| Summary: | The poems of the fourth book of Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto are not infrequently held to have been arranged and published posthumously, firstly because of the absence of the structure of the libellus one might have expected in the light of that found in the first three books of the Epistulae;1 secondly because of the (relatively) wide chronological range of the poems when compared with Ovid’s other books of exilic poetry (AD 13–16);2 and, thirdly because of the number of lines, which exceeds that of each of the other books of the Tristia and ex Ponto by a not insignificant degree.3 The second and the third of these objections have been dealt with succinctly elsewhere.4 In this paper, I will consider further the rôle played by the order of the poems—what Wulfram has referred to as ‘des Pudels Kern’,5 the crux of the matter—in considering whether Ovid had a hand in arranging the libellus, and will demonstrate that an intratextual reading of the poems points to a cohesively arranged collection. To my mind, there is very little about Book 4 that suggests that the epistles were gathered together sine ordine, as Ovid fallaciously claims that those of Books 1–3 were (Pont. 3.9.53).
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