Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto, Book 1 (review)

The Epistulae ex Ponto, for a long time the most neglected area in Ovid's texts, are beginning to attract attention: we already have commentaries on books 1–2 by M. Helzle (Heidelberg 2003) and a very rich commentary on book 4 by L. Galasso (Florence 1995). This new volume is a full-scale treatment of book 1, based on a 2001 Oxford D.Phil. thesis by a German scholar (now teaching in Leipzig). The scholarly biography of the author is relevant to the success of the project. In fact, the commentary combines two aspects that are often associated with, respectively, a German tradition and an English-speaking tradition of research on Augustan poetry: on the one side, a painstaking attention to minute details of language and style, on the other side, a dynamic curiosity for the shifting ironies of political and ideological communication in the Augustan age. The combination works well in a commentary: Galasso on book 4 has all the required competence, for example, but is rather uninterested, by comparison, in all the material that could be analysed in terms of ideological tensions and ambiguity. Gaertner is more flexible, and he pays attention to "counter-effects" of the kind that Stephen Hinds pointed out long ago in a review of a German study of the exile poetry. The addressee of Pont. 1.1 is named Brutus and not securely identified by us: in lines 3–4 this Brutus is being asked to "hide away" (abde) the book of poems from Pontus; then at lines 23–26 the author compares himself to a (better: the) Brutus, the author of "books" (and more specifically, one remembers, of epistles) that are still in circulation and openly displayed, although he waged war against Augustus, and differentiates himself from that Brutus. Is this not an embarrassing supply of people named Brutus for one poem? And how much is at stake in having a Brutus as an addressee being lectured about Caesar and about Caesar's relationship to another Brutus? Gaertner is not particularly interested in this particular example of "surface tension," but his commentary is open to other significant instances. He shows that awareness of historical and political realities (the dissertation was partially supervised by N. Purcell) does not perforce entail a "loyalist" interpretation of Ovid's exile poetics.

The preface includes a striking note of thanks to the distinguished (and generous, one realizes) Latinist K. Sallmann, who taught Latin verse composition to the author per epistulas (!), since the subject was no longer available in his high school.