Ovid’s Amores BII

What are the Amores?

• What are the Amores about or concerned with? Love? Or elegy itself

  • Do we see an element of generic entropy (consumes the elegiac genre as it embodies it)

  • Lyne sees them as ‘fun’ - nothing more

  • Or is it redefining and expanding upon the genre

• Love rarely seems to be the actual focus of the poetry

  • Corinna very clearly an artificial construct

  • What Ovid is interested in is the narrative of the elegiac poet

• Not ‘trying’ to represent real life or even himself

  • Ovid & Corinna not in Apuleius’ list of beloveds = was not believed to be a real relationship unlike eg. Lesbia

  • Corinna’s name is also formed from the Greek ‘kore’ → girl (she is the aestheticised puella)

  • We also have no evidence of a patron to whom Ovid dedicated his work, and unlike Propertius who wrote three books released sequentally, Ovid releases his three at the same time

  • Intended to be read as a singular unit! No hiding how the entire narrative of relationship has been sculpted (allows for further foreshadowing between books)

• Conte - ‘he loves his suffering not only as the substance but above all as the very condition of his poetry, for to live without the suffering of love would mean that the poet remained wordless, no longer a poet’

  • Ovid claifies this - to be struck with love is a poetic shift in his life (no longer write epic!)

  • Emphasis on the poetic side of his life (more likely to believe Ovid as poet is real than Ovid as lover)

  • ‘Love not as an end but as a means’

• Was five in first edition but then shrunk it to three

  • Is this true? Or is this an attempt to emphasise that it is little!

  • And that he could have written more than predecessors but decided to be harsher

• “Supergenre” - S. Harrison

Parody of Propertius?

• Can see how Ovid is riffing on the previous elegists

  • Especially the closest predecessor, Propertius

• Propertius says he will suffer iron and fierce flame for Cynthia → Ovid will put his arms in deserved chains, for messing up her hair…

  • Cynthia’s name is first, while Corinna’s is delayed to fifth poem (‘we’ in 1.3 but no name!)

  • And Corinna is not the only girl…in 2.19, the new girl should take Corinna as model for behaviour

  • 3.7 - Chlide, Pitho and Libas described in active sexual trysts

  • And 3.13.1, hear of Ovid’s wife… (has three in total as hear from tristia 2)

• BUT should also not view Propertius, in contrast to Ovid, as this very solemn figure

  • __ where Gallus has entrusted Propertius to be a witness to his lovemaking

  • And 3._ where afraid of what might happen to him if he goes to Tibur as Cynthia has summoned him

  • Propertius also finds the comedy in the elegiac persona!

  • ‘self-conscious interest in literary inspiration which underpins Propertius’ highly personal approach’

• Also see the hypocrisy of writing in Propertius’ work BUT for others eg. Ponticus who mocks elegy but then falls in love 2 poems later (1.7 → 1.9)

  • But now happens to Ovid

What is humour?

• Interesting question about crucial element to Ovid’s text

  • Humour? How can we define it, and how can we lay aside our own modern cultural understanding of humour?

• Cicero, de orator (55BC)

  • ‘But you that the most common type of humour is when we expect one thing and another is said; in this case our own error makes us laugh’ 2.255

  • 2.289, list of what can make someone laugh: deceiving expectations, laughing at the nature of others, pointing out own in ridicule, likeness to something base, dissembling, saying rather absurd things, reproving foolish things

• Very analytical and objective actions that create laughter

  • Logical approach to humour

  • And Ovid does them all! Should we thus see Ovid’s frivolity more as an intentional attempt at comedy, rather than a lack of care in the world of elegy?

  • ‘strategies resorted to by a poet attempting to say something meaningful in an exhausted genre who found, paradoxically, that the only way to write within the tradition was to deny it’

2.1 - why sing songs?

• ‘This too is the work of my pen - mine, Naso’s born among the humid Paeligni, the well-known singer of my own worthless ways’ (nequitiae)

  • Written at the bidding of love! Evokation of first poem

  • And orders the austere (severae) to leave as not a fit audience for his ‘tender’ strains (teneris)

• He wishes for audience the maiden who blushes at her lover or the boy suddenly in love or youth wounded as he is

• Remembers that he once dared (ausus) to sing of a gigantomachy (nor was his utterance weak!)

  • Held the lightning bolt along with Jove

• YET his beloved closes her door! Thus he forgets Jove (‘that door she closed was a thunderbolt greater than thine’)

  • Needs light and bantering elegy, with gentle words

  • Songs have power to turn water back and burst snakes

• Function of poetry → to get a girl as reward (pretium) thus Achilles, sons of Atreus, Hector etc are useless!

• Asks girls to turn their beautiful faces to him as he sings songs Love dictated to him!

2.2 - addressing Bagoas

• Addresses Bagoas, who guards his mistress

  • Bagoas most likely inspired by Lygdamas from 3.6 and 4.7-8 in Propertius!

  • Yesterday he saw the ‘puellam’ walking in the portico = the portico of Augustus’ temple of Apollo on the Palatine

  • Thus asks her for favours in note and she writes back with trembling hand - ‘non licet!’ because the guard is too strict

• Asks him why is he guarding, when nothing can be lost?

  • ‘let him think she can be chaste who takes the eyes of many’ … (gaze!)

  • The guard should rather conspire wth her, and thus when she reads letters, believe it to be her mother and if visting sick friend, let her go

  • Don’t ask what happens in Isis’ temple or the curved theatre! More public spaces for sexual activity…

• And even if the husband seems angry, he will listen to his wife

2.2 - consequences for snitches

• But should sometimes pretend that they are arguing, and she can feign tears

  • Must charge her with that which she can explain

  • And soon he will be free!

• ‘Do you note that tellers of tales wear chains tied round their necks?’

  • Tantalus cannot eat or drink for his garrulous tongue, Argus too fell and Io became a goddess!

  • Forcing the husband to know himself a cuckold will only punish you

• The husband will not want to know nor want his wife to lose her good name

• And can you even prove it?

  • He will not believe what she denies, and give himself to the lie

  • If she cries, so will he, and then you will be flogged

• ‘What we ask is that you will give us the means to love in safety: what can be more modest than our prayers?’

2.3 - another attempt

• Another address to Bagoas, ‘who guard your mistress are neither man nor woman and cannot know the joys of mutual love’

  • Compares him to someone castrating boys

  • And suggests the guard would be compliant if he knew a woman’s love

• The guard is also not born for a horse or arms, but for his mistress thus should listen to her!

  • ‘tis a shame for her beauty to perish by dull neglect’

  • Thus ask for his aid

• Essentially the same poem again but shorter…

  • Intentional? To emphasise his repeated attempts or to show that this can only really be done once..and then boring

2.4 - every woman!

• ‘I would not venture to defend my faulty morals or to take up the armour of lies to shield my failings’ → futile for the elegiac lover to even attempt to defend his behaviour (comment on predecessors…?)

  • He hates what he is yet cannot stop

  • Lacks the strength and will to rule himself and swept along like a ship tossed on the rushing flood (thus not in control! Powerless to Cupid and to women)

• ‘there a hundred causes to keep me always in love’ → loves every girl (catalogue that attempts to specify actually generalises, 23! Unlike Prop 2.22 where he mentions four)

  • If she is modest and looks to ground, he is aflame but if she is saucy then he can imagine ‘enjoying her supple embrace on the soft couch’

  • Likes how she walks no mater it be light or hard

• Hippolytus would become Priapus! = fault of the girls, not the morality of the man

• Whether tall or short → almost foreshadowing B3 of Ars Am where he explains how different women should accentuate different features

• ‘In fine, whatever fair ones anyone could praise in all the city - my love is candidate for the favours of them all’

Inept player?

• After 1.2 where Ovid sleeps alone, tossing and turning, he asks himself ‘do I yield or fan the sudden flames by struggling? I’ll yield’

  • In 1.4, giving tips on how to flirt under husband’s nose and in 1.5, Corinna is in her bed

• And here seems that his desires have stretched past just Corinna, as he now desires all girls! Has fully yielded

  • He describes his love as ambitiosus - ambitious but also carries the connotations of canvassing for votes

  • Like a political hack who will say anything to get your vote (or here, your body!)

• + in 1.3, despite giving instructions later on how to cheat, tries to persuade the girl to sleep with him, as he will make her famous like Io or Europa or Leda

  • Famed for their love affairs

  • BUT all of these women slept with the same male deity - Jove! Who is himself married

  • Accidentally emphasises his infidelity here → reveals his player instincts without realising

  • (And will regret teaching the girl in 1.4 as in 2.9, she will use it against him - fear of Propertius and Tibullus, should have read better!)

• And later in 2.7 / 8, will struggle to hide his desire to cheat from his beloved (and has to threaten the second partner by revealing his own adultery - will he not be hurt by this?)

2.5 - she cheats

• ‘No love is worth so much - away, Cupid, with the quiver!’ - that so often my most earnest prayer should be for death’

  • Wishes to die whenever he recalls her affairs

  • And he has not discovered this via an ill-erased note or secret gift giving (if these, he could pretend this not be true)

• BUT he saw it himself…

  • When she thought he asleep → both quivering their brow to speak, nodding too and table written with wine

    • From 1.5! supercilio, loquentes, digitis all used! Exact tactics

  • Now shared shameful kisses = of the tongue, not like Diana to Phoebus

• He thus cries out, ‘what are you doing?’ and asks why she is sharing what is for them both

  • Now she blushes like Auora or ‘roses gleaming among the lilies’ OR ‘Assyrian ivory Maeonia’s daughter dyes’ = Lavinia !!

  • And no more beautiful than then and kept her eyes on the ground (‘to keep them on the ground was becoming’)

2.5 - too good!

• Thus, ‘I was moved to tear her hair and to fly at her tender cheeks’

  • Yet as he looks on her face, his brave arms dropped

  • Once in cruel rage, now humble and asks her to give him kisses no less sweet than those

• She thus kisses him, ‘that could make irate Jove let drop from his hand the three-forked bolt’

  • Tormented that the rival tasted these kisses just as sweet

  • And these were much better than he had taught! Too pleasing, too voluptuous

• ‘These kisses could have been no wise but lewdly taught. Some master has had a great reward for his teaching’

  • Asks for no deteriora kisses but then upset that they are meliora

• Here, we see the teachings of Ovid not only in his girl utilising techniques to cheat under a man’s nose against Ovid, but also in the kisses

  • Reveals that Ovid’s attempt to become the praeceptor amoris have backfired against him (and other, and better, teachers around!)

  • In Amores 3, see Corinna pimped out by Ovid’s words of praise (her door opened by his hands…)

2.6 - the parrot

• ‘Our parrot, winged mimic from Indian land of dawn, is no more - come flocking, ye birds, to his obsequies!’

  • Imitation of Catullus 2 and 3

    • ‘imitatrix ales’ ! Very clear (can only imitate what has been said before)

    • Also his beloved is Corinna, Greek poetess like Lesbia is allusion to! Not Apolline like Propertius

  • Beat your breast with the wing, and mark tender cheeks with rigid claw

  • And asks Philomela (who became a bird) to now weep for the parrot, not the son Itys who they killed in revenge

• Loyalty between the parrot and the turtle-dove, much like the youth of Phocis to Orestes

  • Humour in the severe comparisons

• So bright, he could dim jasper with wings and beak punic red with ruddy saffron tinge (like a foreign object)

  • + no-one could imitate speech better

  • Thus was envious fate who swept him away (no mover of battles!)

• Ate and drank little as only wanted to speak (a nut or poppy seeds)

• loquax humanae vocis imago (only the image of speech, not actually)

2.6 - the parrot’s after life

• The greedy vulture lives on and the kite and daw and raven (hated by Minerva! Story later in Metamorphoses)

  • = ‘best things are all too oft first swept away by the greedy hands of fate’

  • eg. Hector! But wasn’t even warlike (loved peace - elegist!)

• ‘Fate stood over you with distaff empt now’ and as he passed he cried out ‘Corinna, fare you well!’ (calls upon mistress in dying breath - Tib 1.1 and Prop 1.10)

• And at foot of hill in Elysium is a grove of ilex, where told that all winged kind live

  • The swans and phoenix and peacock and dove

    • Like scene from Tibullus 3.9 (piae volucres / numeri piii) & Tib 1.3 where birds wander through Elysium

  • → the parrot is accepted here and bones covered by a mound (which fits his body’s size and on which a scant stone bears a legend that just fits the space) - typical epicedion here?

  • ‘You may judge from my very monument my mistress loved me well. I had a mouth skilled in speech beyond a bird’ (placuisse is erotic! And puella as dominae! servitae amoris)

  • Epitaph for the bird! And an Alexandrian one at that → magnus is great but then more like ‘apt’ for his ‘small’ body (periphrastically explaining that it is all slight)

  • Leonidas of Tarentum - cricket remarks that the slight size of the tomb should not suggest that the creature was little loved by its mistress!

  • + Propertius 2.13b - wishes to have simple burial (both use exiguo)

• doctus → learned poet and docta loqui is a Greacism only used in poetry

• And ‘ave’ → more than a bird, and more than a hello (learned)

2.7 - not cheating!

• ‘Am I then to stand trial on new complaints forever?’

  • Have come in media res to argument (thus sympathy, cannot hear her question so assume the worst)

  • He suggests that she is upset if he looks to highest rows of the marble theatre, or if a beauty looks at him, or he praises or insults a girl

  • ‘I would I were even conscious of some wrong done!’

• You accuse me without reason!

  • And compares himself to a pitiable ass who is broken by never-ending blows!

• ‘And look now, a fresh charge! Cypassis, the deft girl that tires your hair is cast at me, accused of wrong her mistress’ couch’

  • Asks why a free man would sleep with a slave and clasp waist cut with lash

  • And she would be faithful to her obviously!

• Ends ‘by Venus, I swear, and by the bows of her winged boy, I am not guilty of the charge you bring!’

  • Crescendo of his frustration at the puella who doesn’t trust him! But then will see this all tumble down in bathos

  • Foreshadowing in volatilis - lit/ in flight but also fleeting emotion? Emphasis on fickleness

2.8 - maybe cheating

• ‘Perfect in setting hair aright in a thousand ways but worthy to dress only that of goddesses, Cypassis, you whom I have found in our stolen delight not wholly simple…’

  • Such clear irony ! Name in 2nd line already!

  • ut then asks how their affair has been revealed? Did he blush or let some word slip?

• Should he have believed that someone infatuated with a slave could be sane!

  • But Achilles loved Birseis, Phoebus by the Mycenaean chief

• It was her! When she looked angrily on you, you blushed!

  • He was much better and even swore ‘to my faithfulness in mighty Venus’ name!’

  • References and then undermines previous poem

• In return for his impressive defence, she should sleep with him again

  • ‘Why do you shake your head and refuse, ungrateful girl?’ - writing as action occurs?

  • ‘feign fresh fears’ = only pretending

  • Now threatens to blame her if he doesn’t (to explain where, how often and in what ways they had sex)

• Is this a commentary on Propertius? 3.15, where he asks Cynthia to spare Lycinna (3 years ago or hardly less…was it? + undermines Cynthia as first love!)

2.9 a - Cupid harming his own

• ‘O Cupid, who can never be reviled as thou deservest, O boy lodged in my heart and doing naught…’

  • Asks why he harms him, the soldier who never left the standard (why wounding his own camp!)

• We have surrendered to you and feel the weight of your weapons! But Cupid does not harm the foes who resist!

  • Barbed arrows on his naked bones (naked by love)

• Should turn to those without love, this is ‘great and glorious triumph’

  • Like Rome who if she had not employed her powers against the boundless world, would be filled even now with straw-thatched huts

• ‘The tired-out soldier is let retire to the acres he received’ (eclogues…?)

  • Race-horse to pastures, and long docks receive the ship of pine (Catullus!)

  • Wishes for same peace after fighting for love

  • to ‘vivere’ after suffering (will begin ‘vive’ with love laid aside BUT will not want to)

2.9 b - wait, never mind

• ‘Lay asife thy loves’ should some god say to me, ‘and live without them’

  • Pray him not to ask! Even so sweet an evil are the fair

  • SUDDEN shift here! Common in the Hellenistic tradition (Theocritus idyll 30, Meleager and Prop 2.5)

• When he has grown weary of love, soul seized by whirlwind of wretchedness

  • Like hard-mouthed horse in flight when master strives to hold him back with foaming bit but is carried along

  • Keep about the touch haven but winds sweep it to the deep

  • So easily does Cupid veer him off his tracks

• ‘Transfix me, child! I have laid aside my defences and stand unarmed before thee’ = now wants the pain

  • His arrows scarce now the quiver because of him

• Unhappy is the man who can rest easy at night (sleep is but the image of chill death)

  • Wishes his girl to lure him in, speak winningly but then chide, go repulsed away

• Mars is inconstant because of his step-son Cupid (step-son??)

  • Cupid is light on his wings → fickle

  • But asks him and his mother to set up their thrones in his heart and reign forever more!

2.10 - two girls?!

• Address to Graecinus, who once has told our poet that it is impossible to love two maids at once

  • Thus our poet is caught off guard that he has fallen for two maids

  • ‘Each one is beautiful, both tasteful in their dress’ (both fairer than the other, and please more too!)

• Veers like a yacht driven by contrary winds → torn in two

  • Already suffering with one love!

  • But still better than loving none (to fall asleep in a lonely bed - sexual)

• Thus he will meet this challenge head-on - ‘slender my limbs but not without strength

  • Does not wish to be the lone burden of his bed

  • And has been merry throughout the night and reached morning fit and strong

  • And wishes to die in this moment

• Let the soldier be plucked by hostile dart, the trader drown in the sea in search for wealth

  • But he wishes to fall in the midst of the ‘delight’

  • ‘thine was a death accorded with thy life’

  • See 3.7.1-6 where Ovid cannot perform how he wishes… (more internal turmoil!)

    • Metapoetic? Wishes to branch out from elegy? Ars amatoria different?

2.11 - Corinna has gone

• ‘twas the pine felled on Pelion’s top that first taught men the evil paths of the sea…’ (wishes the Argo had been sunk, so no-one would try it again)

  • Why? Well, Corinna has decided to leave for treacerous paths

  • Fears for her in the N,E,S,W winds

• She will not gaze on towns or groves, but the ‘deep-blue form of the unjust sea’

  • Even a little better if she wanders the shore (with her ‘marble white feet’)

• Many tales of the sea could be told by others eg Scylla or Charybdis, Ceraunians or the Syrtes (epic?)

  • When the storms come and the waves roughen, you’ll be jealous of the girl who land holds

• ‘The safer course was fondly to keep your couch’ (read books and play the Thracian lyre)

2.11 - she returns

• Now threatens Galatea and Nereus and his daughters that it be their fault if she die

  • And wishes that the breeze be favourable to his shore, and pray that Zephyr strike the sheets

  • ‘I shall be first to get sight of the well-known craft from the shore and shall say: ‘That sail bears hither my gods!’

  • Will take her in his arms and snatch kiss on kiss

• The sands now levelled into couch (…) and a heap into a table

  • When wine set, tell tales of storms but that on the return there was no fear of the southern wind

  • ‘All I shall take for truth, though you invent it all - why should I not flatter my own heart’s desires?’

• And then prays to Lucifer to bring this hour quickly!

2.12 - success

• ‘Come lie about my temples, ye laurels of the triumph! Victory is mine; look Corinna is in my arms, whom her husband, whom her keeper, whom the unyielding door all guarded in fear…’

  • And nothing stained by blood

  • No lowly wall, no town with little moats but a girl!

• When Pergamum fell, so many men gained praise and little for Atreus’ son

  • ‘But my glory is a thing apart for me, unshared by any soldier’

  • Captain in the march, and the soldiery

  • Cavalry, infantry, standard-bearer

• But not new cause of warfare!

  • Helen was cause of Trojan war

  • Women that turned the Lapiths and centaurs to battle

  • Lavinia for Italy, and the rape of the Sabines

• And bulls contend for snowy mate too (she stands to be seen and thus spurs their heart)

  • ‘Cupid…has orders me too - but me without shedding of blood - to take up the standard for his campaigns’

2.13 - abortion

• ‘Corinna, rashly seeking to rid her heavy bosom of its load, lies languishing in peril of life’

  • May have triggered a miscarriage (might be because of him…to hide the signs of affair)

  • Tries this without asking Ovid = anger? More fear

  • Might be him or another… (he ignores the potential truth)

  • A much harsher (and realistic) take on the elegiac sickness topos (from Tibullus 1.5 and Propertius 2.9)

• Prays to Isis and the face of revered Anubis (‘so may loyal Osiris ever love thy rites’) → save her and spare us both

  • She has often sat in Isis’ temple (Gallic squadron circles round the laurel trees = statues around the temple)

• And Ilithyria, who has compassion for women in their pangs, listen! She is worthy of aid

  • Ovid will offer incense on the smoking altars, bring votive gifts and lay them at her feet

  • And add the legend - ‘Naso, for Corinna saved!’

2.14 - abortions part 2

• ‘Of what avail to fair women to rest free from the burdens of war, nor choose with shield in arm to march in the fierce array, if free from peril of battle she suffer wounds from weapons of her own and arm her unforeseeing hands to her own undoing?’

  • She who commits an abortion should die in that warfare

  • ‘to spare your bosom the reproach of lines’ = argument that it is for aesthetics

• If women of old times had done this, there would be no man (need Deucalion and Pyrrha again!)

  • Thetis → Trojan war? Ilia → Rome? Venus → Caesars? And Ovid and Corinna too!

  • Why pluck the fruit unripe, should let it fall for itself

• Condemn Medea and lament the murder of Itys but they at least had tragic reasons (what reason do you have?)

• She who tries this often dies and when she is put on the pyre, they should that she deserves this

• SWITCH - ‘but may the words I am saying to you be carried away on the winds of heaven…’ (first time, be safe)

  • Clash of morals and his desire (what would he be like if he wasn’t in love?)

2.15 - one ring to rule them all

• ‘O ring, that art circle the finger of my fair lady’

  • Address to the ring (may she slip you on her finger immediately, and fit her as well as she fits me)

  • Hints of sexuality from the start - articulis induat & terat (rubbing), as well as recipere (with female subject)

• Jealousy of the ring, that she be touched by the hands of his lady

  • Wishes to become the gift (eg. by art of Circe) and touch her breasts and place the left hand (autoeroticism) within the tunic, fall into her bosom

    • ‘o utinam fieri…posse’ (adaption of the wish structure in Greek epigram)

    • And then tunc…ego to signal the switch

  • Or when she is sealing letters, be kissed by her moist lips (‘only so that I sealed no missive that would bring me pain’)

    • The Ovid-poet and Ovid-anulus start to merge (his desires outside of fantasy start to impede and it cracks)

    • Moist - the vagina? Catullus - desirable dry mouth

• If you would wish to place me in the jewellery box, he would tighten his hold and stay

  • Yet when she wear him in the warm rain of the bath (don’t shrink at the harm from water leaking beneath the gem)

  • ‘methinks my passions would rise at sight of your fairness and I though naught but that ring would play the human part’

    • Here is when we start to see how the human desires don’t jarr well with Ovid-anulus

    • ‘pushing it to its logical consequences’

• Ends however asking ‘why pray for what cannot be? Little gift, go on thy way; let my lady feel that with thee my true love comes!’

  • Realises his own absurdity in the rhet Q

  • Has moved from addressing the ring, to addressing the lady as ring, to himself addressing the ring → ring composition!

• Strato (Greek anthology 12.208) - little book that touches boy’s lips and thighs (jealousy → fantasy of becoming object, absurdity!)

2.16 - in Sulmo alone

• ‘Sulmo holds me now’

  • Wholesome with channeled streams

  • Although the sun is hot and cracks the earth with heat, the acres of the Paelgni are wandered by this liquid river and are green in their tender soil!

• Land rich in corn and richer still in the grape

  • And the berry-bearing tree of Pallas (olive)

  • ‘But my heart’s falem is not here. I was wrong in one word! - she who fires my heart is afar; the fire is here’

• Even if set between Castor and Pollux, would not wish to be in heaven

  • ‘May they lie restless weighed down by ungracious clay who have cut long roads upon the earth!’

  • Even if in the alps, journey would be easy with his girl (Libyan Syrtes nor Scylla or Charybdis)

  • And if the ship sunk, he would swim them to safety (like Heroides 18 & 19, Hero)

2.16 - she should come

• And thus now even though he is in a locus amoenus of vines, streams and rivulets, he is in Scythia or Cilicia or Britain

• The elm and vine love each other (Oenone?) so why so often separated?

  • She swore she would be his comrade forever!

  • ‘Words of women lighter than falling leaves, go all for naught, swept away by the whim of wind and wave’ (Catullus)

  • Thus if she cares for him, should shake the reins for the ponies (and hills should shrink down and ways not wind)

2.17 - fierce mistress

• ‘If there by one who thinks it base to be a slave to womn, before his judgement seat shall I be proved guilty of being base’

  • But he must be victim to a fierce mistress because she is beautiful (‘beauty breeds arrogance’)

  • She is hard because of her face, but only her face after she has made herself up

• Should not scorn him - great things come with little

  • Calypso smitten with Odysseus, Thetis married to Peleus, and Egeria to Numa

  • ‘this very kind of verse is unequal; and yet the heroice line is fitly joined to the shorter’

• Asks her to dictate laws to him as if in the midst of the forum

  • And ‘felicitious song instead of great possession is mine and many a fair one wished for glory through me’

  • Knows of a girl who pretends to be Corinna

  • Yet none but ‘real’ Corinna shall be sung in his books

2.18 - what to write?

• ‘While you, Macer, are bringing your poem to the time of Achilles’ wrath and clothing the conspiring chiefs with the war’s first arms, I dally in the slothful shade of Venus…’

  • Contrast of epic and elegy

  • Macer! In exp Ponto 2.10 → autobiography?

• Would tell his love to leave and she would sit upon his lap and give him kisses when he claims himself ashamed

  • Is vanquished = summons back his genuis to sing of exploits at home (not of arms)

• ‘Nonetheless, I did begin to sing of sceptres, and through my effort tragedy grew in favour and for that task no-one more fit than I’

  • Is Ovid revealing that he did write a tragedy?? Doesn’t have to actually have done this for this to work… (Romantic ideal of generic ascent & discomfort with Ovid’s contentment to write ‘lower’ genres)

  • Love laughed at the painted buskins and the sceptre in his unkingly hand

  • Will of his lady and Cupid dragged him away

  • ‘Either I profess the art of tender love (ars amatoria!) or I write the words Penelope sends her Ulysses (first Heoides)

    • Sappho ends?

  • But in these tales, all receive a response (Penlope recognises Ulysses, Phaedra reads what Hippolytus says??)

• And Macer too does not leave love unsung (Paris and Helen in his song, Laodamia too)

  • He is changing camps!

2.19 - lax husband

• ‘If you feel no need of guarding your love for yourself, O fool, so that you guard her for me, that I may desire her the more!’

  • Needs the chase for it to be enjoyable = has to be adultery

  • ‘What one may do freely has no charm’

  • Heart of iron if he loves what one concedes

• Only fun if sometimes afraid and hopeful and being repulsed

  • ‘May nothing be mine that never wounds!’

• Corinna is aware of this and thus feigns an aching head, feigned a charge of attacking me → stirred him and fanned the flames → then friendly and compliant to prayers

  • And then how many kisses!

• Compares the husband to a pimp! (lenone)

2.19 - and his other woman

• AND ‘you too who have lately stolen my eyes away, see that oft you pretend to be afraid and oft when entreated say no’

  • Allow him to stretch himself on her door (this is what nourishes his passions)

  • Love fed flat harms us like sweets harm our stomach

• Danae trapped in the tower is what meant she was seduced, Io guarded made her more desirable

• But still ‘may I not meet torment from my own advice!’ (3.4…)

  • torquear → torture, but also twist!

  • And quod sinit alter in both, and Danar appears!

  • Shatters allusion of the credible elegist

• Thus the husband should ask who beats on your threshold, why the dogs bay and what tablets the slave-girl brings

• ‘Unless you begin to watch your lady, she will begin to cease being mine!’

  • ‘Endure things unendurable to any husband’

  • ‘Shall the night never threaten me with someone’s revenge?’

• If he is pleased to be a rival, stop it!

• This poem reveals that Ovid is already leaning into his role as a praeceptor amoris (ordering people to behave in manner to aid his passion)

  • BUT he will regret this in 3.4

Amores → Ars Amatoria openings!

• Ovid is eager to play with the idea of WHO this lover is

  • And thus see a transformation from a nervous love elegist into a confident teacher of the ars am and remedia amoris (it is said that Cupid… - relating a story heard, autiobiography?)

  • But also see a confident narrator develop into insecure and ineffectual teacher of love

• Poetic persona in 1.1

  • The renowned ‘Cupid stole a foot’ → can no longer write epic (arma - specific type of epic!)

  • Shattered self-confidence (me miserum like Propertius’ first line miserum me = works fast!)

  • Much like the Aetia fragment of Callimachus and Apollo but there with the god of poetry! (Virgil and Propertius too)

  • And the gods then do not physically intervene → Cupid as a ‘poetic dictator’

  • But also demands that Ovid must begin his elegiac text without a beloved! Paradox of sorts

    • And she only appears in 1.3 ! And only in name at 1.5 where she is entering his bed

• But after three books of elegy, would expect that the lover knows what to do

The Ars Amatoria

• In third book, see Ovid turning to something new

  • 3.7 - can’t have sex and lassus amore

  • 3.11 - his love conquered by vitia

  • 3.13 - wife attending festival in Falerii (Fasti?)

  • Last poem of text emphasises concern for his immortality of poetry !

  • Returning back to where he was in beginning of text however…

• BUT THEN his new text is not new but is?

  • Essentially teaching men to write their own Amores (might be tricking the readers into thinking he is ‘generically ascending’)

  • And suggests in the opening that he controls Cupid (like Chiron over Achilles, and farmer over lifestock)

    • But reading the Iliad, is Achilles’ wrath ever truly calmed?

Usus?

• 1.25-30: I do not think that my arts were provided by you, Phoebus, nor are we counselled by the cries of the flighty bird, nor were Clio and her sisters seen by me guarding cattle in your valleys, Ascra; experience inspires this work: listen to the experienced ‘vates’; I will speak the truth. Mother of Love, may you aid my work now just begun’

• What is Ovid suggesting he is not

  • Second couplet is allusion to Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses on Mt Helicon (Theogony 22-23) → also an allusion to Callimachus

  • The bird? Tibullus 1.8.3-6: tells the lovers Marathus and Pholoe that he requires no supernatural help to understand the meaning of their nods and whispers (not the songs of the bird!) → his teaching is not based on augury

  • And the Phoebus here is the prophetic one! Helenus in Aeneid has the numina Phoebi! And can understand bird’s tongues

  • Like Lucretius’s proem (repudiates inspiration) and Propertius 2.1 (not Calliope or Apollo, but his girl!)

  • And maius opus moveo in Aeneid proem → usus opus movet hoc

  • And Clio? The first Muse to explain aetiology to Callimachus followed by sisters (scholion)

• → vates peritus (paradox?)

  • And also asks Venus to attend to his beginnings!

  • But always hovering near paradox (concessaque furta !!)

  • And Achilles terrifying but also timid - exterruit and pertimuisse

  • The paradox of love (is not always rational!)

But does Ovid actually have usus?

• Ovid will pose that he always has control

  • In Ars Amatoria and remedia Amoris (Cupid agrees for Ovid to write this text!)

• But does he actually have control / does he consistently portray himself as having control?

  • When Cupid appears in the RA to Ovid, he is unsure whether it is a dream or real → decides it is not real (reducing the potency of the advice)

  • And ends the passage in despair, confused how to go as his Palinurus (helmsman), Cupid, has abandoned him

  • Sometimes, he ‘forgets’ - ‘quam paene admoniu, ne trux caper iret in alas’ (3.193) or seems unwilling to speak - ‘eloqua invitus’ (rem 757)

  • Ashamed to speak - ed pudet et dicam (rem 407)

  • And as in Ars 3.663-72, reveals his own inexperience!

  • And lacking control - et fateor medicus turpiter aeger eram (rem 311-14)

• Reminds us of how he started out as a lover - being hit by Cupid without wanting to! And constantly engaging in hypocrisy in the Amores!

  • And will contradict himself in the Ars Am! B1 = every woman is mad and horny (like Pasiphae), B3 = virtue is a woman

  • Reduces the potency (can we trust the persona he has created?)

What is the Ars Amatoria about?

• Much like the Amores, the Ars Amatoria too is equally about the construction of the Ovid-lover/Ovid-poet

• The second book begins - arte mea captast, arte tenanda meast

  • Balancing the two books by his ‘arte’

  • And will be given the palm, snatched from Homer and Hesiod! Poetic comparison

  • Also compares himself to epic heroes (as much as Achilles with his right hand, Nestor with his chest, Calchas with entrails → diminuitive catalogue)

  • And wishes to be celebrated as a vates for tantus amator ego

  • Ovid successfully teaching love is viewed as equal to the successful application of it!

• In the remedia Amoris, Ovid attacks his detractors who say his Muse is shameless

  • But he responds that this is not a fault and that it makes sense for what he is writing

  • But this circumvents the question of WHY is Ovid writing this?

  • This argument also suggests that shamelessness is a persona adopted for this specific reason → he could write epic or tragedy if he desired !

A new world

• But also about reconstructing Rome to exist as the playground for love

  • The theatre is a good hunting ground becausee it was at a theatrical festival that the Romans carried off the Sabine women (1.101-34)

  • Aetiology → Callimachus

  • And Gaius Caesar leading a triumph after victory over Parthians → occasion for seduction (lover told to lie about triumph to seem well-informed)

    • Like Propertius 3.4 ! Caesar’s triumph is to be watched from the lap of the mistress

    • BUT also emphasises how Ovid is very happy with contemporary Rome! And women require the empire to cultivate themselves and become who they should be for men to be pelased

• And philosophy and cosmology of chaos and harmony should be learned in order to understand how love can aid a woman’s reproaches

• And nosce teipsum from Apolline Delphi should be for the lover to know his best romantic traits!

  • Interesting since prior Ovid said he didn’t need Apollo!

  • Also a parody of the Callimachean Apollo (evoking the apparition of Lycian Apollo from the aetia prologue, both interrupt and play the golden lyre)

  • Does not spare his own master

Georgics in the Ars Amatoria /1

• The relationship between men and women in the ars amatoria is defined through allusion to the relationship between man and nature

  • Different soils support different plants (1.755)

  • And the man should know that even grain sown does not always yield a harvest!

  • Stresses women’s need to be cultivated, contained, forced to comply

• As well as as animals!

  • Near beginning of B1, see Ovid explain that women will always want to be trapped → Pasiphae! Wishes to have sex with the bull → animalising female desire (untamed and wild)

  • And an unruly woman will become tractable with time, just as bullocks learn to draw the plough and horses submit to the rein (1.471-2)

  • Different techniques for different women eg. older deer knows the snare (1.765)

• Same in B2 - prey in the net but the captor must learn to hold onto the prize and tame her to his will

  • Don’t let he realise you are cheating (she is more violent than the hunted boar, lioness with cubs or snake trodden)

  • And the beloved may become sick in autumn (like animal pestilence in this season G3)

Georgics in Ars Amatoria /2

• Capio and teneo are two of most common verbs in the text

  • And implication for the men here is that they need to cultivate and control

  • Inspired by Tibullus 1.4 where Priapus speaks as a magister amoris advising the lover to be persistent and heed example by man’s conquest over nature

• Even B3 is not too different

  • Suggests women should learn cultus ← Georgics on trees: quare agite o proprios generatim discite cultus, agricolae

  • Need to be adaptable

• Even the vocabulary is the same - quaere, nunc age, disce, adspicio, iubeo, labor and opus

  • Both the toil of the farmer and the puella are durus

  • ‘approaches his frivilous subject with an air of studious gravity’

Do we ever see female pleasure?

• ‘Female sexuality has always been conceptualised on the basis of masculine parameters’

  • To be the counterpart to the male, to be suppressed for the male and remain unarticulated

  • In ancient world, many beliefs around sex, one of which that women could not control their sexual urges and thus needed to be penetrated for her wellbeing (and ideal of seclusion)

  • + often viewed that the female body ejaculated like the male → reproduction! Pregnancy thus signalled that the woman had enjoyed herself

• ‘even the girl you might think doesn’t want it will’ 1.274

  • furiosa libido (uncontrolled, all want to have sex!)

  • Pasiphae provided as example… (forte, not divine punishment)

  • Male cow ‘implevit’ her (means impregnate but also to satisfy)

  • So exaggerated as example that it contradicts his point that rejection is safe (here, the female body as dangerous and transgressive…)

• AND ‘but while fighting back, she’ll still want to be conquered’ 1.666

  • ‘you may call it force but that force is pleasing to girls’ (female pleasure = rape)

  • And the mistress can be calmed (can achieve pax) by having sex with the mistress (even if she knows the truth)

  • Pain as eroticised - the girl weeps while the lover seduces and beds her

The female needs to be hidden

• ‘Venus herself whenever she takes off her clothes, bends down and hides her mons pubis with her left hand…and the pubenda hides under a carefully placed garment’ B2

  • Everyone knows everyone is having sex but the activity and specifically the locus for the sex, the vagina, must be kept hidden

  • Refers to it as the ‘loca’

  • Explicit erasure of the female pars

  • But pushed to the brink of absurdity where it must be hidden even in the bedroom!

• Ovid too praises older female lovers because they are more pliable and easily manipulated for sake of male pleasure

  • ‘The women compensate for the loss of their years…and they make love in a thousand positions, as many as you wish’ B2

  • Try to hide their maturity

  • More utilis not for fertility but for pleasure

  • Become inventor and living sex doll, Pygmalion and his love object in order to ensure the body is painted to pleasure the man

  • Female body as prop!

• AND even when Ovid states he wants a woman who enjoys herself, it is because it pleasing for HIM

  • ‘I hate the girl who offers sex because she has to and lies there, dry, thinking about her wool’

  • AND later tells women to fake it if they can (only care about the performance of pleasure)

• Contrast between the vagina that will not wear down like iron and flint AND the female body that needs to be cultivated

  • And hidden - what should be seen (spectentur, sunt aspicienda, conspicienda)

  • The pregnant woman should face away to hide the stretch marks

Augustus?

• Example of Venus and Mars to explore the idea of female infidelity is an interesting one

  • As Venus and Vulcan ARE married

  • And Venus is closely associated with Augustus through Caesar

• Are we meant to view this as a clue that we are actually talking about husbands and wives here?