The Last Poems of Ovid

Public-domain ebook

The Last Poems of Ovid

Name: The Last Poems of Ovid
Author: Ovid

by Ovid

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Language: en1,415 downloads on Project Gutenberg

Subjects

Latin poetry

In: Poetry·Classics of Literature

Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #21920.

About this book

This volume presents the final collection of Ovid’s poems, the last three books of the Tristia, assembled from ten manuscripts and enriched with a critical apparatus that restores readings once suppressed by nineteenth‑century editors. The editor explains that many passages previously regarded as corrupt have been repaired, and several dozen conjectural emendations, both his own and those of other scholars, are documented in the accompanying indices. The introductory material details the history of the edition, from its graduate‑student origins at the University of Toronto in 1985 to its digital publication, and it outlines the two available formats: an HTML version that preserves Greek characters and special markings, and a plain‑text version that maximizes compatibility across devices. The work is positioned as a guide for intermediate and advanced students of Latin poetry, while also offering a resource for textual critics interested in the ongoing refinement of Ovid’s exile verses.

The text reflects the polished elegiac style of early first‑century AD Latin, marked by Ovid’s characteristic clarity and metrical precision, even as he confronts exile and appeals to Augustus. Readers who enjoy close‑reading of poetic form, the interplay of myth and personal lament, or the scholarly challenges of textual reconstruction will find this edition rewarding. It is especially suitable for students of Latin literature, classicists engaged in manuscript studies, and anyone drawn to the nuanced voice of a poet navigating the margins of Roman society.

Who appears in The Last Poems of Ovid

OvidRoman poet in his thirties, short curly hair, thoughtful eyes, simple tunic, laurel wreath
AugustusImperial Roman elder, balding, dignified beard, regal toga with purple trim, laurel crown

The opening · free to read

History of this edition

I originally prepared this edition and commentary during my time as a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Upon its completion (and my graduation) in 1985, a copy was deposited at the National Library of Canada.

Had I followed a university teaching career after graduation, I would undoubtedly have taken the necessary steps to publish the edition, if only in pursuit of academic promotion. But I instead chose a career in the software industry, which both removed the external incentive to publish the edition, and denied me the time that I would have needed to prepare it for publication.

However, I wished to ensure that future editors and commentators were aware of the edition and would be able to make use of it. I therefore decided to publish two short articles drawn from the edition. These articles were intended to make generally available two textual conjectures which I considered likely to be correct. But the articles were also intended to make future editors aware that I had worked on the text of Ovid, so that they would seek out my unpublished edition.

The first article ("An Intrusive Gloss in Ovid Ex Ponto 4.13") appeared in Phoenix (vol. 40, p. 322) in 1986: it reported the restoration of IV xiii 45 discussed at page 408 of the commentary. Phoenix is published by the Classical Association of Canada, and since my own training in the classical languages had taken place almost entirely in Canada, it seemed appropriate that my first publication should be in a Canadian journal.

To my surprise and pleasure, my short article attracted a critique by Professor Allan Kershaw ("_Ex Ponto_ 4.13: A Reply", Phoenix, vol. 42, p. 176), followed by a learned defense of my conjecture by Professor James Butrica ("Taking Enemies for Chains: Ovid Ex Ponto 4.13.45 Again", Phoenix, vol. 43, pp. 258-59).

Four years later, I published a second article ("A Palaeographical Corruption in Ovid, Ex Ponto 4.6"), which appeared in the May 1990 issue of the Classical Quarterly (pp. 283-84). This article reported the restoration of IV vi 38 discussed at pages 240-41 of the commentary. I selected the Classical Quarterly because of its prominence within the world of classical scholarship, and in particular because of its close association with the modern history of Latin textual criticism: it was in the Classical Quarterly that many of the learned articles of A. E. Housman first appeared.

My hope had been that these two articles would serve as a signpost that would lead editors to my edition. The publication of J. A. Richmond's Teubner edition of the Ex Ponto in 1990 proved that this plan was inadequate. Professor Richmond had indeed discovered the existence of my edition: it received a prominent and flattering mention at the end of his preface. However, he stated that he received the microfilm of the edition too late for use in his edition!

In his review of Richmond's Teubner edition in the Classical Review (n.s. 42, 2 [1992], pp. 305-06), Professor James Butrica highlighted a number of proposed emendations from my edition.

It had become clear there was considerable outside interest in the work that I had done, and that simply having a copy of an unpublished edition on deposit at the National Library of Canada was not a sufficient means of making the edition available to the public, so over the years that followed I gave some consideration to how I might publish the edition so that it would be conveniently available to students of Latin poetry.

Early in 2006, I was working as a volunteer proofreader for the Project Gutenberg digital library: I noticed that the Project Gutenberg library included some public domain classical editions comparable in scope to my own. Prompted by this, I decided that I would publish my edition online in order to make it instantly accessible free of charge to anyone wishing to use it. This seemed in every way preferable to seeking out a university press, going through the time-consuming process of seeking the necessary grants to subsidize publication, in order to produce a printed book so expensive that no student and not many libraries could afford to purchase a copy.

Nature of this edition

In essence, this is a corrected version of the original typescript. Typing errors have been corrected, and minor errors have been set right.

All statements made and conjectures proposed should be considered to have been made in 1985.

The HTML and Text versions of this edition

This digital edition is being made available in two versions.

The HTML version takes advantage of the Unicode character set to present Greek passages using the Greek alphabet, and to present certain other special characters, such as the macron. It also offers hyperlinks from the table of contents and from the indices to the relevant sections of the edition.

Popular and useful as HTML is, it does not offer the universality of ASCII text. Essentially every computer can display plain ASCII text correctly. The Text version is presented so that the edition can be read on any computer, large or small, new or old. However, this portability comes at a price. The ISO 8859-1 ASCII character set does not include the Greek alphabet, nor does it include certain special characters which form part of this edition.

Therefore, the Text version of this edition presents Greek passages transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Similarly, in the textual apparatus any capital letter occurring in the report of a manuscript should be considered to be that letter in lower case, with a macron (dash) above.

When the textual apparatus reports a manuscript correction where the original reading is no longer legible, the HTML version underlines the corrected letters, but the Text version uses capitalization. For example, the Text version reports "facTisque B2c" at iii 25: a later hand in B has erased the original fourth letter, and has replaced it with "t".

In the commentary, when metre is being discussed and a Latin word is quoted, any vowel in that word which is capitalized is long, and any vowel which is not capitalized is short. I have occasionally pointed out explicitly that a word is metrically inconvenient because it has a series of short vowels: in the HTML edition, because the actual letters are marked short, these statements will appear to be redundant.

In the Latin text, the start and end of passages which are deeply corrupt and therefore difficult to correct are indicated by an asterisk, instead of the usual dagger (obelus).

Finally, in the critical apparatus, 'æ' is used where a manuscript has 'e' with a cedilla.

Enhancements made: the indices

In order to make the digital edition as useful as possible, I have added this preface, a full table of contents, and two indices.

The first index (starting on page 477) is an index of topics discussed. It is a selective rather than an exhaustive index for the following two reasons:

(1) A commentary is already in effect indexed by the text it is linked to. If, for instance, readers wish to find what the commentary has to say about a certain passage, all they need do is turn to the part of the commentary dealing with that passage.

(2) A digital edition can be searched online very quickly and easily. A reader wishing to find any mention of the eminent Dutch textual critic Nicolaus Heinsius could find every mention of Heinsius in the edition simply by using "Heinsius" as a search argument.

However, some of the discussions in the commentary do not have an obvious link to the text, nor would they necessarily be found quickly by an electronic search. An example would be the discussion of "Simple verbs used for compound ones" at page 281.

Also, there were some parts of the introduction and commentary which I wanted to highlight to the reader as being of possible interest: including references to these in the index would serve this purpose.

For similar reasons, I have included (starting on page 489) an index of textual emendations first proposed in this edition. Some of these emendations involve works other than Ex Ponto IV, and authors other than Ovid. The index of textual emendations makes these corrections easy to find.

My basic training in the classical languages took place at the University of British Columbia, where I completed my B.A. in 1974, and my M.A. in 1977. It is impossible to repay the debt I owe to every single member of the Classics Department at that time.

Professor Charles Murgia of the University of California (Berkeley) initiated me into the mysteries of Latin palaeography and textual criticism.

I created this edition while a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Richard Tarrant, who encouraged me to undertake the edition, posed many excellent questions, and offered many excellent suggestions.

I owe a similar debt to Professor Alexander Dalzell, Professor Elaine Fantham, Professor J. N. Grant, and Professor C. P. Jones, all of them members of the Graduate Department of Classics at the University of Toronto when I was creating the edition.

I have known Rob Morrow for twenty-one years, and he has touched every aspect of my life. The study of Latin poetry is a field of endeavour far removed from his usual interests: but even here he has made an important contribution in the work he did in scanning the original typescript, and in his continuing encouragement and support during the months I worked on creating this digital edition. It is to him, with deep affection and gratitude, that I dedicate this edition.

In AD 8, when he was fifty years of age, Ovid was abruptly banished from Rome to Tomis, an exile from which he never returned. In his poetry from exile, he gives two reasons for the banishment: the publication of the Ars Amatoria, and an unnamed error (Tr II 207; EP III iii 71-72)[1]. The Ars Amatoria had been published some years previously, being generally dated on the basis of AA I 171-72 to 2 BC or shortly thereafter; compare Tr II 545-46. The error was clearly the real cause of the banishment; what precisely this error was Ovid does not reveal, but it appears from Tr II 103-4 and Tr III v 49-50 to have been the witnessing of some action that was embarrassing to the imperial family. Beyond this nothing is known, for Ovid was careful to avoid compounding his original mistake by mentioning what it consisted of.

[Footnote 1: The evidence for Ovid's error and the many theories advanced to explain it are gathered and fully discussed in J. C. Thibault's The Mystery of Ovid's Exile (Berkeley: 1964).]

The catastrophe which befell Ovid did not put an end to his poetic activity; from the eight or nine years of his exile we possess a corpus of elegiac verse that substantially exceeds in bulk the combined production of Tibullus and Propertius.

The first work produced by Ovid was book I of the Tristia. Although it is perhaps not literally true that Ovid wrote much of the poetry on shipboard (Tr I xi 3-10), all of the poems are directly related to the circumstances of his downfall and his journey to exile; and it is reasonable to suppose that the book was published shortly after Ovid's arrival in Tomis.

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