Abstract: (The crisis of exile in Ovid: from expulsion into the barbaric abyss to the abyss of interiority) The prefiguration of subjectivity (in the sense of Western modernity) as a complex process, which requires paradigmatic structuring (being supported by cultural and epistemic paradigms), has been occurring since antiquity, even if the turning point is the experience of self-examination in Christianity, respectively the Cartesian self-foundation in the exercise of thought (cogito ergosum). Beyond the anthropocentric representation specific to antiquity, of the hero as the central piece around which the community coagulates according to the model of the cosmic order, subjective experiences are timidly asserted, especially in elegy, on the border with the rhetorical scaffolding (the germination of emotion under the fixed form of rhetorical convention). The effect of a cruel life experience, the poetry of exile becomes for Ovid the space of converting the external abyss (the dangerous sea voyage, the unknown of the barbarian world) into an internal abyss. In the extreme conditions of exile in Tomis, Ovid has the vision of the abyss to the extent that the uprooting from the physical place triggers an uprooting from the psychic place, just as, later, Saint Augustine’s existential crisis will cause the revelation of the abyss of human consciousness (abyssus humanae conscientiae). The forced abandonment of Rome and his own home, the inner death that occurred under these conditions – in the poem The Last Night in Rome from the volume Tristia (Sorrows), the poet sees himself as dead – the distance from the Italic shore, the abandonment by friends create a state of profound emptiness against the backdrop of which Ovid experiences the inner abyss.