Angeline Chiu (University of Vermont)
Nec legitur pars ulla magis: Vergil’s Aeneid 4 from Ovid’s Exile
In Tristia 2.533-36 Ovid famously claims that no part of the Aeneid is more read than the affair
of Dido and Aeneas - non legitimo foedere iunctus amor - and that this is prima facie an
argument against his sentence of exile by Augustus. Nevertheless, Ovid's deployment of Vergil
as a defense against authoritarian suppression both ostentatiously presents him as an imperial
favorite (felix Aeneidos auctor) and complicates that status. This gambit, however, should also
be considered with Ovid's own thoroughgoing, career-long interaction with the Dido story
through the love poetry, Heroides 7, Metamorphoses 14, and Fasti 3. If Vergil's Book 4 is indeed
the "most read" portion of the Aeneid , this is inextricable from Ovid's many re-presentations of it.
The Tristia 2 argument becomes as much metaliterary commentary as literary apologia.