¹ Fredericks, B. R.(now Nagle),‘Tristia4.10: Poet's Autobiography and Poetic Autobiography’, TAPA106 (1976)Google Scholar, 139–54, is the most important of these appreciations and includes a survey of earlier interpretations; valuable insights into the poem may also be gained from Misch, G.,A History of Autobiography in Antiquity(English trans, from ed.3,London,1950).Google Scholar

² For these, see the commentaries of de, T.J., Publii Ovidii Nasonis Tristium Liber IV(Groningen,1951)Google Scholar;Luck, G.,P. Ovidius Naso: Tristia II(Heidelberg,1977).Google Scholar

³ See Kranz, W., ‘Sphragis’,RhMus104 (1961),3–46,97–124Google Scholar; Paratore, E., ‘L’evoluzione della “sphragis” dalle prime alle ultime opere di Ovidio',Atti del Convegno internazionale Ovidiano(Rome,1959), 1.173–203, especially p. 201 for a list of motifs from earlier Ovidian sphragis-poemswhich recur in Tristia4.10,Google Scholar

⁴ On this elegy see Fedeli, P.,Properzio: Elegie libro IV(Bari,1965);Google ScholarReitzenstein,‘Uber die Elegie des Properz auf den Tod der Cornelia’,Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse: Akademie der Wissenschaflen und der Literatur, Mainz(1970), no. 6.Google Scholar

⁵ See Paratore, AttiI (see n. 3), 196, on Tristia4.10 as sphragisand apologia;as he notes, Tristia 2is another case where Ovid uses the apologetic mode very expansively.

⁶ Cf.Evans, H.B.,Publica Carmina: Ovid's Books from Exile(Nebraska,1983),87:‘It might even be suggested that Ovid planned his collections from exile as a four-book block of poetry, analogous to the four books of Cornelius Gallus and Propertius. The poet indeed refers to Tristia1–4 as a separate corpus in the first couplet of his next collection from Tomis.’This is, however, an overstatement: compare Tristia5.1.1 f. Hunc quoque de Getico, nostri studiose, libellum litore praemissis quattuor adde meiswithAm.2.1.If.:Hoc quoque composui Paelignis natus aquosis ille ego nequitiae Naso poeta meae.Google Scholar

⁷ On this rhetorical device see Arist. Rhet1367b34.

⁸ See OLDs.v. testificatioa; also teslatioa.

⁹ One would give much to know whether Gallus, too, concluded his fourth book with an apologia.

¹⁰ Dating by consular year (5f.); by months (10); by days (llf.); by the religious calendar (13f.); by Roman clothing customs (27f.); by years of a man's age (3If.); by stages in a man's physical development (58; cf. 93f.); by lustraxs(77f.); by Olympiads (95f.).

¹¹ About Ovid's brother B. R. Fredericks, op. cit. (n. 1), 146, comments: ‘The facts about him are not included for their intrinsic interest, but for their function in elucidating Ovid's poetic career’

¹² The four Gospels provide the best known instances of this tendency. In biographies of Greek literary men there were sometimes elaborate infancy narratives (see my ‘Fiction in the Biographies of Ancient Writers’,Ancient Society5,272–4); anecdotes about the boyhood and adolescence of poets do occur, but they are not plentiful. In Ovid's autobiography we may perhaps discern the beginnings of that greater interest in the psychology of the young which we find in the later Roman empire, notably in St Augustine's Confessiones.

¹³ See Kenney, E. J., ‘Ovid and the Law’, YCS21 (1969),243–63, on the various official capacities in which Ovid is known to have served. Ovid's account of his public career in Tristia4.10 is highly selective.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Compare Sallust, Cat.3.3ff.sed ego adulescentulus initio, sicuti plerique, studio ad rent publicam latus sum, ibique mihi multa advorsafuereetc. Misch, op. cit. (n. 1), I, 119f., 327f., sees a prototype for this kind of narrative in Plato's account of his decision to leave politics for philosophy in the Seventh Epistle324b ff.:etc.

¹⁵ Note in particular that he omits all specific reference to poetry other than the Amores.No explanation for this baffling fact so far advanced has seemed very satisfying; see B. R. Fredericks, op. cit. (n.l), 144f.

¹⁶ I know of nothing remotely comparable in any other ancient poets' Lives;remarkably little attention is paid in them to wives and mistresses.

¹⁷ How standard it was in apologiato refer to one's illustrious predecessors and to deny that one had been motivated by financial considerations is a question which calls for further investigation. However, the notion that Ovid might have specifically remembered Isocrates'Antidosisis not inherently absurd, as will emerge in due course.

¹⁸ Op. cit. (n. 1), 142 n. 12.

¹⁹ I cite this instance of a type of transition commonplace in defence orations merely exempli gratia,though actually there is no need to doubt that Ovid might have studied Plato's Apology,as we shall see.

²⁰ See e.g. Cic. Marcell.13 etsi aliqua culpa tenemur erroris humani, ab scelere eerie liberati sumus; Lig.17 alii errorem appellant(sc. Ligarii causam)..., scelus praeter te nemo.It would be highly controversial to suggest that Cicero or Ovid had a direct knowledge of Aristotle's Poetics(see D.W.Lucas, Aristotle, PoeticsOxford, 1968, xxiiff.; Janko, R.,Aristotle on Comedy, London,1984Google Scholar,Mi.),though it was in Rome in the first century B.C. that Aristotle's esoteric writings were restored to circulation after long neglect (see Moraux, P.,Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen, Berlin/New York 1973, vol. I, 1–94; W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophyvi, Cambridge, 1981, 59–65; F. H. Sandbach, Aristotle and the Stoics,Cambridge, 1985, 1–3). But Cicero certainly knew the Rhetoric(see e.g. De Inv.1.5.7; Brut.46; Or.(114, 228), where the antithesis occurs in 1.12.14 (1372b18); he also knew the Nicomachean Ethics(see De Fin.5.12) with its important classification of types of harmful action (5.8, 1135bl Iff.). General awareness of the concepts of Aristotelian dramatic theory is shown e.g. by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who in De Thuc.5 refers to in early Greek historiography. Another older contemporary of Ovid, Nicolaus Damascenus, wrote an autobiography influenced considerably by Peripatetic ethics FGrHist90 F 131–9, discussed by Misch, op. cit. (n. 1), i, (307–15).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Note the bold imitation here of the Greek‘vivid’ indicative in indirect questions. The idiom is one that Ovid uses elsewhere: see Her.16.78; Met.10.637; Tristia1.3.52; Ex P.1.8.25, but specific reminiscence of the Phaedoneed not be ruled out. Misch, op. cit. (n. 1), i, 106f. sees the Phaedopassage as the prototype behind a number of later autobiographical narratives concerned with stages in intellectual development.

²² It was recognized in the ancient theory of rhetorical conquestioset out by Cicero in De Inv.1.106–9 that one might arouse sympathy either (locusI) simply by pointing a contrast between one's present misfortune and past good fortune or (locusV) by narrating one's calamities straightforwardly without specific appeals for sympathy.

²³

²⁴ See Lattimore, R.,Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs(Urbana,1962), 279 n. 108.Google Scholar

²⁵ For these see Degrassi, A.,Inscriptions Latinae liberae rei publicae(Gottingen,1957).Google Scholar

²⁶ Degrassi 793, 982.

²⁷ Degrassi 817, 932, 977,985.

²⁸ Four examples are cited in Jory, D. W.,Inscriptions Urbis Romae Latinae: Indices(Berlin,1974)Google Scholar: CILvi. 11407, line 1; 33961 = 10098, line 5; 1372, line 1; 34066+A = 13481, line 3; 1692, line 2; for further examples from outside Rome see index to CLE (Anthologia Latino, pars posterior: Carmina Epigraphica, ed. Buecheler, F.,Leipzig,1993).Google Scholar

²⁹ Donat. Vit. Verg.42, p. 16.165ff.; Servius, Vit. Verg.p. 23.33ff. Hardie.

³⁰ CILIX. 1837 = CLE960, Degrassi 985.

³¹ C/L VI.17985 + A = 34112, line 1; 33960= 10097, line 7; 34066 + A= 13481, line 5.

³² I make this assertion on the basis of the study of Greek poets' Liveswhich gave rise to my publications ‘Fiction in the Biographies of Ancient Writers’,Ancient Society5 (1974), 231–75, and ‘Traditional Narrative, Inference and Truth in the Livesof Greek Poets’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar4 (1983), 315–69. See also Lefkowitz, M. R.,Lives of the Greek Poets(London,1981)Google Scholar. Recent editions of Greek and Roman poets' Livesare scattered through editions of the separate poets. There is no modern comprehensive collection to replace Westermann, A.,Biographi Graeci Minores(Braunschweig,1845, repr. Amsterdam, 1964)Google Scholar, and there has never been a Latin counterpart. As ‘complete’ Vitaeneed to be studied in relation to more fragmentary testimonia,comprehensive collections of testimoniasuch as S. Radt's for Sophocles (TGFvol. 4, Gottingen, 1977) and Tarditi's, G. for Archilochus (Archilochus: Fragmenta, Rome,1968Google Scholar, 3–55) represent the most valuable modern contributions to the presentation of the material. The Hellenistic Livesof poets are only extant in epitomes and fragments and, as much Greek and Latin poetry is also lost that could have contained quasi-autobiographical pronouncements influential in a poet of Ovid's date, the gaps in our knowledge of the intellectual background to his poetic self-presentation are huge; for instance we do not know which of the Greek poets Ovid is referring to in the line, nee nos aeriae voce monemur avis (Ars Am.1.26).

³³ See Orion s.v., 58.8 Sturz = Archilochus T 118 Tarditi:(sc. ):cf. Hor. Ars Poet.77f. quis tamen exiguos elegos emiserit auctor grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice Us esl.

³⁴ He was also reckoned a transmitter of the poetic tradition which was passed down from Linus eventually to Gallus (Verg. Eel.6.64ff.).

³⁵ Hesiod, Theog.22ff., cf. Vitae Hesiodiin Hesiod,ed. Solmsen, F. (Oxford,1969), 1–3; A. Colonna, ‘Iprolegomeniad Esiodo e la Vita Esiodeadi Giovanni Tzetzes’, Bolletino del comitato per la preparazione della edizione nazionale dei classici greci e latinin.s. 2 (1953),27–39. For the vocation of Archilochus see the inscription of Mnesiepes, Archilochus T4 Tarditi, first edited by N. M. Kontoleon, ‘’, Eph. Arch.(1952), 32–95.Google Scholar

³⁶ See especially frs 120, 193 Tarditi. Plutarch quotes in his De exilio12 lines by Archilochus unfairly alleging that Thasos was wild and bleak (fr. 17 Tarditi): Here is an observation to bear in mind when considering the discrepancies between Ovid's statements about Tomis and the geographical realities, on which see Fitton, A. D.,‘The Unreality of Ovid's Tomitan Exile’10,2 (Feb.1985),18–22.Google Scholar

³⁷ This is especially probable if lines 2–5 (with fata... dulciain line 2) are an amoebean response to a quatrain ending with our line 1, as I suggest in ‘The “Gallus Papyrus”: a New. Interpretation’,CQ34 (1984), 167–74. I also suggest very tentatively (p. 172 n. 34) that Verg. I Eel.10.37–9 might reflect stages in an amoebean contest poem prior to those found in the papyrus fragment. Ovid's use of circumsoner armisand tristia fatain consecutive lines fits in well with this hypothesis, for what it is worth.

³⁸ Ovid, Tristia4.10.8; Propertius 4.1.131: Vita Tibulliin e.g. Rolfe, J. C. (ed.), Suetonius Cambridge, Mass.,1914), n.492.Google Scholar

³⁹ P. 187.

⁴⁰ See Menander Rhetor, 344.31ff.:

⁴¹ Ilk ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena\ carmen et egressus sihis vicina coegi\ ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono,\ gratum opus agricolis; at nunc horrentia Martis \ arma virumque cano...

⁴² The classic expositions of the case for and against authenticity, Henry, J.,Aeneidea I (London,1873)Google Scholar, 1–123 and Austin, R.G.,‘IIIe ego qui quondam…’ CQ18 (1968)Google Scholar, 107–15, by no means cover all the ramifications of this complex problem. For further bibliography see Suerbaum, W., ANRW Il.31.1(1980)206f.Google Scholar

⁴³ See e.g.Wilkinson, L.P.,Ovid Recalled(Cambridge,1955),238;Google ScholarMariotti, S., ‘La camera poetica di Ovidio’,Belfagor12(1957), 631;Google ScholarGrisart, A.,‘La publication des Metamorphoses: une source du recit d'vide’,(Roma,1959), n, 142–9;Google ScholarBrooks, Otis,Ovid as an Epic Poet(Cambridge,1966), 89–90 n. 1.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Nagle, B.R.,The Poetics of Exile(Brussels,1980), 29f., makes the valid point that the analogue for Ovid's book-burning to which he overtly draws our attention in Tristia1.7.17f. is a mythological one.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ For example, out of the Roman poets singled out by Ovid as important to him in Tristia4.10.43ff., Propertius, Horace, Virgil and Tibullus are extant, but very little indeed remains of the works of Macer, Ponticus, Bassus or Gallus.

⁴⁶

⁴⁷

⁴⁸ Text in Acta Divi Augusti I ed. Riccobono, S. (Rome,1945)Google Scholar; cf. Res Gestae Divi Augusti, ed. Brunt, J. M. (Oxford,1967).Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Note the literary tone of such phrases as rem publicam a dominatione factionis oppressamand cum consul uterque in bello cecidisset.On the De vita suaand other prose works of Augustus see Suet. Aug.85; on the Res Gestaeand its purpose, Ibid 101.4.

⁵⁰ Cf. Plut. Cic.45 (a passage where Augustus is later acknowledged as a source):

⁵¹ This line is also found in Lygdamus (Tib. 3) 5.18, to designate his date of birth.

⁵² N.b. Ovid does not mention all the official capacities in which he served. We know him to have been also a decemvir stlitibus iudicandis (Fasti4.383f.) and an orator in the centumviral court (Tristia 2.93–6); seeKenney, E.J.,‘Ovid and the Law’, YCS 21 (1969), 243–63. Now we can see why he suppresses such information in this context!Google Scholar

⁵³ Fragments in Malcovati, H.,Caesaris Augusti Imperatohs Operum Fragmenla(Torino,1928).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Suet. Aug.2.3: Ipse Augustus nihil amplius quam equestri familia ortum se scribit vetere ac locuplete, et in qua primus senator pater suus fuerit.Ovid's words also allude to earlier lines of his own in the sphragisto the Amores: si quid id est, usque a proavis vetus ordinis heres, \ non modo militiae turbine factus eques (Am.3.15.5f.)

⁵⁵ Two bereavements are mentioned in Suet. Aug.61.2: matrem amisit in primo consulatu, sororem Octaviam quinquagensimum et quartum agens aetatis annum,but the latter one occurred later than the period covered by the De vita sua.Suetonius' information here cannot therefore simply have been lifted from that source, and it is not to be ruled out that Augustus referred to the loss of his mother, as Ovid wrote about his brother, in connection with a narrative of his rise to office, rather than at the start of a distinct section devoted to his private life. The death of Augustus' father, omitted in Aug.61.2, has been mentioned earlier (8.1) in its chronologically proper place just after the account of his birth and naming.

⁵⁶ Suet. Aug.62.2: Mox Schboniam in matrimonium accepit nuptam ante duobus consularibus, ex ahero etiam matrem. cum hac quoque divortium fecit, ‘pertaesus’, ut scribit, ‘morum perver-. sitatem eius’, ac statim Liviam Drusillam matrimonio Tiberi Neronis et quidem praegnantemI abduxit dilexitque et probavit unice ac perseveranter.

⁵⁷ " See Tristia1.1.69ff. (Ovid addresses his book): forsitan expectes, an in alta Palatia missum scandere te iubeam Caesareamque domum. \ ignoscant augusta mini loca dique locorum.j venit in hoc illafulmen ab arce capul.

⁵⁸ In Rhet.2.8.13 (1386a) Aristotle elaborates on this topic and specifies the various respects in which one man may be like another; these include his public offices and his family

⁵⁹ Quintilian introduces the subject of figured rhetoric, evidently something very popular in his time, as follows: iam enim ad id genus quod et frequentissimum est et expectari maxime credo veniendum est, in quo per quandam suspicionem quod non dicimus accipi volumus, non ulique contrarium, ut in , sed aliud latens et auditori quasi inveniendum, quod, ut supra ostendi, iam fere solum schema a nostris vocatur, et unde controversiae figuratae dicuntur. eius triplex usus est: unus si dicerepalam parum tulum est, alter si non decet, tertius qui venustalis modo gratia adhibetur et ipsa novitate ac varietate magis quam si relatio sit recta delectat(9.2.65–6).

⁶⁰ Dionysii Halicarnasei Opusculan ed. Usener, H. and Radermacher, L. (Leipzig, 1904), 295–358.Google Scholar

⁶¹ See Wiedemann, T., CQ25 (1975), 264–71.Google Scholar

⁶² Theories that Ovid never went into exile at Tomis are not for me. See n. 36 above. The Roman empire was far too well organized for such a thing to be credible.

⁶³ Seneca the Elder, Contr.2.4.12–13, touches interestingly on several aspects of political sensitivity in the time of Augustus: an unintended political meaning is read into a declamation by Porcius Latro (one of Ovid's teachers); another prosecutor deliberately takes the risk of insulting Agrippa. Mihi videtur admiratione dignus divus Augustus sub quo tantum Hcuit, sedhorum non possum misereri qui tanti putant caput potius quam dictum perdere,comments Seneca. It seems that Ovid's attitude to risk-taking was not unparalleled in contemporary Rome.