Ovidʼs exile at the edge
The first reference to human exile in the Fasti occurs in the first book in the episode of Evanderʼs exile, where his mother Carmentis seeks to comfort him before, in true Ovidian style, listing others who have suffered the same fate:
Views differ about the extent to which Ovid is here intentionally inserting or even encoding an autobiographical reference to his own exile in Tomis on the Black Sea, a place he describes as being at the edge (in margine) of the world.Footnote 2 But what is nevertheless clear, as we shall see below, is that the language Ovid uses in these lines has unmistakable similarities to the language he repeatedly uses about his own exile in his exilic works. As often noted by commentators, Carmentis, in proceeding from her predictions about exile to enunciate (like Virgilʼs Cumaean Sibyl in Aeneid 6) a great prophecy of Rome through Aeneas to Augustus (515–36), becomes increasingly Sibyl-like – and the Sibyls were famous for the use of acrostics in their prophecies in the Sibylline Books.Footnote 3 Perhaps, then, we should look again at the central lines of this passage with a focus on the ʻedgeʼ of Ovidʼs verse:
TOMIS is the poetʼs address in exile, given here in an imperfect telestich, as will occur twice more in this form in the Fasti. The imperfect nature of the telestich assists Ovidʼs plausible deniability and, imperfect or not, reveals Ovidʼs exact place of exile.Footnote 4 And it is encrypted at the edge of his verse, just as his exile is, as Ovid constantly complains, ʻat the edgeʼ (in margine) of the world.Footnote 5
Clearly, if Ovid intended such a telestich – if he did not, we must assume that a poet so sensitive to such wordplay failed to notice it when writing or finalising lines specifically relating to exile while himself in exile in Tomis – it is likely to have meaning and purpose as well as adding to the evidence of exilic activity in the Fasti.Footnote 6 But one key element stands out immediately, not least because Ovidʼs account of Evanderʼs exile does not, in this respect, match any known version of the myth: here is an apparent statement by Ovid that he was completely innocent, a claim he never makes elsewhere in his exilic poetry and which indeed is flatly contradicted by all of his many plaintext admissions that he was in fact guilty of some error.
Further, the four lines of the telestich appear to stand outside their context, since the essence of his motherʼs words is that Evander must accept his undeserved exile as the result of fate and bear it like a man: it is the bearing of exile, not its cause or its rights and wrongs, that is the point here. It may indeed be argued that the allegory within the telestich should be extended to include lines 485–6 also (conscia is used by Ovid in connection with his exile and mens and factum in connection with the deed and the intention – or lack of it). As we shall see, Ovidʼs T-O-M-IS telestich is a signum, and its substance may be something extending beyond the lines of the telestich itself.Footnote 7
The linguistic parallels between these lines and Ovidʼs descriptions of his exile elsewhere are prolonged and significant. The key exilic elements in the telestich are fate or chance (in fatis), blame (culpa), an offended god and divine anger (deus … offenso deo and numinis iram), deserved or undeserved punishment (meriti poenam), and the absence of criminal act (crimen abesse) and of deliberate intention or guilt (conscia mens).Footnote 8 The issue of just deserts arises often, and in his public and plaintext language Ovid always admits that he deserved his punishment, although in the T-O-M-IS telestich, of course, he denies it. The related issue of guilty knowledge or complicity (conscius or, in the telestich, conscia mens) is more sinister in the context of the expanding law of treason (maiestas) under Augustus (and in numinis laesi in Tr. 3.5.23 and elsewhere laesus may certainly bear the implication of treason): see further Tr. 2.1.103–5, 3.5.49, 3.6.28.
A major element of the T-O-M-IS telestich is the ira of the offended god.Footnote 9 Particularly significant here is Ovidʼs poem Tr. 1.10, which describes his journey into exile on the Black Sea and which in language and subject matter links with his third T-O-M-IS telestich (Fast. 5.258–61, discussed later):
As this poem links with his third telestich dealing with the journey to the Black Sea, so perhaps Ovid makes a link here with his second telestich (Fast. 4.942–5), which describes a different victim being sacrificed, a less important one (non facit ad nostras … opes), in substitution for a greater (maior) (see below).
Finally, perhaps the most significant exilic formula in and around the T-O-M-IS telestich is Ovidʼs striking disclaimer that criminality was absent (amid great evils), magnis crimen abesse malis (line 484): see Tr. 1.2.98, 3.11.33–4, 4.1.23–4, 5.11.17; Pont. 1.7.40, 3.3.70. Significantly, in Tr. 4.4.44 Ovid uses the same formula after conspicuously interrupting himself in the apparent act of revealing the cause of his exile, exactly as he does in his plaintext reference to his exile in Fast. 4.83–4.
The other T-O-M-IS telestichs in the Fasti
de re publica breuiter ad te scribam; iam enim, charta ipsa ne nos prodat, pertimesco. itaque posthac, si erunt mihi plura ad te scribenda, ἀλληγορίαις obscurabo.
About politics I shall write to you briefly; for now, lest the very paper betrays me, I am becoming very fearful. So after this, if there are more things I have to write to you, I shall obscure them by allegories (allegoriais).
(Cicero, Att. 2.20)As previously noted, the imperfect T-O-M-IS telestich occurs in exactly this form twice more in the Fasti. By contrast, there are only four more in the whole of the rest of Ovidʼs works, three of which are pre-exilic (Her. 20.218–21; Am. 1.2.28–31; Met. 11.135–8), with the final case in Tr. 3.4.55–8. Clearly, pre-exilic cases can have no significance in this context, and must be fortuitous (see below).Footnote 10 Of course, post-exilic cases may be fortuitous too, but in fact both the remaining cases in the Fasti give grounds for speculation about linked coded references to Ovidʼs own situation, albeit highly encrypted in his fantastical narrative, and this paper argues above all that the hermeneutic positives presented in the exegesis constitute a decisive factor in which plausible deniability applies precisely on these terms.
Sacrificing the wrong victim
The first of the other T-O-M-IS telestichs occurs at Fast. 4.941–6, where Ovid marks the rising of the Dog-star (exoritur Canis, 904). He then tells the story of the festival of the Robigalia in honour of the god Mildew (Robigo), whose purpose is to fend off disease from the crops, and asks the priest why an ʻunwonted victimʼ (noua uictima), the sacrifice of a ʻnewʼ or ʻdifferentʼ dog (canis), is used:
The telestich spans the end of the episode and the transition to the next, and that may be considered a weakness (although, as we shall see, it will turn out to be an important strength).Footnote 11 On the other hand, if Ovid intended a coded reference, it needed to be safely and deniably embedded. Whatever the truth, the fact is that, as the text stands, Ovidʼs place of exile begins with the very last letter of the story in which a ʻnewʼ or ʻdifferentʼ victim is sacrificed, and that what follows is the completion of his place of exile, Tomis, in lines simply marking the passage of time before a fixed deadline, not unlike the procedure relating to exile.Footnote 12
If there is, as some think, some confusion in the text – whether the sacrifice of the dog is to Robigo or the Dog-star, about the date of the event (April or August), and even about the sites of the sacrifice – it may be that Ovidʼs determination to insert here a tale which ends with the sacrifice of a substitute victim has conflated different traditions. This aspect will become more teasing still when we reach the third and final case of the T-O-M-IS telestich in the Fasti, but it is teasing enough already as Ovid emphatically states in the episodeʼs concluding line (4.942) – which also begins the telestich of his place of exile – that the only point of all this is the name: nil nisi nomen habet. For Ovid is clear in his exilic work that the fame of his name (particularly his infamy as the poet of the Ars amatoria) has played a part in his exile and may well play a part in his death.Footnote 13 In Tr. 1.11 he writes that he is worth robbing (praedam) but – significantly – his fear is also because of the fame to be won (titulum) by his death, titulum nostrae mortis habere uelit (30).
The precise basis of Ovidʼs exile evades certainty much beyond his own statement of an unknown error and the well-worn pretext or reality of his ʻadulterousʼ carmen, the Ars amatoria (and his poetry generally), but almost all conjectures link his fate with the historical fact of an Augustan political crisis in AD 8–9, in which Augustus exiled his own granddaughter Julia for adultery and banished or executed her lover L. Aemilius Paullus for conspiracy, and the consequent suspicion that Ovid was complicit or somehow caught up in a scandal which may have been political or dynastic or moral or a combination thereof.Footnote 14 If the Ars amatoria is taken as the real cause (as well as the pretext), its traditional weakness is that Ovidʼs exile postdated the Ars and the ira principis by at least eight years. A paper on a newly discovered inscription, however, aptly reminds us about the personal as well as political significance which Augustus attached to his moral legislation (ʻConjectures aside, the poem can be viewed as insulting the lex de adulteriis … The legislation about marriage makes war on a lifestyle which Ovidʼs poetry could reasonably be seen as embodyingʼ) and powerfully demonstrates the persistence of the opposition which he had to manage, granting a three-year delay in AD 2 and then (by means of a commentarius in AD 5) a further two-year delay, together with increased inducements (Suetoniusʼ auctisque praemiis, Aug. 34.1–2).Footnote 15
Certainly the events of AD 8–9 may bear the hallmarks of a wider purge and of the public trials, confessions, exiles and executions manufactured by autocratic regimes pour encourager les autres, remove threats and distract public attention at times of internal crisis. And the hypothesis of Ovid as a high-profile sacrifice would tally with what Ovid himself says of his exilic circumstances and what he seems to say in allegory in the three T-O-M-IS telestichs in the Fasti.Footnote 16 In short, as Ovid may have encrypted in his telestich, Augustus needed a victim, but may have sacrificed a ʻdifferent dogʼ.
If so, we do not know who was saved instead of Ovid, or why: perhaps a powerful Augustan figure (possibly the more highly placed victim, hostia maior, of Tr. 1.10.44 noted earlier as a possible cross-reference to Ovidʼs second and third T-O-M-IS telestichs), perhaps even – hence the sacrifice of an exceptionally high-profile victim like Ovid – another member of the imperial family implicated in the scandal. In Ovidʼs allegory, the dog which should have been sacrificed is cane sidereo: that astronomical title might conceal such an elevated or glittering personage beneath the ʻcelestialʼ cover of the earthly Jove, especially since the regimeʼs sidus Iulium was a celebrated symbol of the imperial family itself.
The case for a dog allegory relating to Ovid and his exile is substantial (see n. 20), but an astonishing – and well-placed – canine connection with Augustan allegory itself also occurs in the Fasti (5.129–47), midway between Ovidʼs second and third T-O-M-IS telestichs, where he tells us that the lares praestites, the time-honoured guardians of Rome, had an equally time-honoured dog standing between them – except that by Ovidʼs time the dog had mysteriously disappeared and that central position had been usurped by Augustus himself. Modern scholars habitually see in the Fasti (and elsewhere) the penetration and appropriation of the Republican calendar and religion (and virtually every aspect of public and political life) by Augustus and the symbols of his autocracy, and the disappearance of the laresʼ dog may certainly be seen in this light.Footnote 17 Significantly, too, Ovid himself labels the lares episode as a misplaced digression: quo feror? Augustus mensis mihi carminis huius | ius habet (147–8).Footnote 18
Such speculation may be beyond the pale, but we may be much surer of the victim who was sacrificed. Ovid refers to the sacrificial dog in line 908 simply as exta canis, but by the time of the actual sacrifice (uidimus, 936) the dog has become turpiaque obscenae (uidimus) exta canis (936). In his famous lines to Augustus referring to his ʻtwo crimes, a poem and an errorʼ (duo crimina, carmen et error, Tr. 2.1.207), Ovid writes (Tr. 2.1.211–12):
For Ovidʼs critics and enemies it would be difficult to find a more definitive description of the poet of the Ars amatoria and of the poem itself than turpis and obscenus, the adjectives used of the substitute dog sacrificed.Footnote 19 The episode, if chosen or elaborated by Ovid for this purpose, fixes on the issue of a famous name, allows the victim who is saved to be described as sidereus and calls the victim who is sacrificed in substitution turpis and obscenus. Ovid is the (in)famously named praeceptor Amoris, the obsceni doctor adulterii. And, if this is an allegory and we expect it to be signalled, the first word of the episode, and of the line in which the dog is first mentioned, is signa (904). Whoever was saved, Ovid was surely the different dog sacrificed instead.Footnote 20
Divine help and a place in Rome
The third and final case of the T-O-M-IS telestich in the Fasti is in the fifth book, where the goddess Flora, at the conclusion of the first episode dealing with her role as the deity of flowers, tells the story of how Juno became pregnant and, travelling onwards after her visit to seek Floraʼs help, gave birth to Mars:
Here again we have the poetʼs place of exile, this time in a context in which Juno appears to be making the journey which the exiled Ovid himself made to Tomis, Thracen et laeua Propontidos, Thrace and the left side of the Black Sea. We know from Ovidʼs own account of his journey into exile in Tristia 1.10 that he sailed to Samothrace, where he took another ship to Samos and Tempyra, just off the Thracian coast, and then travelled by land to Tomis: fleximus in laeuum cursus (17) and Threiciam … Samon (20).Footnote 21
The significance of this episode is threefold. First is its direct link with the previous T-O-M-IS telestich, which bridges Flora, uariis florum dea nexa coronis (4.945), and sacrum Florale (4.947). Having made that link, Ovid returns to Flora some 200 lines later (mater … florum, 5.183), and to another T-O-M-IS telestich, as we have seen, in the same episode (5.258–61). Flora, the dea florum, is the connection between both episodes, and coronis is the connection between both telestichs.Footnote 22 And this third case of T-O-M-IS, concerning Floraʼs assistance in promoting childbirth, also links back to the first case, the exile of Evander and his mother Carmentis, who is the goddess not just of prophecy but also of childbirth and whose festival for this purpose is celebrated by Ovid later in the first book of the Fasti (617–36), where he inserts a reference to her exile (fugae … tuae, 634).
Secondly, just as the key issue identified by Ovid in the second telestich is the name – nomen, the victim being the wrong one but the name (or ʻnounʼ) ʻdogʼ being correct – so in the third telestich the key issue is also the name, the guarantee of secrecy for the name of the auctor (a crucial word here, to which we shall return). That leads, thirdly, to the point of the story, which has as much, if not more, relevance to Ovidʼs position in exile as it does to Flora, since Mars, the divine founder of Rome, in this telestic issues a command that ʻyou must have a place in Romeʼ, the city of Romulus: habeto tu quoque in Romulea urbe locum – and that place is offered explicitly because the god of Rome has received a favour, memor accepti per me natalis (259). If Ovid is owed a favour, he does not (or cannot) tell us why: perhaps he is speaking generally, as the famous poet of Augustan Rome (ille ego Romanus uates, Tr. 5.7.55) who deserved a return-favour (literally, to Rome) from its living god – but perhaps the allegory is more specifically that Ovid did the regime a favour by taking the secret into exile with him and playing the role of the faithful dog that did not bark.
The three T-O-M-IS telestichs in the Fasti and their interconnections
The main point … is that precisely when he was pretending to be somebody else, Ovid was in fact being much bolder than it is normally realised.
(Barchiesi (Reference Barchiesi2001) 155)All three cases of the T-O-M-IS telestich may now be considered together – and that process reveals even greater significance in the third T-O-M-IS telestich and in the way in which all three telestichs interlock to produce an integrated tripartite allegory. The episode with Flora and Juno is about seeming to be able to do something (nescio quid … posse uideris, 5.245), ʻsomethingʼ which – like Ovidʼs error – is never made clear. Whatever it is, it is done in the context of great fear of the anger of Jove (ira Iouis magni causa timoris erat, 5.248) and its repercussions. This language is frequently applied in Ovidʼs exilic work to Augustus, the god in Rome, the anger which led to Ovidʼs exile, and the fear which Ovid had of the emperor who could take his life whenever he chose.Footnote 23
The speaker tries to speak three times (ter … ter, 5.247), as Ovid seems to try to do in the three T-O-M-IS telestichs in the Fasti, and only with doubt and hesitation (uoltum dubitantis, 5.245) and repressed voice (lingua retenta est, 5.247), finally speaking only on the strictest of oaths that the author will be hidden (celabitur auctor | et Stygiae numen testificabor aquae, 5.249–50), all of which is encompassed in Ovidʼs use of three identical telestichs signalling content that is mythologically and allegorically camouflaged and plausibly deniable. Finally, the great oath taken in the name of the Underworld recalls Ovidʼs fear of imminent death at the hands of the regime.
It is clear that the connections between the three telestichs are substantial and multiple. In another significant signum of these allegorical interconnections Ovid then returns, as mentioned above, to Carmentis and her festival later in the first book (617–36) in celebration of her festival, thus specifically linking back to Carmentis in her previous appearance in the book and her prophecy, which includes the T-O-M-IS telestich, but now emphasing the other role of Carmentis, the promotion of childbirth (pro pueris fieri uirginibusque iubent, 628), which becomes significant in its turn in the third and final case of the T-O-M-IS telestich in the Fasti (5.255–62) centring around the assistance given by the goddess Flora to Juno in securing the birth of Mars. There may be other connections, too, which we cannot now trace, such as the linkage between the Sibylline books, the prophetess Carmentis with her T-O-M-IS telestich in Fasti 1 and Flora, who links not only the second and third cases of the T-O-M-IS telestich in the Fasti but perhaps also the first case, since we know from Pliny (HN 18.286) that Flora was given a temple in Rome in 238 BC on the advice of the Sibylline books.Footnote 24
In the episode containing the second T-O-M-IS telestich, where the telestich (4.942–45) spans the festival of the Robigalia and the rites of Flora, Ovid again makes nomen significant, since at the rising of the Dog-star, in his version, a dog is indeed sacrificed, but it is a different dog (pro cane sidereo canis his imponitur arae, 4.914), and the only reason this happens (he tells us at the climax of the episode and the first line of the T-O-M-IS telestich) is the name: et, quare fiat, nil nisi nomen habet, 4.942. In the last line of the telestich the goddess Flora arrives (mille uenit uariis florum dea nexa coronis, 4.945), and Ovid is specific that he will return to the rites of Flora in his next book for May (in Maias sacrum Florale Kalendas: | tunc repetam, 4.947–8), plainly marking a corresponding link back at that point (Mater, ades, florum … | distuleram partes mense priore tuas, 5.183–4). Clearly, Ovid wishes the two parts to be taken together, and it is of course in this episode that the T-O-M-IS telestich occurs again (5.258–62), again at the climax of an episode. Furthermore, nomen appears at the beginning of the episode in a remarkable couplet in which Ovid himself addresses the goddess:
You yourself explain who you are. Public opinion is fallacious;
Ovid himself is speaking, as he makes pointedly clear in his next words: sic ego (193). And he seems, in addressing the goddess he puts into his poetry, to be addressing his poetry itself, the poetry which he addressed explicitly in the preceding line: hoc quoque cum Circi munere carmen eat (190). In short, Ovidʼs own words bring us to nomen once again, but this time the authorʼs own name. The goddess Flora, whom Ovid has placed in his own poetry in his own version of the story, will be the best authority of his own name. It is an intriguing statement, multiply and necessarily encrypted in its context, and Ovid will return to the auctor at the climax of the episode when, on pain of death, the (name of the) author will be guaranteed complete secrecy: celabitur auctor | et Stygiae numen testificabor aquae (249–50).
The final T-O-M-IS telestich in Ovidʼs exilic work
The fourth and last T-O-M-IS telestich in Ovidʼs exilic work occurs at Tr. 3.4.55–8, where Ovid makes a direct and emotional contrast between his real home in Rome and his home in exile at Tomis:
Ovidʼs home in exile, Tomis, is embedded in lines which begin precisely at the point when he begins to ʻseeʼ – as if they were present (adsunt) – images of his home, his wife and particular locations and events which are not there. The exact positioning of the telestich may signal intentionality, just as cuncta uidenda may be a signum telling his readers to ʻseeʼ his T-O-M-IS telestich which – like his images of things which he ʻseesʼ but which are not there – makes visible his otherwise unseen exilic address, a word and a place existing not in the lines but at their edge, as Tomis exists at the edge of the Roman world. But there may be a wider significance: although in this context the telestich is a singleton and appears to contain nothing beyond personal sentiment, the poem ends with one of Ovidʼs most overt and graphic statements about the danger of naming his friends in a perilous political climate:
We have already seen the extreme danger of Ovidʼs position in exile, and we should note the inescapable emphasis of his language here: the repeated fear, caution and restraint of all concerned, the insecurity (anceps), the latent implications (which the Latin will bear) of people habitually in hiding and being dragged out as a result of informing (indicio, latitantes, protrahit), the risks of loyalty and friendship which are best honoured – if at all – in secret (occulte). Ovidʼs T-O-M-IS telestich here may be significant by its mere presence in a context of Augustan terror.
Codes, plausible deniability and dissimulation
sed haec scripsi properans et mehercule timide. posthac ad te aut, si perfidelem habebo, cui dem, scribam plane omnia, aut, si obscure scribam, tu tamen intelleges. in iis epistulis me Laelium, te Furium faciam; cetera erunt ἐν αἰνιγμοῖς.
But these things I have written in haste and, by god, in fear. After this I shall either write all things plainly to you, if I have someone very trustworthy to give to, or, if I write obscurely, you will nevertheless understand. In these letters I shall make myself Laelius, you Furius; the rest will be in riddles (en ainigmois).
(Cicero, Att. 2.19)Because they are always deniable, acrostics allow authors a freedom from the constraints of narrative persona, responsibility, and decorum.
(Hejduk (Reference Hejduk2018) 74)Let us turn briefly to what Ovid may be doing in these telestichs – if this is an intentional process on his part – and what he certainly cannot do. Ovid is perhaps the Roman poet most addicted to the notion of secrets, signs, hidden meanings and codes, usually in amatory contexts. But these were dangerous times of political scandal and dynastic struggle. No one in the public eye could risk compromising the security afforded by plausible deniability – the terminology is modern (1960) but the device is as old as politics itself – and least of all Ovid with his poetic record of sailing close to the political wind and tilting at the boundaries of autocracy and free speech.
For Ovid there could be no question of using a code that was ultimately breakable and undeniable, whether at the beginnings or ends of lines or otherwise – and we must remember the relatively unsophisticated nature and vulnerability of ancient codes whose fundamental flaw was that they were encryptable and decryptable by a single key. If Ovid intended to say something about his exile which contradicted the official line, as appears from the T-O-M-IS telestichs in the Fasti, he had to be able, plausibly and safely, to deny it. In short, he needed a double safeguard, a steganographic technique which concealed the existence of a code (his T-O-M-IS telestichs, arguably so effective that they have avoided suspicion for 2,000 years) and a cryptographic technique which, in addition, disguised the message itself (his poetic allegory which – even if it might arouse suspicion in some – was beyond final detection).
Nothing better illustrates Ovidʼs need for double encipherment about the cause of his exile – and for watertight plausible deniability – than his wretched and conspicuously inadequate attempt to speak of it in his own person in Fast. 4.79–84:
There is no mention, let alone detail, of the cause of exile, as Ovid suddenly and overtly interrupts himself – in the excruciating kind of aposiopesis that we have already seen him employ at moments of acute political sensitivity – to insist that he must say no more (non tibi … sunt canenda). Significantly, too, Ovid adds a context of command and suppression, sed supprime (with which we should compare lingua retenta est in the episode containing Ovidʼs final T-O-M-IS telestich in Fast. 5.247, where the speaker is held back by fear of the anger of mighty Jupiter, ira Iouis magni causa timoris erat). These features are repeatedly paralleled in Ovidʼs plaintext references to his exile and the need for silence in a context of fear and censorship.Footnote 25
Ovidʼs dissimulation
In the light of these severe – and publicly highlighted – constraints in referring to the real cause of his exile, it is an intriguing question whether Ovid sought to encode some sort of message in his exilic work. For – despite Ovidʼs repeated references to his required silence on the subject – he is (though obscure and enigmatic) emphatically not silent, referring more than once to practising dissimulation which, whatever his precise meaning, is clearly not simple or absolute silence.
Perhaps Ovid has left, if not his key, at least a signum pointing towards it. In the winter of AD 8/9, very shortly after his exile, he penned a perplexing passage in Tr. 1.5.45–52. First, he is clear that, if anyone wants to know all the circumstances, he is seeking more than the thing allows (scire meos casus siquis desiderat omnes, | plus, quam quod fieri res sinit, ille petit, 45–6). Ovid is of course careful (and carefully imprecise, as he is throughout this passage) as to who or what is denying permission: res might mean almost anything, including (unspecified) circumstances, (suppressed) truth or (political) reality. Then he adds that much of what he has suffered is too great to be believed and that what has actually happened would not produce a credible validity (multaque credibili tulimus maiora ratamque, | quamuis acciderint, non habitura fidem, 49–50). But what follows is more tantalising still:
Whatever has happened, Ovid appears to say, ʻeven a certain part ought to die with me, and – with me disguising it – I would wish that it could be covered upʼ. This may be mere Ovidian ambiguity – but it may go beyond that to dissimulatio and a desire to signal, deniably, some means of literary encryption, as discussed in the case of the telestichs in this paper, so that ʻthat part could be concealedʼ but at the same time preserved for posterity.
The T-O-M-IS telestich in Ovid and Augustan poetry
Finally, let us consider the T-O-M-IS telestich in other major poets as well as Ovid, in the light both of actual occurrence and theoretical probability, as regards the essential question of chance or intention. On both counts it may justifiably be argued that the odds are clearly against the Fasti telestichs being accidental, although such matters by their nature can never be conclusive.
There are, as we have seen, three cases of the T-O-M-IS telestich in Ovidʼs pre-exilic works amounting to almost 22,000 lines. Ovidʼs exilic works amount to just under 12,500 lines, so that, on the best evidence we have of chance occurrence in Ovid (one in over 7,000 lines), we might perhaps expect – intuitively, since the numbers are too small for statistical significance – two cases in the whole of Ovidʼs exilic works, with one of these (or none) in the Fasti. But there are four in total, three of them in the Fasti, the frequency of Ovidʼs T-O-M-IS telestich doubling after exile from one in over 7,000 lines to one in just over 3,000 lines, and doubling again in the specific case of the Fasti at one in just under 600 lines. By comparison, the T-O-M-IS telestich occurs only once in Catullus (66.70–3) and Horace (Epod. 5.46–9), not at all in Tibullus or Propertius, and twice in Lucretius (3.624–7 and (in the Loeb edition) 5.420–3). That amounts to one case in over five thousand lines of poetry, a rate of chance occurrence which may seem very significant in comparison with Ovidʼs exilic rate. On the other hand, Virgil has no fewer than ten cases in his three great works, or one case in about fifteen hundred lines, increasing the overall frequency of the telestich in these poets to one in just over 2,500 lines.
The practical limitations of probability theory are clear from earlier work in this field: it can tell us little in the context of different poetsʼ verse styles and techniques, the inevitable differences which occur between letters at the beginning of lines and at the ends of lines, or about the complex interrelationship between human intuition and scientific or mathematical reasoning.Footnote 26 Probability theory nevertheless has a contribution to make, and it suggests here that the occurrence of a T-O-M-IS telestich in a work the size of the Fasti is extremely unlikely to happen by chance.Footnote 27 More improbable still, of course, would be a random first occurrence of the T-O-M-IS telestich in – of all places – a specifically exilic context in the Fasti, the first such episode in the work. And if a single case of the T-O-M-IS telestich is extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance, the odds of three such telestics occurring by chance in the same work are vastly greater. And if the odds of three such random occurrences are vastly greater, the notion that pure chance has produced a sequence of three identical telestichs which appear to interlock as constituent parts of the same allegory in the same work may reasonably be regarded as improbable to the point of impossibility.
Conclusion
This article argues that Ovid uses telestichs to encode personal and political statements as an exile whose freedom of speech has been curtailed in a situation of constant mortal danger. The three T-O-M-IS telestichs in the Fasti seem to be both significant and intentional. Ovidʼs own use of language as well as wider considerations of actual occurrence and statistical probability in Ovid and other poets appear to confirm that the presence of one such telestich in a work the size of the Fasti is extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance, and much more so in the case of the occurrence of three identical, and linked, telestichs in the same work.
If these telestichs are deliberately encrypted, Ovid appears to tell us that something untoward happened that deserved exile (or worse), but that he was wholly innocent; that he was a high-profile scapegoat, the notorious obsceni doctor adulterii, sacrificed in place of a greater, possibly imperial, perpetrator; and that he ought to be back in Rome in return for some favour he had done. Perhaps the essential truth of Ovidʼs fall was that he was the regimeʼs fall-guy, the substitute dog which was sacrificed and which, expecting or awaiting recall, agreed not to bark. Perhaps, too, as time passed and his hopes of recall and redemption began to fade, he felt doubly betrayed and resolved, in the face of official Augustan silence and censorship, to encode for posterity the truth of his exile in the most puzzling of his works, the Fasti, a work which shows significant late revision, including the latest datable reference in his work, and whose mysterious wider fate still eludes us today.
Whether by dissimulatio Ovid provided a signum – and whether that dissimulation disguised some means of literary encryption, as perhaps in the telestichs discussed in this article, so that the truth of his exile could be concealed but at the same time preserved – is unprovable. But Ovid knew that no power lasts forever (sed nulla potentia longa est, Met. 2.416), whether the power of Jove, the all-powerful father of the gods (pater omnipotens, 401) or of Augustus, the father of his country, the all-powerful pater patriae. And perhaps, believing that his poetry would be immortal and that every empire ultimately falls (Met. 15.871–79 and 420–30), he also believed that every dog has his day – especially an innocent one sacrificed in place of another – and that the truth of his exile might one day be revealed by three telestichs spelling out his place of exile.
