The Last Poems of Ovid.

by Ovid.

PREFACE

It is a pleasure to present to the public this digital edition, with commentary, of _Ex Ponto_ IV, the final poems written by the Roman poet Ovid, published after his death as a posthumous collection quite separate from the earlier _Ex Ponto_ I-III.

These poems have a special place among Ovid's works, but have not received the attention which they deserve. In particular, there has been no full modern commentary on these poems.

This text presented in this edition is based on my personal examination of ten manuscripts. I have also restored to the text certain readings commonly accepted by editors until the nineteenth century. Finally, the edition contains several dozen new textual conjectures by myself and others.

The intended audience of this edition

This edition is intended to serve as a guide to the poems for intermediate and advanced students of Latin poetry. However, I have deliberately made it as straightforward as possible, and my hope is that even a beginning student of Latin poetry embarking on the study of these poems will find the commentary helpful.

This edition is also directed towards present and future Latin textual critics.

My expectation when starting my research for this edition was that I would be presenting a text that differed little from that to be found in current editions. However, I made two discoveries during my research into the text.

The first discovery was that many important textual corrections generally accepted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been suppressed by editors in the course of the nineteenth century. I have restored many of these readings to the text, and others will be found in the textual apparatus.

The second discovery was that there was a surprisingly large number of passages which appeared to be corrupt and for which it was possible to suggest corrections. Given the long history of Latin textual criticism, and Ovid's central position in Roman literary history, it was surprising to find that so much remained to be done. Yet such was the case.

Nothing is more certain than that this book of poems as well as the three earlier books of the _Ex Ponto_ represent an outstanding opportunity for future editors and commentators to contribute to the progress of Latin scholarship.

History of this edition

I originally prepared this edition and commentary during my time as a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Upon its completion (and my graduation) in 1985, a copy was deposited at the National Library of Canada.

Had I followed a university teaching career after graduation, I would undoubtedly have taken the necessary steps to publish the edition, if only in pursuit of academic promotion. But I instead chose a career in the software industry, which both removed the external incentive to publish the edition, and denied me the time that I would have needed to prepare it for publication.

However, I wished to ensure that future editors and commentators were aware of the edition and would be able to make use of it. I therefore decided to publish two short articles drawn from the edition. These articles were intended to make generally available two textual conjectures which I considered likely to be correct. But the articles were also intended to make future editors aware that I had worked on the text of Ovid, so that they would seek out my unpublished edition.

The first article ("An Intrusive Gloss in Ovid _Ex Ponto_ 4.13") appeared in _Phoenix_ (vol. 40, p. 322) in 1986: it reported the restoration of IV xiii 45 discussed at page 408 of the commentary.

_Phoenix_ is published by the Classical Association of Canada, and since my own training in the classical languages had taken place almost entirely in Canada, it seemed appropriate that my first publication should be in a Canadian journal.

To my surprise and pleasure, my short article attracted a critique by Professor Allan Kershaw ("_Ex Ponto_ 4.13: A Reply", _Phoenix_, vol. 42, p. 176), followed by a learned defense of my conjecture by Professor James Butrica ("Taking Enemies for Chains: Ovid _Ex Ponto_ 4.13.45 Again", _Phoenix_, vol. 43, pp. 258-59).

Four years later, I published a second article ("A Palaeographical Corruption in Ovid, _Ex Ponto_ 4.6"), which appeared in the May 1990 issue of the _Classical Quarterly_ (pp. 283-84). This article reported the restoration of IV vi 38 discussed at pages 240-41 of the commentary.

I selected the _Classical Quarterly_ because of its prominence within the world of classical scholarship, and in particular because of its close association with the modern history of Latin textual criticism: it was in the _Classical Quarterly_ that many of the learned articles of A.

E. Housman first appeared.

My hope had been that these two articles would serve as a signpost that would lead editors to my edition. The publication of J. A. Richmond's Teubner edition of the _Ex Ponto_ in 1990 proved that this plan was inadequate. Professor Richmond had indeed discovered the existence of my edition: it received a prominent and flattering mention at the end of his preface. However, he stated that he received the microfilm of the edition too late for use in his edition!

In his review of Richmond's Teubner edition in the _Classical Review_ (n.s. 42, 2 [1992], pp. 305-06), Professor James Butrica highlighted a number of proposed emendations from my edition.

It had become clear there was considerable outside interest in the work that I had done, and that simply having a copy of an unpublished edition on deposit at the National Library of Canada was not a sufficient means of making the edition available to the public, so over the years that followed I gave some consideration to how I might publish the edition so that it would be conveniently available to students of Latin poetry.

Early in 2006, I was working as a volunteer proofreader for the Project Gutenberg digital library: I noticed that the Project Gutenberg library included some public domain classical editions comparable in scope to my own. Prompted by this, I decided that I would publish my edition online in order to make it instantly accessible free of charge to anyone wishing to use it. This seemed in every way preferable to seeking out a university press, going through the time-consuming process of seeking the necessary grants to subsidize publication, in order to produce a printed book so expensive that no student and not many libraries could afford to purchase a copy.

Nature of this edition

In essence, this is a corrected version of the original typescript.

Typing errors have been corrected, and minor errors have been set right.

All statements made and conjectures proposed should be considered to have been made in 1985.

The HTML and Text versions of this edition

This digital edition is being made available in two versions.

The _HTML version_ takes advantage of the Unicode character set to present Greek passages using the Greek alphabet, and to present certain other special characters, such as the macron. It also offers hyperlinks from the table of contents and from the indices to the relevant sections of the edition.

Popular and useful as HTML is, it does not offer the universality of ASCII text. Essentially every computer can display plain ASCII text correctly. The _Text version_ is presented so that the edition can be read on any computer, large or small, new or old. However, this portability comes at a price. The ISO 8859-1 ASCII character set does not include the Greek alphabet, nor does it include certain special characters which form part of this edition.

Therefore, the Text version of this edition presents Greek passages transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Similarly, in the textual apparatus any capital letter occurring in the report of a manuscript should be considered to be that letter in lower case, with a macron (dash) above.

When the textual apparatus reports a manuscript correction where the original reading is no longer legible, the HTML version underlines the corrected letters, but the Text version uses capitalization.

For example, the Text version reports "facTisque _B2c_" at iii 25: a later hand in _B_ has erased the original fourth letter, and has replaced it with "t".

In the commentary, when metre is being discussed and a Latin word is quoted, any vowel in that word which is capitalized is long, and any vowel which is not capitalized is short. I have occasionally pointed out explicitly that a word is metrically inconvenient because it has a series of short vowels: in the HTML edition, because the actual letters are marked short, these statements will appear to be redundant.

In the Latin text, the start and end of passages which are deeply corrupt and therefore difficult to correct are indicated by an asterisk, instead of the usual dagger (obelus).

Finally, in the critical apparatus, 'ae' is used where a manuscript has 'e' with a cedilla.

Enhancements made: the indices

In order to make the digital edition as useful as possible, I have added this preface, a full table of contents, and two indices.

The first index (starting on page 477) is an index of _topics discussed_. It is a selective rather than an exhaustive index for the following two reasons:

(1) A commentary is already in effect indexed by the text it is linked to. If, for instance, readers wish to find what the commentary has to say about a certain passage, all they need do is turn to the part of the commentary dealing with that passage.

(2) A digital edition can be searched online very quickly and easily. A reader wishing to find any mention of the eminent Dutch textual critic Nicolaus Heinsius could find every mention of Heinsius in the edition simply by using "Heinsius" as a search argument.

However, some of the discussions in the commentary do not have an obvious link to the text, nor would they necessarily be found quickly by an electronic search. An example would be the discussion of "Simple verbs used for compound ones" at page 281.

Also, there were some parts of the introduction and commentary which I wanted to highlight to the reader as being of possible interest: including references to these in the index would serve this purpose.

For similar reasons, I have included (starting on page 489) an index of textual emendations first proposed in this edition. Some of these emendations involve works other than _Ex Ponto_ IV, and authors other than Ovid. The index of textual emendations makes these corrections easy to find.