Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity

Ovid could be considered the original poet of late antiquity. In his exile poetry, he depicts a world in which Rome has become a distant memory, a community accessible only through his imagination. This, Ovid claimed, was a transformation as remarkable as any he had recounted in his Metamorphoses. Ian Fielding's book shows how late antique Latin poets referred to Ovid's experiences of isolation and estrangement as they reflected on the profound social and cultural transformations taking place in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries AD. There are detailed new readings of texts by major figures such as Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Boethius and Venantius Fortunatus. For these authors, Fielding emphasizes, Ovid was not simply a stylistic model, but an important intellectual presence. Ovid's fortunes in late antiquity reveal that poetry, far from declining into irrelevance, remained a powerful mode of expression in this fascinating period.

Introduction: a poet between two worlds; 1. Ovid Recalled in the Poetic Correspondence of Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola; 2. Ovid and the Transformation of the Late Roman World of Rutilius Namatianus; 3. The Poet and the Vandal Prince: Ovidian Rhetoric in Dracontius' Satisfactio; 4. The Remedies of Elegy in Ovid, Boethius and Maximianus; 5. The Ovidian Heroine of Venantius Fortunatus, Appendix 1; Conclusion: Ovid's Late Antiquity.

Ian Fielding is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has published a number of articles on Latin poetry in late antiquity and on classical receptions in Naples and Campania.