This paper uses the lens of the epistolary genre to provide a fresh examination of Ovid’s Ex Ponto.Footnote 1 As Ovid declares to Graecinus, the letter is a literary genre uniquely suited to the expression of the exilic experience:Footnote 2
exulis haec uox est; praebet mihi littera linguam,
et, si non liceat scribere, mutus ero.
This is the voice afforded to an exile; what furnishes me with a tongue is a letter and in the event that I am not allowed to write, I will be voiceless. (Ovid, Pont. 2.6.3–4)
Letters furnish the exiled person with a voice: the juxtaposition of littera and lingua in v. 3 highlights the letters’ role in physically bridging the gap between the physically absent author and his addressees and reading public. The Ex Ponto are the exilic poems which are most self-consciously styled as ‘letters’. Whereas the Tristia are addressed for the most part to anonymous recipients and are only self-described as letters beginning with the last poem of the first book (Tr. 1.11.1: littera quaecumque est toto tibi lecta libello), the poems in the four books of the Ex Ponto are addressed almost exclusively to named individuals.Footnote 3 Ovid highlights the openly epistolary nature of the Ex Ponto in the very first poem of the collection. These poems will have a different title and none of them will hide their addressee:Footnote 4
rebus idem, titulo differt, et epistula cui sit
non occultato nomine missa docet.
In subject matter these poems are the same, but they differ with respect to their title and each letter reveals its addressee without hiding their name. (Ovid, Pont. 1.1.17–18)
When he points to the epistula as an essential vehicle of self-expression in exile, Ovid is gesturing to the role that epistolography played in the representation and dramatisation of the lives of famous men in antiquity. Most obvious of all is the use of the letter to expand upon the exile of famous figures of antiquity in rhetorical training.Footnote 5 Writing from the fringes of the Roman Empire, the exiled Ovid recalls various types of exiled Greek figures, such as Aeschines, Themistocles, Demosthenes and Diogenes, in whose name letters were written in antiquity, letters supposedly composed during the character’s stay in exile.Footnote 6 Remarkably, exile features so prominently in the extant Greek pseudepigraphic corpus collected by Rudolph Hercher in the nineteenth century that it is possible to think of these letters as fleshing out the struggles of the exilic experience. The centrality of exile in the extant pseudepigraphic corpus suggests that the experience of banishment was a rhetorically malleable one, a theme potentially rife with possibilities for inuentio. These creative affordances came with the weight of exemplary narratives that overwhelmingly centred on the character’s resistance to the unjust despotic power responsible for his banishment and occasionally, as in the case of Themistocles, on a character’s assimilation to the foreign host. The use of the epistolary form has thus important consequences for the way we interpret the politics of the Tristia and Ex Ponto. Ovid’s exilic letters should be read in light of the pervasiveness of the themes of tyranny and constitutional crisis in the fictional epistolary corpus. The recriminations of Ovid’s exiled epistolary counterparts against unjust power form an important rhetorical and literary background to the Ex Ponto, even as Ovid adopts a more deferential tone towards Augustus.
More broadly, Ovid’s exilic letter collection can be seen as an instance of ‘biofiction’, by which I mean the process through which self-writing creates biographical realism by replicating the lived textual experiences of famous personalities.Footnote 7 The self-edited nature of the Ex Ponto is crucial to understanding Ovid’s impulse to memorialise himself through the medium of letter writing. In the logic of pseudepigraphic fiction, letters are often accidentally found and assembled by compilers. By contrast, Ovid is very explicit that the Ex Ponto is an authorially curated collection (Pont. 3.9.53: postmodo collectas utcumque sine ordine iunxi), which both leverages the good faith of individual recipients and collectively vouches for Naso. This Augustan model of an authorially curated book collection, employed by Ovid (Ex Ponto), as well as Horace (Epistulae Book 1), influenced the development of post-Augustan prose epistolary collections, especially those of Seneca and Pliny the Younger.Footnote 8 The epistolary form, as fashioned by Ovid, thus continues to play a role in the textualisation of exemplary Roman lives outside of strictly pseudepigraphic corpora. Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto, however, already deftly mediate between epistolary personas that exist on different points of the broad and complex spectrum between fiction and history. In particular, Cicero was the most immediately available example of a republican icon, albeit a politically problematic one.Footnote 9 The paper thus revisits the vexed question of the relation between Ovid’s representation of the exilic experience and Cicero’s by arguing for an approach rooted in ‘biofiction’ rather than intertextuality alone. Cicero’s epistolary collections are not strictly speaking fictional. Yet Cicero’s letters, curated and arranged in books by a compiler (e.g. Atticus or Tiro), straddle the domains of history and fiction and potentially offered Ovid a model of a textually constructed life.Footnote 10 My reading of Ovid’s engagement with Cicero, however, is not limited to the latter’s exilic letter production. Rather, Section II explores the ways in which Ovid punctuates the Ex Ponto at strategically relevant points with references to Ciceronian language and to characters that inhabited the orator’s life (and, from the perspective of Ovid, did or could have inhabited his epistolary space). Ciceronian characters and Ciceronian language become models for Ovid to signal the realistic exemplarity of his own experience. In constructing his own exile through a self-edited epistolary medium, Ovid thus hints at the process through which letter collections — historical and fictional — monumentalise exemplary lives.
Methodologically speaking, this analysis of the Ex Ponto treats the genre of the letter and its rhetorical roots as heuristic tools for understanding the ‘horizon of expectations’ for the collection.Footnote 11 Being conversant with the genre of fictional letters by historical characters in the schoolroom, Ovid and his readers will have seen the potential for the epistolary form to carry implications of fictionalisation, memorialisation and critique of despotism. My analysis is largely comparative and built on the careful interpretation and juxtaposition of broad narrative themes in ancient fictional letter writing: because of the nature of the evidence, it does not and cannot always try to establish normative intertextual links between specific letter collections, but rather seeks to create new avenues of interpretation of the exilic production that take seriously Ovid’s programmatic comparison, beginning in Pont. 1.3, between his exile and that of political figures from the Greek and Roman past. The overarching goal is to see how history and politics, however fictionalised, are just as important frameworks for Ovid as Greek myth in the construction of his exile.
Additionally, this reading of the Ex Ponto as belonging to the tradition of fictional letter writing enables an entirely new through-line to emerge between Ovid’s pre- and post-exilic works. While previous scholarship has largely focused on the way in which Ovid’s exilic letters recuperate themes of loss and desire that dominated his pre-exilic elegiac production, the use of the fictional letter provides yet another trait d’union between these collections.Footnote 12 In the Heroides, the letter form evokes the fictional impersonation of mythological characters in the rhetorical schoolroom.Footnote 13 By contrast, in the exilic letters, it is Ovid’s own persona which echoes that of the sages and politicians whose exilic experiences were rhetorically elaborated in the schoolroom.Footnote 14 When we examine the Heroides and Ex Ponto as complementary experiments in fictional letter writing, what stands out is Ovid’s sophisticated effort to self-fictionalise: by deploying the epistolary genre, which was pivotal in translating the private lives of historical actors into a public and endlessly replicable literary experience, the exilic collection creates a public persona for Ovid, endowing his life with exemplary potential. The exilic persona of the Ex Ponto is thus yet another sophisticated example of Ovid’s play with concepts of fiction.Footnote 15 In the Ex Ponto it is the biographical self that is the subject of fictionality. I am here borrowing from James Phelan’s definition of fictionality in life writing as a rhetorical act:Footnote 16 intentional ‘departure[s] from the realm of the actual’ clearly signalled to the audience. Unlike generic fictions, like the novel, which are ‘extended forays into invention’, fictionality in life writing can coexist with (and in fact be placed in the service of) non-fictional purposes.Footnote 17 Within different genres of life writing, epistolary collections leverage the assumed realism of letters as mirrors of the self, while also committing themselves to a complex act of self-fashioning that blurs the line between fiction and reality.Footnote 18 Ovid’s exilic writing leverages not just mythical paradigms of exile (see above at n. 14 on Odysseus), but also historical ones. I understand this exilic persona as pseudepigraphic, not because it is inauthentic or un-Ovidian, but because it constructs exile via recourse to the genre of letter writing through which the life of a famous personality of history and myth could be expanded upon. Through this framework, we are invited to read Ovid’s authorial persona as a participant in this tradition of fictional epistolary writing and to treat the monotony of the collection as a recognisable feature of the genre. One way to interpret the fictionality of Ovid’s exile has been to question its authenticity.Footnote 19 Instead I argue that the conjuring of various models of textualised lives in letter form is part of Ovid’s effort to build his persona as worthy of remembrance and authority.
I Letters from exile
Ovid’s adoption of the epistolary form can be understood as part of a tradition of fictional letters ascribed to historical figures. The corpus of Greek historical letters was collected and translated into Latin in the late nineteenth century by Rudolf Hercher in Epistolographi Graeci.Footnote 20 While the bulk of what is collected in Hercher’s collection dates to the second to third century c.e. or later, pseudepigraphic letters attributed to historical figures were known from the first century b.c.e., with new papyrological findings confirming that letter exercises were regularly practised from the third century b.c.e. onwards.Footnote 21 Given the uncertainty that surrounds the dating of these extant corpora, however, my aim is to demonstrate not that Ovid imitated specific letters or collections, but that he operated within a rhetorical and literary tradition that treated exile as a theme to be explored through fictional letter writing. Romans not only read the Greek letters, but also composed fictional letters in the persona of historical Roman characters: extant pseudepigraphic letters in Latin date from as early as the first century c.e.Footnote 22 Though none of these extant letters are exilic, the pseudo-Ciceronian Pridie quam in exilium iret, a speech supposedly written by Cicero on the day before his exile in 58 b.c.e. and variously dated anywhere between the first and the fourth century c.e., gives us a glimpse of the importance of exile in the Roman pseudepigraphic production.Footnote 23
The most relevant models for exilic pseudepigrapha are four extant collections which purportedly address events of fifth- and fourth-century Greek history — namely, the letters of Demosthenes, Diogenes, Themistocles and Aeschines. Crucially, the theme of exile is ubiquitous in these corpora — partly because exile gave the pretext for writing letters, partly because letters from abroad functioned to fill the gap in the career of an author or politician. These epistolary corpora stage the political crisis of democratic Athens in the face of Persian and Macedonian aggression. There are the six letters attributed to Demosthenes: letters 1–4 are typically considered genuine, while the authenticity of 5, the only private letter, and 6 is contested.Footnote 24 Letters are also known from the biographical tradition. Plutarch’s account of the death of Demosthenes at the hands of Antipater and Craterus after the final battle of the Lamian War (322 b.c.e.) centres the importance of the letter as an instrument of resistance to tyranny: according to one version of the story, it was Demosthenes’ pen which was laced with poison, a pen he used (depending on the version of the story) to write to his family (Plutarch, Dem. 29.3) or to Antipater himself (Plutarch, Dem. 30.1). Demosthenes’ rallying of the Athenians against the threat posed by Philip of Macedon was of crucial importance for Cicero in his Philippics, and the corpus of letters circulating under Demosthenes’ name and dated almost exclusively to his time in exile was known already to Cicero (see below, Section III). There are 51 letters attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, the founding figure of the Cynics.Footnote 25 The themes and narratives of the fictional letters intersect with those of the biographical tradition: exiled from his homeland, Diogenes comes to Athens, where he critiques Plato for his luxury and is later made captive and then released by Philip of Macedon at the battle of Chaeronea (Diog. Laert. 6.43). Diogenes’ parrhesia in the face of absolute power is encapsulated in the famous incident of his meeting with Alexander the Great. According to Plutarch (Alex. 14), when prompted by Alexander to ask for anything he wanted, Diogenes entreated the monarch to stand a little out of his sun (Diog. Laert. 6.38; Cic., Tusc. 5.92; Plut., Alex. 14). Diogenes’ ability to make do with little leads not only to his defiance of Alexander’s absolute power but also to the latter’s envy of the Cynic’s self-sufficiency — Alexander is reported to have said: ‘Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes’ (Diog. Laert. 6.32). As if to underscore the symbiotic relationship between absolute freedom and absolute power, the two men reportedly died on the same day (Diog. Laert. 6.79). There are 21 letters of uncertain date attributed to Themistocles:Footnote 26 these in many ways expand on a letter of Themistocles, addressed to Artaxerxes and requesting his protection during exile (472 b.c.e.), transmitted by Thucydides (1.137.4) and translated by Nepos (Life of Themistocles 9). According to Martina Janßen, the Themistoclean corpus thematises ‘the events surrounding the exile and escape of Themistocles as a result of ostracism’.Footnote 27 In the biographical tradition, the case of Themistocles, the only one of these Greek figures to die in exile, offers a proverbial example of a statesmen unjustly punished by his people (Cic., Rep. 1.5; Off. 1.75) who gets his vengeance in his exile in Asia Minor by toying with the possibility of assimilating himself to the Persians. The corpus of the pseudo-Aeschines contains twelve letters purportedly written by Aeschines during his exile in Rhodes (330 b.c.e.), following his defeat at the hands of Demosthenes. On the basis of papyrological evidence, Zilong Guo has recently argued that some of these letters could be dateable to the second century b.c.e.Footnote 28 In short, the biographical tradition in which these chronologically composite epistolary corpora insert themselves interrogates the ability of the Greek world at large to withstand the influence of outside tyrannical powers.Footnote 29
It is clear that Cicero knew about some of these epistolary exilic corpora, even if their arrangement and composition were different from the ones that have survived. In the Brutus and Orator, Cicero refers to Demosthenes, Epistle 5, in which the orator mentions his education under Plato.Footnote 30 Scholars have found commonalities between Epistle 2, ‘On his own return’, and Cicero’s representation of his own exile, both in the letters from exile and in the post reditum speeches, but as Caroline Bishop has noted, the Demosthenic example was especially important in Cicero’s later career as a model for resistance to tyranny.Footnote 31 Additionally, it is clear that some of the Cynic letters circulated well before the Augustan period.Footnote 32 In the Tusculan Disputations (5.90), Cicero translates a letter of the sixth-century Scythian prince Anacharsis from the Greek.Footnote 33 In the third century Diogenes Laertius, who cites letters attributed to the Cynics in his biographies, reports that in the second century b.c.e., Sotion of Alexandria knew a list of genuine letters of Diogenes (Diog. Laert. 6.80), though his corpus does not necessarily coincide with the one that has come down to us.Footnote 34 Diogenes Laertius also reports that there were ongoing debates about the authenticity of the letters of Epimenides of Crete (seventh century) in the first century b.c.e., when Demetrius of Magnesia, a friend of Atticus, discredited the authenticity of a letter of his to Solon (Diog. Laert. 1.112) on linguistic grounds.Footnote 35 Although they are not relevant to the theme of exile, the letters of Epicurus (cited extensively at Fin. 2.96–103), Panaetius (Fin. 4.23) and Dichaearchus (Att. 13.32.2) should be added to the list of letters attributed to famous Greek personalities that were known in Rome at least since the time of Cicero.Footnote 36
Despite this wealth of materials, efforts to situate Ovid within the broader tradition of exilic literature have focused primarily on his relation to Cicero, particularly in the representation of the pain of exile.Footnote 37 For example, when at Pont. 2.3.1–4 Ovid compares exile to death, scholars have noted similarities with how Cicero describes the grief of exile to his brother Quintus in the summer of 58 b.c.e. from Thessaloniki.Footnote 38 In turn, it is possible to argue, as Betsy Nagle does, that the representation of grief overcoming the exiled writer has commonalities with the Demosthenic corpus, especially the second letter (2.25), a text to which I will return.Footnote 39 These intertextual approaches, however, prove rather inconclusive when one considers the longue durée of exilic topoi. By contrast, my argument will not primarily rely on echoes of specific passages in the extant exilic epistolary corpus. Instead, I take even extant epistolary corpora of authors such as Aeschines and Themistocles, which largely postdate Ovid, as guides to a long-standing interest in the fictionalisation of exile in and before Ovid’s own time. I consider then what it means for Ovid to construct his exilic persona in ways that are reminiscent of the character, challenges and experiences of political figures whose exile could be, and likely was already, fictionalised and dramatised in letter form in the rhetorical schoolroom.
II Representing exile in Ovid
As noted by Gareth Williams in a recent paper on ‘philosophical failure’ in the Ex Ponto, in many respects Ovid sets his epistolary project up as a departure from exilic literature.Footnote 40 This point is articulated most strongly at Ex Ponto 1.3, addressed to a certain Rufinus (also addressed in Pont. 3.4), a poem which can be read as a programmatic reflection on Ovid’s relation to his exilic predecessors.Footnote 41 Rufinus sent soothing words (v. 3: solacia) to aid his friend; one by one, Ovid rejects the standard topoi of exilic consolation as unsuitable to his circumstances and, in acknowledging the mollitia of his heart, embraces the label of effeminacy:
cum bene firmarunt animum praecepta iacentem,
sumptaque sunt nobis pectoris arma tui,
rursus amor patriae ratione ualentior omni,
quod tua fecerunt scripta, retexit opus.
siue pium uis hoc seu uis muliebre uocari,
confiteor misero molle cor esse mihi.
When your precepts have strengthened my prostrate soul and I have put on the weapons of your heart, once again love for my fatherland, stronger than any reasoning, unravels the work that your writings have done. Whether you want to call this loyal or whether you want to call it girlish, I admit that in my misery my heart is soft. (Ovid, Pont. 1.3.27–32)
Within the anti-consolatory disquisition of Ex Ponto 1.3 comes a passage enumerating exempla (1.3.61: ueterum. . . exempla uirorum) of men from the past that have coped well with the pain of exile. At lines 61–84 Ovid lists, and quickly dismisses, nine exempla of men who endured exile with a brave disposition (1.3.62: forti … mente):
The first two exempla are philosophers: Rutilius Rufus (vv. 63–6), a Stoic who was exiled unjustly to Smyrna and refused to come back when Sulla recalled him (Quintilian Inst. 11.1.13), and Diogenes the Cynic, who was exiled to Athens from his native Sinope on the Black Sea (vv. 67–8). The next two are Greek politicians: Themistocles, son of Neocles, who defeated the Persians at the battle of Salamis and spent the first part of his exile in Argos (vv. 69–70); Aristides, who was exiled from Athens to Sparta, though in actuality he spent his exile at Aegina (vv. 71–2). Finally, we move to mythology with five examples in rapid succession: Patroclus, Jason, Cadmus, Tydeus and Teucer. All seem to have in common that they find unexpected blessings (Patroclus meets Achilles) or found new cities in or as a consequence of exile.
Ovid’s diatribe here has a distinctly anti-Stoic and anti-Cynic flavour. His first example, Rutilius Rufus, was elsewhere equated to Socrates, whose student Antisthenes founded the Cynic sect.Footnote 42 For example, in Ep. 24.4, Seneca gives advice to Lucilius about how to deal with anxiety surrounding a pending lawsuit which an angry enemy is bringing against him. Seneca equates Rutilius to Socrates as an example of a wise man who refused to escape from banishment and death. Lucilius is well aware that these exempla are coming straight out of the rhetorical schools: ‘ “These stories are chanted in all the rhetorical schools”, you say; “soon you’ll be coming to the theme Contempt for Death and telling me about Cato” ’ (Seneca, Ep. 24.6: ‘decantatae’ inquis ‘in omnibus scholis fabulae istae sunt; iam mihi, cum ad contemnendam mortem uentum fuerit, Catonem narrabis’). It is unclear whether the fabulae that Seneca refers to as being chanted in rhetorical schools include the letters of the Cynics or the composition of new letters in the persona of a Cynic, though given the role of letter writing in rhetorical schools this is quite likely. This refusal of Cynic philosophy reaffirms a point already made in Tristia 5.12, where Ovid states that not even Socrates could deal with the blow to fortune he, Ovid, has suffered.Footnote 43 Potential evidence of Ovid’s engagement with the letters of the Cynics can be gleaned through the next exemplum. In lines 67–8, Ovid refers to the exile of Diogenes the Cynic, who left his native Sinope on the Black Sea after a scandal and found refuge in Athens:
non doluit patria Cynicus procul esse Sinopeus,
legit enim sedes, Attica terra, tuas.
The Cynic from Sinope was not distressed to be far from his fatherland, for he chose you as a home, land of Attica. (Ovid, Pont. 1.3.67–8)
This episode is similarly recounted in the first of the 51 pseudepigraphic letters attributed to Diogenes the Cynic, a text which is also cited by Diogenes Laertius.Footnote 44 The first letter of the Diogenes corpus is addressed to the people of Sinope and reads:
You condemned me to exile but I sentence you to remain at home. Thus, you will live in Sinope and I in Athens; that is, you in the company of merchants, I with Solon and those who have liberated Greece from the Persians. Moreover you deal with the Heniochians and Achaenas, a stock of people which is at enmity with all the Greeks; but I with the Delphians and Eleans, with whom even the gods associate. (Diogenes, Epistle 1; trans. Malherbe)
The Cynic epistles are notoriously hard to date, and it is possible that Ovid knew of this episode from a different source.Footnote 45 However, the letters of Diogenes, together with those of Heraclitus and Anacharsis, are the earliest attested examples from the corpus of Cynic letters. As we have seen above, in an extended passage in the fifth book of the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero translates one letter from the corpus of Anacharsis (5.91) and proceeds to tell of the famous episode of Diogenes’ meeting with Alexander (5.92), which was a paradigmatic example of the Cynic’s disregard for authority and power.Footnote 46 In short, in rejecting the graue robur (v. 63) of these Cynic (Diogenes) and para-Cynic (Rutilius) characters, Ovid is both polemicising against philosophical responses to exile (Stoics and Cynic) and reaffirming his elegiac mollitia (v. 32: confiteor misero molle cor esse mihi).Footnote 47 Moreover, while it is often said that Ovid has in mind philosophical consolatio literature, it is quite likely that he also knew the Cynic pseudepigraphic corpus in which these episodes were recounted.
The next two exempla — Themistocles and Aristides — are also known from pseudepigraphic corpora. Themistocles is mentioned by Cicero as an example of someone unjustly exiled by his people (Rep. 1.5: et Themistoclem patria quam liberauisset pulsum atque proterritum, non in Graeciae portus per se seruatos sed in barbariae sinus confugisse quam adflixerat; cf. Off. 1.75; Val. Max. 5.3.3). When in the letter to Lucceius (Fam. 5.12.9) Cicero mentions the pleasure he gets from reading about Themistocles’ exile and his return, he mentions Herodotus as the source. Cicero and Ovid, however, may have known about the existence of Themistoclean letters from exile. In the letter to Lucceius, Cicero seemingly confuses Themistocles, who died at Magnesia in the Achaemenid Empire (Plutarch, Them. 31), with Aristides, his opponent, who was ostracised and then returned before the battle of Salamis (480 b.c.e.), in which he fought with Themistocles.Footnote 48 Ovid too shows considerable confusion in terms of the relation between these two. First, he concentrates on Themistocles’ time in Argos, not Persia, arguably the more controversial part of his exile (hence primam … fugam). Additionally, he mentions Themistocles’ exile ahead of Aristides’ (v. 72: inter quas dubium, quae prior esset, erat, a reference which seemingly underscores the rivalry between the two men, but which functions as an Alexandrian footnote concerning the time inversion). Moreover, Aristides’ exile was in Aegina, not Sparta (v. 71: Lacedaemona).Footnote 49 It is noteworthy not just that all the Themistoclean letters are focused on exile but that Argos and Aristides feature prominently in the epistolary collection:Footnote 50 several letters (1–2; 13–16) are written from Argos, and two are addressed to Aristides (12 and 18). Letter 18 is a comparison of the fates of the two men.Footnote 51 Finally, the pairing of Themistocles and Aristides is known from an another pseudepigraphic corpus: thus pseudo-Aeschines in letter 7, itself modelled on Demosthenes letter 4, addresses the Athenians and asks to be allowed to defend himself by bringing up Themistocles and Aristides as comparable exempla.Footnote 52
To sum up, the focus of Ovid’s portrayal of Themistocles and Aristides shares commonalities with the pseudo-Themistoclean epistolary corpus. Ovid focuses on the beginning of Themistocles’ exile (v. 70: primam … fugam) and his time in Argos, which is prominently represented in the epistolary collection. Furthermore, the comparison between Themistocles and Aristides, however historically inaccurate, can also be seen to be fuelled by the preoccupations with synkrisis and exemplarity in the pseudepigraphic corpus. Since the extant corpus of Themistocles is not cited before the Suda and is typically considered the product of a Second Sophistic author, it is likely that Ovid did not have access to the specific collection of pseudepigraphic epistolography that has come down to us.Footnote 53 However, remarkable similarities between Ovid’s specific selection and focus in the exempla polemically referred to in Pont. 1.3 and the interests and thematic emphasis of various collections of pseudepigrapha suggest the rich tradition of rhetorical treatment of exile in epistolary form was not unknown to Ovid, even if the selection of letters available to him differed from the one in our possession.Footnote 54
Finally, we may step back from this catalogue of exilic exempla and interpret Ovid’s main claim that his exile is characterised by amor patriae (v. 29) and softness of heart (v. 32: confiteor misero molle cor esse mihi). For it is Cicero above all who provides a model for rejecting consolation in exile and for unmanly weakness in the face of amor patriae.Footnote 55 For example, Livy’s epitaph of Cicero, cited in Seneca the Elder (Suas. 6.22), stated that he bore none of his adversities in a way worthy of a man except for death (omnium aduersorum nihil, ut uiro dignum erat, tulit praeter mortem). Seneca the Younger returns to this theme in the De brevitate vitae when he uses Cicero as an example of a failed Stoic sapiens neither able to maintain calm in good times nor to shoulder adversities (Dial. 10.5.1: nec secundis rebus quietus nec aduersarum patiens). This theme is elaborated in the Second Sophistic when Cassius Dio, for example, stages a consolation by the fictional philosopher Philiscus directed at Cicero, now exiled from Rome.Footnote 56 Philiscus introduces his consolation through shaming and upbraiding:
He accordingly went over to Macedonia and spent his time there in lamentations. But there he met a man named Philiscus, who had made his acquaintance in Athens and now by chance fell in with him again. ‘Are you not ashamed, Cicero,’ he said, ‘to be weeping and behaving like a woman [θρηνῶν καὶ γυναικείως διακείμενος]? Really, I should never have expected that you, who have enjoyed such an excellent and varied education, and who have acted as advocate to many, would grow so faint-hearted [μαλακισθήσεσθαι]’. (Cass. Dio, 38.18; trans. Cary, modified)
Plutarch has similar comments about Cicero’s gender-bending lamentations while in exile:Footnote 57
But although many people visited him out of goodwill, and the Greek cities vied with one another in sending him deputations, still, he passed his time for the most part in dejection and great grief, looking off towards Italy like a disconsolate lover [ὥσπερ οἱ δυσέρωτες]. (Plut., Cic. 32; trans. Perrin)
It is especially productive to compare Cicero’s and Ovid’s representations of grief as the centre piece of the exilic experience with Demosthenes’, particularly in the second letter ‘On his own return’. Already Plutarch in the Life of Demosthenes underscores the lack of courage with respect to danger by portraying Demosthenes as bearing exile without fortitude (25.5: ἤνεγκε δὲ τὴν φυγὴν μαλακῶς).Footnote 58 This word recurs in the second letter of Demosthenes, where in the peroration, Demosthenes addresses the issue of his own grief:
Let not one of you think, men of Athens, that through lack of manhood or from any other base motive I give way to my grief from the beginning to the end of this letter. Not so, but every man is ungrudgingly indulgent to the feelings of the moment, and those that now beset me — if only this had never come to pass — are sorrows and tears, longing both for my country and for you, and pondering over the wrongs I have suffered, all of which cause me to grieve. If you but scan this record fairly, in none of the political actions taken by me in your behalf will you find softness or lack of manhood [οὔτε μαλακίαν οὔτ’ ἀνανδρίαν προσοῦσαν] attaching to me. (Demosthenes, Epistle 2.25; trans. DeWitt)
Demosthenes defends himself from the same charge of anandria (lack of manliness/courage) we see reflected in Plutarch and Cicero. In portraying the exilic experience as a natural corollary to erotic elegy, Ovid has latched onto this particular problem in evaluating the characters of Demosthenes and Cicero: is the outpouring of amor patriae, longing for the fatherland — an emotion, amor, traditionally associated with erotic desire — a justified response to the unjust exile or an expression of anandria? Both Cicero and Demosthenes were accused of unmanliness in the way they dealt with the blow of exile. Different texts dealt with this legacy in different ways: Demosthenes justifies the statesman’s grief as motivated by legitimate love of country, while Livy pointed to Cicero’s death as a redemptive gesture. When read in the context of this widespread critique of Cicero’s gender-bending response to exile, Ovid’s approach in Pont. 1.3 is especially provocative: Ovid embraces Cicero’s exilic mollitia, while recontextualising it as an elegiac trait. The reader is invited to assimilate Ovid’s amor patriae to Cicero’s, while contextualising the pathological aspects of eros within the elegiac topos of medicina amoris.Footnote 59
It is worth stressing that Demosthenes’ representation of the pain of exile is in many ways at odds with the more philosophical approach of his fictional contemporaries in the pseudepigraphic corpus, Aeschines and Themistocles. These three corpora can be read as urgent answers to the question of unjust exile: whereas Demosthenes in Epistle 2 claims innocence and laments his exile, Aeschines embraces his downfall. Thus in Epistle 5, he writes:
In so far as it depends on Cleocrates, I do not wish for any other city or persons; instead, I am extremely satisfied with my misfortune, and it seems to me that the riddance to public life in Athens is the beginning of my life [ἀρχὴ δοκεῖ μοι τοῦ βίου ἡ ἀπαλλαγὴ τῆς αὐτόθι πολιτείας]. (pseudo-Aeschines, Epistle 5Footnote 60 )
By contrast, Themistocles wavers but is ultimately closer to the model of fortitude in exile to which Demosthenes could not live up. Proudly affirming that he will not sell himself to the Persians, even if the Athenians continue to oppose his return irrationally, he states:
The worst of the Athenians might be able to force me into exile, but they could never force me to be a coward [κακούς]. Ironically, in the way the Athenians are punishing me I think I perceive the very authority I saved for them. So I think about these things often, and am full of a thousand ideas, and try to resist getting too upset; but my present state of exile lies heavily on my mind, dragging me into despair and overwhelming my emotions, and even leads me away from the previous strength of my convictions [τῶν ἰσχυροτέρων λογισμῶν]. (pseudo-Themistocles, Epistle 13.11–13; trans. Rosenmeyer Reference Rosenmeyer2006)
While wavering, Themistocles is still committed to his initial decision to put up with exile without complaining too much (13.2: οὐκ ἂγαν ὀδυρόμενοι). Taken together, Themistocles represents a happy mean between the iskhuroteroi logoi of Aeschines and the malakia of Demosthenes and Cicero, while Ovid takes to extreme the latter’s response, framing his mollitia as a logical generic expectation for his elegiac persona.
III Lives, exile and letters: Ovid and Cicero
In the previous section, I have argued that in writing letters from exile, Ovid was inspired by a tradition that elaborated on the exilic experience of Greek statesmen with fictional letters. Moreover, by rejecting a philosophical attitude towards exile and embracing instead exilic despair, Ovid re-enacts Cicero’s outlandish desire for the patria, all while cloaking it in a suitable elegiac form. In this section, I explore in greater detail how Cicero is an implicit literary model for the Ovidian collection. After reviewing the evidence for the circulation of the Ciceronian epistolary corpus in the late Augustan period, I speculate that the dialectic between exilic time and space around which the Ex Ponto is organised may have been inspired by the narrative of exile in the Ad Atticum. Regardless of whether Ovid had this narrative version of Cicero’s exile at his disposal, however, several addressees in the collection beg to be interpreted through the lens of Cicero’s life writing.
Considerable uncertainty exists on the extent to which Cicero’s letters circulated in the Augustan period. The earliest extant citation of Cicero’s letters is that of the Ad familiares by Seneca the Elder, though the ninth-century entry in a catalogue of the Abbey of Lorsch is the earliest evidence for the modern sixteen-book collection of the Ad familiares.Footnote 61 Of the modern collections of Ciceronian letters, the Ad Atticum is the most relevant for our purposes, both because the third book of the extant collection of letters to Atticus focuses exclusively on exile and because letters to Atticus were known to Cornelius Nepos in the mid-30s b.c.e. Nepos cites eleven books of letters to Atticus (Att. 16.3), a number which does not, however, align with the modern collection of sixteen books. It is a subject of debate, however, whether the letters in Ad Atticum circulated beyond a small circle of friends, especially given their explosive political content.Footnote 62 The earliest extant citations of letters from Ad Atticum are in Seneca the Younger, who in his Letters to Lucilius (97.3–4; 118.1) refers to the work under the title Ciceronis epistularum ad Atticum. According to the scholarly consensus, the terminus ante quem for the circulation of the modern collection of Ad Atticum is the early 60s.Footnote 63
Nevertheless, scholars have pointed to allusions by Ovid to Cicero, Ad familiares and Ad Atticum, as evidence that at least some letters of Cicero circulated by the time Ovid wrote the Tristia and Ex Ponto.Footnote 64 One potentially relevant piece of evidence which has been neglected thus far comes from the positions of the intertexts identified in the structures of the Ad Atticum and Ex Ponto letter collections. Within the Ciceronian epistolary corpus, Ad Atticum Book 3 focuses exclusively on exile: it begins as Cicero is in itinere in the spring of 58 (3.1), tracks his journey into exile as he moves through the southern tip of Italy to Greece and back towards Epirus, and ends with a despondent letter, likely from Dyrrachium, in February of 57 b.c.e. (3.27).Footnote 65 Book 4 begins with Cicero finally back in Rome (4.1: cum primum Romam ueni). It is important to remember that, as Roy Gibson has demonstrated, Ad Atticum stands out for its chronological rather than thematic arrangement — one of the few other extant letter collections to be arranged chronologically is Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, which Gibson argues is influenced by the Ad Atticum.Footnote 66 Moreover, the compiler of Ad Atticum Book 3 chose to make exilic despair the thematic focus of the collection.Footnote 67
It is noteworthy that Ovid, too, has chosen a chronological approach for his exilic collection in a radical departure from the meandering structure of the Amores:Footnote 68 like Ad Atticum Book 3, Tristia 1 presupposes a poet on his way to exile. Thus at Tr. 1.10.1–2, Ovid writes:Footnote 69
littera quaecumque est toto tibi lecta libello,
est mihi sollicitae tempore facta uiae.
Every letter that you have read in my whole book was composed by me during the time of my anxious journey. (Ovid, Tr. 1.11.1–2)
This arrangement, whereby the structure of the book is patterned around the physical location of the exiled man in his journey, is also at work in the epistolary corpora of Themistocles and Demosthenes. The Themistoclean collection is arranged in a diptych structure with each half (1–12 and 13–21) beginning with Themistocles writing from Argos immediately after being ostracised and ending with him writing as a refugee at the Persian court (12 is sent from Sousa and 20–1 from Magnesia).Footnote 70 These parallel units, while differing in their portrayal of the statesman, share a common approach in making the journey the structuring principle of the collection. The Demosthenic corpus is different in two respects: first, with the exception of letter 5, addressed to Heracleodorus, the six letters are addressed to the Athenian boule and demos rather than to friends. Secondly, it has a less clear-cut chronological structure. One important consideration, however, is that letter 1, on the topic of homonoia, while still written in exile, is marked by a reference to the death of Alexander (1.13). As we know from Plutarch (Dem. 27), Demosthenes was recalled from exile after the death of the ruler, though he was subsequently expelled and committed suicide after the end of the Lamian War. Thus the reference to the death of Alexander in the first letter establishes a temporal framing for the collection as the product of Demosthenes’ attempt to bring to an end his own exile.Footnote 71 The collection of letters, with the exception of letter 5, which attests to an earlier phase, is thus organised around the question of how Demosthenes brought about his own return from exile.
To go back to Ovid, Tristia 5.1, the first poem in the last book of the collection, refers to the themes of despair and emaciation, as well as the overarching desire to be reunited with the fatherland, which end the third book of the Ad Atticum. Just as in Att. 3.25, Cicero speaks of his having to waste away in exile (nobis in hac calamitate tabescendum esse); in the penultimate couplet of Tristia 5.1, Ovid similarly refers to his soul wasting away with cares: nolumus assiduis animum tabescere curis (Tr. 5.1.77).Footnote 72 As the first book of the Ex Ponto begins, Cicero can be seen to function as a model in absentia. Ad Atticum Book 4 opens with Cicero writing from Rome to Atticus about his own triumphant reditus to the capital: ‘when I first arrived in Rome’ (cum primum Romam ueni) are the first words of the book.Footnote 73 By contrast, the first poem of Ex Ponto fails to deliver the expected reditus. Instead of Ovid returning from exile, it is his libelli which have made their way to Rome. Thus, at Pont. 1.1.1–10, he writes:
His books’ refusal to enter the public space of the library (v. 5: publica . . . monimenta) and their preference for hiding in private spaces (vv. 9–10: latere/sub lare priuato) provide a drastic contrast with Cicero’s public reditus. Moreover, Ovid’s characterisation of his books as foreign (v. 3: peregrini) play with a Ciceronian topos whereby scholarship and books prevent men from being strangers (hospites) in their own country.Footnote 74 Ironically, the sense of estrangement which Cicero imputed to the Roman readers has now been displaced onto the books themselves, which are now fugitives unable to enter the public libraries.
The clear and unique chronological structure which Ovid has employed to construct the Epistulae ex Ponto is certainly suggestive of the narrative arrangement of Ad Atticum Books 3–4. As we begin to read the Ex Ponto, the echoes of Cicero are reinforced by the identity of some of the addressees in the collection. The first three books of the Ex Ponto are dedicated to an addressee by the generic name of Brutus, to whom both 1.1 and 3.9 are individually dedicated (in addition to 4.6).Footnote 75 Two more of Ovid’s addressees have names that evoke the Ciceronian world: Atticus, the unknown addressee of Pont. 2.4 and 7, and Sextus Pompey, a descendant of Pompey the Great and a consul in 14 c.e., who replaces Brutus as the main addressee in Book 4 — 4.1, 4.4, 4.5 and 4.15 are addressed to him. At structurally sensitive positions in the collection, Ovid’s addressees evoke Ciceronian namesakes. In addition, Ovid peppers the text with the vocabulary of Cicero’s social and political philosophy to hint further at the comparison between himself and the republican statesman.
To start with Brutus, it is suggestive that Ovid chooses to address the first three books of epistulae to a little-known addressee, perhaps to be identified with a rhetor mentioned by Seneca the Elder, but one with a name that would have been impossible not to connect to the anti-Caesarian conspirator.Footnote 76 That Brutus is named programmatically in Ex Ponto 1.1 as a foil for Ovid, making it almost inescapable to think of the conspirator in conjunction with the letter’s addressee.Footnote 77 Thus, at lines 21–6, Ovid writes:
In an attempt to persuade Brutus not to be afraid to accept his children/poems born in exile, Ovid sets up a contrast between his liber, which does not lack in homage to Augustus (v. 28: non caret e nostris ullus honore liber), and the writings of Antony and of the other Brutus. As commentators have pointed out, Antony’s scripta may be a reference to his letters, which Augustus is said to have read out to his friends after Actium (Plutarch, Ant. 78.3).Footnote 78 When Ovid declares that unlike Brutus and Antony, he did not bring arma against the gods (i.e. Julius Caesar and the future Augustus), he is arguably referring to Antony’s ventriloquised confession in a sarcastic passage of Cicero’s second Philippic that he brought weapons against the gods of the fatherland, the altars and fires.Footnote 79 As for the writings of Brutus, his letters are especially appropriate not just in light of the generic comparison with the Ex Ponto. The reference to scrinia in v. 24 suggests letters: the scrinium was a container used for storing documents and letters.Footnote 80
In the last poem of Book 3 and epilogue to the first three books, Brutus is told to be forgiving of the shortcomings of Ovid’s exilic poetry.
nec liber ut fieret, sed uti sua cuique daretur
littera, propositum curaque nostra fuit.
postmodo collectas utcumque sine ordine iunxi:
hoc opus electum ne mihi forte putes.
da ueniam scriptis, quorum non gloria nobis
causa sed utilitas officiumque fuit.
My goal and objective were not to give rise to a book but rather that each person should be given their letter. Afterwords, I gathered them up and put them together as they were without a specific order: so you don’t by chance think that this work is the result of choice. Forgive these writings which were not composed for the sake of glory but rather for utility and social obligation. (Ovid, Pont. 3.9.51–6)
As already discussed, Ovid claims that his goal was not, after all, to assemble a book but rather to ‘join together without order a collection of letters’ (v. 53: postmodo collectas utcumque sine ordine iunxi).Footnote 81 In closing, Ovid claims that ‘the purpose [of the Ex Ponto] was not glory but rather utility and duty’ (vv. 55–6: quorum non gloria nobis/causa sed utilitas officiumque fuit). The word officium in the epilogue matches the reference to Ovid’s Muse as officiosa in Pont. 1.1.20, thus inscribing via ring composition the notion that the exile elegies will bring about their utilitarian goal — the utilitas of Ovid as an individual — if they perform the duties (officia) of pietas, amicitia, fides etc. towards the author’s friends and if those duties are honoured in return.Footnote 82 As has been noted, the words utilitas and officium have a strong Ciceronian colouring, and the relation between virtue (honestum) and advantage (utile) in the context of the theory of officia, the duties which must be cultivated both in private and in public to lead a virtuous life, occupies the third and final book of Cicero, De officiis. As Andrew Dyck has shown, for Cicero the focus of the discussion is the utilitas rei publicae, which ‘tends to become, especially in the final portion of the book, a criterion of conduct almost, if not quite, equal to the honestum itself’.Footnote 83 Cicero could not be a more jarring contrast for Ovid: whereas for Cicero the statesman, acting in the interest of the res publica embodies the greatest virtue, for Ovid as an imperial subject utilitas is the personal goal of recall from exile. Despite or because of these differences, the use of the terms utile/utilitas and officium in a letter addressed to Brutus brings to mind Cicero’s discussion of the ultimate test of the conflict of the utile and honestum — namely, tyrannicide. In this passage of De officiis Book 3, Cicero obliquely refers to the killing of Caesar by Brutus and Cassius as an example of a situation in which moral rectitude (honestas), the restoration of a just society, has prevailed over expediency (utilitas), here represented by Brutus’ own safety.Footnote 84 In the ensuing passage (Off. 3.19b–32), Cicero, writing to his son in 44 b.c.e., uses the recent political event as a prime example of a situation ‘in which we have to determine what moral duty [officium] is, as it varies with varying circumstances’ (Off. 3.32: huius generis quaestiones sunt omnes eae in quibus ex tempore officium exquiritur).Footnote 85 Thus, the killing of a tyrant is the exception to the rule that it is better to endure all losses than to wrong a fellow human being. For men have no fellowship (societas) with a tyrant but rather the bitterest feud (distractio), and tyrants ought to be killed just like non-functioning limbs are amputated for the sake of the overall health of a body (3.32).
Thus, not only is the strong ethical colouring of the epistolary project in these final lines of Pont. 1–3 reminiscent of the Ciceronian vocabulary of appropriate actions and public good, it also leverages specifically Brutus’ exemplary role in the discussion of officium in the Ciceronian treatise. Finally, in referring to the fact that the collection is not the result of selection (v. 54: hoc opus electum ne mihi forte putes), Ovid plays with the use of eligo in the context of political life (e.g. OLD 2: eligere magistratus).Footnote 86 Here in the closing of the first part of the collection is a powerful reminder of republican politics, effaced by Caesar’s heir.
Ovid reminds us again of the anti-Caesarian conspirator in Ex Ponto 4.6, the final poem addressed to Brutus.Footnote 87 The poem is in part a laudatio funebris for Ovid’s former patron Fabius Maximus, addressed in Pont. 1.2 and 3.3, and in part a request to Brutus to replace the deceased patron. It also contains an oblique reference to the death of Augustus and Ovid’s poem on the recently deified emperor which, Ovid says, he entrusted to Brutus:
Ovid has entrusted a poem about the recently deified Augustus (v. 17: caelite ... recenti) to Brutus, or rather to Brutus’ mouth:Footnote 88 Akrigg translates carmen in ora dedi (v. 18) as ‘I sent a poem for you to recite from and speak of’; Wheeler translates as ‘I sent for your reading’, but the line weirdly gestures to impersonation by Brutus of Ovid’s poetry. When, in lines 21–2, Ovid swears that Brutus joins in Ovid’s prayer, it is hard not to read the emphasis on recognition in the figura etymologica at v. 22 (non dubia cognite … nota) as an ironic reflection on the identity of the addressees. Finally, in his commentary Helzle notes that the theme of uerus amor in lines 23–5 recalls Ciceronian language of friendship in the Ad familiares.Footnote 89 What is notable, therefore, is that Ovid reminds us of Brutus the conspirator just as he alludes to his own poem on the newly deified Augustus and compares their punishments.
Yet another of Ovid’s addressees has a significant Ciceronian colouring: it has proved difficult to identify with certainty Atticus, the addressee of Pont. 2.4 and 2.7, as well as Am. 1.9.Footnote 90 To begin with, the language of these two poems addressed to Atticus in Pont. Book 2 is especially Ciceronian.Footnote 91 It is thus no surprise to find Ovid punning with the Ciceronian colouring of his addressee’s name.Footnote 92 In the two poems of the Ex Ponto, Atticus features in the capacity of a trusted friend and literary critic, precisely the roles played by Titus Pomponius Atticus in Cicero’s life and correspondence. Two key words recur in these poems: iudicium and fides.Footnote 93 Thus, after introducing the letter as a conversation (v. 1: conloquium), Ovid remembers the times that the two men spent exchanging words and work:
While commentators point to Horatian intertexts, the passage evokes Atticus’ role as Cicero’s trusted editor friend:Footnote 94 Cicero famously calls Atticus the ‘Aristarchus’ of his orations (Att. 1.14.3: totum hunc locum, quem ego uarie meis orationibus, quarum tu Aristarchus es) and Atticus seems to be participating in the selection of Cicero’s letters for an edition curated by Tiro (Att. 16.5.5: sed habet Tiro instar septuaginta, et quidem sunt a te quaedam sumendae. eas ego oportet perspiciam, corrigam; tum denique edentur). Cicero too plays with Atticus’ name: when he asks him to review Brutus’ speech on the Capitol and let him know his judgement (Att. 15.1a.10: tu tamen uelim orationem legas, nisi forte iam legisti, certioremque me facias quid iudices ipse), he shares that he is ‘afraid lest deceived by your name you might be “hyper Attic” in your judgment’ (Att. 15.1a.10: quamquam uereor ne cognomine tuo lapsus ὑπεραττικὸς sis in iudicando. sed si recordabere Δημοσθένους fulmina, tum intelleges posse et Ἀττικώτατα et grauissime).Footnote 95 Ovid puns in similar ways with Atticus’ name elsewhere: in Tristia 5.4, it is the letter itself speaking to its addressee who is described as ‘sweeter than that famous honey which the Attic bees stores in wax’ (Tr. 5.4.29–30: o dulcior illo/melle, quod in ceris Attica ponit apis), another potential reference to the same Atticus.
The insistence on Atticus’ display of his customary fides, a recurrent motif in both Pont. 2.4 and 7, is evocative of the Ciceronian Atticus’ celebrated fides towards Cicero. Thus, according to Nepos, Atticus displayed extraordinary loyalty towards Cicero even during his exile:
sicut Ciceroni in omnibus eius periculis singularem fidem praebuit: cui ex patria fugienti HS ducenta et quinquaginta milia donauit.
Thus to Cicero in all his times of peril he showed unparalleled loyalty, and when the orator was on his way to exile, he made him a present of two hundred and fifty thousand sesterces. (Nepos, Att. 4)
In Pont. 2.7, however, Ovid torments himself with doubts about Atticus’ loyalty and asks his friend to be forgiving: fear of misfortune forces Ovid to embrace empty fears (vv. 5–6: me timor ipse malorum/saepe superuacuos cogit habere metus). Ovid’s questioning of Atticus’ loyalty (v. 4: cura mei) in the opening of Pont. 2.7 finds a counterpart in one of the longest letters from Ad Atticum Book 3. Writing in August of 58 from Greece, Cicero obliquely chastises Atticus for not doing more to ensure his safe return and bids him stop using consolatory motifs and tell him the truth instead:
si potes, erige adflictos et in eo nos iuua; sin omnia sunt obstructa, id ipsum fac ut sciamus et nos aliquando aut obiurgare aut communiter consolari desine. ego si tuamfidem accusarem, non me potissimum tuis tectis crederem; meam amentiam accuso, quod me a te tantum amari quantum ego uellem putaui. quod si fuisset, fidem eandem, curam maiorem adhibuisses, me certe ad exitium praecipitantem retinuisses, istos labores, quos nunc in naufragiis nostris suscipis, non subisses.
Now, if it is in your power, raise me from my affliction and help me out; but if all paths are closed off, then ensure we know and stop reproaching or consoling me with commonplaces. If I were reproaching your loyalty, I would not be entrusting myself above all to your home. It is my own stupidity that I reproach, in that I imagined that I was as loved by you as I would have wished. Had this been the case, you would have brought to bear the same loyalty but greater care, you would have held me back as I rushed to destruction, and you would have not taken upon yourself those toils which you now undertake in the shipwreck of my misfortune. (Cicero, Att. 3.15.7)
Cicero’s emphasis on the fides of Atticus finds a counterpart in the finale of Pont. 2.4 and 2.7, where Ovid returns to the theme of Atticus’ ‘tested loyalty’, while also entreating him not to abandon him at sea (in aequore).Footnote 96
In Book 4, a new addressee replaces Brutus: it is Sextus Pompey, the consul of 14 c.e.Footnote 97 4.1 begins with Ovid bidding Sextus Pompey, the dedicatee of the book, to accept not just the book but also its naming of the dedicatee, perhaps a joking reference to the inevitable association between the addressee and Pompey the Great’s son Sextus Pompey.Footnote 98 As Francesca Martelli has noted, however, Ovid does not allow us to forget about Pompey the Great, the consul’s ancestor.Footnote 99 The third poem of the book is addressed to an unnamed former friend, who now pretends not to know who Ovid is (Pont. 4.3.9–10: dissimulas etiam, nec me uis nosse uideri,/quisque sit audito nomine Naso, rogas). While the opening of the poem toys with two options — complaint or silence (v. 1: conquerar, an taceam?), Ovid chooses to deliver a diatribe on the fickleness of fortune to this nameless friend (v. 35: omnia sunt hominum tenui pendentia filo). The traditional theme is illustrated by way of four canonical exempla, two Greek and two Roman, which get increasingly more relevant to Ovid’s predicament: Croesus, the king of Lydia, Dionysius II, the tyrant of Syracuse who was deposed and exiled to Corinth, Pompey the Great and Marius:
With these exempla we are squarely in rhetorical territory. Marius was a standard presence in declamation.Footnote 100 The exile of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius II, after the failed attempt by Plato and Dion to educate him, is known from several sources, including two letters in the corpus of Diogenes the Cynic, which are addressed to Dionysius (letter 29) or recount his encounter with Dionysius in Corinth (letter 8), where the former tyrant is seen setting up shop as a teacher.Footnote 101 The two Roman exempla and these illustrate not just the fickleness of fortune but specifically the impact of exile: Pompey the Great (v. 41: quid fuerat Magno maius) is depicted asking for a client’s help in his flight after Pharsalus (v. 42: fugiens). After the lacuna in v. 44, we get two couplets about Marius’ exile in 88–87 b.c.e.Footnote 102 The very mention of Marius’ exile might have brought to mind Cicero’s. After all, Marius and Cicero were both noui homines from Arpinum, and Cicero himself had compared his own exile to Marius’ in the Pro Sestio (49–50) and recounted a vision he had of Marius in his sleep while banished from the city (Div. 1.59; cf. Valerius Maximus, Mem. 1.7.5).
These stories of exile and misfortune precipitate an exemplary crisis that already started with the first book of the Ex Ponto: the use of the letter, which had served as an instrument of resistance to arbitrary injustice in exile for Demosthenes and Cicero, demands that we read the exile as unjust and Augustus as a despot. While the deferential tone that Ovid employs towards the regime pulls the reader away from this interpretative framework, the shadows of Cicero’s correspondents and political partners in the Ex Ponto — Brutus, Atticus and Pompey — put this deference in question, creating room for subversion and critique.
IV Conclusion
The choice of the letter form drives Ovid’s self-fiction in the Ex Ponto. Ovid’s verse letters demand to be read in the context of the longue durée of a genre in which unjust exile was a prominent theme. Ovid’s exilic narrative arc is consistent with that of Themistocles, who, like Ovid, dies abroad (in the Persian empire) and is not afforded a return. In Plutarch, Themistocles ‘learned the Persian language sufficiently to have interviews with the King by himself without interpreters’ (Them. 19.4), attracting the suspicion and jealousy of the courtiers. Eventually, while both Plutarch and the letters show Themistocles wavering between loyalty to the Athenians and anger, we see him ultimately resisting the allure of Persian power instead of selling out his countrymen who have betrayed him.Footnote 103 The assimilation of Themistocles to the ways of the Persians is suspiciously close to Ovid’s resignation to the ways of the Getae, especially in Book 4 of the Ex Ponto (4.13.18: paene poeta Getes). As far as Demosthenes and Cicero ‘on their own return’ are concerned, the timing of Ovid’s exile differs from that of both Cicero and Demosthenes. Whereas Cicero and Demosthenes return to their cities in triumph after exile, Ovid’s return fails to materialise within the literary world constructed by the collection. Furthermore, Ovid’s voice is markedly deferential and pro-imperial. Cicero’s Philippics, modelled on Demosthenes’ orations by the same title, echo the anti-tyrannical sentiments of the Demosthenic letters, but are importantly disconnected from his experience of exile and reinstatement. The parallel of the historical tradition of exiled Greek and Roman figures, raised by the adoption of the epistolary form, poses a problem for evaluating the politics of Ovid’s exilic voice: is the anti-tyrannical subtext of the Greek pseudepigraphic tradition of letters from exile, as mediated by Cicero, inviting us to read Ovid’s deference towards Augustus as a self-conscious innovation, or is it providing an opening to question his sincerity as a loyal imperial subject?Footnote 104
Perhaps the duality of the politics of Ovid’s epistolary exile is not meant to be resolved. Whatever the case may be, the epistolary form has a clear interpretative pay-off in the way in which it demands that we consider Ovid’s career side by side with that of other great men.Footnote 105 From a textual point of view, Ovid’s participation in a specific rhetorical and literary practice in which the letter expands upon the uita of a famous historical actor already marks his life as worthy of memorialisation. If we consider the epistolary poems through the lens of the genre of fictional letters, which editorialise, curate or expand upon the life of a celebrated individual, Ovid is acting like his own compiler or continuator, forestalling the work of anonymous letter writers and instead writing up his exile before his own death. When, in the finale of the Metamorphoses, Ovid declares his nomen will be indelebile (Met. 15.876: nomenque erit indelebile nostrum), there is a strong contrast between the ephemeral survival of the uates living ore populi (15.878: ore legar populi) and the textuality of his nomen that cannot be erased: the verb delere acts as a reference to the erasure of words from the written record.Footnote 106 I suggest that Ovid is not referring to his ‘imperishable fame’, the standard translation of indelebile nomen, but to the impossibility of his works undergoing anonymity.Footnote 107 This concern with the authorial fashioning of the posthumous literary legacy of an author is what is at stake in Ovid’s play with biofiction in the Ex Ponto. By writing quae uerba in exilio Ouidius scribat, Ovid pre-empts future poetae Ouidiani, impersonating himself. In Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Robert Musil’s playful effort to anticipate the publication of his last words thematises the death of poetry in the German nation:Footnote 108 while the finality of Posthumous Papers is a self-declared ‘sham’, the announced death of the living author acts as commentary on the crisis of literature. Similarly, Ovid’s construction of his exilic persona through the lens of epistolary fiction asks that we read the Ex Ponto as posthumous writing and exile as a metaphorical death.
