From the whole of Roman elegy, Ovid’s exile poetry is perhaps singularly susceptible to a narratological reading such as Edoardo Galfré offers here in a revision of his 2019 doctoral dissertation. I say ‘susceptible’, because the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto — let’s set aside the Ibis for now — tell a calamitous personal tale that begins the night of Ovid’s forced departure from the city in Tr. 1.3 in late autumn a.d. 8 to, say, the latest datable poem in the collection, Pont. 4.9, which Ronald Syme’s History in Ovid (1978), 42, placed in ‘late summer of 16’. The singular contribution of G.’s study, however, is that this story never really ends; the book-by-book publication of Tr. and Pont. creates instead a ‘serial narrative’ (19: narrazione a puntate) that grows over time — the ‘evoluzione’ of G.’s subtitle — continuously added to (20: una poesia fatta di addenda), ever-repeating and deliberately open-ended. Tragically, the same can be said of the punishment of exile itself, described by Ovid at Tr. 2.127: Vita data est, citraque necem tua constitit ira (‘my life was spared, and your anger stopped short of slaughter’), which verse helps G. conclude ch. 1: the poet has been left alive, but barely, and his punishment recurs in a never-ending Tomitan limbo. That Ovid presents these poems as letters suggests that we are reading an epistolary novel (187: romanzo epistolare), an idea I had myself entertained, but lacked the methodological apparatus to express.

G. makes a persuasive case for reading these poems as ‘una storia di un esule’ along narratological lines in a brisk introduction, where he defends his diachronic reading (16) and builds on the work of D. P. Fowler on ‘closure’ and S. Hinds on the ‘a-temporality’ of exile. Ch. 1 reprises arguments from CJ 117 (2021), 32–66, where G. presents Tr. 1 as a totus libellus, ‘a whole book’ — or as G. calls it here the ‘monobiblos ovidiano’ (38), cast along neoteric lines similar to Catullus and Propertius — which does not so much end as break off in the middle of a sea-storm. What’s new here is that Tr. 1 already looks ahead to book 2, where the poet caps the address to his libellus from 1.123: plura quidem mandare tibi … habebam ‘I had more to send you with’ by referencing his crimina at Tr. 2.3: cur modo damnatas repeto, mea crimina, Musas ‘why now rehash that the Muses, the sources of the charges against me, have been condemned?’. The plura of Tr. 1 become the crimina of Tr. 2, and in G.’s illuminating reading there is always more to be added, especially from a poet proverbial for copia or ‘expressive excess’ who seems never to come to a close.

Ch. 2 argues for a poetics of Tr. 3–5 in which each book appears to offer a conclusion while paradoxically also necessitating a further instalment. G. expands this tidy insight into how the exile’s experience balances between a goal-oriented telos, which is both spatial (recall) and temporal (reprieve), and a cyclical repetition that appears to be infinite or, as he states, ‘un movimento appunto ciclico, un eterno ritorno’ (120). Clearly, the only one who can end these poems, which is to say end the poet’s exile, is the emperor, who for G. appears not to have the will — or, in my view, the interest — and the Tristia’s five books close with the praise of Ovid’s wife (instead of, say, a sphragis to seal the poet’s own glory) and another ship about to set sail (Tr. 5.14.44), a symbol here, according to G. (102), not of arrival but of ongoing voyage.

That voyage, of course, takes us to the poet’s next exilic collection, letters not just in spirit but in form, and the subject of G.’s final chapter on the epistolary representation of Ovid’s exile. He moves through the letter’s formal features and builds, again, on the work of S. Hinds, PCPhS 31 (1985), 16, about ‘the internal, literary format’ of Tr. — and of the exile poetry generally — catching up in Pont. to ‘the external, real-life fact of its always being written for posting’, i.e. as letters. Here the argument pivots on the collection’s first poem, 1.1.17: rebus idem, titulo differt ‘in subject the same, in title different’; the exile’s permanent suffering established in Tr. reasserts itself, even as the poet introduces something new: his addressees’ names, 1.1.17–18: et epistula cui sit/non occultato nomine missa docet ‘the letter itself reveals to whom it has been sent without hiding the name’. By Pont. 4, however, G. argues that the very form of the letter begins to dissolve and the linear time of exile collapses into the eternal, cyclical time of the Roman state.

This book deepens our understanding of Ovid’s exile poetry and, especially, of how Tr. relate to Pont. The claim, however, that Ib. might serve as ‘una sorta di caso-studio’ (23) for G.’s narratological approach and these poems’ unfinished quality, a never-ending curse on a constant loop, is left underdeveloped (cf. 41, 131f.). A minor quibble about an otherwise compelling study that shows complete mastery of the exilic corpus — G.’s fluency with all of Ovid’s work and with Catullus, Vergil, Horace and Propertius is impressive — and demonstrates the vitality of the poet’s voice in exile and the life-and-death stakes attending artistic expression before a ruler whose temporal power is absolute.