The letter to Suillius addressing Germanicus
No poem in the fourth book of the Ex Ponto is addressed to a member of the imperial family, but the greater part of IV viii, nominally addressed to Suillius, is in fact directed to his patron Germanicus. Suillius' family ties with Ovid and his influential position would have made it natural for Ovid to address him in the earlier books of the Ex Ponto or even in the Tristia; and it is clear from the opening of the poem that Suillius must have distanced himself from Ovid:
Littera sera quidem, studiis exculte Suilli,
huc tua peruenit, sed mihi grata tamen
In the section that follows, Ovid asks for Suillius' assistance, rather strangely setting forth his own impeccable family background and moral purity; then he moves to the topic of Suillius' piety towards Germanicus, and in line 31 begins to address Germanicus with a direct request for his assistance. In the fifty-eight lines that follow he develops the argument that Germanicus should accept the verse Ovid offers him for two reasons: poetry grants immortality to the subjects it describes; and Germanicus is himself a poet. In this passage Ovid allows himself a very high level of diction; as the topic was congenial to him, the result is perhaps the finest extended passage of verse in the book[7].
Ovid ends his address to Germanicus by asking for his assistance; only in the final distich of the poem does he return to Suillius.