Latin Love Poetry

by McCoskey, Denise Eileen; Martirosova Torlone, Zara;

  Ovid would ultimately suffer the most serious consequences for his conversations with Augustan Rome, leading to his forced departure from the city. Despite the drastic changes in his own personal fortunes, Ovid’s preference for cultus remains nevertheless unaltered in his exilic poetry, as we shall see. Moreover, Rome itself will become Ovid’s elusive beloved, the cruel mistress unresponsive to all his pleas to open the locked door – and not, as Martial would have it, a lover ready to give the returning exile thousands of kisses.

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  ‌VI

  ‌Love and Exile

  Finally, I am not the only one to have written about tender love:

  but I alone am punished for writing about love.

  OVID, Tristia 2.361–362

  IN THE LINES ABOVE, Ovid expresses bitterness that he was seemingly the first Roman poet punished for writing love poetry. The plight of the exile is, to say the least, not foreign to contemporary artistic sensibility. If anything, it strikes a chord with modern readers; especially those of us who have been displaced or misplaced recognize in Ovid’s unceasing pleas the anguished state of nostalgia that manifests itself in the recurring obsessions, tricks of memory and physical ailments so vividly and accurately described by him. In this chapter, we want to trace the development of Latin love poetry to a perhaps surprising destination: Ovid’s writings from exile. These writings are crucial for any understanding of love poetry, in part because Ovid uses his exilic work to reflect back on his earlier erotic writing. Even more, Ovid’s exile poetry sheds light on the variability and adaptability of love poetry, given that it adapts many of love poetry’s conventions, including its overall mood, as an anguished Ovid seeks reconciliation with a city and society from whose company he has been so dramatically banished.

  In the following pages we pursue several goals. While acknowledging a certain degree of futility in determining the precise reasons for Ovid’s exile, we would nonetheless like to address this ‘non-question that has led to much ingenious but fruitless surmise’,1 especially since love poetry, and more specifically the Ars Amatoria, is at the core of most speculations about Ovid’s heartbreaking banishment. We therefore offer a reading of the Ars Amatoria focusing on what in the entertaining and risqué work might have enraged the man responsible for Ovid’s banishment: Augustus. More importantly, we want to explore the continuity between Ovid’s love poetry and his exilic work, for even if Ovid’s amatory elegiacs were the reason for his exile, he conspicuously adopts the elegiac metre in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, and not a more ‘serious’ metre like hexameter, presumably encouraging his readers to draw connections with his earlier amatory writing. Still, as we shall see, despite their many links, what ultimately emerges from the juxtaposition of Ovid’s poems in Tomi and his earlier works is a ‘contrast between the artificiality of the world of the amator [lover] and too real world of the exul’.2 Finally, we shall discuss the ways in which Ovid takes the opportunity to revisit his own evolving ideas about what it means to be a love poet.

  A Poem and a Mistake?

  Ovid’s exile to Tomi, the modern Romanian city of Constanța, remains one of the great mysteries of Latin literature. While Ovid tells us that the circumstances of his exile were generally known in Rome (Tristia 4.10.99), we have no mention of it in contemporary Roman sources; nor is it mentioned for centuries following his death. The fact that Ovid is the only source for the event has led to considerable difficulty in determining what actually happened (if anything) and why.3 Since the ego of Latin poetry is a sophisticated and often manipulative construct, how reliable can we take Ovid to be in recounting the traumatic events of his own life? We can begin to gauge Ovid’s credibility by examining the descriptions he gives of his place of banishment.

  In the first book of the Tristia, Ovid poignantly recalls the last night he spent in Rome. While recalling tearful goodbyes to his friends and his loyal wife, Ovid reaches the highest pitch in his lament when he exclaims: ‘It’s Scythia where I’m being sent, it’s Rome that must be left behind: each one an excuse for delay’ (Tristia 1.3.61–62). As this stark contrast indicates, Ovid’s repeated longing for his beloved Rome is intertwined in his exilic poetry with frequent characterizations of Tomi as an inhospitable and barbaric landscape, a portrayal most likely influenced by Virgil’s description of Scythia in the third Georgic (339–383).

  Yet Tomi was not some remote savage colony lacking in culture. Located at the tip of a small peninsula seventy miles south of the main Danube delta, in 8 CE it formed part of the still unsettled Roman province of Moesia. Originally a colony of the Greek city Miletus, Tomi was a trading centre, a teeming harbour and a fishery.4 As various inscriptions demonstrate, it still used Greek at the time of Ovid’s exile, and the level of education and literacy in the province, especially among the elite, was much higher than Ovid repeatedly suggests. Even Ovid is forced to admit in one passage that the citizens of Tomi honoured him as a poet and that the Greek-educated provincials were not indifferent to his literary merit (Ex Ponto 4.14.55–56). Set against our knowledge of what Tomi was actually like, Ovid’s colourful description of its inhabitants as unkempt barbarians wielding poisoned arrows and riding horse carts in unceasing winter terrain seems more a well-worn stereotype than an accurate ethnographic observation.5

  Such a biased account of Tomi alerts readers to the fact that they should treat with equal scepticism Ovid’s identification of the actual reasons for his banishment, especially since he remains rather vague about them. He tells us in the second book of the Tristia only that two ‘crimes’ caused his exile from the city: carmen et error, a poem and a mistake (2.207–208). Many generations of scholars have been puzzled by this combination; were both the poem and the mistake equally to blame? Or was one the cause and the other merely a pretext?

  What Ovid means by ‘mistake’, we can only speculate since we know only that he was a witness or enabler of some kind of forbidden activity.6 Some theories propose a delicate situation in which Augustus or a member of his family was involved7 or Ovid’s participation in some kind of political treason8 or violation of sacred religious rites. One widely accepted view is that Ovid was somehow involved in the scandalous and illicit affair of Julia Minor, Augustus’ granddaughter, and Decimus Junius Silanus.9 The extent of Ovid’s participation in the affair is not clear, though. There was no public prosecution launched against him, and Ovid makes it clear that he was not condemned by the senate in its judicial capacity but that his fate was decided unofficially, without a public trial or appearance in court (Tristia 2.131–132).10 While Ovid did not suffer loss of citizenship or property (relegation in Roman law only required exclusion from certain places – in Ovid’s case, Rome – and Augustus left his property alone), the fact that the main malefactor in the supposed affair, Silanus, did not suffer any significant punishment beyond Augustus’ withdrawal of his friendship seems rather odd. Only a mere witness or marginal participant in any presumed offence, Ovid apparently bore the full brunt of Augustus’ anger and was dispatched to the remote part of the Empire.11

  6.1 Created in 1887 by the Italian sculptor Ettore Ferrari (1845–1929), the statue of the Roman poet Ovidius Publius Naso is located in the centre of Constanța, Romania.

  Still, to take only a ‘mistake’ as the cause of exile is to imagine Ovid somehow acting against Augustus’ interests, a stance that ‘would have been pitifully one-sided and perhaps historically inconceivable’.12 As a young man, Ovid had refused to embark on the cursus honorum, the traditional ladder of political offices for members of the aristocracy (Tristia 4.10.33–38), and the whole direction of his life clearly shows that he was a man far removed from politics and any tendency towards organized conspiracy.13 As we mentioned in Chapter 4, the Ars Amatoria is the poem Ovid seems to be alluding to as the carmen behind his exile.14 Yet, it is equally hard to discern whether the frivolous Ars Amatoria was the main reason for Ovid’s downfall.

  Thibault asserts that ‘Augustus punished Ovid far
too severely and much too late, if the Ars Amatoria was the real cause of this punishment’,15 but Ovid accuses his enemies in Rome of bringing the unsavoury passages from his poetry to the attention of the enraged princeps (Tristia 2.77–80). It is also possible that Augustus punished the poet so many years after the poem was written because the so-called mistake ‘triggered a long restrained eruption of the emperor’s feelings’,16 although Green suggests that the poem may ‘have been dragged in (almost ten years after its publication!) to camouflage the real, politically sensitive charge’.17 In his formative study, Ronald Syme offers perhaps the best solution: the poem and the mistake are ‘in a tight nexus. Neither charge was good enough without the other’.18

  As we discussed in Chapter 1, several moral laws were passed in 18 BCE and the years following; the Ars Amatoria could have been seen as an embarrassment for the princeps and his attempt at moral reform in light of such legislation. Making matters worse, the Ars was published between 1 BCE and 1 CE, right after a scandal that involved Augustus’ very own daughter, Julia, who was relegated to the island of Pandataria on charges of adultery involving not one but several aristocratic lovers in 2 BCE.19 The timing of publication might seem, then, in extremely bad taste.

  Debates over Ovid’s potential textual transgressions have frequently involved attempts to assess the degree of his so-called ‘anti-Augustanism’.20 As we argued in Chapter 1, however, labels like ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-Augusan’ generally do not allow for the range of feeling or nuance that the Augustan era surely evoked from its participants and observers; moreover, as Alessandro Barchiesi points out, we do not really even know ‘what it meant to be “against”’ in this context.’21 In Ovid’s case, in particular, such an approach defies recognition of the complexity of his poetry at different stages of his career. In assessing Ovid’s prospective response to Augustan moral reform, it is also important to remember that Ovid had not lived through the turbulent contexts that produced Augustus’ policies and so may have underestimated their importance to the princeps. Born in 43 BCE, Ovid was only twelve at the time of the battle of Actium and he never experienced the devastating civil unrest and agonizing fall of the Republic witnessed by the older Augustan poets. He was truly the son of the pax Augusta (‘Augustan peace’) and enjoyed every benefit brought by Rome’s growing empire. Generally speaking, ‘Ovid represents not so much the opposite of Augustan culture as its fullest flowering.’22

  In 8 CE, furthermore, the year of his relegation, Ovid was Rome’s most distinguished poet, one who had produced several books of erotic elegy, a tragedy, an epic and an unfinished poem on the Roman calendar. Virgil and Horace were dead and Ovid’s poetic achievement stood out as extensive and impressive. As Thomas Habinek aptly observes, ‘the political commitments of Ovid’s poetry differ from those of his predecessors (and successors), but they are no less complex and consequential.’23 In many ways, Ovid seems to serve as the voice of his generation, of the sophisticated and fashionable Roman upper-class youth, both men and women, and his unabashed endorsement of an upper class engaging, on the face of it, in free-wheeling extra-marital affairs seems to reflect well the image of the times.24

  Moreover, in playfully advocating a life far removed from Augustan moral standards, it could not have escaped Ovid’s attention that Augustus himself was not exactly adhering to his precepts in his own private life. Augustus, after all, had divorced his first wife, Scribonia, and forced Tiberius Claudius Nero to yield to him his then six-months-pregnant wife, Livia. In Book 2 of his Tristia, Ovid even hints at those embarrassing circumstances when trying to justify his own indiscretions (2.161–165). Augustus’ affair with Terentia, the wife of his close friend and adviser, Maecenas, was also no secret.25 How sanguine Augustus would have been about criticism of his policies or allusions to his own hypocrisy, even if done in jest, is a crucial question. It is true that early in his career Augustus had enthusiastically participated in the ribald arena of political discourse we saw presented in Catullus’ poetry. But, over time, the princeps increasingly ‘withdrew from the sort of competitive accusations of immorality which had characterized political disputes under the republic’.26 By setting himself apart, Augustus seemingly drew a line between himself and other public figures in Rome, one bolstered by his relentless consolidation of power; it is that line Ovid may very well have crossed.27

  Ovid’s Roman audience – Augustus among them – would surely have been familiar with the love poets’ longstanding indifference to the institution of marriage and growing demands for procreation. That attitude might have frustrated Augustus, but he had been familiar with the genre since Cornelius Gallus and did not seem to have had any difficulty with Propertius or Tibullus, or even with Ovid’s Amores, in which the poet had notably ‘presented himself as a flagrant adulterer […] and in terms which explicitly recalled provisions of the Julian Law on Suppressions of Adultery’ (e.g. 2.19 and 3.4).28 In that respect, the Ars Amatoria added nothing new to the Amores.29 In all, Ovid’s own poetry is our only evidence for how Augustus read the Ars Amatoria and why it became ‘the art of making oneself hated’.30

  A careful reading of Ovid’s exilic poetry supports the general view that Ovid’s feelings towards Augustus involve ‘a severe internal conflict that could not help manifesting itself in his poetry’.31 But before we turn more fully to these later writings from Tomi, we want to take a closer look at the actual text of the Ars Amatoria to figure out what sorts of attacks Augustus might have perceived in the work.32

  The Art of Provocation?

  Looking at the poem’s form, Miller argues that the Ars Amatoria ‘must have been particularly galling to Augustus since it adopted the pose of didactic poetry. Certainly, the position of praeceptor amoris [‘adviser on love’] was a common trope in elegy, but it had never been developed in this kind of systematic fashion.’33 In the work, the persona of the ‘adviser’ replaces the traditional ego of love poetry as Ovid makes his agenda clear from the outset: ‘If anyone among the Roman people lack knowledge in matters of love, let him read this and let him love after he is educated reading my verse’ (Ars 1.1–3). Ovid remains true to this initial promise throughout, and his advice on how to seduce appears in considerable detail, ranging from specific locations to matters of sexual technique.

  One of the ideal circumstances for seduction, according to Ovid, is the military triumph, which we discussed in Chapter 5. Here Ovid’s account starts with an inspired panegyric to Roman conquest in all parts of the world, as well as to Caesar Augustus himself (Ars 1.177–214); eventually, the scenario dissolves into advice on how to become acquainted with a girl who also happens to be present (1.215–228): ‘Answer all her questions […] pretend you know even when you don’t’ (1.221–222). Any initial pride in the display of Roman military prowess thus turns into a dismissive gaze at the passing spectacle, the whole purpose of which becomes the seduction of a fellow spectator. In a similar way, Ovid appropriates the popular trope of militia amoris, comparing the self-indulgent pursuit of erotic pleasure to service in the Roman military. He names the hardships in both pursuits: inclement weather, endless journeys, painful wounds and the requisite sleeping in the open air (2.233–238).

  In prescribing methods of seduction, Ovid promotes several questionable techniques: the use of excessive drinking to boost self-confidence (1.237–240); the befriending of the girl’s maid (1.351–354); the employment of excessive flattery and promises (1.619–620 and 1.631); even the use of excessive force (1.673–680). The final example is one of many that have led Lowell Bowditch to conclude that ‘for all its urbane wit, there is something chilling, even monstrous about the Ars’.34 Ovid’s mocking rendition of Romulus’ arrangement of the first Roman marriages through the kidnapping and rape of the Sabine women also renders the pursuit of love in a way that is unsettling for a modern reader. As far as Ovid’s contemporaries were concerned, such irreverent treatment of sensitive issues could have been read as critique of Augustan attempts to control marria
ge.35

  Advice, however questionable, on the seduction of girls in Book 1 evolves in Book 2 into advice on how to keep that captured prey. What emerges clearly from this book is that Ovid is not talking about courtship that leads to marriage. In fact, throughout the poem he makes several references to Augustan marriage laws, showing his keen awareness of the ongoing legislative efforts, at times apparently mocking them. Already at the start of Book 1, Ovid makes it a point to clarify that he sings of ‘safe Venus’ and that ‘there will be no cause for indictment in my poem’ (33–34). The Latin word he uses in these lines for ‘indictment’ is crimen (literally ‘crime’), an important detail given later events. These cautionary lines display Ovid’s knowledge of the laws’ provisions and we find the same disclaimer in Book 2, where the ‘adviser on love’ reminds his readers again about his moral infallibility: ‘there is no play going on here except what is allowed by the law’ (599–600). Ovid’s ‘adviser’ clearly understands the difference between the relationship of a husband and wife and the love that he urges his ‘pupils’ to pursue. In the same book, the ‘adviser’ draws a sharp distinction between the legal joining of a man and a woman (which obliges people to ‘come to a single bed’) and love that is ‘substituted in place of the law’ (which presumes the free choice of a partner, unrestrained by any legal or social constraints) (153–158).