IMPERSONATING THE BANISHED PHILOSOPHER PSEUDO-SENECA'S LIBER EPIGRAMMATON

Abstract

poetry has been to convince the majority of critical readers that the persona of the banished ego must, like its counterpart first-person personae in the poet's other works, be perceived as the product of poetic engineering. Ovid stages his appearance in the role of exul as an elegiac part spoken in monologues and letters. The content of an elegy is traditionally a lament, to be voiced in the first person, and in the Amores the circumstances which Ovid's persona has occasion to bewail had been those of an elegiac lover. A similar situation, with some modifications, forms the backdrop for the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto. Like the poeta amans, the poeta exulans complains that he is denied access to a particular place-now no longer the puella's bedroom, but his hometown, Rome-and that this "lock-out" is due to the hard-heartedness, or duritia, of a certain person there: in this case not an imperious lass, but an imperial ruler, Augustus. As many studies of the exile elegies have shown, Ovid frequently avails himself here of the diction and themes of erotic elegy, so much so that, just like his earlier works, these last of his poetic compositions have at times all the appearance of an intertextual parlor game.' In the two elegy collections, Tristia and Ex Ponto, the allusions to other works of literature which the player-reader is supposed to recognize also take the form of structural parallels. The experiences of the poeta exulans are recorded poem by poem in chronological order, and similar ongoing unfolding can be found in the Greek collections of fictional prose letters that survive from Hellenistic and imperial times. These can be seen as predecessors of the modern epistolary novel. I See esp. Stroh 1971:250-255; Nagle 1980:42-70; Labate 1987; Videau-Delibes