microfilm of the edition too late for use in his edition!

In his review of Richmond's Teubner edition in the Classical Review (n.s. 42, 2 [1992], pp. 305-06), Professor James Butrica highlighted a number of proposed emendations from my edition.

It had become clear there was considerable outside interest in the work that I had done, and that simply having a copy of an unpublished edition on deposit at the National Library of Canada was not a sufficient means of making the edition available to the public, so over the years that followed I gave some consideration to how I might publish the edition so that it would be conveniently available to students of Latin poetry.

Early in 2006, I was working as a volunteer proofreader for the Project Gutenberg digital library: I noticed that the Project Gutenberg library included some public domain classical editions comparable in scope to my own. Prompted by this, I decided that I would publish my edition online in order to make it instantly accessible free of charge to anyone wishing to use it. This seemed in every way preferable to seeking out a university press, going through the time-consuming process of seeking the necessary grants to subsidize publication, in order to produce a printed book so expensive that no student and not many libraries could afford to purchase a copy.

Nature of this edition

In essence, this is a corrected version of the original typescript. Typing errors have been corrected, and minor errors have been set right.

All statements made and conjectures proposed should be considered to have been made in 1985.

The HTML and Text versions of this edition

This digital edition is being made available in two versions.

The HTML version takes advantage of the Unicode character set to present Greek passages using the Greek alphabet, and to present certain other special characters, such as the macron. It also offers hyperlinks from the table of contents and from the indices to the relevant sections of the edition.

Popular and useful as HTML is, it does not offer the universality of ASCII text. Essentially every computer can display plain ASCII text correctly. The Text version is presented so that the edition can be read on any computer, large or small, new or old. However, this portability comes at a price. The ISO 8859-1 ASCII character set does not include the Greek alphabet, nor does it include certain special characters which form part of this edition.

Therefore, the Text version of this edition presents Greek passages transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Similarly, in the textual apparatus any capital letter occurring in the report of a manuscript should be considered to be that letter in lower case, with a macron (dash) above.

When the textual apparatus reports a manuscript correction where the original reading is no longer legible, the HTML version underlines the corrected letters, but the Text version uses capitalization. For example, the Text version reports "facTisque _B2c_" at iii 25: a later hand in B has erased the original fourth letter, and has replaced it with "t".

In the commentary, when metre is being discussed and a Latin word is quoted, any vowel in that word which is capitalized is long, and any vowel which is not capitalized is short. I have occasionally pointed out explicitly that a word is metrically inconvenient because it has a series of short vowels: in the HTML edition, because the actual letters are marked short, these statements will appear to be redundant.

In the Latin text, the start and end of passages which are deeply corrupt and therefore difficult to correct are indicated by an asterisk, instead of the usual dagger (obelus).

Finally, in the critical apparatus, 'æ' is used where a manuscript has 'e' with a cedilla.

Enhancements made: the indices

In order to make the digital edition as useful as possible, I have added this preface, a full table of contents, and two indices.

The first index (starting on page 477) is an index of topics discussed. It is a selective rather than an exhaustive index for the following two reasons:

(1) A commentary is already in effect indexed by the text it is linked to. If, for instance, readers wish to find what the commentary has to say about a certain passage, all they need do is turn to the part of the commentary dealing with that passage.

(2) A digital edition can be searched online very quickly and easily. A reader wishing to find any mention of the eminent Dutch textual critic Nicolaus Heinsius could find every mention of Heinsius in the edition simply by using "Heinsius" as a search argument.

However, some of the discussions in the commentary do not have an obvious link to the text, nor would they necessarily be found quickly by an electronic search. An example would be the discussion of "Simple verbs used for compound ones" at page 281.

Also, there were some parts of the introduction and commentary which I wanted to highlight to the reader as being of possible interest: including references to these in the index would serve this purpose.

For similar reasons, I have included (starting on page 489) an index of textual emendations first proposed in this edition. Some of these emendations involve works other than Ex Ponto IV, and authors other than Ovid. The index of textual emendations makes these corrections easy to find.

The debt I owe to others

I was able to create this edition only because of the help that I have received over the years from others.

My basic training in the classical languages took place at the University of British Columbia, where I completed my B.A. in 1974, and my M.A. in 1977. It is impossible to repay the debt I owe to every single member of the Classics Department at that time.

Professor Charles Murgia of the University of California (Berkeley) initiated me into the mysteries of Latin palaeography and textual criticism.

I created this edition while a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Richard Tarrant, who encouraged me to undertake the edition, posed many excellent questions, and offered many excellent suggestions.

I owe a similar debt to Professor Alexander Dalzell, Professor Elaine Fantham, Professor J. N. Grant, and Professor C. P. Jones, all of them members of the Graduate Department of Classics at the University of Toronto when I was creating the edition.

I have known Rob Morrow for twenty-one years, and he has touched every aspect of my life. The study of Latin poetry is a field of endeavour far removed from his usual interests: but even here he has made an important contribution in the work he did in scanning the original typescript, and in his continuing encouragement and support during the months I worked on creating this digital edition. It is to him, with deep affection and gratitude, that I dedicate this edition.

INTRODUCTION

In AD 8, when he was fifty years of age, Ovid was abruptly banished from Rome to Tomis, an exile from which he never