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Generalising About Ovid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Stephen Hinds
Stephen Hinds*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Extract

The aim of this essay is to confront some ageing generalisations about Ovid which seem to have survived the latest close readings of his poetry intact. Most of the critics who have recently been casting new light on particular poems and passages have been too cautious to use their very specific findings to call explicitly into question long-established overviews of the Ovidian oeuvre. However, an attempt of some kind should be made. Today's generalisation is nothing more than an accretion of yesterday's particular readings; and reassessment of it can come only when it is tested against a new generation of particular readings. My focus, therefore, will be on specifics, but with an untimid eye towards overviews.

A like absence of timidity will also be found in my specifics themselves. Writers of ‘general’ articles tend to eschew difficult or controversial interpretations of particular passages, lest some overall balance in their presentation of an author be upset. I shall have few such qualms: one of my aims is precisely to destabilise — however slightiy — the terms of reference within which Ovidian poetry is usually read. Indeed, I shall risk beginning with what will probably be the most controversial reading in my essay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 16 , Issue 1-2 , 1987 , pp. 4 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1987 

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References

1. Williams, Gordon, Tradition and Originality in Raman Poetry (Oxford 1968) 512 Google Scholar.

2. The ensuing quotations come from Lyne, R.O.A.M., The Latin Love Poets from Catullus to Horace (Oxford 1980) 259–64Google Scholar.

3. See the first half of line 13, which I have included in my quotation as an indicator of this shift. Limitations of space preclude full quotation of all the passages which I discuss in this essay: I am assuming a reader who has a complete text of Ovid to hand.

4. In Times Literary Supplement, 7 March 1975. Once again, the italics in the passage quoted are his.

5. See Wiseman, T. P., Catullan Questions (Leicester 1969) 17f Google Scholar., and Catullus and his World (Cambridge, UK 1985) 159 Google Scholar and 184, arguing a strong case for regarding the arrangement of poems 65ff. as essentially Catullus’ own.

6. Lyne (n.2 above) 52–60.

7. Let me amplify the final item in this slightly vatic paragraph. Lais, as the commentaries remind us, was a famous courtesan; but in Am. 1.5.12 the main interest is in the purely verbal matter of the etymology of her name. Ovid’s simile here for his quasi-candida diva reinforces his primary allusion to Catullus by picking up the beginning of Catullus’ own simile for his Candida diva at 68.73f. On this reading, Lais, overtly etymologised (multis Lais amata viris, ‘Lais loved by many men [=Greek laos]’), operates as a distillation of and learned gloss on the highly mannered juxtaposition of names in that first Catullan pentameter: coniugis ut quondam flagrans advenit amore / Protesilaeam Laudamia domum. The Catullan juxtaposition is probably itself implicitly etymological: allusion to the common etymological ground between Protesi-laos and Lao-dameia seems to be a long-established topos in Latin poetry, if we may judge from the title of Laevius’ Protesilaudamia.

8. Un-Propertian, that is, until Propertius’ belated conversion in his third book to an overtly divine apparatus of inspiration: see especially poem 3.3.

9. This formulation of the traditional contrast comes from Lyne (n.2 above) 260. However, in a discreet footnote (309 n.33) he hints at the possibility of a less extreme emphasis in reading Propertius: ‘we are entitled to infer ulterior artistic motives … ’.

10. I have already alluded to this circumstance in section 1 above.

11. I should acknowledge a general debt in my reading of Propertius to the work of Maria Wyke. Also, I should draw the reader’s attention to an important forthcoming paper by Alison M. Keith, ‘Propertius and the Ovidian Programme: Amores 1.1’, to which I have had access. I have not divulged here any of the contents of this paper; but it will be found to set on a new — and newly firm — basis some points which are merely adumbrated here.

12. Harvey, Sir Paul, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford 1937 Google Scholar), s.v. Propertius.

13. See Doepp, S., Virgilischer Einftuss im Werk Owls (Munich 1969) 56–76Google Scholar; Littlewood, R. J., ‘Ovid and the Ides of March (Fasti 3.523–710)’ in Deroux, C. (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History II (Brussels 1980) 301–21Google Scholar; McKeown, J. C., ‘Fabula proposito nulla tegenda meo’ in Woodman, A. J. and West, D. A. (edd.), Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus (Cambridge, UK 1984) 169ȓ87Google Scholar. However, my remarks here on Ovid’s role as a reader of Virgil are more significantly indebted to research in this general area by Catherine Connors.

14. See Austin, R. G., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Primus (Oxford 1971 Google Scholar) ad 1.430ff.

15. Also, where Ovid’s sequel illustrates a scene of chaos which immediately follows the suicide of a queen (Dido), Virgil’s own sequel within the Aeneid illustrates a scene of chaos which immediately precedes the suicide of a queen (Amata). Does Ovid here show his awareness of the recurrent narrative parallelism between Dido and Amata in Virgil’s epic?

16. Note too perhaps, by way of reinforcement, that each of the lines beginning with amisso is adjacent to a line which begins with a di- compound. McKeown (n.13 above) 171, recognises Ovid’s Georgic source in these lines, but offers no discussion.

17. Compare my remarks on this aspect of the Fasti in Hinds, Stephen, The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge, UK 1987) 69 Google Scholar.

18. Conte, Gian Biagio, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets (Ithaca and London 1986) 60–62Google Scholar; adapted from his Italian essay, Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario (Turin 1974 Google Scholar).

19. See Ross, D. O., Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry: Gallus, Elegy and Rome (Cambridge, UK 1975) 78 Google Scholar, newly developing an observation by Norden, E., P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneis Buch VI (Leipzig and Berlin 1926 [3rd edn]Google Scholar) ad Aen. 6.14.

20. For another example see Hinds, Stephen, ‘An Allusion in the Literary Tradition of the Proserpina Myth’, CQ n.s.32 (1982) 476–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar = Hinds (n.17 above), 38–40: Fast. 4.417 closely echoes Cicero, Verr. 2.4.107; Fast. 4.418 both continues the allusion and footnotes it as allusion.

21. Hinds (n.17 above) 6–16, esp. 15f.

22. See Palmer, A., P. Ovidi Nasonis Heroides (Oxford 1898 Google Scholar) ad he.: ‘cana senectus [‘white-haired old age’] can hardly be for cana vetustas [‘hoary antiquity’]: and if sound is probably abstract for cani senes [‘white-haired old men’]. Old men and women had told Hypermnestra these family legends.’

23. See e.g. Quintilian, Inst. 1.6.34, commenting on this technique of etymologising.

24. The observation is made in A. D. Melville (trans.) and Kenney, E. J., Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford 1986 Google Scholar), introduction xxviii; the phrase ‘nudge to the reader’ comes from Kenney’s associated note on Met. 8.726.

25. See the seminal discussion by Wimmel, W., Kallimachos in Rom (Wiesbaden 1960) 222–33Google Scholar.

26. In HSCP 90 (1986) 171–98. Thomas prefers to speak of ‘reference’ rather than of ‘allusion’. The main drawback is his consequent appropriation of the already existing ‘self-reference’ to describe something narrower than is ordinarily meant by that term. In effect, Thomas’s ‘self-reference’ is what others call, faute de mieux, ‘self-echo’ or ‘self-imitation’.

27. In the context of such debate, the word mollis (‘gentle, soft, smooth’) naturally evokes the carmen deductum (‘fine-spun song’) favoured by ‘Callimachean’ poets: compare such adjectives as tenuis, exiguus, levis (‘fine’, ‘slight’, ‘light’). Arma (‘arms’), on the other hand, are suggestive of the carmen perpetuum (‘continuous song’) which sings of reges et proelia (‘kings and battles’), widely characterised by such adjectives as gravis, inflatus, durus (‘weighty’, ‘inflated’, ‘solid’). The ‘Callimachean’ poet conventionally praises the former kind of writing and denigrates the latter, offering by means of this contrast a succinct, if disingenuously simple, formulation of his artistic values.

28. I have learned much in this connexion from the work of Alison Sharrock and Jamie Masters.

29. For the Odyssean and Aenean resonances in Trist. 5.3.12, see Luck, G., P. Ovidius Naso, Tristia (Heidelberg 1967–77Google Scholar) ad be., with (esp.) Homer, Od. 1.3f., Virgil, Aen. 1.3–5. For the Odyssean and Aenean color in Tristia 1, see especially elegies 2–5.

30. Williams, Gordon, Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire (Berkeley and L.A. 1978 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). The quotations in this paragraph and the next are taken from the following pages, in order of citation: 52 (chapter on Ovid); 3 (introduction); 53; 3; 96.

31. Williams (n.30 above) 164.

32. The main issues are well discussed by Ahl, Frederick M., Lucan: An Introduction (Ithaca and London 1976) 47–49Google Scholar and n.54.

33. Cf. the remarks on the emperor’s interests at Tacitus, Ann. 14.14.

34. One might now be tempted, turning back to the original Phaethontic allusion in line 49, to read mutato sole, ‘changed sun’, as a self-referential ‘gloss’ by Lucan specifying a literary source: namely, Ovid’s poem of mutatas formas, ‘changed shapes’ (Met. 1.1).

35. Was there also a Virgilian idea behind Lucan’s use here of the Phaethon myth? A quite compelling observation on Geo. 1.511–14 by R.O.A.M. Lyne suggests to me that my inquiry is far from over. Let me quote, without comment, Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford 1987 Google Scholar) 140n.63: ‘At Geo. 1.463ff. the sun, “Sol”, is associated with Julius Caesar [cf. Lyne in Woodman, A. J. and West, D. A. (edd.), Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry (Cambridge, UK 1974), 51f Google Scholar.]. In the impotent auriga [“charioteer”] of 514 there is a whisper of the Sun’s son Phaethon, figuring the “son” of the dictator, as yet ineffective in managing the chariot of State.’

36. I should like to thank Alison Keith and Catherine Connors for their helpful comments on the penultimate draft of my essay; and to dedicate the finished product to all the members of my Latin 820 Graduate Seminar on the Amores (Ann Arbor, Winter Term 1987), the most stimulating and exacting critics of my recent Ovidian work.