Latin Love Poetry

by McCoskey, Denise Eileen; Martirosova Torlone, Zara;

  Excursus: Why Myth?

  Myth unquestionably occupied a central place in ancient literature and culture. Inhabiting a time and place categorically removed from everyday experience, myth could shed light on the present precisely because of its distance from it.47 More specifically, myth provided a repository of well-known characters and stories that poets or artists could adapt to their own needs while still maintaining ‘a community of experience’ with their audience.48 Part of the appeal of myth for the love poets was the specific way it allowed them to demonstrate their extensive knowledge of previous literature, while also carving out their own voice by reinterpreting or reimagining individual stories. Ovid, in particular, uses myth to showcase his learning and cultus, features clearly evident in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an impressive collection of about 250 mythological tales, which remains one of our main sources today for classical mythology.

  The careful repurposing of classical myth in love poetry is evident already in Catullus, who artfully turns to myth in his longer poems. In poem 64, as we saw in Chapter 3, Catullus presents his own take on the myth of Ariadne’s abandonment, while in poem 68 Catullus treats the myth of Laodamia and Protesilaus’ love as a parallel to his own clandestine affair with Lesbia. The widespread use of mythological exempla (‘examples’) in helping to ‘explain’ the actions or qualities of various individuals – juxtaposing, as it were, the grandiose with the mundane – appears throughout love poetry, as it does throughout ancient literature. As we discussed in the last chapter, Propertius uses a series of mythological women to help describe the sleeping Cynthia in 1.3. In more anguished tones, he compares his own violent desire to die alongside Cynthia to the self-inflicted death of Haemon in Antigone’s tomb (2.8.21–24).

  Ovid’s Heroides examines the plight of the abandoned lover exclusively through the lens of mythical characters. Myth, however, also appears in Ovid’s other amatory works, where it functions to illuminate both the puella and ego. Although Ovid uses myth in such situations to offer seeming models of behaviour, he frequently employs it in ways that parody myth’s authority or that undercut his own arguments.49 In Amores 1.3, for example, Ovid tries to persuade his mistress to pursue an exclusive relationship with him, promising to make her famous through his poetry, just as former poets made the loves of Io, Leda and Europa famous (21–26). Initially compelling in its learnedness, Ovid’s actual choice of mythical women here raises red flags. As Fritz Graf observes, ‘the very triteness of the argument directs attention to the underlying incongruity: those relationships did not last very long, nor did they bring happiness to the women.’50 Like many devices in Ovid’s work, then, myth ultimately allows the poet to pay homage to an earlier tradition, while at the same time establishing his own critical distance from it.

  Since mythological examples are often used for didactic purposes in love poetry, they accordingly become especially prominent in the Ars Amatoria. In the Ars Amatoria, exempla serve alternately as models to be imitated or as warnings against certain types of behaviour. At times, exempla also help Ovid illustrate ‘general’ or ‘universal’ truths; thus, in one passage, he recounts the myth of Pasiphae and her copulation with the bull as proof that women are innately libidinous (Ars 1.289–326). Similarly, the example of Clytemnestra, the unfaithful and murderous wife of the Greek chieftain Agamemnon, is used by Ovid to exemplify the notion that ‘a wronged woman will take her just revenge by committing the act of infidelity on her own part’ (2.399–408).51

  We can perhaps better observe the arresting suppleness of myth in the hands of the Roman love poets by tracing the appearance of a single myth across a number of works: the myth of Atalanta.

  Atalanta Transformed

  Atalanta’s myth generally encompasses two main events: her participation as the only woman in the Calydonian boar hunt and her father’s use of a foot race to find her an appropriate husband. Having previously vowed to remain a virgin in service of the goddess Artemis, Atalanta is only defeated in the race when Milanion – or, in other versions, Hippomenes – uses golden apples to distract her, after which she is given to him in marriage. Atalanta markedly appears in three lines at the end of Catullus’ second poem. Often treated as a separate fragment, the lines avoid naming her and read only: ‘it is as welcome to me as they say the golden apple was to the swift puella, which dissolved her girdle bound for a long time’ (2b.11–13). Alluding to the foot race, Catullus’ short fragment mainly seems to celebrate the role of the apple in overcoming Atalanta’s erotic reluctance.

  Propertius echoes Catullus by also using Atalanta to illustrate his ideas about love in his first poem (1.1.9–16); in Propertius’ poem, though, Atalanta’s exemplum is adapted to demonstrate how much hard work and persistence matter in the pursuit of love, and the poet focuses not on Atalanta, but on her male pursuer. Significantly, Propertius references a lesser-known version of Atlanta’s myth, one minus the legendary foot race, in which Atalanta grows up in the wild after being exposed on Mount Parthenius as an infant. As a young woman, Atalanta is pursued by a range of suitors, including Milanion, and, while hunting one day, the two centaurs Hylaeus and Rhoeteus assault her. According to Apollodorus, she kills them herself (3.9.2), but Propertius places Milanion at the scene, where he is wounded defending her; Propertius then credits Milanion’s devotion with his ultimate conquest of the young woman.52 Throughout his use of the exemplum, Propertius closely identifies with Milanion, casting him as a double for his ego, one whose wounds foreshadow well the bruises Propertius’ own body will acquire in his dogged pursuit of Cynthia.53

  Atalanta appears twice in the Amores. First, she is evoked – along with Ariadne and Cassandra – in helping demonstrate Corinna’s beauty in her dishevelment following Ovid’s assault in 1.7. Identified only as ‘Schoeneus’ daughter’, Atalanta is described as equally lovely when she ‘disturbed the Maenalian wild animals with her bow’ (13–14), an image that pointedly evokes her vigorous hunting activities. In 3.2, however, Ovid coarsely reduces Atalanta to her legs – presumably an outcome of her speed – in urging his puella to show more of her own limbs, exclaiming, ‘such legs of swift Atalanta Milanion wanted to raise up in his hands’ (29–30). Later, in the second book of the Ars Amatoria, Ovid returns to Milanion as a model of praiseworthy persistence and masculine prowess (185–196), a passage that recalls Propertius’ earlier poem. But, in the third book, Ovid boils the myth down once again to an objectifying focus on Atalanta’s legs, instructing his female readers to assume sexual positions using their best physical attributes and offering, as crude illustration, Atalanta’s placement of her legs on Milanion’s shoulders during the act of love (Ars 3.775–776).

  As this progression in the use of Atalanta’s myth demonstrates, myth allows the love poets to adopt a range of attitudes in alternately prescribing male and female behaviours. Ovid’s tone towards myth, however, changes perceptibly in his exile poetry, as he uses it to illustrate the hardships of his banishment. In the Tristia, for example, Ovid compares himself to Odysseus, whose fate as a homeless vagabond he presents as similar to his own. Yet Ovid’s comparison emphasizes that Odysseus was a tough hero and built for that sort of life, while he, Ovid, is only a ‘tender poet’ for whom life in exile is deadly (Tristia 1.5.57–84). In the stories about Phaeton, who incurred Jupiter’s wrath, and Icarus, victim of his own reckless behaviour (1.1.79 and 89), Ovid finds additional templates for his own harsh fate. Throughout his exilic poetry, then, myth loses its frivolity for Ovid and is turned into a poignant and at times bitter discourse. Fritz Graf importantly perceives in this pessimistic recourse to myth an acknowledgement of the limits of love elegy’s conventional devices: ‘the very exempla that were useful in the world of urbane love […] are no real help in understanding what is going on.’54

  As such analysis suggests, in the evolution of Ovid’s work from the Amores to the exilic poetry, we see the transformation of many of elegy’s devices, as well as greater and greater exposure of its tactics and limits
. So it is time to turn more fully to Ovid’s evolving view of his own poetic programme.

  Ovid: Elegy Redefined

  At the core of many scholarly treatments of Ovid are assumptions that draw on his final position in the development of elegy as a genre, with many openly suggesting that he brings about the ultimate ‘decline’ of the form. Barbara Boyd, however, identifies the pitfalls of interpreting Ovid in terms of a progressive and generic fallacy according to which ‘Ovid is the last, and so the least good, of the elegists’.55 As we have seen from his literary lists, Ovid positions himself as part of a longer tradition, so one way to approach Ovid’s poetry is to acknowledge that he provides an invaluable manual for reading earlier writers,56 but that is certainly not the only lens to use in assessing the value of his work. That Ovid’s sole claim to immortality was his ability to make people laugh at the shortcomings of his predecessors seems far too unsophisticated an interpretation; Ovid’s elegiac output may be seen more profitably as ‘not simply a replica of a tradition but rather a contribution to that tradition’.57

  We can already witness a lively examination of elegy and its boundaries in the work of Propertius, including his evolution from a poet of strictly amatory themes to one drawing on such diverse topics as poetics, politics and even, by Book 4, antiquarianism. Exploration of the flexibility of elegy, as well as the variety of themes it could incorporate, becomes the main characteristic of Ovid’s love poetry. Moreover, there is no clear, linear development in his treatment of the elegiac genre. His early work, the Amores, was written (in its first edition) during the same period as the Heroides. The Ars Amatoria and the Remedia Amoris, written between 1 BCE and 1 CE, further display Ovid’s interest in remapping and reconfiguring the genre, tendencies which find ultimate expression in his poetry of exile. But we turn first to Ovid’s Amores.

  Amores: Love as a Game

  Ovid first composed the Amores (translated literally as ‘Loves’, but more often known as ‘Love Poems’) when he was not yet twenty, although only the second edition, published many years later in 1 CE, comes down to us. The title Amores undoubtedly alludes to the title previously used by Cornelius Gallus for his collection of love poetry and Roman readers would presumably have recognized the strong connections between the two works. Situating his own poetic voice, Ovid references some of his predecessors in the very opening lines of the work:

  Arms and violent wars I was preparing to produce

  in a heavy metre, the subject matter matching verse form

  with the top and the bottom lines matching. But Cupid (they say)

  has laughed and stole away one foot of my verse.

  (Amores 1.1.1–4)

  Carefully crafted, these lines teasingly inform Ovid’s reader that his original intent was to write a true war epic. Indeed, any reader of Roman poetry would immediately recognize the first word of Ovid’s poem, arma, as a direct allusion to Virgil, whose Aeneid opened with the very same word. Although Ovid may set out to follow in the footsteps of Virgil, however, he informs his audience that he has been ambushed by Cupid, who, stealing a ‘foot’, transforms Ovid’s metre from the dactylic hexameter of epic to elegiac couplet.

  In many ways, Ovid’s opening follows Propertius’ earlier use of recusatio in pointedly denying epic as a literary undertaking, yet a more overt playfulness permeates Ovid’s choice of love poetry. So, too, Ovid picks up on Propertius’ own encounter with Amor in his first poem, although in the earlier work the god does not seize a foot, but rather brings his own feet down forcibly on Propertius’ head (1.1.4). The rest of Ovid’s poem proceeds in the same self-deprecating tone as the mischievous god, in response to the poet’s indignation, strikes him with one of his shafts, causing Ovid to bid farewell to both the metre and the theme of epic: ‘Harsh wars, off you go, together with your metre’ (28).

  Other poems in the Amores likewise treat Ovid’s specific choice of genre. In poem 2.1, the narrator claims that despite his best efforts, epic with its ‘swift-footed Achilles’ and ‘mutilated Hector’ does not amount to much when it comes to the locked doors of his ruthless mistress (2.1.30–33). Girls swoon over love songs and Ovid firmly asserts his adherence to that genre (37–38). In the same vein, Ovid displays his rejection of the tragic genre in Amores 2.18, a poem that seems to anticipate the previously discussed Amores 3.1 and is addressed to a poet named Macer.58 Here Ovid confesses that he tried his hand at the tragic genre, but the demands of Amor and his disgruntled mistress interfered once again, ‘and Love has triumphed over the tragic bard’ (2.18.18).59

  The initial sequence of poems in Amores 1 introduces the main themes that recur throughout Ovid’s elegiac work and, in the second poem, the poet lies sleepless in his bed, aching from passion and deciding that it is futile to resist Cupid. He agrees to surrender and asks only that Cupid treat him as Cupid’s ‘cousin’ Augustus treats those he has conquered (an artful poke at the Augustan promotion of the goddess Venus as a kind of ancestor60), that is, by taking them under his protection (1.2.51–52). While the Amores is generally an apolitical work, this poem employs the potent image of a triumph, an important Roman public spectacle (one whose appearance in love poetry we shall examine in the next chapter), in illustrating Cupid’s power. In 24 BCE Augustus had pacified Spain and Gaul, and the ‘mocking description of Cupid’s triumph could, all too easily, be transferred to those real celebrations still fresh in everyone’s memory’. Thus the poem can be read as ‘a sharp piece of socio-political satire’.61

  Throughout his work, as we have seen, Ovid continually responds to earlier elegists, whether expanding their ideas of militia amoris, reimagining lost tablets or drawing his own meaning from the exposure of the puella’s body.62 Still, Ovid ‘rewrites’ these tropes with a jesting physicality and even salaciousness that continues to push their limits. Although Catullus was not an elegist per se, Ovid was undoubtedly aware of his ‘indecent’ poetic legacy and evokes it often, such as in Amores 2.6, a poem about the death of a parrot that clearly alludes to Catullus’ earlier sparrow poems (2 and 3). Ovid also follows Catullus’ lead in Amores 3.11 when he echoes Catullus’ desperate appeal to himself to ‘stop the insanity’ and bid goodbye to his fickle mistress (Catullus 8). At line 34, Ovid explicitly references Catullus’ famous mingling of love and hate (Catullus 85), ruminating ‘on this side love, on this side hate’. As we saw in the previous chapter, both Ovid and Catullus likewise make boastful declarations about their sexual prowess, although Ovid’s claim is perhaps offset by his own graphic admission of impotence (3.7.3–4). The same prurient approach is evident in Amores 2.15, where Ovid identifies himself with a ring he has given his mistress as a gift; fantasizing about the possibilities it gives for access to Corinna, the poem ends with an imagined erection from all the wishful thinking.

  Throughout such passages, Ovid seems to revel in the artificiality of elegy as he tackles all the commonplaces of the genre. Such reiteration of elegy’s major themes displays Ovid’s awareness of the tradition, yet he seems to engage them with his ‘tongue […] firmly in his cheek’.63 So is Ovid capable of pausing on a somber note and contemplating the alleged sufferings of his predecessors without any irony? Amores 3.9, a poem in which Ovid laments the death of Tibullus, who died around 19 BCE and whom Ovid calls ‘the seer and glory’ of elegy (5), is especially noteworthy in this regard. Poem 3.9 contains all the constituent parts of the formal funeral lament: an address to the mourners, praise for the deceased mingled with grief over his untimely demise, a ritual outburst against unjust fate, a deathbed scene followed by words of consolation, and a burial scene with accompanying prayer for the repose of the dead.64 In the course of the poem, Ovid mentions both Delia and Nemesis, ‘old love and new’ (32), who gained immortality through the poet’s work, and he envisions Tibullus being welcomed in Elysium by Catullus, Calvus and Gallus – the best of the early Roman love poets.

  On the surface, this poem seems to be a serious expression of mourning, a melancholy and solemn contem
plation of a young poet’s untimely death with concomitant praise of his lasting legacy. Peter Green, however, points out that this poem contains many parallels to Amores 2.6, mentioned above, on the death of the parrot. Ovid’s earlier poem is itself undoubtedly an allusion to Catullus’ poem of double entendre and Green emphasizes that ‘Ovid seldom produced effects by accident’, so the correlation between the poem on the death of Tibullus and the death of the pet parrot is no ‘random juxtaposition’.65 Green proposes of Ovid that ‘while his grief was genuine, one unregenerate corner of his mind may well have found the dead poet’s private life mildly risible, and his verses not wholly free from excessive (i.e., parrot-like) imitatio’.66 Even in his most somber thoughts, then, the narrator of the Amores remains potentially irreverent.

  For some readers – especially those conditioned by the rhetoric of romantic love and their own pre-formed expectations of love poetry – Ovid’s Amores, with its tone of amused detachment, may seem ‘the work of an outrageous cad or else the pointless invention of an emotionally shallow mind’.67 And in the final poem of Amores 3, Ovid gives the impression that he is bidding farewell to the entire genre: ‘Mother of tender Loves, seek a new poet. My elegies are going around the final turning post’ (3.15.1–2). Yet Ovid also lays claim in this poem to poetic fame by putting himself in the company of Virgil and Catullus (3.15.7). Several other poems in the Amores, like 3.15, point in the direction of the poet’s claims to longevity, even immortality (e.g. Amores 1.15.8), engendering a subgenre of so-called monumentum poems familiar to modern readers mostly through Horace’s famous ode (Odes 1.30). Thus the choice of the elegiac genre does not ultimately entail a short-lived fame for Ovid, despite the limits he put on elegy in 3.15.