The letters to Tuticanus
The two letters to Tuticanus show a similar dichotomy.
Of the two poems, xii is more personal and more concerned with poetry. The first eighteen lines are a witty demonstration of the impossibility of using Tuticanus' name in elegiac verse, while the twelve verses that follow recall their poetic apprenticeship together. In the final twelve lines, referring to Tuticanus' senatorial career, Ovid asks him to help his cause in any way possible.
Poem xiv is far less personal than the earlier epistle. The only mention of Tuticanus is at the poem's beginning:
Haec tibi mittuntur quem sum modo carmine questus
non aptum numeris nomen habere meis,
in quibus, excepto quod adhuc utcumque ualemus,
nil te praeterea quod iuuet inuenies.
The bulk of the poem is a defense against charges raised by some of the Tomitans that he has defamed them in his verse. Ovid answers that he was complaining about the physical conditions at Tomis, not the people, to whom he owes a great debt. It is characteristic of the fourth book of the Ex Ponto that Ovid complains less of his exile than in his earlier verse from exile; this poem furnishes the most explicit demonstration that the years spent in exile and the dwindling likelihood of recall has made Ovid reach an accommodation with his new conditions of life.
The topic of the poem clearly has no relation to Tuticanus; Professor R. J. Tarrant points out to me Ovid's use of the same technique in some of the Amores, such as I ix (Militat omnis amans), and II x, to Graecinus on loving two women at once, where there is no apparent connection between the addressee and the subject of the poem. Professor E. Fantham notes that the bulk of xiv could even have been written before Ovid chose Tuticanus as its addressee.