The third book of the Tristia is the first to have been written in Tomis, Ovid's place of exile. The long journey from Rome, the subject of the first book of the Tristia, is over. The distractions of the journey can no longer sustain him, and his only pleasure is to weep, in other words to write the elegy of lament:

dum tamen et uentis dubius iactabar et undis,
fallebat curas aegraque corda labor:
ut uia finita est, et opus requieuit eundi,
et poenae tellus est mini tacta meae,
nil nisi flere libet…
(Tr. 3.2.15-19)

But while in turmoil I was being tossed around by winds and waves, my worries and sad heart were distracted by the battle for survival. Now that the journey is over, the effort involved in travel is spent, and the land of my punishment has been reached, weeping is my only pleasure.

exulis haec uox est: praebet mihi littera linguam,
et si non liceat scribere, rautus ero.
Epist. ex Pont. 2.6.3f.

This is the exile's voice; the written word gives me a tongue,
and if writing is forbidden, I shall be dumb.

Ovid's exilic persona reveals itself over the course of his correspondence as a literary pastiche of other texts and identities. We hear the narrator's voice in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto echoing that of Horace and Propertius, Homer's Odysseus and Vergil's Aeneas. These allusions to canonical works are widely recognised and catalogued. But equally crucial to Ovid's self-presentation are allusions to his own previous masterpieces. I interpret his choice of the letter form for the exile poems as not only an allusion to, but also an authorial statement of identification—on some level—with his earlier epistolary work, the Heroides. The Heroides may be read as letters from exile, epistulae ex exilio in which Ovid pursues his fascination with the genre of letters and the subject of abandonment through literary characters; the Tristia take that fascination one step further as the author himself, in letters to loved ones, writes from the position of an abandoned hero of sorts.

What Ovid endured as an ‘exile’ in Tomis is a great unknown—the stuff now of novels and ‘imaginary’ lives. If we take him at his word—the testimony of the exile poetry—literary isolation was the least of his worries. Bordering on the Black Sea, Ovid's frontier town was a place of life-threatening illness (Tr. 3.3.13, 3.8.23f.) and unbearable, limb-numbing cold (Ex Pont. 1.7.11f., 4.12.33f.), a place where inhabitants pass an existence at war, warding off frequent invasions by savage barbarians—so frequent, in fact, that the aged poet is himself conscripted into military service (Ex Pont. 18.7). In many respects, Tomis is constructed in the exile poetry as the antithetical opposite of the world of Rome; for the urbane ‘urban’ persona of the Ars Amatoria, life in Tomis rates as a fate worse than death, and often the poet describes his existence there as death-like (e.g. Tr. 5.9.19, Ex Pont. 1.8.27), his surroundings like the underworld (cf. Tr. 5.7.43f.), and his daily rituals as practice for dying. And although he outlived Augustus—the princeps who exiled the poet to the Black Sea in 7 CE—Ovid would indeed die in Tomis, far from family and home, out ‘on the furthermost limits of the unknown world’ (in extremis ignoti partibus orbis, Tr. 3.3.3).

In this article I propose to explore the disposition which the reader must bring to bear to Ovid's exilic works. More specifically, I want to begin by considering the way in which Ovid himself shapes or represents the attitude of his reader; that is, the way in which the text explicitly or implicitly shapes his ideal reader, and gives him indications as to how to read the new works which gradually reach Rome from Pontus. We start at the beginning: Tr. 1.1.

Fasti is Ovid's prime exilic work. Begun at the same time as Metamorphoses it is yet the last of Ovid's poems, rewritten in exile to juxtapose past and present, centre and periphery, tradition, religion, time and their ideological appropriation and abuse. Ovid's carmen ultimum, it joins Epistulae ex Ponto in straddling the principates of Augustus and Tiberius and bearing witness with Epistulae to the factuality of dynastic succession and the consolidation of imperial power. There is no evidence that any of Fasti was recited, or otherwise made public, before Ovid's departure for Tomis; indeed the only reference to Fasti outside itself is the second Tristia's description of the rupturing of the work (opus ruptum, Tr. 2.552) by Ovid's exilic ‘fate’ (sors). Pre-exilic and exilic strata exist in the poem, as many critics have too frequently noted, but, since they were never read in separate contexts but always within the frame of Ovid's exile, their dynamic interplay serves only to enrich and to deepen the exilic nature of Fasti's discourse.