ABSTRACT
This programmatic introduction to the collection focuses, like Propertius 2.1, on the opposition of epic and elegy. The tone here is openly satirical, and the Aeneid is the unambiguous object of Ovid's irony. In later poems, other targets come in for similar treatment, including Augustus himself. Ovid's infectious, almost compulsive, irreverence is on display from the poem's first line, which there parodies the Aeneid's arma uirumque cano. Yet, Ovid is not subversive in any narrow or simple sense. Where Propertius and Tibullus both imagine and have memories of a world beyond that of the principate, Augustus's world is Ovid's [63]. Because he takes this brave new world for granted in both its vanities and benefits, his irony is self-deconstructing. That even the position of self-subverting ironist was ultimately no longer safe, however, is revealed by the poet's subsequent exile. Ovid's fate is more evidence of the increasing impossibility of the elegist under the imperial regime than it is of his political sympathies.
