Latin scholarship through the years did not exactly splash out on this pig's whisper of a carmen, 3.22. Stunted notices regularly saw it off as ‘a traditional invocation’—just a coda and confirmation for 3.21—and it is securely penned into the Hellenistic dedicatory ‘Epigrammstypus’. Yet the poet has indeed set t/his tree off against the poetic wood that lines the continui montes of Odes I-III. In that company, the poem primes a cultural reading by framing the interpretivity of its performance against all the other scenarios. As a recurrent event in Roman pedagogy and classical reading-culture to this very moment (these very moments), it pushes us to enact religio as a modality of agent self, mobilised within the social imaginary of formative environment and temporality, and modelling a contribution to the formation of that sociality. The challenge to Horace, as to other ancient magi and musers such as Cicero, Varro and Augustine, is not not the same that faces modern gurus and pundits writing Roman religion: but poetry conscripts its readers for its project, animating the Roman religion it re-invents and activates, obliges the doing and the showing and the telling to fuse in the enthusing, three-in-one.

nos quoque delectant, quamuis nocuere, libelli,
quodque mihi telum uulnera fecit, amo.
(Tr. 4.1.35f.)
My books delight me, even though they have harmed me,
and I love the weapon which caused my wound.

In Amores 3.7, Ovid sings, hymns, celebrates his own impotence. Why?

In stark contrast with its nearest Latin relative, Horace's most grotesque, violent and abusive impotence poem (Epode 12, to be discussed later), Am. 3.7 is an erotic poem, and could even be considered a gentle one, perhaps excepting the couplet 67f. which is the emphatic opposite of the rest of the poem.

In Tristia 2 Ovid claims that he has always been devoted to the emperor. It is mere that he defends both himself and the Ars Amatoria:

per mare, per terrain, per tertia numina iuro,
per te praesentem conspicuumque deum,
hunc animum fauisse tibi, uir maxime, meque,
qua sola potui, mente fuisse tuum.
optaui, peteres caelestia sidera tarde,
parsque fui turbae parua precantis idem,
et pia tura dedi pro te, cumque omnibus unus
ipse quoque adiuui publica uota meis.
quid referam libros, illos quoque, crimina nostra,
mille locis plenos nominis esse tui?
(Tristia 2.53-60)