Ovid and the Inscriptions

In the year 8 CE, Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea for “a song and a mistake.” This chapter explores a series of iconic poems from the Tristia in which Ovid imagines the state of exile through a variety of textual media: his own books of poetry sent back to the city and rejected from the public libraries; the lapidary inscriptions of Augustus he imagines them to encounter; and, several times over, his own funerary epitaph, formulated in explicit competition with Augustus’s own monumental list of deeds, the Res gestae. It is an examination of the challenges presented to the poet by exile and how he uses writing itself and written forms, real and imagined, to overcome that distance and disgrace, becoming increasingly aware that it was at the level of written language, and only at that level, that he and the emperor were “on the same page.”