A Companion to Ovid

By Peter E. Knox

A Companion to Ovid is a comprehensive overview of one of the most influential poets of classical antiquity.

• Features more than 30 newly commissioned chapters by noted scholars writing in their areas of specialization
• Illuminates various aspects of Ovid's work, such as production, genre, and style
• Presents interpretive essays on key poems and collections of poems
• Includes detailed discussions of Ovid's primary literary influences and his reception in English literature
• Provides a chronology of key literary and historical events during Ovid's lifetime

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Nov 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118556665

Book preview

Figures

1 The Fasti Amiternini

2 ‘St. Dunstan’s Classbook’

3 A fragment of the Metamorphoses

4 A medieval commentary

5 Regius’ commentary

6 John Lyly’s Euphues

7 Phaedra in a Renaissance translation

8 The ‘Flores of Ovide’

9 Golding’s Metamorphoses

10 Sandys’ Metamorphoses

Notes on Contributors

Benjamin Acosta-Hughes is Associate Professor of Greek and Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He works primarily on Hellenistic poetry, its reception of Archaic lyric, and its recall in Roman literature. He is currently editing a Loeb Library edition of Hellenistic epigrams.

Joan Booth is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She is the author of a commentary on Ovid, Amores II (1991), and of Catullus to Ovid: Reading Latin Love Elegy (1999). She is also co-editor (with Robert Maltby) of What’s in a Name? The Significance of Proper Names in Classical Latin Literature (2006) and editor of Cicero on the Attack: Invective and Subversion in the Orations and Beyond (2007).

Barbara Weiden Boyd is Henry Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores (1997), and editor of Brill’s Companion to Ovid (2002). She is currently writing a commentary on the Remedia Amoris.

Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry (1978), Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (1985), The Idea of the Renais-sance (with William Kerrigan, 1989), Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), editor of Sixteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (2004), and co-editor of Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (forthcoming).

Sergio Casali is Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. He has published a commentary on Ovid, Her. 9 (1995), and articles, notes, and reviews on Roman poetry. He is currently working on a commentary on Virgil, Aeneid IV, for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. A commentary in Italian on Aeneid II is also forthcoming.

Mario Citroni teaches at the University of Florence. His numerous publications on Latin poetry include a commentary on Book 1 of Martial (1975), Poesia e Lettori in Roma Antica (1995), and the edited volume Memoria e identità: la cultura romana costruisce la sua immagine (2003).

Jo-Marie Claassen has retired from teaching Classics at the University of Stellenbosch. She has published on Ovid and Cicero, exile in the ancient world and today, women and children in antiquity, the Classical tradition in South African architecture, academic development, and the use of the computer in the teaching of Latin. She recently completed an English translation of the verse drama Germanicus by the Afrikaans poet N. P. Van Wyk Louw.

Elaine Fantham taught for eighteen years at the University of Toronto before moving to Princeton in 1986 as Giger Professor of Latin. She is author of a commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, Book 4 (1998) and a number of articles on the Fasti. Since her retirement in 2000 she has continued teaching and publishing, most recently The Roman World of Cicero’s De Oratore (2004), An Introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2004), and a biography of Julia, daughter of Augustus, Julia Augusti (2006).

Joseph Farrell, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Virgil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (1991) and has published widely on Augustan poetry and other aspects of Latin literature and culture.

Laurel Fulkerson is Associate Professor of Classics at the Florida State University. She has written various articles on Ovid, particularly on the Heroides, and is the author of The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (2005). Her current work is on the portrayal of emotions in ancient literature.

John M. Fyler is Professor of English at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English. He is the author of Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (2007) and Chaucer and Ovid (1979), as well as of a number of essays on Ovid, Chaucer, and medieval literature. He also edited the House of Fame for the Riverside Chaucer.

Luigi Galasso teaches Latin language and literature in the Faculty of Musicology at the University of Pavia. He has edited the second book of Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto with a commentary (1995) and is the author of a commentary on the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2000).

Roy K. Gibson is Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester, and the author of Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3 (2003), Excess and Restraint: Propertius, Horace and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (2007), and the co-editor (with Steven Green and Alison Sharrock) of The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (2006).

Julia Dyson Hejduk is Associate Professor of Classics at Baylor University. Her research interests include Latin poetry, Roman religion, and women of ancient Rome. She has written one monograph, King of the Wood: The Sacrificial Victor in Virgil’s Aeneid (2001), a sourcebook in translation with commentary, Clodia: A Sourcebook (2008), and several articles on Virgil and Ovid. She is currently at work on a monograph involving religion and intertextuality in Ovid, Ovid and His Gods: The Epic Struggles of an Elegiac Hero.

Martin Helzle, Professor of Classics and Chair at Case Western Reserve University, has published extensively on Ovid. Most recently he published a commentary on Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 1–2 (2003).

Geraldine Herbert-Brown is an independent scholar. She is author of Ovid and the Fasti (1994), editor of Ovid’s Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium (2002), and has published articles on other Roman authors, including Lucilius, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus.

Stephen Heyworth is Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. He edited Classical Quarterly from 1993 to 1998; and in 2007 issued a new Oxford Classical Text of Propertius, as well as a companion volume, Cynthia, and edited a volume of papers, Classical Constructions, published in memory of Don Fowler. He has also published articles on Callimachus, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid.

Heather James is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (1997) as well as numerous articles on classical reception in the Renaissance, and is editor of the Norton Anthology of Western Literature.

Alison Keith is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. She has written extensively on the intersection of gender and genre in Latin literature, including Engendering Rome (2000), and is currently finishing a book on Propertius, Poet of Love and Leisure.

E. J. Kenney is Kennedy Professor Emeritus of Latin at the University of Cambridge. His publications include a critical edition of Ovid’s amatory works (2nd edn, 1995); editions with commentary of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura III (1971), Anon. Moretum (1984), Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche (1990), and Ovid’s Her. 16–21 (1996); a translation with introduction and notes of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (1998); The Classical Text (1974; Italian translation by A. Lunelli 1995); and numerous articles and reviews. He is at present completing a commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 7–9.

Peter E. Knox is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado. He is the author of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry (1986), as well as a commentary on selected Heroides (1995). Most recently he edited Oxford Readings in Ovid and has written articles on a wide range of topics in Hellenistic poetry and Latin literature.

Jane L. Lightfoot has been Fellow and Tutor in Classics at New College, Oxford, since 2003. All her books have been published with Oxford University Press: Parthenius of Nicaea (1999), Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess (2003) and The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (2008). She is working on a volume of Hellenistic poetry for the Loeb Classical Library.

Robert Maltby is Professor of Latin Philology at the University of Leeds. His research interests are in Roman comedy and elegy and the Latin language in general, especially ancient etymology. His main publications include A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (1991) and Tibullus: Elegies (2002).

Christopher Martin is a member of the English department at Boston University, where he serves as NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor. He has published Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare (1994) and the anthology Ovid in English (1998), as well as journal articles on literature of the Renaissance and other topics. He is currently completing a book on conceptions of old age in late-Elizabethan literature.

Charles McNelis is Associate Professor of Classics at Georgetown University. In addition to articles on ancient poetry and intellectual life, he has written Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War (2007) and is currently working on a commentary on Statius’ Achilleid for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series.

Mark Possanza is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Translating the Heavens: Aratus, Germanicus and the Poetics of Latin Translation (2004) and of articles on textual problems in Latin authors.

Efrossini Spentzou is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Gender and Genre (2003). She co-edited with the late Don Fowler Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (2002). She has just finished Reflections of Romanitas: Discourses of Subjectivity in an Imperial Age (co-authored with Richard Alston).

Richard Thomas is Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard University, where he writes and teaches on Roman and Hellenistic Greek poetry, reception, and Bob Dylan. Recent books include Reading Virgil and his Texts (1999), Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001), co-edited with Charles Martindale, Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006), co-edited with Catharine Mason, Bob Dylan’s Performance Artistry (2007).

Gareth Williams, Professor of Classics at Columbia University, is the author of several works on Ovid’s exile poetry, including Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (1994) and The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid’s Ibis (1996). Recent publications include a commentary on Seneca’s De Otio and De Brevitate Vitae (2004) and several studies on Seneca’s Natural Questions.

David Wray is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (2001) and articles on Roman and Hellenistic poetry.

Theodore Ziolkowski is Class of 1900 Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. In addition to Virgil and the Moderns (1993), Ovid and the Moderns (2005), and the forthcoming Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-century Literature and Art (2008), his recent works include Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (2007), Clio the Romantic Muse (2004), and The Sin of Knowledge (2000).

Preface

Another companion for Ovid … Arriving on the bimillenary of his exile to the shores of the Black Sea, perhaps this Companion is timely. More than one of the contributors to this volume has noted that we are living in another aetas Ovidiana, to borrow a famous, if somewhat problematic, phrase. Two excellent volumes of essays appeared in 2002, which offer readers of Ovid a wealth of information and provocation for future study. In preparing this volume I have had in mind the newcomers to Ovid’s works, be they students or scholars, and the emphasis of the chapters has been on utility. Vast as the sweep of subjects covered in this Companion is, there are inevitably omissions, many of them deeply to be regretted. In particular, it proved impossible to do justice to every aspect of the rapidly developing field of reception studies, so the papers in the volume focus on literary receptions, with a heavy bias toward literature in English. Ovid’s influence on the visual arts deserves a Companion of its own, which could not be included here.

I have allowed the contributors considerable leeway in approaching their topics, including some variation in matters of presentation, such as the use of BC or BCE to indicate dates. In the first instance thanks must go to all the contributors for their diligence, their forbearance, and their talents. I hope that my labors as editor have obscured as little as possible of their learning. I am deeply grateful to Sophie Gibson for soliciting this volume, and to Ben Thatcher and Hannah Rolls for their hard work in seeing it to completion.

Peter E. Knox

University of Colorado, Boulder, November 2007

List of Abbreviations

Ovid’s works are referred to throughout the volume by the following standard abbreviations: Amores (Am.), Heroides (Her.), Ars amatoria (Ars), Remedia amoris (Rem.), Medicamina faciei (Med.), Metamorphoses (Met.), Fasti (Fast.), Tristia (Tr.), Ibis (Ib.), Epistulae ex Ponto (Pont.). All translations are the authors’ own, unless otherwise indicated. References to other authors follow standard conventions to be found in, for example, The Oxford Latin Dictionary or Liddell and Scott. The following abbreviations for journals and reference works are used here:

Chronological Table of Important Events in Roman History and Literature during the Life of Ovid

Most of the dates of Ovid’s works are entirely conjectural. Those given below reflect a consensus view, but can only be considered approximate.

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PART I

Contexts

CHAPTER ONE

A Poet’s Life

Peter E. Knox

Introduction

Late in his career, Ovid defined his place in recent literary history by drawing up a list of names (Tr. 4.10.41–54):

temporis illius colui fouique poetas,

     quotque aderant uates, rebar adesse deos.

saepe suas uolucres legit mihi grandior aeuo,

     quaeque nocet serpens, quae iuuat herba, Macer.

saepe suos solitus recitare Propertius ignes,

     iure sodalicii, quo mihi iunctus erat.

Ponticus heroo, Bassus quoque clarus iambis

     dulcia conuictus membra fuere mei.

et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures,

     dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra.

Vergilium uidi tantum, nec auara Tibullo

     tempus amicitiae fata dedere meae.

successor fuit hic tibi, Galle, Propertius illi;

     quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui.

The poets of that time I cultivated and cherished, and for me poets were so many gods. Often Macer, already advanced in years, read to me of his birds, of poisonous snakes, or healing plants. Often Propertius would recite his flaming verse, by virtue of the comradeship that joined him to me. Ponticus, noted for epic, and Bassus, noted for iambics, were sweet members of my circle. And Horace, he of the many numbers, held our ears in thrall, while he tuned his fine-crafted songs to the Ausonian lyre. Virgil I only saw; greedy fate gave Tibullus no time for friendship with me. He was your successor, Gallus, and Propertius his; after them I was fourth in order of time.

The climate for poetry in Rome during Ovid’s lifetime was electric. Ovid places himself in distinguished company, including poets whose works, though lost to us now, were celebrated in their time: Aemilius Macer, the author of didactic verse (Courtney 1993: 292–9; Hollis 2007: 93–117), Ponticus, an epic poet (Hollis 2007: 426), Bassus, writer of iambs (Hollis 2007: 421), and Gallus, celebrated by Virgil in his Eclogues and widely recognized as the first Roman elegist (Courtney 1993: 259–70; Hollis 2007: 219–52). The selection cannot be random, and is not likely to have been limited only to poets whom he had met or heard. These are the names that mattered to Ovid among his contemporaries, whose works influenced his own forays into epic, didactic, invective, and the verse epistle. But when it comes to classifying himself in this company he is an elegist, following in the footsteps of Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, the same company he cites in his apology to Augustus (Tr. 2.445–66) with the concluding remark (467), ‘to these I succeeded’ (his ego successi). In the process he defined the canon, for when Quintilian turns to the chief exponents of elegy in Latin, it is these same four whom he names and no others (Inst. 10.1.93): ‘we challenge the Greeks also in elegy, in which Tibullus seems to me particularly polished and elegant, though some prefer Propertius. Ovid is more extravagant than both of them, just as Gallus is harsher.’ It is telling that Ovid thus classifies himself as an elegist, even after the achievement of his Metamorphoses, for the background of elegy informs even his hexameter epic: it is the wellspring from which he draws inspiration in all his manifold creative endeavors.

In His Own Words

Ovid is himself the source for most of what we think we know about his life; indeed, he provides more information about himself than most ancient poets. It is always hazardous to infer too much or too confidently from such references in a poet’s own work: as Ovid himself avers (Am. 3.12.19), nec tamen ut testes mos est audire poetas (‘nor is it the custom to listen to poets as if they were courtroom witnesses’). It is nonetheless possible to glean some data about his background and career, not only from the long autobiographical poem composed toward the end of his life during his exile on the Black Sea (Tr. 4.10), but also from numerous revealing remarks scattered throughout his works. His hometown was Sulmo (Tr. 4.10.3 Sulmo mihi patria est), now called Sulmona, situated in a well-watered valley in the Abruzzi of central Italy, and in Ovid’s time one of the chief towns of the tribe known as the Paeligni. He was born Publius Ovidius Naso on 20 March 43 BCE. The significance of this date was not lost on Ovid later in life, for as he notes (Tr. 4.10.6) it was in this year that the two consuls Hirtius and Pansa both fell in the campaign against Mark Antony at the head of the last army of the Roman Republic. Most of the poets Ovid names in his autobiography began their careers in the confused circumstances of the civil wars that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination. Virgil, who released his Georgics in 29 BCE in the immediate aftermath of Octavian’s victory at Actium, had earlier composed his book of Eclogues, in which the tenor of the times is refracted through the lens of Theocritean bucolic. Horace’s book of Epodes, probably published near the end of the Triumviral period, also meditates on the fears and apprehensions of that era. At about the same time, Ovid’s two surviving predecessors in elegy, Tibullus and Propertius, were producing books in which the harsh realities of the time impinge on their idealized visions of the life of love. Ovid, so far as we can tell, was touched by none of this. His career belongs entirely to the early Empire, a time of peace at least on the domestic front, and the great matters treated in his works are affairs of the heart and of character, rather than of state.

His first literary performances probably took place several years after the battle of Actium and the fall of Alexandria, perhaps around 25 BCE. The date can only be approximate, deriving as it does from information given by Ovid himself (Tr. 4.10.57–8):

carmina cum primum populo iuuenalia legi,

     barba resecta mihi bisue semelue fuit.

When I first read my youthful songs to the public, my beard had been cut but once or twice.

We may suppose that Ovid was no more than about eighteen years old when this took place (Wheeler 1925: 11–17), but precision on this score is unimportant: the point that Ovid makes is about the precociousness of his venture into a life of poetry.

His family presumably preferred a different career path. As the second son of an old, equestrian family of considerable standing in the community, Ovid might have been expected to pursue a career in public life, where opportunities beckoned under the new regime in Rome. As recently as during the Social War of 91–89 BCE, Sulmo had aligned itself with the rest of the Paeligni against Rome, but there was a long tradition of alliance. In his move to consolidate power Augustus sought to draw on such communities throughout Italy to recruit new magistrates and senators. From Ovid we learn that he embarked on just such a course: he studied rhetoric in Rome and Athens, the traditional route to a political career (Wheeler 1925: 4–11). He held two positions on boards of magistrates, as one of the tresuiri capitales (Tr. 4.10.33–4; Kenney 1969b: 244), who exercised police functions in the city. And later he informs us (Fast. 4.383–4) that he held a seat among the decemuiri stlitibus iudicandis (‘Board of Ten for Judging Lawsuits’), an important judicial post that was commonly a precursor to seeking the quaestorship and a senatorial career. On Ovid’s testimony his earliest recitations of poetry took place at the very time when he was ostensibly embarking on a life in law and politics. He ironically remarks that his father had hoped for a more lucrative livelihood:

saepe pater dixit ‘studium quid inutile temptas?

     Maeonides nullas ipse relinquit opes.’

Often my father said, ‘Why do you attempt a useless pursuit? Homer himself left no wealth.’

Perhaps his father might have gotten the joke, but if Augustus ever noticed this poem, he would not have been amused. Ovid abandoned public office for the life of letters, but his choices in that field were not bound to win him favor.

During the first twenty-five years of his career, a period extending roughly from the mid-twenties BCE to 2 CE, Ovid was occupied exclusively with elegy, issuing a stunning series of works: Amores, Heroides, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris. To this period too belong most of the lost works (Chapter 15), among which the tragedy Medea may be reckoned the greatest loss. The exact sequence of the release of these works is unclear and much disputed. The matter is complicated in the first instance by the fact that his earliest collection, the Amores, survives only in a three-book edition, which, Ovid asserts, has been reduced from an original five-book collection. There is no consensus about the date of either edition, or about the nature of the revision effected upon the earlier work, but opinions generally divide between those who argue that Ovid’s final edition collects the best poems from the first edition without the addition of new poems or extensive revision (Cameron 1968) and those who contend that the three-book edition was essentially a new work (McKeown 1987: 86–9). Ovid himself seems to suggest the former, when he describes his earliest work in the autobiography from Tomi (Tr. 4.10.61–2):

multa quidem scripsi, sed, quae uitiosa putaui,

     emendaturis ignibus ipse dedi.

I wrote a great deal indeed, but what I considered defective I myself gave to the flames for correction.

Even if this inference is correct, it is not entirely clear where in the chronological sequence to date the release of the Heroides, a collection that itself raises intractable questions about composition and publication. The dates given above in the Chronological Table are thus tentative at best.

By the time Ovid completed the Remedia amoris, the last of his amatory elegiacs, in roughly 2 CE he was probably already deeply involved in the composition of his two large-scale narrative poems, the Fasti and the Metamorphoses. It is clear that he had not completed the Fasti by the year 8 CE, when his life changed drastically with the issuance of a decree of relegation by the emperor. Ovid himself refers to twelve books (Tr. 2.549–50), but only six survive and there are clear signs of revision to the existing poem during the period of exile. There is no reason to believe that the remaining six ever left the poet’s hand, and the poet’s words here carry no more weight than his assertion that the Metamorphoses was unfinished (Tr. 2.555–6):

dictaque sunt nobis, quamuis manus ultima coeptis

     defuit, in facies corpora uersa nouas.

And though this work lacked final revision, I also told of bodies that changed into new shapes.

The composition of this masterpiece was surely the preoccupation of the years immediately preceding his exile.

We will never know what led Augustus to send Ovid into exile, or what sense of irony or private joke led him to choose the venue for Ovid’s relegation, remote and inhospitable Tomi on the shores of the Black Sea. The reason famously given by Ovid (Tr. 2.207), ‘a poem and a mistake’ (carmen et error), may invert the sequence, a hysteron proteron of sorts, if, as many scholars believe, the poem, which Ovid identifies as the Ars amatoria, was brought into the indictment later to provide cover for some other offense, the error that Ovid never explains. Many scholars cannot escape the suspicion that Ovid’s relegation was somehow related to the disgrace of Augustus’ granddaughter Julia, exiled on a charge of adultery in the same year (e.g. Syme 1978: 215–29). Others incline to a scandal of a more personal nature (e.g. Goold 1983), or attempt to relate the exile to changes in the climate for literature during Augustus’ dotage (Knox 2004). The consequences for Ovid were tragic, but did not sap his creative powers. A stream of innovative new works flowed from his stylus while he lamented life on the Roman frontier: the Tristia in five books composed during the journey to Tomi and in his first years there; that bizarre display of erudite invective known as the Ibis; and four books of epistles to friends and acquaintances, his Epistulae ex Ponto, the last book of which probably contains his final works. A common thread uniting all the works of exile is Ovid’s return to the elegiac mode, the measure in which he began his career and by which he defined himself. Ovid began writing just a few years after Octavian assumed the title by which he is best known to history, and his death came only a few years after the emperor’s. Ovid, perhaps the most Augustan poet and certainly the last, died at Tomi sometime during the winter of 17–18 CE.

FURTHER READING

Still fundamental for basic information and collection of the evidence about Ovid’s career are surveys such as Wheeler (1925), Martini (1933), or Kraus (1968). In the absence of new evidence, there is always a place for re-evaluation and recontextualization. For instance, Kenney (1969b) investigates Ovid’s use of legal language against the background of his public career, while Syme (1978) attempts to review Ovid’s network of friends and associates within the changing political landscape of Augustus’ later years. The subject of Ovid’s exile continually attracts new speculation: in addition to the works surveyed by Thibault (1964), papers by Goold (1983) and Knox (2004) may be consulted for recent attempts to set the relegation within the context of the times.

CHAPTER TWO

Poetry in Augustan Rome

Mario Citroni

Introduction

The substantially unchanging judgment of the centuries has considered Virgil, Horace and Ovid, already highly admired during their own lifetimes, to be the prime examples of the greatness and the full maturity of Roman poetry. The fact that the works of these three foremost poets were all composed during the reign of Augustus, and that this same period witnessed the production of other important poets, such as Tibullus and Propertius, and of some whose works are no longer extant but who enjoyed widespread renown in antiquity (the founder of the Latin elegy, Cornelius Gallus, the epic and tragic poet Varius Rufus, the epigrammatist Domitius Marsus, the didactic poet Aemilius Macer), caused the Augustan age to be viewed, both in ancient and in modern times, as a thoroughly exceptional period of poetic splendor, and encourages reflection on the elements which determined, or favored, its development.

It has always been difficult to avoid the idea that there must have been a connection between the exceptional level of the poetic production of those years and the extraordinary success of Augustus’ policies, especially in the light of the fact that the relationship between literature and political power, always very close in Rome, appears to be particularly striking in the case of Augustan poetry. Augustus maintained a personal contact with Virgil, with Horace, and with other poets, and his close collaborator Maecenas was a generous friend and patron of many of the leading poets of the period. It is clear that there was an intention to stimulate poetic production, and to orientate it appropriately, in order to create and consolidate the image of Augustus as the founder of a new period of even greater splendor for Rome, after the disasters of the civil wars. In actual fact the poetry of this period frequently includes expressions of praise and thanks for Augustus and his policies, as well as some truly encomiastic passages. Above all, a considerable part of the conceptual content of Augustan poetry can be traced back to the moral, civil, and religious themes that characterized the ideology of his regime.

Furthermore, Augustus succeeded in exploiting the prestige of his poets in order to enhance his own prestige as a political leader, publicly rewarding and honoring them, and including their compositions on occasions that were of great symbolic significance for the regime. Suffice it to recall the commission assigned to Varius to provide the text of a tragedy to be performed on the occasion of the triple triumph for the victories in Illyria, at Actium, and in Egypt, which celebrated the end of the civil wars and the starting-point of Octavian’s unrivalled power in 29 BC, and the lavish recompense that Varius received. Or again, the commission given to Horace to compose the text of the hymn that was sung during the course of the solemn Ludi Saeculares, in 17 BC, which were held to acclaim the Augustan age as a new age of the world. The glory of the poets of this period was perceived even in antiquity as one of the basic components of the image of fullness and splendor that the regime of Augustus succeeded in communicating to contemporaries, and has transmitted to succeeding generations. However, Ovid’s banishment at the height of his success demonstrated that the relationship between the regime and poets could also have complicated and sinister repercussions.

Actually, external conditions of a political or social nature are never able to account for the qualitative level of artistic production. Even Martial, who affirmed (8.55.5–20) that one Maecenas was sufficient to create a Virgil, was undoubtedly well aware that he was launching this paradox as a provocation against what appeared to him to be the insufficient patronage of literature in his period. On the contrary, it is clear that any patronage of the arts which is connected with the motivations and the interests of political power tends to encourage a production that is mainly conformist and celebratory, and as a result, it may even act as an obstacle to the creation of works of high quality; and modern readers have often been rather severe in their judgment of that part of the poetic production of the Augustan age which is most closely linked to the ideology of the regime. Until the Second World War, above all in Germany, but also in Italy, the dominant, albeit obviously not exclusive, interpretation of Augustan poetry was that it was deeply sympathetic to the regime of Augustus and its ideology: the greatness of Virgil and Horace was considered to stem largely from their ability to express the new imperial Rome desired by Augustus, and its values, or even to be the prophets and inspirers of the political and ideological program adopted and implemented by Augustus. In the new climate determined by the defeat of the European dictatorships, interpretations changed, and the Augustan poets have been appreciated mainly for their ability to resist pressure from the regime, seeing that none of them ever wrote an epic to celebrate Augustus, and to continue to compose poetry that was different from what their patrons would have preferred. Whenever they celebrated the regime, they were suspected of agreeing to act as mouthpieces of political propaganda, out of either weakness or convenience.

The identification of the ways in which the political, institutional and social conditions of an age may influence its literary production is always an extremely delicate question. Writers and artists follow vocations and tendencies which can only partly be attributed to the experience of contemporary society: to a certain extent, these orientations can be traced back to intellectual and aesthetic experience acquired with literary texts of the past and of the present. And writers and artists, also in the Rome of Augustus, do not respond only to their patrons and those who commission their works; they also respond to a wider reading public, whose varying expectations and criteria of judgment, can, in turn, be traced back not only to the experience of contemporary life but also to their reading of texts of the past, which inspire dreams and ideals that are projected into the future. Thus, even the temporal relationship between literary production and the political and social situation is problematic: while it is true that on the level of themes and contents the literature of this period appears to react, continually and immediately, to current events and circumstances, the motivations on the more strictly literary level of choices of genre, style and form, and the general poetic stance adopted, though linked with current experience, are rooted in, or react against, long-standing tendencies and traditions.

Nowadays, scholars are debating whether many of the social, cultural, and even the political and institutional aspects which appear to us to be typical of the Augustan age, and have usually been connected directly with the ‘revolution’ brought about by Augustus—that is to say, the passage to a new form of monarchy whose power was based on social forces that to some extent were different from those that had supported the res publica—should not rather be traced back to longer-standing processes, among which the activity of Augustus was only a conditioning factor, albeit an extremely significant one. In the case of high-quality literature, where the relationship with contemporary experience is almost always indirect and mediated, this aspect is particularly important.

An initial problem is what exactly we mean by ‘Augustan age’. Discussions still aim to establish, also from the political and institutional point of view, from what date Rome may truly be defined as ‘Augustan’: but in the case of literature, as a result of its indirect relationship with current political affairs, the definition of the concept of ‘Augustan’ and the division into stages of the period called ‘Augustan’ raise particularly delicate problems.

The Roman Political Revolution

When Caesar was killed, on the Ides of March in 44 BC, he was governing Rome with a power that in reality was absolute, and had recently been formalized as a lifelong dictatorship; this institutional form was incompatible with the principles of the res publica, which only contemplated dictatorship as a short-lasting appointment, for emergencies. Caesar had shortly before concluded the complex military operations that were necessary to give stability to his decisive victory over Pompey in 48 BC: the long period of civil wars that had devastated Italy, overrun the provinces, and swept away the institutions of the res publica seemed to be over. The assassination of the dictator led to a new phase of wars and dramatic instability. Powerful figures, competing for supremacy, again clashed at the head of their armies.

The framework within which these conflicts found space and reason to develop was a society that was undergoing a profound transformation and did not possess adequate political institutions for its new complexity. In little more than a century, a city-state which continued to identify itself with the ethical traditions and the civic institutions typical of an ancient rural community, even if it had assumed a dominant role in the Italian peninsula, had become an enormous imperial reality. New territories, vast and distant, had entered into the political and social systems of Rome. There were new lands to be colonized and new movements of wealth had been created, together with new frontiers for trading, new tasks of administration, a new role for the armies, new opportunities for action, and new responsibilities for Roman citizens of the various classes in different areas of the world. New subjects, from faraway regions, or from previously excluded social areas, entered into the citizenship system, or increasingly pressed to become a part of it. The contacts that had long before been set up with different cultures rapidly multiplied, above all with Greece and the Hellenized regions of the East, with their customs, religious beliefs and intellectual advances. As we shall see, this spectacular renewal is particularly important for the development of a new literary public.

There was little renewal in the body of those who sat in the Senate at Rome and occupied the position of magistrates: an oligarchy of land-owning families still prevailed, who were unwilling to admit homines novi into the power system, and had little regard for interests that were different from those of their own class. The political system of the old city-state was totally insufficient to provide adequate representation for the forces that had now come into play. The inhabitants of Italy had only won the concession of the rights of citizenship after 90 BC, at the end of a fierce war. This tardy recognition had made it clear that it was impossible for the whole civic body to take part in assemblies and elections (which were held in Rome), which was the basic presupposition of the republican institutions (Brunt 1988: 23–6; Mouritsen 2001).

Caesar had been the most authoritative of those representatives of the Roman nobility who had tried to open up the political system to different requirements, and call into question many of the privileges of the traditional aristocracy. All the struggles of this period—the political, and subsequently military, conflict that had opposed Caesar to Pompey, the champion of the senatorial tradition, and, after Caesar’s death, the series of battles in which Caesar’s brilliant general, Antony, and the young Octavian, Caesar’s nephew and adoptive son, fought each other for Caesar’s political inheritance, and subsequently united against Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius (defeated at Philippi in 42 BC), and Pompey’s son (defeated in 36 BC), and in the end clashed again in a final struggle—were fought to establish the personal supremacy of men who knew that they were destined either to rule or to be ruined. Victory or defeat was decided in battle; but in order to have any chance of obtaining consensus, and a lasting power, it was necessary to find a political synthesis between the tradition of the res publica and the different interests and powers to which the traditional system did not assign an adequate institutional representation.

For the twelve years from the setting up of the triumvirate of Octavian, Antony and Lepidus (who were assigned special powers for a period of five years, prolonged in 37 BC for another five) by the law of 43 BC to the defeat of Antony at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, constitutional legality had been flouted, if not totally suspended. Lepidus was soon limited to a marginal role, while Octavian controlled Italy and the Western provinces, and Antony those of the East. Octavian succeeded in exploiting his position, by forming a positive relationship with the Senate, and creating for himself the image of the defender of Roman and Italic moral and religious tradition, in contrast with Antony, who behaved like an Oriental despot, accepting divine honors, and leading people to suspect that his policies were contrary to the interests of Italy. Even though Octavian also exploited his position as the son of the deified Caesar, he was aware that in order to gain lasting success it was necessary to present himself as the guarantor of the republican civic institutions and the ethical and religious tradition on which, according to the Roman and Italic collective conscience, these were based. If the revolution under way was to be accepted and consolidated, it had to be presented as a recovery of tradition, which possessed a superior prestige in Rome. Even the triumvirate had formally been instituted rei publicae constituendae, that is to say, for the purpose of re-establishing the res publica (an ambiguous expression, which could mean ‘the state’ or ‘the state in its traditional principles’, as opposed to the alterations to which it had been subjected during the civil wars: cf. e.g. Millar 1973: 63–4).

The consolidation of a regime which was in reality monarchic (and hereditary), which Octavian carried out with great skill, still required a long time after Actium, with continual adjustments and modifications to adapt to various pressures and requirements. The dominant feature was the gradual, visible, relinquishment of all special powers, and the restoration of the traditional offices. But Octavian himself held, for several years consecutively, offices which in the republican tradition were annual, he held offices at the same time, which were only to be held separately, and he maintained lifelong high civil and military powers which were typical of republican offices, without ever formally occupying them, thus setting himself above all other magistrates. A crucial stage in this process of institutional ‘normalization’ was the cancellation of the triumvirate laws, at the end of 28 BC, and the restoration of the traditional offices with the assumption of the title of Augustus in January of 27 BC. Strictly speaking, this is the beginning of the ‘Augustan’ age. The subsequent stages (that of 23 BC is important) continued to enhance the personal role of Augustus, as the supreme governor of the state, both in view of the powers effectively attributed to him and as a result of his superior authority (auctoritas), which was universally recognized. This condition was confirmed by titles which were devoid of any juridical-institutional value, but contained a strong emotional quality, like that of Augustus, which, in its etymological connection with augurium and augere (‘to increase’), gave his figure a sacred, well-wishing aura (confirmed in 12 BC by the assumption of the highest religious office, that of Pontifex Maximus), alluding to his role as the re-founder of the city, with its reference to the augurium which had inspired Romulus at the original foundation. And like the title of pater patriae, assumed in 2 BC, these qualifications expressed his role as the guarantor not only of political life but also of every aspect of social life, customs, religion, and culture: in all these fields, his influence was considerable, in promoting laws, decreeing acts and fixing regulations.

Augustus died in AD 14, at the age of 76, after holding power by himself, unopposed, for the forty-four years that had passed since the battle of Actium, and fifty-six years after assuming power in the triumvirate, which had placed the government of Italy in his hands. For forty years, he had been Augustus. This extraordinary monarchy, clothed in the robes of the res publica, might seem to be an original invention of Octavian, and of the wholly exceptional situation in which he was forced to operate; however, it remained—with some adaptations—the stable form of the Roman state for centuries, which continued to have a single leader, possessing superior powers, who was supported in his government by the Senate, whose members continued to occupy the traditional magistracies of the res publica, and were assigned important duties, albeit essentially of an administrative nature. Already, before Octavian, Julius Caesar, and before him Marius, Sulla and Pompey, on the basis of the prestige that they had conquered in battle, had temporarily held power substantially by themselves, accumulating consulships, special powers and extraordinary honors. Under Augustus, for the first time, this recurring tendency of the republican institutions, failing a substantial legitimization, to create space for the figure of a governor—who, from a position of superior strength, could impose a different balance of forces, thus avoiding stormy conflicts within the apparatus of the state—was transformed into a permanent political system.

Poetry from Revolution to Empire

One of the first acts of the triumvirate, in 43 BC, had been the compilation of lists of adversaries to be eliminated. Antony desired the death of Cicero, who had attacked him violently, as an enemy of the Senate and of the State. Octavian, who had maintained an ambiguous relationship with Cicero, and in reality had used him, endorsed the decision. Thus, the greatest Roman intellectual died at the age of 63. By that time, almost all the poets who had acquired prestige during the age of Caesar had already died, at a more or less young age: Lucretius and Catullus about ten years earlier, and Calvus at least six years before; others had fallen in the recent civil wars. Chance and wars had caused a break in the continuity of generations between the poets who were active during the period of Caesar and those whom we usually call ‘Augustan’. One exception is represented by Varius, who outlived his friend Virgil, and had become famous already before the death of Caesar.

The different age groups of the poets of the period indicate different conditions of their belonging to the ‘Augustan’ age. Virgil, who was born in 70 BC, seven years before Augustus, had already completed his formation before the death of Caesar. He worked on the Eclogues in the period of the triumvirate, from 42 to 38 BC approximately. In this work, there is only one, impersonal, reference to Octavian as a young man, who is able to right the injustices that are perpetrated at the expense of Italic farmers whose lands had been expropriated on behalf of the army veterans. Maecenas is not mentioned, and there is a reference to another patron: the intellectual and commander in Antony’s army, Asinius Pollio. The Georgics are dedicated to Maecenas, who is addressed as their commission client, and they celebrate the new Caesar: but this work, too, which was completed in 29 BC, was largely written before the battle of Actium. Horace, who was born in 65 BC, published his first book of Satires in 35 BC, and Book II of the Satires and the Epodes in the year 30 BC, shortly after Actium; but many compositions in these two collections, and also some of the Odes (the first three books of which were published in 23 BC), were written in the years of the triumvirate. Horace had been an officer in the army of Brutus at Philippi, and had fought against Antony and Octavian, but in 38 BC, he had become a friend of Maecenas, to whom he had been introduced by Varius and Virgil, who were already connected with Octavian’s collaborator. Probably, of all the epodes and the satires, not more than four or five compositions date back to before his friendship with Maecenas.

Virgil and Horace, therefore, had lived through the period of the civil wars in their youth, experiencing all the risks and hardships of those years, and they developed and refined their talent as poets during the dark years of the triumvirate, before Rome became ‘Augustan’. But while Virgil completed one important work before coming into contact with Maecenas, Horace became a friend of Maecenas while he was still a developing poet.

It is difficult to say to what extent, in the years of the triumvirate, being a poet connected with Maecenas already meant being involved in a project of cultural politics which could be defined as ‘Augustan’. Maecenas had a sincere love for poetry, indeed, for an uncommitted, refined, sensual poetry. But at the same time, he was deeply involved in his political support of Octavian, who, as one of the leaders in a civil war, obviously did not know that he was to become ‘Augustus’, but realized how important it was to create an image for himself as the defender of the Italic moral and civic traditions, and to organize around himself, on this basis, a consensus of public opinion. The oath of tota Italia in his name, on the eve of Actium, was an important reason for his political prestige, and even for his military success. The Georgics, which the ancients quoted also as the ‘poem of Italy’ (Mart. 8.55.19), can be read against this background of cultural politics, as can also the civil and moral themes of Horace’s poetry of the years of the triumvirate. As we shall see, other reasons, which were independent of political circumstances, might have led these poets to choose such themes. But it may also be admitted that Octavian may soon have developed the idea of exploiting poets, too, in order to consolidate the consensus of opinion around him. We still have some verses (Epigr. Bob. 39 and 40) composed by the epigrammatist Domitius Marsus in 43 BC, in support of Octavian (Mariotti 1962: 62–3; Courtney 1993: 304 suggests a later date). Also Antony had some poets on his side (Cic. Phil. 13.11 and Serv. on Virg. Ecl. 9.36), and Varius already wrote against Antony in about 43 BC (fr. 1 and 2 Blänsdorf). Today we know that some public monuments, which we are used to considering as linked to the ‘Augustan’ idea of a solemn imperial Rome, date back to the initiative of Octavian the triumvir and his collaborators (Millar 2000: 9–12). And it has also been observed that in the course of his years in the triumvirate Octavian was already concerned to present some of his political actions as examples of republican legality (Eder 2005: 20–2). The creation of the regime, its symbols and its ideology had thus already started before Actium. But it was a process in fieri, open to a variety of solutions, in which the poets could play different roles, depending on their vocations and tendencies.

Tibullus and Propertius, who were born around the year 50 BC, had only had some experience of the civil wars in their early youth. Propertius retained memories of the devastation of his region, Umbria, in 41 and 40 BC, and of a death that had occurred in his family. Tibullus may have taken part in the battle of Actium, and definitely served in the campaigns of those years, at the side of his patron, Messalla, who had passed over to Octavian’s side, at least from 36 BC on, after previously fighting against him. But both Tibullus and Propertius wrote their elegies after Actium. Propertius became a friend of Maecenas in 28 BC, after publishing his first book. No relationship between Tibullus and Maecenas is known to us, but Tibullus was a friend of Horace, who was also a friend of Messalla.

Ovid is the only one among the great Augustan poets who grew up in a Rome that had been securely pacified by Augustus. In an autobiographic elegy written from exile, he says that he was born in the year in which two consuls fell victims of the same destiny (Tr. 4.10.6): this is 43 BC, when Antony fought against the army of the Senate, which at that time was supported by Octavian and was commanded by the two unfortunate consuls, who died in the battle. The result, in that same year, was the triumvirate, which was immediately to trigger renewed civil strife. Thus, Ovid places his birth under the inauspicious sign of one of the darkest years of the republic. But he was only 12 years old when Octavian remained alone in command, and he made his first attempts at writing poetry perhaps around the year 25 BC, when the ‘Augustan’ regime, strictly speaking, had already existed for two years. All his poetry before going into exile expresses a serene satisfaction with Augustan Rome, which he describes as rich in all kinds of opportunity, modern, elegant, and fully developed, in an atmosphere of peace, safety, and availability of resources. The perception of the enormous tragedy which lies at the origins of this happy condition, which we feel so acutely in Virgil, and which pervades, in different forms, the work of Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius, seems to have been put aside. Indeed, Ovid seems to believe that all the emphasis with which poets and intellectuals had celebrated the values and virtues of the ancient Roman rural community, as if they were the only reliable guarantees of the survival of the nation, is by now outdated. He evidently thinks that there is a new public that intends to turn over a page with respect to the dark memories of the past, and in literature seeks pleasant entertainment. The success that he enjoyed seemed to show that he was right. But not everybody could share this attitude, and, on the contrary, the political and cultural scene of Augustan Rome was still evolving, and was to lead to different results.

The first edition of the Amores can be dated around 15 BC: Ovid therefore elaborated this new poetics of lightness in the same decade which witnessed the production of the Augustan poetry with the highest ethical ideals: the Aeneid, the Odes, and the Epistles by Horace, the second book of Tibullus, and the last two books by Propertius. Ovid, however, did not feel that his position was polemical, or one of contrast. On the contrary, from his exile he recalls with poignant nostalgia those years when he had the privilege of being a part of that extraordinary season of Latin poetry, in a spirit of friendship and cooperation with the most prestigious poets (Tr. 4.10.41–52): Macer, Ponticus, Bassus, Propertius (who also mentions Ponticus and Bassus as friends), Horace, Virgil, and Tibullus. Thus, in those years there was the opportunity for free and varied literary research, in which different poetics were elaborated in an intellectual climate of friendly solidarity. But this season did not last long. Virgil and Tibullus died four years before the probable date of publication of Ovid’s first work. We have no information about Propertius after the year 16 BC, which was the date of his last book. Horace’s final compositions were written no later than 10 BC, and he died in 8 BC, the same year as the death of Maecenas.

At the date of Horace’s death, Augustus still had 21 years of government in front of him. And Ovid died three years after Augustus. The difference in age, which spared Ovid the sad experience of the civil wars, also meant that he was the only one, among the great poets, who lived through the years of the definitive consolidation of the regime, until the succession. And as this succession took place inside the family of Augustus, without arousing any controversy, it rendered explicit, for the first time, what had been clear for some time to everybody, and had been accepted by everybody, but had always been formally denied: a dynastic monarchy had effectively been installed in Rome. These are the years of the maturity of the regime, the years when Rome, under the strong leadership of Augustus, increasingly assumed the role of the splendid capital of an immense empire, pacified internally, proud of its superior power, and successfully involved in the consolidation of its wide-ranging boundaries. But with his exile, Ovid was the witness, and the victim, of the new relationship between power and literature, which neither he, nor the poets older than him, could have imagined in the years when he was composing the Amores in that happy cultural company.

Since he grew up when Rome was already governed by Augustus, and he continued to write poetry all through the subsequent course of his reign, Ovid is the most truly ‘Augustan’ of all poets, from a chronological point of view. Until about the year AD 2, he continued to develop the same poetics, playful and sentimental at once, which seemed to interpret so well the sensation of the new generations that they were living in an age of peace and prosperity, in which it seemed right to dedicate space also to pleasure and leisure. And the Metamorphoses—with its vast plot of tales in which human suffering again finds expression, through the mediation of myth and fantasy, and is recomposed, under the overarching gaze of the author, with the joys, the passions, the virtues and vices of human life in a polymorphous combination of situations and points of view—appears as an emblem of this mature Augustan civilization, absorbing into an open system, without the lacerations of the past, a great variety of intellectual and ethical attitudes. But just as Ovid was completing this composition, and was working on the Fasti, in which, again in the form of a pleasant tale, he was seeking a harmonious composition of Rome’s present with its religious, ethical and historical past, his sudden exile, decreed by Augustus, alienated him and made him incompatible with that regime of which he had seemed to be, and felt that he was, the most genuine poetic expression.

The alleged reason for the exile of the writer who was recognized as the greatest living poet was the licentious nature of a work of his which had been circulating for some years, meeting with great success. Even if this motivation was only a pretext, which is unlikely, the very fact that such a pretext could be used, and that a work of success could be banned from libraries by decree, brutally exemplifies the change that had taken place in the relationship between literature and power since the period when Maecenas acted as a skillful mediator, making many concessions to the freedom of single authors, and thus obtaining their gratitude and their participation in the cultural programs of the emperor. The last book by Propertius (16 BC) and the last book of Horace’s Odes (13 BC) already contained more rigid and formal panegyric passages, and more marked tones of traditional moralism, which may reflect the control that the pater patriae increasingly tried to exercise over the customs