The mixing of levels of diction
As well as variety of subject, the fourth book of the Ex Ponto shows a variation in style that is typical of Ovid's letters from exile. The poems use the metre and language of elegiac verse. But at the same time they are letters, and are strongly influenced by the structure and vocabulary of prose epistles. This influence is naturally more obvious at some points than at others; and even within a single poem there can be a surprising degree of variation in the different sections of the poem.
Some poems tend more to one extreme than the other. The eleventh poem, a letter of commiseration to Gallio on the death of his wife, is extensively indebted to the genre of the prose letter of consolation; this prose influence is evident in such passages as:
finitumque tuum, si non ratione, dolorem
ipsa iam pridem suspicor esse mora
(13-14)
At the opposite extreme is the final poem of the book, a defence of Ovid's poetry; as this was a traditional poetic subject, the level of diction throughout the poem is extremely high, particularly in the catalogue of poets that forms the main body of the poem.
An interesting result of the mixture of styles is the presence in the poems of exile of words and expressions which belong essentially to prose, being otherwise rarely or never found in verse. Some instances from Ex Ponto IV are ad summam (i 15), conuictor (iii 15), abunde (viii 37), ex toto (viii 72), di faciant (ix 3), secreto (ix 31), respectu (ix 100), quominus (xii 1), praefrigidus (xii 35), and tantummodo (xvi 49).
Both in subject and style the sixteen poems of Ex Ponto IV show a wide variety, worthy of the creator of the Metamorphoses. The following section examines the special characteristics of each of the poems.