Ovid E-Book

Katharina Volk

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 306

Beschreibung

This book provides a unique and accessible introduction to the complete works of Ovid. Using a thematic approach, Volk lays out what we know about Ovid's life, presents the author's works within their poetic genres, and discusses central Ovidian themes. * The first general introduction to Ovid written in English in over 20 years, offering the very latest Ovidian scholarship * Discusses the complete works of Ovid * Accessible writing and a thematic approach make this text ideal for a broad audience * A current revival in Ovid makes this timely edition highly valuable

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Abbreviations for Ovid’s Works

Introduction

Ovid’s Fame

About This Book

Work

Love Poems

Long Poems

Exile Poems

Lost and Spurious Poems

2 Life

Ovid’s Biography

The Story of Ovid

The Conundrum of Exile

3 Elegy

A Brief History of Elegy

Choosing a Genre

Deconstructing Love

4 Myth

The Uses of Myth

Epic and Intertextuality

Storytelling

Time

5 Art

Rhetoric

Art Conquers All

Artifice and Artificiality

6 Women

The Female Perspective

The Man Who Loved Women

Performing Gender

7 Rome

The Poet of the City

Pimping for Rome

The Problem with Panegyric

8 Reception

The Gospel of Love

The Painter’s Bible

At the End of the World

Further Reading

General Works on Ovid

Individual Works

Life

Elegy

Myth

Art

Women

Rome

Reception

Notes

Ovidian Passages Cited

Index

BLACKWELL INTRODUCTIONS TO THE CLASSICAL WORLD

This series will provide concise introductions to classical culture in the broadest sense. Written by the most distinguished scholars in the fi eld, these books survey key authors, periods and topics for students and scholars alike.

Published

Greek Tragedy

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz

Roman Satire

Daniel Hooley

Ancient History

Charles W. Hedrick, Jr.

Homer, second edition

Barry B. Powell

Classical Literature

Richard Rutherford

Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory

Thomas Habinek

Ancient Epic

Katherine Callen King

Catullus

Julia Haig Gaisser

Virgil

R. Alden Smith

Ovid

Katharina Volk

In Preparation

Roman Historiography

Andreas Mehl, translated by Hans-Friedrich Mueller

This edition first published 2010

© Katharina Volk 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Volk, Katharina, 1969–

Ovid/Katharina Volk.

p. cm. – (Blackwell introductions to the classical world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-3642-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.–

Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.–Appreciation. 3. Epistolary poetry, Latin–History and criticism. 4. Didactic poetry, Latin–History and criticism. 5. Elegiac poetry, Latin–History and criticism. 6. Mythology, Classical, in literature. I. Title.

PA6537.V65 2010

871’.01-dc22

2010016272

To Christine

Figures

1 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne (Galleria Borghese, Rome). Photo: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della Città di Roma. Reproduced by permission.

2 Antonio Allegri da Correggio, Jupiter and Io (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. Reproduced by permission.

3 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Diana and Actaeon (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). Purchased jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery, London, with the aid of the Scottish Government, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Monument Trust, The Art Fund, and through public appeal, 2009. Photo: National Galleries of Scotland. Reproduced by permission.

Preface

When I was an undergraduate and budding Latin major at the University of Munich, my friend Christine and I would meet up in the afternoon at my apartment and read the Metamorphoses . Fortified by many pots of tea and provisions from the nearby Konditorei, we slowly made our way through Ovid ’s Latin, moving from the creation of the world to the crime and punishment of Lycaon, the cinematic cataclysm of the flood, Apollo’s unsuccessful pursuit of Daphne, Io ’s bovine metamorphosis, and beyond. We were deeply fascinated by what we read – not only the uncanny tales themselves but also the poet’s beautiful and clever turns of phrase – and not a little excited by our own ability to understand and relate so well to something that had been written in a dead language so many centuries before.

Reading Ovid is a joy, and I hope that this book will communicate some of my own love for the poet, enabling readers from many different backgrounds and with many different interests to gain a a better understanding and appreciation of his works. To keep the discussion accessible, I quote only sparingly from the original Latin and have instead provided English translations, all of them my own. These lack all poetic aspiration and are intended simply to convey the text’s literal meaning.

Since my discussion is not primarily directed at an audience of scholars but at a wider readership, I have not documented critical opinion on each and every point of discussion, as I would have done in a more narrowly academic publication. This does not mean, however, that I have not been greatly influenced by the work of many colleagues. My debts will be obvious to those familiar with the literature; in addition, I list in the chapter “Further Reading” a large number of publications on Ovid that I recommend, as well as titles that have been especially important in shaping my own views.

In writing this book, I have furthermore profited from the expertise and ideas of Caleb Dance, Elaine Fantham, Marco Fantuzzi, Christine Hehle, Monica Hellstr ö m, Bob Kaster, Donald Mastronarde, Brigitte and Peter Volk, Craig Williams, and the anonymous referees for WileyBlackwell. Gareth Williams kindly read the entire manuscript and offered numerous suggestions for improvement. My heartfelt thanks go to them all. Of course, all remaining errors are my own.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the editorial team at Wiley Blackwell, especially Al Bertrand and Sophie Gibson for suggesting to me the idea for this book in the first place and Haze Humbert and Galen Smith for assisting me in seeing it to completion. I am further indebted to the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della Citt à di Roma, the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna for supplying me with the photographs of three works of art discussed in chapter 8 and to the Stanwood Cockey Lodge Foundation for financial support in the acquisition of these images.

The American Academy in Rome provided me with a congenial setting for three weeks during the final stages of the project. Mille grazie first and foremost to Carmela Franklin, the Director, as well as to everyone for the hospitality, intellectual stimulation, and legendary food.

This book is dedicated to Christine, in fond memory of our Ovidian afternoons.

Katharina Volk

New York

Abbreviations for Ovid’s Works

Am. Amores ( “Loves” ) ArsArs amatoria ( “Art of Love” ) Fast. Fasti ( “The Roman Calendar” ) Her. Heroides ( “Heroines” ) Med. Medicamina faciei femineae ( “Cosmetics for the Female Face” ) Met. Metamorphoses ( “Transformations” ) Pont. Epistulae ex Ponto ( “Letters from the Black Sea” ) Rem. Remedia amoris ( “Remedies for Love” ) Tr. Tristia ( “Sad Poems” )

Introduction

Ovid’s Fame

At the end of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid proudly declares that he has fashioned a work “which neither the wrath of Jupiter nor fire nor sword nor devouring time will be able to destroy” (15.871–2). Even though one day his body will die, his poetry will live on:

Wherever Roman power extends over conquered lands, I will be read by the lips of the people, and – if there is any truth to the prophecies of poets – I will live for all ages through my fame. (877–9)

Ovid died nearly 2,000 years ago, but his prediction has been fulfilled beyond the poet’s imagination. In the passage quoted, Ovid merely hopes that his literary reputation will reach as far as the political power of Rome. But the Roman empire has long since collapsed and Latin has ceased to be a world language – and yet Ovid’s works are still being read, including in parts of the world that Ovid did not know existed and in languages that were not yet spoken when he wrote his verse.

If the poet’s fame has thus indeed endured through all ages, it appears recently to have received a particular boost. In the past thirty years or so, Ovid has become so popular that it is often claimed that we live in a new aetas Ovidiana (“Ovidian age,” a term originally coined by the medievalist Ludwig Traube to refer to the 12th and 13th centuries, a period when Ovid was much studied and imitated 1). This trend is apparent not just from the fact that today Ovid is one of the most widely taught Latin authors in schools and universities (an elementary Latin textbook in use in the United States even undertakes to teach Latin via Ovid) and that the number of scholarly publications on the poet has skyrocketed over the last few decades. Even more remarkable is the appeal that Ovid holds for a wider audience, as witnessed, for example, by the interest in poetic translations (such as Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid (1997)), the success of Mary Zimmerman’s play Metamorphoses (a Broadway hit in 2002), and the appearance of the literary mini-genre of the “Ovid novel” (prominent authors, to be discussed in chapter 8, include David Malouf, Christoph Ransmayr, and Jane Alison).

Why this fascination for Ovid? Those who can read his works in the original may point to the classical beauty of his verse – which is, incidentally, easy enough to make the poet accessible to students early on in their Latin studies. Much of Ovid’s work is dedicated to the topic of love and the telling of mythological tales, subjects that modern readers tend to find as engaging as their ancient counterparts, and the fact that the poet treats these themes with his trademark wit and humor makes his texts additionally appealing. Furthermore, the sad fate of the author, who at the height of his success was exiled to a faraway land under mysterious circumstances, continues to elicit both sympathy and speculation.

Perhaps the main reason why late 20th-and early 21st-century readers have found Ovid so congenial, however, is that the poet appears to be so modern – or, rather, postmodern – sharing many of the attitudes and concerns found not only in contemporary academia but in popular culture as well. Distrustful of grand narratives, interested in linguistic structures rather than reality, intertextual, self-referential, and fundamentally ironic, Ovid speaks not only to scholars versed in poststructural theory but also to the kind of wider audience that has come to expect (to take just one example) that even a mainstream movie will contain self-conscious and often humorous allusions to earlier films of the same genre and thus call attention to its status as a work of art. Ovid’s prediction of his fame at the conclusion of the Metamorphoses is a perfect example of his postmodern playfulness. Just as a moviegoer steeped in cinematic history will be better able to appreciate the allusivity of any new film, a lector doctus (“learned reader”) of Ovid will be aware that the poet’s proud claim to his work’s immortality harks back to similar pronouncements by two earlier Latin authors. In the last poem of his third book of Odes, Horace (65 – 8 BCE) declared that he had fashioned a “work more durable than bronze” (3.30.1), whose survival through the ages was to guarantee that the poet, too, would not die but would live on through his fame. Like Ovid after him, Horace linked his undying reputation to the duration of the Roman empire, stating that he would grow more and more famous “as long as the pontiff walks up to the Capitol together with the silent virgin” (8–9), a reference to the Pontifex Maximus and the Vestal Virgins. Before Horace, already the archaic Latin poet Ennius (3rd–2nd C. BCE) advised his friends not to cry for him after his death since he was not in fact going to die but would “fly, alive, through the lips of men” (Epigrams, fr.18 Vahlen = 46.2 Courtney).

In addition to alluding to these two famous moments in earlier Latin poetry, Ovid’s prediction also plays a self-referential game with the reader. The phrase “I will be read by the lips of the people” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is literally true any time anyone reads the line – and even more so if the reader reads aloud, as was standard practice in antiquity. Simply by reading his words, we keep Ovid alive.

About This Book

This book is intended to introduce a new generation of readers to a poet who after two millennia still speaks to us. It is written not for classical scholars (though they, too, might find in it points of interest), but for readers of Ovid who would like to know more about what they are reading. Students who approach the poet either in his native Latin or in a translation, scholars in such disciplines as art history and comparative literature, or that elusive category, the “general audience” – all of them will, I hope, discover in these pages ideas and information that will guide and deepen their understanding of Ovid. Given the introductory nature of the book, I will be doing what the Latinist Stephen Hinds warned against in a famous article of 1987:2 I will be “generalizing about Ovid,” that is, I will unabashedly make a number of reasonably large claims about the nature of Ovidian poetry. Individual readers may well disagree with individual points, and some Ovidian scholars in particular will have different perspectives on some of the issues discussed. Nevertheless, I believe that the book presents an Ovid who will be easily recognized by both specialists and nonspecialists as the author who piqued their interest in the first place.

A traditional way of introducing readers to a poet’s oeuvre is to discuss each of his or her works in turn. This is the approach taken by most other books on Ovid that are on the market (see the chapter “Further Reading” at the end of the book). I have chosen a different method and, in the discussion that follows, will treat in turn different topics and themes. Though Ovid, in the course of his career, created a series of highly original works that greatly differ from one another, he also continued to exhibit similar concerns and interests, even as he moved from genre to genre and from one poem to the next. By concentrating on these concerns and interests, I hope to bring out the internal coherence of Ovid’s work, while not losing sight of its development over time. Individual poems and passages will still be discussed in some detail, but the stress is on the larger themes that unite the corpus. I am aware that many readers will have experience with, or interest in, only one or a few Ovidian works, but I believe that they, too, will easily be able to follow the discussion and glean the pieces of information of immediate relevance to their purpose. With any luck, such readers will feel inspired to pick up some books by Ovid hitherto unknown to them, while those who approach these pages without any prior knowledge of Ovid will come to realize what they have been missing and will rush to get their hands on a text.

To orient readers and convey the necessary basic information, chapter 1 (“Work”) lays out and describes in detail all of Ovid’s poems in chronological order, discussing in turn the poet’s amatory works (Amores, Heroides, Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris), long poems (Metamorphoses and Fasti), and exile poetry (Tristia, Ibis, and Epistulae ex Ponto). The complementary chapter 2 (“Life”) discusses what we know of Ovid’s biography, which – as is the case with nearly all ancient authors – does not amount to much. Instead of hard facts about the poet’s vita, we have his highly stylized “life,” the account of his poetic career that Ovid constructs in the course of his work and that I examine in detail. The chapter ends with a discussion of Ovid’s exile and the ways in which the poet transformed this traumatic experience into literature.

Chapter 3 (“Elegy”) is concerned with the genre that dominates Ovid’s poetic production: with the exception of the Metamorphoses, all of his extant works qualify as elegy. After tracing the history of the elegiac genre – with a special focus on the subgenre of Roman love elegy as practiced by Ovid’s older contemporaries Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius – I examine Ovid’s uses and transformations of elegy, from his early love poetry to the aetiological Fasti and finally the plaintive exile poems. Special attention is given to Ovid’s frequent self-referential reflections on his generic choices and to his humorous deconstruction of the code of Roman love elegy in his amatory works.

In chapter 4 (“Myth”), I survey Ovid’s employment of myth throughout his oeuvre, focusing in particular on questions of genre and on the Metamorphoses as an epic poem, as well as on intertextuality. This leads to a narratological discussion of storytelling in the Metamorphoses and to an exploration of Ovid’s treatment of time, a concern evident in many of the poet’s works, most notably his calendar poem, the Fasti.

While chapters 3 and 4 present a first overview of Ovid’s work in its entirety (chapter 3 treats the elegies, chapter 4 gives pride of place to the Metamorphoses), the following three chapters highlight particular themes. Chapter 5 (“Art”) deals with what I view as Ovid’s central concern, his pervasive interest in the question of art (Latin ars), the aesthetic imitation of reality through language and other media. The chapter discusses the poet’s much-maligned use of rhetoric, his depiction of artists in the Metamorphoses, and his occasionally shocking propagation of artifice and artificiality.

In chapter 6 (“Women”), I turn to Ovid’s treatment of women. The poet’s obvious interest in the female sex and his repeated espousing of female points of view have been variously explained as motivated by particular sympathy toward women or otherwise by blatant misogyny. In revisiting the question, I concentrate in particular on Ovid’s unusually pronounced “heterosexuality” (in the sense of a privileging of opposite-sex relationships and intercourse) and his awareness of culturally constructed gender roles.

Chapter 7 (“Rome”) examines Ovid’s interest in and depiction of the city of Rome in his work. A paradigmatically urban poet, Ovid uses contemporary Rome as a backdrop for his erotic teaching in the Ars amatoria, celebrates the Roman past in the Metamorphoses and especially the Fasti, and attempts to conjure up the city he has lost in his exile poems. His relationship to Rome raises the question of his attitude to the emperor Augustus, who fundamentally shaped both the physical city and the life of its inhabitants and who, infamously, exiled Ovid to a place that the poet experienced as a veritable anti-Rome. I discuss mentions of and allusions to Augustus in a variety of Ovid’s works, attempting to throw light on the poet’s views of Rome’s most powerful man.

The following chapter 8 (“Reception”) takes a look at some of the many creative reactions to Ovid in Western literature and art. The discussion focuses on depictions of Ovid as a teacher of love in Latin poetry of the Middle Ages; Renaissance and Baroque art inspired by the Metamorphoses; and contemporary “Ovid novels” fascinated by the mystery of Ovid’s exile. A concluding chapter entitled “Further Reading” provides ample suggestions for readers who wish to pursue their interest in Ovid beyond the covers of this book.

1

Work

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in 43 BCE in the Italian town of Sulmo (modern Sulmona) but spent most of his adult life in Rome. In 8 ce, he was banished by the emperor Augustus to Tomis (modern Constantza), a town on the shores of the Black Sea in what is today Romania, where he died in 17 or 18 ce. What little else is known about Ovid’s life will be the subject of the next chapter, but for the moment, these bare dates may serve as the chronological framework for an examination of the poet’s work.

Ovid’s poems are notoriously difficult to date, and no attempt will be made here to solve any of the longstanding chronological problems. Roughly speaking, the poet’s work can be divided into three phases, treated in turn below. In the first twenty-five years or so of his active career (mid-20s BCE to c. 2 ce), Ovid published a number of poetry collections and shorter works in the elegiac meter, all of which treat, in one way or another, the topic of love. In the following six years up to his exile (2–8 ce), he was working on his two longest poems, the epic Metamorphoses and the elegiac Fasti. Finally, Ovid produced a number of works in exile, including the collections Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, as well as the curse poem Ibis, all in elegiacs. These phases are not clearly distinct: it is quite possible that Ovid began work on the Metamorphoses and/or Fasti before 2 ce, and it is obvious that he revised at least the latter while in exile. Finally, there are a number of Ovidian works that are lost – most notably the tragedy Medea – as well as poems attributed to Ovid that scholars today believe to be inauthentic. These are discussed at the very end of the chapter.

Love Poems

Amores (“Loves”)

In its transmitted form, the Amores is a collection in three books of forty-nine elegiac poems in the style of Tibullus and Propertius, in which the male first-person speaker treats his erotic feelings and relationship with a woman whom he calls Corinna. The work is prefaced by a short epigram that informs the reader that there were originally five books but that the author reissued the work in abridged form, making it (thus the poem humorously claims) a less painful read. The fact that the Amores underwent these two editions significantly complicates any attempt to establish a chronology for the work’s publication(s), especially since it is unclear whether the five books of the first edition came out together or consecutively and whether or not new poems were added to the second edition.

In Tr. 4.10.57-60, Ovid says that his first public poetry reading took place “when [his] beard had been cut once or twice” (58) and that it featured poems about Corinna. This would put the earliest parts of the Amores some time in the 20s BCE. Very few of the poems in the surviving three-book edition contain references to datable events: 3.9 mentions the death of the poet Tibullus (19 BCE) and 1.14.45–50 alludes to a Roman victory over the Germanic tribe of the Sygambri (possibly 16 BCE, though hostilities continued and the tribe was finally defeated only in 8 BCE). Intriguing but problematic is poem 2.18, where Ovid refers to a number of his other works as completed or in progress: these include the Medea (13–14), the Heroides (21–6), and perhaps the Ars amatoria (19–20). The last reference is doubtful since some scholars have taken Ovid’s mention of the “arts of tender love” (artes teneri… Amoris, 19) as an allusion not to the Ars but to the Amores itself. However, if Ovid does mean the Ars, datable to c. 1 BCE–2 CE , then poem 2.18 is a very late addition to the Amores, no doubt written for the second edition, which must then be placed around the turn of the millennium. It is thus possible that the poet worked on the Amores, on and off, for about twenty-five years.

The Amores is the last manifestation of the genre of Roman love elegy, which will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. In keeping with the conventions of the genre, the first-person speaker of the Amores is both a lover and a poet of love, that is, an elegist. In addition to appearing in a number of typical elegiac situations (at the dinner party, on his lover’s doorstep, jealous at a rival, enraged at the perfidy of his mistress, etc.), the poet-lover also frequently reflects on his activities as a poet. By drawing attention to the artificiality of the elegiac scenario (in which a man, overwhelmed by love, pines for an ultimately unattainable, idealized woman) and stressing the more physical aspects of an erotic relationship (including such unromantic incidents as impotence, 3.7, and abortion, 2.13 and 14), Ovid pokes fun at elegy while widening its scope, a tendency that continues in his other amatory works.

Heroides (“Heroines”)

The Heroides or Epistulae heroidum (“Letters of Heroines”) are fictional letters in elegiacs, purportedly written by mythological women (and a few men) to their love interests. There are twenty-one such poems that have come down to us under Ovid’s name. The first fifteen (“single Heroides”) are letters by heroines to the men they love, from whom they have been separated (not infrequently having been abandoned) and with whom they wish to be reunited. These letter-writers include such famous literary characters as Penelope, Phaedra, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea, as well as, exceptionally, a historical woman, the poet Sappho, nominal author of Heroides 15. The remaining six letters (“double Heroides”) constitute three pairs, in each of which a man first writes to his female beloved and then receives an answer. The couples involved are Paris and Helen, Leander and Hero, and Acontius and Cydippe.

As noted above, Ovid mentions a few of the single Heroides in Am. 2.18.21–6, which implies that they were written simultaneously with (parts of) the Amores, that is, some time in the last quarter of the 1st century BCE. In the same text (27–34), Ovid tells us that a friend of his by the name of Sabinus composed poems in which he had the male addressees write back to the heroines; thus, for example, Penelope finally received an answer from the wayward Odysseus. It is possible that Sabinus’witty sequel (which does not survive) gave Ovid the idea for the correspondences found in the double Heroides. Since Ovid himself never mentions the paired letters (which, treating mythological topics, contain no references to contemporary events), it is impossible to date them, beyond the fact that they must have been written after Am. 2.18. On stylistic grounds, scholars often place the double Heroides quite late in Ovid’s career, and they were perhaps written only during the poet’s exile.

A lively debate surrounds the authenticity of some of the Heroides. Most often called into question is the letter of Sappho, which is now conventionally referred to as no. 15 of the collection but which has a different manuscript tradition from the remaining twenty letters and has been known only since the 15 th century. The double letters, too, have been suspected as spurious, as have others, particularly those of the single letters not mentioned explicitly in Am. 2.18 (to complicate matters, though, that poem does refer to a letter by Sappho). Most of the arguments are based on suspicious stylistic and metrical features in the letters in question. The issue will continue to be debated, but it seems to me more likely than not that all twenty-one letters are in fact Ovidian, and I treat them as such in what follows.

Medicamina faciei femineae (“Cosmetics for the Female Face”)

With the Medicamina Ovid begins his foray into didactic poetry, a genre typically written in hexameters and dedicated, at least ostensibly, to teaching either a practical skill (such as agriculture in Vergil’s Georgics) or a theoretical field of knowledge (such as Epicurean physics in Lucretius’De rerum natura). Ovid, by contrast, dispenses his instructions in elegiacs and treats a suitably elegiac topic: a woman’s cosmetics. The poem exists today only in fragmentary form, breaking off after line 100. Half of what we have is taken up by a proem in which Ovid, addressing his female audience, celebrates the concept of cultus (“cultivation, sophistication”) that underlies not only female adornment, but culture in general. The rest of the text consists of very technical “recipes” for various skin treatments and facial creams. Since the Medicamina is mentioned in Ars 3 (205–8), it must have been written before that book and most likely before the entire Ars.

Ars amatoria (“Art of Love”)

If in the Medicamina, Ovid was trying out his original combination of a didactic format with elegiac meter and subject matter, he perfected this new hybrid genre in the Ars. Roman love elegy, including Ovid’s Amores, merely describes the poet-lover’s often painful amatory experiences. By contrast, the new “Art of Love” ambitiously undertakes to teach elegiac love – and teach it in such a way that it is no longer painful. In Books 1 and 2, Ovid addresses himself to the young men of Rome, demonstrating that a satisfactory relationship can be achieved in three easy steps: first the man must find a woman to love; then he must seduce her; and finally he must take steps for their love to last for an extended period of time. The teacher’s instructions are hands-on: he enumerates auspicious pickup places throughout the city of Rome, builds up his students’confidence before they approach their girls, and generally provides advice on everything from the writing of love letters and the giving of gifts to successful behavior in the bedroom. At the end of Book 2, the young men have secured their female lovers and celebrate their teacher Ovid as the master of his craft.

At this point, Ovid declares that the “tender girls” (2.745), too, are asking for his advice and, ostensibly out of a sense of fairness, launches into his third book, which contains instructions for the women. It has traditionally been assumed that after the first two books were published and met with success, Ovid conceived of Book 3 as a funny sequel that was to treat the material of the male-centered preceding books from a female perspective. It is, however, also possible that the poet planned the three books as a unit from the start and that the claim that Book 3 is an afterthought, undertaken only at the urging of the women themselves, is but a humorous fiction. Book 3 itself harks back to the Medicamina in recommending cultus to the women and offers plentiful advice on such topics as clothing and hairstyles. While Ovid clearly expects his female students to take a less active role than the males in the pursuit of their love interests, he is still training them to be serious players who know how to manipulate men for their own purposes.

The first book of the Ars contains references to two contemporary events that allow us to date the work unusually closely. In 171–6, Ovid mentions as a recent occurrence a mock naval battle that Augustus staged in 2 BCE, and in 177–228, he discusses the imminent Parthian campaign of the emperor’s grandson Gaius Caesar, who departed for the east in 1 BCE. At least the first two books were thus presumably published in late 2 or early 1 BCE. If Book 3 was part of the original plan, it belongs to the same time; if not, it probably appeared shortly thereafter.

Remedia amoris (“Remedies for Love”)

As we have seen, already in Ars 3, Ovid delights in humorously reversing some of the teaching of his two preceding books. In the Remedia, Ovid’s last work of amatory didactic, the poet executes a further about-face. Having taught the art of love, Ovid now offers advice on how to free oneself from any unwanted emotions and attractions. As is apparent from the title, the poet here presents himself as a doctor confident of healing his patients of the “disease” of love (a traditional metaphor much used in Roman love elegy). While still humorous in tone, the book’s advice (such as not to become entangled in an unhealthy relationship in the first place, to distract oneself through activity, and to effect a clean but non-hostile breakup) is generally more sober and even finds parallels in the ethical teachings of contemporary philosophy.

In the context of advising the lovesick student to join the army to take his mind off his beloved, Ovid again mentions Gaius Caesar, who at this point has arrived in Parthia and is presented as poised for battle (155–6). However, rather than fighting the Parthians, the actual Gaius reached a diplomatic settlement with them in 2 ce. Since Ovid was apparently not yet aware of this when he wrote his lines, we may conjecture that he completed the Remedia and thus his amatory oeuvre by early 2 ce.

Long Poems

Metamorphoses (“Transformations”)

After Ovid’s comparatively short elegiac works, the Metamorphoses, a hexametric epic in fifteen books, presents a striking departure. As the poet announces in the proem, the work’s topic is “shapes changed into new bodies” (1.1–2), that is, myths of transformation. Metamorphosis had been a favorite subject of Greek literature, and such learned works as the HHeteroioumena (“Changes”) of Nicander (2nd C. BCE) may have served as the Roman poet’s sources. However, Ovid’s project is considerably more ambitious than any previous catalogue of transformations. At the end of the proem, he asks the gods to direct his song “from the first beginning of the world to my own times” (1.3–4), highlighting the universal scope of a poem that purports to cover metamorphoses that took place from the creation of the cosmos (described at the beginning of Book 1) all the way to the reigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus (mentioned at the end of Book 15).

Most of Ovid’s material is what we would call mythological (though note that for the ancients, the distinction between myth and history was not always clearly drawn, and a story like that of Aeneas might well be considered either), and in the course of the work, the poet manages to cover most major Greco-Roman myths (such as the Trojan War and the exploits of Hercules) and a multitude of less prominent ones. The Metamorphoses is thus an excellent source for ancient myth and was used as a veritable mythological handbook by writers and artists throughout Western cultural history (see further chapter 8 on the reception of Ovid in Renaissance and Baroque art). The poem is divided into three blocks of five books each, a structure that corresponds to the chronological progression of the work’s subject matter. Books 1–5 treat exploits of the gods, Books 6–10 recount the adventures of heroes, and Books 11–15 tell tales about mere men.

In writing the Metamorphoses, Ovid faced the challenge of treating a large number of individual stories (there are about 250) while making them all part of an overarching narrative. He achieved this through a number of methods, including varying the length and focus of individual tales (some stories are alluded to in a few words, others told for hundreds of lines), enclosing stories within stories through the use of internal narrators (about a third of the text consists in embedded narrative), and devising ingenious transitions from story to story. While it is thus possible to mine the Metamorphoses for particular myths or read individual episodes out of context, the full extent of Ovid’s virtuosity becomes apparent only to those who make their way through the poem from beginning to end.

Not all stories in the Metamorphoses