The Exiled Ovid's Reception of Gallus

The poet Cornelius Gallus may be termed the “first exiled poet” of the Augustan regime, although his banishment from Augustus' circle of friends (between 29 and 26 BCE) was probably political. He subsequently committed suicide and possibly underwentdamnatio memoriae. In exile, Ovid appears to be consciously featuring allusions to Gallus. This paper examines some examples of such allusion that throw light on Ovid's relationship with Augustus. Most of what Gallus wrote is lost, so that sources available for comparison are relatively slight. Yet Ovid's exilic reception of Gallus, as far as it can be ascertained from comparison of his exilic oeuvre with the small Gallan corpus, casts an interesting light on the poet-prince relationship.