In the hymn to Bacchus (Tristia 5.3), Ovid looks from Tomis back to Rome, where the chorus of poets gathers for the Liberalia. This article argues that Ovid fashions in Tristia 5.3 a poetic rebirth out of Tomis, deploying in this elegy themes and motifs from the god’s mysteries to bolster the pervasive message of persistence in the Tristia. This Bacchic mystic tone is accomplished through the hymn’s ritual elements and dithyrambic strategies, which reflect on both Ovid’s death-like position in exile and his poetic activity there. Furthermore, this article argues that Ovid encodes his mystic dithyrambic strategies in a hitherto unnoticed bilingual acrostic. Through ritual and dithyrambic strategies, Ovid merges three loci of time and space—past Rome, present Rome and present Tomis—and thus reintegrates himself into Rome, rearticulating his Roman citizenship as a literary one.

This article offers a close reading of Pindar's lacunose fr. 140b S.-M. and explores the evidence it includes for Pindar's contributions to contemporary debates and polemics in late sixth- and early fifth-century musical culture concerning, among other things, harmonics, tonal ranges, instrumentation and the boundaries between different genres. By reading the contents of the fragment against the backdrop of other works from the period that similarly engage in these issues and the later revisionary accounts of the questions first raised by the author-musicians of the early classical age, I show how the diction, imagery and structure of the work are designed to position Pindar as one among the current choral innovators. In the discussion's final part, I address the question of the genre to which the piece belongs and propose some fresh ways of addressing this still outstanding matter. At several points, the article also considers some relevant visual evidence.