ABSTRACT
In classical antiquity there was no fixed literary form for autobiography as such, and many different authors from Hesiod and Isocrates to Ennius and Cicero included “autobiographical” material in their poems, letters, commentarii, and speeches. When taken as a whole, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto may be said to construct for Ovid an autobiography of exile, that is, an extended first-person account of a particular life-experience. Ovid makes creative use of the details of his life to construct an exilic identity for himself that establishes his own abject condition on the periphery of the empire over against the powerful presence of Augustus at its center. In Aristotle’s terms, the poem moves from the purely personal to the universal as poetry trumps history in Ovid’s story of himself. Throughout the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto Ovid presents Augustus and his family as traditional gods of Greek and Roman myth.
