THE OVIDIAN CAREER

Ovid has the historical privilege of being next in line and the first to react to what had been the boom in poetic self-reference and auto(bio)graphy in the times of Catullus, Virgil, Propertius and Horace. He is also the one who does the most to continue Horace's invention of a ‘literary system’ and a ‘school’ and an ‘Augustan age’ model of Roman poetry (compare e.g. Horace, Serm. 1.10.31–50 with Ovid, Tristia 4.10.41–56; Ex Ponto 4.16.5–40).

Furthermore, Ovid is unique in ancient literature for the sheer number and quasi-systematic regularity of autographic situations: in his extant production, every single work (with the exception of genres that cannot accommodate authorial self-expression: his heroic epic, and presumably his lost tragedy Medea) has a space of self-expression and, often, of recapitulation. Equally important, there is no single poetic text by Naso that remains ‘unsigned’, either through the inclusion of the author's name, or by explicit reference in another Ovidian text, or, often, both. In other words, there is almost no Ovidian poem that remains unacknowledged. Even more important, in a number of cases his texts ‘talk to each other’ (Hinds 1985; Barchiesi 2001; compare Frings 2005), with the result that each work is positioned within a career: for example, the Fasti engage the earlier elegiac/erotic work with the question ‘Who would believe that a path could lead from there to here?’ (2.8).