The Poet and the God. Ovid, Tristia 3.1. Text, Translation and Commentary with an Introduction

The author’s doctoral research resulted in a literary and critical commentary on Ovid, Tristia 3.1, with an introduction, Latin text, an English translation, and indexes. The commentary is in line with the most recent commentaries on other books of the Tristia and aims at clarifying some passages of ambiguous interpretation, poetically and topographically. First, the misplacement of some of the monuments on the Palatine mentioned in the poem, such as the porta Mugonia and the temple of Jupiter Stator, fully complies with the overlapping figures of the princeps and Jupiter, appearing for the first time in Latin literature precisely in the Tristia. Secondly, the booklet’s arrival in Rome and request for help can be traced back to the typical gestures and formulae of the request for hospitium by a stranger: the handshake, the production of a letter of introduction, the presence of a seal or an object of identification. The correspondence of the booklet with a hospes exerting the ius hospitii may indicate the conventional request for hospitium as an unusual model for the composition of Tristia 3.1. Thirdly, the linguistic analysis of the poem has led to an in-depth investigation of the specific vocabulary of the exile poetry, identifying new terms and nuances, discussed in the commentary and listed in a dedicated index. This commentary addresses literary and topographical issues through a multidisciplinary approach, which combines both the evaluatation of the literary sources, with particular focus on recent scholarly contributions, the diction, the metrics, the intratextual relationship with other works, and the discussion of the latest archaeological findings and their relevant topographical evaluation