Speech, community, and the formation of memory in the Ovidian exilic corpus

At Tristia 1.117-120, Ovid refers directly to his Metamorphoses, equating his exilic situation with that of characters from his magnum opus, stating that his parvus liber should report to those in Rome that the vultus of his fortune may now be listed among the mutata corpora. This statement, placed in the opening poem of Ovid’s exilic project, is invested with programmatic value and begs the following questions: How has Ovid been changed? Why does he compare himself to characters from the Metamorphoses? What exactly is the payoff – for Ovid and the audience – of such an intertextual move? This dissertation explores these questions, arguing that this line is central to Ovid’s conception of his entire ‘exilic project’. By equating himself with his earlier characters, Ovid makes himself a character who undergoes the same transformations as they did; thus, his exilic transformation should be interpreted as occurring in the same fashion as transformations in the Metamorphoses. Those transformations, it is argued, were conceived of in terms of speech, community, and memory: whenever a character is transformed, that character suffers speech loss, is exiled from community, and is forgotten. In his exilic project, Ovid portrays himself as passing through these same steps. Furthermore, Ovid depicts his transformation in this way with an eye towards memory: reformulating how his exile would be perceived by his audience and how he, as a poet, would be remembered by posterity. In Chapter One, I begin by 1) setting the study within current scholarly trends and 2) examining what it meant to be ‘speechless’ in Ovid’s Rome. In Chapter Two, I set out the model for speech loss and community for the characters of the Metamorphoses. In Chapter Three, I turn to how Ovid applies this model to himself in his exilic project. In Chapter Four, I connect this model to memory, arguing that Ovid focuses on this model of speech and community because he, as an exile, is attempting to place himself back within the social frameworks of his community not only to be remembered, but to be remembered as he wants to be remembered.