Teaching the Elegiac Lover in Ovid’s Amores

Phyllis Katz

Classical World, Volume 102, Number 2, Winter 2009, pp. 163-167 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/clw.0.0063

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* EDITOR’S NOTE: The papers included here were originally presented at the Fall Meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States in Towson, Md., October 12–13, 2001, for the panel “New Directions in Research and Teaching on Ovid,” organized by Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland.

1 P. Veyne, D. Pellauer, trs., Roman Erotic Elegy: Love, Poetry and the West. (Chicago 1988).

2 Veyne and Pellauer (above, n.1) 41.3 Veyne and Pellauer (above, n.1) 107.4 J. T. Davis, Fictus Adulter: the Poet as Actor in the Amores (Amsterdam 1989) 1.

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PAEDAGOGUSSpecial Section on ovid*

•teachinG the eleGiac lover in ovid’S aMoreS

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the evolution of views of Ovid’s elegiac lover. To counteract the tendency to define Ovid as a poet whose humor and irony were weaknesses, recent approaches have explored the complexities of Ovid’s lover, seeing him as both dominated by his puella and as her shrewd manipulator, a true desultor amoris. The paper summarizes five different ap-proaches to the Amores (those of Paul Veyne, J. T. Davis, Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ellen Greene, and Sharon James), and in addition suggests a series of steps that might be used in the classroom to enhance students’ understanding of Ovid’s elegiac lover.

Recent approaches to Ovid’s Amores have moved from an assessment of the Amores as the inferior work of a poet still finding his voice or as the last example of the declining form of the genre of Latin love poetry to a growing appreciation of Ovid’s unique place among the elegiac poets. Until the 1970s many scholars viewed Ovid as an imitator of his predecessors in the writing of elegiac poetry and saw his employment of “parody” and his constant use of humor and irony as weaknesses. Many scholars today, how-ever, see Ovid’s elegiac lover as complex, humorous, and irreverent—as a true desultor amoris whom the poet portrays as both the lover dominated by his puella and the dominating lover who shrewdly manipulates his beloved. This article summarizes some recent approaches to the Amores, offering suggestions for exploring the poems to find Ovid’s lover.

Seminal to my understanding of Ovid’s place among the elegiac poets and to the nature of his elegiac lover have been a number of works which I will consider in chronological order. In contrast to earlier scholars, Paul Veyne, for example, sees the work of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, as unconcerned with sincerity.1 According to Veyne, the elegies are not real stories of actual love affairs, though they may draw upon real experiences and feelings. Instead, the poems are rooted in a tradition of detachment and humor. Veyne insist that “Roman erotic elegy does not submit to the move-ment of the heart; instead, the whim of the artist carries the day.”2 But, the artists’ whims subscribe fully to the demands of a genre that, as Veyne so beautifully puts it, is written by poets who “are more concerned about their verses than about their mistresses.”3

Davis observes how the persona (or poet / lover within the poem) of the Amores metamorphoses himself to become alternately “the outraged innocent, the abject slave of love, the erotic adept, the jealous admirer, the frustrated adulterer, the ingratiating �friend,’ the practical adviser and so forth.”4 The

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central argument of J. T. Davis’ study is that Ovid’s love poems stem from his training in rhetoric and that the persona of the poet is masked through-out as a poseur. Davis contends that “many of the Amores, are in effect, suasoriae that have no chance of convincing their supposed addressee, but which nevertheless afford Ovid the opportunity of displaying his ingenuity and so amusing his audience and winning applause.”5 Davis cites 1.1 as an example of a suasoria in that Ovid has no chance of convincing Amor that he is not a love poet.

Barbara Weiden Boyd’s book offers a look at Ovid’s accomplishments that focuses both on the creation of the lover and the creation of the poet.6 What makes Ovid’s work as an elegiac poet unique, she believes, is his self-conscious focus on the story of the poet’s career told as an enveloping narrative in the Amores. Boyd turns to contemporary work in narratology to explain the dual actors that the poet creates in the Amores. While the poet provides the narrative frame, “entirely embedded within the first narrative is the amatory one, featuring the lover as central player. It is,” she argues, “the remarkable interdependence of these two narratives [which] makes the Amores something distinctively new in the Roman elegiac tradition.”7 In the narrative frame which contains the embedded narrative of the poet as lover, Ovid articulates his decision to explore the genre of love poetry in Amores 1.1, depicts himself as a lover with many faces, reveals his authorial conflict between elegy and tragedy in Amores 3.1, and crafts his farewell to elegy and his choice of tragedy as his new focus in 3.15.

Ovid’s poet looks at himself as lover with ironic and humorous detach-ment; he depicts his fall into love as a deliberate manipulation by Cupid to force him to write love elegy:

Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam edere, materia conveniente modis. par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem. Amores 1.1.1–4

I was preparing to sing of weapons and violent wars in weighty rhythm, with material suing the meter. The second verse was equal; Cupid is said to have laughed and to have stolen one foot.8

Rejecting the idea of a single persona for the poet, Boyd argues that Ovid crafts his dual role of love poet and lover so that both change dramati-cally in the course of his three books. He progresses from failed epic poet “arma . . . parabam” to elegiac love poet:

Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat: ferrea cum vestris bella valete modis! Amores 1.1.27–28

Let the work rise in six measures, let it fall in five; farewell hard-hearted wars with your rhythms.

5 Davis (above, n.4) 13.6 B. W. Boyd, Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Imitation in the Amores

(Ann Arbor 1997).7 Boyd (above, n.6) 140–41.8 All translations are from P. B. Katz and C. A. Jestin, trs., Ovid Amores, Meta-

morphoses, Teacher’s Edition (Wauconda, Ill., 2002).

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9 Boyd (above, n.6) 201.10 E. Greene, The Erotics of Domination Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin

Love Poetry (Baltimore 1998) 113.11 Greene (above, n.10) 113. See in addition her entire final chapter “Sexual

Politics in Ovid’s Amores, pp. 93–113.12 Greene (above, n.10) 113.13 Greene (above, n.10) 7614 S. L. James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in

Roman Love Elegy (Berkeley 2003) 9.

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to tragedian:

corniger increpuit thyrso graviore Lyaeus pulsanda est magnis area maior equis. inbelles elegi, genialis Musa, valete, post mea mansurum fata superstes opus! Amores 3.15.17–20

Horned Bacchus has rattled a heavier thyrsus; a larger ground must be beaten by the great horses. Farewell, elegies, unfit for war, [farewell] oh creative Muse [farewell] my surviving work which will remain after my death.

The poet is transformed during the collection; the lover too, in the end, is changed. As Boyd notes, by book three

we can see Ovid distancing himself from his intimate in-volvement with the woman he has created for himself to love. . . . The enterprise undertaken in Am. 1.1, to make himself into a lover and create a lover’s narrative has been completed; the poet thus no longer speaks as a lover, and instead completes the framing narrative, bringing to a suc-cessful conclusion his own poetic education.9

The works of Ellen Greene and Sharon James provide further glimpses into Ovid’s creation of himself as lover and poet. Greene goes beyond those who see Ovid’s poet/lover as upsetting the romantic “idealism traditionally associated with poets of love.”10 In contrast, she attributes to the poet a high moral idealism. Ovid, she claims, views the task of the poet as unveiling the cruelty and inhumanity of the “ideologies of erotic conquest and domination.”11 For Greene, the larger message of the poet, as applicable today as it was in Ovid’s Rome is that by “[desiring] to conquer and enslave others,” we reveal our own failure to recognize the humanity in those we mistreat.12 She comments on 1.3 that “the myths [Ovid] chooses to �win over’ his mistress suggest a paradigm for amatory relations which contradicts completely the image of the lover as �enslaved’ to the woman. Indeed, the female figures in the myths are all captives of the male. . . .”13

Sharon James’ study provides additional grist for Greene’s mill, for she maintains that “Roman love elegy opens up a view into the lived realities of ancient women,” by which she means that the poems do reveal the way men of Ovid’s class viewed and treated the women in their socio-economic group.14 In her chapter “Reading Elegy through Ovid,” James points out how Ovid “exploits and exposes elegy’s inherent disingenuities—particularly those based on gender and class . . . and the constant, though submerged, consciousness of the social, legal, and sexual advantages of being an elite

Horned Bacchus has rattled a heavier thyrsus; a larger ground must be beaten by the great horses. Farewell, elegies, unfit for war, [farewell] oh creative Muse [farewell] my surviving work which will remain afer my death.

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15 James (above, n.13) 157. On this topic see also “Deconstructing the Vir: Law and the Other in the Amores” in P. A. Miller’s Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton 2004) 131–83.

16 In addition to the works I have discussed in this essay, I recommend S. Har-rison’s “Ovid and genre: evolutions of an elegist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, P. Hardie, ed. (Cambridge 2002) 79–94. Harrison situates Ovid’s love elegy in the larger context of his changing role as elegiac poet. In the same volume, A. Sharrock, “Gender and Sexuality,” 95–107, considers the role of the love poet and his puella.

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man in ancient Rome.”15 Such pertinent insights provide a means for raising issues of gender inequality both in antiquity and today.

How do these studies help us to understand the Amores? Veyne and Davis look closely at the multi-faceted lover whose persona is fleshed out in the three books of the Amores. Boyd places this lover within a framework where the poet looks at himself as both lover and a growing and chang-ing artist. Greene and James see Ovid as a social critic, a poet who uses love elegy to show how much male-female relationships are influenced by an accepted gender imbalance. In expanding students’ understanding of the narrative flow of Ovid’s two distinct roles as lover and as self-conscious, self-referential poet, and in encouraging them to perceive both the fusion and the final rupture of these roles, and by demonstrating how male power is wielded to maintain a gender imbalance, we enable them to perceive the Amores as a structured whole with many levels of meaning. A strategy for enabling students to understand how Ovid employs the role of the elegiac lover, it seems to me, should show the students how to appreciate and understand as a positive technique the poet’s use of intertextuality in his references to his predecessors and his contemporaries, and should illustrate how Ovid moves within and beyond the models of the elegiac poems of Propertius and Tibullus.16

At the same time, to the expose students to Ovid’s complex depiction of the lover and to his use of irony, we must show them how to read each poem closely as a separate entity, looking at its structure, tone, language, myths, all of which contribute to a single poem’s unique depiction of the lover and his beloved. In demonstrating the two layers of narrative that move the collection of the Amores, we can help them to see that the individual poems are linked by an overarching structure and can also help them to perceive the uniqueness of Ovid’s accomplishment. To accomplish all this, a syllabus for teaching Ovid’s elegiac lover might do the following:

1 Introduce the “persona” of the lover in the Lesbia poems of Catullus. Since the Catullan lover shares many of the characteristics of the elegiac lover, students can make valuable comparisons between the two lovers.

2 Compare Propertius 1.1, Tibullus 1.1, and Amores 1.1 with emphasis on the role of the lover, the puella, and the role of poetry in each poem (including discussion of the obvious reference to Vergil in 1.1.1). Discuss the role of the puella in other elegiac poets: for example, Cynthia and Delia figure prominently in the very first poems of Propertius and Tibullus, whereas there is no puella in poem 1 of the Amores and Corinna is not named until poem 5.

3 Introduce selected additional poems of Propertius and Tibullus where the lovers describe their passion for and problems with their puellae.

4 Pay close attention to the uses of humor and irony in the Amores, especially to the juxtaposition of poems such as 1.11 and 1.12 and

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to the subversive use of mythological examples such as those in 1.3. Discuss how irony and humor in 1.11 and 1.12 amplify the roles that the lover assumes.

5 Look carefully at 1.9 as an articulation of male power and dominance through the vehicle of military metaphors.

6 Conclude with a reading of poem 3.15, the farewell to elegy and with a discussion of Ovid’s desire to write tragedy and to thereby achieve immortality.17

Finally, if time permits, a read-through of all the Amores in English can also help in establishing these point effectively; I have sometimes simply offered a summary of the narrative flow of the poems in each book with an eye to illustrating the range of Ovid’s treatment of lover and beloved and to showing how Ovid employs the technique of variatio.

Dartmouth College PHYLLIS KATZClassical World 102.2 (2009) Phyllis.B.Katz@Dartmouth.edu

17 In addition, students might also be introduced to Tristia 4.10 for a unique glimpse into Ovid’s view of himself as poet.

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