This essay focuses on the competing representational projects of poet and emperor as represented (or polemically misrepresented) in Ovid's poetry. I begin by developing two readings of the famous weaving contest of Metamorphoses 6, the first emphasizing Arachne's will to truth (her exposéé of Olympian injustice), the second her will to power (her appropriation of Olympian potency). With these models in mind, I explore the vicissitudes of Ovid's rivalrous identification with Augustus in the Tristia, ending with some unhappier implications of this identification, and with some reflections on the question of the reality of Ovid's exile.

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As Betty Rose Nagle has remarked, Ovid's exile poetry deploys proper names within a kind of economy: ‘Ovid immortalises his own name by publicising it and exhorting his friends and readers to keep it alive, and he rewards his friends for actively remembering him by immortalising them, i.e. by putting their names in his poetry.’ What interests me here is the shortcircuiting of this system of exchange within the Tristia. For one of the most striking features of Ovid's first run of exilic elegies is precisely the omission of the names of Ovid's addressees. As Ovid will claim in the poem that opens the Epistulae ex Ponto, it is this omission (along with a change of title) that differentiates the Tristia poems from their successors: inuenies, quamuis non est miserabilis index,non minus hoc illo triste, quod ante dedi.rebus idem, titulo differt; et epistula cui sitnon occultato nomine missa docet.(Ex Pont. 1.1.15-18)

This book is a meditation on the role of psychoanalysis within Latin literary studies. Neither a sceptic nor a true believer, Oliensis adopts a pragmatic approach to her subject, emphasizing what psychoanalytic theory has to contribute to interpretation. Drawing especially on Freud's work on dreams and slips, she spotlights textual phenomena that cannot be securely anchored in any intention or psyche but that nevertheless, or for that very reason, seem fraught with meaning; the 'textual unconscious' is her name for the indefinite place from which these phenomena erupt, or which they retroactively constitute, as a kind of 'unconsciousness-effect'. The discussion is organized around three key topics in psychoanalysis - mourning, motherhood, and the origins of sexual difference - and takes the poetry of Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid as its point of reference. A brief afterword considers Freud's own witting and unwitting engagement with the idea of Rome.