The bi-millennium of Ovid's death saw a multiplicity of conferences on this poet on a global scale. The attractive multi-lingual volume under review assembles papers on Ovid's exile poetry from the 2017 meeting of the ‘Réseau La poésie augustéenne’, which took place at the Freie Universität Berlin. Eleven of the original 22 conference papers are included in the book. Its overall scope is determined by an understanding of Ovid's exile literature as a radical form of writing.
The volume's main body consists of two parts: Part 1, ‘“Leben” im Exil’, contains six contributions and focuses on the Ovidian poems written or revised in exile (regrettably, there is nothing on the Ibis). It deals with various aspects of their literary, historical and political dimensions. The five papers of Part 2, ‘Exil und Exzess’, treat the reception of Ovid's exile poetry from late antiquity to the twentieth century.
In the introduction Möller briefly reflects on the terms ‘exile’ and ‘exile literature’, defined as any text produced in any form of forced or self-inflicted isolation (including ‘inner exile’). The editor succinctly recaps the sparse information we have about Ovid's relegation to the Black Sea, especially the poet's famous statement about his carmen et error (Trist. 2.207). Möller highlights both the uncertainty of the extant information and Ovid's literary strategy to reflect the ideal life of an artist ex negativo (p. 10). She defines the term ‘excessive writing’ as the poet's crossing of boundaries of space, time, life and art and sets out the volume's objective as tracing Ovid's ‘immoderateness’ as an aesthetic category in his exile writing (cf. L. Fulkerson, A Poet on the Margins [2016], on repetition and excess as two universal tendencies of Ovid's poetry). Admittedly, not all papers comply with the volume's motto. Finally, the editor summarises the chapters, which are written in English, German, Italian and French.
The first part starts with the only contribution on the Fasti. J. Fabre-Serris investigates the cultural input brought to Latium by immigrants before the foundation of Rome. Her erudite intertextual reading identifies several Ovidian deviations from Virgil, including window-references to Tibullus. Interestingly, Ovid's most prominent exilic hero is not Aeneas, but Evander. According to Fabre-Serris's political interpretation, Ovid accentuates the hospitality of Evander's mother Carmentis towards exiles like Hercules as a veiled request to the empress Livia. Not all readers will, however, agree with the author's conclusion that passages like these are identifiable as exilic revisions of the Fasti.
M.L. Delvigo re-examines Ovid's choice of genre in exile. She particularly focuses on the metapoetic meanings of travelling and retraces the continuities with the poet's pre-exilic work, using the example of the epic sea storm. A further investigation of other predominantly epic structures, such as battle descriptions (cf. Pont. 4.7), would have been beneficial (cf. G. Williams in B. Weiden Boyd [ed.], Brill's Companion to Ovid [2002], on the epic dimension of Ovid's exile poetry, with further bibliography). Overall, this paper can be read as a call for an ‘epic’ correspondent to H. Tränkle's 1963 study on elegiac elements in the Metamorphoses.
Generic aspects also play a role in the editor's own contribution. Möller reanalyses Ovid's frequent references to Odysseus as a key example of the poet's exilic rhetoric. She evaluates the large-scale syncrisis between Naso and the prototypical mythical hero of travelling and suffering and analyses this correspondence with regard to gods, character pathology and eroticism. Möller adds an additional layer to the poet's widely established rhetorical self-fashioning by redefining it as a generic agon: Ovid's mockery of Odysseus as an exemplum patientiae and the exaggeration of his own sufferings also serve to distance his elegiacs from epic poems like Homer's Odyssey and his own Metamorphoses.
M. Labate convincingly expounds the exiled poet's self-construction as a ‘Horace manqué’. Contrary to his predecessor, Ovid did not profit from the clementia Caesaris. Most interestingly, in Trist. 2.23–6, he evokes not only the Carmen saeculare entrusted to Horace, but also a poetic celebration of the Magna Mater (supposedly after ad 3), for which Ovid would have been the ‘natural’ candidate. Labate adopts a view that has been criticised by part of the scholarship (W. Anderson, BMCR 1995.12.15, on G. Williams, Banished Voices [1994]): he argues that Ovid presents himself as a loyal Augustan poet and demonstrates how he blames some tendentious informers for having reported a distorted picture of his works to the emperor who – as stated previously by Horace – lacked the time for reading poetry himself.
G. Rosati demonstrates how the exiled poet aims to influence the double audience of his friends and public opinion via his letters (esp. Ex Ponto), thus trying to reintegrate himself into the social network around the princeps. Characters such as Augustus’ kinsman Paullus Fabius Maximus are shown to refrain from intervening on behalf of Ovid because of their predominant allegiance towards the emperor. While Rosati plausibly argues that the ‘microfisica del potere’ represents both a helpful network and a filter that limits the poet's access to the ruler, his brief references to M. Foucault's and J. Bentham's ideas about social control could have been developed further.
The fascinating contribution by E. Galfré assesses the poetic credibility of Ovidian triumph prophecies. The poet had already made two ‘quite patently unsuccessful predictions’ (p. 112) about Gaius Caesar, who died in Parthia (Ars 1), and Tiberius, who celebrated a triumph on Illyria instead of Germania (Trist. 4.2). So, what about the anticipated triumph for Germanicus in Pont. 2.1? Galfré persuasively argues that Ovid associates himself with this Caesar: the poet describes both of them as risking their lives at the borders of the empire, and then makes their safe returns to Rome preconditions for the triumph. Ovid thus exceeds limits of time, space and ‘facts’ (cf. now R. Kirstein in R. Conrad et al. [edd.], Säkulare Prozessionen [2019], on facts and fiction in Ovid's representations of triumphs).
Part 2 opens with P. Hardie's exemplary analysis of the reception of Ovid's exile writing in late antiquity. His insightful paper compares Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo and a propempticon by Paulinus of Nola as examples of the contrasting pagan and Christian reception of exilic themes and topoi. Hardie demonstrates how both authors build on intertextual networks about ‘Rome’ and ‘exile’, centred on Virgil's Aeneid. His assessment of the convergence of biblical and Ovidian passages in later writers and seemingly misleading geographical indications, which are in fact literary references to Ovid's exile, is particularly instructive.
In his complex article A. Barchiesi tackles the concept of ‘autography’, which embraces the relationship between an author's life and his works. He spotlights Ovid as the model author for constructing such connections and traces a line of reception to Boccaccio and modern social media writers. Barchiesi, moreover, re-evaluates the question of Ovid's audience and partly identifies it with that of the Augustan legislation. Referring to recent discoveries about a possible revision of the leges Iuliae in ad 4, he proposes a corresponding commentary on epigraphic material as the possible ‘missing link’ (p. 148) that bridges the publication of Ovid's Ars and his banishment.
W. Fitzgerald investigates the structural relationship between poets and exiles. He carefully distinguishes the inwardly and the outwardly directed roles of poetry, i.e. Ovid's reasons for still writing and sending poems. According to Fitzgerald, the motivation for the poet's ‘excessive’ writing in exile oscillates between an orchestrated obsession and some kind of ‘narcissistic masochism’ (p. 158). He makes several subtle observations on some of Ovid's favourite words in his exile poetry, for example modus (ranging from the elegiac metre to possible real-world effects of his poetry) and fama (a mutual relation between news and poetry that comes from Rome to Tomis or vice versa).
M. Haas reads Ovid's exile poetry through the lens of C. Ransmayr's 1988 novel The Last World: in Trist. 4.1 Ovid appears to outline a theory of poetic moderation, but due to his seemingly unlimited suffering, he exceeds the poetic modus in various ways (e.g. by trying to forget his grief instead of simply alleviating it). Haas convincingly establishes the parallels between the questions of finding the modus of writing (Ovid) and narrating a story to its end (Ransmayr). He shows how the twentieth-century writer extends the theme of transition from life to art, which had been an occasional punchline in Ovid's exile poetry, to a central technique of his novel.
The volume closes with an essay by J.P. Schwindt. Based on R. Barthes’s ideas about ‘la fatigue’, Schwindt interprets a poet's exhaustion as fertile soil for literary creation (building on the German wordplay ‘[Er-]Schöpfung’). He analyses Ovid's constraint to write by examining his use of repetition as a structural principle (cf. L. Galasso in P.E. Knox [ed.], A Companion to Ovid [2009], on the ‘rhetoric of repetitiveness’), the intensity of his text (highlighting the value of singing per se) and the constitution of the elegiac ‘I’. While the asserted analogies to Christian rituals may not provide a fully-fledged explanation for the banished poet's ‘Schreibzwang’ (p. 183), Schwindt's thoughts on the history of Latin elegy, and in particular Ovid's manipulation of the ars/vita-relation and his use of the lex Catulli as a literary topos are convincing.
The book is rounded off with two overall helpful indexes (nominum and locorum), but does not contain an index rerum, which could have facilitated the reconstruction of the different theoretical approaches. The main text is almost free from typographical mistakes or serious errors (e.g. there is a miscalculation on p. 117: in ad 1 Augustus celebrated his 63rd not his 64th birthday), but the footnotes and bibliographies would have benefited from better copy-editing. While these errors and inconsistencies are inconsequential, readers with a general interest in exile literature, but without knowledge of Latin may be discouraged by the fact that longer quotations are not always translated into the respective modern language (Greek quotations are always translated). The papers are logically arranged. As many of the contributions gain additional value when read together (e.g. the reader will profit from studying Labate, Rosati and Barchiesi on the late Augustan regime or Fitzgerald and Haas on the meanings of modus), it would have been desirable to find more cross-references.
While new scholarship on Ovid's exile poetry today still runs the same risks that once led to its long devaluation, above all a feeling of repetition admitted by the poet himself, the contributors to this volume succeed in adding new layers of interpretation to Ovid's final works, with a focus on the intersections between life and art. They provide rewarding readings from different perspectives (from traditional philology to twentieth-century literature and philosophy) that augment our understanding of the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto.
