Explores how Ovid in the Tristia and Ex Ponto adopts imagery associated with the eschatological exile of the soul and instead applies it to his own fate at the shores of Tomis so as to give his geographical banishment cosmic significance. Ovid plays upon a longstanding association between philosophy and exile and the notion that the philosopher may be seen as a citizen of the world and so is effectively immune to banishment; Ovid instead views himself as superseding the philosophers and especially Socrates in the hardships he endures in Tomis. The dangers of misreading and the potential destructive dimensions of the text are discussed in relation to Ovid’s Ibis and Plato’s myth of Theuth from the Phaedrus. Connections are also traced with Plato’s Phaedo and the Epistles, as we turn our attention back to ideas of misreading and failures of communication that result from the dislocations of exile.