Ovid

Katharina Volk

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444351507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book provides a unique and accessible introduction to the complete works of Ovid. Using a thematic approach, Volk lays out what we know about Ovid's life, presents the author's works within their poetic genres, and discusses central Ovidian themes.

• The first general introduction to Ovid written in English in over 20 years, offering the very latest Ovidian scholarship
• Discusses the complete works of Ovid
• Accessible writing and a thematic approach make this text ideal for a broad audience
• A current revival in Ovid makes this timely edition highly valuable

1

Work

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in 43 BCE in the Italian town of Sulmo (modern Sulmona) but spent most of his adult life in Rome. In 8 ce, he was banished by the emperor Augustus to Tomis (modern Constantza), a town on the shores of the Black Sea in what is today Romania, where he died in 17 or 18 ce. What little else is known about Ovid’s life will be the subject of the next chapter, but for the moment, these bare dates may serve as the chronological framework for an examination of the poet’s work.

Ovid’s poems are notoriously difficult to date, and no attempt will be made here to solve any of the longstanding chronological problems. Roughly speaking, the poet’s work can be divided into three phases, treated in turn below. In the first twenty-five years or so of his active career (mid-20s BCE to c. 2 ce), Ovid published a number of poetry collections and shorter works in the elegiac meter, all of which treat, in one way or another, the topic of love. In the following six years up to his exile (2–8 ce), he was working on his two longest poems, the epic Metamorphoses and the elegiac Fasti. Finally, Ovid produced a number of works in exile, including the collections Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, as well as the curse poem Ibis, all in elegiacs. These phases are not clearly distinct: it is quite possible that Ovid began work on the Metamorphoses and/or Fasti before 2 ce, and it is obvious that he revised at least the latter while in exile. Finally, there are a number of Ovidian works that are lost – most notably the tragedy Medea – as well as poems attributed to Ovid that scholars today believe to be inauthentic. These are discussed at the very end of the chapter.

Love Poems

Amores (“Loves”)

In its transmitted form, the Amores is a collection in three books of forty-nine elegiac poems in the style of Tibullus and Propertius, in which the male first-person speaker treats his erotic feelings and relationship with a woman whom he calls Corinna. The work is prefaced by a short epigram that informs the reader that there were originally five books but that the author reissued the work in abridged form, making it (thus the poem humorously claims) a less painful read. The fact that the Amores underwent these two editions significantly complicates any attempt to establish a chronology for the work’s publication(s), especially since it is unclear whether the five books of the first edition came out together or consecutively and whether or not new poems were added to the second edition.

In Tr. 4.10.57-60, Ovid says that his first public poetry reading took place “when [his] beard had been cut once or twice” (58) and that it featured poems about Corinna. This would put the earliest parts of the Amores some time in the 20s BCE. Very few of the poems in the surviving three-book edition contain references to datable events: 3.9 mentions the death of the poet Tibullus (19 BCE) and 1.14.45–50 alludes to a Roman victory over the Germanic tribe of the Sygambri (possibly 16 BCE, though hostilities continued and the tribe was finally defeated only in 8 BCE). Intriguing but problematic is poem 2.18, where Ovid refers to a number of his other works as completed or in progress: these include the Medea (13–14), the Heroides (21–6), and perhaps the Ars amatoria (19–20). The last reference is doubtful since some scholars have taken Ovid’s mention of the “arts of tender love” (artes teneri… Amoris, 19) as an allusion not to the Ars but to the Amores itself. However, if Ovid does mean the Ars, datable to c. 1 BCE–2 CE , then poem 2.18 is a very late addition to the Amores, no doubt written for the second edition, which must then be placed around the turn of the millennium. It is thus possible that the poet worked on the Amores, on and off, for about twenty-five years.

The Amores is the last manifestation of the genre of Roman love elegy, which will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. In keeping with the conventions of the genre, the first-person speaker of the Amores is both a lover and a poet of love, that is, an elegist. In addition to appearing in a number of typical elegiac situations (at the dinner party, on his lover’s doorstep, jealous at a rival, enraged at the perfidy of his mistress, etc.), the poet-lover also frequently reflects on his activities as a poet. By drawing attention to the artificiality of the elegiac scenario (in which a man, overwhelmed by love, pines for an ultimately unattainable, idealized woman) and stressing the more physical aspects of an erotic relationship (including such unromantic incidents as impotence, 3.7, and abortion, 2.13 and 14), Ovid pokes fun at elegy while widening its scope, a tendency that continues in his other amatory works.

Heroides (“Heroines”)

The Heroides or Epistulae heroidum (“Letters of Heroines”) are fictional letters in elegiacs, purportedly written by mythological women (and a few men) to their love interests. There are twenty-one such poems that have come down to us under Ovid’s name. The first fifteen (“single Heroides”) are letters by heroines to the men they love, from whom they have been separated (not infrequently having been abandoned) and with whom they wish to be reunited. These letter-writers include such famous literary characters as Penelope, Phaedra, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea, as well as, exceptionally, a historical woman, the poet Sappho, nominal author of Heroides 15. The remaining six letters (“double Heroides”) constitute three pairs, in each of which a man first writes to his female beloved and then receives an answer. The couples involved are Paris and Helen, Leander and Hero, and Acontius and Cydippe.

As noted above, Ovid mentions a few of the single Heroides in Am. 2.18.21–6, which implies that they were written simultaneously with (parts of) the Amores, that is, some time in the last quarter of the 1st century BCE. In the same text (27–34), Ovid tells us that a friend of his by the name of Sabinus composed poems in which he had the male addressees write back to the heroines; thus, for example, Penelope finally received an answer from the wayward Odysseus. It is possible that Sabinus’witty sequel (which does not survive) gave Ovid the idea for the correspondences found in the double Heroides. Since Ovid himself never mentions the paired letters (which, treating mythological topics, contain no references to contemporary events), it is impossible to date them, beyond the fact that they must have been written after Am. 2.18. On stylistic grounds, scholars often place the double Heroides quite late in Ovid’s career, and they were perhaps written only during the poet’s exile.

A lively debate surrounds the authenticity of some of the Heroides. Most often called into question is the letter of Sappho, which is now conventionally referred to as no. 15 of the collection but which has a different manuscript tradition from the remaining twenty letters and has been known only since the 15 th century. The double letters, too, have been suspected as spurious, as have others, particularly those of the single letters not mentioned explicitly in Am. 2.18 (to complicate matters, though, that poem does refer to a letter by Sappho). Most of the arguments are based on suspicious stylistic and metrical features in the letters in question. The issue will continue to be debated, but it seems to me more likely than not that all twenty-one letters are in fact Ovidian, and I treat them as such in what follows.

Medicamina faciei femineae (“Cosmetics for the Female Face”)

With the Medicamina Ovid begins his foray into didactic poetry, a genre typically written in hexameters and dedicated, at least ostensibly, to teaching either a practical skill (such as agriculture in Vergil’s Georgics) or a theoretical field of knowledge (such as Epicurean physics in Lucretius’De rerum natura). Ovid, by contrast, dispenses his instructions in elegiacs and treats a suitably elegiac topic: a woman’s cosmetics. The poem exists today only in fragmentary form, breaking off after line 100. Half of what we have is taken up by a proem in which Ovid, addressing his female audience, celebrates the concept of cultus (“cultivation, sophistication”) that underlies not only female adornment, but culture in general. The rest of the text consists of very technical “recipes” for various skin treatments and facial creams. Since the Medicamina is mentioned in Ars 3 (205–8), it must have been written before that book and most likely before the entire Ars.

Ars amatoria (“Art of Love”)

If in the Medicamina, Ovid was trying out his original combination of a didactic format with elegiac meter and subject matter, he perfected this new hybrid genre in the Ars. Roman love elegy, including Ovid’s Amores, merely describes the poet-lover’s often painful amatory experiences. By contrast, the new “Art of Love” ambitiously undertakes to teach elegiac love – and teach it in such a way that it is no longer painful. In Books 1 and 2, Ovid addresses himself to the young men of Rome, demonstrating that a satisfactory relationship can be achieved in three easy steps: first the man must find a woman to love; then he must seduce her; and finally he must take steps for their love to last for an extended period of time. The teacher’s instructions are hands-on: he enumerates auspicious pickup places throughout the city of Rome, builds up his students’confidence before they approach their girls, and generally provides advice on everything from the writing of love letters and the giving of gifts to successful behavior in the bedroom. At the end of Book 2, the young men have secured their female lovers and celebrate their teacher Ovid as the master of his craft.

At this point, Ovid declares that the “tender girls” (2.745), too, are asking for his advice and, ostensibly out of a sense of fairness, launches into his third book, which contains instructions for the women. It has traditionally been assumed that after the first two books were published and met with success, Ovid conceived of Book 3 as a funny sequel that was to treat the material of the male-centered preceding books from a female perspective. It is, however, also possible that the poet planned the three books as a unit from the start and that the claim that Book 3 is an afterthought, undertaken only at the urging of the women themselves, is but a humorous fiction. Book 3 itself harks back to the Medicamina in recommending cultus to the women and offers plentiful advice on such topics as clothing and hairstyles. While Ovid clearly expects his female students to take a less active role than the males in the pursuit of their love interests, he is still training them to be serious players who know how to manipulate men for their own purposes.

The first book of the Ars contains references to two contemporary events that allow us to date the work unusually closely. In 171–6, Ovid mentions as a recent occurrence a mock naval battle that Augustus staged in 2 BCE, and in 177–228, he discusses the imminent Parthian campaign of the emperor’s grandson Gaius Caesar, who departed for the east in 1 BCE. At least the first two books were thus presumably published in late 2 or early 1 BCE. If Book 3 was part of the original plan, it belongs to the same time; if not, it probably appeared shortly thereafter.

Remedia amoris (“Remedies for Love”)

As we have seen, already in Ars 3, Ovid delights in humorously reversing some of the teaching of his two preceding books. In the Remedia, Ovid’s last work of amatory didactic, the poet executes a further about-face. Having taught the art of love, Ovid now offers advice on how to free oneself from any unwanted emotions and attractions. As is apparent from the title, the poet here presents himself as a doctor confident of healing his patients of the “disease” of love (a traditional metaphor much used in Roman love elegy). While still humorous in tone, the book’s advice (such as not to become entangled in an unhealthy relationship in the first place, to distract oneself through activity, and to effect a clean but non-hostile breakup) is generally more sober and even finds parallels in the ethical teachings of contemporary philosophy.

In the context of advising the lovesick student to join the army to take his mind off his beloved, Ovid again mentions Gaius Caesar, who at this point has arrived in Parthia and is presented as poised for battle (155–6). However, rather than fighting the Parthians, the actual Gaius reached a diplomatic settlement with them in 2 ce. Since Ovid was apparently not yet aware of this when he wrote his lines, we may conjecture that he completed the Remedia and thus his amatory oeuvre by early 2 ce.

Long Poems

Metamorphoses (“Transformations”)

After Ovid’s comparatively short elegiac works, the Metamorphoses, a hexametric epic in fifteen books, presents a striking departure. As the poet announces in the proem, the work’s topic is “shapes changed into new bodies” (1.1–2), that is, myths of transformation. Metamorphosis had been a favorite subject of Greek literature, and such learned works as the HHeteroioumena (“Changes”) of Nicander (2nd C. BCE) may have served as the Roman poet’s sources. However, Ovid’s project is considerably more ambitious than any previous catalogue of transformations. At the end of the proem, he asks the gods to direct his song “from the first beginning of the world to my own times” (1.3–4), highlighting the universal scope of a poem that purports to cover metamorphoses that took place from the creation of the cosmos (described at the beginning of Book 1) all the way to the reigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus (mentioned at the end of Book 15).

Most of Ovid’s material is what we would call mythological (though note that for the ancients, the distinction between myth and history was not always clearly drawn, and a story like that of Aeneas might well be considered either), and in the course of the work, the poet manages to cover most major Greco-Roman myths (such as the Trojan War and the exploits of Hercules) and a multitude of less prominent ones. The Metamorphoses is thus an excellent source for ancient myth and was used as a veritable mythological handbook by writers and artists throughout Western cultural history (see further chapter 8 on the reception of Ovid in Renaissance and Baroque art). The poem is divided into three blocks of five books each, a structure that corresponds to the chronological progression of the work’s subject matter. Books 1–5 treat exploits of the gods, Books 6–10 recount the adventures of heroes, and Books 11–15 tell tales about mere men.

In writing the Metamorphoses, Ovid faced the challenge of treating a large number of individual stories (there are about 250) while making them all part of an overarching narrative. He achieved this through a number of methods, including varying the length and focus of individual tales (some stories are alluded to in a few words, others told for hundreds of lines), enclosing stories within stories through the use of internal narrators (about a third of the text consists in embedded narrative), and devising ingenious transitions from story to story. While it is thus possible to mine the Metamorphoses for particular myths or read individual episodes out of context, the full extent of Ovid’s virtuosity becomes apparent only to those who make their way through the poem from beginning to end.

Not all stories in the Metamorphoses contain actual metamorphoses, and a few of the transformations recounted seem to be only tenuously related to the tales in which they appear. Nevertheless, metamorphosis is the central theme of the poem, and Ovid delights in describing in detail many of the uncanny transformations (mostly of human beings into animals or plants) that occur in the course of his narrative. The significance of metamorphosis is manifold. First, transformation myths serve as an explanation for why the world is the way it is today (along the lines of “how the leopard got his spots”), attesting to the great interest the Greeks and Romans took in aetiology (from Greek aition, “(story of) origin”). Second, metamorphoses often bring out an inherent trait in the character transformed, such as when the “wolfish” Lycaon is actually changed into a wolf in Book 1. In a way, metamorphosis is thus but metaphor turned real, which makes the world of the Metamorphoses a realm where language becomes alive. Finally, the never-ending stream of transformations in the poem conveys the idea of an unstable world that is in continuous flux. This view finds its expression in the speech of the philosopher Pythagoras, which takes up a large part of Book 15 (75–478). Though in many ways a ridiculous character, Pythagoras surely captures some of the spirit of the poem in which he appears when he remarks that, as a universal rule, “nothing retains its shape” (252).

Since myth was the primary subject of Greek and Latin literature, a work that recounts a multitude of mythological stories must necessarily engage with a multitude of literary predecessors. As a result, the Metamorphoses is a highly intertextual poem that interacts in original ways with many sources in many genres, including Homer, Greek tragedy, and Hellenistic epyllion (short epic). Of particular interest is Ovid’s relationship to Vergil. Already by Ovid’s time, the Aeneid was considered the classic Roman epic, and the younger poet (like many Latin epic writers after him) felt the need to position his own work creatively in relation to the master. Not only is the Metamorphoses as a whole a decidedly un-Vergilian epic (some scholars have even called it anti-Vergilian), but Ovid also presents a most idiosyncratic rewriting of the Aeneid in his own treatment of the story of Aeneas in 13.623–14.608.

In Tr. 1.7, Ovid claims that when he was banished, the Metamorphoses was as yet unfinished and that he therefore burned the poem before his departure. The text survived, however; as the poet remarks (no doubt tongue in cheek), “I guess it existed in numerous copies” (Tr. 1.7.24). Both the burning of the poem (if it ever happened) and the reference to its supposedly unfinished state appear to be attempts on the part of Ovid to further align himself with Vergil, who famously (if unsuccessfully) asked for the Aeneid to be destroyed after his death on account of its lack of a final hand. In the case of the Metamorphoses, it is possible that Ovid further revised the work in exile; the final product certainly looks finished to us.

Fasti (“The Roman Calendar”)

If, despite Ovid’s claims, we are unable to spot imperfections in the Metamorphoses, the case is different with the Fasti. In Tr. 2.549–50, the poet maintains to have written twelve books of this work. However, only six have come down to us, with no evidence that the poem’s would-be second half ever existed. While it is possible that the books were lost in the process of textual transmission, it is more likely that Ovid deliberately exaggerated (his words in Tristia 2 are addressed to Augustus, to whom he originally dedicated the poem, 551–2) and either never got around to finishing the work or, as some scholars have suggested, simply decided not to pursue it further.

Also unlike in the case of the Metamorphoses, there are clear indications that Ovid revised the Fasti in exile. In 4.81-4, he explicitly refers to his place of banishment, lamenting how far away it is from his hometown of Sulmo. Furthermore, Book 1 in particular shows obvious signs of having been reworked after the death of Augustus in 14 ce. Ovid apparently decided that it would be more useful if the work were addressed to a living member of the imperial family and – in addition to making a few other changes to reflect the changed political situation – wrote a new proem, in which he dedicated the Fasti to the prince Germanicus. Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• BLACKWELL INTRODUCTIONS TO THE CLASSICAL WORLD
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Abbreviations for Ovid’s Works
• Introduction
• 1: Work
• 2: Life
• 3: Elegy
• 4: Myth
• 5: Art
• 6: Women
• 7: Rome
• 8: Reception
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Ovidian Passages Cited
• Index