Ovid (Routledge Revivals)

J. Binns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317808510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Ancient Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ovid, Rome's most cynical and worldly love poet, has not until recently been highly regarded among Latin poets. Now, however, his reputation is growing, and this volume is an important contribution to the re-establishment of Ovid's claims to critical attention.

This collection of essays ranges over a wide variety of themes and works: Ovid's development of the Elegiac tradition handed down to him from Propertius, Catullus and Tibullus; the often disparaged and neglected Heroides; the poetry of Ovid's miserable exile by the Black Sea; the poetic diction of the Metamorphoses, Ovid's lengthy mythological epic which codified classical myth and legend, and has strong claims to be considered, with the exception of Virgil's Aeneid, Rome's greatest epic poem; humour and the blending of the didactic and elegiac traditions in the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Finally, Ovid's incomparable influence in the Middle Ages and sixteenth century is examined.

IV

The Style of the Metamorphoses

E. J. Kenney

I

Judgments on Ovid’s style have tended to exemplify something of the facility which they purport to expose. Often he has in effect been criticized for not being Virgil. So Mackail speaks of ‘the tripping movement … into which [the hexameter] was metamorphosed … by the facile adroitness of Ovid’.¹ Similarly Green’s verdict that Ovid’s verses are ‘under-enjambed’ and ‘over-dactylic’² can only mean ‘compared with Virgil’s’.³ Glover called them ‘often only elegiac couplets in disguise’,⁴ a sentence echoed by Wilkinson,⁵ though with an important qualification: for having duly quoted the famous criticism of Dryden that ‘Ovid with all his sweetness, has as little variety of Numbers and sound as [Claudian]: He is always as it were upon the Hand-gallop, and his Verse runs upon Carpet ground’,⁶ he goes on to add the rider ‘Yet may not Ovid perhaps have been right, for the purpose in hand?’⁷ That surely is the crux of the matter.

What was that purpose? Much ink has been spilt on the question whether the Metamorphoses is or is not an epic, von Albrecht’s careful analysis of the surprisingly brief proem shows that Ovid’s declared pretensions are those of an epic poet;⁸ and Herter has rightly insisted on the significance of the word perpetuum (I. 4), with its oblique but unambiguous anti-Calli-machean implication that the Metamorphoses was a single poem intended for continuous reading, and not merely a collection of epyllia.⁹ There is of course in this attitude a touch of deliberate paradox, perhaps verging on defiance, since when all is said and done, the resemblance to the Aetia, metre apart, is immediately obvious; and whatever thematic architecture Ovid’s ingenuity might devise or the percipience of modern critics detect, the poem is bound to appeal to most readers as a collection of stories. It is indeed, as von Albrecht has said, ‘an epos sui generis’,¹⁰ and that uniqueness is, as he has also said, the decisive point. In setting out to write the Metamorphoses Ovid was attempting something for which, as he envisaged the undertaking, no precedents existed; and those readers who instinctively sense in the first four words of the poem, in noua fert animus, read autonomously, a proclamation by the poet to that effect are, I think, following a hint intended by him. However that may be, precisely what was he attempting? What is the special genus of which the Metamorphoses is sole representative? To this question very various answers have been returned. One critic sees the poem as an example of ‘Kollektivgedicht’,¹¹ another as an ‘anti-epic’ protest,¹² another as a playful variation of epic,¹³ another as an epic of love,¹⁴ yet another as an epic of rape;¹⁵ and I have myself elsewhere offered epic of pathos.¹⁶ The search for a label may or may not be a profitable exercise; the diversity of labels suggested at all events serves to emphasize the special character of the poem. However, there is one point on which the interpreters seem to be unanimous, and that is the dominant importance of narrative in the Metamorphoses, its status as what has been called ‘the very soul of the work’.¹⁷ To describe Ovid’s verse medium as ‘a comfortable, well-sprung, well-oiled vehicle for his story’¹⁸ is perhaps to relegate it to too subordinate and separate a role: the medium and the message can hardly be distinguished in quite the way suggested by this metaphor. Nevertheless the idea of a vehicle is helpful as a reminder of the necessity for keeping this long poem moving and for sustaining its character as a perpetuum carmen. The reader of the Metamorphoses is always being carried on; the ingenious transitions from episode to episode, abused by Quintilian and variously criticized or justified by later critics,¹⁹ are fundamentally a functional device (whatever extravagances Ovid may have committed in the application of it) to ensure a steady progress through the poem. Smoothness and speed are likewise the salient characteristics of Ovid’s hexameter. Critics who merely miss in Ovid the weight, sonority and expressiveness of Virgil are failing to recognize the great difference, not only between the two poets, but between their two undertakings.²⁰ The comparison with Virgil is by no means misguided; but it is illuminating precisely as it directs attention to this difference.

The existence and instant canonization of the Aeneid confronted all subsequent aspirants to epic honours with a most intractable problem. Of surviving Latin epicists only Ovid and Lucan can be said to have tackled it with originality and anything approaching success. It is relevant to bring in Lucan at this point because the very different nature of his attempted solution and of the stylistic means by which he executed it helps to illustrate the originality of both the Metamorphoses and the Bellum Civile. Both poems were brilliant essays in a modern, or contemporary, style of epic which might legitimately challenge comparison with Virgil, not on his own ground (which Ovid, who obviously admired him, must have seen to be impossible),²¹ but on a new and independent footing. In material, structure and intention Ovid’s independence from Virgil is almost complete. In language it seems at first sight to be otherwise: for all Ovid’s work is shot through and through with Virgilian reminiscences.²² Closer analysis, however, shows that this is not a matter of straightforward borrowing and adaptation, but rather that what might be called a consistent and calculated process of denaturing has been at work. It is important to distinguish in Virgil’s Latinity between its base, the ‘common style’, as a recent critic has called it,²³ which relates directly to the medium itself, the dactylic hexameter,²⁴ and what is specific and original to Virgil himself: his callidae iuncturae²⁵ and his management of the verse-period.²⁶ Virgil’s penchant for ‘coining … expressive original phrases out of extremely elementary words’,²⁷ as seen in lines like

sensit laeta dolis et formae conscia coniunx (Aen., VIII. 393)

(his consort felt, and, smiling at her ruse, knew that she was fair)²⁸

is something more than a trick of style; it is part and parcel of the allusive, ambiguous and allegorical mode in which the Aeneid was composed. Ovid’s diction (as will be illustrated below) is on the whole no more and no less plain than Virgil’s; his use of it is infinitely more straightforward, because that straightforwardness was what the mode in which he was writing called for. Bömer’s careful and perceptive analysis of this problem²⁹ perhaps fails to do full justice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I. The Amores
• II. The Heroides
• III. The Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris
• IV. The Style of the Metamorphoses
• V. The Tristia: Poetry in Exile
• VI. Ovid in the Middle Ages
• VII. Ovid in the Sixteenth Century
• Subject Index
• Name Index