aspicies illic positos ex ordine fratres,
quos studium cunctos euigilauit idem.
cetera turba palam titulos ostendet apertos,
et sua detecta nomina fronte geret;(Nevertheless, when you have been received back in my sanctuary,
and you make it back to your home, the round bookcases,
there you will see your brothers set out in order,
all of whom identical carefulness worked on without sleeping.
The rest of the crowd will display their titles openly
bearing their names on their exposed edges.)Echoing this poem at the beginning of Book 1, the opening of Book 3 is
the account by theliberof its voyage to Rome. Once again, it is the book-
as-object and not the text that has speech. It addresses alector(Trist.
3.1.2) and speaks about its papyrus (in hac charta, 4) as the support of its
versus. Ultimately, it is always an object which speaks through writing,
but thebookin order to speak needs to be metaphorized in a double
fiction built on the basis of its materiality as a roll of papyrus covered with
letters. The book is a letter and the letter is a traveler.
Here, too, its physical appearance is that of anincultus(14): the
papyrus has not been coated with cedar oil; it was not polished with
pumice (13). Its letters are sometimes erased and its paper stained. The
verses are uneven, that is, they are elegiac couplets; it limps because it has
walked too far (9–16). A stranger in the city, it seeks someone to take it in.
A man takes it to see Rome; when it gets to the Palatine, in front of the
house of Augustus, the book is panic-stricken. Its letters shake with fear,
the papyrus goes pale, and the verses tremble (54–56).
From there they go to the nearby temple of Apollo and visit the library
where the ancient and modern authors live together (63). The book seeks its
brothers, Ovid’s previous books, in vain, and it must leave (65–69). It cannot
find a place there, or in any other public library of Rome, not in the Portico
of Octavia, or in the oldest, Asinius Pollio’s in the Atrium Libertatis. The
condemnation of Ovid means at the same time the public disappearance
of his books; he disappears as a canonical author. He no longer forms a part of
thelitterae latinae. His last hope is refuge in a private library (79–82).
THE FICTIVE UTTERANCE OF THETRISTIA
TheTristiatakes the trope of remote address from the epistolary mode
(Trist. 5.1.1–2):
Hunc quoque de Getico, nostri studiose, libellum
litore praemissis quattuor adde meis.(This book, also from the Getic shore, O you who care for me,
Add to the four sent on ahead.)158 Books and Texts