Chapter 17 - Ovid’s Ciceronian Literary History: End-Career Chronology and Autobiography

Summary

The chapter argues that Cicero’s literary and philosophical writings had a profound effect on Virgil and Horace, and later on Ovid. Taking the autobiographical mode of literary history as an example, the chapter investigates how Horace followed Cicero in constructing literary histories from the perspective of his own career; it is then argued that Ovid follows both Horace and Cicero in constructing a literary history of his own time in which he, like them, finds himself isolated and unappreciated at the end of his career.