In this chapter’s analysis, Augustan poets’ recurring triumphal fantasies serve to explore readers’ role in sustaining imperial power. As a ceremony that communicated faraway victories to urban audiences and itself was publicized abroad, the triumph highlights the emperor’s reliance on representation to convey information and authority across Rome’s territorial expanse. Yet Vergil’s shield of Aeneas questions the accuracy and objectivity of such triumphal representations, including its own. Propertius 3.4 suggests that triumphal representations matter more than reality to audiences who, as Ovid shows his love poems, anyway appropriate them for private purposes. But it is his exile poems on imaginary triumphs (Tristia 3.12, 4.2, Ex Ponto 2.1, 3.4) that Ovid most powerfully deconstructs imperial power’s reliance on signs wholly separate from reality, at least from a provincial perspective. Together, these poems illustrate poets’ role in sustaining the emperor’s power as well as the high stakes of their interventions in his public image. They also present reading, broadly understood, as the process that unites empire, from urban audiences’ validating viewership of triumphs to provincial subjects’ imaginative participation in Roman symbols and ceremonies. These poems thus reconstitute empire as an imaginative republic of letters.