Tristia 3.3 purports to be a ‘death-bed’ letter addressed by the sick poet to his wife in Rome (3.3.1–4), in which Ovid, banished from Rome on Augustus' orders, foresees his burial in Tomi as the ultimate form of exilic displacement (3.3.29–32). In order to avoid such a permanent form of exclusion from his homeland, Ovid issues instructions for his burial in the suburbs of Rome (3.3.65–76), dictating a four-line epitaph to be inscribed upon his tomb (3.3.73–6). However, despite the careful instructions he outlines for his burial and physical memorial, Ovid asserts: maiora libelli | et diuturna magis sunt monumenta mihi (‘my little books are a greater and more long-lasting monument for me’, 3.3.77–8), expressing his belief in his continued poetic afterlife. Scholars have seen this poem's concerns as above all literary, concentrating on Ovid's exploitation and development of elegiac and Augustan models which also treat the themes of death and poetic immortality.Footnote 1 However, although Ovid's portrayal of what purports to be personal experience draws extensively upon earlier poetry, and, as we shall see, the poem gains much of its power from its engagement with the tradition that poetry alone can memorialize, previous studies have failed to analyse how Ovid consistently plays up the element that marks him out from the predecessors who had imagined their own deaths and poetic afterlives: that is, his status as an exile.Footnote 2 Ovid's insistence on burial in his native land – from which he had been excluded in life – and his assertion of his poetic immortality in a poem which repeatedly stresses his exilic status, thus take on a markedly political angle, which had been absent or more muted in the models he exploits.
This article explores the way in which Ovid gives a new and specifically exilic slant to traditions about death, poetic immortality and monumentality. It falls into three sections. The first traces the equation between exile and death in Roman life and literature, and explores Ovid's ambivalent characterization of his exile as a form of death, in order to allow us to locate his treatment of death and immortality in Tristia 3.3 in the wider context of his exile poetry. The next section analyses how, when dictating his funeral arrangements and epitaph, Ovid manipulates poetic models and motifs to emphasize their contemporary and political aspect. The third and final section examines Ovid's treatment of the theme of immortality, and his exploitation of the motif that poetry bestows immortality, with particular reference to its use in Augustan verse. I argue that, in the light of Ovid's exile, he gives this poetic motif an explicitly and unavoidably political twist, building on earlier poetic hints of poetry's superiority as a means of securing immortality over the massive self-aggrandizing tombs of rulers, as Ovid makes a number of allusions to the largest and most famous tomb in contemporary Rome, the Mausoleum of the emperor Augustus.
In addition to uncovering the ways in which Tristia 3.3 develops as well as departs from literary tradition to create an innovatively exilic and political reworking of his poetic forebears, this paper therefore also offers a detailed examination of a previously unrecognized example of Ovid's allusive engagement with the monuments of Augustan Rome, a subject which is increasingly of interest to Ovidian scholars.Footnote 3
1. ‘AND SAY'ST THOU YET THAT EXILE IS NOT DEATH?’Footnote 4
Exile and death were strongly linked in Rome, both historically and legally. Exile was not a punishment until the late Republic,Footnote 5 and was in origin voluntary, and a means of escaping the death penalty: those on capital trial could flee from Roman jurisdiction during legal proceedings, provided that they did not later return. Exile was then formalized by the passing of a decree (interdictio aquae et ignis) by which those who had fled could be put to death if they attempted to return.Footnote 6 Latin literature too equates exile strongly with death. The equation is encouraged not just by the legal–historical background outlined above, but also because death provides an effective metaphor for the catastrophe of exile (and vice versa).Footnote 7 The literary equation of death and exile must also owe something to the close connection between the words exitium and exilium, as exemplifed by Virgil, Aen. 10.849–50 ([the exiled Mezentius] heu, nunc misero mihi demum | exitium [exilium: Servius and some MSS] infelix ‘alas, now for the first time unlucky death [/exile] is bitter to wretched me’), where we cannot be certain which of the two is the correct manuscript reading. Ennius' Medea exul also clearly plays upon the similarity between the words and concepts.Footnote 8
Ovid turns this equation into one of the characteristic features of his exile corpus, as he repeatedly depicts his banishment as a form of ‘living death’.Footnote 9 After earlier hints,Footnote 10 Ovid first makes the link between exile and death explicit in Tristia 1.3, which depicts his last night in Rome before his forced departure from the city as akin to a funeral.Footnote 11 Elsewhere, the theme comes to the fore when (for example) Ovid explores the supposed origins of elegiac poetry in funeral lament,Footnote 12 or presents himself as having died by being banished to a region painted as barren and equivalent to the Underworld in earlier poetry.Footnote 13
However, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto also insist upon the fact that the poet continues to live, despite the enmity of Augustus, who is depicted as an angry Jupiter wielding vengeful thunderbolts against the poet.Footnote 14 Augustus' anger is presented as ultimately futile, since Ovid stresses that his poetry – at least – is immortal.Footnote 15 This is a courageous stance, not least because Ovid tells us that one of the two causes of his exile was his poetry, in the form of the Ars amatoria, a handbook on how to conduct successful affairs with members of the opposite sex, which Augustus believed promoted adultery, in contravention of his own anti-adultery laws.Footnote 16 Ovid equates the emperor's treatment of himself with that of his books, which he claims were banned from public libraries;Footnote 17 he also applies the punishment that has been inflicted upon himself to his books, alleging that he burned his unfinished epic Metamorphoses before his departure from Rome.Footnote 18 Yet just as Ovid's attitude towards his own exile as a form of death is ambivalent, so is his stance on his poetry: while claiming that he destroyed the Metamorphoses, he notes that other copies of the epic were in existence, and hopes that the work will continue to live.Footnote 19 Again, in Tristia 1.6, a poem addressed to his wife, Ovid offers the consolation that his poetry will immortalize her fidelity to her exiled husband.Footnote 20 These two motifs – Ovid's exile as death and, paradoxically, his refusal to accept his punishment as a sentence equivalent to death, which is most apparent in his emphasis on the way in which his poetry can bestow immortality – are combined and developed at length in Tristia 3.3, to a detailed examination of which I now turn.
2. DEAD POETS' SOCIETY
After complaining about his lot as a sick man in a strange land, separated from his home and loved ones, Ovid considers the possibility that he will die in Tomi and therefore fail to receive a proper burial:Footnote 21
The reference to Ovid's death on unknown (ignotis) shores evokes Tristia 3.3.3 (aeger in extremis ignoti partibus orbis), which itself recalls Tibullus 1.3.3 (me tenet ignotis aegrum Phaeacia terris). As Huskey (n. 1), 370–1 comments on this network of allusions: ‘The toponym [Phaeacia] lends an element of fantasy ..., recalling the island paradise in Homer, a fact that may undercut Tibullus’ claims of suffering. The absence of the name Phaeacia from Tristia 3.3, however, suggests that there is nothing fantastic about Ovid's plight. He suffers in a real place that has no association whatsoever with Homer'; to Huskey's excellent discussion of these and other correspondences,Footnote 23 I would add two points of significance to the contemporary, politicized edge I detect in our poem. Firstly, it matters that Tomi is profoundly unknown to Ovid's Roman readers: it is on the edges of the Roman, civilized world,Footnote 24 as Ovid's exile poetry insistently stresses, and Ovid's readers in Rome could thus have been expected to know little about it, in a particularly painful contrast to the ‘known’ world of Homeric epic. Before the principate of Augustus, poets could imagine their own death in a land immortalized by Homer; now Augustus banishes poets to regions which lie at a great distance from Rome. Secondly, Ovid's mention at line 37 of shores (oris)Footnote 25 again obtrudes contemporary realities, evoking the fact that, under Augustus, relegation to an island (where the outcast may indeed expire on the shore) became the usual penalty for a variety of offences.Footnote 26
There are other, more troubling, parallels than Tibullus 1.3.3, however. When Ovid envisages his own death as leading to an unburied head in a barbarous land,Footnote 27 he evokes the death of Pompey the Great, an earlier opponent of the Julian family, who, according to a variety of sources, was beheaded when he sailed in exile to Egypt, and his body left to lie on the shore where he had disembarked; poets from Virgil onwards allude to Pompey's dreadful end.Footnote 28 Ovid's indirect evocation of the fate of Pompey (strengthened by reference to the shores where he foresees his own death a few lines before) draws attention to the ruthlessness of the Julian family towards their opponents, and provides an uncomfortable suggestion of what might yet happen to Ovid for having caused offence to Augustus.
Ovid keeps his own status as an exile to the fore here by exploiting another literary model: his description of his fate after death as sine funeribus ... sine honore sepulcri | indeploratum (45–6) evokes the treatment of the exiled Polynices, described by his sister Antigone as ἄκλαυτον, ἄταϕον (‘unwept, without a tomb’) at Sophocles, Antigone 29;Footnote 29 the repetition of sine, with its negative effect, recalls Sophocles' double use of the alpha privative, and the Ovidian coinage in-deploratum represents a close translation of ἄκλαυτον.Footnote 30 This brief allusion anticipates more direct reference to Polynices at 65–8, as Ovid begins his detailed instructions to his wife to bring his bones to Rome and bury them there:
Ovid's desire for a small urn at line 65 reminds us that he is a love elegist and shares his predecessors' adherence to Callimachean programmatic principles even in death.Footnote 31 Nevertheless, despite parallels with his fellow elegiac poets, these couplets give greater weight to Ovid's exilic distance from his elegiac models, with both exul (66) and allusion to the myth of Antigone's burial of Polynices. The myth takes on contemporary resonance in the broader context of Ovid's exilic corpus: non uetat hoc quisquam reminds us that if anyone might wish to prevent Ovid's wife from burying him in Rome, it is surely the princeps who had banished the living Ovid.Footnote 32 The mythological allusion is worth exploring further. Ovid thereby casts himself as a tragic figure:Footnote 33 Polynices, exiled and debarred from his homeland,Footnote 34 even in death. Creon had denied Polynices burial because he had died fighting against his own city, and Ovid's portrayal of himself as another Polynices might therefore throw into some doubt Ovid's repeated claims in the exile poetry that he never carried arms against Augustus.Footnote 35 Ovid's wife here plays the part of Antigone, pious in burying her brother, and patriotic despite her defiance of the king: it is she alone to whom the epithet ‘Theban’ is applied. Rege uetante in line 68 again evokes Augustus: Creon tried to prevent Polynices' burial, and Augustus, the sole ruler in contemporary Rome, is the only person who might attempt to exclude Ovid from Rome after his death. The repetition of the verb ueto in successive lines strengthens the point: Ovid thereby implies that, were Augustus to try to bar him from his city even after death, the attempt would fail, and the behaviour of the princeps would be that of a tyrant.Footnote 36 But why should Augustus object to Ovid's burial in Rome? The answer lies in the imagined scene of Ovid's burial in this poem, and the epitaph he dictates to his wife for himself, at lines 69–75:
When Ovid orders his wife to bury him in the suburban solum or soil, he evokes a common ancient etymology for exul – a word he has employed only four lines earlier – as someone who is banished from the soil of his homeland (ex + solium).Footnote 38 Ovid had already played upon this etymology in the Ars amatoria, where the exiled artist Daedalus asks Minos: sit modus exilio ... | accipiat cineres terra paterna meos (‘let there be a limit to my exile . . . | Let the land that gave me birth receive my ashes’, 2.25–6); that is, Daedalus' exile could be ended by burial in his native land – a literal ‘return to the land’.Footnote 39 Here, however, the wordplay is both more obvious and obviously political: by specifying that he should be buried in the solum of the suburbs, Ovid tries to defy the sentence of exile passed against him by Augustus by returning to his homeland for burial.
Although the inscription of 73–6 at first looks very literary, it also contains politically charged elements which repay close examination. Ovid's debt to and distance from earlier elegy is very clear in the dictation of his own epitaph, which evokes two earlier elegiac epitaphs composed for themselves by elegists:Footnote 40 Tibullus 1.3.54–6:
and Propertius 2.13.35–6:Footnote 41
There are, however, marked differences between these passages.Footnote 42 Ovid is alone in specifying his intended audience, and stressing that the inscription is to be read, with legat (71). While Propertius' third-person epitaph stresses the elegiac themes of the poet's fidelity to one lover and of the seruitium amoris, and Tibullus' inscription emphasizes his role as a soldier of Messalla, it is striking that neither of these earlier epitaphs records the poet's chief claim to fame: that is, as a love elegist.Footnote 43 Ovid's focus is very different: his first-person epitaph continually stresses his fame as a poet of light-hearted love, which, as the exile poetry frequently reminds us, led to his exilic downfall.Footnote 44
Ovid's self-description as ‘the playful poet of tender loves’ (tenerorum lusor amorum, 73) recalls his address to Venus as the ‘Mother of the tender loves’ (tenerorum mater amorum) at Amores 3.15.1, where Ovid had claimed that he was abandoning love poetry; that Ovid now uses a similar phrase to describe himself undermines his earlier rejection of erotic poetry. Ovid's self-description as lusor recalls his many claims elsewhere that he writes light-hearted, playful poetry,Footnote 45 and operates as an implicit defence of the Ars amatoria, implying that Augustus lacked a sense of proportion in punishing Ovid for writing what was merely playful poetry of love. This stress upon Ovid's role as a playful elegiac love poet is somewhat unexpected, not just in light of the fact that his predecessors had not emphasized their fame as love elegists, but also because it ignores Ovid's other poetic productions,Footnote 46 and, perhaps most importantly from a political angle, because Ovid often disclaims his role as a love poet in the exile poetry, since this is what led to his exile.Footnote 47
Yet the role of his love poetry in causing Ovid's downfall is fully acknowledged in the pentameter which follows. Line 74 is amusing when read in the wider context of Ovid's exile corpus: in an epitaph we naturally expect ‘I have perished’ (perii) to refer to literal death, but Ovid here reworks an earlier line from the exile corpus, where perii refers to the metaphorical death of Ovid's exile, caused by his poetry:
In Tristia 3.3, perii refers both to Ovid's poetic downfall, and also his literal death. The claim that Ovid perished through his poetic talent reminds the reader that he was exiled because of his erotic poetry. It is therefore significant that the passer-by who utters a prayer for the dead poet on reading his epitaph will be a lover, as the address to quisquis amasti shows; this phrase has been argued to range all of humanity on Ovid's side against Augustus' attempts to control love through the pro-marriage and anti-adultery legislation passed in the princeps' own name, since all mankind are subject to love.Footnote 48 We can go even further: the passer-by on his way to or from Rome is a lover precisely because he has read Ovid's Ars amatoria and taken its advice; cf. the allusion via the use of the indefinite to the opening claim of the Ars amatoria: Si quis in hoc artem populo non nouit amandi, | hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet (Ars 1.1–2).
Furthermore, even the words that the passer-by is asked to utter on Ovid's behalf reflect Ovid's role as an erotic poet and the exilic downfall it caused: molliter ossa cubent is similar in thought and expression to formulae found on real-life Roman gravestones,Footnote 49 but the phrase also evokes erotic poetry: at Virgil, Eclogues 10.33–4, Cornelius Gallus, the founder of the genre of Latin love elegy, who is perishing from love, exclaims his wish for literary immortality: ‘Oh, how softly then my bones may lie, | if at some time your rustic pipe might speak of my love affairs!’ (o mihi tum quam molliter ossa quiescant, | uestra meos olim si fistula dicat amores). Ovid's request to lovers to utter similar words on his behalf shows confidence in his own literary reputation: the lovers will say Nasonis molliter ossa cubent because they have read his love poetry. There is also a political charge to this allusion: Virgil had presented Gallus as speaking in this way when dying from love, but Gallus in real life committed suicide after he fell foul of the princeps, although his misdemeanour was not, apparently, connected with his erotic poetry. Ovid's allusion therefore aligns himself with another love elegist who ‘perished’ because he had offended Augustus.Footnote 50
Subversive allusions to Gallus may continue at line 77, when Ovid claims that hoc satis in titulo est; although the phrase has other resonances (which I explore in the next section), its juxtaposition with an allusion to the death of Cornelius Gallus looks pointed, given that Dio records that one of the causes of Gallus' downfall was grandiloquent behaviour in erecting statues of himself and inscriptions on pyramids recording his achievements.Footnote 51 Ovid may therefore suggest that he is not about to repeat Gallus' offence by going too far in the wording of an inscription,Footnote 52 hinting that, like other forms of writing, inscriptions too can be dangerous in Augustan Rome.
3. EXEGI MONVMENTVM: POETIC AND MONUMENTAL IMMORTALITY
At Tristia 3.3.77–80, Ovid moves from dictating the words that his tomb should bear to a claim that the words written during his career as a poet are more important and will constitute a greater and longer-lasting monument:
Despite the previous concern that Ovid has shown both for his tomb and its verse inscription, it now appears that these things, the usual means of memorializing individuals, are less important for ensuring Ovid's enduring reputation than his poetic libelli (or ‘little books’; the diminutive form of libelli should be afforded its full force here, given the surrounding comparative terms, and in particular its juxtaposition with maiora, which explicitly evokes size).Footnote 53 Ovid thus points out that his short elegiac epitaph is to be read against the whole of his poetic corpus, which will bestow immortality on him. In order to appreciate the full force of Ovid's claim to immortal fame, it is necessary to read it firstly in the context of the poetic models which it clearly draws upon and then against Augustus' own major attempt at posthumous self-memorializing, the Mausoleum, to which I argue that it also alludes.
Ovid's statement that his poetry will give its author immortality draws on a number of earlier such claims by Augustan poets. Most obviously, Ovid here recalls both in theme and language the much-imitated statement of poetry's power to immortalize, Horace, Carmina 3.30, too famous to need quotation here. Ovid takes the notion and vocabulary of a poetic ‘monument’ from Horace (Ov. Tr. 3.3.78; Hor. Carm. 3.30.1 Exegi monumentum), as well as his predecessor's opening focus on the comparative value of a poetic monument versus the physical monuments that usually immortalize men; compare perennius and altius, Carm. 3.30.1 and 2, with maiora and diuturna at Tr. 3.3.78 and 79, and note how Ovid reverses Horace's order in talking first of size and then the duration of the poetic memorial.
Propertius 3.2.17–26 had given a specifically elegiac twist to Horace's poem and is thus another important model for Ovid:Footnote 54
Ovid takes from his elegiac predecessor the reference to a generically small libellus (placed at the line's end in the opening hexameter on the theme in both elegists) as the vehicle of immortality, and the closing emphasis on the nomen of the poet after death (cf. Tr. 3.3.80 with Prop. 3.2.25).Footnote 55
However, at the same time as setting himself in a poetic tradition of claiming immortality via poetry, Ovid departs strikingly from his models in two important ways. Firstly, Tristia 3.3's elevation of poetry over physical monuments as a means of gaining immortality is, unlike previous poetic meditations on this theme,Footnote 56 prompted by its context, since Ovid claims in Tristia 3.3 to be on the brink of death and has just given his wife careful instructions for his tomb and inscription. Ovid thereby strives for greater realism than is found in his models: he repeats the poetic topos that long-lasting fame comes from poetry rather than physical monuments, but still displays a very human concern for what he hopes will be his actual tomb, in the face of imminent death.
Secondly, Ovid's claim to immortal fame is made on different grounds from those of his predecessors. Horace, Carmina 3.30 asserts his fame as a lyric poet, summing up his achievement in a highly regarded genre with a lengthy and distinguished pedigree. Horace's grand achievement was then undermined by Propertius' use of his theme and language to celebrate the immortal reputation that Propertius' elegiac poetry, with its generically slight little books, is able to bestow upon his beloved.Footnote 57 Revisiting Horace's earlier focus on the poet himself, while combining this with Propertius' generic belittling of Horace's proud claim, Ovid in Tristia 3.3 foresees his light-hearted, generically slight books of love poetry granting him fame and a future, given the stress upon his role as an elegiac love poet in the epitaph that precedes these lines, and the emphasis on libelli; compare Ovid's confident claim already by the end of his first book of Amores (Am. 1.15.31–42) that he has gained the sort of reputation that Horace had earned with the generically much grander Odes in three books. It is not the fame of the epic, fifteen-book Metamorphoses that Ovid predicts here, but above all that of small books of elegiac love poetry. Ovid provocatively includes the Ars amatoria among these books: this must be the sense of quos ego confido, quamuis nocuere in line 79, since the only books which had harmed Ovid were those of the Ars. This is a very political statement: for the Ars amatoria had led to Ovid's banishment, and, according to Ovid, was excluded from libraries associated with the Augustan regime, along with the rest of Ovid's books (see note 17 above). Far from rejecting these officially condemned libelli, Ovid still trusts that they will bring him fame: his ingenium in the shape of his poetry has caused him to perish (Tr. 3.3.74), but it is also, drawing on the final lines of the Propertian passage (where ingenium is twice mentioned within a couplet: 3.2.25–6), what gives him nomen et ... tempora longa (80).
The political aspect of Ovid's claim of immortality for his offensive books of poetry deserves further consideration. Both of Ovid's immediate models have a political charge in so far as they evoke the superiority of poetry over the massive physical monuments erected by rulers as a means of bestowing immortality. Where Odes 3.30 had compared Horace's poetic monument with those erected by rulers in the opening lines (regalique situ pyramidum altius, Carm. 3.30.2),Footnote 58 Propertius had made the topos more concretely Augustan by moving from the pyramids (Prop. 3.2.18) to refer to the original Mausoleum by name (Mausolei … sepulcri, Prop. 3.2.21), thus alluding to the even more famous Mausoleum of Augustus.Footnote 59 Given the literary tradition established by the Horatian and Propertian models that poetic immortality is superior even to the massive physical monuments of rulers, the reader is hyper-alert to any potential evocation of such monuments in a passage on poetic immortality and physical monuments which revisits these models so closely.Footnote 60 The figure of Augustus is already foremost in the reader's mind, given the evocation of him as a potential Creon who wishes to debar Ovid's Polynices from Rome even in death in the lines immediately preceding Ovid's description of his tomb and its epitaph; when Ovid goes on to use the rhetoric of size and competition (maiora, libelli, 77; diuturna, 78) while asserting the superiority of poetry over physical monuments as a means of ensuring immortality, I suggest that it would be very hard for the contemporary reader not to think of Augustus' massive Mausoleum, the largest tomb in the Rome of Ovid's day.
At this point, a brief sketch of the Mausoleum, the enormous tomb completed in 28 b.c., and its role in immortalizing Augustus, will allow the modern reader to appreciate the extent and effect of Ovid's allusions to this monument, which will be analysed below. Augustus' concern with immortality is apparent from, for example, his building programmes and his encouragement of authors such as Virgil, Horace and Livy. In concrete terms, however, the Mausoleum provides the most striking example of Augustus' attempts to ensure his posthumous reputation: its name comes from the enormous fourth-century tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, which was celebrated as one of the wonders of the ancient world, largely because of its unprecedented size,Footnote 61 and Augustus' Mausoleum attempted to rival the original in scale: it is difficult for us to appreciate just how impressive it must have appeared to contemporary viewers, even though the remains are still sizeable, with surviving walls of nine metres high (now dwarfed by the twentieth-century Fascist architecture that surrounds them); it originally had walls nearly 40 metres high, and was 87 metres wide.Footnote 62 The Mausoleum would have dominated the Campus Martius, a large flat expanse of land in which it was the first and most impressive of many monuments erected by Augustus. It represented a huge public memorial to Augustus and his achievements: the Res Gestae, Augustus' own prose record of his life as a statesman and general, was inscribed on tablets erected outside the Mausoleum after his death in a.d. 14.Footnote 63 Augustus encouraged the Roman populace to spend time near the Mausoleum: ancient sources record that groves and walks were opened to the public around the tomb, and it was close to one of the main highways into the city.Footnote 64 This can clearly be seen as a way to consolidate the emperor's reputation both in life and death.
I have argued that Tristia 3.3's context – both the poem's immediate context of a ruler forbidding Ovid's burial and its broader literary context of play with models which set poetic monuments against rulers' physical memorials – primes the reader to be sensitive to possible evocations of the Mausoleum. Specific allusions to the Mausoleum can be identified in Ovid's description of the tomb he asks his wife to erect for him in Rome. Ovid's instruction to his wife at 72, grandibus in tumuli marmore caede notis, evokes the kind of inscription that the Mausoleum would carry, with the scale emphasized by the initial word; scholars of the iconography of Augustan Rome have noted that many contemporary inscriptions in the city were characterized by their large, bronze letters.Footnote 65 Secondly, the verb which gives the instruction to cut the inscription, caedo (caede, 72), is etymologically linked to the dynasty of the Caesars (Ovid puns on this connection elsewhere),Footnote 66 and thus alludes to the famous tomb erected to house the dynasty; the Mausoleum was clearly intended as a final resting place for the entire Augustan gens and not just the emperor himself, as can be seen from the burial of family members there, starting with Marcellus in 23 b.c.Footnote 67 Although marble was commonly used for tombs, given the cluster of references here to the Mausoleum, the specification of a marble tomb may recall that the Mausoleum was finished with marble, a material particularly associated with the princeps.Footnote 68 Furthermore, Ovid's abrupt words after a brief, four-line, epitaph, ‘This is enough for the inscription’ (hoc satis in titulo est, 77) can be read as a sardonic allusion to the lengthy Res Gestae,Footnote 69 which acted as an extended epitaph for Augustus by standing outside the Mausoleum after his death. Augustus' intention to erect a lengthy epitaph for himself, detailing his many achievements, may already have been clear in his lifetime, from the statues with inscriptions recording their achievements that he set up for leading Romans of the past in his Forum,Footnote 70 and his uncompleted autobiography in thirteen books.Footnote 71 Allusion to Augustus' Mausoleum here seems to be confirmed by nomen et auctori tempora longa suo (80): here, Ovid refers to himself as an author,Footnote 72 but there is surely also a nod to Augustus, whose name was believed to derive from augeo (‘I increase’): a wordplay that Ovid uses elsewhere.Footnote 73 Thus Ovid's statement that his books will give their author a name and a long life represents a challenge to Augustus: Ovid hints at Augustus' name here, but he does not give it outright, and he may thereby suggest that the Mausoleum too, named after all for another ruler, will ultimately fail to give Augustus a name.Footnote 74
Ovid's tomb and its epitaph thus represent a small-scale, modest elegiac and erotic alternative to Augustus' enormous Mausoleum,Footnote 75 with its emphasis on grand public achievements and their public recognition. In stark contrast to this, Ovid's tomb is focussed on the amatory and the individual, emphasizing Ovid's audience of lovers, and his achievements as an erotic poet: his epitaph is of course in elegiac couplets, the metre which had brought him both fame and exile. Furthermore, Ovid's assertion that his immortal name ultimately depends on the small libelli of his offensive elegiac poetry rather than a tomb and inscription presents a challenge to Augustus' attempts to turn the poet into an outsider by barring him and his poetry from the city, as well as to the emperor's own grandiose pretensions to immortality.
