All posts tagged Propertius

Martial Epigrams

Readers and listeners like my books,
Yet a certain poet calls them crude.
What do I care, I serve up food
To please my guests, not fellow cooks.
(Book 9, poem 81)

The first thing you discover in the 1964 Penguin Classics paperback edition of Martial’s epigrams, as translated by James Michie, is that this is very far from being a complete edition, in fact it represents only about ten per cent of Martial’s total output.

Martial biography

Martial’s full name was Marcus Valerius Martialis, the cognomen ‘Martialis’ indicating that he was born in March. He was born about 40 AD in the Roman province of Spain and came to Rome around 63, during the reign of Nero. Here, apparently, rather than embark on the cursus honorem or sequence of recognised public offices (quaestor, praetor, aedile, consul) or undertake a recognised profession such as lawyer and advocate, Martial preferred to live by his wits, making himself a witty entertainer and dinner party companion to rich patrons.

Amazingly, Martial seems to have been able to support himself this way for 35 years until he retired back to Spain about 98. (12.18 is a good-humoured song of praise to the simple life back in his home town far from the rigours of Roman life, apparently addressed to his friend, Juvenal the satirist.)

During all those years Martial was dependent on his wealthy friends and patrons for gifts of money, for his dinner, and even for his dress. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in his earlier career he used to accompany his patrons to their villas at Baiae or Tibur and to attend their morning levées. Later on, he owned a own small country house near Nomentum, and sent a poem, or a small volume of his poems, as his representative to the morning levée. He cultivated patrons far and wide and was especially proud at being invited to dinner with Domitian.

And yet, God, it was a shabby, humiliating and tiring sort of life, as his later poems convey:

Have mercy on me, Rome, a hired
Flatterer desperately tired of flattery…
(10.74)

Martial is best known for his twelve books of epigrams, published in Rome between 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian (81 to 96), Nerva (96 to 98) and Trajan (98 to 117). Martial wrote a rather terrifying total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets. This Penguin selection contains only about 150 of them. A notable feature of the Penguin edition is that it contains the Latin original next to Michie’s translation of it (although this seems to be standard practice; the much more recent Oxford University Press selection does the same).

What is an epigram?

“An epigram is a short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end. The subject is usually a single thought or event.” (Academy of American Poets)

It derives from the Greek epigraphein, meaning ‘to write on, to inscribe’ and originally referred to the inscriptions written on stone monuments in ancient Greece. Slowly the term became separated from the act of inscription and by 300 BC referred to any brief, pointed poem, generally about or addressed to someone.

In his 1,500 epigrams Martial is widely agreed to have taken the form to its highest point and every proponent of the epigram for the following 2,000 years to some extent echoes or copies him.

Two texts preface the selection, a 2-page translator’s note by James Michie and an 8-page introduction by scholar Peter Howell.

Translator’s note

In his translator’s note, Michie says the selection is not intended as ‘Martial’s greatest hits’. Rather, the entries were selected to demonstrate Martial’s variety. The texts of the twelve books of epigrams which have come down to us were not arranged logically or thematically, but to ‘reflect the odd juxtapositions of life itself’.

Thus a scatological squib is followed by a deeply felt epitaph (for his 6-year-old slave, Erotion mentioned twice, in 5.34 and 10.61; for the dexterous slave boy Pantagathus, 6.52; or for Pompey the Great, 5.74); contrived panegyrics to Domitian (for liking his poems 4.8; for having impressive fish 4.30; for widening Rome’s roads, 7.61) next to scabrous abuse of someone with bad breath (1.87); a pornographic poem about buggery (1.46) next to a poem lamenting the fickle condition of the dinner party hanger-on (2.27); extended descriptions of a country house (4.64) next to a vivid description of a sumptuous dinner (5.78); corruption at the chariot races (6.46) next to comic behaviour at a slave auction (6.66); insults to a rival poet (7.3) next to a jokey profile of a woman who seems doomed to marry only effeminate men (7.58); a bitter complaint against a noisy schoolmaster whose shouts wake him up early (school lessons started at dawn; 9.68) next to a shrewd criticism of a friend who’s always complaining the world is going to hell (9.70); a fond poem to a friend who’s mean and stingy but makes up for it by being a wonderful farter (10.15) next to the anecdote of the retired boatman who used his boat, filled with rocks, to plug a gap in the Tiber banks (10.85); a comic portrait of the superthief Hermogenes (12.28) next to a short but heartfelt summary of the Good Life (10.47). Variety.

There are a lot of poems about heirs and hangers-on waiting for the elderly to snuff it so they can inherit their money, a lot of anxiety about who cranky old people are favouring in their wills that’s reminiscent of Dickens:

If you were wise as well as rich and sickly
You’d see that every gift means, ‘Please die quickly!’
(8.27)

Or:

She longs for me to ‘have and hold’ her
In marriage. I’ve no mind to.
She’s old. If she were even older,
I might be half inclined to.
(10.8)

(In his fascinating introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Juvenal’s satires, Peter Green says this was an obsessive subject for authors of this generation. Professional legacy hunters were called captatores and he reminds me that an entire chapter of Petronius’s Satyricon describes a visit to a town entirely populated by legacy hunters.)

There’s a recurring theme criticising the kind of affected connoisseur who dismisses the moderns and only values ‘the Classics’, a type the elegiac poets also despised:

Rigidly classical, you save
Your praise for poets in the grave.
Forgive me, it’s not worth my while
Dying to earn your critical smile.
(8.69)

Michie devotes half his note to an impressionistic prose summary of the cumulative portrait of late-first century Roman locations and people which Martial’s epigrams depict, the Rome of:

shops, amphitheatres, law courts, lavatories, temples, schools, tenements, gardens, taverns, and public baths, its dusty of muddy streets filled with traffic, religious processions, , and never-ending business, its slaves, millionaires, prostitutes, philosophers, quacks, bores, touts, dinner-cadgers, fortune-hunters, poetasters, politicians and layabouts. (Introduction, page 9)

Michie makes the point that the epigrammatist, rather like the satirist, has to pretend to be angry and full of bile, but that a cumulative reading of Martial makes you suspect this was just a pose – or the kind of sentiment appropriate to the genre. For, as you work through these scores of short sharp vignettes, what actually comes over is Martial’s ‘great capacity for fun and for friendship, and an evergreen curiosity about people’.

Michie doesn’t mention Chaucer, but Martial shares Chaucer’s fascination with the huge diversity of real people of his time, their names and occupations, and shapes and sizes and ages and habits and mannerisms and verbal tics and sex lives and businesses. Thus a poem about typical scenes through the hours of the day:

The first two hours of the morning tax
Poor clients; during the third advocates wax
Eloquent and hoarse; until the fifth hour ends
The city to her various trades attends;
At six o’clock the weary workers stop
For the siesta; all Rome shuts up shop
At seven; the hour from eight to nine supplies
The oiled wrestlers with their exercise;
The ninth invites us to recline full length,
Denting the cushions. At last comes the tenth…
(Book 4, poem 8)

Michie also doesn’t mention Baudelaire, but you could draw the comparison between the French poet’s fascination with the endlessly teeming life of Paris, and Martial’s endless snapshots of life in what was, at the time, the biggest city in the world, with its extremes of poverty and luxury, power and enslavements, stinks and smells and endlessly fascinating inhabitants. Maybe the thronged novels of Balzac are a better comparison and, in England, Dickens.

Introduction

The introduction is written by historian and editor of Martial, Peter Howell, who makes a number of points:

Spanish writers

Martial was one of a generation of talented writers who hailed from the fully Romanised province of Hispania, which included Seneca the Elder and Younger; the latter’s nephew, Lucan; Quintilian; and Columella.

A career choice

In their writings both Martial and Juvenal give the impression that they were forced by a social system which made if impossible for middle-class, well-educated men to earn a living by respectable means to become the hangers-on and flatterers of the rich, living from hand to mouth. But this was largely false. Friends urged Martial to take up the law or stand for public office, but he turned down both options.

Patrons and clients

The relation of patron and client evolved during the history of Rome. At the beginning it meant the relationship between a full Roman citizen and foreigners who wanted favours done for them within the legal and political system. By Martial’s time a wealthy, well-connected patron prided himself on having large numbers of dependents, clients or hangers-on. The client acquired protection (for example, from lawsuits) and welfare (most often in the form of being invited to lavish dinners) but in return the patron claimed the client’s support, in law courts, at election time, at social events, and their general flattery at all times:

Labullus, I court you,
I escort you, I support you
By lending an ear to your chatter,
And everything you say or do I flatter…
(11.24)

Clients were expected to be at their patron’s house early in the morning to greet them, then accompany them on their day of social duties, at the end of the day receiving maybe a little cash, preferably an invite to dinner. (See poem 2.27 quoted below.)

Hence the many poems Martial writes about the lamentable plight of the humiliated client and the expressions ‘parasite’, ‘dinner cadger’ and ‘hanger-on’ which Michie uses to describe this social type, known in Latin (and in Roman theatre) as the parasitus.

For hours, for a whole day, he’ll sit
On every public toilet seat.
It’s not because he needs a shit:
He wants to be asked out to eat.
(11.77)

The parasite as poet

Martial was a cut above the average parasitus because he quite early became famous as a poet. The earliest surviving work of his is called Liber Spectaculorum, written to celebrate the opening of the Flavian amphitheatre (what came to be called the Colosseum) in 80 AD. But it was the terse, witty epigrams which he appeared to be able to knock out at will, many either flattering a specific client or appealing to their sense of humour, which kept him in free dinners for 35 years.

How Roman authors made money

A Roman author didn’t make money by selling copies of a work. Copies had to be written out by hand and so remained limited in number. Instead there appear to have been two sources of income for an author:

Dedicate your work to a patron who would respond in kind with gifts – the ultimate patron being the emperor, the classic example being Augustus who worked through his minister, Maecenas, to give both Virgil and Horace gifts of property, land and slaves which made them comfortable for life.
It seems that some notable ‘publishers’ would pay an author for the privilege of having first dibs at copying a work they estimated would be popular and which they could guarantee selling copies of.

Thus by the time he came to publish what is conventionally known as Epigrams Book 1, in about 85, Martial must have been writing poetry for about 20 years and so is able to refer to himself as well known, even if all the other works he was known for, appear to have disappeared.

A Roman book

When all these authors refer to what is translated into English as ‘a book’, they mean a cylindrical roll of papyrus whose ends were often smoothed with pumice-stone and the whole roll wrapped in vellum (note, page 192). The wooden stave round which the papyrus was wrapped often had carved knobs at each end to secure the roll and make it easier to handle. The back of the papyrus was dyed yellow with cedar oil to preserve it from mould and moths (note, page 196). According to poem 1.117 a ‘book’ of Martial’s cost 5 dinarii.

Reasons for Martial’s popularity

Most contemporary poetry was long and long-winded, written about stock mythological subjects in elaborate and stylised verse. Thus Virgil’s Aeneid gave rise to poets who tried to ape his success with long epics such as Valerius Flaccus, Statius and Silius Italicus.

By contrast Martial developed a form which was not just short but very short, but which managed to create drama in a very small number of lines (sometimes as few as two lines). Despite their shortness the epigrams, when collected into books, were arranged to offer a pleasing sense of variety and range.

Martial’s epigrams are sometimes contrived in the sense of carefully structured to make a joke or damning point; but never contrived in the sense of striving to be grand and pompous. They are never pretentious.

No real people are skewered

The short poems of Catullus are packed with gleeful abuse of real individuals. The satires of his friend and contemporary, Juvenal, very much flay real life individuals, albeit under pseudonyms. But Martial, scathing though some of them may be, categorically states that he has not satirised any real people, even under fictitious names. Hence the large number of characters in the poem named Flaccus and Labulla and Lesbia and Cinna and Galla and Postumus. They’re just bland common names used as pegs for the jokes.

Obscenity

Many of the poems are what used to be called ‘obscene’ and still was at the date of this translation (1964). In one of the first poems he uses the same argument that Catullus and Ovid had, namely that although his verse may be pornographic his life is pure.

Roman sexual attitudes

The attitude towards sex that emerges from Martial is one of cheerful permissiveness but not wild and orgiastic promiscuousness. (Introduction, p.16)

Sex is acceptable (unlike in, say, Victorian England) and prostitution is widespread. Adultery is theoretically forbidden but in practice also widespread. Homosexuality and bisexuality are regarded as natural, especially with teenage boys. The active role in male gay sex was through acceptable but for an adult man to take the passive role was more shameful. Poem 12.75 is an amusing squib listing all the types of gay boys he’d prefer to ‘some bitch/Who’d make me miserably rich’ (12.75). The poem about the woman who weighs men’s penises erect and flaccid (10.55) is amusing but the long one complaining that his ‘wife’ isn’t sexually adventurous enough is genuinely funny because so outrageous (11.104).

Domitian

Howell entertainingly speaks up for the emperor Domitian (reigned 81 to 96). He says that Domitian had (as of 1964) the reputation of a Hitler (!) but claims this is the result of the works of Tacitus, Juvenal and ‘other biased writers’. Apart from his paranoid vendetta against the senatorial class (which Tacitus and Juvenal and the other biased writers wrote for) Howell claims Domitian’s rule was for everyone else ‘calm and prosperous, marked by beneficial social and moral legislation’ (p.16).

But Domitian liked Martial and awarded him the privileges of a father of 3 children although Martial was never, as far as we know, actually married and had no children. Hence Martial’s numerous poems sucking up to Domitian (as Virgil and Horace and Ovid shamelessly sucked up to Augustus) (I especially like the panegyric to the imperial fish, 4.30); although Howell disapproves of how, following Domitian’s assassination in 96, Martial quickly knocked off poems saying he’d never liked him anyway and praising the new regime.

Rhyming couplets

The great majority of Martial’s poems were written in elegiac couplets, one hexameter followed by a pentameter, such as we’ve encountered in all the elegiac poets (Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid). The most important single thing about Michie’s translation is he chooses to translate every poem he selects into rhyming couplets, quatrains or other rhyming forms. The precise metre varies from poem to poem, but pretty much all of them rhyme.

It’s a bold decision. It aligns Michie’s versions with the rhyming couplets of the Augustan Age of English verse, very roughly from the 1680s to the 1750s. On the upside rhyme in English poetry creates opportunity for humour and often prompts the author to ingeniously amusing collocations. Rhyme is associated with limericks and light verse of all types. On the down side, ‘serious’ modern poetry abandoned rhyme around the time of the First World War so the solid use of rhyme for all the translations signals and lack of…a lack of seriousness or depth, which, from what both Howell and Miche say about Martial, is maybe not appropriate in every instance.

The epigrams

There are all kinds of ways of grouping and categorising them, starting with the 12 books which Martial himself used as a structuring device. Very broadly there are two types of Martial epigram – ones you ‘get’, which have an appealing twist or sting or point which you can understand; and those which don’t have such an obvious payoff, which presumably made sense in their time but seem flat or pointless or even incomprehensible to us today, even with extensive notes. If a joke needs extensive notes to explain it, it isn’t a very good joke.

Themes

The poet as celebrity and showman

May I present myself – the man
You read, admire and long to meet,
Known the world over for his neat
And witty epigrams? The name
Is Martial. Thank you, earnest fan,
For having granted me the fame
Seldom enjoyed by a dead poet
While I’m alive and here to know it.
(Book 1, poem 1)

Insufferable amateur poets

Whether or not Apollo fled from the table
Thyestes ate his sons at, I’m unable
To say: what I can vouch for is our wish
To escape your dinner parties. Though each dish
Is lavish and superb, the pleasure’s nil
Since you recite your poems! To hell with brill,
Mushrooms and two-pound turbots, I don’t need
Oysters: give me a host who doesn’t read.
(3.45)

To Domitian, pleading his moral probity

Caesar, if you should chance to handle my book,
I hope that you’ll relax the frowning look
That rules the world. Soldiers are free to mock
The triumphs of you emperors – there’s no shame
In a general being made a laughing-stock.
I beg you, read my verses with the same
Face as you watch Latinus on the stage
Or Thymele the dancer. Harmless wit
You may, as Censor, reasonably permit:
My life is strict, however lax my page.
(1.4)

Heterosexual sex

Lesbia, why are your amours
Always conducted behind open, unguarded doors?
Why do you get more excitement out of a voyeur than a lover?
Why is pleasure no pleasure when it’s under cover?
Whores us a curtain, a bolt or a porter
To bar the public – you won’t find many chinks in the red-light quarter.
Ask Chione or Ias how to behave:
Even the cheapest tart conceals her business inside a monumental grave.
If I seem too hard on you, remember my objection
Is not to fornication, but to detection.
(1.34)

‘inside a monumental grave‘?

Gay sex

I think what’s going on is the narrator is buggering a boy who, as a result, is on the edge of orgasm. I’m happy to be corrected if I’ve misunderstood.

When you say, ‘Quick, I’m going to come,’
Hedylus, I go limp and numb.
But ask me to hold back my fire,
And the brake accelerates desire.
Dear boy, if you’re in such a hurry,
Tell me to slow up, not to worry.
(1.46)

Slave or paedophile sex

The eroticism of being blocked or prevented is taken a step further in this poem:

The only kisses I enjoy
Are those I take by violence, boy.
Your anger whets my appetite
More than your face, and so to excite
Desire I give you a good beating
From time to time: a self-defeating
Habit – what do I do it for?
You neither fear nor love me more.
(5.46)

Heterosexual smears

Lesbia claims she’s never laid
Without good money being paid.
That’s true enough; when she’s on fire
She’ll always pay the hose’s hire.
(11.62)

Thumbnail sketches

Diaulus, recently physician,
Has set up now as a mortician:
No change, though, in his clients’ condition.
(1.47)

Or:

You’re an informer and a tool for slander,
A notorious swindler and a pander,
A cocksucker, gangster and a whore…
So how is it, Vacerra, you’re so poor?
(11.66)

Chaucerian physicality

Hoping, Fescennia, to overpower
The reek of last night’s drinking, you devour
Cosmus’ sweet-scented pastilles by the gross.
But though they give your teeth a whitish gloss
They fail to make your breath any less smelly
When a belch bubbles up from your abyss-like belly.
In fact, blended with the lozenges, it’s much stronger;
It travels farther and it lingers longer.
(1.87)

His cheap lodgings in a block of flats

Lupercus, whenever you meet me
You instantly greet me
With, ‘Is it alright by you if I send
My slave to pick up your book of epigrams? It’s only to lend:
I’ll return it when I’ve read it.’ There’s no call
To trouble your boy. It’s a long haul
To the Pear-tree district, and my flat
Is up three flights of stairs, steep ones at that…
(1.117)

Behaviour of a hanger-on and dinner cadger

When Selius spreads his nets for an invitation
To dinner, if you’re due to plead a cause
In court or give a poetry recitation,
Take him along, he’ll furnish your applause:
‘Well said!’ ‘Hear, hear!’ ‘Bravo!’ ‘Shrewd point!’ ‘That’s good!’
Till you say, ‘Shut up now, you’ve earned your food.’
(2.27)

Or this poem about not only being a client, but being a client’s client.

I angle for your dinner invitations (oh the shame
Of doing it, but I do it). You fish elsewhere. We’re the same.
I attend the morning levée and they tell me you’re not there,
But gone to wait on someone else. We make a proper pair.
I’m your spaniel, I’m the toady to your every pompous whim.
You court a richer patron. I dog you and you dog him.
To be a slave is bad enough but I refuse to be
A flunkey’s flunkey, Maximum. My master must be free.
(2.18)

Miniatures of abuse

You ask me what I get
Out of my country place.
The profit, gross or net,
Is never having to see your face.
(2.38)

And:

Marius’s earhole smells.
Does that surprise you, Nestor?
The scandal that you tell’s
Enough to make it fester.
(3.28)

Crude humour

If from the baths you hear a round of applause
Maron’s giant prick is bound to be the cause.
(9.33)

Or:

Why poke the ash of a dead fire?
Why pluck the hairs from your grey fanny?
That’s a chic touch that men admire
In girls, not in a flagrant granny…
(10.90)

Sarcasm about his readers

Caedicianus, if my reader
After a hundred epigrams still
Wants more, then he’s a greedy feeder
Whom no amount of swill can fill.
(1.118)

Self portrait in retirement

Poor morning client (you remind me
Of all I loathed and left behind me
In Rome), if you had any nous,
Instead of calling on my house
You’d haunt the mansions of the great.

I’m not some wealthy advocate
Blessed with a sharp, litigious tongue,
I’m just a lazy, far from young
Friend of the Muses who likes ease
And sleep. Great Rome denied me these:
If I can’t find them here in Spain,
I might as well go back again.
(12.68)

Credit

The Epigrams of Martial, translated by James Michie with an introduction by Peter Howell, was published by Penguin Books in 1973.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on January 20, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Translation

Tagged A.S. Kline, abuse, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient world, Augustus, Baiae, Balzac, Baudelaire, buggery, Caedicianus, captatores, caricature, Catullus, Chaucer, Chione, classical literature, client, Columella, cursus honorem, Diaulus, Dickens, dinner cadger, dinner party, Domitian, elegiac couplets, emperor Nero, epigram, epigrams, epigraphein, Erotion, Fescennia, Flavian Amphitheatre, Gay sex, hanger-on, Hedylus, Hermogenes, Hispania, homosexuality, Horace, humour, Ias, James Michie, Juvenal, Juvenal's satires, Labullus, lampoon, Latin, Latinus, legacy-hunter, Lesbia, Liber Spectaculorum, Lucan; Quintilian, Lupercus, Maecenas, Marcus Valerius Martialis, Martial, Martial's epigrams, Martialis, Nero, Nerva, Nomentum, obscenity, orgy, Ovid, Pantagathus, papyrus, parasitus, patron, Penguin classics, Peter Green, Peter Howell, Petronius, poems, poetry, Pompey the Great, pornography, Propertius, Roman literature, Roman theatre, satire, Satyricon, Selius, Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, sex, Silius Italicus, slave, slave sex, Slavery, Spain, Statius, Tacitus, the Colosseum, the Epigrams of Martial, Thymele, Tibullus, Tibur, Trajan, Translation, Vacerra, Valerius Flaccus, Virgil, wit

Posted by Simon on January 20, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/20/martial-epigrams/

Tristia by Ovid

How wretched to live among tribal natives
for him whose name was once a household word.
(Tristia book 4, poem 1, lines 67 and 68)

What I seek is not praise but pardon.
(Tristia book 1, poem 7, line 31)

There’s nothing we own that isn’t mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind.
(Tristia, book 3, poem 7, lines 43 and 44)

America-based British academic Peter Green has published an impressive number of books about the ancient world – numerous histories and essays, along with many translations from ancient Greek and Latin.

Among these are two volumes of translations of the Roman poet Ovid for Penguin books: a portmanteau volume titled The Erotic Poems of Ovid, which includes Amores, The Art of Love and The Cure for Love, and this volume, The Poems of Exile, which includes Ovid’s last two works, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Letters from the Black Sea’).

These fairly long works (Tristia 103 page, Letters 90 pages) were, as the title suggests, written during Ovid’s 10-year-long and miserable exile at a town called Tomis, on the Black Sea (now the coastal resort of Constanca in Romania).

(Apparently it is important to distinguish between exile (deportatio) – where the banished person lost their Roman citizenship and all their property – and Ovid’s condition, which was the lesser punishment of relegatio, whereby he retained his citizenship and his property – very important for the ongoing life of his wife and daughter back in Rome, see note p.225 among others.

Ovid’s career

Born in 43 BC Ovid was a fluent and prolific poet who made his reputation with a series of books about love, treated in a cynically witty, urbane style:

first there was a set of letters supposedly written by women from myth and legend (the Heroides)
then the stylish Amores (‘Love poems’) which followed in the line of elegiac love lyrics pioneered by Catullus and developed by Tibullus and Propertius. The Amores were published in 16 BC
but most successful, and scandalous, was the Ars Amoris (‘The Art of Love’) which I thought might be a philosophical-moral treatise but turns out to be an extremely cynical, worldly guide to picking up women, preferably married women, for an illicit affair, closer to the world of Tinder and modern pickup artists than Plato or Castiglione. The Ars Amoris was published around 1 BC

Around the age of 40, Ovid made a significant shift in subject matter to produce the vast Metamorphoses, an encyclopedic collection of ancient myths and legends linked by the common topic of physical transformation i.e. tales of men and women who were changed by the gods or magic or fate into flowers, trees, animals, rivers and so on.

The poem contains flattering references to the emperor Augustus (who effectively ruled Rome single handed between 27 BC and his death in 14 AD) and leads up to a description of the apotheosis (conversion into a god) of Augustus’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar and then fulsome praise of Augustus himself. Metamorphoses was published in 8 AD.

Ovid was half way through writing a work which contains even more flattering references to Augustus and his extended family, the Fasti, a long poetic account of the Roman calendar which sets out to explain the origins and aspects of Rome’s numerous religious festivals, anniversaries and important dates – when he received an angry summons to the emperor’s personal presence, was given a fierce dressing down and instructed to pack his bags because he was being sent into exile (or to be precise relegatio). He was ordered to go and live in the wretched frontier town of Tomis, in the only partly-pacified province of Moesia, on the coast of the Black Sea in modern-day Romania.

Born in 43 BC, Ovid was 51 in late 8 AD when he was sent into exile.

Ovid’s exile

Why? What had he done which was so outrageous? For the last ten years of his life (8 to 18 AD) Ovid wrote these two books – 50 or so letters in which he pleaded with all his friends back in Rome to beg the emperor to change his mind and rescind his banishment, and 50 or so poems in which he gave poetic expression to the changing moods of an exile. But although he refers to the causes of his exile quite a few times, he never specifies exactly what it was.

To be precise, Ovid attributes his exile to two causes. One was that his recklessly cynical and amoral pickup guide The Art of Love offended against the very serious efforts of Augustus to restore traditional morality among Rome’s aristocracy, particularly when it came to marriage – banning adultery and rewarding fidelity and especially the parenting of children who should be brought up in a traditional, settled married environment. The Art of Love, as a guide to how to start and maintain adulterous affairs, flew straight in the face of everything Augustus was trying to achieve.

But Ovid himself thinks Augustus’s citing of this poem as a cause for exiling him was a smokescreen for a deeper reason. This he refers to repeatedly as his error but, infuriatingly, tells us his lips are sealed and he won’t explain it. For 2,000 years scholars have been forced to speculate.

Political – maybe was present at discussions about a coup to overthrow Augustus; maybe he was a witness to a secret marriage of Julia – either way Ovid’s hints imply that he himself was never part of a conspiracy, never carried out any action: but that he witnessed something and then, apparently, failed to report it.

The Tristia are accessible and enjoyable

I really struggled with Anne and Peter Wiseman’s prose translation of Ovid’s Fasti, several times thinking I’d have to give up reading the work altogether. It was only when I switched to A.S. Kline’s online verse translation that I was able to finish wading through the often very obscure and confusing text.

By contrast Peter Green’s verse translations of the Tristia and The Letters from Pontus are a delight to read. Above all, unlike long sections of the Fasti, it’s obvious what they’re about. Whether he’s describing the long stormy journey by sea to Tomis, or sending his book back to Rome, or praising his wife for her loyalty, or castigating an old friend for abandoning him, or begging Augustus for forgiveness, or saying his frivolous love poetry didn’t deserve to bring such a harsh fate down on their author’s head – the subject matter is obvious and the development of the argument almost always easy to follow.

Peter Green’s translation

This is immensely helped by Peter Green’s fresh, zingy, accessible translation. In fact there are two very strong points about this edition. One is the translation, which has an enjoyably flexible, rolling rhythm about it. The second is Green’s notes. Wiseman’s notes for the Fasti were sensible but fairly brief, restrained, limited. By contrast Green’s notes are almost long as the texts themselves (Tristia text 103 pages, Green’s notes 90 pages).

Green is gloriously unbuttoned, chatty, opinionated, fluent, garrulous. Tristia is divided into 5 books and each book gets a page or so of introduction explaining when it was written, describing Ovid’s changing tone of voice and approach as the books progress.

Then each poem in each book gets a page introduction to itself, before we get onto notes for specific references: these introductions describe what the poem is about, how it differs from other poems or echoes or repeats certain themes, how it riffs off this or that ancient genre or trope. Green freely discusses contemporary history, Ovid’s family relationships, the climate and people of Tomis, the theories of other scholars (for example, whether the poems are arranged in careful order or are more random) and so on, in a buttonholing garrulous manner which I found immensely interesting and entertaining.

And it is all immensely helpful for understanding how the tone and approach of the books changed over the long 10 years during which they were written; at understanding the genres or rhetorical conventions of Latin poetry which they invoke, copy or modify; for understanding the complex matrix of cross references Ovid sets up between them; and, on the simplest bucket level, understanding the historical events, the real historical people or the mythical personages which the poems refer to.

Instead of a set of standalone, isolated factual explications, Green’s notes are more like one vast essay of commentary and explication. His notes are easily as interesting to read as the poems.

Book 1 (11 poems)

1.1 (128 lines)

Little book – no, I don’t begrudge it you – you’re off to the City
without me, going where your only begetter is banned!

This is the envoi to book 1 and addresses the book as a sentient being which he is sending to Rome to argue on his behalf. This was an established literary convention (used by Catullus and Horace among others) but differs from its predecessors in introducing the recurrent theme that the book will argue for forgiveness and an end to his exile.

1.2 (110 lines)

‘You gods of sea and sky’ – what’s left me now but prayer? –
‘Don’t, break up our storm-tossed ship:
don’t, I beseech you, endorse great Caesar’s fury!’

Description of the violent storms which Ovid endured on his journey by ship across the Mediterranean in December 8 AD, with some poking fun at traditional descriptions and epic conventions around describing storms at sea.

1.3 (102 lines)

Nagging reminders: the black ghost-melancholy vision
of my final night in Rome,
the night I abandoned so much I dearly treasured,
to think of it, even now, starts tears…

Ovid paints the scene of his departure from Rome, the weeping and wailing of his servants and family, especially his (third) wife. With typical irony (and mocking epic convention) he compares himself briefly to Aeneas leaving Troy. More to the point he emphasises that his error was a mistake and not a deliberate crime.

1.4 (28 lines)

Dipped now in Ocean, the She-Bear’s stellar guardian
is stirring up stormy seas: yet here am I
constrained, not by my will, to plough the Adriatic…

Another description of his stormy journey, notable for the description of the figurehead of Minerva at the prow of the ship (Roman and Greek vessels carried painted figureheads of gods, to whom the crew prayed if they got into trouble).

1.5 (84 lines)

Friend, henceforth be reckoned the foremost among my comrades,
who, above all others, made your fate your own,
who first, I recall, when the bolt struck, dared to support me
with words of comfort…

Ovid praises the handful of friends who stuck by him when most of his fairweather friends bolted as soon as Augustus’s wrath struck his home. This passage, and Ovid’s plight generally, remind me much of Oscar Wilde’s sudden, fateful reversal of fortune, from talk of the town to almost complete abandonment by all but a handful of real friends:

Before my house’s downfall
visitors thronged the place, I was à la mode
if not ambitious. The first tremor sent them running…

In the second half of the poem Ovid wittily but bitterly compares himself to Ulysses who made a long and painful journey by sea, but the poet uses the extended comparison to bring out obvious differences, namely that Ulysses was a rough tough warrior, whereas Ovid is a sensitive poet unused to rough conditions; and that Ulysses was heading home to his loving wife and family whereas Ovid is heading away from everything that he loves.

1.6 (36 lines)

Not so dear was Lyde to the Clarian poet, not so truly
loved was Bittis by her singer from Cos
as you are deeply entwined, wife, in my heart…

In praise of his wife’s loyalty, including the (repeated so often as to become hackneyed) comparison with Ulysses’ loyal wife, Penelope. It ends with another theme which was to be repeated scores of times, the notion that his exile has killed off his former self, old Ovid is dead, and the old poetic exuberance borne of his high-flying social life is extinguished – but still the old dead suffering ex-poet can still squeeze out a few last lines:

Alas, my verses possess but scanty strength, your virtues
are more than my tongue can proclaim,
and the spark of creative vigour I once commanded
is extinct, killed off by my long
misfortunes. Yet in so far as our words of praise have power
you shall live through these verses for all time.

1.7 (40 lines)

Reader, if you possess a bust made in my likeness,
strip off the Bacchic ivy from its locks!
Such signs of felicity belong to fortunate poets:
on my temples a wreath is out of place.

A poem to a friend who’s stuck by Ovid, but which is really about the condition of the works Ovid leaves behind him in Rome. The poem claims that Ovid threw his copy of the Metamorphoses into the fire, and that it was unfinished, had yet to have a final revision:

…because the poem was still unfinished, still
in rough draft… it lacks my final hand:
a job snatched from me half-done, while still on the anvil,
a draft minus the last touch of the file.

1.8 (50 lines)

A poem of bitter reproach to an old friend who dumped him when trouble struck, scholars identify as the poem Macer, related to Ovid’s third wife, with whom he travelled through Greece and Asia Minor when he was a student. The poem opens with the rhetorical trope called adynaton meaning ‘impossibility’, similar to the modern saying ‘when hell freezes over’.

Back from the sea now, back to their sources shall deep rivers
flow, and the Sun, wheeling his steeds about,
run backward; earth shall bear stars, the plough cleave heaven,
fire shall give forth water, and water flames,
all things shall move contrary to the laws of nature,
no element in the world shall keep its path,
all that I swore impossible will happen now: there’s nothing left
that I can’t believe. This I prophesy after my betrayal by that person
who, I’d believed, would aid me in my distress…

1.9 (66 lines)

Reader, should you peruse this work without malice, may you
cross life’s finishing-line without a spill!

A poem to a faithful friend, notable for reminding friends who hesitate to support him that Augustus has demonstrated a capacity for clemency and respects those who stay loyal to friends and cause, even if they opposed him. Ovid says he wishes now he had never taken up the wretched art of poetry, seeing as where it’s led him. And repeats other recurring tropes: that the cynical amorality of the Ars Amatoria had nothing to do with his own private life which was chaste and faithful; and that it was a joke, a joke for God’s sake.

1.10 (50 lines)

I have (may I always keep!) blonde Minerva’s protection: my vessel
bears her painted casque, borrows her name.

In contrast to the earlier poems about storms at sea, this is a poem in praise of the good ship Minerva which brought him to a harbour in eastern Greece where they docked, Ovid unloaded and continued his journey by land, but the second half of the poem is an envisioning of the voyage back the ship will take, studded with famous placenames and historical references and calling down blessings on the good ship Minerva.

1.11 (44 lines)

Every word you’ve read in this whole book was written
during the anxious days
of my journey: scribbling lines in mid-Adriatic
while December froze the blood…

A poem highlighting the contrast between the lazy peaceful couch on which he composed his great works back in Rome, and the storm-tossed ship on which he tried to write poems on the blustery, brine-drenched journey East.

If these lines fall short – as they do –
of your hope: they were not written, as formerly, in my garden,
while I lounged on a favourite day-bed, but at sea,
in wintry light, rough-tossed by filthy weather, spindrift
spattering the paper as I write.

Book 2 (578 lines)

Book 2 stands out because instead of a set of 10 or so shorter poems it is one longer poem of 578 lines. Green cites earlier scholars who consider the poem a suasoria, meaning:

Suasoria is an exercise in rhetoric: a form of declamation in which the student makes a speech which is the soliloquy of an historical figure debating how to proceed at a critical junction in his life. (Wikipedia)

Or maybe a legal argument, to be presented in court. It consists of:

the exordium – attempt to placate the judge (Augustus) (lines 1 to 26)
the propositio – outlining the speaker’s aim (27 to 28)
the tractatio – the handling or treatment in which the case is unfolded at length (29 to 578); this can be sub-divided into:
1. probatio or proof of evidence (29 to 154)
2. epilogus 1 or first conclusion, entering a plea for mitigation of sentence
3. refutatio or rebuttal of the charge (Ovid argues that his poetry never corrupted anyone because to the pure all things are pure and to the corrupt, anything is corrupt) (207 to 572)
4. epilogus 2 or second conclusion, again calling for clemency

In other words, even more than

Book 3 (15 poems)

These poems were composed in 9 to 10 AD. The first excitement of the journey into exile, undertaken in December 8 AD and vividly described in book 1, is over. He has spent one winter in Tomis and now knows the role freezing bitter cold is going to play in his life. And it is dawning on him that this exile isn’t for a year or so, isn’t a game which will come to an end – but is the bitter condition for the rest of his days.

3.1 (82 lines)

‘I’m an exile’s book. He sent me. I’m tired. I feel trepidation
approaching his city – kind reader, lend a hand.’

Book 3 poem 1 repeats the conceit of book 1 poem 1 in conceiving the book as envoy except that whereas in book 1 Ovid had been outside the book, sending it as the author, this poem speaks in the voice of the book itself. This allows the book itself to find its way through Rome in order to seek out readers, a library to stay in, and the palace of the great Augustus (who, for the umpteenth time, Ovid begs for forgiveness). In so doing, the poem provides an interesting and historically useful guide to the layout of the Rome of his day. He is as conscious as ever of the role the Ars Amoria plays in his personal disaster, something so well known that he has his book tell anyone encountering not to fear:

‘Have no fear: I won’t turn out an embarrassment to you:
no instructions about love, not one page,
not a syllable. So bleak my master’s misfortunes, he shouldn’t
try to camouflage them with light verse,
though that sport of his green years, that frivolous disaster
he now – too late, alas! – detests and condemns.
See what I bring you’ll find nothing here but lamentation,
verse matching its circumstances…’

The book’s tour of Rome, appropriately, at Asinius Pollio’s library

3.2 (30 lines)

So it was my destiny to travel as far as Scythia,
that land lying below the Northern pole,
and neither you, Muses, not you, Leto’s son Apollo,
cultured crowd though you are, gave any help
to your own priest…

Ovid makes the theme clear: he is a soft poet, not used to a hard life (‘an escapist, born for leisured comfort’), his erotic poetry was a joke, a pose, he was never a libertine in real life (‘my poetry’s more wanton than my life’). But now all that’s dead and gone.

The journey to Tomis was so stormy and colourful it helped to distract him from the misery of exile, even inspired him a bit. But now the hard fact of exile has hit him and his existence has settled into a monotonous drudge – it’s cold, it’s boring and it’s dangerous. Now ‘weeping is my only pleasure’. Now he yearns for death.

In the poem he knocks at the door of his own sepulchre door, which he finds stubbornly shut against him. (Green makes the typically illuminating comment that this is an inversion of the trope of the paraclausithyron, the image of the poet keeping watch morosely outside the locked door of his beloved, well established in the elegiac tradition and which Ovid had himself used in the Amores.

3.3 (88 lines)

If perhaps you’re wondering why this letter’s drafted
by another’s hand, I’ve been, am, sick,
sick, and at the unmapped world’s remotest limits,
scarce certain of my survival.

Ovid is ill and depressed. He lists the tribulations of exile: cold climate, impure water, depressing landscape, no proper housing, bad diet, no doctors to treat his illness, no friends’ conversation to distract him. He addresses his wife, swearing she’s the only woman he thinks about, he said her name during the delirium of his illness. He imagines his death. He writes his own epitaph.

3.4A (lines 1 to 46)

Ah friend, my dear care as always, though in harsh circumstances
first truly assayed, after my world’s collapse,
if you’ve any respect for the lessons experience has taught me,
live for yourself, keep far from all great names…

A poem to an unnamed friend, advising him to live a discrete, retired life, not to make grand acquaintances, not to fly too high lest, like poor Ovid, he be blasted by Jove’s thunderbolt. (The comparisons of Augustus with Jupiter, and the decision to exile Ovid falling on him like the god’s thunderbolt, appear in virtually all the poems, quickly becoming a part of their standardised litany of complaint.) He warns his friend to:

Live without rousing envy, enjoy years of undistinguished
ease and delight…

3.4B (lines 47 to 78)

A region that neighbours the polar constellations
imprisons me now, land seared by crimping frost…

The poem begins by lamenting the frozen waste he finds himself in, such that Rome and its familiar landscapes now linger on only in his memory. Next to them, his wife, whose image haunts him. And then his loyal friends. He asks them not to forget him, to do what they can to lend a hand to his cause.

3.5 (56 lines)

Our friendship was new and slight: you could have denied it
without any trouble. (You’d have not, I think,
embraced me more closely had my vessel been driven
on by a favouring wind.)

While some of his old friends have abandoned him, the (unnamed) addressee of this poem stuck by him despite being a new acquaintance. Ovid thanks and praises him, then asks that he use his eloquence to argue his cause before the emperor.

Again and again and again Ovid insists he did no wrong, he merely witnessed something and failed to report it: he committed no crime except simply having eyes. Here there’s one of the longest passages describing this, 10 lines of exculpation, emphasising that he committed an error but – as he repeats just as often – shying away from explaining the nature of this ‘error’. God, I can see why it’s driven 2,000 years of scholars mad with frustration.

3.6 (38 lines)

The bond of friendship between us, carissimo, you neither
wish to dissimulate, nor could if you so wished…

To his best friend, praising his loyalty, saying he’s shared everything with him – except the nature of the ‘offence’ which got him banished. If he’d shared it, his friend would have joined him in exile, indicating what a toxically powerful secret it must have been.

He repeats the claim that he, Ovid, didn’t do anything, merely witnessed something – so that it’s his eyes which are to blame. He says that even to hint at his crime would be ‘great risk’. He says it is better buried in deepest night. He asks his friend to help and intercede on his behalf with angry Jupiter.

3.7 (54 lines)

Go quickly, scribbled letter, my loyal mouthpiece,
and greet Perilla for me. Her you’ll find
either sitting in the company of her sweet mother
or among her books and poems…

A sweet and touching poem to his step-daughter, Perilla (his wife’s daughter by an earlier husband), now a young woman. Surprisingly, it turns out that she is a poet too, her talent spotted and nurtured by her dad. They often read their poems to each other. He praises her and tells her, if she’s worried about his fate, that she’ll be fine so long as she doesn’t set out to teach anyone about love (Ovid’s writing of The Art of Love having been given out as the official reason for his banishment).

It ends with a triumphant assertion of the supremacy and triumph of art. Age may wither her, the emperor’s punishment has blasted him – everything can be taken from them, and yet:

There’s nothing we own that isn’t mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind.
Look at me – I’ve lost my home, the two of you, my country,
they’ve stripped me of all they could take,
yet my talent remains my joy, my constant companion:
over this, Caesar could have no rights…

Caesar will die, yet so long as Rome exists, Ovid will be read. It must have been an optimistic claim, made to keep his spirits up and yet, 2,000 years later, amazingly… it’s true!

3.8 (42 lines)

Now I wish I were high aloft in the car of Triptolemus
who flung the untried seed on virgin soil…

He wishes for the paraphernalia of various mythological figures so he can fly back to Rome, then pulls himself up short. Fool! Instead of old legends he should be petitioning the real Augustus in the here and now. If not to end his exile at least to move him somewhere else. The wretched climate, the lack of all amenities and civilised companionship is sapping his spirit, making him ill. God, why didn’t Augustus just kill him outright and be done with it?

3.9 (34 lines)

Here too, then, there are – who would credit it? – Greek cities
among the wild place-names of barbary: here too
colonists, sent out from Miletus, founded Greek outposts
on Getic soil…

An aetiological poem i.e. one which explains a modern custom, practice or place name in terms of a myth or legend. In this case Ovid derives the name of his exile town, Tomis, from the old story that the witch Medea, having fled her homeland, saw the sail of the ship of her father, Aeëtes, approaching and, in panic, conceived a plan to delay him so she could make a getaway. The plan? To rip to shreds her brother and scatter his body parts about the shore, thus forcing her father to collect them together for a proper funeral pyre. In Latin the (false) etymology relates tomé, a noun meaning the act of chopping up, with Tomis.

Green’s notes tell us that a) aetiological poems were a speciality of the Hellenistic poet, Callimachus (305 to 240 BC) and b) Roman aetiological poems almost always get the etymology and derivation of words wrong. Odd that we, 2,000 years later, know more about their customs and, especially their language, than they did.

3.10 (78 lines)

If anyone there still remembers exiled Ovid, if my
name survives in the City now I’m gone,
let him know that beneath those stars that never dip in Ocean
I live now in mid-barbary, hemmed about
by wild Sarmatians, Bessi, Getae, names unworthy
of my talent!

A long vivid poem giving a rare description of what Tomis was actually like, or the landscape around it. To be precise Ovid focuses on the bitter freezing winter weather and the way the many mouths of the river Danube which enter the Black Sea close to the town freeze over. Not only that but the sea itself freezes: he knows, he’s walked on frozen waves.

But it’s worse, it’s not just that it’s cold: normally the river acts as a barrier against barbarian tribes but when it freezes they can ride over it and raid nearby villages. Some peasants flee, leaving their farms and possessions to be looted by the raiders. Some are shackled and led off to slavery. Some die in agony because the raider’s sharp arrowheads are dipped in poison. What they can’t steal, the barbarians burn to the ground.

3.11 (74 lines)

Whoever you are, vile man, who scoff at my misfortunes,
and with bloody zeal fling charges at me – you
were born from the rocks, by wild beasts’ udders nurtured
with flints, I’ll swear, in your breast…

A bitter recrimination against some (unnamed) enemy who is bad mouthing and savaging his character back in Rome. Why make a miserable man more miserable? Ovid laments the coldness, the isolation, he can’t speak the natives’ language, he suffered cruelly on the journey out, now he lives in terror of the violent tribesmen. O vile calumniator, why hit an unfortunate man when he’s down?

3.12 (54 lines)

West winds now ease the cold: at the year’s closure
a longer-than-ever winter must yield at last,
while the Ram (that bore Helle – and dropped her) now equalises
the hours of darkness and light…

March 10 AD. The first half of the poem is a vivid celebration of the sights and sounds of spring back in Rome and the Italian countryside, spring flowers, children playing in the fields, men exercising, the roar of crowds at the theatre.

Then the volta or ‘turn’ to contrast his sad isolated existence. For Ovid Spring means the very slow thaw of the ice, some water runs a bit free in the cistern. Wine left outside no longer freezes solid in the bottle. The Danube flows again and the Black Sea becomes navigable and so, once in a blue moon, a ship may arrive from Rome and Ovid will avidly question the captain for even the slightest scraps of gossip which can, for a moment, revive his link to his long-lost homeland.

3.13 (28 lines)

My birthday god’s here again, on time – and superfluous:
what good did I get from being born?
Cruel spirit, why come to increase this wretch’s years of exile?
You should rather have cut them short…

The Greeks considered the genethliakon or ‘birthday poem’ a genre in its own right, with its own rules and stock imagery. It’s here to mark Ovid’s birthday. He was born on 20 March 43 BC so, if this poem was written in 10 AD, he was 53.

But Ovid deliberately reverses all the conventions of the birthday poem. For example, he curses the birth god (the natalis) who oversaw his birth. It would have been more merciful to have let him die as a baby, or never be born at all, rather than endure this misery. Instead of the customary toga and ritual thanksgivings on his birthday, he’d prefer an altar of death.

3.14 (52 lines)

Patron and reverend guardian of men of letters, you always
befriended my talent – but what’s your attitude now?
In the days before my downfall you used to promote me –
and today?

Scholars consider the addressee of this poem to have been Caius Julius Hyginus, director of the Palatine library, patron of young poets, and a close friend in the old days back in Rome. The poem echoes the themes of books and libraries announced in poem 3.1, in other words they form bookends ti the volume.

Ovid hopes Hyginus is still supportive of his work. Books are like children, they can remain behind in the city even when the father is exiled. Ovid refers to the fact that his erotic poems (The Art of Live, The Cure For Love) have been banned and removed from all libraries, but hopes the others are read.

Interestingly, he is at pains to emphasise that the Metamorphoses was left unfinished (a claim which consciously or unconsciously compares him with Virgil’s famously unfinished masterpiece, the Aeneid).

Then he turns to the present book, ‘a missive from the world’s end’, and asks Hyginus to be indulgent and remember the context of its writing: Ovid fears his talent has withered, he has forgotten his Latin, here in a place surrounded by barbarian tongues and threatened every day with violent attack, he worries all his stylishness has been rubbed off him. Please make allowances.

Book 4 (10 poems)

4.1 (106 lines)

Whatever defects there may be – and there will be – in these poems,
hold them excused, good reader, by the times
in which they were written. An exile, I was seeking solace,
not fame…

In the envoi to book 4 Ovid asks the reader’s indulgence, and to consider the miserable exile. His only true and steadfast companion is his Muse. He tells us how slaves, chained rowers, slave girls, manual labourers, sing songs to pass the time, as did the legendary figures Orpheus and even Achilles, sulking in his tent.

And so Ovid in exile. He ought to curse the avocation which led him to write the love guide which led to his downfall, but he can’t: he’s hooked. Writing transports him away from his miserable situation, drugs him, like the potions which numbed the lotus eaters.

What is he drugging himself from? The horrible situation of living in a walled defensive town liable to attack at any moment from barbarian tribes. He describes the way the way the alarm goes and he has to buckle on a sword although he’s 60 years old! He repeats the description of the way the raiders capture, shackle and lead off to slavery local farmers, or just shoot them with poisoned arrows and leave them to die.

Once again he laments that there is no-one at all to read his poems to who will understand them let alone appreciate them. Sometimes he waters the paper with his tears. Sometimes he crunches them up and throws them in the fire. What has survived he presents in this book and craves our indulgence.

4.2 (74 lines)

Already fierce Germany, like all the world, confronted
by the Caesars, may well have bent her knee
in surrender…

He imagines the full panoply of celebrations surrounding what he assumes must be Tiberius’s victories in Germany, including the sacrifices in temples and the great public triumphant procession through Rome, all under the guiding vision of beneficent Augustus.

The poem switches to meditate on the process of imagination itself, by which he is imagining and visualising all this, for his imagination, his mind’s eye, can go where he, alas, never again can.

4.3 (84 lines)

He asks the stars of the new constellation to turn their eyes upon his wife, ‘sweetest of wives’. He hopes she is missing him. Then addresses her directly and asks a series of rhetorical questions itemising her grief (when she looks at his untouched pillow in their marital bed, does she weep?)

Yet, to be honest, he wishes he had died. Then she would have something simple and pure to weep over, instead of his agonising shame, and the fact that he lives, but forever inaccessible to her. She supported him and was so proud of his achievements, for so long. Please don’t be ashamed of him, now. Defend him. Intercede for him.

4.4 (88 lines)

O you who with your high birth and ancestral titles
in nobility of character still outshine
your clan, whose mind mirrors your father’s brilliance
while retaining a brilliance all your own…

An appeal to Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus, the eldest son of Ovid’s patron (recently deceased), Messalla Corvinus. Ovid sings Valerius’s praises but as the poem proceeds it becomes clear he never really knew the boy and is trying to curry favour because of the connection with his (now dead) father.

This leads Ovid into embarrassed contortions, and apologies, before going on to the usual litany of self-exculpation (‘it wasn’t a crime, it was an error‘) before begging Valerius to intervene with Augustus to ask for his exile to be, if not revoked, that at least he be moved somewhere better, safer from raids by barbarians, hot for blood and plunder, some of whom are cannibals.

4.5 (34 lines)

A sycophantic poem addressed to Messalinus’s younger brother, Marcus Valerius Cotta Maximus although, as with all the Tristia the addressee is not explicitly named – because Ovid knew it would do nobody any good to be associated with his disgrace, his exile, his crime. This young man was loaded and well connected. Ovid politely, discreetly, begs for his help.

Do what you safely can: rejoice in your heart that I’m mindful
of you, that you’ve been loyal to me; still bend,
as now, to your oars to bring me succour…

4.6 (50 lines)

Believe me I’m failing; to judge from my physical condition
I’d say my troubles have a scant
future remaining – I lack my old strength and colour,
there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones;
yet sick though my body is, my mind is sicker
from endless contemplation of its woes…
(lines 39 to 44)

Two winters have passed (of 9 and 10 AD) so scholars think this poem was written in 11. Ovid is tired, worn down, sick in mind and body, and has one hope left – ‘that my troubles may be soon cut short by death’.

4.7 (26 lines)

Twice has the Sun approached me after the chills of icy
winter, twice rounded his journey off
through the sign of the fish.

The sign of the Fish enters the Sun in February so scholars date this poem to 11 AD. Ovid reproaches a dear old friend (unnamed like all the addressees of these poems) for not writing to him, hoping he has written, but that the letters have got lost on the long, fraught journey to the outer reaches of the empire.

4.8 (52 lines)

Already my temples are mimicking swans’ plumage,
and hoary age bleaching my once-dark hair;
already the frail years are on me, the age of inertia,
already my infirm self fins life too hard…

He has grown old. Ships, racehorses, charioteers, old soldiers, all these get to be pensioned off – why not an old poet? Why can’t an old poet be set free from his miserable exile and allowed to return?

At my time of life I shouldn’t be breathing this alien
air, or easing my thirst at Getic wells,
but dividing my days between those peaceful country gardens
I once possessed, and the pleasures of human life,
the human round…

4.9 (32 lines)

Ovid is ferociously angry with an unnamed enemy who has been bad-mouthing the powerless poet back in Rome. Ovid calls down vengeance on him – ‘then luckless sorrow will perforce take arms’ – and promises that his angry words will travel the world and last for generations to come – as they, indeed, did.

Although
I’m sequestered on this wasteland where the northern stars circle
high and dry above my gaze, nevertheless
my clarion message will go forth to countless peoples,
my complaint shall be known world-wide;
whatever I say shall be heard, across deep waters;
my lamentation shall find a mighty voice.

4.10 (132 lines)

This is the best known of all the 100 or so exilic poems for the simple reason that it is a versified autobiography, detailing Ovid’s early life and career, his decision to choose poetry and art over a career in public service, then the inevitable story of his erotic poetry – emphasising, as always, the clear distinction between his promiscuous poetry and his respectable personal life. And then on to his notorious ‘error’ and so into exile.

He dwells on the deaths of his elder brother, which left him maimed. Later the deaths of his father then mother, and he thinks them lucky to have led long blameless lives. Maybe from Elysium they can hear him when he assures them (for the umpteenth time) that his exile was caused by an error not a crime.

When a youth the older poets were like gods to him. Old Macer read him his latest poems. Propertius and he had ‘a close-binding comradeship between us’. Horace, ‘that metrical wizard’, held them spellbound to the sound of the lyre. Virgil he only saw, never spoke to. Tibullus died young, before he could make his acquaintance. He thinks of the elegiac poets as being, in chronological order, Gallus (whose entire oeuvre is lost), Tibullus, Propertius then himself (interesting that he doesn’t mention Catullus).

He lists his three marriages, the first wife ‘worthless and useless’, the second wife died young, and now his long third marriage. His daughter makes him a grandfather. He is growing old when the thunderbolt falls, and he is sent into exile.

The cause (though too familiar to everyone) of my ruin
must not be revealed through testimony of mine.

After a long and gruelling journey (again and again he compares himself to Ulysses) he arrives in his wretched place of exile and now, his only remaining solace is writing poems, when he can. Again, he repeats the idea that everything else is lost, but his talent, his gift, and the Muse which brings it, remain.

Book 5 (15 poems)

Yet another Black Sea booklet
to add to the four I’ve already sent!

The fifth and final book of Tristria is different in tone from the previous four, more resigned, more limited in ambition, with less zest and irony. More tetchy, irritated, and desperate. Only one poem is descriptive (i.e describes Tomis). The other 13 are all addressed to specific individuals, half of them to his wife (more than in the previous four books put together) begging them all to get Augustus to revoke his exile or, at least, assign him somewhere warmer, safer and closer to Rome.

His references and analogies become increasingly repetitive. In every single poem he repeats that he did nothing wrong, he committed no bloodshed, it was a simple ‘error’, he merely witnessed something by accident, by mistake.

In every poem Augustus is compared to Jupiter (reasonably enough). Ovid repeatedly compares himself to Capaneus, one of the heroes of the war against Thebes who, as he led the attack on one of the city’s gates shouted that not even Jupiter could stop him now, so Jupiter promptly zapped him with a thunderbolt.

Or to Philoctetes, suffering from a wound which would never heal, for ten long years abandoned on the inhospitable island of Lemnos.

5.1 (80 lines)

I don’t correct these poems, let them be read as written:
they’re no more barbarous than their place of birth.

He warns his reader that this is not a book of sexy, frivolous poems as by Gallus, Tibullus or Propertius. They are grim and bleak, like his circumstances: ‘A dirge best fits a living death’.

He imagines a critical reader wondering why he’s bothering to write such depressing poems, and defends it as a form of crying out in pain, an action he then defends by giving half a dozen mythological examples of legendary figures crying out in unendurable pain.

He defends his erotic poetry against the charge of immorality by pointing out the only person who ever suffered because of it was him.

(Green makes the droll point that, alone of all the Augustan poets Ovid was singled out for immorality therefore undermining Augustus’s reforming legislation about marriage; and yet, as far as we know, Ovid was the only one of the famous poets to be married: neither Virgil (gay), Horace (promiscuous bachelor), nor Propertius were.)

5.2 (78 lines)

To his wife, increasingly desperate, sick and depressed.

It’s a barbarous land that now holds me, earth’s final outpost,
a place ringed by savage foes.

He accuses his wife of not putting herself out as she should on his behalf. Has she deserted him, like everyone else? He tells her to approach the emperor directly. If she won’t then he will and at line 45 the poem changes to a hymn of praise to Augustus. All the double-edged irony and wit which you can discern in the earlier references to Augustus has evaporated. Now he is on his knees, spouting extravagantly excessive praise and openly begging.

O glory, O image of the country that flourishes through you,
O hero to match the very sphere you rule.

He says it’s not the cold, nor the lack of culture among a people none of whom speak Latin, it’s the fear of attack by uncivilised barbarians, living in a small settlement protected only by one low wall, that he’s seen fighting at close quarters, that he lives in constant anxiety and insecurity. He begs Augustus to move him to some less terrifying place of exile.

5.3 (58 lines)

A poem celebrating Bacchus, god of wine, on his feast day, the Liberalia, 17 March (described in Ovid’s poetic version of the Roman calendar, the Fasti) then asking him to intercede with Augustus.

5.4 (50 lines)

From the Black Sea’s shore I have come, a letter of Ovid’s,
wearied by sea-travel, wearied by the road.
Weeping he told me: ‘See Rome, for you it’s not forbidden –
alas, how better far your lot than mine!’

Ovid repeats the conceit of having the poem speak in the first person as a letter, all the way from the shores of the Black Sea to the (unnamed) recipient in Rome, a letter able to go where he, alas, cannot, sealed with a signet ring wet with his tears.

But he emphasises that he accepts he was wrong, accepts punishment, like a broken horse doesn’t strain against the leash. He just wishes the great god who punished him will show mercy.

The letter rehearses Ovid’s grievances and bitter experiences before going on to describe the addressee as his best friend, remembering how he stuck by him when almost everyone else abandoned him, how he visited Ovid and wept and tried to console him for his sad fate.

5.5 (64 lines)

A poem to his wife. It’s her birthday so he describes going through the rituals to celebrate a birthday, namely wearing a white toga, building an altar from turf, hanging a woven wreath, lighting a fire and sprinkling wine and incense on it. He sends her a fleet of good wishes, may she have a long untroubled life. He says she has a strength of character to match Penelope or Andromache, she is a paragon of ‘uprightness, chastity, faithfulness’.

He introduces a series of classical comparisons with the thought that all those famous women from antiquity were famous because of their husband’s suffering and their loyalty – Andromache, Penelope, Evadne (wife of the recurring figure of Capaneus, blasted by Jupiter), Alcestis, Laodamia.

But she doesn’t deserve to be famous for her husband’s suffering and her share of it, and so the poem ends with a plea to Augustus to forgive him, for his wife’s sake if not his own.

5.6 (46 lines)

Poem to an unnamed friend. Ovid recriminates the friend for dropping him, now he’s in trouble, now he’s become a ‘burden’. Ovid compares him unfavourably to a raft of mythological figures famous for their loyalty. For the umpteenth time he invokes a familiar set of similes to indicate the sheer number of woes he suffers, as numerous as reeds which soak sodden ditches, or bees on Mount Hybla (famous for its honey), or ants carrying grains to their nest, or grains of sand on the seashore, or ears of wheat in a field.

5.7A (lines 1 to 24)

A short letter to an unnamed friend in which he describes himself as wretchedly miserable and gives a rare description of the native inhabitants, great hordes of tribal nomads, Sarmatians, Getae, hogging the road on their horses, each bearing a bow and quiver full of poisoned arrows, fierce faces, harsh voices, shaggy hair and beards, quick to argue and stab each other with the knives in their belts.

These are the people Ovid lives among, the elegant esteem he won for his light love verses back in Rome long, long forgotten and irrelevant in this harsh environment and violent, illiterate society.

5.7B (lines 25 to 68)

Some scholars divide the poem in two, because this second half switches from describing the grim natives of Tomis and whirls us back to Rome where he hears that his poems are now recited and applauded on the stage (the translator, Peter Green, speculates that this is for the pantomimi where an actor declaimed verses while dancers danced; sounds like ballet).

He curses his poetry which got him into such trouble, and yet he has nothing else. Here in this windswept waste amid violent, illiterate tribals, writing poetry is the only consolation he has, the only last slender link with distant Rome and his former life.

Then about language: not a single person in Tomis speaks Latin, none. Some speak a very debased form of Greek, legacy of when the town was founded centuries ago by Greeks. But most speak only the local tribal tongues. When he talks to anyone it is in pidgen-Sarmatian. He worries not only that he’s lost his style, in the absence of Latin speakers to listen to and comment on his poems – he worries that he’s forgetting Latin. And so he spends his time conversing with himself and doing writing exercises and writing these poems, holding at bay the collapse of his language skills and talent.

Thus I drag out my life and time, thus
tear my mind from the contemplation of my woes.
Through writing I seek an anodyne to misery: if my studies
win me such a reward, that is enough.

5.8 (38 lines)

Angry poem to an unnamed person who has been spreading malicious lies about him, a ‘vile wretch’ than whom no-one is lower. Once again Ovid curses this person, then emphasises the non-criminal nature of his error, praises the emperor’s clemency (hoping against hope), and hopes for the end of his exile and recall.

The early part of the poem is an interesting invocation of the goddess Fortune, whose wheel is always turning, and Nemesis, ‘hot for revenge’. Ovid says he has certainly been brought from the pinnacle of fame to miserable exile, but what makes his unnamed critic so confident the same thing won’t happen to him?

For Ovid hopes that Augustus will apply his mercy and recall him, at which point the critic will be amazed to see his face, one day, in Rome and then Ovid knows things which will secure that his critic is sent into exile!

5.9 (38 lines)

A poem to a friend who stayed loyal, Ovid claims more or less the only friend who stayed loyal and so he wishes he could a) name him (but that is forbidden for the friend’s own safety), b) devote every poem he ever writes in future to his friend’s praise.

The poem is factually interesting because it (unconsciously) brings to the fore the thought that whatever Ovid did (his notorious error) may actually have merited death. Therefore his relegatio already exemplified Augustus’s mercy, and that this may account for why no further mercy(i.e. relenting and letting Ovid return; even moving his place of exile to somewhere less inhospitable) may have been impossible for Augustus.

Behind all this is the most common interpretation of his fate which is that it was tied to something he saw being enacted in favour of Julia and her so-called ‘party’, meaning the aide of the extended Augustan family which wanted the succession to pass to a male on her side of the family.

Tiberius had had two sons by Julia, Augustus’s daughter – Gaius and Lucius, who died in 4 and 2 AD, respectively. Agrippa Postumus, Julia’s son by her first husband, Agrippa, had been unadopted and exiled in 7 AD. Julia herself was sent into exile in 8 AD, the same year as Ovid, ostensibly for immorality and widespread adultery, though conspiracy theorists from that day to this speculate that she was involved in some kind of plan to overthrow Augustus and replace the heir apparent with someone from her side of the family, or possibly a male contender who she married in the hypothetical secret marriage that Ovid hypothetically witnessed or knew about but didn’t report.

Both the Roman historians, Cassius Dio and Suetonius refer to a series of plots in the final years of Augustus’s rule, the most serious in the spring or early summer of 8 AD. Green thinks Ovid’s error was some kind of passive involvement in one of these (note p.212).

Thus the speculation engendered by Ovid’s frustrating failure, in over 100 poems of exile, to spell out what his offence was.

If it was a secret marriage, or a vow, or some kind of ceremony binding the Julia party, this explains the unremitting opposition to Ovid of the man who emerged during these years as the (reluctant) heir apparent, Tiberius, and of his scheming mother, Augustus’s second wife, Livia.

If Ovid’s error had somehow proved him sympathetic to the Julia party then not only was this the reason for his relegatio but explains why Livia made quite sure that Augustus, even if he contemplated mercy, never enacted it. And that when Tiberius came to power in 14 AD, Ovid stood no chance.

It explains why Ovid never mentions Tiberius in any of the 100 exile poems, but does mention Germanicus and Drusus, heirs in the Julian line. (Indeed, in exile Ovid reworked the first book of the unfinished Fasti to introduce a new dedication to Germanicus, Tiberius’s nephew, who Augustus had forced him to adopt in 4 AD – presumably in the hope that he would intercede with Augustus.)

It explains something which comes over in the notes – though not explicitly in the poems – which is that his friends back in Rome, in varying degrees, saw the way the wind was blowing, saw that Tiberius’s rise to power was becoming unstoppable, and so shifted allegiance to the coming man.

For all his contacts back in Rome, then, defending Ovid not only risked angering the old and visibly ailing emperor Augustus, but alienating the new master.

5.10 (52 lines)

Ovid tells his addressee he’s been in Tomis for 3 winters, watching the Danube freeze over. He ponders time: has time in general slowed down or is it only for him? In which case, is time subjective? (Well, the experience of it obviously is).

Once again he laments his location and, above all, the endless threat from marauding tribes whose only language is rape and pillage and the feeble defences (a good defensive site and a low wall) which is all that stands between Tomis and violent death. Their poisoned arrows litter the streets. Farmers dare not farm for they will be raided at any moment. Over half the population of the town are tribals, their chest-length hair, their shaggy bears, their trousers, fill him with loathing.

He knows that the townspeople regard him as the outsider, the oddity, with his soft hands and strange foreign language. Here he is the barbarian. OK, he admits, maybe it was right for him to be exiled…but to a place like this? It is cruel.

5.11 (30 lines)

The poem starts out feeling terribly sorry for his wife who, he’s learned, has been called ‘the wife of an exile’ as a deliberate insult. He grieves at the shame he’s brought upon her and tells her to be steadfast.

Then he switches, for the umpteenth time, to consider his fate. He does this to try and console his wife by making a fine legal distinction, namely that the emperor could have had him a) executed or b) fully exiled (deportatio), deprived of all rights and Roman citizenship. Instead Ovid was c) given the milder punishment of relegatio and so has retained life and estates and civil rights; to that extent, the emperor showed clemency, a punishment fitting his error, not a crime. To that extent the bastard who called his wife ‘the wife of an exile’ was wrong. So there! Little comfort, the modern reader might feel, to his lonely, distant wife.

Then in a move which feels pitifully grovelling, Ovid turns to praising the emperor, claiming his decision was just and mild, and that is why he devotes his poems to praising him:

Rightly then, Caesar, and to the very best of their powers
my poems (such as they are) proclaim your praise…

But if the interpretation that Ovid had seen something (as he repeatedly says, he didn’t do anything, his error was simply to witness, to see something) which somehow linked him with the Julia party, implicated him in a secret marriage or plan or collaboration which, in effect, was a conspiracy against the emperor and his chosen successor, Tiberius – if this was the case then it’s sadly obvious to the reader that absolutely no amount of grovellingly sycophantic hymns to Augustus would ever change Ovid’s plight. And they didn’t

5.12 (68 lines)

Reply to a friend who appears to have told him to buck up and write poems. Ovid sullenly replies there are two kinds of poems, the best ones, the real ones, require happiness and peace of mind to emerge, as inspiration (a commonplace of Roman poetry also mentioned by Horace, Tacitus, Juvenal among others). Here, in the grim outback, surrounded by barbarian tribesmen, the best he can do is squeeze out these exile elegies which are, in reality, mere vehicles for his complaints and grievances.

As to cheering up, should Priam have had fun fresh from his son’s funeral, should Niobe have held a party after all her children were killed?

Chief among the Forces undermining the peace of mind needed for composition are fear, constant fear of attack and violent death. Beside, long rusting has eaten away his talent. He is a field that’s been long unploughed and returned to stones and weeds. He is a rowboat kept out of the water that has cracked and rotting. So that explains the poor quality of the poems he now sends to Rome, such as this one itself.

Finally, a young poet is fired by ambition for renown, to be famous, numbered among the immortals. Now all that has soured to nothing. Now he wishes to be unknown, never to have been famous. His poems got him into this mess. He bitterly blames the Muses for ever inspiring him.

No-one in his remote outpost, a place of savage jabber and animal outcry’, even understands Latin, let alone the wonderful refinements and tricks he brought to it. Lastly, he admits his inspiration does still drive him to write – but he still has his standards and most of it ends up in the fire. Only ‘scraps of my efforts’, such as this very poem, survive because they have a practical purpose.

[What, 2,000 years of fans and scholars have wondered, were those poems he consigned to the flames about and how good were they? Unless this is another trope, developed solely for literary purposes, to illustrate his feelings of disgust and failure, just as he claims to have consigned his own draft of the Metamorphoses to the flames in 1.7. (note p.214)]

5.13 (34 lines)

Of all the Tristia poems this one is most like a letter in format, starting with the standard salutation (‘Good health and greetings from Ovid in his outback’) ending with the standard ‘Farewell’. In between the short poem addresses a loyal friend, possessed of ‘oak-touch loyalty’, complaining that:

he’s sick, the mental illness has penetrated his body, to give him a searing pain in his side (Green and scholars suspect pleurisy, triggered by the freezing climate)
this friend doesn’t send him enough letters to alleviate his bleak isolation

Ovid hopes the friend has not forgotten him, it’s merely the errancy of the postal service not delivering the letters. He remembers their many happy conversations, talking late into the night. Now letters between them can recreate that intimacy and intelligence. Please write.

5.14 (46 lines)

The final poem in the volume is to his wife, ‘dearer to me than myself’. It’s odd because it defines her, praises her, for sharing his suffering; it is this, her role as wife to a famous poet and tragic figure, which will make her immortal, just like Penelope, Andromache and Alcestis, Evadne and Laodameia.

To be good when there are no tribulations is easy; but to be faithful, as she has been, after the wreck of a god’s thunderbolts, ‘that is true married love/that’s loyalty indeed.’

He praises her continually and now – the poem veers in subject matter – wants her to return his devotion by appealing on his behalf. It is a sincere love poem, and that he ends the entire book with it is moving – even though a modern critic, particularly feminist, may find it objectionable, the extent to which he defines his wife solely in relationship to him. But then, he was in a dire situation.

Terms of rhetoric

Green is chatty, loquacious, garrulous, sprinkling his introductions and notes with foreign phrases (not just Latin – French and the like), references to modern poets (T.S Eliot crops up a lot [pages 217, 220, 224], so we can deduce he is an influence on Green’s translating style) and mention of ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical devices. These always interest me but I have a terrible memory for them. So here’s an (incomplete) list:

adynaton – a figure of speech in the form of hyperbole taken to such extreme lengths as to insinuate a complete impossibility: ‘pigs will fly’ (note p.216)
apologia – a formal written defence of one’s opinions or conduct
chiasmus – (‘to shape like the letter Χ’) reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words: ‘By day the frolic, and the dance by night’
circumlocution – the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea; in ancient poetry it refers to poets’ habit of referring to people in terms of their relationships to someone else (‘the son of…’, ‘the wife of…’ etc) or to a place (‘the Phrygian hero’); this can often make ancient poetry difficult to read – it’s particularly common in Ovid’s Fasti which is why I found it such a demanding read (note p.219)
genethliakon – a poem in honour of a birthday in association with a gift or standing alone. Callim.
hysteron proteron – a figure of speech consisting of the reversal of a natural or rational order: ‘putting the cart before the horse’ (note p.218)
laudatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in praise or commendation of someone or something
propemptikon – a poem that wishes a departing friend or relative all the best for a prosperous trip overseas, such as 1.1
recusatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in which the poet says he is unable or disinclined to write the type of poem which he originally intended to, and instead writes in a different style; the Hellenistic poet Callimachus introduced the trope of saying his poetic gift was too modest to attempt great epics, so he would write frivolous love poems instead, and this trope was copied in Augustan Rome by Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid
synkrisis – the juxtaposition of people or things with the aim of comparing them: a famous exampe is the juxtaposition of the long speeches by Caesar then Cato in Sallust’s account of the Catiline conspiracy
variatio – varying a theme with digressions, examples and so on
zeugma – (note p.220) any case of parallelism and ellipsis working together so that a single word governs two or more other parts of a sentence: ‘She filed her nails and then a complaint against her boss’

Conclusion

After struggling through both the Metamorphoses and especially the Fasti, Tristia came as a welcome relief. Although a hundred pages long in the Penguin translation, it’s made up of short, discrete poems which you can pick up and read in a few minutes. You can immediately grasp what they’re about, what he’s saying, and immediately empathise with his feelings.

All this is hugely helped by Peter Green’s easy-going, demotic translations and his free approach to rhythm and metre which means you barely notice you’re reading poetry, in the best sense, meaning each poem flows smoothly, seems well phrased and expresses its meaning, conveys its purpose, easily and enjoyably. Surprisingly accessible and enjoyable.

And strongly helped by the fact that the editorial apparatus around the poems is so ample and informative. Not only the introduction to the entire volume, but the extremely useful introductions to each individual poem accompanied by useful notes, but also a long Glossary of named individuals and places. Altogether it makes for a full and thorough and rich and informative experience. Other translations are available, but this is one of the best, most compendious, most enjoyable volumes of Roman literature that I’ve read.

Credit

Peter Green’s translation of Tristia by Ovid was published by Penguin books in 1994. All references are to this 1994 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on November 30, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation

Tagged A.S. Kline, adultery, adynaton, Aeëtes, Aeneas, aetiological poem, Agrippa, Agrippa Postumus, Alcestis, Amores, Ancient Greek, ancient literature, ancient poetry, ancient Rome, Andromache, Anne and Peter Wiseman, Apollo, apologia, apotheosis, Ars Amoris, Asinius Pollio, Augustan Rome, Bacchus, banishment, barbarians, Bessi, birthday poem, Bittis, Black Sea, Caesar, Caius Julius Hyginus, Callimachus, Capaneus, Cassius Dio, Castiglione, Catiline Conspiracy, Cato, Catullus, chiasmus, circumlocution, Constanca, Cos, deportatio, Drusus, ellipsis, Emperor Augustus, envoi, epilogus, Epistulae ex Ponto, epitaph, erotic poetry, error, etymology, Evadne, exculpation, exile, exordium, fasti, Friendship, funeral pyre, Gaius, Gallus, genethliacon, Germanicus, Germany, Getae, Greek mythology, Helle, Horace, hyperbole, hysteron proteron, Jove, Julia the Elder, Julius Caesar, Jupiter, Juvenal, Laodameia, Laodamia. Mount Hybla, Latin, Latin literature, laudation, Lemnos, Leto, Letters from Pontus, Letters from the Black Sea, Livia, Lucius, Lyde, Macer, Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus, Marcus Valerius Cotta Maximus, Medea, Messalla Corvinus, Metamorphoses, metre, Miletus, Minerva, Moesia, Muses, natalis, Ovid, Palatine library, pantomimi, paraclausithyron, parallelism, Penelope, Penguin books, Perilla, Peter Green, Philoctetes, pickup artist, Plato, pleading, poems, poetry, Politics, probation, propemptikon, Propertius, propositio, Publius Ovidius Naso, recusation, refutation, relegatio, relegation, rhetoric, River Danube, Roman calendar, Romania, Rome, Sallust, Sarmatians, Scythia, suasoria, Suetonius, synkrisis, T.S. Eliot, Tacitus, the Aeneid, The Art of Love, the Black sea, the Fasti, the Getae, the Heroides, the Liberalia, The Poems of Exile, Thebes, Tiberius, Tibullus, Tinder, Tomis, tractatio, Translation, Triptolemus, Tristia, Troy, Ulysses, variation, verse, zeugma

Posted by Simon on November 30, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/30/tristia-ovid/

Fasti by Ovid

I’ll speak of divisions of time throughout the Roman year,
Their origins, and the stars that set beneath the earth and rise.
(Book 1, opening lines in the A.S. Kline verse translation)

Times and their reasons, arranged in order through the Latin year, and constellations sunk beneath the earth and risen, I shall sing.
(Anne and Peter Wiseman’s prose translation)

The word ‘fasti’

The Roman poet, Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō, generally known simply as Ovid was half-way through writing the Fasti when, in 8 AD, he was abruptly sent into exile. The Fasti was intended to be a longish poem about the Roman calendar. This is more colourful than it sounds because the Roman calendar was packed with feast days and festivals and anniversaries of great battles or constitutional landmarks, plus the dies comitiales or dates assigned for the numerous elections to the various magistracies. All of these elements had customs and traditions and legends associated with them and it was these that Ovid set out to investigate and set down in chronological order.

Astrology

Not forgetting the signs of the Zodiac. Speaking of venerable experts on astrology, Ovid says:

Following these masters I too will measure out the skies,
And attribute the wheeling signs to their proper dates.

The Romans took study of the stars very seriously. The stars themselves were arranged in constellations thought to depict various gods and heroes and monsters who had been immortalised in the sky, so you have a whole set of stories to tell right there. And the stars were also meant to exert a concealed influence on human affairs, and understanding how this worked was a special science known only to soothsayers and priests. More stories and explanations.

Unfortunately, the most striking thing about the astrological references is that they made no sense to me whatsoever. They were the most notable among many aspects of the poem which were obscure or downright incomprehensible. Thus, the entry for 23 January reads:

When the seventh rising sun from here has plunged himself into the waves, there will now be no Lyre shining anywhere in the sky. On the night coming after this star, the fire that gleams in the middle of Lion‘s chest will have been submerged. (p.17)

What’s odd is that, although the Oxford University Press (OUP) edition I set out to read (translation by Ann and Peter Wiseman) is festooned with notes, there are no notes to explain this little passage. The OUP edition has an impressively long Index of Names, from which I learn that the Lyre and the Lion are constellations, which I think I could have worked out for myself – but nothing explaining what this passage refers to, in astrological or mythological terms. It’s an odd omission and the same goes for all the other astrological passages – meaning they all remained obscure and enigmatic to me from start to finish.

The words ‘fasti’ and ‘calendar’

Originally the word ‘fasti’ meant something like legitimate or legal. Rome’s college of priests declared some days legitimate to do business (dies fasti) and other days not legitimate (dies nefasti). Slowly, by association, the word fasti came to mean list of significant or important dates.

So the poem was intended to be in 12 books, one for each month, with each month containing an introduction (and explanation of the etymology of the month’s name) before moving on to zero in on the 10 or 12 key dates in each month.

In fact the word we use, ‘calendar’, is also Latin, from kalendae, the plural of kalends. This word referred to the first day of the Roman month when debts fell due and accounts were reckoned. Kalends itself derived from the Latin verb calare meaning ‘to announce solemnly, to call out’, as the Roman priests did when they proclaimed the new moon that marked the kalends.

In Rome new moons were not calculated mathematically but observed by the priests from the Capitol. When they saw it, they would ‘declare’ the number of days till the nones (five or seven, depending on the month; the Romans didn’t number the days of the month like we do, but defined days as a certain number of days before or after key days in each month, namely the nones – 5 or 7 days into the new months – and the ides – 15 days in i.e. the middle of the month). To be more precise:

Ides – the 13th day of the month except in March, May, July and October, when the ides fell on the 15th.

Nones – nine days before the ides and so the fifth day of the month, except in March, May, July and October when it was the 7th.

Like so much Roman culture, the word calendae was directly incorporated into the early Church which replaced the pagan gods’ name days and feast days with their Christian equivalents. ‘Calendar’ kept its meaning of a list of significant days throughout the Middle Ages and only came to be regarded as an entirely neutral list of all the dates in a month and year, relatively recently.

Stories

Ovid set out to work through the year in chronological order, a book per month, stopping at significant days to explain anything interesting about them: a religious festival, name date of a god, association with this or that mythical story, and so on.

Looked at one way, this format was a peg or pretext or theme on which to hang a lot of popular stores, rather as physical transformation was the theme by which he organised the vast compendium of myths and legends in the Metamorphoses. Thus each of the books contains summaries of well-known legends or historical stories, often to explain place names within Rome itself, the names of altars or temples, or, more widely, famous stories about Rome’s founding era.

There is, inevitably, a lot about the legendary founder Romulus, and Ovid loses no opportunity to associate the emperor Augustus with him, generally pointing out how the current princeps outdoes and excels the founder.

Romulus you will give way. This man makes your walls great by defending them. You had given them to Remus to leap across. Tatius and little Cures and Caenina were aware of you; under this man’s leadership both sides of the sun are Roman. You had some small area of conquered ground; whatever there is beneath high Jupiter, Caesar has. You snatched wives; this man bids them be chaste under his leadership. You receive guilt in your grove; he has repelled it. To you violence was welcome; under Caesar the laws flourish. You had the name of master; he has the name of princeps. Remus accuses you; he has given pardon to enemies. Your father made you a god; he made his father one. (2. 1333 to 144)

I love you Augustus.

Ovid’s research

Ovid frequently and candidly shares with us the difficulty he had establishing this or that fact, rummaging through scrolls in libraries or questioning the priests. Sometimes drawing a blank:

Three or four times I went through the calendars that mark the dates and found no Sowing Day… (1.656)

I’ve set forth the custom: I must still tell of its origin:
But many explanations cause me doubt, and hold me back.
(4.783 to 784)

The reason for this month’s name’s also doubtful:
Choose the one you please from those I offer.
(6.1 to 2)

Elegiac couplets and poetic incapacity

The poem is in elegiac couplets i.e. the first line a hexameter, the second line a pentameter, the same metre Ovid had used for his Amores. This is because he still felt himself unable to write a Grand Epic (which would have to have been written in the epic metre i.e. continuous hexameters.) But book 2 opens with a recognition that he is infusing elegiacs, previously used for his frivolous love poems, with new seriousness:

Now for the first time, elegiacs, you are going under more ample sails. Recently, I remember, you were a minor work [i.e. the love poems of himself and his predecessors, Tibullus, Propertius et al].

I myself used you as ready assistants in love, when my early youth played with its appropriate metre. I am the same, but now I sing of sacred things and the times marked out in the calendar…

Characteristically, this passage goes on to emphasise Ovid’s personal brand of patriotism and then onto one of the many passages which appeal directly to Augustus:

This is my military service; we bear what arms we can, and our right hand is not exempt from every duty. If I don’t hurl javelins with powerful arm, or put my weight on the back of a warrior horse, or cover my head with a helmet, or belt on a sharp sword… – yet, Caesar, with zealous heart I follow up your names and advance through your titles. Be with me, then, and with gentle face look on my services just a little, if you have any respite from pacifying the enemy. (2.2 to 18)

The theme of his inadequacy as a poet to sing mighty matters recurs in every book:

My talent is inadequate. What presses me is greater than my strength. This is a day I must sing with exceptional strength. (2.125)

At the start of book 6 there’s an interesting moment when the queen of the gods, Juno addresses Ovid directly, describing him as:

‘O poet, singer of the Roman year,
Who dares to tell great things in slender measures…’

An interesting description of the anxiety he felt about the way elegiacs are a slender measure, and the notion that describing gods and heroes in them is a daring thing to do.

Mind you, if anyone questions his bona fides, Ovid is ready claim the special privilege of being a poet:

I’ve a special right to see the faces of the gods,
Being a bard, or by singing of sacred things.
(6.8)

Poets were thought of as sacred – the word for poet, vates, was also the word for prophet and seer – a belief echoed in Tibullus and Horace.

Ovid and Augustus

In 8 AD Augustus exiled his own daughter, Julia, when he discovered what a dissolute, adulterous life she was leading. Ovid had been part of her circle, a star of the bright young things, famed for his witty love poems and then for the scandalously successful Art of Love (published around 1 AD), which is an extended guide to picking up women and engaging in cynical affairs, preferably with married women i.e. diametrical opposite of the new stricter morality Augustus was trying to impose on the Roman aristocracy. As the translators of the Oxford University Press edition write, Ovid was tempting fate and living on borrowed time.

That said, his next work was the much more respectable Metamorphoses (published around 8 AD), a huge compendium of Greek myths and legends. And this long book leads up to an extended passage at the end, at its chronological climax, which sings the praises of Julius Caesar and Augustus. These final pages describe the wicked conspiracy to murder Julius, and then his apotheosis, his transformation into a god – a fate, the poet says in the most fulsome terms possible, which we can all confidently expect of the Great Leader Augustus as well. But first he wishes him long, long life and wise rule.

Now, in terms of Augustus’s policy of moral revival, you could argue that much of the content of the Metamorphoses is corrupting – lashings of sex and violence (and incest and torture). But a) Ovid was inheriting well-established traditional subject matter and b) the long paean to Caesar at the end was an unmistakable attempt to curry favour with the regime.

Same here, with knobs on. The Fasti opens by acknowledging Augustus’s power and that Ovid is aware that Augustus wanted epic poems celebrating his victories. Ovid goes out of his way to excuse himself and explain why he thinks himself not capable of such a high task (see the quote, above), but has nonetheless written something to praise Augustus and the regime.

Let others sing Caesar’s wars: I’ll sing his altars,
And those days that he added to the sacred rites. (1.13 to 14)

And the very third line of the poem addresses Germanicus, the handsome, brilliant and popular son of the elder Drusus, grandson of Antony, adopted son of Tiberius, and therefore grandson of Augustus. Scholars think Ovid reworked the first book in exile in order to curry favour with popular Germanicus (who had himself turned his hand to poetry when he wasn’t on military campaign in Germany) – maybe, but the rest of the poem is laced with adulation of Augustus, the great leader who has brought peace and prosperity. The entry for 13 January starts:

On the Ides in the temple of great Jupiter the chaste priest offers to the flames the entrails of a half-male ram. Every province was restored to our people [a reference to Octavius handing back authority to the people at the end of the civil wars in 27 BC, at which point the Senate awarded him the honorific ‘Augustus’] and your [i.e. Germanicus’s] grandfather was called by the name Augustus. Read through the wax images displayed throughout the noble halls: no man has achieved so great a name…

Our fathers call sacred things ‘august’, ‘august’ is what temples are called when they have been duly consecrated by the hand of the priests. Augury too is derived from this word’s origin, and whatever Jupiter augments with his power. May he [Jupiter] augment our leader’s rule, may he augment his year, and may the crown of oak leaves protect your doors. [The civic crown of oak leave, granted for saving the lives of Roman citizens, was bestowed on Augustus in 27 BC and hung over the door of his house on the Palatine.]

And under the gods’ auspices, may the inheritor of so great a name, with the same omen as his father [Julius Caesar] undertake the burden of the world.

This sycophantic attitude colours every book:

The far-sighted care of our hallowed leader has seen to it that the rest of the temples should not suffer the same collapse and ruin; under him the shrines do not feel their advancing years. It isn’t enough to bind men with his favours; he binds gods as well. (2.59 to 63)

And now, when damp night induces peaceful slumbers, as you are about to pray, take a generous wine-cup in your hand and say: ‘Blessings on your gods, and blessings on you, best Caesar, father of the homeland.’ The wine once poured, let the words be well-omened. (2.635)

Long live the laurels of the Palatine: long live that house
Decked with branches of oak [i.e. Augustus’s house]
(4.953)

I’ve just realised I can give you a link to Kline’s not about Augustus, which lists every reference in the poem:

A.S. Kline’s note on Augustus, listing his appearances in the Fasti

Alongside worship of Augustus and his family are recurring boomerish references to Rome’s destiny to rule the world, is a continual thread of passages promoting basic Roman patriotism in the manner pioneered by Horace and Virgil of the ‘Rome justly rules the world’ style:

Both nearest and furthest, let the world dread Aeneas’ descendants. (1. 717)

The city of Rome’s extent is the same as the world’s. (2.684)

Here Ovid has Romulus, founder, elaborately laying out the foundations for the walls of his new city and calling on the gods:

‘Let my work be done beneath your auspices.
May it last long, and rule a conquered world,
All subject, from the rising to the setting day.’ (4.830)

And of Rome more generally:

A City arose, destined (who’d have believed it then?)
To plant its victorious foot upon all the lands.
Rule all, and be ever subject to mighty Caesar,
And may you often own to many of that name:
And as long as you stand, sublime, in a conquered world,
May all others fail to reach your shoulders. (4.857 to 862)

In introductions and Wikipedia pages I’ve read that Ovid provoked the regime with his outrageous love poetry: maybe so, but reading the Metamorphoses and the Fasti makes it obvious that by 1 AD he had realised which way the wind was blowing and so packs both poems with North Korean levels of subservience to Augustus, the Great Leader, Father of his Country, the Wise Helmsman, even more so than the slavish Augustus-worship found in the Aeneid of Virgil or the Odes of Horace.

If Caesar was to take his titles from the defeated
He would need as many names as tribes on earth.

Much good it was to do him.

Who’s talking

One of the appeals of reading old or ancient literature is its oddity. If at moments the interest in sex or violence strikes us as utterly contemporary, other aspects of old literature often reveal a yawning gap between us and them; in social attitudes, in definitions of what is important or relevant or funny or tragic; and sometimes in the bare bones of storytelling.

Re. the latter, Fasti is pleasingly odd in containing a host of voices. First of all the poet addresses Germanicus in his opening dedication before going onto frequently address the reader as ‘you’, buttonholing us, telling us not only stories about gods and feasts but all about his research, how he found information in old libraries or by interviewing the priests.

But, a little more unexpectedly, the text also contains what purport to be the voices of gods themselves. Thus as early as book 1 line 100 the god Janus appears in Ovid’s study and talks to him directly. Subsequently, numerous other gods appear and speak to Ovid directly, and even submit to questioning from him about odd customs and traditions.

But there are passages where, despite the limpid OUP translation by Anne and Peter Wiseman, I had no idea who was talking.

The months

Originally the Romans had 10 months. In book 3 Ovid speculates this night be because we have ten fingers, count to ten and then start again (i.e. the decimal system) or because women give birth in the tenth month. Originally March and April started the year, followed by May and June and the remaining months were numbers – quintilis, sextilis, September, October etc – where quint means five, sext means six, sept means seven, oct means eight etc. At some point January and February were added at the start of the year to bring it up to 12 months.

January

Ianua is the Latin for door. Janus was the primeval Roman god of doorways, entrances, ends and beginnings. So it makes perfect sense that they named the first month of the year after him. Janus makes an appearance in the poem, answering a series of the poet’s questions about his origins, the nature of the calendar and more. Stories:

after the Romans have stolen their women, the revenge assault by the Sabines led by Titus Tatius on the Palatine hill, which they seize through the treachery of the young woman, Tarpeia, who they then crush to death with their shields
Priapus’s attempts to rape the nymph Lotis
the story of Evander sailing to Latium and his mother’s prophecy of the rise of Rome – Evander was the son of Carmentis (one of the Camenae or prophetic nymphs) and Mercury. They lived in Arcadia, in Greece, before sailing to Italy and founding the city of Pallantium, before the Trojan war, before Rome was dreamed of. He brought his Arcadian gods to Italy.
Hercules, en route back from Spain, having his cattle stolen by Cacus, finding them and killing Cacus – explaining the origin of the ara maxima altar dedicated to Hercules, in the middle of Rome

February

The Romans came to writing history (and other literary genres) late, copying their first efforts directly from the Greeks who were centuries ahead of them. One result of this was great uncertainty about the origins of Roman traditions, customs, festivals, landmarks, even names. So on one level the poem is an antiquarian investigation.

Ovid knows his Roman forefathers called the means of purification februa and pieces of wool used in rituals are called februa and the branch which covers a priest’s brow in a ritual. Stories:

the story of Arion, a legendary Greek poet, who’s captured by pirates, jumps overboard and is rescued by dolphins
11 February: the story of Callisto, turned into a bear by Diana for getting pregnant by Jupiter who, years later, encounters her son out hunting who is about to kill her with bow and arrow (she is a bear) when Jupiter turns them both into constellations (Ovid told this story in Metamorphoses 2)
the battle between the Fabii (followers of Remus) and the Veii (followers of Romulus
why the constellations of the Raven, the Snake and the Bowl are together in the sky
why the runners in the festival of the Lupercal run naked round Rome
the comic tale of Faunus’s attempt to rape Omphale, Queen of Lydia and (here) mistress of Hercules
why the cave on the hill is called ‘Lupercal’ i.e. the story of the Vestal virgin Silvia, who was made pregnant by Mars and ordered by her scandalised uncle to abandon her newborn twins in a boat on the flooded Tiber; this comes to rest in a tree and the twins are miraculously suckled by a she-wolf
February 14: the myth of Corvus, Crater and Hydra
the origin of the worship of Lucina, goddess of childbirth
February 17: the apotheosis of Romulus (Ovid told this story in Metamorphoses 14); once deified, Romulus was renamed Quirinus, which caused me a lot of confusion till a note in Kline explained it (similarly confused that Quirites was the name of an ancient Italian tribe, the origin of the Romans, so frequently used as an alternative name for them)
origin of the so-called ‘fools’ festival’
story of the naiad Lara who went blabbing about one of Jupiter’s lady loves, so Jupiter had her tongue torn out and her exiled to the underworld, but Mercury raped her on the way and she gave birth to the twin Lares who guard crossroads
21 February: End of the Parentalia, the Festival of the Dead
27 February: The Equirria or Horse Races
rites and traditions surround the god of limits and borders, Terminus
February 24: An extended version (lines 685 to 853) of the events leading up to the expulsion of the last king of Rome, Tarquin the Proud: Tarquin’s son, Sextus, raped Lucretia, the wife of a friend of his, who, next day, confessed that she’d been raped to her husband and father before killing herself – hence rage against the Tarquin family, expulsion, Rome becomes a republic. (Sexual transgression is profoundly woven into the origin stories of Rome – the rape of the Sabine women, the rape of Lucretia).

March

The month of Mars derives from the Latin ‘Martius mensis’, ‘month of Mars’, the genitive of Mars being Martis. March was originally the first month of the Roman year, a number of customs mark a new beginning in March, plus the months are numbered as if starting from March (March, April, May, June, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, December).

It wasn’t until Julius Caesar undertook serious research into the calendar that he enforced a fundamental revision, giving it 12 lunar months and making a year last 365 days, with an additional day every 4 years i.e. pretty much the system we use today.

an extended description of Romulus, starting with the scene by the riverside when the vestal virgin Sylvia falls asleep and is raped by Mars, becomes pregnant, her angry uncle Amulius king of Alba insists she leaves the twin boys exposed to die, the she wolf, the building of Rome etc etc – once triumphant, Romulus promises to make March the first month of the Roman year
the story of the shield that fell from heaven
the story of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on Naxos, she is rescued by Bacchus, called by his Roman name Liber (son of Semele); but when Liber goes to India, he returns with a new lover; so the story is about Ariadne’s recriminations (‘Let no woman trust a man!’) which guilt Liber into setting her among the stars (this soliloquy of a wrong woman reminds me of the Heroides and the same kinds of soliloquies in the Metamorphoses)
origin of the festival of Anna Perrenna – Ovid derives it from Dido’s sister, who has a series of colourful adventurers after Aeneas leaves and Dido kills herself, before fetching up on the shore of Latium, where she’s greeted and welcomed by Aeneas but his wife, Lavinia, suspects he’s having an affair, so a vision appears telling Anna to flee before Lavinia can take revenge and Anna flees and is swept away by the river Numicius
OR Anna Perenna is derived from the time the plebs seceded from Rome, set up on a hill but were running out of food, but an lady named Anna kept them supplied with bread. Mars asks her to help him seduce Minerva and Anna keeps promising to help him but herself turns up in his bedroom. This, apparently, is why bawdy stories are told at the festival of Anna Perenna – see what I mean by confusing? Obscure?
brief mention that it was on the Ides of March (i.e. the 15th) that Julius Caesar was murdered: his adopted son was revenged on the assassins at Philippi and other battles
the reason why cakes are sold on the festival of Bacchus, namely the comic story of Silenus searching for honey and getting stung
origin of the Quinquatrus, the five-day festival of Minerva celebrated from 19 to 23 March
23 March: the Tubilustria, the festival of the purification (lustrum) of trumpets
30 March: Romana Salus, the personification of the Health and Safety of Rome

Mars himself speaks to Ovid (as Janus had in book 1) giving a brief review of Rape of the Sabine Women i.e. local tribes wouldn’t intermarry with the nascent Roman (male) community so Romulus invited them to the Consualia games then abducted their marriageable women. Like all the stories it is told in a tangential way, key bits are omitted or treated as if they’ve happened without being narrated. I think the Wiseman translation is very literal, gives much of the text in Ovid’s original present tense, and this also contributes to the sense of dislocation and broken narrative.

Indeed, the focus of the Sabine Women narrative is not the rape, or the marriages or impregnations, it is the moment a year or so later when the tribes come in arms to reclaim their women and the moment when the women stand between new husbands and outraged fathers and brothers, holding up their babies and asking for peace.

April

The later Roman months are formed by adding the suffix -ilis (as in Quintilis, Sextilis), so Ovid derives the Latin word for this month, Aprilis, from the first syllable of the Greek name of Venus i.e. Aphrodite = Apr + ilis. But it could also derive from the Latin verb to open, aperire, this being the time when buds and blossoms first open.

Just as other gods appear to Ovid, here Venus appears for some light banter while Ovid explains (yet again) that in his young youth he wrote lightly of love, but now has turned his attention to more serious subjects.

Ovid explains how Venus made all beings love their mates. No Venus, no reproduction, no life on earth.

She gave the crops and trees their first roots:
She brought the crude minds of men together,
And taught them each to associate with a partner.
What but sweet pleasure creates all the race of birds?
Cattle wouldn’t mate, if gentle love were absent.
The wild ram butts the males with his horn,
But won’t hurt the brow of his beloved ewe.
The bull, that the woods and pastures fear,
Puts off his fierceness and follows the heifer.
The same force preserves whatever lives in the deep,
And fills the waters with innumerable fish.
That force first stripped man of his wild apparel:
From it he learned refinement and elegance.

Wherefore:

Goddess most fair, look always with a kindly face on the descendants of Aeneas, and protect your young wives, so numerous.

Of course Julius Caesar claimed his family, the Julii, derived from Venus: Venus bore Aeneas, whose son, Ascanius, was also known as Iuli; Iuli fathered the line that led to the Vestal Virgin Ilia, who was impregnated by Mars to give birth to Romulus and Remus. So Romulus managed to have Venus and Mars as progenitors – and Ovid gives a thorough description of both lineages.

April 4: The Megalesian Festival of Cybele, the ‘Idaean Mother’ from her original holy place, Mount Ida. Ovid asks questions about her rites and customs which are answered by one of her grand-daughters, Erato, the Muse of (erotic) poetry, thus:

why is the feast of Cybele accompanied by rattling music, beating shields with sticks etc? Because it commemorates the distracting din kept up by the Curetes who protected baby Jupiter from his vengeful father, Saturn

The story of Attis, a handsome youth who pledged his love to Cybele but then fell in love with someone else; Cybele turned her rival into a tree and Attis, in self-disgust, cut off his penis as do his followers.

The story of how a statue of the Great Mother (Cybele) probably a meteorite, was brought from Greece to Rome and enshrined in the centre of the city.

The story of Claudia Quinta, reputed a loose woman who disproves it by single-handedly pulling the rope and freeing the ship carrying the statue of Cybele from being run aground in the Tiber.

Erato explains that the Megalesia are the first games because Cybele gave birth to the gods and she was given the honour of precedence.

April 12: The Games of Ceres, celebrating the invention of agriculture

Ceres delights in peace: pray, you farmers,
Pray for endless peace and a peace-loving leader.

Ovid tells the story of Persephone being abducted by Dis and taken off to the underworld – which he had told in Metamorphoses book 5 – but gives it a twist by describing at great length the experience of the grieving mother (Ceres) searching everywhere for her daughter until taken in by a poor old mortal couple, then being told she has been abducted and married to Dis

April 15: The Fordicidia – the origin of the festival during which pregnant heifers are killed and sacrificed: it all stems back to an agricultural crisis during the time of Numa Pompilius and a prophecy that sacrificing pregnant heifers would end it

April 19: The Cerialia – the festival and games of Ceres; foxes are loosed carrying burning torches on their backs in memory of a legendary farmer who tried to burn a fox but it escape and carried the flames into his fields.

April 21: The Parilia – the Festival of Pales. Pales was the pre-Roman goddess of shepherds. Rome was founded on the day of her festival, the Parilia, so Ovid wonders what the customs associated with the feast (washing hands in dew and leaping over lines of wheat set on fire) can have with the founding.

April 23: The Vinalia – a wine-festival, dedicated to Jupiter and to Venus. Ovid derives it from the time of Aeneas, when Turnus, in order to win mighty Mezentius to his side, pledged half his wine harvest; Aeneas, to win the support of Jupiter, pledged to the god the wine from his vines: so it is a festival of wine dedicated to Jupiter.

April 25: The Robigalia – the festival of the goddess Mildew (robigo) personified. Ovid learns from a priest why they sacrifice the entrails of a sheep and of a dog.

April 28: The Floralia – the feast and rites of Flora, celebrated on into May.

May

Ovid confesses to being unclear about the derivation of ‘May’. He asks the Muses to help. (In case it’s slipped your mind, the nine Muses are the virgin daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne (Memory). They are the patronesses of the arts, being: Clio (History), Melpomene (Tragedy), Thalia (Comedy), Euterpe (Lyric Poetry), Terpsichore (Dance), Calliope (Epic Poetry), Erato (Love Poetry), Urania (Astronomy), and Polyhymnia (Sacred Song)). He gets three possible explanations:

1. Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Song, gives a brief recap of the creation of the universe from the four elements (water, earth, wind, fire) and goes on to derive May (Maius) from Majesty (Maiestas), who is the daughter of Honour and Reverence. How Jupiter repelled the rebellion of the Giants against heaven, and so preserved Majesty who, ever since, attends him, and attends great men on earth, such as Numa and Romulus.

2. Then Urania the Muse of Astronomy takes over. She explains the possible origin of the month May (maius) from the City elders or ancestors (maiores). On this theory, the following month, June, would be named for young men (iuvenes).

3. Then Calliope, muse of Epic Poetry, gives a grander explanation, linking the month to Maia, one of the Pleiads. (The Pleiads, also known as the Seven Sisters, were the daughters of Atlas the Titan and Pleione the naiad.) Maia slept with Jupiter and bore him Mercury. May is named in honour of Maia.

Flora, the goddess of Spring and of flowering and blossoming plants, explains the origin of her festival of the Floralia which starts on 28 April and continues to 3 May: how she was raped by Zephyrus – a long description of her powers, and her role helping Juno become pregnant with Mars. She plays the same role as Janus in book 1 and Venus in book 4 i.e. appears to the poet and answers his questions about ancient festivals and place names in Rome. Her festival is associated with prostitutes and lights in the evening, joy, colour, fecundity.

May 3: story of Hercules visiting Chiron on Mount Pelion, and the accident whereby one of his poisoned darts killed the centaur, much to the distress of Achilles, his ward – because on this night the constellation of Chiron appears.

May 9: The Lemuria – the festival of the wandering spirits of the dead, called lemures, who visited their old homes, and were placated by offerings of black beans signifying the living. Ovid summons Mercury to explain, who (a typical story within a story) then relates how the ghost of Remus appeared to haunt the old couple who cared for Romulus and Remus (Faustulus and Acca). When the couple told Romulus about this ghostly appearance he named the day after his brother, the Remuria – Ovid suggesting this was also a basis for the Lemuria.

May 11: Jupiter, Neptune and Mercury are wandering the earth disguised as mortals. An old man, Hyrieus, takes them in and offers them his meagre hospitality. They offer him a wish. His wife is dead but he wants to be a father. Ovid (frustratingly) skips over the key moment but I think the story goes the three gods peed on an ox-hide in the old man’s hut which became pregnant and 9 months later gave birth to Orion. (The significance of the pee is that Ovid says Orion’s original name was Urion, connected to ‘urine’; in other words, it is a folk etymology). Orion grew into a mighty hunter and protector of Latona (mother of Apollo and Diana by Jupiter). After various adventures, Orion tries to protect Latona against a giant scorpion: both are killed and set among the constellations.

May 12: Mars descends to heaven to admire the temple built to him by Augustus – this segues into praise of Augustus for recovering the legionary standards lost by Crassus to the Parthians.

May 14: The day before the ides is marked by the rise of the star sign Taurus which Ovid associates with the myth of Jupiter changing himself into a bull in order to abduct Europa from the seashore where she was dancing with her attendants. Some say the star sign is the shape of that bull; others says it is the sign of Io, who Jupiter raped then turned into a heifer to conceal from angry Juno.

May 14: On this day Romans throw effigies of humans into the Tiber. Why? Ovid gives one explanation, that Jupiter ordered the Romans’ ancestors to throw two people into the river each year as tribute to Saturn; until Hercules his son arrived and instructed the Romans to throw effigies, not real people, into the river. Ovid gives another interpretation, that young men used to throw old men into the river to steal their votes. So he asks the river Tiber itself to explain, and the river himself appears (as does Janus, Venus, the Muses et al) and gives a variation on the story: that after Hercules was returning through Italy and killed Cacus (for stealing his cattle) many of his companions refused to continue on the long journey back to Greece. When one of them died he asked for his body to be thrown into the Tiber to carry his spirit back to his homeland. But his son disliked the idea, buried his body properly, and threw an effigy made of dried rushes into the river instead. Which founded the modern ritual. Such is the river Tiber’s version at any rate.

May 15: the Ides – the day the temple of Mercury (messenger of the gods, patron of shopkeepers and thieves) facing the Circus was founded, in 495 BC. His were among the rites brought from Greek Arcadia to Latium by the legendary king Evander. Ovid gives a satirical ‘prayer of the shopkeeper’, taking water from Mercury’s fountain, sprinkling his goods with it and hoping to cheat all his customers!

May 20: Ovid asks Mercury to explain to him the origin of the constellation of the twins, Castor and Pollux, also known as the Gemini – because on this day the sun enters that constellation.

May 23: The Tubilustrium, the festival of the purification (lustrum) of trumpets (tubae). On this day the trumpets Vulcan is ultimately said to have made are ritually cleansed.

June

As with May, Ovid puts forward several theories for the name of this month:

1. Queen of the gods Juno, appears to him to propose the theory it is named after her, goes on to explain Mars consigned ‘his’ city to her care. This explains why there are a hundred shrines to her throughout Rome.

2. Hebe, wife of Hercules, claims the month derives from when Romulus divided the population of Rome into elders (maiores) to whom the previous month (May) is devoted, and young men (iuvenes) for whom June is named.

3. The goddess Concord explains that when Romulus made peace with Tatius, king of the Sabines (after stealing his young women) the two peoples were united (iunctus) and that’s where the name comes from.

June 1: Kalends – the legend of Proca, future king of Latium, attacked by screech owls as an infant five days old, saved by the magic of the nymph Cranaë

June 8: A sanctuary to the goddess Mind or Courage was vowed by the Senate after the defeat by the Carthaginians at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC.

June 9: The Vestalia – festival of Vesta, daughter of Saturn, the goddess of fire, the ‘shining one’ also identified with the earth. Every hearth had its Vesta, and she presided over the preparation of meals and was offered first food and drink. She was served by the Vestal Virgins, six priestesses devoted to her service. The Virgins took a strict vow of chastity and served for thirty years. They enjoyed enormous prestige, and were preceded by a lictor when in public. Breaking of their vow resulted in whipping and death. There were twenty recorded instances in eleven centuries.

The comic story of how Priapus tries to rape the sleeping Vesta but at the crucial moment she is woken by a braying donkey.

The legend of how an image of Pallas Athena (Minerva in Roman mythology), the palladium, fell to earth near Troy and was preserved in their central temple and Troy could never fall while it remained there; so that in a famous escapade, it was stolen by the two Greek heroes Ulysses and Diomedes. However, a parallel and contradictory legend had it that the palladium was brought from Troy to Rome by Aeneas and is now stored in the temple of Vesta.

For reasons I didn’t understand Ovid tacks on the fact of Crassus losing the famous standards in Parthia, a story only worth telling to, once again, praise Super Augustus:

Crassus, near the Euphrates, lost the eagles, his army,
And his son, and at the end himself as well.
The goddess said: ‘Parthians, why exult? You’ll send
The standards back, a Caesar will avenge Crassus’ death.’

June 11: The Matralia, the Festival of Mater Matuta, also known as the festival of good mothers. Ovid identifies Matuta with Ino and tells a string of legends around Ino, and then a sequence of semi-historical events which explain various landmarks in Rome, none of which I understood.

June 13: Ides – and festival of the Lesser Quinquatrus. Minerva, in the form of Tritonia (from her origins near Lake Triton in Libya) explains aspects of this festival to her, in particular and long and convoluted story about why the festival is accompanied by flute playing

June 15: The sweepings of the shrine of Vesta are thrown into the Tiber and washed to the sea

June 19: Pallas begins to be worshipped on the Aventine

June 21: The myth of Hippolytus, dragged to his death by his enraged chariot horses. Ovid tells it because dead Hippolytus was revived by the founder of medicine, Aesculapius, who Jupiter zapped for resurrecting the dead; Apollo insisted his dead son be made a deity, and so he was set among the stars, with the name Ophiucus; and this is the day that constellation rises

June 22: Bad luck: on this day Flaminius defied the oracles in 217 BC and was defeated by the Carthaginians at Lake Trasimene

June 23: Good luck: on this day Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, fell at the battle of Metaurus in 207 BC

June 24: The festival of Fors Fortuna, ancient pre-Roman goddess of Fate. A comprehensible passage:

Quirites [i.e. Romans], come celebrate the goddess Fors, with joy:
She has her royal show on Tiber’s banks.
Hurry on foot, and others in swift boats:
It’s no shame to return home tipsy.
Garlanded barges, carry your bands of youths,
Let them drink deep of the wine, mid-stream.
The people worship her, because they say the founder
Of her shrine was one of them, and rose from humble rank,
To the throne, and her worship suits slaves, because Servius
Was slave-born, who built the nearby shrines of the fatal goddess.

Servius Tullius being the legendary sixth king of Rome, son of Vulcan and Ocresia of Corniculum. The Roman historian Livy depicts Servius’ mother as a captured Latin princess enslaved by the Romans; her child is chosen as Rome’s future king after a ring of fire is seen around his head (Livy 1.39). Killed by his son-in-law Tarquin the Proud.

June 30: The final entry in the text we have has Ovid have the muse of history, Clio, address us and praise Lucius Marcius Philippus for restoring the temple of Hercules Musaeum (of the Muses) in the reign of Augustus. This Philippus had a daughter, Marcia, who became the wife of Paullus Fabius Maximus, from whose household Ovid’s own third wife came and who was a friend and patron of Ovid. Ovid has Clio say that Marcia’s:

beauty equals her nobility.
In her, form matches spirit: in her
Lineage, beauty and intellect meet.

And then point out that Augustus’s aunt (his mother’s sister) was married to that Philip:

‘O ornament, O lady worthy of that sacred house!’

And with this final act of sycophancy, the Fasti, as we have it, in its unfinished form, ends.

Comparison of editions

About half way through I got very fed up with the OUP prose translation by Anne and Peter Wiseman: the lack of explanations and good notes made much of the poem incomprehensible. One of the problems with the poem is that each month is divided into sections. The section breaks for each separate day are clearly marked in the Wiseman, but not the breaks, within the days, into different subjects or stories.

Therefore I strongly recommend the verse translation by A.S. Kline. Kline does divide each book into sections with big headings telling you what the hell is going on. I found this invaluable. Even more usefully, Kline has an interactive Index of Names, so you can simply click on them as they occur in the text to go to a clear explanation of an individual or the many festivals and customs mentioned. A useful aspect of this is Kline lists in this Index all the places where a character (or festival) occurs, with a few phrases indicating how it’s referred to or what its relevance is at each of these mentions. This helps the reader develop an understanding of the matrix of references which tie the poem together.

Breaking point came as I struggled to understand what was going on in the 15 March entry for book 3 of the Wiseman version. Even reading all their notes I couldn’t figure it out. Whereas one click of the Kline version took me to a note explaining that:

Anna Perenna is a personification of the eternal year and a manifestation of the Great Goddess. Her feast was celebrated at the first milestone on the Flaminian Way, where there was a sacred grove. Her worship began in March. Ovid derives her from Anna the sister of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and tells the background story.

There. See how useful that is. Now I totally understood what I was reading about. The Wiseman edition has notes but each one is isolated, small and specific. Ultimately, I found them useless. The Kline ones are marvellously clear and full, and they interlink with each other to build up a network of references and explanations so very quickly you can find out everything you need to know to understand and enjoy the poem. No comparison.

Conclusion

I found this the least interesting or rewarding of Ovid’s books: the astrological stuff is largely incomprehensible and goes completely unexplained by either Wiseman or Kline. Even one diagram of the night sky and Zodiac would have gone a long way to explaining the location of the various star signs.

Some of the shorter entries about Roman customs are likewise so obscure as to be incomprehensible. The mythological stories in each month are, on the whole, told less effectively than in the Metamorphoses and they are often told in a tangential way which makes them oddly unsatisfying, Ovid deliberately skipping central aspects of the story. (Two exceptions are the sorrowful wanderings and lamentations of three women, Anna, Ariadne and Ceres: as we saw in the Heroides and Metamorphoses, Ovid had a sympathetic understanding of the sadness of women.)

But I found Ovid’s entire manner and approach confusing. I like clarity of layout and presentation and so was continually put off by Ovid’s rambling approach, the lack of logic in the linking of disparate elements, and then the obscurity in presentation of the facts. You have to work really hard, and check the Wiseman notes and the Kline notes, and reread entire passages, to really get a handle on what’s going on.

Ovid’s grammar is often obscure. Time and again I found myself reading pages where ‘he’ or ‘she’ was doing or saying something and realised I had no idea who ‘he’ or ‘she’ was and had to track carefully back through the text to try and identify this new protagonist.

This obscurity isn’t helped by Ovid’s habit of referring to key figures as the son or daughter of so-and-so: when he writes ‘and the daughter of Semele spoke’ you have to find the nearest note to remind yourself just who the daughter of Semele is and why she’s relevant to the month we’re supposedly learning about and what she’s doing in the particular story you think you’re reading about. This happens multiple times on every page and eventually becomes very wearing. It’s hard work.

For me the most vivid theme in the poem was Ovid’s shameless brown-nosing to the Great Leader Augustus, which comes over as so craven and arse-licking as to be unintentionally funny. A handful of stories aside, this slavish obsequiousness is my enduring memory of the Fasti.

Credit

Ovid’s Fasti, translated by Anne and Peter Wiseman, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011 (originally under the title Ovid: Times and Reasons). Prose quotes are from the 2013 OUP paperback edition. Verse quotes are from the 2004 verse translation by A.S. Kline.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on November 28, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Poetry, Translation

Tagged A.S. Kline, Acca, Aeneas, Aesculapius, Alba, Amores, Amulius, ancient literature, ancient poetry, ancient Rome, Anna Perrenna, Anne and Peter Wiseman, Anne Wiseman, Aphrodite, April, Ara Maxima, Arcadia, Ariadne, Arion, Ascanius, astrology, Atlas, Attis, Augustus, Bacchus, battle of Metaurus, Battle of Philippi, Cacus, Caesar, calare, Calliope, Callisto, Carmentis, Castor and Pollux, Ceres, Chiron, Christianity, classical literature, classics, Claudia Quinta, Clio, Consualia games, Corvus, Cranaë, Crassus, Crater, creation of the universe, Cybele, Diana, Dido, dies comitiales, dies fasti, dies nefasti, Diomedes, Dis, Drusus, early Church, elegiac couplets, Emperor Augustus, Equirria, Erato, Euterpe, fasti, Faustulus, februa, February, festival of Fors Fortuna, festival of the Lesser Quinquatrus, Flaminian Way, Flaminius, Flora, Fors, four elements, Germanicus, Greek mythology, Greek myths and legends, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, Hercules, hexameter, Hippolytus, Hispania, history, Horace, Hydra, Hyrieus, Ianua, Iö, Idaean Mother, Ides, Ilia, Italy, Iuli, January, Janus, Julius Caesar, June, Juno, Jupiter, kalendae, kalends, King Evander, King of Latium, Lake Trasimene, Lake Triton, Lara, Latium, Latona, Liber, Libya, Livy, Lotis, Lucina, Lucius Marcius Philippus, Lucretia, Lupercal, Maia, Maiestas, Maius, March, Mark Anthony, Martius mensis, Matuta, May, Melpomene, Mercury, Metamorphoses, Mezentius, Middle Ages, Mildew, Minerva, Mnemosyne, Mount Ida, Mount Pelion, Muses, Naxos, nones, Numa, Numa Pompilius, Ocresia of Corniculum, Octavius, October, Omphale, Ophiucus, OUP, Ovid, Ovid's Fasti, Ovid: Times and Reasons, Oxford University Press, pagan gods, Pallantium, Pallas Athena, Parentalia, Paullus Fabius Maximus, pentameter, Persephone, Peter Wiseman, Pleiads, Pleione, poem, poetry, Polyhymnia, Priapus, princeps, Proca, Propertius, Quinquatrus, quintilis, quirites, Rape of the Sabine Women, river Numicius, river Tiber, robigo, Roman calendar, Roman gods, Roman history, Roman mythology, Roman Republic, Romana Salus, Romulus, Romulus and Remus, Saturn, Semele, September, Servius, Servius Tullius, Sextilis, Sextus, signs of the Zodiac, Silenus, Silvia, Sylvia, Tarpeia, Tarquin the Proud, Tatius, Taurus, temple of Hercules Musaeum, Terminus, Terpsichore, Thalia, The Art of Love, the Aventine hill, The Cerialia, the Curetes, the Fabii, the Fasti, the Festival of Mater Matuta, the Festival of Pales, The Floralia, The Fordicidia, the Games of Ceres, the Gemini, the Julii, The Lemuria, The Matralia, The Megalesian Festival, the Palatine hill, The Parilia, the Parthians, the Remuria, The Robigalia, the Roman calendar, the Roman year, the Seven Sisters, the Tubilustria, The Tubilustrium, the Veii, The Vestalia, The Vinalia, Theseus, Tiberius, Tibullus, Titan, Titus Tatius, Tritonia, Trojan War, Troy, Turnus, Ulysses, Urania, Urion, vates, Venus and Mars, Vesta, Vestal Virgins, Virgil, Vulcan, Zephyrus

Posted by Simon on November 28, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/fasti-ovid/

The Cures For Love by Ovid

All my songs offer wise advice, so obey the singer.
(The Cures For Love line 703)

The Cures For Love (Remedia Amoris) follows naturally on from the three short ‘books’ which make up The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria). It’s the same kind of length as one of those books (814 lines, 24 pages in the Penguin paperback edition, translated by Peter Green), has the same gaily mocking tone, and directly relates itself to its predecessors. If the previous three books had claimed to be guides for men and women on how to gain lovers, this one teaches how to cope with a love which has gone wrong.

It is addressed to ‘disappointed gallants’ and describes lovers so miserable they have committed suicide. For those who find unlearning passion impossible, who long to throw off love’s shackles but can’t (line 298) that he writes:

I am your public deliverer, will lighten hearts hard mastered
By passion

Thus he adopts a pose throughout of the book of doctor and healer of broken hearts. (He makes a point of emphasising his advice is for both men and women, although all the examples are cast in the form of male strategies; but he does remember this vow from time to time and repeat that his advice is meant to be unisex.)

As soon as you feel love getting a grip on your heart, throw it out, burn it off. Act quickly.

Rule 1 – always be busy. Love springs up where there is leisure and time to kill. Have things to get you up to do: public business, the law courts. Or become a soldier, go fight the Parthians.

Or farming. For a page he channels the spirit of Virgil’s Eclogues with descriptions of chores on the Roman farm.

Or hunting. Hunting deer across country, or setting traps for small birds.

Or simply leave, go away, go a journey. You’ll cry but ignore all excuses, reasons for delay, and just do it. Travelling companions, sightseeing, practical arrangements – all will take your mind off a love gone bad.

Don’t rely on magic. Their tricks didn’t do either Medea or Circe any good. Just a plain and simple prayer to Apollo, his patron, will do.

Dwell on your grievances, how she:

took all your gifts and gave you nothing in return
bankrupted you
cheated on her promise
kept you waiting outside her door all night
shags any old travelling salesman, everyone except you

Dwell on her imperfections:

her stumpy legs
her skinny arms
she’s fat
she’s dark

Distort the truth: if she’s innocent, say she’s ‘naive’; if she’s experienced, call her ‘saucy’; if she’s a bit plump, call her ‘bloated’.

Whatever talents she doesn’t possess, call for those ones: if she can’t sing, ask her to sing; if she can’t dance, call on her to dance; if she’s clumsy, suggest a going for a walk; if she has udders for breasts, recommend her not to wear a bra.

Kill the image you have of her as a perfect woman. Destroy it, trample it underfoot in order to expel her from your heart.

Make an unannounced surprise early morning visit, before she’s covered her face with paint. Observe how plain she is without her makeup. Look at the pots of disgusting gunk it takes to get her looking even passably presentable. Cultivate your disgust.

[Digression on poetry in which he rebuts critics who accuse him of immorality. He doesn’t write for respectable housewives but for sad loser men and courtesans. Also he is not setting out to write an epic in hexameters; he is writing naughty love poetry in elegiacs. He is already famous and will become even more so, since he has many more poems ready in his head. So Envy can take a hike.]

What about sex with the woman you’re trying to get over? Well, it obviously risks making you fall in love with her all over again? So he recommends various ant-aphrodisiacs.

Have sex with another woman before a date with your girl, then you don’t be mad for it, in fact you’ll be a bit jaded, maybe disgusted with the subject and so can remain aloof and not be tempted.

If you do have sex, choose an unsuitable, ungainly position. Keep the shutters open so critical sunlight reveals all her physical flaws, spots and wrinkles. Memorise every fault in her body. Disgust yourself.

One lover was put off by sight of his girl’s slit, another by the wet patch she left on the sheet when she got up. Watch her having a dump. Yuk. None of these by themselves will sever the bond, but cumulatively will shift your mind from love dependency to disgust, revulsion and so to freedom.

Moving onto a major strategy, he suggests having two mistresses and so diluting the power either one, individually, has over you. He distorts the story of Agamemnon replacing Chryseis with Bryseis to make it fit his thesis (though it doesn’t). But his point is clear. Having two mistresses reduces your emotional dependence on an individual. If one chucks you, it’s no longer the end of the world.

How are you meant to get these other girls? Why, read his Art of Love, of course.

How to find them you ask? Read my handbook,
And your boat will soon be scuppers-deep in girls!
(lines 487 to 488)

Cultivate detachment, even if you don’t feel it. Ignore her calls. If you go and she’s locked the door against you, laugh it off. If she calls you in a crowd, ignore her. She presses you to an assignation, say you have another engagement. Habit makes it easy; we fall in love by habit so we can detach ourselves by cultivating habits of indifference until they become real. If you’re bursting with desire, work it off with a prostitute.

If this doesn’t work for you, if withdrawal and detachment is not your style, try an alternative strategy: throw yourself full tilt into the affair, see her every chance you can, go round her house all the time, have all the sex you can, glut yourself till you begin to sicken, till you become sick of the sight of her house and her.

Don’t be alone. Be always in company. Invite friends round. Have an open door policy. Talk, drink, socialise. Days will pass and you’ll forget your lover.

Avoid other young people who are in love. Being in love is contagious, like the plague. Be with happy, sociable people, but shun anyone who’s all loved up.

Avoid the places you used to go to together, and avoid places you know she frequents. ‘Shun scenes of bygone pleasure.’ Burn her letters. Remove all mementoes. It’s hard, but make a conscious effort to change the habits of the affair.

And don’t go round bragging how you’re not in love any more. That tells everyone that you are. Just let go and let her dribble away from the realm of your desires. Let love ‘fade on the breeze and die’ (l.654).

Don’t hate her. That’s as bad as loving her. Often it’s a symptom of lasting love, certainly of enduring passion. Don’t take her to court, don’t litigate to get your presents back, this keeps the wound alive. Let her keep everything. Walk away. Strive to reach a state of complete detachment, indifference, until you can meet her with the same politeness you extend to any other acquaintance. ‘Until you’re heartwhole’ (752).

Ovid shrewdly remarks that breaking off a love affair is often difficult not so much because we love them as because we want to be loved. It is the horrible emptiness of no longer being loved which is so hard to take. So…inure yourself to it by degrees rather than jumping into an ice cold pool. And replace that hole in your life with friends and family and conviviality and activity.

Rather inevitably he comes round to poetry. Don’t read it. Don’t read Sappho, Callimachus, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius or, though it pains him to say so, even his own poems. They’ll only reopen the wound.

And rivals? Well, you’ll have to overcome your jealousy. He gives half a page of examples of jealous lovers from mythology. But it’s no good tormenting yourself with the thought of her in someone else’s arms. This may be the hardest task but it is the best testament to having escaped love’s net. When you can greet her new lover with perfect cordiality and shake his hand, you’re nearly there. When you can greet him with a cordial kiss, you’re cured!

Thoughts

Although questionable in detail, and no doubt guilty of sexism in numerous ways, nonetheless this is the most impressive of the four books of love. Suggestions like avoiding the places you used to go to together and avoiding her friends and family so as to extirpate all memory of a miserable love – these strike me as very relevant today and, unlike a lot of the stock clichés of the earlier pickup books, indicate a genuine depth of experience and empathy. They aren’t particularly gender-specific or even heteronormative i.e. the lessons apply equally well for the use of women or LGBTQ+ people i.e. anyone trying to get over a love affair or stop themselves getting sucked into one.

Credit

The Erotic Poems of Ovid, translated by Peter Green, was published by Penguin Books in 1982. All references are to the 1982 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on November 14, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation

Posted by Simon on November 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/14/the-cures-for-love-ovid/

The Art of Love by Ovid

ego sum praeceptor Amoris
I am Love’s teacher
(The Art of Love, book 1, line 17)

Ovid the pickup artist

Anyone expecting a treatise on the philosophical types of love à la Plato or Castiglione, or expecting a text about sentimental or romantic forms of love, will be very disappointed and possibly repelled. This is a hard-headed book by a professional pickup artist and consists of practical advice to young men on where and how to pick up, chat up, seduce and take to bed women married or single, young or old.

‘Love’ suggests a steady state, an ongoing condition. That bores Ovid. He is interested in the chase, the pursuit. His premise is that any woman can be seduced but only if you have technique, and that’s what he’s going to teach. Any fool can try to chat up a woman just as any fool can try his hand at sports, angling or taming horses. But all these things have a technique, an expertise, traditions and methods to guarantee success. He, Ovid, the teacher of love, pickup artist extraordinaire, seduction guru par excellence, is going to share his top tips with the excited young reader.

Vexing Augustus

Over half of Peter Green’s immense introduction to the Penguin edition of Ovid’s love poems is taken up speculating about why the emperor Augustus abruptly exiled Ovid to the furthest outpost of the Roman Empire, to the miserable frontier town of Tomis, on the Black Sea. To cut a long story short, Green thinks it’s because Ovid was witness to some kind of meeting or evidence about a conspiracy to overthrow Augustus in 8 AD and didn’t report it. In his wretched Letters From Exile Ovid hints at the nature of his crime, but to the immense frustration of scholars for 2,000 years, nowhere spells it out explicitly. He simply insists that he, personally, was never treacherous, never acted against the emperor or planned to poison or kill or hurt anyone. It wasn’t enough. Augustus, and his successor Tiberius, refused to rescind Ovid’s exile and he died miserably in Tomis in 17 or 18 AD.

The point is that Green has to piece this together, and present it as a theory, because Augustus and his people gave it out that the official reason Ovid was banished was for corrupting morals, that Ovid had deliberately undermined Augustus’s programme of moral revival, and they cited this poem, The Art of Love, as the prime example of his corrupting influence.

To grasp the background to this you have to know that, once he had secured a position of complete power, Augustus set about a wholesale programme or reviving Rome in every way: building new roads and aqueducts, encouraging the building of cities in the provinces and roads connecting them, reviving trade. And in Rome, building a grand new forum, rebuilding the temples of various gods, encouraging the revival of ancient religious ceremonies and rituals.

And when it came to the population of Rome, Augustus embarked on a campaign to reform morals and, above all, to encourage the upper classes to marry and have many sons. The series of civil wars from 91 to 31 BC had decimated many venerable old families. Augustus embarked on a series of laws designed to revive them.

In 18 BC he passed the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus (all laws passed under Augustus began with ‘lex Julia‘ because he saw himself continuing the Julian family of Julius Caesar). This law required all citizens to marry, and granted numerous benefits to fathers of three children or more; conversely, there were penalties for the unmarried and childless. Senators were forbidden from marrying freedmen (ex-slaves).

A year later Augustus passed the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis. This law punished adultery with banishment. The two guilty parties were sent to different islands and part of their property was confiscated. Fathers were permitted to kill daughters and their partners taken in adultery (!). Husbands could kill unfaithful partners, under certain circumstances, and were compelled to divorce adulterous wives (!). Augustus himself invoked the law against his own daughter, Julia (Julia the Elder, who was banished to the island of Pandateria in 2 BC) and then against her eldest daughter (Julia the Younger who was exiled in 8 AD).

In 9 BC Augustus passed the Lex Papia et Poppaea which encouraged and strengthened the institution of marriage. It included provisions against adultery and against celibacy after a certain age. Specifically, it forbade the marriage of a senator or a senator’s children with a libertina (an emancipated slave), with a woman whose father or mother had followed one of the ars ludicra (i.e. been a dancer, actor, gladiator, or other entertainer), with a prostitute, and also the marriage of a libertinus with a senator’s daughter. The provisions against celibacy included, for example, a provision that any unmarried person could not inherit a bequest or legacy; to qualify for the bequest, they had to marry within 100 days. All else being equal, candidates with children were preferred in elections or court cases over candidates with none.

So: Rebuilding Rome, ongoing military campaigns (to pacify northern Spain, parts of Gaul and Switzerland), reviving venerable religious ceremonies, erecting fine new public buildings, enforcing sexual morality, these were all key policies of the new emperor – and, in the Art of Love, Ovid mocks every single one of them.

Ovid’s book says that being a layabout sex pest is a much more worthy lifestyle than being a boring old soldier. He mocks the empire’s military campaigns. He thinks the gods are a load of lies and fancy stories. He thinks the only use of Rome’s fine new buildings is for hanging round so you can pick up women. And above all, he targets married women. The Art of Love encourages and gives tips about precisely the kind of marital infidelity and sexual aberrance which Augustus passed laws and went to great lengths to try and prevent.

Let me instruct you in all
The way of deceit.
(3.617)

In line after line, topic after topic, Ovid seems to be deliberately, calculatedly, spitting in the face of everything Augustus dedicated his life to achieving. The only wonder about all this is why it took till 8 AD for Augustus to banish Ovid given that the Ars Amatoria was published around 1 BC i.e. 8 or 9 years earlier. And also the fact that, by the time of his banishment, Ovid himself had moved on from his erotic period and had only just published the Metamorphoses, his huge collection of ancient myths and legends, far more acceptable to Augustus and his regime, although with a strong, amoral emphasis on sex and violence.

Hence Green’s elaborate theory that the accusations of corrupting public morals which the regime used to justify exiling Ovid so far away were really just a cover for something else, in Green’s view Ovid’s passive participation in some kind of political conspiracy against Augustus.

Comparison with Oscar Wilde

So, in a way, reading the Ars is like reading Oscar Wilde. Obviously you can just read Wilde for the immediate pleasure of his wit and style but…the experience changes when you learn that many passages of his work were read out in court and interpreted in a blunt, literal sense in order to be used as evidence against him, evidence that he mocked Victorian values, mocked decent ‘morality’, and promoted irresponsible sensuality and gross immorality i.e. homosexuality.

What made Wilde’s defence so difficult was that he had written all these subversive thoughts, albeit in a wonderfully witty style. Wilde thought his style would save him but it didn’t. Therefore, reading Wilde with this in mind can be unintentionally harrowing, because each time he pokes his tongue out at conventional Victorian values you shudder for the wretched fate it was to bring him (two years hard labour in a series of grim prisons, which utterly broke his spirit and led to his early death).

Same with Ovid. Having read Green’s very long introduction, which dwells on the miseries of his Black Sea exile, means that, every time Ovid pokes his tongue out at and mocks all the po-faced solemnities of official Roman morality, you shiver a little with a premonition of what is to befall him, the miserable fate that all these witty little jokes would end up bringing down on his head.

The theatre’s curving tiers should form your favourite
Hunting ground: here you are sure to find
The richest returns, be your wish for lover or playmate,
A one-night stand or a permanent affair.
As ants hurry to and fro in column, mandibles
Clutching grains of wheat
(Their regular diet), as bees haunt fragrant pastures
And meadows, hovering over the thyme,
Flitting from flower to flower, so our fashionable ladies
Swarm to the games in such crowds, I often can’t
Decide which I like. As spectators they come, come to be inspected:
Chaste modesty doesn’t stand a chance.
(lines 89 to 100)

Proem

Back to the poem itself, the first 30 or so lines make up the proem, an ancient term for preface or prologue. It is here that Ovid explains his aim of systematically teaching the technique of the pickup artist. It does include a half line invocation of the goddess Venus, but in an almost insultingly cursory manner, compared to the five lines he spends explaining that this book isn’t theoretical – he has lived and practiced all the tricks he describes himself. He emphatically insists everything the book is based on personal experience and is fact.

There follows a brief, 10-line partitio (‘a logical division into parts or heads’, ‘a descriptive programme of contents’) where he lays out the subject matter the poem will address, which is easily summarised:

Book 1 is about finding and wooing a woman
Book 2 is about keeping her

The text contains a book 3, just as long, in fact longer than either book 1 or 2, so the fact that it isn’t mentioned in the partitio makes scholars think it was a later addition.

Book 1 (773 lines)

After the proem and partitio, book 1 is divided into two halves: part one is a description of all the best places in Rome to pick up women, namely the colonnades, foreign temples (the synagogue is a good place), the theatre, the circus (for chariot racing), during triumphal processions, at dinner parties and at coastal spas, notably the notorious resort of Baiae.

Part two lists ploys and strategies for winning women. Cultivate their maids (but don’t end up sleeping with them) so they’ll put in a good word for you at the opportune moment, like when the mistress has been snubbed by another lover.

Don’t let the target woman con you into giving them expensive presents: he lists some of the scams women use to try and wangle gifts from their lovers, and how to resist them. (This was a prominent theme in the elegiac love poems of Tibullus and Propertius, too.)

Soften them up with love letters. Use language carefully, softly, sweetly. And persist: Time breaks stubborn oxen to the yoke, Time accustoms wild horses to the bridle. Same with women.

Be clean in your personal hygiene, though not effeminately so: ‘Real men shouldn’t primp their good looks’ (line 509). Take exercise, work up an outdoor tan. Hair and beard demand expert attention. Trim your nails and your nose hairs. Avoid male body odour.

Don’t drink too much at dinner parties (though it can be handy to pretend to be more drunk than you are as this gives you licence to be more forward than a sober man would be, in order to test the waters). Become knowledgeable in the language of secret signs. Drink from her cup, accidentally brush your hand against hers. If she’s with a companion, butter him up. Let him have precedence, award him the garland so he looks favourably on you.

Promise anything; lovers’ oaths don’t count.

Don’t be shy about promising: it’s promises girls are undone by. (1.631)

You can’t flatter too much, every woman is vain of her appearance.

Undermine them with devious
Flatteries: so a stream will eat away
Its overhanging bank. Never weary of praising
Her face, her hair, her slim fingers, her tiny feet.
Even the chaste like having their good looks published,
Even virgins are taken up with their own
Cute figures.
(1.619 to 624)

Look pale and thin to prove your sincerity. Lean and haggard, reek of sleepless nights, make yourself an object of pity so passersby comment, ‘He must be in love.’

Mocking Romulus

Describing the theatre as a good location to pick up women leads Ovid into an extended comparison with the legend about early Rome, that Romulus and his band of earliest settlers invited members of the nearby Sabine tribe to a very early version of a theatrical entertainment and then, at a pre-arranged signal, all the Romans grabbed a Sabine woman and ran off with them. The so-called Rape of the Sabine Women. It was a traditional story, told in many texts, what makes it Ovidian is the way he satirises and mocks Romulus’s high-minded speeches, and makes the entire story a kind of justification for the contemporary theatre being a good pickup location, an ironic mocking use of ‘tradition’ to justify his current cynical activities.

Ever since that day, by hallowed custom,
Our theatres have always held dangers for pretty girls.

In his notes (p.341) Green points out that Augustus, as part of his programme of restoring Roman values and traditions and religions, took the figure of Romulus very seriously indeed, in fact he had for a while considered renaming himself Romulus before the negative connotations outweighed the positive and he settled on the title ‘Augustus’ (awarded him by the Senate in 27 BC). So in this passage Ovid is going out of his way to take the mickey out of a figure very dear indeed to Augustus’s heart, and remodel him as a sponsor for Ovid’s own brand of cynical sexual predatoriness. Can you imagine how furious Augustus must have been?

The gods are expedient

Book 1 contains a line which became famous, it’s line 637 in Green’s translation:

The existence of gods is expedient: let us therefore assume it.

This sounds like a grand philosophical statement. In fact it’s more to do with the fact that the gods of the Graeco-Roman pantheon behaved scandalously, indulging human passions, mad with lust or jealousy…so let’s copy them with a clear conscience. Jupiter seduced umpteen women so…so can I! Again, you can imagine Augustus reading this kind of thing and grinding his teeth with anger.

Book 2 (746 lines)

Just when you thought it couldn’t get much more offensive, it stops. Book 2 is about keeping your beloved and is considerably more emollient and less sexist than Book 1. Obviously it has the same underlying ideology, which is that women are passive animals while men are the smart manipulators, which 50% of the population may find grossly offensive, but a lot of the actual advice could have come out of a contemporary advice column. Maybe…

To be loved, you must prove yourself lovable.

(So much so that Green in his notes is regularly lampooning the triteness of some the agony aunt truisms he spouts. Maybe. Maybe not.)

Ovid opens Book 2 with ironic cheers for the man who has followed his advice and managed to ‘bag’ himself a lady love. Well done, sunshine. But now the real challenge in this whole business is how to keep her. So that’s what this book will be about:

If my art
Caught her, my art must keep her. To guard a conquest’s
As tricky as making it. There was luck in the chase,
But this task will call for skill.

Don’t mess with witchcraft, aphrodisiacs or drugs. Didn’t work for Medea or Circe. Instead (surprisingly) cultivate the life of the mind.

… to avoid a surprise desertion
And keep your girl, it’s best you have gifts of mind
In addition to physical charms…

Then build an enduring mind, add that to your beauty:
It alone will last till the flames
Consume you. Keep your wits sharp, explore the liberal
Arts, win a mastery over Greek
As well as Latin. Ulysses was eloquent, not handsome…

Be pleasant. Be tactful, be tolerant and understanding. Keep clear of all quarrels and recriminations. Love is sensitive and needs to be fed with gentle words. Leave wrangling to wives; a mistress should hear what she wants to hear.

He emphasises the distinction between married couples who have law to keep them together, and the kind of couples he’s describing where ‘love substitutes for law’. a) the kind of thing calculated to get Augustus’s goat b) a shrewd distinction. Married couples have not only the law, but shared responsibilities for raising children and the expectations of family, plus social reputation, to keep them together; illicit lovers have none of that. So it behoves them to be more considerate and tolerant. In another throwaway line which mockingly equates Rome’s mighty military enterprises with his frothy adulterer’s handbook:

Fight Parthians, but keep peace with a civilised mistress.
(2.175)

Do not use brute force. Go with the natural bend of the bough, don’t force it. Go with the current. Laugh when she laughs, cry when she cries, approve what she approves, criticise what she criticises. Open her parasol, clear a path through the crowd. Help her on and off with her slippers. Don’t bridle at menial tasks like holding her mirror for her. Always be early for dates. If she asks for you at her country residence, Go, no matter what the weather or obstacles.

About now I began to wonder what the point of all this is? The aim doesn’t appear to be to have sex at all. Sex isn’t mentioned anywhere in Book 1 and only appears a bit in the last couple of pages of Book 2 (see below). It’s nice, but it doesn’t appear to the be the prime aim. It feels more as if the whole point of the chase is the thrill of the chase itself and the achievement of…. what exactly? Winning a woman’s what? Heart? Allegiance? Devotion? When he writes that ‘Love is a species of warfare’, I don’t take it in the sexist sense to mean warfare between men and women, but warfare between male suitors for.. for what? For the beloved’s love? All the elegiac poets complain bitterly when their lady love is taken off them by another man: the embittered poem to The Rival is a genre unto itself.

Is it just about a sense of possession, of ownership? Is it about winning a woman as a trophy and then….then not really knowing quite what to do with her?

Anyway, the reference to Parthia allows Ovid a passage comparing the soldier of love with the actual soldier in the army, and make witty comparisons with the hardships both have to endure, a trope which is beginning to feel done to death in the Amores and here, let alone in all the other elegiac poets.

It may sound ludicrous but the rhetoric about the need to humble your pride, humiliate yourself, debase yourself before your beloved, accept that no task is too great to please her is reminiscent of Christian rhetoric, with its emphasis on humility and service. At moments Ovid steps out of the 1st century BC and sounds like a medieval troubador or Renaissance lover.

(Personally, as a Darwinian materialist, I would venture that this is because human nature is finite and only capable of a fixed array of emotions, feelings and strategies. The same kind of rhetoric is found in communist propaganda, which tells you to mortify your bourgeois pride in order to throw in your lot with The People, accepting any task, no matter how humble, for the sake of the Revolution. I appreciate the contexts are wildly different but the same phrases and attitudes can be found in numerous ideologies and religions. We humans think we’re fabulous but are, in practice, very limited, very predictable animals.)

Back to Ovid’s Top Tips for Lovers: Don’t give your mistress costly presents – give small ones, but chosen with skill and discretion. Poetry? Girls might be impressed by it as by a cute little gift, but what most women really want is money, rich presents. That’s why this is truly ‘the Golden Age’, he says, with heavy irony.

Very casually he mentions slaves that are going to be manumitted, or about to be flogged, or sent to a chain gang. As usual, I find references to slavery profoundly disturbing (as I do the references to upper class women scratching the faces of their slave maids or stabbing them with pins, if they make a mistake). The context is that if you were thinking of forgiving your slaves their punishments, wangle it so your mistress pleads for mercy, then do what you were going to do anyway.

Praise her beauty. Praise anything she’s wearing. Compliment her hair, or her dancing, or her singing. Lay it on with a trowel. Praise her technique in bed. The one golden rule is don’t overdo it and get caught out obviously lying. Then your reputation’s ruined.

If she gets ill, attend her sick room, cry, be all sympathy, bring an old crone to purify the room.

The key is to be always present, get her accustomed to you, hearing your voice, seeing your face. Then, when you’ve reached peak presence, arrange to be absent and make her miss you. Absence makes the heart grow fonder…up to a point. Not too long. In a page-long passage he doesn’t blame Helen for eloping with Paris but Menelaus for going off and leaving her by herself (2.357 to 372) (a theme he explored in some detail in the Heroides supposedly written by Helen and Paris).

In a very throwaway manner he says, obviously he’s not imagining you’re restricting yourself to just one lover. God forbid! So in order not to get caught out, don’t give X presents that Y might recognise; make sure you erase all previous messages from a wax tablet letter you send lover Y; don’t meet different lovers in the same places, cultivate different locales for each.

If she catches you out, deny everything, if that fails go for it, in bed. Hard ‘cocksmanship’ is its own proof that a) your not shagging anyone else b) you’re still devoted. Some aphrodisiacs might work and he gives a characteristically Roman quirky list of foodstuffs and ingredients (white Megarian onions, colewort, eggs, Hymettus honey, pine nuts).

If things get boring you could strategically let slip that you’re seeing someone else. Handled correctly, with the right kind of girl, this could lead to terrible scenes and recriminations, sure, but if you navigate your way through the tears, beg forgiveness, take her to bed and have great make-up sex, this can rejuvenate a relationship.

The last couple of hundred lines become chaotic. I found this with Horace’s last few epistles, as well. Roman poets are not great at structure. Their poems often take unexpected turns and detours. Out of nowhere the god Apollo appears by Ovid’s side and delivers a 20 line lecture, telling lovers to employ the famous motto over his oracle in Delphi, namely to know yourself. So if you’re handsome, always present your profile; if you’re clever, fill the space at dinner parties with brilliant talk; if a good drinker, show it and so on. It’s puzzling and random that Apollo pops up like this, given that he was name-checked in the opening lines of the poem as a god who had not inspired the poet (who insists everything he teaches derives from his own experience).

After this interruption, there’s a more puzzling digression as he appears to say that all lovers should know when to quit. It is not gentlemanly to become a bore. Know when to leave, before she starts complaining that you’re always hanging around (2.530). You’d have thought this – advice on how to end a relationship – would come right at the end of the book.

Instead the book still has 200 lines to run and continues with a section on how to cope with a rival, which is accept him with sang-froid – advice Ovid immediately goes on to say he finds hard to follow himself. He advises lovers to let their mistress have another lover and turn a blind eye. Snooping, opening letters, eavesdropping, those are the mean-minded activities of a husband, a lover should rise above them.

There’s more contradiction here, because Ovid had (unnecessarily and briefly) asserted that he doesn’t have in mind, he never has in mind, respectably married matrons. And yet here and at many other places, he mentions the husband of the ideal target of all this seduction technique. It’s a flat contradiction which has no clever or literary impact – it just comes over as confused and contradictory, either badly planned or contradictory passages have been cut and pasted together, for some reason.

The final section seems repetitive. He (again) advises flattery: if the mistress is black as pitch call her a ‘brunette’ to flatter her; if she squints, compare her to Venus; if she croaks, tell her she’s like Minerva; if she’s a living skeleton, call her ‘svelte’.

Never ask a woman her age, specially if she’s past her girlish prime. Anyway, age is good, it brings experience, sophistication and skill. They know a thousand different positions. And then he surprised me by making the most explicit reference I’ve read in any Roman poet. Green has Ovid saying he likes it when both partners reach climax during love making. That’s his main objection to sex with boys, he loves making his mistress gasp with sex, and making her climax (2.683 to 691).

He gives sex advice: touch her where she wants to be touched; watch her eyes assume that expression, rapture, gasps and moans. Take your time. Don’t hurry to climax and don’t come before your mistress.

Book 2 ends with a comic conclusion in which he says he excels all the soldier heroes of legend for his skill and excellence in teaching, so may every man who uses his advice to win and keep a mistress carve a trophy with the words: ‘Ovid was my guide’!

This feels like a very neat tying up of the poem and many scholars feel it was the original ending, emphasised by the fact that two of the heroes he mentions – Achilles and Automedon – were mentioned right at the start of Book 2.

But there then appear 2 additional lines, claiming that now – the girls want his advice, which most scholars think were tacked on in order to justify the later addition of Book 3.

Book 3 (812 lines)

A prologue explaining that he’s equipped men against women, now he’s going to do the reverse and offer the girls the benefit of his ‘wisdom’. The same kind of sweeping generalisations he made against women in books 1 and 2 he now makes for women. It reminds me of Cicero the lawyer, arguing sometimes for, sometimes against, the same client. It makes you realise the extent to which this poem obviously, but maybe Roman literature as a whole, was always much more of a rhetorical exercise than we are used to. Was always more of a performance of the poet’s skill in a certain style, in a certain metre, on a certain topic – than anything like our notion of poetry in particular as expressing genuine personal feelings and views.

All this explains his sudden volte-face and attempts to prove the opposite of what he was asserting a few pages back.

Men are often deceivers, girls hardly ever.

I was president of my school debating society. I recognise the signs of being given a topic you don’t have much sympathy for, and being told to present a case, first for it, then against it. You don’t win prizes for sincerity. You win prizes for the skill with which you select and present your points.

He invents the notion of Venus appearing to him and complaining that men are benefiting from his 2 books of advice; give the girls a chance.

In fact, his advice kicks off by not being particularly woman-friendly. He spends a couple of pages striking the carpe diem note i.e. your youth will pass, you’ll grow old and wizened and grey-haired so seize the day, give into love. Maybe your lover will turn out a cheat and a liar, who cares? What’s lost? Have a shower and move onto the next one. Some goods wear out with use, but your privates won’t wear out (line 92) so let your lovers come to the well a thousand times.

I naively thought the book would be a guide to women on the art of seducing men, so was disappointed when it turned out to be more like a woman’s magazine-type set of articles about how to make the most of yourself. Don’t overdo jewellery and accessories. Advice on the best hairstyle to match the shape of your face. A page on different colours for dresses. Shave your armpits and your legs. Clean your teeth. Make-up, powder and rouge. Mascara. As traditional, the best make-up remains unobtrusive (3.211).

Keep all this hard work hidden. ‘There’s a lot men are better off not knowing.’

Beauties don’t need him, his advice is for the less than perfect, the ugly or plain or short (just as his advice to men wasn’t to the handsome and rich, who need no help, but the less well-off and physically ordinary). He goes on to give advice for the skinny, the pale, the swarthy, those with skinny calves or ugly feet, buck teeth or bad breath.

Learn to cry on demand. Learn to walk elegantly with a nice sway of the hips (3.302).

Girls should know how to sing and play a musical instrument. And, of course, poetry, leading into a much-cited passage mentioning the appeal of various poets, the love poetry of Catullus, Tibullus or Propertius, the heroic history of Virgil (‘the most publicised Latin poem of all time’) maybe even his own products, the Amores and Heroides (proudly boasting that the heroic epistle is an art form he invented himself).

A girl should know how to dance. And how to play board games, which leads into a page about Roman board games which is infuriatingly light on detail (apparently, historians don’t know how to play even one single Roman board game). Ovid points out the key thing about playing is to maintain control while men, all too easily excited by games, lose theirs.

A confused section contrasts women’s limited social freedoms with men being able to exercise on the Field of Mars and go swimming in the Tiber; which quickly cuts back to places women can go to, a surprisingly large amount i.e. temples, the colonnades, the theatre, the circus, the forum. Somehow this morphs back onto a passage about poets and how they used to be respected in olden times, not so much nowadays. As towards the end of Book 2, it feels like Ovid is just cutting and pasting passages in willy-nilly, with no logic and unnecessary repetition. Somehow the passage about poetry ends with the conclusion that a good place to find a husband is at your last husband’s funeral, when you’re there with dishevelled hair and tear-stained eyes, which some men find very sexy.

Beware of smart-looking young beaux with a handsome profile and rings on their fingers – they’re cheaters and users.

By line 470, sensing that he’s becoming chaotic, Ovid tells himself to rein his muse in and try and be more structured in how he’s presenting this advice.

How to handle letters from passionate lovers i.e. wait a bit then get your maid or boy to reply. Don’t be taken in by feigned passion.

Riskily he refers to Augustus as ‘our great leader’ and just as he places men in various positions, advises a woman to do the same to her prospective lovers.

Confusingly there’s now a third section about poets, this time including some famous lines about how they get their inspiration from heaven, the God is within them etc. Sure, but why weren’t these three separate passages about poets gathered together and ordered more logically?

Back to lovers. Lock them out sometimes. Make them sweat. When things are getting boring drop hints that you have another lover, he has a rival. Juice him up. Pretend your husband’s a tyrant who’s having you watched. In the middle of an assignation have a maid come running in shouting, ‘The master’s coming,’ and then both bundle him out the window in a panic. That’ll keep him interested.

He gives a couple of pages on how to evade the watchful eye of your husband or guardian, by smuggling messages in and out, arranging illicit meetings, using a friend’s apartment, dates at the theatre or circus, let alone the baths, or the religious ceremonies supposedly restricted to women only etc.

Don’t trust girlfriends. Or your own maid. Ovid confesses to having seduced many a maid when her mistress just made herself too unavailable. The theme of jealousy prompts him to insert a lengthy telling of the story of Cephalus and Procris (3.687 to 746). This feels like padding out and is immediately followed by a note to himself to stop all these digressions.

Final burst of advice: regarding parties, already arrive late, after dark, when the torches have been lit. Eat sparingly and daintily. Final part is another surprisingly candid section of sexual advice. Just as he recommended different hairstyles and dress colours for different faces and physiques, here he runs through half a dozen different sexual positions which are appropriate for different body types (if you have a pretty face, do it missionary position; if a strong back, from behind; if you’re petite, ride him like a horse etc).

This and the parallel passage in Book 2 are the only descriptions I’ve read in the 50 or so Roman texts I’ve read. As this is a guidebook, they’re brisk and practical. As in Book 2, his ideal is that man and woman climax together. He is aware of the fact that many women can’t climax (at least not through penetrative sex) and so suggests they pant and moan and pretend, ‘put on an act!’ something, as I understand it, hundreds of millions of women have done through the ages.

And with that it’s over and he, very weakly, ends with a straight repeat of the lines at the end of Book 2, telling his girl disciples, like the boys before them, to inscribe on their trophies of successful loves, ‘Ovid was my guide.’ It was funny the first time round. Here it’s indicative of Book 3’s very belated, tacked-on and ragbag structure. No wonder he tells himself frequently throughout the book to leave off digressing, to get back to the point, to pull his socks up.

I wonder if a powerful woman ordered him to add a Book 3. Livia, maybe?

Sexism

The Ars Amatoria isn’t a bit sexist, it is made of sexism. Has there ever been a more sexist book? The entire text is based on the assumption that women are prey, like wild animals, to be stalked and captured, that they have little or no will of their own, that their main characteristics are vanity about their looks and shopping, which is why the pickup artist should focus on relentless flattery and know how to gracefully handle endless demands for gifts.

As the Amores set out to capture and record every possible aspect of the love poem, as the Metamorphoses set out to record every single Greek myth which involved bodily change, so the Ars Amatoria is, in effect, an encyclopedia of sexist and misogynist attitudes.

I could list the ways Ovid dehumanises women, reducing them to game (as in big game, animals to be hunted), birds to be caught, wild animals to be stalked, fish to be hooked, or soil to be ploughed, wild land to be tamed, and so on.

At a less metaphorical level, he is straightforward insulting about women’s natures:

If you’re wise
Gull only girls, they’re no danger. In this one deception
It’s good faith that ought to make you blush.
They’re cheats, so cheat them: most are dumb and unscrupulous: let them
Fall into the traps they’ve set themselves.
(1.642 to 646)

If Augustus was driven to fury by Ovid’s calculated mockery of Rome’s religion, venerable founder, and sexual mores, what must the formidable Livia have made of this unrelenting abuse of women as a sex? Did she have any input into the decision to banish the scandalous poet?

I imagine modern women readers will struggle with such continual libel, objectification, undermining, insult, sexism and misogyny without being overcome with disgust. Towards the end of Book 1 Ovid sinks into the darkest hole of all when he repeats the lie of the ages, that when a woman says no she doesn’t mean it: all women, deep down, want to be overcome, by force if necessary.

It’s all right to use force – force of that sort goes down well with
The girls: what in fact they love to yield
They’d often rather have stolen. Rough seduction
Delights them, the audacity of near-rape
Is a compliment.
(1.673 to 677)

And goes on to mention two women from Greek mythology who were raped and then fell in love with their rapists. Wow. Needs no comment from me.

Just one comment about Green’s style. As I mentioned in my review of his translation of the Amores, Green uses an exaggeratedly demotic, Jack-the-Lad register, and this turns out to be really appropriate for this poem, which is a long hymn to Jack the Lads. I now understand that Green’s very demotic style – which I initially thought inappropriate for the Amores – turns out to be very appropriate for the Art of Love, bringing out the vulgarity and crudity of a lot of the thought, more so than a smoother, more ‘literary’ translation might have done.

Many women adore the elusive,
Hate over-eagerness. So, play hard to get,
Stop boredom developing. And don’t let your entreaties
Sound too confident of possession. Insinuate sex
Camouflaged as friendship. I’ve seen ultra-stubborn creatures
Fooled by this gambit, the switch from companion to stud.
(1.717 to 722)

This is a vivid translation of often very repellent sentiments.

Anticipations of the Metamorphoses

Ovid is most known and read for his epic masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, a long poem in 15 books which chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. What makes it distinctive is that it tells the story via a series of classic Greek myths or legends, in particular, stories about humans metamorphosing into plants and animals of which, when you come to study it, there turn out to be a surprising number.

I mention it here because, unexpectedly, and not really directly relevant, the Ars Amatoria contains fairly long passages which anticipate some of these stories. Thus there are extended accounts of:

Book 1

the legend of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, and how she was impregnated by a bull, conceiving the half-man, half-bull monster, the Minotaur (1.289 to 327)
Bacchus coming to the rescue of Ariadne, abandoned on her desert island by Theseus (1.525 to 564)

Book 2

Daedalus devising his plan to escape imprisonment on Crete by creating wings for himself and his son Icarus, and flying to freedom (2.20 to 97)
the creation of the world and the universal drive to procreate among animals (2.467 to 489)
Vulcan trapping his wife in adultery with Mars (2.561 to 592)

Book 3

the legend of Cephalus and Procris (3.687 to 746)

Last word

Let others worship the past; I much prefer the present,
Am delighted to be alive today.
(3.121)

This is actually quite a striking departure from convention, because it was axiomatic for pretty much all writers and thinkers in the ancient world that the past contained a matchless Golden Age and the present was a sad, fallen age of degeneration and decline. In this handful of words Ovid rejects that entire tradition and hapless, sorry-for-itself way of thinking and strikes an exuberantly Nietzschean note: Rejoice! The present is all we have, so: Make the most of it.

Credit

The Erotic Poems of Ovid, translated by Peter Green, was published by Penguin Books in 1982. All references are to the 1982 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on November 11, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Translation

Tagged Achilles, adultery, Amores, ancient poetry, ancient Rome, aphrodisiacs, Apollo, Ariadne, ars ludicra, Augustus, Automedon, Bacchus, Baiae. Romulus, banishment, Black Sea exile, Black sea Letters, carpe diem, Castiglione, Catullus, Cephalus and Procris, Circe, cosmetics, Crete, Daedalus, drugs, elegiac metre, elegiacs, exile, Field of Mars, Helen, Icarus, Julia the Elder, Julia the Younger, Julius Caesar, Letters From Exile, Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis, lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus, Lex Papia et Poppaea, libertine, libertinus, love, love poems, make-up, Mars, Medea, Menelaus, Metamorphoses, Minotaur, misogyny, mistress, morality laws, objectification, Oscar Wilde, Ovid, Paris, partition, Pasiphaë, Peter Green, pickup artist, Plato, poems, poetry, praeceptor Amoris, predatory behaviour, Proem, Propertius, Rape of the Sabine Women, river Tiber, sex, sexism, slave, Slavery, slaves, The Art of Love, the Black sea, The Erotic Poems of Ovid, Theseus, Tiberius, Tibullus, Tomis, troubadour, Venus, Venus and Mars, Victorian values, Virgil, Vulcan, witchcraft

Posted by Simon on November 11, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/11/the-art-of-love-ovid/

Amores by Ovid

The Peter Green edition

I read Ovid’s Amores in the 1982 Penguin edition, which also includes Ovid’s later works, The Art of Love and the Cures for Love, all translated and introduced by Peter Green. This edition contains an awesome amount of editorial paraphernalia. The introduction is 81 pages long and there are 167 pages of notes at the end, so that’s 248 pages of scholarly apparatus (not counting the index). The text of the three Ovid works only take up 180 pages. So in the Penguin/Peter Green edition there’s a hell of a lot of information to process. And in doing so, it’s possible to get caught up in the matrix of interconnections (this passage from an Amor resembling that passage from the Art of Love and so on) and the web of mythological references and end up quite losing yourself in what is quite a deceptively huge book.

Ovid’s Amores

Ovid’s Amores (Latin for ‘loves’) is a set of 50 short love poems written in the elegiac metre – pairs of lines or couplets in which the first line is a hexameter, the second line a pentameter – a format which had become traditional in late-Republican Rome for this kind of subject matter. Poets such as Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and several others whose works are now lost (notably Gallus), had used the elegiac metre for this kind of personal love poem, generally addressing poems to a beautiful but inaccessible and capricious lady. Catullus (born 84 BC) addressed poems to Lesbia, Tibullus (b.55 BC) to Delia, Propertius (b.55 BC) to Cynthia and Ovid (b.43 BC) to Corrina.

A.M. Juster in his introduction to the love poems of Tibullus suggests that Ovid took the form to such a peak of clever irony, witty pastiche and knowing self-mockery that he hollowed out the form and ended the tradition; nobody after him attempted such a long sequence of love poems in this format and metre.

A little epigram at the start of the work tells us that Ovid’s Amores were initially published in five volumes in about 16 BC. The Penguin translator, Peter Green, devotes some of his huge introduction to speculating that these were very much a young man’s poems and that some time in middle life, Ovid went back, deleted some, rewrote others, and republished them in the three-volume edition we have today.

The Amores’ contents are very straightforward. The poet writes in the first person of his love affair with an unattainable higher-class woman, Corinna. Each poem picks a different incident or mood in this love affair then explores or develops it with rhetorical, logical and poetical skill. The sequence builds into a showcase for the poet’s skills at handling different subjects and feelings.

In line with the idea that Ovid was the most sophisticated and knowing poet in this tradition, many scholars doubt whether the ‘Corrina’ addressed throughout the poems ever actually existed, but was merely a literary pretext for the poet’s powers.

Ovid’s sequence feels more unified and planned as a narrative than those of Tibullus or Propertius; both those poets include in their works lots of poems on unrelated subjects. On closer examination, so does Ovid, addressing a number of husbands, lady’s maids, and women he’s pursuing who are evidently not Corrina. Nonetheless, the sequence somehow feels more smooth and structured than those of his predecessors.

Of course, if the other poets were describing actual events, the order of their poems is likely to be as scrappy and haphazard as real life generally is; whereas, if Ovid was making the whole thing up, he could afford to be more carefully structured and calculating.

Carefree Ovid

Unlike all the previous Roman authors I’ve reviewed, the key thing about Ovid is that he grew up in times of peace. Born in 43 BC, Publius Ovidius Naso was just a toddler during the civil wars which followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, and just 12 when Octavius won his decisive battle against Anthony at Actium in 31 BC, which brought 60 years of civil wars to an end.

This may explain the tone of frivolous irresponsibility which marks most of Ovid’s poetic career. Green makes the point that from about 25 BC (when he’s thought to have started the Amores) through to 1 AD (when he published the Cure For Love) Ovid devoted the best years of his maturity to writing about sex.

OK, he also wrote the 21 love letters of the Heroides (themselves on the subject of love) and a play on the subject of Medea (now, tragically, lost) but what survived, and survived because it was so popular, were his witty, clever poems depicting the author as a stylish man-about-town and sexual athlete. He may describe himself as a ‘slave to love’ (a trope so common it had its own name, the servitium amoris), stricken by Cupid’s arrows and plunged into despair – but it’s impossible to ever take Ovid seriously. Irony, parody and irreverent laughter are his thing, what Green describes as ‘his wit, his irony, his bubbling sense of fun’ (p.80). As Green puts it, ‘Ovid is Homo ludens in person’.

The translation

On page 79 of his long introduction Green explains that he is going to translate the strict elegiac metre (a hexameter followed by a pentameter) very freely, using ‘a variable short-stopped line with anything from five to two stresses’. This approach hints at the metrical regularity of the original, yet gives scope for changes of pace and emphasis, ‘often through a casual enjambment that works more easily in English than it might in Latin.’ None of this prepares you for the tone and style of Green’s translations, which is wild, flippant and jazzy.

Arms, warfare, violence – I was winding up to produce a
Regular epic, with verse form to match –
Hexameters, naturally. But Cupid (they say) with a snicker
Lopped off one foot from each alternate line.
‘Nasty young brat,’ I told him, ‘Who made you Inspector of Metres?
We poets comes under the Muses, we’re not in your mob.’

Right from the start Green announces the flippancy and slanginess of this translation. The result is that the number of beats in each line is difficult to ascertain and, as Green indicated, not at all regular. Instead we are carried away by the energy of the diction, although this, also, is a little difficult to nail down. That ‘Hexameters, naturally’ sounds like a confident posh boy, but ‘snicker’ is an American word, whereas ‘mob’, I suppose, is an America word associated with the 1930s but makes me think of the Lavender Hill Mob. So I found his tone wildly all over the place.

‘Look boy, you’ve got your own empire and a sight too much influence…’

‘Boy’ is either the demeaning word used by southern Americans to blacks (unlikely) or the tone of a posh, public school banker to a waiter at his club (maybe); ‘a sight too much’ strikes me as a very English locution, again of a posh variety, something I don’t think anybody says any more. I give plenty of quotes below, and you can see for yourself how Green uses a variety of locutions to create a witty, slangy, vibrant register.

The Amores

Book 1

1.1 The poet announces that love will be his theme.

In a trope familiar from all the elegists, the poet declares he wanted to write a grand epic as society (and Augustus) require, but was foiled by Cupid. When he wails that he hasn’t got a subject to write about Cupid promptly shoots him with his arrows, making him fall furiously in love.

‘Hey, poet!’ he called, ‘you want a theme? Take that!’
His shafts – worse luck for me – never miss their target:
I’m on fire now, Love owns the freehold of my heart.

So that’s going to be the subject, love, and Ovid himself, right here in the first poem, describes the process of abandoning ambitious plans to write a highfalutin’ epic poem in regular hexameters and settling for the alternating metre of elegiacs:

So let my verse rise with six stresses, drop to five on the downbeat –
Goodbye to martial epic and epic metre too!

1.2 He admits defeat to Cupid

He tosses and turns at night and then pleads with Cupid that he’ll come quietly. The ox that resists the yoke suffers most or, as Green puts it in his deliberately uncouth, slangy style:

It’s the same with Love. Play stubborn, you get a far more thorough
Going-over than those who admit they’re hooked.
So I’m coming clean, Cupid: here I am, your latest victim.

Sounds like a character from ‘The Sweeney’ – I’m surprised he doesn’t address Cupid as ‘guv’nor’. Anyway, the poet says he’ll submit to Love’s demands, he’ll be a captive in Love’s great triumphal procession, and then gives a mock description of a Roman triumph as burlesqued by Love and Love’s army:

And what an escort – the Blandishment Corps, the Illusion
And Passion Brigade, your regular bodyguard:
These are the troops you employ to conquer men and immortals…

1.3 He addresses his lover for the first time and lists her good qualities

Green’s Cockney register continues in this poem, where the poet addresses Venus and vows to be true to her if she can make his mistress love him.

Fair’s fair now, Venus. This girl’s got me hooked. All I’m asking for
Is love – or at least some future hope for my own
Eternal devotion. No, even that’s too much – hell, just let me love her!
(Listen, Venus: I’ve asked you so often now.)
Say yes, pet. I’d be your slave for years, for a lifetime.

‘Pet’? Very casual locution, originally from the North East of England. Anyway, Ovid goes on to say that he doesn’t come from some posh, blue-blood family with ‘top-drawer connections’.

What have I got on my side, then? Poetic genius, sweetheart.

‘Sweetheart’? This is fun.

1.4 He attends a dinner part where his beloved and her husband are also present

The poet is driven so mad with jealousy that his beloved is going to be embraced and kissed and pawed by her husband, in full view of himself and everyone else at this dinner party, that he gives her a list of secret signs to reassure him that she secretly loves him.

As with everything else in the Amores, you strongly feel these are stock clichés of the form, but jived up by Ovid’s breezy attitude. So: when she’s thinking about the last time they made love, she should touch her cheek with her thumb; if she’s cross with him but can’t say so, pinch her earlobe; if he says or does something which pleases her, she should turn the ring on her finger.

If her husband kisses her, he swears he’ll leap up, declare his love, and claim all her kisses as his own! He’ll follow them home and, though he’ll be locked outside at her door, he begs her to be frigid with her husband, ‘make sex a dead loss’.

1.5 Corinna visits him for afternoon sex

This is the poem brilliantly translated by Christopher Marlowe one and a half thousand years after it was written. It’s the first time in the sequence that Corrina is called by her name.

1.6 He begs Corrina’s doorkeeper to let him into her house to see his love

This is an example of the paraclausithyron or ‘poem at the beloved’s door’ and Ovid adopts the traditional figure of the exclusus amator (the ‘shut-out lover’). Similar poems were written by Horace (Odes 3.10), Tibullus (Elegies 1.2) and Propertius (Elegies 1.16). Propertius’s variation on this familiar theme is notable, for he gets the door itself to give its opinion about all these weeping lovers hanging round outside it.

In Ovid’s version, the poet tracks through a range of topoi associated with this genre – how the poet’s tears water the doorpost, how the porter need only open the door a fraction because the poor poet has lost so much weight pining away that he’ll be able to slip through a mere crack, etc.

What struck me was the opening line where he describes how the door slave is chained to the doorpost. At line 20 he reminds the door slave of the time he was stripped ready for a whipping but he, the poet, talked Corrina out of punishing him. This is all meant to be part of the playful banter, but…chains and whips. Slavery.

1.7 He hits his lover and is remorseful

Obviously he’s consumed with regret, says he was momentarily out of his mind with rage – but the alleged hitting is really only a pretext to invoke a whole host of precedents from myth and legend of psychotically angry heroes like Ajax and Orestes. And after all (he whines), all he did was mess up her hair a little, which made her look even more beautiful, like Atalanta or Ariadne or Cassandra about to be raped at the fall of Troy (!).

To be precise, he grabbed her hair and scratched her face (line 50) – an oddly girlish form of assault. He asks himself why he didn’t do something more manly, such as ripping her dress from neck to waistline (an interesting notion). What’s most effective in the poem is his description of how Corrina didn’t say anything but stood shivering and crying mute tears. That sounds horribly believable.

As a side point, he remarks that, instead of tears, the proper marks of love should be bruised lips and bites around the neck and shoulders. Now, love bites are mentioned in Propertius and in Plutarch’s life of Pompey: it was obviously an accepted part of love play in ancient Rome.

1.8 Dipsas’s monologue

Dipsas is a bawd or procuress. The poet violently describes her as a cursed witch. This is because, one day, he claims to have overheard her giving cynical advice to Corrina on how to bewitch young men and wangle rich gifts out of them, gifts she can then share with her mentor, Dipsas.

He particularly hears Dipsas disrespecting Ovid because he’s poor, telling Corrina to angle for richer lovers, and not even to be fussy about freed slaves, so long as they’re rich. Dipsas tells Corrina to play hard to get, to agree to sex now and then but often say she’s got a headache or abstain because of Isis (attendants at ceremonies for Isis had to be celibate 10 days beforehand). He overhears Dipsas telling Corrina to stage strategic arguments to drive him away, though not permanently. She should learn how to cry at will. She should get a houseboy and a maid, who can both extract even more presents from her desperate lover.

Like the beating poem or the door poem, above, this feels like Ovid adopting a standard topic (the wicked old adviser) and determined to write the best, most comprehensive poem on the theme.

As a footnote to Roman love, Dipsas tells Corrina to cultivate a few bruises on her neck i.e. indicating that she’s having sex with someone else to make her lover jealous. Love bites and bruises.

1.9 The poet compares lovers with soldiers

Both belong to the same age group, lusty young men.

A soldier lays siege to cities, a lover to girls’ houses,
The one assaults city gates, the other front doors.

Obviously this is mocking the martial traditions of Rome, in a style previously done by Propertius, but somehow in Ovid’s hands it feels that much more mocking and derisive. And the poem ends with the mocking thought that he was a lazy good-for-nothing scribbling poems until – he fell in love! Now look at him – ‘fighting fit, dead keen on night exercises’!

1.10 He complains that his mistress is demanding material gifts instead of the gift of poetry

So he mounts a list of arguments why this is corrupt, why love should be naked, why sex should be equal, only prostitutes ask for money or gifts etc. All gifts are trash and will rot, but his poetry, if he gives it to her, will last forever and make her immortal. Another very familiar trope.

1.11 Praise of Corinna’s maid

Let me tell you about Napë. Though she’s expert at setting
Unruly hair, she’s no common lady’s maid.

The poem is set in the present as the poet calls Napë over and instructs her to take this note to his beloved, right now, and wait while she reads it, and mark her expression, and insist on a reply, and not just a brief note but ‘a full tablet’: get her (Corrina) to squeeze up the lines and scribble in the margins.

1.12 The poet curses his tablet

Corrina says NO to a visit and so the poet vents his fury on the wood and wax tablet which failed in its duty, cursing the tree which made the wood, the beeswax etc. It turns into a full blown execration of the wretched tablet, which is inventive and funny.

1.13 He addresses the dawn and asks it to wait, so he can stay longer with his mistress

The poet addresses Aurora asking her to rise slowly, to wait, so he can extend his time with his beloved. He invokes the mythology surrounding Aurora, cruelly claiming she’s only in such a rush each morning to get away from her ancient withered lover, Tithonus.

1.14 He mocks Corinna for ruining her hair by dyeing it

A very uxorious, familiar poem in which the poet scolds his beloved for ignoring his advice to lay off hair dyes and rinses; she used them and now her hair’s all falling out. It used to be so long, could be arranged in a hundred different styles, was so fine, like spider’s web, a ‘brindled auburn’ colour. It was also damaged by her insistence on applying heated tongs to corkscrew it.

Oh well, he says, look on the bright side – after ‘our’ recent German conquests she can get a wig made from some captive German woman’s hair.

1.15 The book ends with Ovid writing of the famous poets of the past, and claiming his name will be among them

He gets the allegorical figure of Envy to articulate all the criticisms which could be made of his position: drone, parasite, layabout who should be using his youth as a soldier or his intellect as a lawyer – then refutes these accusations. He wants to be numbered among the immortal poets:

What I seek is perennial fame,
Undying world-wide remembrance.

Though Time, in time, can consume the enduring ploughshare,
Though flint itself will perish, poetry lives –
Deathless, unfading, triumphant over kings and their triumphs,
Richer than Spanish river-gold.

And here I am, 2,000 years later, reading his poetry, proving him correct.

Preliminary thoughts

1. In his mockery of a soldier’s life, his description of a mock triumph, his jokey comparison of a soldier and a lover (1. 9) Ovid mocks Rome’s military tradition (‘the dusty rewards of a soldier’s career’, 1.15). And in his whole approach promotes the lifestyle of an upper-class layabout lover with no sense of public duty, frittering his life away on girlish emotions. This, as his later career was to make clear, was a risky strategy. As with Oscar Wilde, traditional society eventually took its revenge on a taunting provocateur.

2. In his introduction, Peter Green spends a lot of effort suggesting that ‘Corrina’ is based on a real figure and that it was Ovid’s first wife, who he married when he was just 18. Although the convention for these poems was that the beloved was the wife of another man, high-born and unattainable, or a moody and capricious courtesan – and this certainly fits some of the poems, such as the door poem and the pair about sending a note to his mistress – on the other hand the ‘Corrina was Ovid’s wife’ theory is a better fit for the poems about sex on a summer’s afternoon (1.5), the poem to the dawn and especially the one about her hair (1.14). These have none of the stress of stolen visits while husband is away, but have the relaxed candour of married love.

3. Above all else, the poems feel very programmatic, systematic, as if he’s listed all the topics which poems in this genre ought to address, and then set out to write the best possible example of each type.

4. Ovid’s persona is of supreme self-confidence, a very attractive, brash, bullet-proof, man-about-town cockiness. Even when he pretends to be downhearted we know he’s only playing

5. Lastly, re. Green’s style of verse, I like the way his lines are of unpredictably varying length, they rock along in perfect match with his laddish, demotic diction. BUT. One small point of criticism – I don’t like the way he starts each line with a capital letter. It has the effect of cluttering lines which are already cluttered with italics, brackets, exclamation marks and so on. I wish that, like most modern poets, he’d started new lines with small letters, unless it is actually starting a new sentence.

My mistress deceived me – so what? I’d rather be lied to
than ignored.

is better than:

My mistress deceived me – so what? I’d rather be lied to
Than ignored.

Clearer, easier to read and parse (understand the grammar of), and looks more modern, has more swing.

Book 2

2.1 The poet describes the sort of audience he wants (girls)

A formal opening to the second book by ‘that naughty provincial poet’, ‘the chronicler of his own wanton frivolities’. Ovid describes how he was actually writing a worthy epic about war in heaven when his mistress locked her door against him and straightaway he forgot his epic and fell back on soft love poems, for

Soft words
Remove harsh door-chains. There’s magic in poetry, its power
Can pull down the bloody moon,
Turn back the sun, make serpents burst asunder
Or rivers flow upstream.

Yes, ‘epics’s a dead loss for me’:

I’ll get nowhere with swift-footed
Achilles, or either of Atreus’s sons.
Old what’s-his-name wasting twenty years on war and travel,
Poor Hector dragged in the dust –
No good. But lavish fine words on some young girl’s profile
And sooner or later she’ll tender herself as the fee.
An ample reward for your labours. So farewell, heroic
Figures of legend – the quid
Pro quo you offer won’t tempt me. A bevy of beauties
All swooning over my love songs – that’s what I want.

2.2 The poet asks Bagoas, a woman’s servant, to help him gain access to his mistress

The poet addresses Bagoas, a beautiful woman’s maid or servant and delivers a long list of reasons why she should engage in all kinds of subterfuges to help her mistress’s lover gain his ends, the main motive being she’ll be paid and can save up enough to buy her freedom (line 40).

What struck me is the poem opens with him describing taking a walk in some cloisters and spying this young woman and being struck by her beauty i.e. it doesn’t seem particularly about Corrina.

2.3: The poet addresses a eunuch (probably Bagoas from 2.2) who is preventing him from seeing a woman

A short poem in which the poet laments the condition of men who’ve been castrated and says they (the poet and his mistress) could have got round the neuter minder anyway, but it seemed more polite to make a direct approach and offer him cash for access.

2.4 The poet describes his love for women of all sorts

Other people are going to criticise his character so why doesn’t he go ahead and do it himself. He despises who he is, his weakness for every pretty face he sees, his lack of self discipline. Thick, clever, shy, forward, sophisticated, naive, fans of his, critics of his, dancers, musicians, tall, short, fashionable, dowdy, fair, dark or brunettes – he’s ‘omnisusceptible’, he wants to shag them all.

Young girls have the looks – but when it comes to technique
Give me an older woman. In short, there’s a vast cross-section
Of desirable beauties in Rome – and I want them all!

2.5 The poet addresses his lover, whom he has seen being unfaithful at a dinner party

Describes the rage of jealousy he’s thrown into when he sees her fondling and snogging another man at a dinner party. When he confronts her, later, about it, she denies it means anything and, like a fool, he believes her. Still. Her kisses show a new style, technique and passion. She’s been learning from a master!

2.6 The poet mourns the death of Corinna’s parrot

A comic exequy for Corrina’s parrot, a gift from the East, who was so sociable and clever and ate so little and now is dead. He gives an extended comparison with all other types of birds ending with a vision of pretty Polly in paradise.

2.7 The poet defends himself to his mistress, who is accusing him of sleeping with her handmaiden Cypassis (28 lines)

Short one in which he accuses his mistress of being too touchy and jealous. Of course he isn’t having an affair with her maid! God, the thought! Why would he bother with ‘a lower-class drudge’? More to the point:

What gentleman would fancy making love to a servant,
Embracing that lash-scarred back?

‘Lash-scarred back.’ I know I’m developing an obsession with this subject, but the ubiquity in Roman social life of slaves, performing every possible function, present at almost all events, present throughout everybody’s house, who can be chained to the doorpost, who can be shackled and manacled and who can be stripped and whipped at a moment’s notice, seriously impairs my enjoyment of these ‘light-hearted’ poems.

2.8 The poet addresses Cypassis, asking her to keep their affair a secret from her mistress

The joke is that, having just denied it in 2.7, he now lets us in on the secret that he is shagging his mistress’s slave. The poem bespeaks the furtiveness of a secret affair. Did they get away with it when Corrina accused him point blank? When Cypassis blushed, did the poet’s fierce oath that it wasn’t true convince her? Now – he wants sex.

I did you a good turn. Now it’s time for repayment.
Dusky Cypassis, I want to sleep with you. Today.

‘Dusky’? Is she black?

2.9a The poet rebukes Cupid (24 lines)

He blames Cupid for trapping him in this life of love for good. The old soldier can retire, an old racehorse is put out to grass, warships are dry docked, an old gladiator can hang up his sword. Why won’t Cupid let him go?

2.9b The poet professes his addiction to love (30 lines)

He admits to sometimes feeling sick of the whole business of love but some kink in his nature addicts him to it. He just can’t kick the habit of loving and shagging. He’s Cupid’s best customer, his arrows know the way to his heart without needing to be fire. They’re more at home in his heart than Cupid’s quiver. He sounds quite a bit more tired and cynical than previously:

My mistress deceived me – so what? I’d rather be lied to
Than ignored.

2.10 The poet bemoans being in love with two girls at once

The poet addresses a man, Graecinus, and makes you realise it’s the first time he’s done so on 25 poems. A lot of Tibullus and Propertius’s poems are addressed to other blokes; surprisingly, this is rare in Ovid. Maybe showing how much of a lady’s man he is.

Anyway, this Graecinus told him no man could possibly fall in love with two women and yet – here he is, in love with two women! It seems like an unnecessary surfeit but he’d rather have two than none at all. And he proceeds to show off a bit:

I can stand the strain. My limbs may be thin, but they’re wiry;
Though I’m a lightweight, I’m hard –
And virility feeds on sex, is boosted by practice;
No girl’s ever complained about my technique.
Often enough I’ve spent the whole night in pleasure, yet still been
Fit as a fighting cock next day.

He wants to die in mid-act, ‘on the job’.

2.11 Corinna’s voyage (56 lines)

He deploys the full range of arguments against taking a sea voyage (the danger, the monsters, the boredom) but Corrina is determined to go, so he switches to wishing her good luck.

2.12 His triumph (28 lines)

Meaning Roman triumph because the poet has, finally, despite all obstacles, won his Corrina. Again he compares himself to a soldier, conscripted and fighting in great battles , except:

The credit is mine alone, I’m a one-man band,
Commander, cavalry, infantry, standard-bearer, announcing
With one voice: Objective achieved!

What’s odd is we saw him having lazy summer afternoon sex with Corrina back in 1.5, so why is ‘winning’ her, here, depicted as such a huge triumph? Is it a reminder that we should never take these poems as telling any kind of coherent narrative, but more a selection, arranged in a vague but not narrative-based order?

2.13 The poet prays to the gods about Corinna’s abortion (28 lines)

Corrina has carried out an abortion on herself and now lies badly ill. The poet addresses the goddesses Isis and Ilythia, saying he’ll do anything for them offer them anything, if only his beloved recovers. If we’re talking about possible narratives and orders, it is odd to have a poem this serious immediately after the one in which he claims to only just have ‘triumphed’ and won her (2.12).

2.14 The poet condemns abortion (44 lines)

A fairly playful development of the anti-abortion position, to wit: if every woman acted like Corrina the human race would die out. This is followed by a list of amusing counterfactuals: what if Thetis had carried out an abortion? No Achilles, no defeat of Troy. Or what if the priestess of Mars had done the same? No Romulus and Remus, no Rome. What if Corrina’s mum had done the same? No Corrina! Or Ovid’s mum, if he’d been ‘mother-scuppered before birth’? No Amores!

From a social history point of view the poem makes clear that self-attempted abortion was quite a common occurrence in ancient Rome and equally common girls dying from it (line 40).

2.15 The ring (28 lines)

He sends her a ring and then, in flights of fantasy, imagines being the ring, fitting snugly on her finger, accompanying the finger when it strokes her skin, her cleavage or…elsewhere.

2.16 At Sulmona, a town in his native region (52 lines)

His home town, Sulmona, is lovely and fertile and all…but his girl isn’t with him so it feels barren and strange. Suddenly, urgently, he wills her to call out her cart, harness the quick-stepping ponies and make haste to be with him.

2.17 His devotion to Corrina (34 lines)

Corrina’s loveliness makes her treat him like dirt. He describes beautiful legendary women who paired with less attractive men e.g. Venus and Vulcan, and then compares them to the way the hexameter and pentameter are combined in the elegiac couplet.

Well, look at the metre I’m using – that limps. But together
Long and short lines combine
In a heroic couplet.

Apparently some other woman is going round claiming to be the ‘Corrina’ of his poems, but gently and sweetly he assures her she is his only beloved.

…none but you shall be sung
In my verses, you and you only shall give my creative
Impulse its shape and theme.

2.18 The death of tragedy (40 lines)

He writes to his friend Macer, a poet who appears to have been writing a epic poem describing the events leading up to the Iliad describing having another go at writing a tragedy but how not only his Muse mocked him but then Corrina came and sat on his lap and covered him and kisses and asked why he wasn’t writing about her. Oh, what the hell, he might as well stick to what he’s good at, ‘verse lectures on seduction’ or ‘love-lorn heroines’ letters’ (referring to the Heroides).

Interestingly, he appears to imply that another friend of his, Sabinus, also a poet, had written letters in which the absent menfolk reply to the letters listed in the Heroides. If he did, they’re now lost.

2.19 To a husband to be more protective of his wife (60 lines)

Ironic satirical poem written to the husband of another woman who he’s seeking to woo (not Corrina) telling him (the husband) to take more care of her because at the moment, seducing her is just too easy! He prefers a battle, a struggle, the thrill of the chase.

Then the addressee seems to change to the woman in question, ‘my latest eye-ravisher’. He tells her to copy Corrina who was a master of teasing him, throwing temper tantrums, then relenting, leading him on, rebuffing him, exciting his ardour.

That’s the way I like it, that feeds the flame.

Then back to the husband and a very funny sequence of mounting frustration at his relaxed complaisance. Be more jealous, put your foot down, be a man for God’s sake. There’s no fun in an easy conquest.

Book 3

3.1 Elegy and Tragedy

Walking in a wood, the poet encounters the allegorical figure of Tragedy who tells him it’s time to grow up, drop ballads for schoolgirls and produce a really serious work. But then appears Elegy (with one foot shorter than the other, harping on that at fact of the elegiac metre, hexameter followed by pentameter) who tells Tragedy not to be so condescending, and then tells both of them what she’s been through, pinned to closed doors, torn up and flushed down the loo. If Tragedy’s interested in Ovid, it’s because of what Elegy’s done for him.

The poet asks the two ladies to stop quarrelling and admits that he chooses Elegy (again) and Tragedy will just have to be patient. (It is a big irony of history that Ovid did apparently write a tragedy, on the subject of Medea, and it was praised by Tacitus and Quintilian, but, very unhappily, it has been lost. Or ironically, in the context of this poem.)

3.2 At the races (84 lines)

A vivid description of our man chatting up a girl in the audience of the chariot races. In Green’s translation it’s a stream-of-consciousness account as the poet compares himself to a chariot racer, asks other members of the audience to stop poking and cramping them, begs Venus to give him luck with his new amour.

He describes a fixed feature of the races, which was the entrance of a procession (pompa) of ivory statues of the gods, borne on wagons or floats, which made its way through the Forum and into the Circus and proceeded the entire length of the racetrack to the cheers of the vast audience. The poet gives a running commentary on the images of the gods and how they’re useful to him, and then commentates on an actual race, yelling for the chariot his amour has bet on to win.

3.3 The lie (84 lines)

Ovid laments that his lover has not been punished for lying. He blames the gods for letting beautiful women get away with murder but coming down like a ton of bricks on men.

3.4 Give her freedom (48 lines)

Ovid warns a man about overprotectively trying to guard his wife from adultery. Do the opposite, give her complete freedom and watch her lose interest. We only chafe for what we can’t get. If it’s suddenly all available, we lose interest. ‘Illicit passion is sweeter.’ Doesn’t seem to be about Corrina.

3.5 The dream (46 lines)

The poet describes having a dream about a white heifer who is joined in a field by a black bull, but a black crow comes and starts pecking at the heifer’s breast till she stands up and waddles off to another herd of cows in the distance.

The poet asks the dream interpreter (an oneirocrit) who’s listened to his recounting, what it means, and the interpreter says that he, Ovid, is the black bull, the white heifer is his beloved, and the crow is a bawd who comes and pesters her to leave him (the poet) and go off to seek riches elsewhere.

At these words the blood ran freezing
From my face and the world went black before my eyes.

This, for me, is one of the most effective poems in the set, maybe because it’s so unusual, so unlike the familiar tropes of the genre.

3.6 The flooded river (106 lines)

The poet had got up early to make a journey to see his lover and finds his way blocked by a swollen stream. First he complains to the river about being so damn inconvenient. Then he claims the river ought to be helping him not hindering and rattles off a page-long list of rivers and how they helped lovers, or were themselves lovers, back in mythological times – although, knowing as ever, he emphasises that these old stories are:

All lies, old poetic nonsense
That never really happened – and never will.

Despite this brash dismissal, the poem is unusually long precisely because it contains a dramatised version of one these old ‘lies’, the legend of Ilia the Vestal Virgin ravished by the river Anio.

And the poem ends with an amusing execration of the river that’s blocking his path, barely a proper river at all, a desert of stones and dust in the summer, then an unpredictable torrent in winter, not marked on any maps, just a ‘no-name dribble’!

3.7 Erectile dysfunction (84 lines)

Also unusually long. The poem is about a time he lay in his beloved’s arms and she tried every trick in the book (French kisses, dirty words, called him ‘Master’) to no avail:

My member hung slack as though frozen by hemlock,
A dead loss for the sort of game I’d planned.
There I lay, a sham, a deadweight, a trunk of inert matter…

I wonder if Ovid is really as much of a Jack the Lad in the original Latin as Green’s zingy English makes him sound:

It’s not all that long since I made it
Twice with that smart Greek blonde, three times
With a couple of other beauties – and as for Corrina,
In one short night, I remember, she made me perform
Nine times, no less!

The poem is interesting because it puts his ‘love’ for Corrina in the context of sleeping with umpteen other girls as well i.e. it is nowhere near as devoted and obsessive as Propertius’s love for Cynthia, let alone the high devotion of Courtly Love which was to invoke his memory over a thousand years later.

He wonders whether some jealous rival has commissioned a magician to put a hex on him, laments that she was such a beautiful girl and yet no dice; compared to the moment when he’s actually writing, when his member is standing stiff and proud to attention, ‘you bastard’ (line 69). After trying everything, eventually his girl got cross, accused him of recently sleeping with someone else, flounced out of bed and – to fool her maids that something had happened – splashed around with some water for a bit.

Is this the reason why his beloved appears to have abandoned him in 3.5 and appears to be going out with a soldier, described in the next poem as having more money than Ovid, but maybe just being able to…get it up.

3.8 The cure of money (66 lines)

He can’t believe his beloved is now dating a soldier, just because he has money from his campaigns. This develops into a traditional curse on gold and greed, and a lament on the decline since the idyllic days of Saturn (the so-called Saturnia regna) the lost Golden Age when gold and precious metals lay in the ground. Instead gold rules Rome now and leaves a poor lover like him unable to compete with a rich soldier, flashing his rings and stolen treasure (boo hoo).

In his notes Green adds resonance by pointing out that Ovid was not well off but prided himself from coming from an old established family and not being a parvenu like so many of the nouveaux riches who had made a fortune and acquired status through the disruptions of the civil wars. Soldiers who’d done well in the wars or merchants who’d bought up proscribed land, speculators and bankers. Ovid, like hard-up poets throughout history, despised them all.

Me, genius, out in the cold,
Traipsing round like a fool, replaced by some new-rich soldier,
A bloody oaf who slashed his way to the cash
And a knighthood!

An interesting footnote points out that that the beloved who’s been taken by another man is married i.e. has swapped adultery with Ovid for adultery with the soldier. No mention of Corrina’s name.

3.9 An elegy for Tibullus (68 lines)

He says Cupid has doused his torch and broken his bow in sorrow at the death of Tibullus, the great elegiac poet (thought by scholars to have died in autumn 19 BC). There can be no gods if such good men are allowed to die. While his body is rendered down to an urnful of ashes, only the poet’s work, his songs, survive, and for all time.

Green, in his notes, points out the structural similarity with the epicedion or funeral lament for Corrina’s parrot (2.6) and that both follow the same five-part structure:

introductory address to the mourners
the laudatio including the ‘what avails it…’ theme, and a ritual outburst (schetliasmós) against unjust fate
the deathbed scene
a consolatio
the burial itself followed by a prayer for the repose of the dead

Interestingly, Ovid confirms the names of the two beloved women mentioned in Tibullus’s elegies, claiming that at his pyre Delia and Nemesis squabbled over who loved him most. Then says his soul will be greeted in Elysium by Catullus (84 to 54 BC) and Gaius Cornelius Gallus (69 to 26 BC), his predecessors in elegiac poetry.

3.10 The Festival of Ceres (48 lines)

The annual festival of Ceres prevents Ovid from making love to his mistress, which leads into an extended description of the rise of Ceres and her own godly love affairs.

3.11a Enough (32 lines)

He’s finally had enough of his lover, enough of being shown the door, grovelling in the street, while she was shagging someone else inside, then watch his rival, exhausted by sex, stumble out into the street. He is ashamed of watching her send secret signals at dinner parties to other men; of her broken promises. Enough! ‘I’m not the fool I was.’

3.11b Conflicted (20 lines)

He is conflicted. He loves and hates:

Your morals turn me off, your beauty on
So I can live neither with you or without you.

He loves and lusts after his lover but describes her infidelity and betrayals. He wishes she were less attractive so he can more easily escape her grasp.

3.12 (44 lines)

Ovid laments that his poetry has attracted others to his lover, led them to her front door.

What good have my poems done me? They’ve brought me nothing but trouble.

So he’s sick not just of Corrina but of poetry, or these kinds of poems – fat lot of good they’ve done him. He claims that poets’ statements shouldn’t be taken for fact, they’re much more suited to making up wild fantasies – and then goes off on a page-long digression listing some of the most florid Greek myths.

Oh, creative poetic licence
Is boundless, and unconstrained
By historical fact

A thought worth keeping in mind when we come to the Metamorphoses.

3.13 The Festival of Juno (36 lines)

A relatively chaste poem in which he describes the festival of Juno (‘sacrifice of a heifer; crowded games’) taking place in the town of his wife’s birth, Falsica (Falerii), and its origins, describing at some length, the shrine, the procession of youths and shy maidens and so on. He ends by hoping Juno will favour both him and the townspeople.

Green makes the point that the poem breaks the cardinal rule of love elegies by mentioning his wife! At a stroke this dose of spousal affection and family piety undermines the elaborate poses of the entire series. Unless, like Green, you take the rather mind-boggling view that Corrina may be based on Ovid’s wife. Personally, my experience of reading the other elegists (Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius) suggests to me that these sequences are more random, and contain more random elements, than modern tidy-minded critics would like. To us a poem about his wife breaks the fourth wall, undermines the illusion of the hard-shagging, lover-about-town image promulgated in the other poems.

3.14 Keep it to yourself (50 lines)

Ovid sounds tired, resigned. He doesn’t mind if his beloved has other affairs, but can she just keep it to herself. He describes the passion of the bedroom (stripping off, twining thigh over thigh, French kissing, ecstatic moans, the bed rattling like mad) but when you reappear in public, affect respectability and virtue. Instead of which his beloved enjoys feeding tittle-tattle about her sex life to gossips. Must she flaunt her dishevelled hair, the unmade bed, those live bites? So disappointing, so vulgar. Every time she confesses another liaison it kills him by inches. Can’t she please just deny her countless other trysts and so let him live in ignorant bliss.

3.15 Farewell to love elegy (20 lines)

Mother of tender loves, you must find another poet;
My elegies are homing on their final lap.

This final very short poem gives a brief potted biography of him, not from a rich family, but an ancient and distinguished one; from the little town of Sulmona in the region of Paelignia, which fought so bravely against Rome in the Social Wars. Farewell to elegiac verse;

Horned Bacchus is goading me on to weightier efforts, bigger
Horses, a really ambitious trip.

What’s he referring to? The Metamorphoses?

Brief summary

Reviewing the Amores I can well see how Ovid took the stock subjects or topics of the genre, one by one, and took them to the limit, developing each premise to sometimes absurd extents, stuffing each poem with the maximum number of relevant mythological references, including all possible relevant emotions – but at the same time he quite visibly did it as a joke, as a game, playfully, ironically, knowingly. Homo ludens. Thus I can see the force of A.M. Juster’s point that Ovid both a) exhausted the possibilities of the content of the genre but, more profoundly b) undermined all future attempts to take it seriously. He killed it.

Latin terminology

consolatio – type of ceremonial oratory, typically used rhetorically to comfort mourners at funeral
epicedion – funeral lament
exclusus amator – the shut-out lover
Homo ludens – playful man, game-playing man
laudatio – epitaph in praise of someone who’s died, often a loved one
paraclausithyron – poem at the beloved’s door
rusticitas – rusticity, the quality of country life and people, by extension, lack of education, idiocy
schetliasmós – ritual outburst against unjust fate
servitium amoris – servant of love
urbanitas – city fashions or manners; refinement, politeness, courtesy, urbanity, sophistication; of speech – delicacy, elegance or refinement of speech; wit, humor

Credit

The Erotic Poems of Ovid, translated by Peter Green, was published by Penguin Books in 1982. All references are to the 1982 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on November 9, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Sex, Translation

Tagged A.M. Juster, Abortion, Achilles, adultery, Ajax, amor, Amores, ancient Rome, Anthony, Ariadne, Atalanta, Atreus, Aurora, Bacchus, Bagoas, Battle of Actium, Cassandra, Catullus, Christopher Marlowe, classical literature, consolation, Corrina, Cupid, Cures for Love, Cynthia, Cypassis, Delia, Dipsas, doorpost poem, elegiac metre, elegy, Elysium, Envy, epicedion, erectile dysfunction, eulogy, Eunuch, exclusus amator, Falerii, Falsica, Festival of Ceres, Festival of Juno, funeral lament, Gaius Cornelius Gallus, Gallus, Golden Age, Graecinus, Hector, Heroides, hexameter, Homo ludens, Horace, humour, Ilia, Ilythia, invective, irony, ISIS, Julius Caesar, Juno, late-Republican Rome, Latin, laudation, Lavender Hill Mob, Lesbia, Literature, love, love poems, love poetry, Macer, Mars, Medea, Metamorphoses, metre, Napë, Nemesis, Octavius, oneirocrit, Orestes, Oscar Wilde, Ovid, Ovid's Amores, Paelignia, paraclausithyron, parody, parrot, pastiche, Penguin, pentameter, Peter Green, Plutarch, poems, poetry, pompa, Pompey, Propertius, Publius Ovidius Naso, Quintilian, Roman Circus, Rome, Romulus and Remus, rusticitas, Sabinus, Saturn, Saturnia regna, schetliasmós, servitium amoris, sex, Slavery, Social Wars, Sulmona, Tacitus, The Art of Love, The Erotic Poems of Ovid, The Sweeney, Tibullus, Tithonus, Tragedy, Translation, Troy, urbanitas, Venus, Vulcan, witch

Posted by Simon on November 9, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/amores-ovid/

Heroides by Ovid translated by Harold Isbell (1990)

Like devout incense thrown on smoking altars
like waxed torches tipped with sulphur, I
am burning with love…
(Dido to Aeneas, Letter 7)

This turns out to be an excellent and compelling translation of Ovid’s brilliantly original poems, despite the rather poor quality of some of the introductory matter.

Harold Isbell

In 1990 Penguin published this translation of Ovid’s Heroides by Harold Isbell. Isbell was a) American b) Associate Professor at Notra Dame University and c) from 1972 to 1983 director of the Continental Bank and Trust Company in Salt Lake City. His little biography proudly tells us that he also sat on the board of directors of a school, two ballet companies, and a publishing house. What’s he doing translating Ovid, then?

Doubts about his qualifications are quickly confirmed by Isbell’s introduction, 13 pages long and often very weak. The reader is continually pulled up short by his trite and banal observations:

The experience of love is a very complex emotional phenomenon. Love exists in many forms and it can be both rational and irrational.

I would suggest that it is a personality which exhibits both good and evil that is most interesting for an audience and most typical of the people with whom we, the readers, live and work.

Isbell’s often orotund prose style sounds like a banker pleased with his own importance:

It seems, however, that a critical comment more germane to the fact at hand…

Or a senior barrister’s preening presentation to a high court, rather than scholarly description and analysis. Most of his introduction is like this and very disappointing. Compared to the brisk, factual and immensely insightful introduction to Tibullus by A.M. Juster, this is very poor stuff.

Key facts

Nonetheless, a handful of hard facts emerge:

the Heroides are an early work by Ovid
they consist of 21 verse letters written by figures from ancient Greek legend
all the poems are about 5 or 6 Penguin pages long i.e. not brief lyrics (not like Propertius’s elegies which are mostly just a page long) but not very long either
the first 15 are all written by wives or female beloveds, generally in a tone of grievance at having been abandoned by the addressees of the letters, absent men whose side of the story we never hear
the last 6 letters – the so-called ‘double letters’ – consist of 3 sets of letters, the first in each set written by the male figure to his beloved, the second being a reply by the beloved woman to the man’s letter; they are generally agreed to be in a significantly different style from the first 15 poems and some scholars think they aren’t by Ovid at all
were the second set of 6 written as part of a second work, or a second book, then tacked onto the original 15? were they written by a different author and tacked on to Ovid’s 15, either explicitly or by subterfuge? nobody knows

In his later writings Ovid is very proud of having created an entirely new genre: the verse love letter.

Dramatic irony

Isbell points out that the pervasive mood of the Heroides is irony because the women (mostly) are writing to their distant menfolk a) wondering where they are and b) hoping they will return and so provide a happy ending for the letter writer. But the letter’s audience –Ovid’s contemporary readers and educated readers ever since – unlike its writer, know just what is delaying the man’s return (which is generally his infidelity or that he’s just gone off and abandoned her for good) and so, contrary to the hopes of the letter writer, knows the loved man will never return.

An aspect of this is that the letters are written at a particular moment in a narrative which contemporaries and educated audiences since know all about. The letter writer is trapped in that moment like a fly in amber: Laodamia begs Protesilaus to be careful but we know he won’t and he will die because of it; Ariadne pleads for Theseus to return to her but we know he won’t, ditto Dido to Aeneas; furiously angry Medea makes wild threats that the reader knows will eventually lead to her murdering her own children by the feckless Jason. The letters are dramatic in the sense that the reader supplies the rest of the drama.

Elegiac metre

Isbell briefly tells us he has decided to translate all the poems into the same strict metre. Ovid wrote his poems in couplets so Isbell does the same, translating all the letters into couplets which do not rhyme but in which the first line has 11 syllables and the second 9. But, weirdly, he nowhere explains why he’s chosen this form. It was only from reading the Wikipedia article about the Heroides that I learned that Isbell is copying, with his metre, the ‘elegiac metre’ used by Ovid, a metre of couplets, the first a hexameter (six ‘feet’) the second a pentameter (five ‘feet’).

Isbell doesn’t explain this basic fact or give the history of the elegiac metre, unlike the excellent introductions of A.M. Juster and Ronald Musker to their editions of Tibullus and Propertius, respectively. Those are model introductions; this one very much is not.

Mythological references

Isbell’s edition prefaces each of the letters with a 2 or 3 page introduction and follows it with 2 or 3 pages of notes. Thus the first letter, from Penelope to her husband Ulysses, is 4 pages long (there is no line numbering; why not?), is preceded by 2 pages of introduction and followed by two and a half pages of notes. So each poem is accompanied by as much or more editorial matter.

You quickly realise Isbell’s introductions to each of the letters is as weak as his general introduction. What the reader obviously needs is an explanation of the setup to each poem – who the character writing it is, who they’re writing it to, a summary of their relationship or the story up to that point i.e. the writer’s motivation for writing it – and then what happened after the moment of writing.

Having established the basic facts, then maybe the ideal editor would add a page or so considering how the poet treats their character and story, its leading themes, anything noteworthy about it.

Instead Isbell’s mini introductions go straight into the second part, not explaining the story behind the letter at all, instead going straight into commenting on the treatment and themes, all sprinkled with the kind of fatuous comments we met in the general introduction.

For example, after giving a sketchy introduction to the story of Phyllis to Demophoon, he concludes:

Yet as Phyllis here presents herself as a simple woman swept off her feet by an experienced man of the world, the reader cannot help remembering that love is blind. (p.11)

‘The reader cannot help remembering that love is blind.’ Good grief! I found this kind of trite editorialising very frustrating. All I wanted was a clear explanation of the basic facts behind each letter.

The notes following each poem are a lot better than the introductions; they do stick to the facts and explain who the umpteen different mythological and legendary figures referred to in each poem are – and there are a lot of them. To say the poems are full of myth and legend references is an understatement: it’s what the poems are made of. You have to really know the stories, in great detail, to appreciate the depth with which Ovid has dramatised them and the nuances included in almost every line.

You have to know not only who the letter writer is and the addressee is, but who their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers are because a) they are often referred to in the poem b) they often play a key role in the events being described.

A particularly complicated example is poem 8. The letter writer, Hermione, was betrothed as a child to her cousin, Orestes, and grew to love him but now, a decade later, her father, Menelaus, off at the Trojan War, has abruptly decided she’s to be married off to the son of Achilles, Pyrrhus, in order to keep him motivated fighting in the Trojan War.

So Hermione’s grievance isn’t simply with one man, as in most of the other poems, but with her own mother and father and her uncle and aunt. To understand her feelings towards all these people you first have to get a good grasp on the family relationships and how they’ve all behaved towards her.

In this respect I should point out that the Penguin volume does have another layer of help, for at the back is a glossary of Principal Characters devoted to the really central figures in the poems, giving a page each on Achilles, Hercules, Helen, two pages on Jason and Medea, and so on.

Thus you come to realise, as you work your way through the book, that for each new letter you need to a) go to this glossary and see if the letter writer (or addressee) features in it b) read their entry c) identify the part of their biography which relates to the particular moment in their lives dramatised by the letter, d) really grasp what has happened to them up to this point and what their current feelings must be, before e) going back to the short introduction which prefaces each poem and reading that to see how the letter treats their situation (ignoring Isbell’s fatuous comments) – all this before f) you finally start reading the actual poem. Quite a lot of work.

As usual with Greek mythology, the stories have an appeal of their own and its quite easy to get lost in the notes and glossary, with their repetitions of key elements of each legend and their beguiling interconnections, so lost you almost forget about the poems. In this respect it feels like you’re not just reading a collection of poems but entering an entire world, the world of Greek mythology.

Isbell’s translations

Putting criticism of Isbell’s feeble comments to one side – his actual translations are very enjoyable. They’re good. I think it’s for a combination of two reasons:

Ovid’s letters are themselves brilliant – deeply imagined, dramatic in construction, and often very moving. In effect, they’re like extended soliloquies by wounded and hurt lovers pouring their hearts out. They’re reminiscent of the soliloquies of Shakespeare characters, taking right into the hearts and souls of these poor, wronged women. Maybe a better comparison would be with the brilliantly imagined poems about characters from history by the Victorian poet, Robert Browning.
The metre Isbell has chosen – a line of 11 syllables followed by one of 9 – is very precise and tight and this forces him to cut his use of language right back: the flabby platitudes of his introductions are just not present; instead we have very concentrated essence of Ovid.

Also, the result of Isbell’s choice of syllables to measure his lines by, is that the number of beats in the lines – which is what English readers tend to notice ore than syllable count – varies quite a bit: although a line can have exactly 11 syllables it might have 5, sometimes 4, sometimes 3 beats. This has the result of keeping the rhythm of the poems unpredictable, varied and fresh.

I’ll give excerpts from each of the poems to demonstrate how effective this approach is. Isbell’s poems are very good; his introductions are poor. Maybe Penguin should have adopted the same strategy they’ve done with some other classical translations I’ve read, namely have got the translator to do the translations and gotten a scholar to write a separate introduction.

The 15 single letters

1. Penelope to Odysseus

Penelope writes asking why, now the Trojan War has ended and so many other heroes have returned to their homelands, her husband Odysseus still hasn’t come home to her? Has he been waylaid by some foreign lover?

In this excerpt anyone can see that the syllable count is fixed and regular (11 syllables then 9), but I’m not at all sure that I’ve put the stresses in the right place; someone else might easily read the lines in a different way. And that’s the point. Using syllabic count gives the verse regularity of length but allows considerable freedom of emphasis.

Fields of grain grow on the site of Troy, the soil (11 syllables, 5 beats?)
has been sweetened by Phrygian blood (9 syllables, 3 beats?)
while ploughs drawn peacefully by captive oxen (11 syllables, 4 beats?)
turn up the bones of buried heroes (9 syllables, 4 beats?)
and ruined palaces are covered by vines. (11 syllables, 4 beats?)
You are a victor but I am here (9 syllables, 4 beats?)
alone while you loiter in some foreign place. (11 syllables, 4 beats?)

2. Phyllis to Demophoon

Phyllis is a princess of Thrace. After she found Demophoon (son of Theseus, king of Athens) shipwrecked on her shores on the way back from the Trojan War, she gave him everything, had her men rebuild his ships, believed his wooing and went to bed with him and gave him her virginity. He eventually said he had to sail home to tell his parents he was still living and he sailed off promising to return within a month and then…nothing…and slowly she realises she has been duped.

You swore by the gods to come back to me
but even they have not brought you back.
it is quite clear to me now, not even love
will move your ship, you delay too long.
When you left this port you unfurled your white sails
and the wind blew your promise away.

Isn’t that a beautiful image? ‘The wind blew your promise away.’ Isbell’s phrasing in his translations is confident and smooth.

3. Briseis to Achilles

Early in the Trojan War the Greeks sacked all the small cities in the neighbourhood of Troy. Achilles led an attack on the city of Lyrnessus where the Greeks killed the king, all his sons, his one daughter, along with Briseis’s husband, leaving her orphaned and widowed. Achilles then took Briseis as his concubine.

Some time later, Agamemnon, being deprived of one of his own concubines, seized Briseis from Achilles. Book 1 of the Iliad describes the furious argument which ensued and ended with Achilles stomping off to his tent and refusing to come out and fight. After the Greeks are badly defeated in a series of battles, the other Greek leaders force Agamemnon to change his tune, to offer Achilles not only Briseis but a bevy of other captured women, plus various treasures to make up for the initial offence, but Achilles is obstinate, refuses to return to the fight, and even lets it be known he plans to sail home to Greece, find a well-born princess and settle down.

It’s at this point that Briseis writes her letter to Achilles, referring at various points to all these events and begging him to accept Agamemnon’s offer and take her back. Having seen her father and brothers murdered and her home destroyed, what motivates Briseis is less love than a longing for security and safety. She knows Achilles will marry a high-born princess and she, Briseis, will just be a slave, but still she wants him to take her.

Your brave men levelled the walls of Lyrnessus.
I who was part of my father’s land
have seen my dearest relatives lying dead:
the sons of my mother, three brothers,
comrades in life, are today comrades in death;
my husband writhed in the bloody dirt…

I fear nothing so much as the fear
that I will be left here behind when you sail.

Rather than be deserted again, she prefers to die:

Why should I wait for you to tell me to die?
Draw your sword, plunge it into my flesh…

Briseis’s grief and loneliness and fear are viscerally conveyed.

4. Phaedra to Hippolytus

Phaedra is the middle-aged wife of Theseus. She was daughter of King Minos of Crete (and so sister of Ariadne and half-sister of the Minotaur). After Theseus had killed the Minotaur and sailed back to Athens, he took her as wife. Here she slowly tired of Theseus’s love and watched the maturing of Theseus’s son by an earlier wife, Hyppolita. This fine young man, Hippolytus, grows up disgusted by sex, devotes his life to the virgin huntress Diana, and so refuses to take part in ceremonies to Aphrodite. In revenge, Aphrodite casts a spell on Phaedra to make her fall madly in love with Hippolytus who, as we’ve seen, is revolted by love and so spurns her.

It is at the point, high on her bewitched infatuation for her young stepson, that she writes this letter to him, confessing her semi-incestuous and illicit love for him. Ovid persuasively dwells on the way it is not a youthful love but one which has seized a mature heart and is all the deeper for it.

Because it has come late, love has come deeper.
I am on fire with love within me;
My breast is burned by an invisible wound…

When the art is learned in youth, a first
love is simple; but the love that comes after youth
always burns with a harsher passion…

There’s a passage describing how Phaedra admires Hippolytus’s physique and strength, how he reins in his high-spirited horses, the flex of his arm when he hurls a lance or grasps a hunting spear, which really do convey the force of sexual obsession.

5. Oenone to Paris

Paris was one of the many sons of Priam, king of Troy. Before he was born his mother, Hecuba, dreamed she gave birth to a firebrand which set fire to all of Troy. Soothsayers told her this meant the boy would be the ruin of Troy and so she and Priam ordered the baby to be given to a shepherd, Agelaus, to take into the mountains and abandon to his fate. The shepherd did so but when he went back a few days later found the helpless baby being suckled by a bear, which he took to be an omen, so he took the baby in and raised it as his own. Obviously the young prince grew up strong and tall etc and the mountain nymph Oenone fell in love with him, they married according to simple rustic rites and she bore a son, Corythus.

However, Paris went to take part in competitive games at Troy and, being of princely blood, won everything, much to the anger of his brothers, before finally being recognised as the long-abandoned son and taken back into the royal family. At some point (the chronology is vague) Paris had, quite separately, been asked to judge which of the three major goddesses – Juno, Minerva or Venus – was most beautiful and chose Venus because she promised him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world.

So, under her guidance, he built a small fleet and embarked on a tour of friendly Greek states which brought him to Sparta where he met and seduced Helen, wife of King Menelaus, abducted her and brought her back to Troy.

It is at this point that Oenone writes her letter, lamenting that Paris has abandoned her, with much execration of Helen:

You were a nobody when you married me;
I was the daughter of a great stream…
When you were only a poor shepherd you were
content with no one but me, your wife…

Your tears fell when you left, do not deny them.
Victims of grief, we wept together;
your arms held me closer than a clinging vine
holds the elm.

And of Helen:

I tore my clothes away from my breasts
and beat my hands against my flesh; my long nails
tore at my tear-stained cheeks and my cries
filled Ida’s holy land with their sad lament:
I took my grief to the barren rocks.
So may Helen grieve and so may she lament
when she is deserted by her love.
The pain I endure was brought by her and she
should suffer then as I suffer now.

And then criticism of the immense mistake he has made in stealing another man’s wife, and another beautiful metaphor:

Happy Andromache, Hector is faithful.
Why could you not be like your brother?
But you are lighter than dry leaves drifting on
a fitful breeze, you are even less
than the smallest tip of a spear of grain dried
in the insistent warmth of the sun.

6. Hypsipyle to Jason

Hypsipyle was queen of Lemnos, the granddaughter of Dionysus and Ariadne. In an exceptional event, the women of Lemnos killed all the males on the island, though Hypsipyle saved her father Thoas. So she was ruling Lemnos as queen when the Argonauts visited the island. She was wooed by Jason, who stayed on Lemnos for two years and had two sons by him.

However, he told her he had to sail off on his quest for the Golden Fleece and so off he went, promising to return. Now, some time later, she has learned that Jason went on to take up with the witch Medea (‘some barbarian poisoner’, ‘a barbarian slut’) before sailing on to Colchis, winning the golden fleece, and then sailing back to his home city of Iolchus, in Thessaly, with Medea as his partner. This is the moment of maximum bitterness at which the poem is written.

Where is your promised fidelity? Where are
the marriage oath, the torches that might
better be used now to light my funeral pyre?

Her long description of Medea’s witchly practices is wonderful, her contempt for her rival, magnificent.

7. Dido to Aeneas

For the plot, see my review of the Aeneid books 4 to 6. Dido’s letter is written at the dramatic moment when Aeneas has packed his men into their ships but they have not yet actually departed Carthage’s harbour, waiting for a favourable wind.

Dido very shrewdly asks Aeneas why he is pursuing his quest when she offers him everything a prince could want, a devoted queen, a new-built city and a people to rule as his own? When he arrives in Italy he will have to set about doing it all over again. Why?

If all your wishes were granted now,
without any further delay, could you find
a wife who will love you as I have loved you?

Ovid depicts her piteous pleading with moving insight:

By your former kindness to me, by that debt
which I will owe you after marriage,
give me just a little time until the sea
and my love for you have both grown calm.

8. Hermione to Orestes

Hermione is the victim of a double betrothal arranged by the menfolk in her life. Old King Tyndareius had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Hermione was the daughter of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and his wife, Helen of Troy. Prior to the Trojan War, Hermione had been betrothed by her grandfather, Tyndareus, to her cousin Orestes, son of her uncle, Agamemnon. She was just nine years old when Paris, son of the Trojan King Priam, arrived to abduct her mother, Helen.

During the Trojan war, Menelaus, desperate to curry favour with the greatest Greek fighter, Achilles and – apparently – ignorant of his father, Tyndareus’s plan for the cousins, promised Hermione to Achilles’ son, sometimes named Neoptolemus, in this poem called Pyrrhus.

After the war ended – and Achilles’ death – Menelaus sent Hermione to the city of Phthia (the home of Peleus and Achilles), where Pyrrhus was staying and the two were married. Meanwhile, Orestes has been involved in bloody adventures. His mother, Clytemnestra, had conspired with her lover Aegisthus, to murder his father, Agamemnon on his return from the war. In revenge, Orestes had murdered Aegisthus and his own mother, Clytemnestra, with the result that he is now being pursued by the Furies in punishment for his sacrilege (the sequence of events which is the subject of Aeschylus’s trilogy of plays, the Oresteia).

Hermione writes her letter to Orestes after being married off to Pyrrhus, telling Orestes she still loves him and begging him to save her from marriage to Pyrrhus.

Ovid vividly imagines what Hermione’s life must have been like: at a young age her mother was abducted (by Paris) and soon afterwards her father and all the young men of the city disappeared off to war. Therefore, he nominal engagement to Orestes was the one certain point in her young life and then even that was torn away from her. Hence the excessiveness of her please for him to come and rescue her.

My childhood knew neither father nor mother;
one was away, the other at war.
Oh my mother, you did not hear your daughter’s
childish words, you neither felt her arms
around your neck nor felt her weight on your lap;
when I was married no one prepared the bed.
When I returned I went to meet you –
I tell the truth – but I did not know fyour face.
You were the most beautiful woman
I had ever seen, you had to be Helen,
but you asked which one was your daughter.

I don’t know why, but that passage made me cry.

9. Deianira to Hercules

Deianira was Hercules’s first wife. She has learned that he has begun an affair with Iole, the daughter of Eurytus, king of Oechalia. She writes to upbraid him and ask him back. All educated audiences know that her keenness to have him back leads directly to Hercules’s death. Wikipedia:

Travelling to Tiryns, a centaur, Nessus, offers to help Deianira across a fast-flowing river while Hercules swims it. However, Nessus is true to the archetype of the mischievous centaur and tries to steal Deianira away while Hercules is still in the water. Angry, Hercules shoots him with his arrows dipped in the poisonous blood of the Lernaean Hydra. Thinking of revenge, Nessus gives Deianira his blood-soaked tunic before he dies, telling her it will ‘excite the love of her husband’.

Several years later, rumour tells Deianira that she has a rival for the love of Hercules. Deianira, remembering Nessus’ words, gives Hercules the bloodstained shirt. Lichas, the herald, delivers the shirt to Hercules. However, it is still covered in the Hydra’s blood from Hercules’ arrows, and this poisons him, tearing his skin and exposing his bones. Before he dies, Hercules throws Lichas into the sea, thinking he was the one who poisoned him (according to several versions, Lichas turns to stone, becoming a rock standing in the sea, named for him). Hercules then uproots several trees and builds a funeral pyre on Mount Oeta, which Poeas, father of Philoctetes, lights. As his body burns, only his immortal side is left. Through Zeus’ apotheosis, Hercules rises to Olympus as he dies.

Ovid, with his gift for getting to the heart of a character, imagines that the wife of Hercules would be constantly terrified that his next great challenge, that the next monster he has to fight will be his doom.

I so rarely see my lord that he is more
a guest in our house than my husband;
he is always away, pursuing wild beasts
and horrible monsters. I busy
myself, widowed and chaste, with praying at home,
tortured by my relentless fear that
some vicious foe will bring him down; my mind’s eye
is filled with snakes and boars and lions,
with three-throated hounds pursuing their quarry…

10. Ariadne to Theseus

Theseus volunteers to go on the latest shipment of 14 young Athenian men and women who are sent every nine years to be sacrificed to the Minotaur on Crete. He falls in love with the daughter of King Minos, Ariadne, and she has the bright idea of using a ball of thread to help them escape the labyrinth after Theseus has killed the half-man half-bull. He pledges his love to her and she departs in the ships of the rejoicing young Athenians back to their home city. But somewhere along the way (accounts differ) he abandons her on an unpopulated island.

So she has not only lost her love, but for him had given up all the rights and perquisites pertaining to a royal princess (of Crete). So she is double bereft.

Ovid, as usual, captures the intensity of the experience, to be abandoned, the entire fleet to sail off without her, leaving her abandoned on a desert island. How terrible!

Often I go to the couch where once we slept,
a couch that would not see us again,
and I touch the hollow left by your body –
it is all that remains – and the clothes
that once were warmed around your flesh. I lie down
on the bed wet with my tears, and I cry…

11. Canace to Macareus

Canace was the daughter of Aeolus, the lord of the winds. Canace fell in love with her own brother, Macareus, and committed incest with him, which resulted in her getting pregnant. Macareus promised to marry Canace but never did. When their child was born, Canace’s nurse tried to take the baby out of the palace in a basket, pretending to be carrying a sacrificial offering, but the baby cried out and revealed itself. Aeolus was outraged and compelled Canace to commit suicide, sending her a sword with which to stab herself. He also exposed the newborn child to its death.

The letter is written just before Canace kills herself, she holds the quill in her right hand and the sword in her left. She describes how she and her nurse used a variety of herbs to try and induce an abortion but failed. She describes how, during labour, she was close to death but Macareus brought her back, swearing to marry her. Then how her nurse tried to smuggle the baby out in a basket of fruit but it started crying, arousing Aeolus’s suspicions who rummaged in the basket and produced the baby, showing it to the assembled courtiers with howls of outrage.

As the ocean trembles at the passage of
a little breeze, as the ash tree shakes
in a warm breeze from the south, you might have seen
my whitening flesh shiver.

She describes how Aeolus ordered the screaming baby to be taken and exposed in the wild and then sends a servant with the sword and the order to kill herself. Through all this she retains a strange kind of innocence and barely reproaches Macareus, mainly reproaching Aeolus for his mad rage, but above all feeling pity for her baby son, barely a day old and condemned to die a horrible death.

My son, pitiful pledge of unholy love,
this day is both your first and your last.
I was not allowed to let my tears – the tears
that are owed to you – fall upon you;
I was not allowed to clip a lock of hair
that I might carry it to your tomb;
I was not allowed to bend over your flesh
and take a last kiss from your cold lips.

12. Medea to Jason

Jason and the Argonauts came to Medea in desperate need of her help. Venus made Medea fall in love with Jason and join the expedition. Her help was invaluable in winning the golden fleece. Jason returned and settled in Corinth but here, in a peaceful civilised state, Medea’s sorcery – and the fact she was a non-Greek ‘barbarian’ – becomes a liability. When Jason is offered the hand of Creusa, princess of Corinth and daughter of King Creon, in marriage, he takes it as she is a civilised woman, a princess, and a useful alliance. It is this betrayal that drives Medea into a frenzy of jealous rage. Wikipedia:

When Medea confronted Jason about the engagement and cited all the help she had given him, he retorted that it was not she that he should thank, but Aphrodite who made Medea fall in love with him. Infuriated with Jason for breaking his vow that he would be hers forever, Medea took her revenge by presenting to Creusa a cursed dress, as a wedding gift, that stuck to her body and burned her to death as soon as she put it on. Creusa’s father, Creon, burned to death with his daughter as he tried to save her. Then Medea killed the two boys that she bore to Jason, fearing that they would be murdered or enslaved as a result of their mother’s actions. When Jason learned of this, Medea was already gone. She fled to Athens in a chariot of dragons sent by her grandfather, the sun-god Helios.

A hymn of vengeance:

Let her laugh now and be merry at my faults
while she reclines on Tyrian purple,
soon enough she will weep as she is consumed
in a blaze that is hotter than mine.
So long as I have poison, fire and weapons
Medea’s foes will all be punished.

13. Laodamia to Protesilaus

Unlike most of the other writers, Laodamia has no grudge or grievance against her man – they are loyally married and still in love. He has simply been swept up and off to the Trojan war and her letter worries about him. The audience knows that an oracle had prophesied that the first Greek to from the invading force to set foot on Trojan land was fated to die and Protesilaus couldn’t control his enthusiasm so, as his ship beached, leapt from it and, sure enough, was cut down by the mighty Hector in the first battle, though Laodamia, as she writes her letter, doesn’t know this. Instead she pours ridicule on the whole idea of an army being raised because one man’s wife has been abducted: what an absurd over-reaction to put so many thousands of lives at risk for ‘a common slut’. Laodamia doesn’t care about ‘honour’ and ‘war’. All she wants is her beloved husband back.

How long until I hold you, safely returned;
how long until I am lost in joy?
How long before we are joined together, here
on my couch and you tell me of your deeds?

14. Hypermnestra to Lynceus

In ancient times Hypermnestra was one of the 50 daughters of Danaus. Danaus took his daughters and settled in Argos. Now Danaus had a brother, Aegyptus, who had 50 sons. Aegyptus ordered his sons to follow the Danaids to Argos and there press their suits to each marry one of the 50 daughters. Danaus strongly suspected Aegyptus’s motivation was less family solidarity than a wish to take over all Danaus’s land.

Anyway, a huge wedding party was held at which all the suitors got royally drunk, then Danaus handed out daggers to all his daughters and told them to stab to death the 50 cousins as they came to claim their conjugal rights. All the daughters did so except for Hypermnestra who spared her spouse, Lynceus. She either did this because she found herself unexpectedly in genuine love with Lynceus or maybe because Lynceus was charitable enough to spare her virginity.

Either way Hypermnestra helped Lynceus escape the palace full of his brothers’ bodies before dawn but her subterfuge was discovered, the was arrested and imprisoned. This is the moment when the letter begins. She doesn’t regret behaving ‘morally’; it is her murderous father and her sisters who are the real criminals. If she is to be punished, so be it.

Then she launches into a vivid description, told in the present tense, of the events of that bloody night. The poem is less about grievance than most of the others, it is more about presenting the moral case for her actions in defying her father. She says her family has already seen enough of bloodshed, why add more?

Only right at the end does she ask Lynceus to come and save her, but cuts the poem short saying the weight of the manacles on her wrists prevents her from writing more!

What happened next? Danaus had her brought before a court but Aphrodite intervened and saved Hypermnestra. Lynceus later killed Danaus as revenge for the death of his brothers. Hypermnestra and Lynceus’ son, Abas, would be the first king of the Danaid Dynasty.

15. Sappho to Phaon

This is an exception in the series because it is the only poem relating to an actual historical personage. Sappho is the famous archaic Greek poetess who lived from about 630 to 570 BC. She was prolific and within a few centuries came to be treated as a classic. Unfortunately, only fragments of her copious works survive. In the same kind of way her life story was subjected to speculation and invention by later generations. A particularly enduring legend was that she killed herself by leaping from the Leucadian cliffs due to her love for the ferryman, Phaon. And so this last of the 15 poems is a fictional letter from Sappho to this ferryman.

Another striking departure from the previous 14 is that neither character came of aristocratic let alone royal family. Phaon really was just a ferryman and no more.

But the poem does have in common with the others is its tone of grievance. Sappho was a lot older than Phaon. She appears to have conceived a pash for the handsome young labourer, they had a torrid affair, now he’s legged it.

What makes it quite a bit different from other poems on the same subject is that, in leaving, Phaon has not just ‘betrayed’ her yaddah yaddah yaddah – he has taken her poetic inspiration. Her identity, her sense of self, her achievement, her reputation in her society, is based on the numerous brilliant love poems she has written to young women in her circle. Hence our modern word ‘lesbian’ from the island of her birth and where this circle of gay women lived.

But now, to her dismay, Sappho discovers that, in his absence, Phaon has become an obsession. She has erotic dreams about him at night and erotic thoughts during the day and these have a) destroyed the calm and equilibrium which were once so important to her inspiration as a poet b) destroyed her feelings for other women.

I do not make songs now for a well-tuned string,
for songs are the work of carefree minds…
Yours is now the love these maids once had,
yours the face that astonished my eyes…
I wish that eloquence were mine now, but grief
kills my art and woe stops my genius.
The gift of song I enjoyed will not answer
my call; lyre and plectrum are silent.

The double letters

There are six double letters, divided into three pairs. They present several differences from the 15 single letters which precede them. For a start they’re all about twice the length.

But they’re still written by the same kind of Homeric hero as the first series, exemplified by the first pair, the letter of Paris to Helen, then Helen’s reply to Paris.

16. Paris to Helen (13 pages)

As mentioned, this poem is twice the length of previous letters. But something else, which happened a bit in previous poems, really comes to the fore in this one: which is that the moment of writing, the moment the letter is written, seems to change as it progresses.

On the first page it seems as if Paris is writing before he’s even set off for Greece, imagining the great beauty of Helen he’s heard so much about and addressing the oddity of him being in love with her without ever seeing her:

But let it not seem odd that I am in love
from so far off. With a bow so strong
the arrows of love were able to find me.
So said the Fates. You must not refuse…

But on the second page Paris describes building the ships and setting sail; on the third page he describes arriving in Sparta and being graciously hosted by Menelaus; then he describes in great detail being overwhelmed by the reality of Helen’s beauty, at successive dinners being unable to look at her without choking with love; then he describes how Menelaus has chosen this moment to leave to supervise his estates in Crete and so, how the gods are conspiring for them to run off together; and it ends with Paris using an array of arguments to beg Helen to elope with him.

So the end of the poem seems to be composed at a drastically later moment than the beginning, and the precise time of writing seems to continually shift through the course of the poem. This makes it feel very dramatic and, as it reaches the climax of begging her to run away with him, quite exciting and immediate.

17. Helen to Paris (9 and a half pages)

In the medieval courts attended by Geoffrey Chaucer, among many other literary games, there was one in which the courtiers divided up into two teams and staged a formal debate, one team proposing the merits of the flour (beautiful but transient), the other, of the leaf (dull but enduring). It was a sophisticated courtly entertainment.

I can’t help feeling a sort of echo of that here: in Paris’s letter to Helen Ovid provides the Trojan with a series of arguments for why Helen should run away with him:

the Fates decree it
Venus orders it
the gods are immoral and break marriage vows
their ancestors on both sides broke marriage vows
her mother, Leda, let herself be ravished (by Zeus in the form of a swan)
Menelaus is unworthy of her
his own record of bravery and his descent from gods
Troy is much richer than Sparta so she will be adorned with beautiful things
the Greeks won’t seek her back and even if they do, he is strong and he has his mighty brother Hector to fight alongside him etc.

And then Helen, in this letter, refutes Paris’s arguments and proposes her own counter-arguments.

You can imagine Ovid’s sophisticated audience enjoying not just the dramatisation of the characters, but savouring the argumentation they articulate. Roman poetry is, as I’ve pointed out half a dozen times, very argumentative. Even the love elegists – Tibullus, Propertius – make a case in each of their poems; each poem takes a proposition (women look best without makeup, women are fickle etc) and then marshals a sequence of arguments to make the case.

Anyway, Helen concedes that Paris is very beautiful (making the two of them sound like Vogue models: ‘beauty attracts you to me as me to you’). She admits that if she were unwed she would be tempted by him as a suitor. But she makes a shrewd hit when she simply refuses to believe his cock and bull story about the three most powerful goddesses in the world presenting themselves to him on some hillside! What an absurd story!

She says she us unused to the ways of adultery. She sees him writing her name in wine on the dining table and thinks he is silly. She knows she is watched. It was she who advised Menelaus to go on his journey to Crete, telling him to hurry back. Now she agrees with Paris, this has presented her an opportunity for illicit love but she hesitates, she is in two minds, she is fearful.

She’s been doing her research about Paris and knows he was married to Oenone and abandoned her. Won’t he do the same to Helen? And, the final worry of all hesitant women, what will people say? What will Sparta and all Achaia (i.e. Greece) and the people of Asia and of Troy think of her if she abandons her husband for him? And Priam? And his wife? And all his brothers?

If she abandons her legal husband and kin and adopted homeland she will have nothing, nothing. She will be entirely at the mercy of his moods and his kinfolk who, chances are, will bitterly resent her.

If he and his family become fearful of Greek revenge then every new ship coming over the horizon will trigger their paranoia and she knows men: eventually she’ll get all the blame, everyone will blame her womanly weakness instead of his insistent lechery. She knows war would follow in her footsteps.

And what about the two goddesses he didn’t choose, in his absurd story? They won’t support him, will they? They will be against him, and her. And for all his boasts that he is a warrior, he is not: he is a sensualist; his body was made for love, not war.

The letter concludes by reminding him (and the reader) that Paris has begged for a secret meeting so he can plead his cause face to face. She refuses and says she is sending this letter now, by her servants, and let that be an end. Leaving the reader to speculate about what came next: did they meet up? Did Paris finally overcome her doubts and persuade her to elope with him? Or, as some accounts say, did he drug and abduct her?

18. Leander to Hero (7 pages)

Hero (despite the name, a woman) was a priestess of Venus who lived in a tower in Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont (now generally known as the Dardanelles), and Leander was a young man from Abydos, on the opposite side of the strait. Leander fell in love with Hero and every night swam across the Hellespont to spend time with her. Hero lit a lamp at the top of her tower to guide him.

Hero wanted to remain a virgin but Leander wore her down with lover’s pleading until she gave in and they made love. Their secret love affair lasted through one long summer. They had agreed to part during winter and resume in the spring due to the turbulent nature of the strait between them.

One stormy winter night, Leander saw the torch at the top of Hero’s tower, thought it must be important and so set out to swim to her. But the winter wind blew out Hero’s light and Leander lost his way in the strong waters and drowned. When Hero saw his dead body, she threw herself over the edge of the tower to her death to be with him. Their bodies washed up on shore together in an embrace and they were buried in a lover’s tomb on the shore.

Leander’s letter is written towards the end of the summer, as autumn is coming on, as the seas are growing rougher. He is writing it to give to a ferryman to pass on to Hero. He’d come in person but everyone would see him getting into the boat and start gossiping and the pair, in their young innocence, want to keep their love a secret.

It is extremely sensuous, the text of a very young man experiencing the first thrill of sexuality. Unlike the 15 single letters, this isn’t a letter of reproach or grievance but of intoxicated young love. Brilliant description of the joy and ardour and fatigue of swimming, but his delight of seeing the light atop Hero’s tower, stepping out of the water exhausted and dripping to be greeted by his love who wraps him in a towel and dried his hair and takes him tom her chamber for a night of sensual delight.

Now, with the autumn storms coming on, Leander can sense the difficulty of the crossing and, in the final passage, imagines his own death as a sensual pleasure, imagines his beloved caressing his smooth corpse on the seashore, splashing his body with tears, all very young and idealistic and sentimental.

19. Hero to Leander (7 pages)

Hero, in her reply, begs Leander to come, inadvertently luring him to his death which, in turn, will trigger her suicide.

Hero reproaches him for spending his days and nights in manly activity while she, a woman, is unfree, confined to her room, working her spindle, with only her nurse for company. She knows the sea is becoming rough, she knows the excuses he will make – but at the same time wants him so badly. She is consumed with jealousy, wondering if he doesn’t come because he has found another woman; then acknowledges that she is being silly. There is something of Juliet’s innocent passionateness about her.

It has tremendous immediacy: Hero describes the lamp she is writing by, the way it flares up then dies down, and how she interprets that as a good omen. Come to me, swim to me, let us enfold ourselves in each other once again, she writes. Hard for any man to resist.

20. Acontius to Cydippe (9 pages)

The maiden Cydippe had gone to the temple of Diana at Delos and here a young man, Acontius, rolled an apple across the pavement in front of her with an inscription written on it. Curious, she stooped, picked it up and read the inscription aloud. It was a trap. It read: ‘I swear by this place that is sacred to Diana that I will marry Acontius.’ Before she could stop herself she had made a binding oath, which is the basis of the next two letters.

This pair of letters feel like the most complicated of the set, in the way the invoke, explore, play with ideas of oath, promise-making, faith, bonds and legal concepts. If someone makes an inadvertent promise is it still binding? Because he tricked her into it, is the oath Acontius made her read invalid? But if it was uttered in the presence of then god, does Cydippe’s assent matter? Acontius goes on to scare Cydippe with legends of the bad ends people have come to who scorned Diana.

This is the creepiest of the letters: Paris sort of had the force of destiny behind him but Acontius is just a creep bullying a helpless young woman. He jealously speculates that someone else might be kissing and holding her and becomes creepily jealous. He hangs round her closed door and buttonholes her servants. He is talking her.

It emerges that she was betrothed to another man and their wedding day is approaching, but she is incessantly ill. Acontius says this is because she is breaking her vow to him and the goddess is punishing her. The only way for her to get better is to ditch her fiancée.

Jacques Derrida would have a field day with the multi-levelled complexity of argumentation going on: the way the spoken word is meant to bind, but Acontius tells Cydippe about the primacy of the spoken word using the written word. In his writing he tries to impose a permanent meaning to words spoken by accident and ephemerally. The text goes on to create a complex web of meanings around pledges, oaths, promises and bonds.

Acontius then complexifies things even more by claiming the goddess came to him in a dream and told him to write those words on the apple: a spoken order to inscribe an oath which, when read aloud, becomes legally binding, as he is insisting, in another written text.

By what authority do promised things written come to pass? Does the mere act of writing make them happen? What extra is needed then? It feels dense with assumptions and ideas about language, speech and writing, which could have supplied Plato with an entire dialogue.

21. Cydippe to Acontius (8 and a half pages)

Cydippe’s reply rejects the idea that a trick oath has validity. But as her letter proceeds we realise that she is not utterly disgusted by Acontius’s subterfuge; in fact, she is intrigued by a man who would go to such lengths to win her, and now finds herself torn between the fiancé her father and family have chosen for her and this adventurer. Maybe he represents freedom. Certainly she enjoys having, even if only briefly, the choice.

She begins by confirming that she is ill, weak and weary, and her nurse and family all speculate why. She thinks it’s these two men fighting over her have made her ill. If this is his love, making her ill, she’d prefer his hate!

She gives a long description of the journey she, her mother and nurse made to the island of Delos where the apple incident took place.

She makes the key argument that even though the words of an oath may be read out, they are meaningless without informed consent. It is

the mind that makes an oath; and no oath ever
has been uttered by me to benefit you.
Only intention gives form to words.
Only counsel and the soul’s careful reason
can shape an oath…

Words without will mean nothing. So why is she being punished? Why is she ill? Has she offended against Diana without realising it?

She describes the unhappiness of her fiancé who visits her but she turns away, she removes his hand from her skin, he knows something is wrong. If he, Acontius, could see her now, lying sick and pale in bed, he would hurriedly take back his oath and try to drop her.

Then she comes to the point: her family have sent to the oracle at Delphi which has declared the gods are unhappy with Cydippe because some pledge has not been carried out. So it seems as if the oath she read out is binding in the eyes of the gods. At which point she stops fighting fate. She has told her mother about reading out the oath. She gives in. She will come to him. And so the letter ends.

Violence

The poems are quite varied but the cumulative impression is of the extremity of these legends, the extreme violence of the world they inhabit and the anguish and hysteria of much of the tone. So many of the women writers have had fathers, brothers, families murdered.

Briseis’s entire family massacred by the Achaians
Agamemnon murdered by Aegisthus who is murdered by Orestes
Patroclus killed by Hector, swathes of Trojans massacred by Achilles, Achilles killed by Paris, Paris killed by the rival archer Philoctetes
Hippolytus killed by his horses
Hercules killed by the cloak sent by his wife
the Minotaur killed by Theseus
the women of Lemnos killed all the men on the island
the daughters of Danaus stabbed to death 49 of the sons of Aegyptus

And that’s just the close relatives of characters writing the letters; behind them, their backstories contain scads of other gods and mortals who met very grisly ends.

Emotional extremity

Many of the writers threaten to kill themselves or the addressee or the woman he’s gone off with (or she’s guessing he’s gone off with). In several cases we know these dire threats come true – Dido piteously kills herself while Medea kills her children by Jason then disappears. It’s a paradox that the Greek philosophers have such a reputation for calm reflection while the imaginative world they inhabited reeked of emotional and physical extremity.

I long for poison, I wish that I could plunge
a sword in my heart so that my blood
could be poured out and my life would be finished.
Since you placed your arms about my neck
I should gladly tie a noose about it now.
(Phyllis to Demophoon)

You should see my face while I write this letter:
a Trojan knife nestles in my lap;
tears fall from my cheeks on its hammered steel blade
and soon it will be stained with my blood.
How fitting that this knife was your gift to me,
for death will not diminish my wealth.
My heart has already been torn by your love,
Another wound will hardly matter.
(Dido to Aeneas)

Now vicious beasts are tearing into pieces
the child’s body that my flesh produced.
I too will follow the shade of this infant,
I too will give myself the blade so that
not for long will I be known to all the world
as both grief-stricken and a mother.
(Canace to Macareus)

I admit the awful truth – I put
to your throat the blade my father gave. But dread
and piety stayed the brutal stroke…
(Hypermnestra to Lynceus)

There is a terrible, heart-tightening, stricken quality to so many of the women’s complaints that makes them genuinely moving.

Necks and breasts

Breasts are for beating

When the women are stricken and distraught they tear their robes and beat their exposed breasts.

I tore the clothes away from my breasts
and beat my hands against my flesh; my long nails
tore at my tear-stained cheeks and my cries
filled Ida’s holy land with their sad lament.
(Oenone to Paris)

Terrified, I rose from the abandoned bed,
my hands beat my breasts and tore my hair,
dishevelled as it was from my night of sleep…

Those were my words. When my voice became weak I
beat my breast and mixed my words with blows…
(Ariadne to Theseus)

my enemy rushed [my] child away from me
to the dark forests, that the fruit of my flesh
be consumed by wolves. He left my room.
I could beat at my breasts and score my poor cheeks
with my sharp nails…
(Canace to Macareus)

…I tore my cloak and beat
my breasts; I cried out and my nails tore my cheeks…
(Medea to Jason)

When I recovered grief, I beat my breast and
tore my hair and without shame I shrieked
like that loving mother who lifts to the high
funeral pyre her son’s empty body…
(Sappho to Phaon)

A discreet veil is drawn over the act of sex…

The act of sex is nowhere described. When Hero refers to making love with Leander she draws back, draws a veil, stops.

I could say more, but a modest tongue stops and
says nothing while memory delights;
words spoken now would bring a blush to my face…

Ditto Sappho to Phaon, describing the feeling but not the detail of her vivid erotic dreams:

It seems I fondle you while uttering words
that are near the truth of wakefulness
and my sensation is guarded by my lips.
I blush to say more…

…which is instead symbolised by arms round necks

Instead, when they remember making love, all the letter writers use the image of arms round the neck as a synecdoche, this one gesture standing for all the entanglements of the act of love. It seems that a man only puts his arms round a woman’s neck as a gesture of the utmost intimacy.

Since you placed your arms about my neck
I should gladly tie a noose about it now…
(Phyllis to Demophoon)

So often, it seems, I press the weight
of my neck against your arms and so often
do I place my arms beneath your neck.
I know the kisses, the tongue’s caresses which
once you enjoyed giving and getting…
(Sappho to Phaon)

Many times my arms are wearied by
the endless stroke and can hardly go on through
the endless waters. When I tell them,
‘You reward will not be poor, for you will have
the neck of my lady to embrace,’
they find strength and reach for the prize…
(Leander to Hero)

It seems that you swim nearer to me, and now
it seems your wet arms have touched my neck…
You must come to me, throwing about my neck
those arms weakened by the pounding sea.
(Hero to Leander)

Beating breasts symbolises emotional torment; arms round necks symbolise physical bliss.

Rape

A lot of women are raped in these stories or desperately flee would-be rapists. This is accepted by the characters, the narrator, the author and, presumably, his audience. But not by modern readers.

Faithful Tros, Troy’s builder, once loved me
and the secrets of his gifts ran through my hands.
We wrestled together for the prize
of my virginity, I pulled at his hair
and scratched his face with my fingernails…
(Oenone to Paris)

Has some fate come to us, pursuing our house
down the years even to my time so
that we, mothers of the line of Tantalus,
are easy prey to any rapist.
(Hermione to Orestes)

It’s a toss-up who was the biggest rapist, Jupiter or Neptune but pretty much all the male Greek gods are rapists.

Familiarity and pleasure

It’s inevitable that I enjoyed the letters by the characters I’m most familiar with because I knew enough about the ‘setup’ or backstory to the poem to really appreciate the emotional and psychological nuances, the train of thought, how Ovid has his character develop their argument. These would be:

Penelope to Odysseus
Briseis to Achilles
Oenone to Paris
Dido to Aeneas

Reflecting on that choice I realise it’s because these are characters from the epic poems, the Iliad and the Aeneid which I have known since childhood. I know about, but am less familiar with, the secondary stories of, for example, Phaedra or Deianira; and I know nothing about Phyllis, Hypsipyle, Laodamia, Hypermnestra or Sappho. For these characters I was relying on the introductions to tell me who they were, what their dramatic situation was, what their grievance was and what the outcome would be – making it very frustrating that Isbell’s introductions do such a poor or patchy job.

To be fair, if you look up characters in the glossary at the back of the book, this does give the complete biographies of key players such as Helen, Paris, Jason, Medea and so on. But it requires quite a lot of juggling to read those biographies, then the wobbly introductions, and then the footnotes to each poem. It felt a lot like hard work before you could get round to the actual pleasure of reading the poems themselves.

Credit

Heroides by Ovid, translated by Harold Isbell, was published by Penguin books in 1990. All references are to the revised 2004 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on November 7, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation

Tagged A.M. Juster, Abydos, Achaia, Achilles, Acontius, Acontius to Cydippe, adultery, Aegisthus, Aegyptus, Aeneas, Aeolus, Aeschylus, Agelaus, ancient world, Andromache, Aphrodite, Argonauts, Argos, Ariadne, Æneid, Briseis, Canace, Carthage, classical mythology, Clytemnestra, Colchis, Corinth, Corythus, Crete, Creusa, Cydippe, Cydippe to Acontius, Danaus, Dardanelles, Deianira, Delos, Demophoon, Diana, Dido, Dionysus, dramatic irony, elegiac metre, elegiacs, Eurytus, Feminism, Geoffrey Chaucer, Golden Fleece, Greek legend, Greek mythology, Harold Isbell, Hector, Helen, Helen of Troy, Helen to Paris, Helios, Hellespont, Hercules, Hermione, Hero, Hero to Leander, Heroides, Heroides are an early work by Ovid, Hippolytus, Hypermnestra, Hyppolyta, Hypsipyle, Iliad, incest, infanticide, informed consent, Iolchus, Iole, irony, Italy, Jacques Derrida, Jason, Jason and the Argonauts, Juno, Jupiter, King Creon, King Menelaus, King Minos, King Priam Hecuba, king Tyndareius, Laodamia, Latin poetry, Leander, Leander to Hero, legend, Lemnos, lesbian, letters, Lichas, love, love poem, Lynceus, Lyrnessus, Macareus, Medea, Menelaus, Minerva, Mount Oeta, murder, myth, Neoptolemus, Neptune, Nessus, Odysseus, Oechalia, Oenone, Olympus, Oresteia, Orestes, Ovid, Paris, Paris to Helen, Peleus, Penelope, Penguin, Phaedra, Phaon, Philoctetes, Phthia, Phyllis, Plato, Poeas, poetry, Priam, Propertius, Protesilaus, Pyrrhus, rape, Robert Browning, Roman mythology, Roman poetry, Ronald Musker, Sappho, Sestos, sex, Shakespeare, Sparta, suicide, the Fates, the flower and the leaf, the Lernaean Hydra, the Minotaur, the verse love letter, Theseus, Thessaly, Thoas, Thrace, Tibullus, Tiryns, Translation, Trojan War, Troy, Ulysses, Venus, Zeus

Posted by Simon on November 7, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/07/heroides-ovid/

The poems of Propertius translated by Ronald Musker

He errs who expects the madness of love to end;
Love that is true can know no measure…
In life I shall always be hers; in death
I shall be hers still.
(Book 2, elegy 15)

Robert Maltby’s introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of the elegies of Tibullus is outstanding in its clarity and authority and includes elements which make a good introduction to Propertius, too.

Maltby explains that in the last decades of the first century BC, Rome was home to a small cohort of leading Roman poets who took the Greek metre associated with elegies and which had come to be called ‘elegiacs’, and repurposed them as vehicles to describe very personal (or personal sounding) love affairs. Or, in Propertius’s words:

Priestlike I lead the way from the crystal spring
To adapt Italian rites to Grecian measures.
(3.1)

To repeat what I wrote in the Tibullus review:

What is an elegy?

The modern sense of ‘elegy’ as a lament for the dead only crystallised during the 16th century. Two thousand years ago, for the ancient Greeks and Romans the word had a much wider definition – elegies could cover a wide range of subject matter (death, love, war).

The defining feature of them was that they were written in elegiac couplets or ‘elegiacs’, which consist of a dactylic hexameter line followed by a dactylic pentameter line i.e. six ‘feet’ in the first line, five in the second. In English it looks like this, 6 beats, followed by 5:

My girl is now held hostage by a surly guard (6)
and her stout door is shut and bolted tight. (5)

I’ve often tried to banish pains of love with wine,
but sorrow turned the uncut wine to tears.

Obviously you’re not meant to say it out loud emphasising these beats, that would be silly. It’s just a structuring device, a convention, a code buried under the words, a rhythm you’re meant to be only dimly aware of, if at all, which gives a subliminal sense of regularity and rhythm.

Elegiac couplet Wikipedia article

The effect of a long line followed by a slightly shorter one was to create a kind of dying fall, repeated every two lines – hence its attraction for poets who wanted to write an elegy in our sense, a lament for someone who’d died, and the elegiac couplet was in fact the metre used for writing funeral inscriptions and sometimes examples of these were included in elegiac poems. However, the most famous of the Roman elegists copied the way that late Greek or Hellenistic poets had taken to using it to express personal and often ‘amatory’ subject matter.

The variation between the two lines helped to build the impression that elegiac couplets were more appropriate for the expression of ‘direct and immediate concerns’ i.e. the poet’s personal life, than a poem written entirely in hexameters, which was felt to be the metre for continuous narrative, as in Homer’s epics.

Catullus (84 to 54 BC) was the first Roman poet to co-opt the form from the Greek Hellenistic poets and adapt it to Latin for his scandalous love poems and execrations. Catullus was followed by Tibullus (55 to 18 BC, in his elegies), Propertius (50 to 16 BC in his elegies) and Ovid (43 BC to 18 AD, in a series of works, namely the Amores, Heroides, Tristia and Letters from Pontus).

Elegiacs as love poems

The classic Roman elegists used the form to write love poems, often surprisingly candid about their own love affairs. The convention quickly arose of devoting some or all of the poems to a Beloved Mistress, who receives the poet’s devotion despite being often capricious or antagonistic.

‘Your theme shall be flower-wreathed lovers at someone’s door,
And the signs they leave of their drunken flight through the night…’
(The Muse Calliope telling Propertius what his subject should be, book 3, elegy 3)

Catullus (b.84 BC) can be said to have invented many aspects of this convention in his poems to ‘Lesbia’, universally taken as a pseudonym for the Roman aristocrat Clodia Metelli with whom he (if the poems are to be believed) had a passionate affair and then an equally emotional falling-out. (Catullus and Lesbia are mentioned a couple of times by Propertius; he consciously compares his love for Cynthia with Catullus’s for Lesbia, 2.32, 2.34C).

In the next generation Tibullus (b.55 BC) is a little unusual in addressing elegiacs to three figures, two women and a boy. The dates of publication of Tibullus’s two books interlink with the first books by Propertius. Propertius (b.50 BC) is more typical in addressing most of his elegies to just the one figure, who he names ‘Cynthia’. A little later, Ovid (b.43 BC), wrote love elegiacs addressing a figure named ‘Corinna’, though there is widespread agreement that she probably didn’t exist but was a poetic convention.

In Maltby’s opinion Ovid rang pretty much every possible permutation on the use of elegiac as love poem and made it obvious that he was experimenting with the form for its own sake. Maltby thinks he used it up and hollowed it out and as a result the metre fell out of fashion.

Publishing in ancient Rome

Using the word ‘publishing’ gives a misleading impression. There were no printing presses in the West for another 1,500 years. ‘Publishing’ meant that a hand-written manuscript of the text was given to secretaries or amanuenses to copy out in full, by hand, on rolls of papyrus. These rolls were then rolled up and slipped into tubular containers. A library’ consisted of numerous tubes containing manuscripts.

As this implies, not many copies were made, generally scores, rarely into the hundreds. There was no question of making money from this process. The aim was a) if you were rich, to gain a reputation among the people who counted, the educated class or b) if you were less well-off (as Virgil, Horace and Propertius were) to win the patronage of a rich sponsor, as all three were lucky enough to do with Maecenas, who gave land, property and money to both Horace and Virgil.

Ronald Musker’s introduction

I read Propertius’s poems in the 1972 Everyman edition translated by Ronald Musker. In his introduction Musker points out that Propertius came from the equestrian class i.e. the second rank of the aristocracy below the senatorial class. His family had extensive lands in north-central Italy but, like many of his class and generation, lost a substantial amount during the enforced confiscations of Octavian after the Battle of Phillippi.

Too early you gathered up your father’s ashes;
And you had to accept a straitened hearth and home,
For many an ox had turned your rich lands over,
But the ruthless surveying rod took your wealth away. (4.1)

It also appears from one of the elegies, that a close relative or perhaps guardian was killed in the bitter localised civil war known as the Perugine War because it ended up with the rebels (led by Mark Anthony’s wife and brother) holed up and besieged by Octavian’s forces in the city of Perugia, near Propertius’s birthplace. Musker considers the trauma of these events may explain the tone of melancholy which recurs throughout his poems.

In Rome young Sextus Propertius was a friend of fellow poets Gallus and Virgil and, through them, was adopted by the renowned patron of the arts, Gaius Maecenas. His poems survive in 4 books containing around 92 poems. Actually the number varies because editors of book 2 in particular think some poems are jumbled together which must once have been separate poems and so snip and separate them; other scholars disagree; hence the difficulty of giving an exact number.

The translator, Musker, appears to have given each poem a tabloid-style title, which aren’t in the original. These are actually quite helpful in distinguishing between them and indicating the topic of each poem at a glance.

Book 1, 25 BC (23 poems)

Cynthia is the main subject, the first word of the first poem and mentioned in over half the other poems. The poems proceed through the set subjects and attitudes of the afflicted male love for his mistress, including mad declarations of love, promises to be true, lists of her achievements and perfections, jealousy of other men, despair at being abandoned, rage at being abandoned, laments on why women are so fickle and/or easily bought by rich men with shiny trinkets – and so on.

It includes a paraclausithyron i.e a poem describing the lover at the locked door of his beloved. Apparently, Propertius’s version of this is a novelty because he has the door itself speak – we get the door’s point of view, a rather cutting description of the wretched poet pining outside.

I noticed, reading Propertius, that the way these poets created the bulk of a poem, most of its content, is to address a friend, sometimes a rival or enemy – either calling them to witness aspects of your sorrow and affliction, or giving wise advice to them if they fall in love, or any other kind of address.

This conceit of addressing the poem to a pal a) makes it more dynamic b) makes it more like a speech than a solitary meditation. At many points a poem reminded me of Cicero’s legal speeches. All of them, without exception, make a case.

Also, addressing a friend in a poem makes it very public because you have to respect politeness and decorum. The two friends whose names crop up most frequently are Gallus and Tullus, apparently, historically verified real people.

Why, Bassus, by praising all these other girls
Must you try to change me… (1.4)

Put an end, my envious friend, to your tiresome talk… (1.5)

I am not afraid, my Tullus, to learn with you
The Adriatic’s moods… (1.6)

While you, my Ponticus, tell of the city of Cadmus… (1.7)

I told you, my scornful friend, that love would visit you… (1.9)

You, as your way is, Gallus, will be delighted
At my plight… (1.13)

I suppose it’s worth pointing out that the poet addresses a cohort or circle of friends and they are all men. A group of men talking about a woman, one woman’s behaviour. Hmmm. Very much a one-sided perspective, not just a guy talking about a girl but a buy recruiting all his mates to pile in behind him and back up his interpretation.

Although the Cynthia poems felt competent, the single poem which stood out for me was the ante-penultimate one, number 20, which Musker titles ‘Beware of the nymphs!’. This advises his friend, Gallus, on his love affair with a boy, warning him that the (unnamed) boy is so beautiful that he, Gallus, should keep him away from predatory girls, otherwise he’ll lose him, just as the legendary Hylas was lost to Naiads (spirits of the water) on the voyage of the Argonauts. Apart from 4 or 5 lines at the beginning and end, this is a verse description of Hylas’s story i.e. an extended fantasia into Greek legend, describing the way Hylas was sent off by Hercules to gather firewood but wandered too far and was seduced by the water nymphs while Hercules’ voice echoed wanly from afar. This was genuinely haunting.

This raises the issue of the extent to which Propertius not just incorporates Greek myth and legend into his poems, but packs them with mythological references (see below).

Book 2, 24 BC? (55 poems, including 10 or more ‘fragments’)

Book 2 for the first time features poems addressing Augustus’s great ‘minister for the arts’, Maecenas. He is described, rather unctuously, in the first poem as:

True heart alike in peace or war

and:

hope of the youth of Rome
And their envy, and my true glory in life and death…

Scholars deduce that the first book brought Propertius to Maecenas’s attention and in this second one he has become one of the great man’s circle. So not only does it address Maecenas himself but also, as was required, directly addresses Augustus.

Book 2 contains as many poems as 1 and 3 put together so some scholars think it actually combines 2 separate books. This is also suggested by the poor state of many of the poems in it. This has led some scholars to drastically rewrite the poems, taking bits which from poems where they seem out of place and stitching them into other poems where they seem to fit better. I can imagine this leads ultimately to a nightmare jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of fragments on the table in front of you as you rack your brains to recombine them in more ‘sensible’ ways.

Musker explains all this and concludes that, although many of these scholarly editions are intriguing for experts in the field, in this edition he rejects almost all of them. Because there is an alternative explanation – which is that Propertius deliberately made sudden swerves and juxtapositions in his verse, as policy. One of the elements that contributes to what Musker calls Propertius’s ‘elusiveness’ and has made him less popular in modern times that the far more sensible, down-to-earth Horace, or the scandalously sexy Catullus.

The subject matter of the poems is more varied though still circling round the figure of Cynthia. Several describe a rich rival who appears to have won her affections with jewels, and throw deep hatred his way. But then the next one might be another hymn of fulsome love and devotion. So the poems follow no order i.e you can’t make out a narrative, in fact they seem almost deliberately randomised.

Book 3, sometime after 23 BC (27, including 2 ‘fragments’)

The poems start to range in subject matter beyond simple love songs to tackle more public themes. For example, several invoke Augustus’s previous victories against Antony and Cleopatra and his current campaign in Parthia (3.4) (cf the long poem in book 4 celebrating the battle of Actium and repeatedly criticising Cleopatra).

There’s one very close to the royal family, lamenting the death of young Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus’s nephew, who he legally adopted then married to his daughter Julia, only for him to die in 23 BC, his twentieth year (3.18).There’s one on the standard topic of how Rome has become corrupted by foreign riches and let its shrines and temples fall into shameful disuse:

Proud Rome is falling, crushed by her own prosperity. (3.13)

Several of the early ones are recusatios, a stock type of poem in which the poet bashfully excuses himself from writing the grand epic poem about Rome’s heroic military victories which society expected, and instead gets a Muse or god to explain that the poet’s real vocation is love poetry.

Wars I would tell of in patriotic verses,
But, alas, how weak the notes that sound on my lips! (4.1)

He writes a long poem to Maecenas saying everyone has his own nature and his (Propertius’s) is emphatically not either going to war or writing about war. The only war he enjoys is the battle of love (‘love’s sweet strife’, 3.20B). In fact this is continuing a trend which began in book 2, with 2.34 actually mentioning Virgil as the great epic poem of Propertius’s time.

Cynthia still pops up. In some he celebrates Cynthia’s birthday (3.10), but overall he seems to be tiring of her, and the final poems declare himself well shot of her:

False is that trust of yours in your beauty, woman,
Whom my favouring eyes have long made overproud.
Yes, Cynthia, greatly indeed my love has praised you;
It shames me now that through my verses
You gained such fame. (3.24)

And the last poem in the book is an execration, calling down curses on her, and looking forward to her aging and withering and losing her beauty (3.25).

Book 4, published sometime after 16 BC (12 poems)

Book 4 contains only half the number of poems as book 1, leading some scholars to speculate that it may have been published posthumously, a tidying-up operation. Several of the poems imply that Cynthia is dead – in 4.7 her ghost complains to Propertius that her funeral wasn’t lavish enough.

The other poems move well beyond love poetry, addressing a variety of subjects. They include several ‘aetiological poems’, a genre which explains the origin of various Roman rites and landmarks. They’re longer than before, too. Many poems in book 1 were one page long. All those in book 4 are at least 2 pages long, some 3 or even 4.

The poet describes the early history of Rome for 2 pages and the original rural appearance of Rome in terms very reminiscent of the Aeneid before the second half is spoken by a Babylonion priest predicting Propertius’s horoscope.
The Etruscan god Vertumnus speaks, speculating about his own origins and purpose; he is a chameleon and can be male or female or take any role or profession.
Two-page poem in which a young wife, Arethusa, writes to her husband, Lycótas, away at the wars, describing her sadness and devotion.
Three pages describe the iniquity of Tarpeia, a vestal virgin back in the earliest days of Rome, when it was little more than a village, who falls in love with Tatius king of the neighbouring tribe of the Sabines; she betrays a secret path up the Palatine Hill into Rome but when Tatius marries her, as he promised, he gets his men to crush her with their shields for her treachery. This, supposedly, is the origin of the name of the Tarpeian Rock on the Palatine.
Execration of a procuress named Acanthis, who incited his (unnamed) love to spurn the gods, whore after gold, reject his love, and so on.
Three pages celebrating Augustus’s victory at the Battle of Actium. Always good policy to suck up to the emperor.
Cynthia’s ghost comes back from the tomb to upbraid him on the evening of her funeral. At the end he tries to embrace her but her ghost vanishes into air which reminds me of the umpteen time the same thing happens in the Aeneid.
To get his own back on Cynthia (see how the poems are not in any narrative order) the poet organises a little orgy with two hand-picked courtesans at the height of which Cynthia storms in, drives the girls out scratching and screaming, then demands complete submission from the poet, before fumigating the place. Then they have championship sex.
Another poem describing what Rome looked like before it was founded i.e. was idyllic countryside – very reminiscent of book 8 of the Aeneid – here the backdrop for the legendary moment when Hercules stopped on the site only to have his cattle stolen by Cacus. The poem describes the Forum when it was just a grazing ground and explains the origin of the Great Altar which still stood in Propertius’s time. I wonder if it was Augustus and Maecenas’s pressure which led him to drop love poetry and turn to accounts of Rome’s founding legends.
If a Roman military leader defeated the leader of the enemy in single combat and kept the latter’s arms and armour, these were called the spolia opima and brought back to be dedicated in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. It had only happened three times in Roman history and this poem describes those three great personal achievements, by Romulus, Aulus Cornelius Cossus (consul in 428 BC) and Marcus Claudius Marcellus (consul in 222 BC).
The final poem is a touching address by the recently deceased Cornelia consoling her husband, Paullus Aemilius Lepidus (77 to 11 BC). This man’s father had been brother to the Lepidus who was in the Second Triumvirate alongside Anthony and Octavius. Not long after Cornelia’s death, he married Claudia Marcella Minor, a daughter of Octavia the Younger, sister of Augustus. So like the lament for Marcus Claudius Marcellus (3.18) this is by way of being an imperial commission. However, its stately beauty has led to it being described as the ‘queen of the elegies’ and it is commonly considered the best poem in the entire collection.

Musker’s translation

Having carefully explained what the Latin elegiac metre was, Musker then goes ahead and cheerfully ignores the strictness of it in his own translation. His versions are very free and all the better for it. Try and spot traces of the hexameter-pentameter combination in the following:

Whence, you ask me, come all my poems of love,
And my book that sounds on men’s lips its note of langour.
Calliope does not sing me these songs nor Apollo;
A girl provides me with all I have
Of poetic talent.
(2.1)

Instead of couplets defined by the elegiac metre, Musker uses the verse paragraph. Each poem, instead of presenting a solid column of verse –as they do in the original Latin – is divided into 3 or 4 or 5 verse paragraphs of 5 or 6 lines, the last one or two lines always notably shorter, maybe a kind of recreation of the ‘dying fall’ of the original. Thus:

Penelope, who was worthy of many suitors,
For twice ten years was able to live untouched;
To defer remarriage by feigning a womanly industry,
Then unwinding by nightly stealth the weft of the day.
And though, grown old with waiting, she had no hope
Of ever seeing Ulysses again,
She yet stayed true.
(2.9A)

This not being faced by a wall of verse, instead being able to read a paragraph at a time, makes the poems immensely more readable, as does Musker’s relaxed approach to metre

Conventions of the love poem

Scholars have suggested various real-life models for Cynthia but there is no consensus. As usual all we have to go on is hints within the poems and one remote historical reference.

Propertius mentions that Cynthia is a descendant of the Roman poet Hostius. He frequently compliments her as docta puella meaning ‘learned girl’. He tells us that she herself was a writer of verse. This kind of autobiographical clue-hunting strikes me as pointless. Even when you have confirmed that Lesbia was a codename for Clodia…does it change anything? If anything, it reduces the impact of the poems, which they gain from being about a shadowy unnamed woman.

Instead, the poems are artifices; they rehearse a number of postures or attitudes or emotions related to love affairs. These may or may not ever have been ‘genuine’ or related to ‘a real person’ but it’s a question of taste whether you need to believe that to enjoy them. I don’t.

Poems are verbal machines designed to evoke psychological states in the reader; some of these might be mimetic, directly replicating the emotion described in the poem. But once you’ve read a certain number of poems and start to recognise the same topics recurring in the same treatment, at least part of your mind becomes capable of detachment, regarding even the most moving poem as a verbal artifact, a device.

Mythology

Apparently, Propertius is often criticised because of his excessive use of references from myth and legend. For example, elegy 2.6 kicks off with a flurry of mythological comparisons: he cites three of the most famous courtesans from ancient times and the crowds of men who flocked around them and then claims they were all nothing compared to the hordes of men who swarm at Cynthia’s door. In other words, it is a poem about male jealousy.

The house of Laïs at Corinth, though at her door
All Greece paid court, was never thronged like yours;
Thaïs, famed by Menander and once the darling
Of Athens, attracted no such swarm;
Nor yet did Phrynë, enriched by all those lovers
So that she could have re-erected
Demolished Thebes. (2.6)

In his introduction Musker defends Propertius against the charge of introducing too much mythological matter into his poems. His defence is:

The ancients thought through mythology. Lacking anything remotely like a modern scientific understanding of the laws of nature, their extremely dense and multi-layered mythology provided not exactly rules or laws but stories from history which suggested underlying tendencies, among humans and among the fate which seems to hover over them. Mythology helps to make sense (albeit a chaotic and violent sense) of the world.
Sheer swank. Propertius’s jealousy risks coming over as petty, small-minded, unaristocratic. But if he devotes a paragraph to comparing himself and Cynthia to figures from myth and legend then he obviously flatters her, bigs himself up, and turns a personal peeve into what sounds like the grand statement of some general law rather than a trivial tiff between pampered layabouts.

Personally, I enjoyed Propertius’s use of mythology. In Horace the mythological references often felt dragged in – I think it’s because Horace is such a regular guy, his entire schtick is about living for the moment and enjoying life in a very realistically described Rome, his is such a down-to-earth, sensible philosophy, that Achilles and Apollo seem wildly out of place in it.

Whereas Propertius from the start is more intense and shrill, a little more hysterical and extreme, and so his use of myth and legend genuinely helps to expand and enhance the poems, gives them size, like adding echo to a voice track.

The Romans expected their lovers to give them prominent love bites (note to 4.3, p.220, and 4.5).

Credit

Poems of Propertius, translated by Robert Musker, was published by Everyman books in 1972. All references are to the 1972 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on November 4, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Translation

Tagged Acanthis, Achilles, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Antony and Cleopatra, Apollo, Arethusa, Argonauts, Athens, Augustus, Aulus Cornelius Cossus, Æneid, Battle of Actium, Battle of Phillippi, Cacus, Calliope, Catullus, Cicero, classical literature, Claudia Marcella Minor, Cleopatra, Corinth, Cynthia, dactylic hexameter, dactylic pentameter, elegiac couplets, elegiacs, elegy, first century BC, Friendship, Gaius Maecenas, Gallus, Great Altar, Greek legend, Greek mythology, Hellenistic poetry, Hercules, Homer, Horace, Hostius, Hylas, Julia, Jupiter Feretrius, Lais, Latin poetry, Lepidus, love, love bites, love poem, love poetry, Lycótas, Maecenas, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Mark Anthony, Menander, mythology, Naiads, Octavian, Ovid, Palatine Hill, paraclausithyron, Parthia, Paullus Aemilius Lepidus, Penelope, Perugia, Perugine War, Phryne, poem, poems, Poems of Propertius, poetry, Propertius, recusatio, Robert Maltby, Robert Musker, Roman civil war, Roman poetry, Rome, Romulus, Ronald Musker, Sabines, Second Triumvirate, Spolia opima, Tarpeia, Tarpeian rock, Tatius, Thais, Thebes, Tibullus, Tullus, Ulysses, Vertumnus, Virgil

Posted by Simon on November 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/04/propertius-ronald-musker/

Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos, Slave Trader by M.I. Finley (1968)

This blog post started out as simple notes on a short essay by the noted historian of the ancient world, Sir Moses Finley (1912 to 1986) – until I stumbled on the wider context of the essay on the internet, which I then try to summarise.

Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos, Slave Trader

The essay ‘Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos, Slave Trader’ was published in the early 1960s, then included in a slim Pelican paperback collection, ‘Aspects of Antiquity’, published in 1968, which I picked up sometime in the 1980s.

It is far from being a big definitive essay on the huge subject of slavery in antiquity. Rather, it’s a set of meditations which flow from contemplating just one artifact from the ancient world, a seven-feet-high, finely decorated marble tombstone to this man, Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos.

Tombstone of Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos, Slave Trader

The tombstone

This tombstone was found at a town near the border between modern Turkey and Greece. It shows three carved scenes: a typical banquet at the top; a work scene in the middle; and on the bottom, a depiction of 8 slaves, chained together by the neck, being led in single file, accompanied by two women and two children, not chained, preceded by a man who is obviously in charge. Between the top and second row is an inscription in Greek, reading:

Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos, freedman of Aulos, slave trader

Apparently what makes this stone rare and unusual is its blunt candour. In the scattered writings we have from the ancient world slave trading was looked down on, sometimes despised, which is odd because the entire economies of ancient Greece and Rome relied on slaves in enormous numbers. But clearly, the writing classes – the people who left opinions for us to read – were ambivalent about it at best.

The American South

Finley compares and contrasts the situation in the ancient world with that in the Southern United States in the nineteenth century. American slave owners were uneasily aware that the rest of the civilised world had abolished slavery and strongly disapproved of them. Hence their increasingly anxious over-compensating justification of the ‘peculiar institution’.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had no external voice of conscience to upbraid them. The reverse. Everywhere they looked they saw all other societies of their time practising slavery.

The racial justification for slavery

The slave society of the Deep South justified its exploitation with widespread propaganda about the intrinsic inferiority of black people. You don’t read far in any text about the American civil war without coming across southern ideologues using the Bible or any other spurious means they can lay hands on to justify the intrinsic superiority of whites and the intrinsic inferiority of blacks. Plenty of authors and politicians claimed that blacks could only find true happiness in the condition of slavery, blacks are children who need the strong hand of a father etc etc.

So a black person in America could never lose the stigma associated with slavery, even if they were free, even if they lived in the north, ran a business, lived a free life, could never be completely free.

The raceless basis of ancient slavery

The situation was drastically different in the ancient world because slavery wasn’t associated with any particular race or ethnicity. Literally anyone could be enslaved – in Spain, in Gaul, in Greece itself, conquering Roman armies enslaved entire cities of white Caucasians.

The crucial point is that there were no specifically slave races or nationalities. Literally anyone and everyone might be enslaved, and which groups predominated at one time or another depended on politics and war. (p.157)

The association of slavery with skin colour was an invention of the Atlantic slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Freed names

Back to Aulos – his first two names, Aulos Kapreilio were those of his master, which he took when he was made free, as per Roman custom. Timotheos was his slave name.

Roman slave names

In the early days of slavery Romans gave their slaves names like Marcipor or Lucipor which was simply a contraction of Marcus puer or Lucius puer, puer being Latin for ‘boy’ (hence the English word ‘puerile’, which has come to mean ‘childishly silly and immature’).

From the year of the twin defeats of Carthage and Corinth, 146 BC, the number of slaves began to steadily increase and so they needed more names.

After 146 the empire became unofficially divided into a Latin-speaking West and a Greek-speaking East, and so slave names sometimes indicate a slave’s origins, east or west.

Side

A city on the south coast of Anatolia, became notorious as a slave market. But maybe the epicentre of the ancient slave trade was the island of Delos

The people of Phrygia in central were notorious for selling their own children into captivity. Many slaves from Scythia (the area to the north of the Black Sea) were bought from their own chieftains, captives in their own wars, or children, or simply human levies, like tax, sold at a profit (p.163).

Slave sales

Given the millions of men, women and children who were slaves it is notable that we have just two visual depictions of an actual slave auction. In both of them a male slave stands on a platform while another man, presumably the buyer, lifts his tunic to admire his strong thighs.

The condition of a slave

is to be brought into a new and alien society violently and traumatically; to be torn not only from his homeland but from all the relationships which provide identity and psychological stability, with family, kin, tribe, village, region, gods, customs, dress – everything.

All this is replaced with just one cardinal relationship – with the slave’s male owner who controls not only every aspect of his physical existence, but his mental horizons, the language he has to use, the new religion he has to practice, rules he has to obey – everything.

Slave sexual exploitation

Complete control over the person of slaves meant the master class had unfettered unlimited sexual access to all slaves, male, female, young or old. As I’ve read the chatty odes of Horace or elegiacs of Tibullus, Propertius or Ovid, I have been disturbed again and again by the casual way they talk about being ‘given’ slaves (of either gender) for sexual purposes.

Slave punishments

The most chilling thing for me, though, has been the casual references, in all the Roman literature I’ve read from Plautus onwards, of the horrific punishments slaves could be subject to, starting with whipping and escalating through torture, having limbs deliberately broken, and so on, up to the ultimate punishment of crucifixion.

Finley returns to the attempts of Americans to justify slavery through the intrinsic inferiority of one race and say not only was it not attempted in the ancient world, it was actively disproved by the case of the Greeks.

Greek revenge

After the brutal conquest of the Greek League in 146 BC, over the next few centuries hundreds of thousands of Greek men, women and children were brought back to Italy as slaves. However, in the long term this caused a kind of cultural revolution. The Gauls or Germans might have been considered ‘barbarians’ (they wore trousers, for God’s sake!) but the Greeks were citizens of the culture which had taught the Romans literature, philosophy and architecture. Hard to maintain the fiction that these people were in any way ‘inferior’. On the contrary many of them, while remaining technically ‘slaves’, rose to become secretaries, assistants or teachers to the master’s children.

Manumission

This leads into another important issues, which is manumission, which is the fancy word for freeing your slaves. The Romans became famous among the cultures of the ancient world for freeing their slaves, as reward for loyal service. It was a disconcertingly simple procedure – the owner declaring the slave free, maybe touching them or gently pushing them away, and a state official such as a consul or a praetor touching the slave with a rod called a vindicta and pronouncing him or her to be free.

The slave’s head was shaved and a pileus was placed upon it. The pileus was a brimless felt cap of undyed wool. Based on what we can see in surviving frescos, sculptures, and coins, the pileus ranged from a short cone to a gumdrop shape. It was the identifying garment of a freedman.

Anyway, we know that the rate of manumission became a real problem in Roman society because the emperor Augustus passed laws trying to limit it:

He established maxima on a sliding scale, according to which no one man was allowed to free more than one hundred slaves in his will. (p.158)

Finley points out a notorious contradiction in Roman attitudes to slavery: which is that noted jurists such as Florentinus clearly stated that slavery as an institution was ‘contrary to nature’, that this idea was shared in some of the literature and incorporated into legal codes – and yet it didn’t make any difference to the actual practice.

He instances the moral philosopher Seneca who freely admitted that a slave is a person with a soul like you and me, but from this premise he draws the conclusion that one should live on friendly terms with one’s slaves, dine with them, converse with them etc – everything except actually free them, which seems beyond the scope of his philosophy (p.164).

War

Because, as Finley points out, war was central to the entire institution of slavery and the slave trade.

The ancient world was one of unceasing warfare, and the accepted rule was that the victor had absolute rights over the person and property of the captives, without distinction between soldiers and civilians. (p.159)

Caesar

went to Gaul an impoverished nobleman and returned a multi-millionaire and this was partly because of the huge number of captives he seized and sold into slavery, taking a commission. After he captured the town of the Atuatuci he sold the entire population of 53,000 into lifelong slavery. After the Battle of Alesia in 52 BC he gave one captive to every one of his legionaries.

War slavers

Enormous numbers like this would slow an army down so by Caesar’s time arrangements were in place to have slave traders accompany the army, or meet them at arranged rendezvous, there to buy the newly captured slaves, take them off the commander’s hands, and do with them as he please, tramp them all the way back to Italy or sell them locally.

Maybe the procession on Timotheos’s tombstone depicts such a merchant marching off some of his new merchandise.

Pirates

From a business point of view the problem was the extreme unpredictability of war. Hence the inexorable rise from 150 or so onwards of piracy in the Mediterranean. This wasn’t a case of a few swashbuckling privateers but ‘a complex business network of pirates, kidnappers and slave dealers’, with its headquarters at Side and its main emporium on the Greek island of Delos. Finley quotes the figure I’ve read elsewhere that the docks and warehouses of Delos were extended so that at its peak it turned over as many as 10,000 slaves a day.

(On the subject of scale, Finley says that as early as the 4th century BC the number of slaves working in Athens’s silver mines was probably as high as 30,000.)

Latifundia

The rise and rise of slavery went hand in hand with a crucial socio-economic development in mainland Italy. This was the eradication of the small family farm – the kind of place which Virgil and Horace idolised as the cradle of morality and right living – and its replacement by vast estates or latifundia owned by enormously rich absentee landlords and worked by slave gangs often working in chains.

The servile wars

The scale of the exploitation and the resentment it bred led to the three major slave revolts which escalated so far as to be called ‘wars’, the so-called Servile Wars:

First Servile War (135 to 132 BC) in Sicily, led by Eunus, a former slave claiming to be a prophet, and Cleon from Cilicia
Second Servile War (104 to 100 BC) in Sicily, led by Athenion and Tryphon
Third Servile War (73 to 71 BC) on mainland Italy, led by Spartacus

Training

Specialist skills were in great demand. If a slave could play music, recite poetry, take dictation or any number of other skills then he or she might secure a relatively comfortable lifestyle. Alternatively, slaves could be trained, specially if started young.

Many slaves became masters of crafts and trades; the chain-ganged brute labour of the countryside was matched by highly skilled slaves in more urban settings who worked in potteries or textile mills, on temples and other public works, sometimes performing artistic and delicate work.

The sheer number of slaves present at every level of Roman society, participating in a huge range of activities, suggests the ‘condition’ or psychology of slavery must have been hugely varied, as varied, maybe, as the number of individual slaves.

The end of ancient slavery

Slavery ended not because of any abolitionist movement but because of profound socio-economic changes in the Roman Empire. These slow economic transformations replaced both the ‘chattel slave’ and the free peasant of Virgil and Horace’s dreams, with a new social class, a new type of ‘bondsman’ – the colonus, the adscripticius, who was himself to evolve into the serf.

For the most part. But slavery didn’t disappear from Europe, not even from the Empire. Finley tells us that when the sixth-century emperor Justinian drew up a codification of all existing laws, the issues thrown up by slavery took up more space than any other topic.

The essay in the context of Finley’s career

Online you can read the first page of an essay about Finley and slavery by the American academic, Arnaldo Momigliano. This tells us that Finley had a lifelong interest in the question of slavery in the ancient world and that the present essay repeats some themes and ideas already discussed in his 1958 essay, ‘Was Greek civilisation based on slave labour?’ (itself included in a 1960 collection, ‘Slavery and Classical Antiquity’) and takes its place alongside other papers on the subject gathered in the 1981 volume, ‘Economy and Society in Ancient Greece’.

Apparently, Finley’s ideas about slavery were most fully expressed in the book-length study, ‘Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology’, published in 1980 (so when he was 68). If you go looking for it on Amazon, you find the latest imprint of the book and discover that it was republished in 1998 with new material by an academic named Brent Shaw.

This volume, ‘Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology’, isn’t a history of slavery as such, it’s an account of the interpretations succeeding ages have made of slavery in the ancient world, according to each era’s ideologies and principles. In what follows I’m indebted to the excellent review of ‘Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology’ on Amazon by Richard Mathisen. To be clear, I’m putting Mathisen’s words in italics.

Richard Mathisen’s summary of ‘Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology’

For Finley, there have been only five genuine slave societies, two ancient (Greece and Rome), and three modern (the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South).

Historians of ancient societies have always been affected by ideological bias. Classical historians admired Greek and Roman civilisations so they downplayed the ugly aspects of slavery. Christian historians tried to claim that Christianity ended slavery, but it didn’t. Marxist historians wanted to interpret ancient slavery through their lens of class war while anti-Marxist historians took the opposite view.

While ancient slavery had no racial component, modern historians are influenced by racial concerns so that every “new interpretation of slavery has professed to be more anti-racist than the one it replaces.”

Finley’s aim is to trace the distorting effect of each of these ideologies on the history of slavery. Finley explains the emergence of ancient slave societies, which requires three conditions: private ownership of land, commodified systems of production, and a shortage of labour. He considers societal attitudes toward the humanity of slaves and traces the end of slavery as it transitioned into feudalism.

Finley carefully defines slavery, because many examples of forced labour have existed, including Egyptian pyramids, Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Spartan helots, feudal serfs, and indentured servants, but they were not slaves. Indeed, he notes that the most unusual labour system in history is modern free wage labour, with individuals free to move.

This leads to Finley’s real interest. What factors led to ancient slavery? When did it start, when did it end, and why? What aspects of ancient society were part of slavery’s support system? What were the ideological presuppositions of the Greeks and Romans? Why was the legitimacy of slavery never questioned in ancient times, even during slave revolts? Why did slavery exist only in certain areas of Rome, such as Italy and Sicily? Could slavery ever come back again in the modern world, if the necessary conditions seemed to demand it?

When re-issuing Finley’s book, Brent Shaw added a 1981 response by Finley to his critics and a 1979 essay on “Slavery and the Historians.” Shaw himself wrote a 76-page essay updating the slavery debate since 1980.

The vast historiography of a complex subject

All this builds up to quite a complex picture which can be summarised as:

during his career Finley wrote a number of essays about slavery in the ancient world
his main statement on the subject is a book which describes the changing interpretations of ancient slavery made by the leading ideologies of different eras
critics criticised this book
Finley wrote an essay addressing these criticisms
Brent Shaw added a long essay updating the debate since 1980 (presumably up till 1998, when this new edition was published)

But quite obviously a lot of this is very old. When I skimmed through the passages of ‘Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology’ available on Amazon, I caught references to the Soviet Union. The idea of describing an aspect of the ancient world as it has been interpreted, reinterpreted and misinterpreted by the leading ideologies of successive ages sounds really interesting, but…1980. Surely I ought to be reading something far more up to date.

And then, when I saw that the Arnaldo Momigliano essay about Finley had been published in a periodical titled ‘Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies’, my heart sank. Every month or so since the late 1970s this journal has been publishing articles about slavery. By now there must be a mountain of content – and I bet there are other journals on the subject, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of academic papers and tens of thousands of books, and hundreds of conferences which must have been held on the subject. How long would it take to read all the relevant studies, paper and books on the subject? A year? Three years? I’d like to learn and understand more but do I have the time required? Does anyone have the time?

Credit

‘Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos, Slave Trader’ was included in a collection of essays by M.I. Finley titled Aspects of Antiquity, published by Penguin books in 1968. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 26, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History, Slavery

Tagged adscripticius, Afro-Americans, Amazon, American Civil War, American South, Anatolia, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, ancient world, anti-racism, Arnaldo Momigliano, Aspects of Antiquity, Athenion, Atlantic slave trade, Atuatuci, Aulos Kapreilio, Aulos Kapreilios Timotheos, Battle of Alesia, Bible, black, bondsman, Brent Shaw, Caesar, Carthage, chain gang, chattel slave, Cilicia, Cleon, colonus, Corinth, Crucifixion, Delos, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, Emperor Augustus, essay, feudalism, Finley, First Servile War, Florentinus, forced labour, Gaul, Greek, history, Horace, Justinian, latifundia, Lucipor, Manumission, Marcipor, Marxist historian, MI Finley, Ovid, people of colour, Phrygia, pileus, pirates, Propertius, punishment, racism, Richard Mathisen, Roman army, Roman Empire, Roman slave names, Roman slavery, Scythia, Second Servile War, Seneca, serf, Servile Wars, sexual exploitation, Sicily, Side, Sir Moses Finley, slave gangs, slave revolts, slave society, slave trade, Slave Trader, Slavery, Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Slavery and Classical Antiquity, Sparta, Spartacus, the Deep South, the Greek League, The servile wars, Third Servile War, Tibullus, Timotheos, Tryphon, vindicta, Virgil, war, Was Greek civilisation based on slave labour?

Posted by Simon on October 26, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/26/aulos-kapreilios-timotheos-slave-trader-m-i-finley/

Ovid’s Amores translated by Christopher Marlowe

The bed is for lascivious toyings meet (3.13)

Introduction to Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso, generally known as Ovid (43 BC – 17/18 AD) was a well-known Latin poet who lived at the time of the Emperor Augustus (63 BC – 14 AD), and a younger contemporary of arguably the greatest poet of ancient Rome, Virgil (70 BC – 19 AD).

After years of success and public honours, at the height of his fame, in 8 AD the emperor ordered Ovid to be summarily exiled to the remote backwater of the Black Sea. Possibly some of his verse had offended, either because of their satire or their erotic content. Possibly he had a relationship with the emperor’s daughter Julia. To this day, scholars aren’t completely sure. Augustus ordered Ovid’s works removed from libraries and destroyed, but that seems to have had little effect on his popularity. He was always among the most widely read and imitated of Latin poets and more copies of his works survive than of any other Latin poet.

Amores is Latin for ‘loves’ and the work consists of 48 poems, all in the first person, which describe the poet’s love affair with a rich and unhappily married woman, named Corinna. The series doesn’t tell a well-defined narrative with beginning, middle and end. Some poems seem to refer to specific events, but more often they address topics arising from the general idea of being in love. Some seem aimed at a generic female figure, others wander off the central topic altogether to make general points about Poetry, or the poet’s Muse. One is an elegy to fellow poet Tibullus, who had done much to establish the genre of the erotic elegy.

The word ‘elegy’ has come to mean a lament for someone who’s died, but in Ovid’s day it had the broader meaning of a poem written to or about a specific person – in this case Corinna, although many of the poems are actually written to figures surrounding her, such as her eunuch.

Scholars credit Ovid with taking aspects of the love elegy and developing them further, in particular a subversive irony and humour, ironising his own role as lover, the beloved’s character and, indeed, the whole palaver of being in love, wooing and all the rest of it.

Summary of the Amores

Book 1 contains 15 poems. The first tells of Ovid’s intention to write epic poetry, which is thwarted when Cupid steals a metrical foot from him, changing his work into love elegy. Poem 4 is didactic and describes principles that Ovid would develop in the Ars Amatoria. The fifth poem, describing sex in the afternoon, first introduces Corinna by name. Poems 8 and 9 deal with Corinna selling her love for gifts, while 11 and 12 describe the poet’s failed attempt to arrange a meeting. Poem 14 discusses Corinna’s disastrous experiment in dyeing her hair and 15 stresses the immortality of Ovid and love poets.

The second book contains 19 poems. The opening poem tells of Ovid’s abandonment of a Gigantomachy in favour of elegy. Poems 2 and 3 are entreaties to a guardian to let the poet see Corinna, poem 6 is a lament for Corinna’s dead parrot; poems 7 and 8 deal with Ovid’s affair with Corinna’s servant and her discovery of it, and 11 and 12 try to prevent Corinna from going on vacation. Poem 13 is a prayer to Isis for Corinna’s illness, 14 a poem against abortion, and 19 a warning to unwary husbands.

Book 3 contains 15 poems. The opening piece depicts personified Tragedy and Elegy fighting over Ovid. Poem 2 describes a visit to the races, 3 and 8 focus on Corinna’s interest in other men, 10 is a complaint to Ceres because of her festival that requires abstinence, 13 is a poem on a festival of Juno, and 9 a lament for Tibullus. In poem 11 Ovid decides not to love Corinna any longer and regrets the poems he has written about her. The final poem is Ovid’s farewell to the erotic muse.

The most accessible poems

I have boldened the poems I found easiest to understand and so most enjoyable, being 1.5, 2.4, 2.10, 2.13 and 2.14 about abortion, 3.6 about impotence, 3.8 the elegy to Tibullus, 3.13 telling his mistress to be discreet.

The summaries in italics are in the Penguin edition and appear to be the summaries given in the original Elizabethan edition.

Book 1

1.1 How he was forced by Cupid to write of love instead of war – At the time epic poetry was written in hexameters which have six ‘feet’ or units per line, whereas love poems were written in pentameters with five ‘feet’. The poet humorously complains that he set out to write bold, manly war poetry but that Cupid stole one of the ‘feet’ of his verse, and so now he is condemned to write love poems. He complains this is topsy turvey, Cupid should not have the power to intervene in poetry, but Cupid replied by shooting him with one of his arrows.

Thus I complaind, but Love unlockt his quiver,
Tooke out the shaft, ordaind my hart to shiver:
And bent his sinewy bow upon his knee,
Saying, Poet heers a worke beseeming thee.
Oh woe is me, he never shootes but hits,
I burne, love in my idle bosome sits.

1.2 First captured by love, he endures being led in triumph by Cupid – What is keeping him awake at night? It is love. He gives examples of types of animals which know that fighting against man’s shackles and bridles only makes it worse. Similarly, he has the wisdom to submit.

Yielding or striving do we give him might,
Let’s yield, a burden easily borne is light.

1.3 To his mistress – He describes his devotion and his good qualities as a lover:

Be thou the happy subject of my books
That I may write things worthy thy fair looks.

1.4 He advises his love what devices and signals they ought to employ when they were at dinner with her husband present – The poet goes to a dinner party along with his lover and her husband and gives a long list of instructions to her not to dally too much or too openly with him, not to hang about his neck, fondle his chin, entwine her legs with his and the secret signs they will use to convey their passion to each other.

View me, my becks, and speaking countenance;
Take, and return each secret amorous glance.
Words without voice shall on my eyebrows sit,
Lines thou shalt read in wine by my hand writ.

1.5 Sex with Corinna – He describes an afternoon when Corinna comes to his rooms and they make love (quoted in full below).

1.6 To her porter, to open the door for him – He begs Corinna’s doorkeeper to let him into the house to see his love. This is an example, believe it or not, of a recognised genre, the paraclausithyron, the ‘door poem’ or ‘lament beside the door’, in which the exclusus amator (‘shut-out lover’) addresses the door or doorkeeper keeping him from his mistress. Horace wrote a poem threatening the door, Tibullus appealed to the door, Propertius wrote a poem in which the door is the speaker. The trope was revived by some of the troubadors, recurs in Victorian poetry, and lives on into our day, witness the 1971 song Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? by the Rolling Stones:

Can’t you hear me knockin’ on your window
Can’t you hear me knockin’ on your door

1.7 That his mistress, who he has beaten, should make peace with him – In a blind rage he hits his lover, then sees her tears and throws himself at her feet in regret.

1.8 He reviles the bawd who has been introducing his mistress to the courtesan’s art – The longest poem in book 1, the poet describes the ancient bawd and procuress Dipsas as a witch and then overhears, from a hiding place, the old crone giving his mistress lessons on how to keep a lover on tenterhooks. At the end of her lecture the poet heartily curses her.

1.9 To Atticus: that a lover may not be lazy, any more than a soldier – The poet compares lovers with soldiers, including the greats of the tale of Troy, and says he is like a soldier, at his mistress’ beck and call as a soldier is of his captain’s.

1.10 To his girl, that she should not demand money for her love – He complains that alone among species, female humans refrain from sex until given gifts, until bought like whores.

The mare asks not the horse, the cow the bull,
Nor the mild ewe gifts from the ram doth pull.
Only a woman gets spoils from a man,
Farms out herself on nights for what she can;
And lets [prevents] what both delight, what both desire,
Making her joy according to her hire.

He swears that the gift he gives his mistress – his – will last long after the gold and jewels that common mistresses demand.

1.11 He pleads with Nape to carry a letter to Corinna – He asks Corinna’s maid to take a message to her and await her reply.

1.12 To those who begrudge the poet eternal fame – He seems to be attacking a book or books or manuscript, maybe it’s a letter announcing his mistress cannot visit.

1.13 To Dawn, not to hurry – He criticises the dawn for waking humanity from its rest and forcing all kinds of people, trades and animals to their daily work.

Poor travellers though tired, rise at thy sight,
And soldiers make them ready to the fight.
The painful hind by thee to field is sent;
Slow oxen early in the yoke are pent.
Thou coz’nest boys of sleep, and dost betray them
To pedants that with cruel lashes pay them.

But, worst of all, parting him from his mistress.

1.14 He consoles his girl, whose hair has fallen out from excessive hair-washing – He mocks Corinna for cutting off her hair and dyeing the rest and then complaining about the result.

She holds, and views her old locks in her lap;
Ay me! rare gifts unworthy such a hap!

1.15 To those who begrudge the poet eternal fame – The book ends with Ovid describing the immortal fame achieved by the great poets of the past and the subjects they wrote about (Troy, Aeneas, the golden fleece) and that he will be among them (as he, indeed, is).

Therefore when flint and iron wear away,
Verse is immortal and shall ne’er decay.
To[ verse let kings give place and kingly shows,
And banks o’er which gold-bearing Tagus flows.
Let base-conceited wits admire vild things;
Fair Phœbus lead me to the Muses’ springs.

Book 2

2.1 Why he is impelled to write of love, rather than of titanic struggles – The poet describes the sort of audience that he desires, hot maids looking for a husband and boys hurt, like him, by Cupid’s arrows. He jokingly says what good will it do him to write about Achilles or Odysseus, they’re long dead? But if he writes a poem to a pretty woman, he might get a snog out of it!

2.2 To Bagous, to keep a more lax watch over his mistress, who has been entrusted to him – The poet asks Bagous, a woman’s servant, to help him gain access to his mistress in a poem I found largely incomprehensible.

2.3 To the eunuch serving his mistress – The poet addresses a eunuch, arguing he should let him see his mistress.

2.4 That he loves women of all sorts – An unusually comprehensible poem in which the poet explains that he loves every woman he sees, tall or short, dark or fair, coy or brazen, singing or silent, dancing or plodding:

I cannot rule myself but where Love please;
Am driven like a ship upon rough seas.
No one face likes me best, all faces move,
A hundred reasons make me ever love.

2.5 To his faithless mistress – How lucky is a lover who intercepts letters or hears gossip that his lover is unfaithful: because she can deny it and he can believe her. But the poet saw with his own eyes how, when a dinner party had ended, she kissed at length, with tongues, ‘another’ (presumably her husband).

2.6 On the death of his parrot – A pet parrot has died and he expends numerous classical analogies in mourning it. Despite reading the poem several times I can’t work out whether the parrot belonged to Corinna, or the poet, or whether Corinna is meant to be speaking (‘The parrot, from East India to me sent/Is dead…’)

2.7 He swears to his mistress that he has not made love to her maid – The poet complains that she’s always accusing him of something, in this case of sleeping with her handmaiden Cypassis. The poet denies it based on class loyalty, he would never demean himself to have sex with a slave. He throws in an unnerving detail – that her back is ‘rough with stripes’. From being whipped!?

With Venus’ game who will a servant grace?
Or any back, made rough with stripes, embrace?

2.8 To Cypassis, Corinna’s maid – In humorous contrast to the preceding poem, the poet now addresses Cypassis freely admitting that they’ve been having sex, and using classical precedents (Achilles and Agamemnon both had affairs with servants) as freely to justify the affair to Cypassis as he had used others to deny it to Corinna.

The poem appears to take place in real time, i.e. is his part of a dialogue, because after he’s taken the credit for speaking up in her defence when Corinna accused her, he promptly asks her to lie with him as a reward and, when she refuses, gets cross and threatens to reveal the truth to her mistress (which would, presumably, lead to another whipping).

2.9 To Cupid – The poet reproaches Cupid for causing him so much pain in love, for driving him like a headstrong horse or a storm at sea, when he (the poet) is a fellow soldier, a colleague, in love’s wars.

2.10 To Graecinus, that he can love two at once – His friend Graecinus told him it was impossible to be in love with two women at the same time, but he is (‘Which is the loveliest, it is hard to say’)! He describes the joy of two lovers at length and humorously gloats over his enemies who lie alone at night in their big empty beds.

2.11 To his mistress sailing – He is very anxious indeed about a planned sea voyage Corinna is going to make, curses the pioneers of sea adventures, and then invokes a ton of gods to look after her, before anticipating the joy of their reunion when she returns.

2.12 He rejoices that he has conquered his mistress – A humorous poem in which he compares himself to a mighty warrior and says he deserves to be crowned with bay leaves like the traditional victor of a campaign because he has won Corinna who is even at this moment lying on his breast, a victory greater than the defeat of Troy.

2.13 To Isis, to aid Corinna in Labour– He prays to the Egyptian goddess, Isis, and to Lucina goddess of childbirth, to protect and save Corinna who is having an abortion he is sure is from him, save Corinna and, in doing so, also save the anxious poet.

My wench, Lucina, I entreat thee favour;
Worthy she is, thou should’st in mercy save her.

2.14 To his mistress, who has attempted an abortion – The poet laments that, although women are not involved in war, they have come up with ways to harm themselves, namely having abortions which, apparently, involves ‘hid irons’ and ‘dire poison’. If all women had practiced abortion, the world would be empty, there would have been no Priam or Achilles (as usual his mind goes straight to the Trojan Wars), no Romulus and Rome, in fact no Ovid and Corinna.

2.15 To a ring which he has given his mistress – He wishes he were his mistress ring so he could familiarly touch her lap and pap.

2.16 To his mistress, to come to his country estate – He wishes his mistress would come to his country estate in Sulmo (in the Abruzzi, a region of east-central Italy). He gives an extensive description of the region’s natural beauties but says that, without her, it means nothing.

2.17 That he will serve only Corinna – He laments that his mistress is well aware how beautiful she is and this makes her haughty and disdainful. He recalls how many women from classical myth accepted a more junior lover e.g. Venus with club-footed Vulcan.

And thou, my light, accept me howsoever;
Lay in the mid bed, there be my lawgiver.

2.18 To Macer, writing of his love poems – Another poem pointing out that he would like to write of war and high tragedy but his mistress is wriggling on his lap, refuses to go when he orders her, and so his poems end up being about love and his love emotions.

I yield, and back my wit from battles bring,
Domestic acts, and mine own wars to sing.

2.19 – To his rival, her husband, who does not guard his wife – He is irritated with the husband for making Corinna so available. Forbidden love is sweeter, and he rattles off a list of women from myth and legend who were difficult to attain and so fired up their lovers more (Danae kept in a high tower, Io guarded by Juno)

What flies I follow, what follows me I shun.

In fact, he warns the husband, unless he starts protecting her more seriously, Ovid is going to give up being her lover, it’s too easy, it’s boring.

Now I forewarn, unless to keep her stronger
Thou dost begin, she shall be mine no longer.

Book 3

3.1 The poet’s deliberation whether to continue writing elegies or to turn to tragedy – Walking in a wood he is confronted by personifications of Elegy and Tragedy. Tragedy says he has become a laughing stock, writing about his lewd love affairs. Time to fulfil his talents and write Great Things. Elegy replies that she is light and trivial and yet suited for some subjects. She dresses out Venus and Corinna. The poet says he will turn to Grand Things in time and Tragedy appears to grant him a period to continue dawdling with trivial love, before turning to Higher Things. A worry which is still nagging him in 3.10:

When Thebes, when Troy, when Cæsar should be writ,
Alone Corinna moves my wanton wit.

3.2 To his mistress watching the races – He has come to the races, not to look at the horse, but his mistress. As avidly as she feeds on the arduous horse, he feeds on sight of her. There is an extended description of every element of a Roman horse-race and how they can be metaphorically applied to his feverish wooing.

3.3 On his mistress, who has lied to him – He is appalled that his mistress has lied to him and yet looks just as beautiful and desirable as before. Are there no gods, is there no justice? Characteristically, he launches into a long list of legendary figures and asks why the gods bothered punishing them so excessively if they are going to let his mistress off scot-free?

3.4 To a man who guards his wife – He warns a man who is trying to guard his lover from adultery that it will have the opposite effect: forbidden fruit tastes sweeter; it is nature to hanker for what is banned.

3.5 To a torrent, while he is on his way to his mistress – He has travelled day and night to reach his lover and now is prevented by a river in flood as the mountain snows thaw. Characteristically, he then compares the flooded river to numerous other rivers in Graeco-Roman mythology, an extended litany which helps to make this the longest poem in the book.

3.6 He bewails the fact that, in bed with his mistress, he was unable to perform –

Though both of us performed our true intent,
Yet could I not cast anchor where I meant.

Interestingly, he points out that whatever caused the first failure, it was compounded by shame i.e. embarrassment. Interesting because that is, indeed, how erectile disfunction works, the more aware you become, the worse it gets, and the more humiliated you feel. At several points he directly describes the failing member:

Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk,
It mockèd me, hung down the head and sunk…

Yet notwithstanding, like one dead it lay,
Drooping more than a rose pulled yesterday…

3.7 He mourns that his mistress will not receive him – He is consumed with anger and jealousy that his mistress has rejected him, ‘the pure priest of Phoebus and the Muses’, for a battle-scarred hunk whose hands are bloody from the men he’s killed. Alas, poetry and the arts are now worth less than gold – Barbarism!

3.8 He mourns the death of Tibullus – Albius Tibullus (c. 55 BC – 19 BC) was a Latin poet and writer of elegies. In Ovid’s poem Cupid has broken his bow and mourns. He compares Tibullus’ death to those of legendary heroes and says death makes him doubt the existence of the gods.

Outrageous death profanes all holy things,
And on all creatures obscure darkness brings.

It is a sweet and moving elegy, in the modern sense of the word.

3.9 To Ceres, complaining that because of her ceremonies he is not allowed to sleep with his mistress – The Festival of Ceres prevents Ovid from meeting his mistress who lies alone in an empty bed. There is an extended description of Ceres’ history and attributes, before he concludes that he’d rather be celebrating a festival to Venus!

3.10 To his mistress, from whose love he cannot free himself – So many times he has been turned away from her door and slept on the floor. ‘Long have I borne much, mad thy faults me make.’ He has impersonated one of her servants and seen many a sated lover leaving her bedroom, observed her tricks and signs to lovers at dinner parties, put up with her lies and deceptions. But now he has made some kind of break:

Now have I freed myself, and fled the chain,
And what I have borne, shame to bear again.

Now hate and love fight in his breast.

Now love and hate my light breast each way move,
But victory, I think, will hap to love.
I’ll hate, if I can; if not, love ‘gainst my will,

Torn: ‘Nor with thee, nor without thee can I live.’

3.11 He complains that his lover is so well known through his poems that she is available to many rival lovers – Actually, when you stop and reflect on the previous 40 or so poems, you realise that he has not in fact painted a particularly vivid picture of his lover. Horse-racing, his native countryside, the maid he had a fling with, the doorkeeper, her husband, even the details of horse-racing – and lots and lots of references to classical myths, yes, certainly. But in a curious way, the mistress – if her name is Corinna – is strangely absent from many of the poems, and even when she’s explicitly named, a strangely fugitive presence.

Which makes you realise how conventional this poem lamenting that fact that he’s made her famous, actually is.

Characteristically, he turns to classical mythology to give examples of how vivid and blazing and enduring the poet’s myths and fables have been.

3.12 On the feast of Juno – A straightfoward description of the Festival of Juno, which takes place in the town of his wife’s birth, Falsica (Falerii), and its origins. He ends the poem by piously hoping that Juno will favour both him and the townspeople.

3.13 – To his mistress; if she will be licentious, let her do it discreetly – He tells her not to boast about her night’s adventures, if she is going to stray, at least have the decency to be discreet about it. Be as wanton as she likes in bed, but, risen and dressed and in company, be sage and graceful and proper. That will make it easier for him to overlook her infidelities.

3.14 To Venus, putting an end to his elegies – In a relatively short, poignant poem, he bids farewell to ‘tender Love’s mother’ i.e. Venus, to ‘weak elegies’ and his ‘delightful muse’. What gives it a particular feel is that it is almost devoid of the extensive lists of gods and heroes which pad out most of the poems. Instead he speaks fondly of his home among the Paeligni tribe of the Abruzzi. Whereas visitors might think it fitting that Mantua sired the great poet Vergil and Verona was home to Catullus, they might be surprised that the little town of Sulmo was his birthplace. But he loves it and will praise it. And now it is time to move on, to tackle a greater ground with a greater horse. To move onto the more Serious kind of poetry which has periodically nagged him throughout the series.

Marlowe’s translation

Marlowe’s Ovid is the earliest, the least studied of his works and the most dismissed. One reason is the technical inaccuracies, errors and mistranslations which, apparently, crop up in every line, partly Marlowe’s errors, partly because the printed texts he was working from were themselves inaccurate.

This, understandably, irks Latin scholars and has resulted in 400 years of negative reviews. We, however, need not be very troubled by these pedantic concerns about literal accuracy. A hundred years ago Ezra Pound showed that translations can be full of howlers but still be very beautiful (Cathay). The thing deserves to be judged on its own terms.

That said, these poems are often boring and quite hard to follow. Why? Having just read Hero and Leander and the first couple of plays, I think it’s for several inter-connected reasons:

The couplet form

Ovid’s original was written in couplets, that’s to say paired lines, sentences divided into two lines which end with a full stop. The impact of reading a series of self-contained rhymed couplets quickly becomes monotonous. It feels mechanical.

Aye me an Eunuch keepes my mistrisse chaste,
That cannot Venus mutuall pleasure taste.
Who first depriv’d yong boyes of their best part,
With selfe same woundes he gave, he ought to smart.
To kinde requests thou wouldst more gentle prove,
If ever wench had made luke-warme thy love.

It feels like Marlowe is cabined and confined by this format. He is clearly constrained to convey Ovid’s original meaning and struggles to do so within the narrow bounds of the couplet. It routinely feels like he is contorting normal English phrasing or rhythm, so much so that I found it very difficult to understand what entire poems were actually about. 1.2 mentions a husband and husbands generally, but I struggled to understand even one line.

I sawe ones legges with fetters blacke and blewe,
By whom the husband his wives incest knewe.
More he deserv’d, to both great harme he fram’d,
The man did grieve, the woman was defam’d.
Trust me all husbands for such faults are sad
Nor make they any man that heare them glad.
If he loves not, deafe eares thou doest importune,
Or if he loves, thy tale breedes his misfortune.

The pronouns, and the apparent subject, of the poem keep changing so that I’m not sure who’s being talked about. I’ve no idea why incest has cropped up, I’ve no idea who the man is, or the woman is in the first four lines. I don’t understand what faults are being referred to, and I nearly understand the last couplet but don’t really know who the ‘thou’ referred to is. Is it the poet’s lover Corinna? But if so, why does her tale breed ‘his misfortune’?

Latin

Latin is a more compact language than English. Its declensions and conjugations, the way it changes the ends of the words to convey changes in case for nouns, and tense and person for verbs, mean that one Latin word can convey what can easily take two, three or four English words to express.

Latin can elegantly fit into two lines ideas and meanings which English can only fit into the tight straitjacket by mangling word order and meaning. To give one repeated example of this at work, many of the poems start with a ringing couplet whose first line sounds fine because he has written it out at full length, so to speak – but whose second line is incomprehensible, as Marlowe tries to fit into the second line a meaning which really requires one and a half or two. Quite often the second lines are incomprehensible.

I ask but right, let her that caught me late,
Either love, or cause that I may never hate… (?)

Bind fast my hands, they have deservèd chains,
While rage is absent, take some friend the pains…(?)

I, Ovid, poet, of my wantonness,
Born at Peligny, to write more address. (?)

It explains why Marlowe continually distorts normal word order and sense. In the poem about the doorkeeper, he writes:

Little I ask, a little entrance make,
The gate half-ope my bent side in will take.
Long love my body to such use makes slender,
And to get out doth like apt members render.

So, the first line is fairly smooth and understandable, the second is peculiarly phrased (‘bent side’?). The third line is understandable if you make the effort to read it carefully, and the fourth line is gibberish. He’s mangling the English because he’s trying to shoehorn a Latin meaning which simply contains more than an English couplet can handle.

The net effect is that it’s possible to read line after line, poem after poem, without really understanding what they’re about. Easy to begin skipping verse which is so hard to get a grasp of, or reading through entire passages without properly understanding them. Takes this couplet from 1.3:

I love but one, and her I love change never,
If men have faith, I’ll live with thee for ever.

The first line is so compacted you have to read it several times to parse the meaning – the second half of the second line is clear enough, but I don’t quite get why he’ll live with his love forever ‘if men have faith’. What have other men got to do with it? Maybe it means something like, ‘as long as men are faithful, I’ll live with thee forever’, but the little shoebox of the heroic couplet forces him to abbreviate English words so much as to teeter on the incomprehensible.

Contrast with Marlowe the playwright

Taken together what the set highlights, by being such a sharp contrast to it, is Marlowe’s natural gift for a completely different type of verse when he is writing at will and with freedom – for verse which flows freely for entire paragraphs – his gift for rolling lines which convey a luxurious flow of meaning over 5, 6, 7 or more lines, the kind of wonderfully fluent passages you find again and again in the plays. Here is Jupiter flirting with Ganymede at the start of his earliest play, Dido, Queen of Carthage:

Sit on my knee, and call for thy content,
Control proud Fate, and cut the thread of Time;
Why, are not all the gods at thy command,
And Heaven and earth the bounds of thy delight?
Vulcan shall dance to make thee laughing sport,
And my nine daughters sing when thou art sad;
From Juno’s bird I’ll pluck her spotted pride,
To make thee fans wherewith to cool thy face:
And Venus’ swans shall shed their silver down,
To sweeten out the slumbers of thy bed:

What makes this both enjoyable and understandable is they way the same basic thought (‘I’ll give you anything you want, sweet Ganymede’) expands out over ten lines. All the examples repeat the same basic idea – that all the gods will dance at Ganymede’s command – and the reader, having once grasped the basic idea, is freed up to enjoy the poet’s embellishments and elaborations. We readers revel in Marlowe’s inventiveness and fluency and therein lies the mental pleasure, the sense of luxury which derives from the effortlessness with which Marlowe spins out elegantly phrased elaborations of the theme. It’s like a luxury hotel, every room is smoothly and tastefully furnished.

Seeing Marlowe pace up and down the cage of these rhyming couplets, makes you appreciate it even more when you see him released to go bounding joyfully across the open sunny savannah of the blank verse of his plays.

The dead parrot

Whereas in the Ovid translations, the reader continually feels, along with the poet, that his natural grandiloquent discursiveness has been chopped up and cramped into bite-sized couplets. The poem about the death of Corinna’s parrot ought to be funny, the subject is potentially humorous, but the performance feels stuttery and confined.

Elisium hath a wood of holme trees black,
Whose earth doth not perpetuall greene-grasse lacke,
There good birds rest (if we beleeve things hidden)
Whence uncleane fowles are said to be forbidden.
There harrnelesse Swans feed all abroad the river,
There lives the Phoenix one alone bird ever.
There Junoes bird displayes his gorgious feather,
And loving Doves kisse eagerly together.
The Parrat into wood receiv’d with these,
Turnes all the goodly birdes to what she please.

What does ‘if we believe things hidden’ really mean? That belief in the afterlife is some esoteric knowledge? – but it wasn’t. As in hundreds of other lines, the meaning is puzzlingly meaningless or unclear. The line about harmless swans on the river is easy enough to understand but, although you can see the idea lurking behind ‘there lives the Phoenix one alone bird ever’, the actual phrasing feels clumsy and contorted, and poetry is about the actual phrasing.

Juno’s bird (the peacock) displaying her gorgeous feather I understand alright, and the loving turtle doves are a stock cliché – but the final couplet is horrible: ‘The parrot into wood received with these’ is just horrible phrasing, and what does the final line actually mean? Is it something to do with the parrot’s ability to mimic the other birds? I’ve no idea.

Love in the afternoon

Of the 45 poems only one manages to be both completely understandable and to show the extended fluency on a simple idea which distinguishes the more relaxed and fluent verse of his plays – which explains why it’s the one that is always included in anthologies.

Book 1 Elegy 5

In summer’s heat, and mid-time of the day,
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay;
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,
Or night being past, and yet not day begun.
Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown,
Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown.
Then came Corinna in a long loose gown,
Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down,
Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed
Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped.
I snatched her gown: being thin, the harm was small,
Yet strived she to be covered there withal.
And striving thus, as one that would be cast,
Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see!
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me!
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I,
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh!
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,
I clinged her naked body, down she fell:
Judge you the rest; being tired she bade me kiss;
Jove send me more such afternoons as this!

And then, it’s about a naked woman and sex, which always helps.

Legacy

There are several points to make.

1. Marlowe’s sonnet sequence

Although they are obviously not sonnets, and he didn’t write them from scratch, nonetheless the Amores can be thought of as ‘Marlowe’s sonnet sequence’. Most other leading poets of the day wrote an extended series of sonnets, all addressed to the same remote and aloof mistress, which they used to explore different moods and subjects, some tragic, some humorous. Examples include Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser’s sequence Amoretti, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the set which is sometimes seen as ending the fashion, Michael Drayton’s Idea sequence.

The point is, the Amores played something of the same role for Marlowe, allowing him to experiment with how to phrase in English a wide variety of moods, emotions and tones of voice. Each of the poems tends to make a case i.e. is not a flow of emotion, but a string of rhetorical arguments around a particular love-related issue (jealousy, passion, anger, regret). So you could argue that the Amores was practice, warming up and rehearsal for deploying variations on all these emotions in the mouths of the characters in his plays, for example the variety of arguments deployed by Aeneas and Dido as they fall in and out of love.

2. Grabby openings

One of the often-noted features of both Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne’s lyrics, is their colloquial, dramatic, buttonholing opening lines – ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ or ‘I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved…’ being examples of Shakespeare and Donne, respectively.

The point is you can make the case that Marlowe helped establish this tone – that instead of the long and formal exordium of earlier Renaissance poetry, Marlowe’s translations leap straight in with colloquial, chatty or arresting openings:

What makes my bed seem hard seeing it is soft?

Thy husband to a banquet goes with me…

Bind fast my hands, they have deservèd chains…

Leave colouring thy tresses, I did cry…

Ay me, an eunuch keeps my mistress chaste… (2.3)

Well, maybe. Maybe some of them. But just as many start with crabbed or obscure lines, simple situational setups, or promising phrases which are then bent and broken:

An old wood stands, uncut of long years’ space,
‘Tis credible some godhead haunts the place…

I sit not here the noble horse to see;
Yet whom thou favour’st, pray may conqueror be.

What, are there gods? herself she hath forswore,
And yet remains the face she had before.

Rude man, ’tis vain thy damsel to commend
To keeper’s trust: their wits should them defend.

Flood with reed-grown slime banks, till I be past
Thy waters stay: I to my mistress haste.

3. The ubiquity of classical mythology

So obvious it’s easy to overlook, but the Amores are stuffed with references to the gods and legends of the ancient world. Probably Marlowe read Horace and Virgil, too, and many other Latin authors, but the way the characters of the gods and the stories of their adventures continually pop into the poet’s mind to illustrate almost every point he’s making, will also characterise the plays – certainly Dido and Tamburlaine – where all the characters invoke the Roman gods, the characters from the tale of Troy, plus stock stories from ancient myth.

4. Classical padding

About half way through I began to notice a pattern to many of the poems: Ovid states the situation and describes it in fairly realistic terms. And then, around line 10, he will suddenly switch to invoking classical precedents. One minute he’s addressing his mistress, doorkeeper, friend etc. Then there is almost always a swerve, a change of tone, and he suddenly begins a (usually very extended) list of comparisons with figures from myth and legend. This suggests two thoughts:

It is padding. He can pad out any thought, emotion or moment by invoking a classical precedent and then describing it at length, or alternatively piling up a list of quickfire precedents. Either way, most of the poems are twice as long as the ostensible subject justifies, because they have these long passages invoking Venus and Vulcan and Jove and Achilles and so on.
I wonder to what extent people living in those times really did structure, categorise and make sense of their human experience through the filter of classical myth and legend. We nowadays – I think – invoke a range of discourses, popular sayings about mental health, maybe, or gender stereotyping or other cliches, maybe about northerners and southerners, or class-based tropes. I’m not in a position to make a full list and I dare say it varies from person to person. But whereas we might think ‘I’m depressed, I’m stressed, it’s sexism, the management don’t know what they’re doing’ – those kinds of categories – I wonder if denizens of the ancient world actually thought, ‘Well beautiful Venus had an affair with ugly Vulcan, this is like jealous Juno taking her revenge on Hercules, he’s sulking like Achilles’ and so on. Or was it only in the poems? Is it an entirely literary artifact?

5. Poetry lasts forever

People still talk about Troy, the Trojan War, Helen of Troy, getting on for 3,000 years after the stories were first told. Ovid is still mentioned, discussed and quoted long after most of the generals and all the politicians of his day are forgotten. Poetry really does outlast not only men’s lives, but entire civilisations. It’s an ancient trope because it’s true. In this couplet, I like the way he places poetry alongside ‘history’s pretence’.

Poets’ large power is boundless and immense,
Nor have their words true history’s pretence.

That’s a complicated word, ‘pretence’, because it involves effort and aspiration (pretensions), but also acting and dissembling. History is the attempt to make sense of what has happened but, as I’ve made clear in my 350 history reviews, it is always a story, or an attempt to frame a meaningful narrative. And the sense of what history is, what it is for, as well as the actual ‘histories’ of every period, change and mutate over time. But not Ovid’s words, or Marlowe’s. When Marlowe wrote ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ he made something which will last as long as the English language.

Marlowe’s works

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 16, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Literature, Mythology, Poetry

Tagged Abortion, Abruzzi, Achilles, Aeneas, Agamemnon, Albius Tibullus, Amores, ancient Rome, Astrophil and Stella, Bagoas, Catullus, Ceres, Corinna, Cupid, Cypassis, Edmund Spenser, elegy, Emperor Augustus, erotic elegy, Ezra Pound, Falerii, Falsica, Ganymede, Helen of Troy, Hercules, Hero and Leander, hexameter, Horace, ISIS, Italy, John Donne, Jove, Juno, Jupiter, Lais, Latin, love, Lucina, Macer, Marlowe, marriage, Michael Drayton, Ovid, Paeligni, paraclausithyron, Philip Sidney, Phœbus, poet, poetry, Priam, Propertius, Publius Ovidius Naso, Rolling Stones, Semiramis, sex, Shakespeare, Sulmo, Tibullus, Trojan War, Troy, Vergil, Verona, Virgil

Posted by Simon on October 16, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/ovid-amores-christopher-marlowe/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 640 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome ancient world art Augustus Biography book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War comedy Communism drama Egypt exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Germany Graham Greene Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism Italy Julius Caesar Latin literary criticism Literature London Nazis New York novel Ovid Painting Paris Philosophy photography Play poetry Politics Pompey religion Roman Empire Roman Republic Rome Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare short stories Slavery Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain Tate Modern theatre thriller Translation Virgil war
Categories
- Adventure (126)
- Africa (60)
- America (85)
- American literature (31)
- Ancient history (134)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Archaeology (2)
- Architecture (26)
- Art (478)
- Australia (6)
- Autobiography (21)
- Biography (65)
- Biology (9)
- Books (791)
- British Empire (9)
- Buddhism (1)
- Cartoon (12)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (18)
- China (14)
- Christianity (72)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (145)
- Communism (23)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (12)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (4)
- Detective stories (20)
- English literature (112)
- Environment (5)
- Essays (11)
- European History (173)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (428)
- fairy tale (1)
- Fantasy (31)
- Fashion (4)
- Feminism (31)
- Film (20)
- Flowers (4)
- France (61)
- French literature (43)
- German literature (3)
- Germany (23)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (74)
- History (396)
- Holocaust (12)
- Horror (9)
- Illustration (11)
- imperialism (14)
- Irish literature (16)
- Islamic terrorism (5)
- Japan (7)
- Latin America (8)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (61)
- Literature (146)
- Mathematics (6)
- Middle Ages (67)
- Museum (11)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (530)
- Novella (3)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (18)
- Philosophy (36)
- Photography (88)
- Play (78)
- Poetry (93)
- Politics (85)
- Prints (4)
- Psychoanalysis (3)
- Psychology (4)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (4)
- Russia (15)
- Russian literature (15)
- Saga (39)
- Science (30)
- Science Fiction (125)
- Sculpture (28)
- Second World War (86)
- Sex (36)
- Short stories (127)
- Slavery (41)
- Spy novel (65)
- Theatre (85)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (221)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (69)
- Travel writing (14)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (8)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (211)
- World War One (16)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Propertius

Martial Epigrams

Martial biography

What is an epigram?

Translator’s note

Introduction

Spanish writers

A career choice

Patrons and clients

The parasite as poet

How Roman authors made money

A Roman book

Reasons for Martial’s popularity

No real people are skewered

Obscenity

Roman sexual attitudes

Domitian

Rhyming couplets

The epigrams

Themes

The poet as celebrity and showman

Insufferable amateur poets

To Domitian, pleading his moral probity

Heterosexual sex

Gay sex

Slave or paedophile sex

Heterosexual smears

Thumbnail sketches

Chaucerian physicality

His cheap lodgings in a block of flats

Behaviour of a hanger-on and dinner cadger

Miniatures of abuse

Crude humour

Sarcasm about his readers

Self portrait in retirement

Credit

Related links

Roman reviews

Share this:

Like this:

Tristia by Ovid

Ovid’s career

Ovid’s exile

The Tristia are accessible and enjoyable

Peter Green’s translation

Book 1 (11 poems)

1.1 (128 lines)

1.2 (110 lines)

1.3 (102 lines)

1.4 (28 lines)

1.5 (84 lines)

1.6 (36 lines)

1.7 (40 lines)

1.8 (50 lines)

1.9 (66 lines)

1.10 (50 lines)

1.11 (44 lines)

Book 2 (578 lines)

Book 3 (15 poems)

3.1 (82 lines)

3.2 (30 lines)

3.3 (88 lines)

3.4A (lines 1 to 46)

3.4B (lines 47 to 78)

3.5 (56 lines)

3.6 (38 lines)

3.7 (54 lines)

3.8 (42 lines)

3.9 (34 lines)

3.10 (78 lines)

3.11 (74 lines)

3.12 (54 lines)

3.13 (28 lines)

3.14 (52 lines)

Book 4 (10 poems)

4.1 (106 lines)

4.2 (74 lines)

4.3 (84 lines)

4.4 (88 lines)