As a single, continuous poem of 578 lines addressed directly to the emperor Augustus, who was personally responsible for relegating Ovid from Rome in AD 8, Tristia 2 is unique among the poems conventionally labelled Ovid's exilic epistles (unlike the rest of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, collections of short individual poems addressed to a variety of recipients). Tristia 2 is overwhelmingly concerned with the defence of the author and his poetry in the light of Ovid's relegation: it is the first of the exile poems to pinpoint the cause of Ovid's downfall, the famous and much debated carmen et error. Ovid identifies the former as the Ars amatoria, and debates its alleged offence towards the emperor at length, thus strongly foregrounding the issue of readers and reading. As a means of demonstrating his innocence and the novelty of his punishment for writing erotic verse, Ovid in Tristia 2 includes readings of the Ars and a huge variety of other texts, raising important questions of literary history and hermeneutics which Jennifer Ingleheart explores in her introduction and commentary. She pays particular attention to the possibility of irony and subversion and the implications of their presence in a text which presents itself as a humble apologia. Tristia 2 is one of very few texts from the ancient world to present its readers with a view of literary history, in an extended passage which revisits previous authors who wrote on erotic themes yet did not suffer foe doing so; Ingleheart's commentary explores Ovid's version of literary history. Book jacket.