‘This poem is the feeblest and least poetical of all the Heroides, and has certain solecisms in diction and metre, which are either spurious or show that the epistle is an unfinished and careless performance.’ So Arthur Palmer in the preface to his commentary on Heroides 8, Hermione's letter to Orestes imploring him to rescue her from Neoptolemus, her abductor; and Peter Knox fans the flames of doubt about the authenticity of the letter (or at least parts of it) in his analysis of lines 65-74, where Hermione locates herself alongside Leda, Hippodamia and Helen in a Tantalid tradition of rape-victims:

num generis fato, quod nostros durat in annos,
Tantalides mattes apta rapina sumus?
non ego fluminei referam mendacia cygni
nee querar in plumis delituisse Iouem.
qua duo porrectus longe freta distinet Isthmos,
uecta peregrinis Hippodamia rotis;
[Castori Amyclaeo et Amyclaeo Polluci
reddita Mopsopia Taenaris urbe soror;]
Taenaris Idaeo trans aequor ab hospite rapta
Argolicas pro se uertit in arma manus.
(Her. 8.65-74)

For poetry, read poverty, passim.
Martin Parker

This poetry-stricken essay on onomastication finds in Tristia 1.10 a polynymous atoll in Tristia 1's ocean of anonymy, allonymy, anomie, anatomi.

Sail away sail away sail away.
Enya

All aboard! The first book of the Tristia is an emotion-ocean autoportrait, where elegiac couplets and compositions mime troughs of helpless misery and swells of resentment at reality:

As Betty Rose Nagle has remarked, Ovid's exile poetry deploys proper names within a kind of economy: ‘Ovid immortalises his own name by publicising it and exhorting his friends and readers to keep it alive, and he rewards his friends for actively remembering him by immortalising them, i.e. by putting their names in his poetry.’ What interests me here is the shortcircuiting of this system of exchange within the Tristia. For one of the most striking features of Ovid's first run of exilic elegies is precisely the omission of the names of Ovid's addressees. As Ovid will claim in the poem that opens the Epistulae ex Ponto, it is this omission (along with a change of title) that differentiates the Tristia poems from their successors:

inuenies, quamuis non est miserabilis index,
non minus hoc illo triste, quod ante dedi.
rebus idem, titulo differt; et epistula cui sit
non occultato nomine missa docet.
(Ex Pont. 1.1.15-18)

So wrote G. Schubert in his study of dream symbolism (Die Symbolik des Traumes) published in 1814—one of many works of dream theory that served as a resource for Freud, whose magnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—would appear at the turn of the century. Schubert offers the example of the nonsensical association of the word ‘writing’ with the image of two men (‘one carrying the other on his back’) in an effort to argue a thesis later challenged by the work of Freud: that a ‘daytime language of words’ exists independent of, and unaffected by, a ‘nighttime language of dreams’. Read nearly a century after Freud, the passage is ironic, as Neil Hertz has observed, largely because Schubert's exemplary ‘nonsensical’ combination of word and image is richly suggestive of one of the principal concerns of poststructuralist psychoanalysis: how writing is a process of bearing the burden of the past and shouldering the father, an (oedipal) narrative of the son coming to terms with paternal authority: ‘The weight of the older man's body, the pressure of his will give substance to the voiced word…[w]riting, Freud would have us say, is Oedipal, a coming to terms with the Father, a shouldering of the burden of the past.’