In Ovid's Amores 1.12, the second poem of the diptych that recounts a rejected invitation, we find the first-person narrator (ostensibly Ovid himself) transfer his hostility at this rejection from the puella to her enslaved hairdresser (who carried the message from ‘Ovid’ to the puella) and finally to the tablets themselves. Indeed, Nape (the enslaved hairdresser of the puella) is read by some as being connected, primarily through the descriptor sobria ‘sober’, with the lena of the puella, Dipsas, who appears in Amores 1.8.Footnote ¹ If we reconsider the text of 1.12, however, I propose that we can further see Nape and Dipsas, two characters who possess an undue and baleful influence over the puella, as being even more closely aligned through the mystical language employed in the description of the tablets and the duplicity associated with those tablets in 1.12.

As ‘Ovid’ transfers the blame from one intermediary of his message (Nape) to another (the tablets), he does not blame the words themselves (his own message) for failing to persuade his puella, but sees the medium as at fault. Indeed, this transference of blame dominates the majority of the poem (Am. 1.12.15–20):

Everything about the tablets is considered to be against the lover, from the character of the man who cut down the tree, to the nature of the tree itself, and even the animals who once made their home there.

Moreover, the connection between the tablets and Nape is one that has been well documented by other scholars. The adjective duplices at Am. 1.12.27 is well understood to be an example of Ovid's clever rhetoric, referring both to the tablets’ folding construction and to their ‘duplicity’ against ‘Ovid’ who wrote on them. Although McKeown commented that this ‘seems to offer a somewhat unnecessary explanation of the joke’, Pasco-Pranger has demonstrated the connection and complexity of this adjective's appearance, particularly as it connects to the simplex of Am. 1.10.13.Footnote ³ Pasco-Pranger explains that implicit in Nape's role as a go-between is her lack of simplicitas and that the pre-existing understanding of the moral sense behind simplicitas reinforces the moral meaning behind duplices when it is thus applied to the tablets. Essentially, if the tablets are duplices, then so too is Nape. Henderson, meanwhile, who considers Nape as a forerunner of Cypassis (and subject of the narrator's affection in Amores 2.7 and 2.8), notes that Nape gets her name from the ‘«grove» or «Coppices» which bespeak(s) «raw material for poetry»’, thus making her both the material of Ovid's poetry and the physical material (wood) of his writing tablets.Footnote ⁴ Fitzgerald, building on the work of Henderson, has further found a connection between Nape and the tablets through the descriptors of the writing tablets as fidas … ministras ‘faithful servants’ (Am. 1.11.27), arguing that the ‘constant slippage in this poem between tablets and maid’ suggests to the reader that they are substitutes for or extensions of one another.Footnote ⁵

With this connection between tablets and enslaved hairdresser in mind, the verb applied to those tablets at Am. 1.12.15 can thus subtextually be linked with Nape as well, while also subtly tying the construction of the tablets to the theoretically supernatural skills of the stereotypical elegiac lena. Footnote ⁶ Here I have translated uertit as ‘transformed’, yet one of the possible definitions of uertere is ‘to change’ in terms of magical or supernatural transformations.Footnote ⁷ In Amores 1.8, in fact, Dipsas is described as mystically changing form (1.8.13) using uersam as well. Additionally, in referring to the owls and the striges to whom the wood of the original tree once offered sanctuary, Ovid is calling upon birds specifically associated with ill-omen and witchcraft.Footnote ⁸ For all that this is the case, there is additionally a close association between the strix and witches themselves, specifically in Ov. Fast. 6.141–2:

Yet we do not need to look intertextually for this reference. During Dipsas’ description in Amores 1.8, Ovid writes that (1.8.14) pluma corpus anile tegi ‘her old woman's body clothed with feathers’. Although Ovid never overtly claims that Dipsas’ avian form is that of a strix, her magical (witchy) powers described at Am. 1.8.5–12 in the lead up to her feathered form at 1.8.14 subtly imply that this avian transformation is into that animal most associated with the Roman witch: a strix. Footnote ⁹ Thus the ominous transformation of the trees into tablets is linked semantically to the magical transformations of Dipsas, creating intratextual connections between Dipsas and the tablets and thus between Dipsas and Nape.

The poem's final couplet also links Nape and the tablets with the age of Dipsas, when Ovid offers a final curse (Am. 1.12.29–30):

Just as the older Dipsas in Amores 1.8 has albam raramque comam ‘sparse white locks’ (1.8.111), here the wax is cursed to become white with age as well.

Finally, we return to the beginning (of this article, at least), with the connections built between Nape, the tablets and Dipsas through the descriptor duplices. Outside of the notable appearance of this adjective in Amores 1.12, the only other appearances of duplex/duplices occur in Amores 1.8. First at 1.8.15, Ovid includes in his description of Dipsas her pupula duplex or ‘double pupils’ which Pliny explains give women the power of the evil eye (Plin. HN 7.18): feminas quidem omnes ubique uisu nocere quae duplices pupillas habeant ‘Indeed, all women everywhere who might have double pupils harm with their vision.’ The second appearance of duplex/duplices in Amores 1.8 comes only seven lines later at 1.8.22 immediately prior to Dipsas’ monologue to describe the doors which keep the narrator's eavesdropping from being discovered: me duplices occuluere fores ‘the double doors conceal me’. The duplicitous meaning holds true in Amores 1.8 as well, with the double door, just as the double-tablets, being both literally double and duplicitous in their ability to conceal the eavesdropper and later allowing the narrator's betrayal by his own shadow (1.8.109): cum me mea prodidit umbra ‘when my shadow betrayed me’.

Thus we see that the connections between Nape and Dipsas are more complex than simply through their drinking habits. Instead, they (along with the tablets) are supernaturally transformed just as a lena, like Dipsas, can transform into a strix, and, just as Dipsas, the tablets too need to fear the curse of age. Finally, the double-tablets are connected back to Dipsas through the use of the adjective duplex in Amores 1.8, both as a reminder of the mystical powers of the lena as well as foreshadowing the coming duplicitous doubling of the writing tablets in the double doors which allow ‘Ovid’ to eavesdrop and later also allow for his presence's betrayal. In this way we find an additional level of connection between these three figures and, although Dipsas is not present here in Amores 1.12, she is present through these connections with Nape and the tablets.

The significance of this magical connection between Nape, the tablets and Dipsas further reveals the complexity of the web of associations braided through the Amores. Owing to this complex web, the magical elements of this connection between Nape/Dipsas/the tablets further impacts the possible reading of ‘Ovid’ himself. In her discussion of Nape, Papaioannou suggests that the enslaved woman's skills as a hairdresser, when viewed through the clear analogy between hairstyling and poetics in Amores 1.14, make her an equal to or even interchangeable with ‘Ovid’ himself.Footnote ¹¹ Dipsas too has been linked with ‘Ovid’ through her art, and Myers writes that ‘The lena's shared status as erotic expert reveals her to be less an “other”, altera, than an alter-ego to elegy's first-person narrator.’Footnote ¹² Thus the focus on magical powers as the nexus of connections between Dipsas, Nape and the writing tablets forces the reader to wonder about the nature of the narrator's carmina as well.Footnote ¹³ If the educated Nape and Dipsas are connected in part through their witchy transformations and are connected through their art with the poet, then we are forced to wonder if the carmina produced by ‘Ovid’ (especially the one that appeared on the tablets of Amores 1.11 and 1.12), may not simply be a form of attempted persuasion but of persuasion magic.