Both books reviewed here approach related questions from markedly different methodological positions. Mayr’s volume is a doctoral dissertation; Kißel’s volume continues a methodological position he had already taken up in Personen und persona in den Epigrammen Martials (2022), to which the new volume explicitly refers (p. 53 n. 183; p. 120 n. 447). At first sight, the two studies look at Roman self-representation from opposite directions: Kißel’s programmatic rejection of persona-theoretical readings of Ovid’s love and exile poetry seems fundamentally incompatible with Mayr’s analysis of persuasive self-fashioning of personae in Horace, Ovid and Seneca. Yet what makes them productive to read together is that both ultimately describe the same phenomenon – the rhetorical process by which literary selves establish credibility before their audience – from opposing methodological premises.

Kißel’s question, which he characterises as ‘wie gänzlich aus der Zeit gefallen’ (p. 7), is whether the Amores, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto contain a recoverable reference to reality and, more importantly, to Ovid’s life. The book is divided into two largely independent parts: Ovid as a lover in the Amores (pp. 11–76) and Ovid as an exile in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (pp. 79–118). The treatment of the love elegies opens with a long demonstration of Corinna’s ‘reale Existenz’ (p. 17) and inner consistency across the three books. Yet many of the study’s claims are presented with a degree of certainty that readers might find problematic. This is particularly evident in the treatment of Catullus’ Lesbia as unquestionably identical with Clodia (pp. 17; 57) or in Kißel’s discussion of Corinna’s social status, where he argues firmly for her identification as hetaera or freedwoman while engaging only selectively with more recent scholarship that complicates such classifications (contrast, for instance, I. Ziogas, Law and Love in Ovid [2023], p. 86).

The core of the volume (pp. 41–66) lies in Kißel’s rejection of the concept of the elegiac self, even though he retains the terminology in a chapter heading (p. 41). For Kißel, the language of persona and literary self-fashioning obscures rather than clarifies the relation between text and reality. Against approaches grounded in intertextuality, generic convention or poetological self-reflexivity, he insists that Ovid’s poetry aims at a plausible representation of lived experience and therefore remains accessible, at least in part, to historical reconstruction. Accordingly, the Amores aim to convince their reader of an ‘objective background’ (pp. 64–5) both social and emotional. Kißel is careful to bracket both ends of the spectrum: he explicitly disclaims the recovery of biographical fact (p. 8) and concedes that an irreducible measure of fiction is inherent in any literary text (p. 52). What he wants to recover is rather the audience-directed ‘Wirklichkeit suggerierende Darstellung’ (p. 7) by which Ovid produces the effect of authentic experience. The exile section follows by necessity. Unsurprisingly, Kißel strongly rejects – as does the majority of current scholarship – the theories that question the historical reality of Ovid’s exile and repeatedly argues against readings that emphasise the literary construction of the poet’s representation of Tomis. However, Kißel goes a decisive step further, since alongside justified reservations about an overly fictionalising reading of the literary evidence, the study also advances alleged ‘proofs’ of Ovid’s exile (p. 80) and even a definitive identification of the causes of his relegation (pp. 113–18) with a degree of certainty that many readers may find excessive. This is not to say that the study lacks illuminating interpretations. Some of Kißel’s readings are genuinely persuasive: he rightly notes, for example, a significant shift in the representation of exile in the fourth book of the Epistulae ex Ponto (p. 105), a development that Mayr (pp. 126–34) tends to minimise. Moreover, Kißel’s insistence that literary interpretation must remain connected to the social realities within which Roman elegy operated (e.g. pp. 119–20) is entirely justified. Yet the broader problem lies elsewhere: the difficulty is less that Kißel argues for historical referentiality – few contemporary scholars would deny that Roman elegy is embedded in social and historical realities – than that the study frequently presents current scholarship as committed to a far more radical fictionalism than is typical of recent work.

Kißel’s portrayal of research often appears oddly detached from the present state of the field. Although the bibliography is genuinely impressive and frequently up to date, the study’s polemical targets derive predominantly from scholarship of the early 2000s and earlier. This imbalance becomes especially visible when Kißel describes a position of ‘only a few decades ago’ (p. 70), citing in support a publication from 1930 (p. 70 n. 246). As a result, the book sometimes constructs an opposition between historical and literary interpretation that no longer accurately reflects contemporary debates. Persona-theoretical approaches, particularly in more recent scholarship, have generally sought not to deny historical embeddedness but rather to mediate between textual construction and historical referentiality. This is not only evident in K. Volk’s influential discussion of Ovid’s elegiac persona (A&A 51 [2005]) from two decades ago, which is cited in Kißel’s bibliography but not engaged with in the main argument, but also in the second book under review.

Mayr’s book, although a year older than Kißel’s and carrying the much-debated term ‘persona’ in its title, demonstrates that persona-theoretical approaches need not entail the radical fictionalisation against which Kißel argues. Mayr explicitly acknowledges the impossibility both of proving historically accurate self-representation and of reducing self-fashioning to pure fictionality (pp. 19–20). Instead, he approaches ancient texts through the concept of ‘fallibility’, analysing how authors construct persuasive representations of themselves through the staging of weakness, failure and misconduct. In doing so, the study ranges comparatively across three canonical authors and distinct generic contexts. Such breadth is methodologically necessary for the comparative ambitions of the project, though it requires Mayr to define fallibility in deliberately expansive terms as an anthropological phenomenon (p. 13), encompassing ‘Eigenschaften und Handlungen, die allgemein für negativ befunden oder in einem Text negativ konnotiert werden’ (p. 11). The study is organised into five sections: a concise theoretical introduction, followed by substantial chapters of roughly equal length on Horace’s Satires, Ovid’s exile poetry and Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, before concluding with a synthetic comparison of the three authors. The unavoidable selectivity of such a wide-ranging study is generally handled very well, though the bibliography is surprisingly brief given the scale of the material treated and occasionally results in notable omissions from the secondary literature. In the discussion of Pont. 3.1 (pp. 120–5), for example, neither C. Formicola’s commentary on Book 3 (P. Ovidio Nasone: Epistulae ex Ponto, Libro III. Introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento [2017]) nor B. Larosa’s monographic commentary devoted specifically to the poem (P. Ovidii Nasonis: Epistulae ex Ponto III 1. Testo, traduzione e commento [2013]) is considered.

Nevertheless, Mayr succeeds to a remarkable degree in developing a coherent interpretative vocabulary across highly different corpora. Through the concept of fallibility, he offers a productive framework for analysing passages in which ancient authors present deliberately weakened or compromised versions of themselves. This is perhaps the study’s greatest strength. Rather than defending ancient authors against their own self-critical or self-deprecating statements, Mayr asks what literary and persuasive functions these representations fulfil. Mayr’s readings of individual texts are genre-specific, philologically careful and consistently moving from precise close reading to a larger argument about role-construction. For Horace’s Satires Mayr argues that the poet’s representation of his own vitia and social limitations serves pre-emptively to neutralise external criticism and stabilise his literary authority (esp. pp. 80–1). In Ovid’s exile poetry the sustained representation of suffering and weakness becomes the basis of a new poetic authority: exile appears simultaneously as crisis and as the condition of literary productivity. Particularly effective is Mayr’s analysis of the exul poeta et patiens, whose fallibility enhances rather than diminishes the credibility of the poetic voice (pp. 134–5). In the chapter on Seneca Mayr interprets the philosopher’s self-presentation as a morally struggling proficiens as central to the paraenetic programme of the Epistulae Morales: by acknowledging his own failures, Seneca combines rational instruction with emotional persuasion and presents ethical improvement as an ongoing but attainable process (pp. 188–91).

One may reasonably question whether these conclusions are entirely new or whether the category of ‘fallibility’ occasionally risks becoming so broad that quite different forms of self-representation are subsumed under the same interpretative rubric. Yet the study’s most distinctive contribution lies in the comparative horizon it opens. By placing Horace, Ovid and Seneca alongside one another, Mayr demonstrates how negatively coded self-representation can function as a literary strategy across genres and intellectual contexts. At the same time, the study repeatedly gestures beyond its individual analyses towards wider comparative implications that come fully into focus only in the concluding section. There Mayr groups the material into five broader typologies (moral failure, physical illness, literary failure, fallibility as a point of departure for learning and fallibility in contexts of self-justification) and relates them back to the passages discussed throughout the book. The result is highly stimulating, though one occasionally wishes that Mayr had pursued the comparative implications still further, for instance regarding the diachronic dimension of the corpus or possible strategic non-admissions of fallibility. Nevertheless, research into fallibility in Graeco-Roman antiquity remains in its early stages (see e.g. T. Fuhrer and J. Soldo [edd.], Fallibility and Fallibilism in Ancient Philosophy and Literature [2024]), and Mayr’s study succeeds in opening productive paths for future work.

What ultimately makes the books rewarding to read together is not simply the methodological opposition between them, but the unexpected point at which their arguments converge. On the final pages of his study Kißel argues that Ovid’s poetry had to produce an ‘überzeugende Inszenierung’ (p. 119) of reality: in the Amores, in order to move its audience emotionally and shape readers’ responses to erotic experience; in the exile poetry, in order to generate sympathy and thereby secure support. Strikingly, Mayr, despite his different methodological premises, attributes precisely this persuasive function to the literary representation of fallibility in Ovid’s exile poetry (e.g. p. 134). In this respect Kißel’s notion of ‘convincing staging’ and Mayr’s understanding of ‘Persuasionsziele’ (passim) pursued through ‘Inszenierungsstrategien’ (passim) of weakness and failure appear less opposed than fundamentally aligned. Both studies, in different ways, assume that literary self-fashioning succeeds only insofar as it corresponds to recognisable expectations shared by author and audience. Readers moving through both studies are therefore left with the impression that the long-standing question of whether the ‘persona’ of Roman literature should be understood as historically ‘real’ or literarily ‘fictive’ may not fully capture the interpretative problems that both studies ultimately bring into focus. More revealing, despite the methodological differences between the two works, is the question of how literary texts construct credibility and persuade their audiences. If literary self-representation depends upon producing socially recognisable forms of persuasion, greater attention must be paid to the norms, expectations and social structures of the audiences meant to be convinced. These studies suggest that an equally important question may therefore be under what cultural conditions the literary performance of weakness, suffering or moral failure could become persuasive at all.