Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE POEMS OF EXILE
ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque:
Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil.
quilibet hanc saeuo uitam mihi finiat ense,
me tamen extincto fama superstes erit,
dumque suis uictrix omnem de montibus orbem
prospiciet domitum Martia Roma, legar. {Trist. 3.7.43—52)
In short, all that we possess is mortal except for what mind and spirit confer. Even to
me, who have lost my country, my family and my home, from whom has been snatched
all that there was to take, my mind is company and pleasure; over that Caesar could
have no power. Anyone may put an end to my life by the edge of the sword, but my
fame will survive my death, and so long as warlike Rome shall survey the whole
world victorious from her hills, I shall be read.
And he was to conclude Book 4 with a pronouncement in the same vein:
siue fauore tuli, siue hanc ego carmine famam,
iure tibi grates, candide lector, ago. (Trist. 4.10.131-2)
Whether it is partiality or merit that has earned me my fame, to you, kind reader,
are rightly due the thanks.
To his readers and to no one else — so runs the implication — is he beholden.
Supposing that Augustus read these poems and took the point, he is unlikely
to have been much mollified. The Tristia have been criticized as abject; in
some respects they show Ovid as bold to the point of foolhardiness.
The individual books of the Tristia, like those of the Amores, are constructed
so as to throw their main themes into relief. 1 Books 3 and 4 begin and end with
poems that in one way or another are about Ovid's poetry. Trist. 3.1 again
uses the book-as-ambassador motif, this time with the book personified and
speaking; 3.14 commends his poetry to a friend and apologizes for its quality.
Trist. 4.1 begins on the same note of apology, to which, after the more positive
development previously noted, it returns. A phrase in this concluding section
looks forward to the last poem in the book: Ovid records his frustration at the
contrast between what he now was and what he had been — qiri sim fuerimque
recordor (99); and what he had been is precisely the theme of 4.10: quifuerim. ..
ut noris, accipe, posteritas (1—2). This latter poem is usually referred to as an
autobiography, but it is rather what would now be called a personal statement:
what Ovid wished to go on record to allow posterity to judge between him and
Augustus. It is therefore highly selective. Ovid attempts to show that, though
he had done his duty as best he could by the state and by his family, his first
loyalty was to poetry, and that this was not merely a matter of personal preference
but an imperative vocation. In a famous (and frequently misinterpreted) 2
1
Martini (1933) 52, Froesch (1968) 61—2, Dickinson (1973) 160—1, 175, 180, 183—4.
* Stroh (1968).
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