The epilogue briefly considers Ovid’s exile poetry from an environmental and place-based perspective. Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetry does not need to rely on a positive attachment to a local land. His exile poetry is about and is marked by place, shaped by the location from which Ovid is estranged and the location in which he writes. Moreover, local place matters to Ovid as a particular more-than-human environment. Tomis is represented as an environment with its own specific geography, climate, and ecologies. Ovid further explores ecological themes by emphasizing the physical effects Tomis has on his body, through motifs of cold and sickness. The epilogue also uses Ovid’s exilic work to clarify the theoretical foundations of the environmental poetics identified in Vergil and Horace. Through his provocative play with intertextuality and fictionality, Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetics can rely not on realistic description or extratextual reference, but rather on the poetic imagination.

The book’s conclusion follows the fact of Rome east rather than west via a seventeenth-century translation of Ovid’s Tristia—a collection of poems written by Ovid near the Black Sea during the years following his exile from Rome. These translations see a former grammar-school boy reconstructing, from the temporal distance of manhood and maturity, a popular curriculum text and, by necessary extension, revisiting the scene of his own instruction. Ovid’s meditations on the subject of what it means to live apart from Rome, and his expressions of fear that Rome’s language is slipping from his grip, provide a final backdrop against which to reframe the book’s arguments.