to no one/is like dancing in the dark' (33-4). Yet how else to fill the time? Drinking and dicing hold no attractions for him. Extramural gardening, given the conditions of Tomis, is dangerous. Poetry ('a frigid consolation') is all that remains (39- 46). It has been the guiding star of his life: this depressed description of it as a mere pis aller (not least when we consider the sustained brilliance of imagination and technique that Ovid shows, despite disclaimers, right to the end) fails to convince, and should not be taken seriously except as evidence for the depression itsel£ Some oddities give one pause. Ovid several times (IV.I.27-36, 5.39-40, 15.39-42) describes himself as Sextus Pompeius's slave, his possession, indeed his creation, citing as parallels, inter alia, the statues made by Pheidias. It turns out that Pompeius helped him during the overland section of his journey into exile (IV.5.33-8), which makes Ovid's prior neglect of him (IV. I. 11-22) in the exilic poems almost as surprising as his present determination to be regarded as a chattel or (even more improbably) an artistic (£uvre. What did he mean by this? Was the conceit merely excess of self-

Ii INTRODUCTION abasement to a prospective patron? If so, why did Ovid never employ it elsewhere? Its oddity has attracted less attention than it deserves. Did Ovid imagine, even subconsciously, that as a piece of literary luggage he could travel with the same freedom as his own poems - including the two (IV.4 and 5) he devoted to Pompeius's consulship? Now it is certainly true that IV.4 offers an unusually vivid exercise of Ovid's literary imagination. News of Pompei us's forth• coming inauguration reached him (he tells us) personified as Rumour, who obligingly passed on the information to him as he was strolling on the beach (13-18). As the poet fantasized this occasion 'the iniquitous/harshness of this place just fell away' (21- 2). He 'seems to see' the attendant crowds (27); a moment later he does see (uideo, cf. below, p. 356) the oxen being sacrificed. But all too soon the illusion is shattered (43ff.): 'My bad luck that I won't be seen in that crowd, that my eyes won't/be able to feast on the sight!' What he can do, he goes on (45-6), is 'visualize a mental image of you' - which pictures Pompeius (all too plausibly) asking, in a casual aside amid more important matters, 'Poor man,/what's he up to these days?' (48--9). When Graecinus gets his consular poem (IV.9), Ovid again talks of 'the pleasure/that now I have to catch with my mind alone' (37-8). In IV.5 the poem is, as earlier, requested to act as surrogate and petitioner. Fantasy and reality have slipped apart again: the condition of exile is un• changed. Then what about the much-touted comforts of philosophy, Stoic philosophy in particular, which - in an age when exile for the upper classes (as opposed to a life sentence in the mines for a common-or-garden working man) was a commonplace - produced a whole series of stock platitudes for the alleviation of the well-to• do depayse? It is interesting, but in the circumstances perhaps not surprising, that Ovid, well-read though he was, should have shown no interest whatsoever in the consolatory exilic literature popular from the Hellenistic period onward, and of which we have numer• ous specimens, mostly (but not exclusively) from after Ovid's death. Since the aim of this literature was to reconcile the exile to his lot, Ovid, whose agenda (except in brief moments of depression) never envisaged capitulation, is unlikely to have taken it seriously.

Iii INTRODUCTION

The likelihood is decreased still further by its bromidic nature. The tone is set by Teles (third century BC), a Cynic philosopher who wrote a treatise on exile (ed. Hense, 1909) preserved in epitome. In Teles' view, exile harms one neither physically. nor spiritually, nor does it bring disgrace: to leave one's country is no worse than walking out of one's house or off a ship. It is not hard to imagine Ovid's reaction to stuff of this sort. The same set of platitudes is still being exploited, with variations, by later writers such as Musonius Rufus (born c. AD 30: fr. ix, Hense), Plutarch (Moral. 599A-607F), Seneca (Dial. 12), or Favorinus (II€pl CPvy~" ed. Barigazzi 1966); they are conveniently collected by B. Hasler, Favorin uber die Verbannung (1935), pp. 29ff. (§4, 'Die Topoi und ihre Ausgestaltung'). The grandiose notion of being a citizen of the world (kosmo• polites) is advanced as sufficient compensation for the loss of one's country: Ovid doubtless noted that Cicero, while advancing similar theoretical arguments (Tusc. Disp. 5.36.I05f[), showed himself at least as frantic as Ovid over his own immediate plight (cf. Shackle• ton Bailey, Cicero (1971), pp. 64-'72), indeed displaying, or at least laying claim to, several similar symptoms (weight loss, nervous prostration, etc.). The same was true later of Seneca (Dial. 12 = Consolo ad Helv. 5.6.2ff., cf. M. Griffin, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (1976), pp. 59ff.). Cicero, moreover - another fact that would not have been lost on Ovid - spent little more than a year in exile, and got no further than Macedonia, just as Seneca was relegated to Corsica, today a Club Med paradise. The total silence of Ovid speaks volumes as to his opinion of such easy don't-do-as• I-do-do-as-I-say philosophical panaceas. It is noteworthy that Seneca, during his eight-year stretch overseas, begins to imitate Ovid (Griffin, p. 62): if anything it was Ovid who set the philosophers an example. If Ovid could only dream of a no-more-than-metaphorical return to Rome, he could also, after the autumn of AD 14. play with the (equally metaphorical) translation of Augustus to heaven, perhaps encouraging himself with the thought that this essay in politico-religious catasterism (the deification decree was ratified on 17 September) had nothing more implausible about it than did his own exilic fantasies - might, indeed, offer a chance to appease the

liii INTRODUCTION new deity's heirs. He duly composed an encomiastic poem celebrat• ing Augustus's apotheosis, and sent it to Brutus (IV.6.I7-18, 9.131-2). Prayers to the Princeps took on a new force and appropri• ateness when directed heavenwards rather than towards the Pala• tine (IV.9.I27ff.). In his pious zeal the poet even reports himself as having assumed the role of missionary, spreading the gospel mes• sage of Augustus's ascent to godhead - duly translated into 'Getic' for the occasion - among the heathen tribes of the Black Sea (IV.I3.17ff.), and praising Livia, Tiberius, Drusus and Germanicus as a kind of Holy Family on earth. Genuflection allies itself with rhetoric: both fail in the face of that stonily hostile indifference. There are attempts to deflect criticism. Ovid spends a sizeable portion of his epistle to Albinovanus Pedo (IV.I0.35ff.) proving that he is not a liar, that the Black Sea does freeze (cf. IV.9.8S-6: he was clearly touchy on this point). Though he is at pains to stress the honour in which the population of Tomis holds him (IV.9.97ff.), he also admits, to Tuticanus (IV.14.ISff.), that his attacks on Tomis (which he tries, unsuccessfully, to separate from animadversions on the local inhabitants) have caused much local resentment against him. 'Shall I never stop being injured/by my verse,' he exclaims, 'will I always be taking knocks from this/too tactless talent of mine?' (IV.14.I7-19). The answer, alas, is no to the first question, yes to the second. Even the closing poem (IV.I6), Ovid's proud autobiographical testament to his achieve• ments 'when I was alive still' (4), forms an angry answer to some anonymous enemy, and its final six lines make an agonized appeal to Malice to 'sheathe your bloody claws', asking 'What pleasure do you get from stabbing this dead body?/There is no space in me now for another wound' (51-2). The bulk of the poem is taken up with a catalogue (5-46) of Roman poets, with whom Ovid compares himself. Whether the placement of this poetic valediction was Ovid's or the work of some posthumous editor, the sense it provides of a last ghostly admonition is both moving and effective. The close echoes in the mind with uncomfortable force. What is more, even in extremis Ovid brings off a really lethal literary joke, one that only time could - and did - validate. Of all the poets he lists (some, like Varius Rufus, highly rated in their day), not a single one,justifiably

liv INTRODUCTION or not, has survived intact. We possess one poem by Grattius, and, for the others, at best, a handful of brief testimonia and random fragments, and more often nothing except an obscure name. Ovid's epitaph thus also becomes his triumphant vindication: as he says (45-6), he was 'fit to be read'. Two millennia later, his trendy contemporaries all forgotten, he is still read. Dying and in exile, he nevertheless contrived to have the last word. Athens-New Orleans-Austin 198HZ