Rome’s early military battles are the central theme of 4.10, which recounts the origins of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitoline. Romulus had allegedly first founded the temple in honour of his defeat of Acron, King of Caenina and ‘thereafter any Roman commander who defeated the enemy commander in single combat was awarded the right to dedicate the spoils as spolia opima.’73 Augustus restored the temple prior to Actium; its potential dialogue with the larger temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, also on the Capitoline, is disputed.74 In recounting the stories in which spolia opima had been earned by three earlier Roman leaders, Propertius seems to be ‘venturing onto swampy ground’,75 since Augustus had recently contrived to deny Crassus rights to the spolia in 29 BCE and, from then on, it would become the sole privilege of the princeps.76 In his look back at these figures from Rome’s early history, Propertius conspicuously focuses on their violence; while Romulus is praised for his prowess, a residual brutality is nonetheless attached to his image as Rome’s founder. The very first word of the Romulus section is the jarring imbuis, a verb meaning ‘to dampen’ or ‘to stain’, one often used of weapons and blood, suggesting that Romulus ‘dips in blood’ the example of first conquest (5).77 In the case of Cossus, Propertius expressly sympathizes with defeated Veii, contrasting its glorious past with its humble present, where now men ‘harvest fields on your bones’ (27–30). Far from treating the Roman past as a carefree Golden Age, then, poem 4.10 seems to stress ‘the violence that is at the heart of Rome’s identity’.78
Notably, in the opening lines of 4.10, Propertius claims that he ascends a great height, but that the prospect of glory gives him strength, since a crown (corona) taken from an easy peak does not yield pleasure (3–4); Welch and others have argued that the reference to a crown here, rather than the garland he requests elsewhere, is significant. When we extend the idea of climbing to mean the Capitoline itself, where the Roman triumphal procession ended, such symbols allow Propertius, in essence, to stage his own triumph as poet, appropriating an event whose symbolic importance for the Roman state we have previously considered.79 In an earlier poem, poem 4.6, Propertius explains the origins of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, likewise placing poetic composition in competition with both Rome’s military achievements and their commemoration in the Augustan urban landscape.
The temple of Apollo on the Palatine, as we have seen, was closely connected to Augustus’ victory at Actium; its intricate decorative programme could ‘be used to evoke simultaneously the naval battle at Actium, Augustus himself as victor in that battle, and also the vital aid rendered by the god Apollo himself’.80 In 4.6, Propertius gives a vivid account of the supposed battle, giving special focus to Apollo’s imposing participation on Augustus’ side. Calling it ‘one of the strangest and most contested poems in his poetic corpus’, Welch notes that critical response to this poem has varied greatly, including debate over the degree to which it praises or criticizes Augustus in its depiction of the precise event on which the princeps’ rise to power had been predicated.81 Its relation to earlier appearances of Actium in Books 1–3 (e.g. 2.16 and 3.11) at times seems awkward,82 although it takes a familiar sideswipe at Cleopatra when comparing the two sides (4.6.21–22). In the course of the poem, Apollo delivers a lengthy pep talk to Augustus, whom he calls ‘saviour of the world’ (37), and Julius Caesar, looking down from the heavens, proclaims provocatively: ‘I am a god’, and that this is proof Augustus is of his blood (60).
In portraying the actual battle, which, after the grand build-up of speeches, devolves almost immediately to Cleopatra’s flight (63 ff.), Welch argues that the poem ‘exposes the fiction of the temple, namely, the discrepancy between what happened at Actium and how it was represented in the city’.83 Even more, Propertius’ claims about the role of poetry itself are central to the poem’s interpretation, for Propertius begins 4.6 by setting the stage for his role as vates and he later opens the final part of the poem by proclaiming that Apollo – who was earlier described as appearing at Actium in the guise of the god who rained arrows down on the Greeks in the Trojan War (31–34) – wants his lyre back now that he has been victorious (69).84 While this preference for his poetic role gives Apollo the appearance of the cult statue described in 2.31, unlike in the earlier poem, Propertius ultimately says very little about the actual temple, so that, by the end, the poet’s role in constructing the memory of the battle seems to outweigh Augustus’ own monument.
Indeed, the centrality of poetic creation to any understanding of the Roman past and its shaping by the Augustan city seems to echo throughout Book 4. Propertius appropriates the vocabulary of Roman city-building, a prominent theme in Virgil’s Aeneid as well, when he claims in 4.1 to ‘lay down walls’ with his own poetry (1a.57); his boast in the same poem that the work ‘rises’ for Rome also suggests a kind of construction.85 Viewing Propertius as a kind of architect in language, Welch argues that the poet adopts an adamantly dynamic role in his depiction of Rome, serving not as a passive reporter of contemporary Rome’s urban renewal, but rather ‘a rival to Augustus in the creation of Rome’s urban identity’.86 Taking Propertius’ poetry as a whole, we can witness across his four books, then, the role of the city (as well as the shadow of the world outside) in Propertius’ rambunctious, if tortured, pursuit of love and also in his attempt to come to terms with the darker meanings of a world increasingly inscribed by Roman power.
Less than a generation later, Ovid would find his own pleasures in the Augustan city, as well as develop his own, often derisive, treatment of rural landscapes and Rome’s legendary past. For Ovid, the dream of the countryside and nostalgic reminiscences about the past Golden Age would become fused into one and treated as the antithesis of both Rome and of his own era.
Ovid: Cultus and the Augustan City
Throughout his elegiac poetry, Ovid remains a loyal devotee of the city of Rome and of what Cicero terms in his De Oratore ‘the scent of urbanity’ (3.40.161). In his treatment of pastoral themes, Ovid accordingly adheres to a straightforward premise: the pastoral countryside equals primitivism; thus, time and again Ovid rejects the prevailing attempts to sentimentalize Rome’s rural origins. Only once in the Amores does Ovid turn to the countryside with any degree of reverence, when he describes a journey together with his wife to Falerii for the festival of Juno (3.13), but this poem is set awkwardly apart from the rest of the work. For one, mention of the poet’s own wife (as opposed to someone else’s) is rather strange in the context of love poetry. Secondly, this is not an amatory poem, but a poem about sacred Roman festivals, anticipating the future author of the Fasti more than the self-proclaimed ‘adviser on love’. Indeed, the whole poem projects a sense of the elegiac ego gravely misplaced as Ovid dutifully observes the rites and solemnly prays, but seemingly cannot wait to get away. In the following poem, he returns to the urban landscape and his elegiac mistress with great relief, or so it seems.
Leaving the Past Behind
Shortly before, in 3.8, Ovid presents his most detailed commentary on the Golden Age in the Amores, a discussion closely related to Ovid’s general views of the countryside. In this poem Ovid laments that his poetic genius, which used to be valued more than gold, is no longer considered precious (3–4). Later in the poem we find out that Ovid’s disappointment has a personal source: his mistress has dumped him for a wealthier man who is also, to add to the offence, a newcomer without any pedigree. The argument of the poem focuses, as Green notes, ‘on the charge of feminine gold-digging’ and ‘bitter reproach for the girls who – whether through avarice or sexual inclination – found soldiers attractive as lovers’.87 In lines 35–44 Ovid launches into somewhat vague praise of Saturn’s reign, which he paints as oblivious to precious metals and wealth, giving ‘crops without husbandry’ (39). But in this evocation of the lost Golden Age, ‘Ovid does no more than pay traditional lip-service to a kind of dim mesolithic paradise, the nomadic hunter’s world, minus all the back-breaking business associated with farmi
ng.’88
While contemplating the changed mores of his day, Ovid cannot help but make a dig at Augustus for having his own temple and divine cult (3.8.52–53) – a far cry from the simplicity of the ancestors. In a society where the ruler verges on treating himself as a god, Ovid seems to ask why his subjects should reject newly found refinement and luxuries in preference of Rome’s once humble beginnings. After hinting at the hypocrisy of the princeps’ public nostalgia for the past (the kind of ‘jest’ that may have elicited, as we shall see in the next chapter, a belated response from Augustus), Ovid then casts passionate reproaches at the degeneration of human nature: navigation, trade and urban civilization destroy the innocence of the old days as the Romans ‘break into the ground for gold instead of crops, the soldiers possess wealth acquired by blood’ (53–54).89 The stern philosophical nature of these reproaches and complaints seems at odds with the framing of the poem, however: namely, the jealousy Ovid’s ego feels towards his more successful rival. Hence Ovid’s longing for the Golden Age or the undisturbed countryside only matters in so far as he ‘translates’ it into romantic terms, using it in a fairly limited, and so intentionally banal, way. For Ovid, the reign of Saturn and the pre-urban community associated with it represent the time when a cruel object of elegiac passion was not greedy and the poor poet’s song sufficed as a gift of love.90
The Golden Age and images of rural life are both strongly opposed to Rome in Ovid’s work. While Ovid conveys his awareness of the preceding tradition as a way of displaying his impressive erudition, he continually ensures that the reader also understands his complete indifference to, and even rejection of, the Augustan reverence for past values.91 In the Ars Amatoria, such ideas come into even greater focus as Ovid frankly voices his rejection of the rustic past in favour of his own refined age, announcing in Book 3:
Let the old times delight others. I am thankful that I was born
now: this very age suits my tastes
not because now delicate gold is dug out from the ground,
not because chosen shells come to us from different shores,
not because mountains crumble from all the marble quarried,
not because the sky-blue waters are pushed back by large palaces,
but because now we have refinement and in our lifetime
that tasteless crudity of our ancestors is no more.
(Ars 3.121–128)
This passage, which emphasizes Ovid’s partiality to his own time, demonstrates well his rhetorical artistry, with the last causal explanation (‘but because’) underscoring all the preceding causal clauses since it cannot occur without those activities, including the mining of gold,92 a feat also mentioned in Amores 3.8. The ethical complications that are the price one pays for cultus cause Ovid little concern.
Without the luxury and greed that violate the pristine state of nature there is no cultus, a quality that for Ovid represents the most attractive feature of his times, since ‘it is both the agent and the outcome of empire’,93 as the lines just before acknowledge:
Crude simplicity belongs to the past. Rome is golden now
and possesses the vast riches of the tamed world.
Look what the Capitol is now and what it used to be.
You would say that today’s sight belonged to a different god.
(Ars 3.113–116)
Here, Ovid’s elegiac protagonist revels in his civilized age. His ardent preference for the ‘golden’ Rome of his era clearly showing, the ‘different god’ referred to in the final line is cultus itself, whom ‘Ovid here sets up as his own prime divinity’.94 In this way, Ovid openly takes pride in the imperial economy, the ‘vast riches’ that caused Propertius such anxiety. Indeed, as the epigraph to our chapter suggests, Ovid earlier implies that the sheer availability of desirable women in Rome evidences the Empire’s great bounty.95
In the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, a poem about ‘looking good’, Ovid similarly explores female adornment in connection with the wealth of the Empire. Openly mocking the laudation of olden days, Ovid portrays the women of the past as happy with menial tasks and household chores (11–17), underlining their difference from the young girls today, who are delicate and pampered, their clothes refined, their hair perfumed and ears weighed down by exotic gems (17–22). Unlike Propertius, Ovid does not begrudge women their extravagant taste; in fact, he thinks of himself and the men of his circle as equally prone to self-indulgence (24–25). For Ovid, then, the terms rusticitas (‘country life’) and rusticus (‘country dweller’) bear entirely the pejorative connotation of ‘unsophisticated’.96 The mores maiorum (‘customs of the ancestors’) are as anachronistic for Ovid as drinking cheap wine from clay goblets amid pasturing sheep. One might call Ovid’s elegy ‘sober’97 or even ‘shallow’,98 but his disparagement of rural life must be understood in partnership with the prodigious power he accords Rome throughout his poetry.
Enjoying Rome
Ovid’s Amores generally avoids precision in time and space and it has only one poem with a recognizably Roman setting: the circus (Amores 3.2). In this poem Ovid describes an outing with his ‘new mistress’ (57) at the circus during the chariot races. The whole event is treated as foreplay, leading to the winning-over of his new object of affection. While his puella cannot take her eyes off the racing chariots, Ovid is equally busy gazing at her, imagining what hidden treasures her summer dress conceals and comparing the challenges of chariot racing with his own amatory task (5 ff.). In all, Ovid’s poem celebrates the dynamic competition at the heart of the city, both athletic and erotic. As Ovid’s elegy matures from the Amores to the Ars Amatoria, his landscape becomes unequivocally focused on Rome. In the Ars, Ovid explicitly ‘advocate[s] the use of Augustan monuments for transgressive sexual practices’.99
Ovid’s portrayal of the city as a hotbed of erotic pleasure is impressive in its detail and his pride in being able to reimagine Rome in such lascivious terms is obvious, such as when he advises his reader to visit sites like Pompey’s shady colonnade, or the colonnade that Octavia built for her dead son Marcellus, or Livia’s portico full of old paintings (Ars 1.67–74). As we have seen, Pompey’s colonnade featured in both Catullus and Propertius, and P.J. Davis suggests that each place listed by Ovid in this passage ‘has dynastic associations’.100 Octavia’s portico, for example, was associated with Claudius Marcellus (42–23 BCE), Augustus’ heir, who died at the age of nineteen before he could fulfil all the promise invested in him (see also Propertius 3.18). The portico of Livia, Augustus’ wife, is also mentioned as a fitting place to pick up girls, a joke perhaps especially piercing given Livia’s prominent association with the Augustan moral programme.101 While each of these landmarks was undoubtedly very familiar to Roman readers, Ovid uses them expressly to shock his public by suggesting they are places for an easy pick-up instead of quiet contemplation and reverence.102 The list of the sites given here, mostly of recent construction, is repeated at Ars 3.389–396 (with the addition of Agrippa’s portico of the Argonauts and the theatre of Marcellus), a complementary passage addressed to women who want to hunt for an easy acquaintance in the city.103
When advising men on the best places to seduce women, Ovid also makes use of Roman history, interpreting it perversely for his own benefit. Thus, in the first book of his Ars, Ovid flippantly recalls the rape of the Sabine women, a story that held great import for the Romans, especially in its links to the Roman institution of marriage.104 According to the legend, when the first Romans found themselves in need of wives they forcibly took the daughters of their neighbours, the Sabines, after inviting them to attend a theatre performance in Rome. The episode is depicted on the frieze of the Basilica Aemilia, dating to the Augustan era, where Tarpeia’s punishment is also portrayed.105 Augustan writers were quite sensitive to the myriad connotations of the Sabine story. Virgil, for one, dealt with this episode by placing more emphasis on the subsequent reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines rather than on the act of rape (Aeneid 8.635–6
41) and Livy, while treating the event in more detail, expressly justified the Romans’ actions by placing blame on the girls’ parents and their refusal to cooperate with the Romans (1.9).
5.3 The Rape of the Sabine Women (1627–1629) by Pietro da Cortona.
Ovid, on the other hand, uses the story in a completely inverted way, namely to illustrate the erotic possibilities of the theatre, eagerly exclaiming: ‘Romulus, you were the only one who knew how to provide bounty for your soldiers: if you give me these benefits, I will become a soldier’ (Ars 1.131–132). There is invariably a paradox in Ovid’s use of one of ‘the most venerable national legends as the origin and authority for the practices of elegant and sophisticated Rome’;106 such grating appropriation perhaps allowed Ovid to disorient the reader or even aggressively parody the Augustan narrative of a more virtuous Roman past by suggesting that the sexual freedom of the present had its origins in the actions of the city’s very founder. Ovid might also be drawing a sharp distinction between Rome’s uncouth ancestors and their descendants, to whom the refined and elegant poet is trying to teach better manners.107
Ovid’s mythologizing of Rome, and corresponding de-mythologizing of the rural landscape, brings adamant closure to elegy’s multivalent exploration of the rus/urbs opposition. Significantly, the ultimate rejection of the rusticitas that we see in Ovid is conditioned in part by his predecessors, for already in Virgil’s Eclogues the idea of the rus as an uncomplicated refuge is beginning to fray. Following Virgil’s lead, Tibullus and Propertius in their turn re-evaluate the ideals of pastoralism as well as the image of Rome’s past, and so enter into complex dialogue with the Augustan era and the princeps’ attempts to rewrite Rome in both historical and topographic terms.
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