Completion of a commentary on Ovid, Tristia 2 (with a particular focus on lines 359-578)

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Ovid's Tristia 2 is a text which stands at the heart of Ovid's exilic poetry, but also sheds much light on literary works by other authors and by Ovid himself (in particular, the Ars amatoria, which Ovid in this work identifies as one of the two major causes of his banishment). Tristia 2 contains many problems of interpretation for the reader, particularly with reference to the way in which Ovid talks to his addressees (the emperor Augustus, the named addressee of this literary epistle, as well as other implied readers of the poem) and the catalogue of authors Ovid provides as examples of those who have written erotic works before him and have not been punished for their writing, offering tendentious interpretations of many major works of ancient literature. Such issues are crucial in the portion of the commentary (lines 359-578) on which I intend to conduct research.My line by line commentary will illuminate the sorts of issues of usage, metre, tone, and historical and literary allusions that are the staple of any scholarly classical commentary. In addition, I will focus particular attention throughout on the key area of literary hermeneutics (one of the aspects of Tristia 2 to have attracted the greatest amount of interest from recent scholars, but an area which requires further detailed comment on the entire catalogue of authors). Tristia 2 offers a very unusual vista in Augustan poetry by providing a vision of literary history, which, while tendentious, deserves to be explored in depth and set alongside other, more famous pronouncements on literature by Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian. Detailed notes in the commentary itself and its introduction will furthermore provide a much needed exploration of the generic affiliations of this work. My commentary also focuses throughout on political issues, elucidating the connections between the poet and the princeps who banished him, and the ways in which Ovid reflects the workings of late Augustan imperial ideology. My research should therefore illuminate a poem which is important for Ovid's corpus as a whole, as well as for the history of the late Augustan principate, Greek and Roman literary history, the history of the literary apologia, and the figure of the exiled artist in literature from the classical to the modern age.