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This paper offers a reassessment of the character of Livia in Ovid’s poetry, in particular with regard to her repeated appearances over the course of the exile epistles. Whereas a majority of previous scholars have identified Ovid’s Livia as being excessively prominent and treated with an unwarranted level of panegyric, this paper uses other primary sources of information from the period to demonstrate that Ovid’s Livia is grounded in the discourse of the period and Ovid’s Livia is an appropriate reflection of her evolving status in the late Augustan and early Tiberian periods.