Ovid: Epistulae ex Ponto Book I

Letters from exile: a new vessel for old grief

Issued in 13 CE, Ovid's Epistulae ex Ponto 1–3 is the last collection of Augustan poetry. Augustus died in 14, and a fourth book appeared later, probably after Ovid's death in 17. In 8 CE the poet, having incurred the lasting wrath of the princeps, had been exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain unclear. By his own account there were two charges, carmen et error (Tr. 2.207). The latter he does not want discussed, telling correspondents not to ask about it (see 1.6.23–6 and the headnote to that poem), and he directs attention instead to the carmen, the Ars amatoria, which he often condemns as if it solely wrought his ruin. In exile he continued to write, issuing two collections of elegiac poems in which he laments his fate and begs for help in mitigating it. The earlier collection, the Tristia, is partly epistolary, the Epistulae ex Ponto entirely so. The latter collection is in a sense a continuation of the Tristia – rebus idem, titulo differt, he remarks in the opening poem (Ex P. 1.1.17): this work, ‘the same in subject matter, differs in title’. The last book of the Tristia contains more verse-epistles than the four earlier books and consequently signals a transition between the preceding four books and the Epistulae ex Ponto. In the Tristia, however, Ovid does not name his addressees, fearing that his verse may harm them by calling attention to their association with the disgraced and exiled poet. Now he not only names his addressees but turns their identification to an artistic purpose: he arranges the poems of Ex P. 1–3 by addressee. At the end of the collection he claims that he ‘collected and joined’ the letters ‘together somehow, without order’, collectas utcumque sine ordine iunxi (3.9.53). They may not seem so random to the reader, but their putative disorder serves a symbolic function, meant to illustrate the principle that ‘my muse is too true an index of my woes’, Musa mea est index nimium quoque uera malorum (3.9.49). In fact it is clear that he selects the addressees for each book with an eye to variety, and his careful arrangement of letters in a largely symmetrical pattern allows most addressees to recur, some several times in the course of the three books.