The third book of the Tristia is the first to have been written in Tomis, Ovid's place of exile. The long journey from Rome, the subject of the first book of the Tristia, is over. The distractions of the journey can no longer sustain him, and his only pleasure is to weep, in other words to write the elegy of lament:

dum tamen et uentis dubius iactabar et undis,
fallebat curas aegraque corda labor:
ut uia finita est, et opus requieuit eundi,
et poenae tellus est mini tacta meae,
nil nisi flere libet…
(Tr. 3.2.15-19)

But while in turmoil I was being tossed around by winds and waves, my worries and sad heart were distracted by the battle for survival. Now that the journey is over, the effort involved in travel is spent, and the land of my punishment has been reached, weeping is my only pleasure.

‘This poem is the feeblest and least poetical of all the Heroides, and has certain solecisms in diction and metre, which are either spurious or show that the epistle is an unfinished and careless performance.’ So Arthur Palmer in the preface to his commentary on Heroides 8, Hermione's letter to Orestes imploring him to rescue her from Neoptolemus, her abductor; and Peter Knox fans the flames of doubt about the authenticity of the letter (or at least parts of it) in his analysis of lines 65-74, where Hermione locates herself alongside Leda, Hippodamia and Helen in a Tantalid tradition of rape-victims:

num generis fato, quod nostros durat in annos,
Tantalides mattes apta rapina sumus?
non ego fluminei referam mendacia cygni
nee querar in plumis delituisse Iouem.
qua duo porrectus longe freta distinet Isthmos,
uecta peregrinis Hippodamia rotis;
[Castori Amyclaeo et Amyclaeo Polluci
reddita Mopsopia Taenaris urbe soror;]
Taenaris Idaeo trans aequor ab hospite rapta
Argolicas pro se uertit in arma manus.
(Her. 8.65-74)

exulis haec uox est: praebet mihi littera linguam,
et si non liceat scribere, rautus ero.
Epist. ex Pont. 2.6.3f.

This is the exile's voice; the written word gives me a tongue,
and if writing is forbidden, I shall be dumb.

Ovid's exilic persona reveals itself over the course of his correspondence as a literary pastiche of other texts and identities. We hear the narrator's voice in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto echoing that of Horace and Propertius, Homer's Odysseus and Vergil's Aeneas. These allusions to canonical works are widely recognised and catalogued. But equally crucial to Ovid's self-presentation are allusions to his own previous masterpieces. I interpret his choice of the letter form for the exile poems as not only an allusion to, but also an authorial statement of identification—on some level—with his earlier epistolary work, the Heroides. The Heroides may be read as letters from exile, epistulae ex exilio in which Ovid pursues his fascination with the genre of letters and the subject of abandonment through literary characters; the Tristia take that fascination one step further as the author himself, in letters to loved ones, writes from the position of an abandoned hero of sorts.

For poetry, read poverty, passim.
Martin Parker

This poetry-stricken essay on onomastication finds in Tristia 1.10 a polynymous atoll in Tristia 1's ocean of anonymy, allonymy, anomie, anatomi.

Sail away sail away sail away.
Enya

All aboard! The first book of the Tristia is an emotion-ocean autoportrait, where elegiac couplets and compositions mime troughs of helpless misery and swells of resentment at reality:

As Betty Rose Nagle has remarked, Ovid's exile poetry deploys proper names within a kind of economy: ‘Ovid immortalises his own name by publicising it and exhorting his friends and readers to keep it alive, and he rewards his friends for actively remembering him by immortalising them, i.e. by putting their names in his poetry.’ What interests me here is the shortcircuiting of this system of exchange within the Tristia. For one of the most striking features of Ovid's first run of exilic elegies is precisely the omission of the names of Ovid's addressees. As Ovid will claim in the poem that opens the Epistulae ex Ponto, it is this omission (along with a change of title) that differentiates the Tristia poems from their successors:

inuenies, quamuis non est miserabilis index,
non minus hoc illo triste, quod ante dedi.
rebus idem, titulo differt; et epistula cui sit
non occultato nomine missa docet.
(Ex Pont. 1.1.15-18)

What Ovid endured as an ‘exile’ in Tomis is a great unknown—the stuff now of novels and ‘imaginary’ lives. If we take him at his word—the testimony of the exile poetry—literary isolation was the least of his worries. Bordering on the Black Sea, Ovid's frontier town was a place of life-threatening illness (Tr. 3.3.13, 3.8.23f.) and unbearable, limb-numbing cold (Ex Pont. 1.7.11f., 4.12.33f.), a place where inhabitants pass an existence at war, warding off frequent invasions by savage barbarians—so frequent, in fact, that the aged poet is himself conscripted into military service (Ex Pont. 18.7). In many respects, Tomis is constructed in the exile poetry as the antithetical opposite of the world of Rome; for the urbane ‘urban’ persona of the Ars Amatoria, life in Tomis rates as a fate worse than death, and often the poet describes his existence there as death-like (e.g. Tr. 5.9.19, Ex Pont. 1.8.27), his surroundings like the underworld (cf. Tr. 5.7.43f.), and his daily rituals as practice for dying. And although he outlived Augustus—the princeps who exiled the poet to the Black Sea in 7 CE—Ovid would indeed die in Tomis, far from family and home, out ‘on the furthermost limits of the unknown world’ (in extremis ignoti partibus orbis, Tr. 3.3.3).

So wrote G. Schubert in his study of dream symbolism (Die Symbolik des Traumes) published in 1814—one of many works of dream theory that served as a resource for Freud, whose magnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—would appear at the turn of the century. Schubert offers the example of the nonsensical association of the word ‘writing’ with the image of two men (‘one carrying the other on his back’) in an effort to argue a thesis later challenged by the work of Freud: that a ‘daytime language of words’ exists independent of, and unaffected by, a ‘nighttime language of dreams’. Read nearly a century after Freud, the passage is ironic, as Neil Hertz has observed, largely because Schubert's exemplary ‘nonsensical’ combination of word and image is richly suggestive of one of the principal concerns of poststructuralist psychoanalysis: how writing is a process of bearing the burden of the past and shouldering the father, an (oedipal) narrative of the son coming to terms with paternal authority: ‘The weight of the older man's body, the pressure of his will give substance to the voiced word…[w]riting, Freud would have us say, is Oedipal, a coming to terms with the Father, a shouldering of the burden of the past.’

In this article I propose to explore the disposition which the reader must bring to bear to Ovid's exilic works. More specifically, I want to begin by considering the way in which Ovid himself shapes or represents the attitude of his reader; that is, the way in which the text explicitly or implicitly shapes his ideal reader, and gives him indications as to how to read the new works which gradually reach Rome from Pontus. We start at the beginning: Tr. 1.1.

Fasti is Ovid's prime exilic work. Begun at the same time as Metamorphoses it is yet the last of Ovid's poems, rewritten in exile to juxtapose past and present, centre and periphery, tradition, religion, time and their ideological appropriation and abuse. Ovid's carmen ultimum, it joins Epistulae ex Ponto in straddling the principates of Augustus and Tiberius and bearing witness with Epistulae to the factuality of dynastic succession and the consolidation of imperial power. There is no evidence that any of Fasti was recited, or otherwise made public, before Ovid's departure for Tomis; indeed the only reference to Fasti outside itself is the second Tristia's description of the rupturing of the work (opus ruptum, Tr. 2.552) by Ovid's exilic ‘fate’ (sors). Pre-exilic and exilic strata exist in the poem, as many critics have too frequently noted, but, since they were never read in separate contexts but always within the frame of Ovid's exile, their dynamic interplay serves only to enrich and to deepen the exilic nature of Fasti's discourse.