These sorts of disclaimers intensify in Book 3, which is addressed to women. Ovid’s ‘adviser’ writes at the end of the proem to this book that ‘nothing except wanton love is learned from me’ (27); he then returns to the issue again thirty lines later: ‘girls, whom modesty and the laws and their own rights allow, seek advice here’ (57–58). In this way, Ovid goes to considerable length to make sure that he does not promote adultery and that his advice is not directed at respectable Roman matrons (3.483–484 and 3.611–616). Previously, in Book 1 of the Ars, Ovid makes the same distinction, urging married women ‘who wear hairbands and those whose hem covers their ankles’ to stay away (31–34), a sentiment he desperately repeats in Tristia 2.247–250.
The obvious question, then, is what kind of women were excluded from Augustus’ legislation and thus considered fair game for Ovid’s advice? It is again among Ovid’s disclaimers in Book 3 that we learn more precisely about this presumed class of women:36
Let the bride be afraid of her husband: let the guarding of the bride be planned;
this is appropriate, the laws and the ruler and modesty command.
But that you should be watched, whom ceremony just released,
who could handle that?
(Ars 3.613–616)
The language of these lines is a bit opaque, but it suggests that while married women must obey the laws, freedwomen, that is, ex-slaves freed by the ceremony of manumission, are exempt from it.37 These, then, are presumably the kinds of women who are able to follow Ovid’s advice for illicit affairs. But is Ovid really being as careful as he seems?
Several scholars have argued that Ovid constructs a consciously mixed female addressee: someone between a proper Roman matrona, accepted and respected by society, and a frivolous, venal good time girl or meretrix, a type of a girl perpetuated and enshrined in Roman elegiac discourse.38 Moreover, despite Ovid’s claims to stick to the letter of the law, the laws themselves failed to specify which types of woman were subject to their provisions and which were exempt.39 Nor is Ovid consistent in avoiding the promotion of adultery. Time and again he slips; in one passage he advises his reader to pursue ‘secret Venus’ (Ars 1.275) and in another to seek out a ‘secret affair’ (2.730), furtivus or ‘secret’ in both passages carrying connotations of adultery rather than free love. Elsewhere, in Book 1, he advises an eager lover to befriend his mistress’s husband (1.579); on another occasion he proposes that the lover should stealthily approach his girlfriend’s litter and speak in riddles to avoid any detection of the affair (1.488–490).
Book 3 is perhaps the most explicit of all three in its decisive rejection of traditional values, as Ovid reminds his readers that they must play around and enjoy their youth while it lasts (Ars 3.61), that frequent childbirth damages their looks and ages their body (3.81–82), and that there is nothing wrong with artificial adornment and finery when one tries the art of seduction (3.13 ff., and passim). Extending this idea of ‘finery’, Ovid is once again most impassioned when singing the praises of contemporary Rome and its cultus, proclaiming ‘crude simplicity’ a thing of the past and refinement the rule of the day (3.121–128).40 He teaches Roman ladies how to dress and walk and which positions to assume during sex, likewise how to educate themselves, refining both their conversation and their minds.
The Ars Amatoria is unique in its structure, addressing both men and women in turn, thus seemingly involving both parties equally in the pursuit of love. However, some scholars have argued that Ovid draws the traditional cultural distinction between ‘active’ male and ‘passive’ female roles in his didactic poem. While Ovid demonstrates the progress of men’s sexual journey from the public sphere at the beginning of Book 1 to the privacy of the girl’s bedroom at the end of Book 2, Book 3 starts and ends its instruction in the girl’s bedroom, thus relegating the women completely to the private sphere.41 The attention that Ovid pays in Book 3 to women’s appearance and comportment is also striking when compared to the emphasis he places on shaping men’s more active modes of behaviour, only perfunctorily urging that men stay clean and shaved.
More fundamentally, it has been argued that the self-proclaimed ‘adviser on love’ is ‘essentially hostile towards real women, whom he regards as savage, offensive and physically flawed’, and that he aims ‘to make [them] more amenable to the male audience by replacing the natural with the artificial’.42 As Eric Downing phrases it, ‘women are shaped to the literary parts needed by men to play at and succeed at their literary game’.43 It also appears that the intended audience of Ovid’s advice in Book 3 is not always exclusively female. Occasionally Ovid distances himself from his female readership and delivers his teachings from the male perspective, suggesting that there is an implied male audience for whom the advice he gives to women may be useful as well.44
Taken together, the three books of the Ars Amatoria show us an Ovid who light-heartedly mocks the moral aspirations of Augustus, takes militarism as a metaphor for sexual pursuit and conquest, treats Roman spectacles and Roman law as sources of amusement and opportunities for seduction, and brands the Augustan emphasis on marriage and family values boring and unworthy of the lifestyle to which his generation has grown accustomed. Earlier classical scholarship saw Ovid’s Ars Amatoria as a prolonged elaboration on the sentiment expressed at Ars 3.121–128, a passage discussed in the last chapter: Rome is indeed ‘golden’ now and ‘Ovid is delighted to be a citizen of modern Rome because it offers the proper sort of refined cultus. Immorality is irrelevant compared to inelegance.’45 But a number of more recent studies ‘have refashioned Ovid into a poet whose humour, instead of glorifying the erotic world of Rome, condemns it’.46 Even if Ovid’s work fits better into this latter reading, it is hard to believe he stood alone in his refusal to return to the crude habits and primitive outlook of the Republican forefathers. Rather it seems more likely that he expressed sentiments common to his generation, yet perhaps underestimated the seriousness of Augustus’ attempts to turn back the clock and so change the habits of the young Roman beau monde.
In his exilic poetry, Ovid repeatedly reflects on the nature of his sins and singles out the Ars Amatoria as his unintentional literary trespass, expressing regret that he ever wrote such a poem and confessing that he both condemns and hates it (Tristia 3.1.8). In exile, Ovid’s elegiac voice thus changes, becomes somber. However, as Miller points out, ‘the exilic poetry does not abandon the subject position of amatory elegy but recasts it.’47
Exile Poetry as Love Poetry
Ovid’s exile poetry is seen by most of its readers as tedious and monotonous, ‘a dreary epilogue to a brilliant career’.48 The first work composed in exile, the Tristia, consists of five books of poems united by a single theme: lament over the exiled poet’s desperate condition. These poems were primarily intended as an apology to the angry princeps, an attempt on Ovid’s part to soften Augustus’ alleged anger. Across the five books of the Tristia, we see the evolution of the poet as he adapts to his new status as exile and, as the years pass by, increasingly recognizes the impossibility of his return. Book 1, ostensibly written onboard ship,49 was sent to Rome as early as the autumn of 9 CE – right after Ovid arrived at Tomi – and it depicts Ovid as a man completely shaken by his fate but still confident that the situation can be rectified. After a heartbreaking account of Ovid’s last night in Rome (1.3), we are invited to share with the poet the vicissitudes of his journey into exile and his supposedly private appeals to both his loyal friends (1.8) and his faithful and much-suffering wife (1.6).
While the first book of the Tristia is unquestionably bitter, it still contains traces of Ovid’s former acerbic wit and irony. Book 2 of the Tristia, however, changes tone to a certain degree and is addressed to Augustus as a single book-length poem combining self-justification with an appeal for mercy. Ovid’s frustration pokes through in many allusions to Augustus, such as when he compares Augustus to a ‘vengeful and arbitrary avatar of Jupiter’, one who randomly hurls thunderbolts again
st his enemies.50 But praise for Augustus is also present; he is called ‘merciful Caesar’ (2.27), and his anger is even called ‘just’ as Ovid thanks Augustus for sparing his life and his property (2.129–130).
Book 3, in turn, chronicles Ovid’s first year in Tomi with an emphasis on his sickness at heart, a condition that manifests itself in his declining physical health (3.1.1, 8.23–34), which would from then on become the main rationale in arguing for commuting his place of exile (8.37–42). It is also in Book 3 that we first encounter numerous descriptions of Ovid’s place of exile as a joyless, cold, barbaric terrain. As Ovid’s hopes of return were increasingly abandoned, especially by Book 5 (5.2.77–78, 10.49–50), they were notably replaced by an insistence on maintaining continuous and prolific correspondence with those left in Rome through the verse-letters of Epistulae ex Ponto, a work started by Ovid in 12 CE that was carefully planned and designed for public consumption.
The addressees of Epistulae ex Ponto were carefully chosen, ranging from Brutus (Ovid’s literary representative in Rome), Fabius Maximus and Cotta Maximus (the patrons with whom the poet connected his hopes of return) to Ovid’s wife and various other men of letters.51 The poems in this collection repeat the worn-out themes of the Tristia: bitterness, complaints about Ovid’s deteriorating health, frustration at the persistent silence from Rome and pleas for transfer combined with flattery of the princeps. While the subjects of these poems are not particularly new there is nonetheless a new sense of distance from the trauma of exile, with Ovid at times even engaging in a kind of self-parody. He muses at one point, for example: ‘If anyone had told me: “You’ll end up by the Euxine [Black Sea] scared of being hit by an arrow from some native’s bow,” my reply would have been, “Have a purge, your brain needs cleansing”’ (Ex Ponto 4.3.51–53). Even if Ovid remained hopeful about his return to Rome until his death, Epistulae ex Ponto projects an acceptance of grim finality, a feeling especially evident in 3.7, when the poet addresses his remaining friends. As if fully acknowledging for the first time that his death will occur far away from his beloved city, Ovid writes: ‘I have come to the Getic land: then let me die here, let my misfortunes end their course as they began!’ (19–20).
Ovid’s exilic poetry was a radical new departure from the elegiac tradition and it ‘stands alone in classical Roman literature as an unprecedented meditation on the state of exile itself, on the psychological pressures bearing upon an individual isolated from the native land, the family, friends and the literary culture which define his entire being’.52 At the same time, it is deeply connected to earlier Latin love poetry; in many ways, ‘the exile poetry is the final and most spectacular twist to elegiac love’.53 Indeed, it is remarkable how skilfully Ovid adapted the elegiac conventions to his new circumstances. The autobiographical mode of the Amores combined with the epistolary techniques created in the Heroides helped give the exilic poetry a new direction and voice.54
Patrcia Rosenmeyer proposes that Ovid’s choice of the letter form for his exile poetry must be interpreted as ‘an authorial statement of identification – on some level – with his earlier epistolary work, the Heroides’, and that he sees himself as an ‘abandoned hero of sorts’.55 The Heroides and exilic poems share the themes of abandonment and loneliness; several of Ovid’s former heroines re-emerge in his exilic poetry, including Medea, who is also the heroine of Ovid’s lost tragedy (Tristia 3.9.15).56 The epistolary format is itself key in situating both texts as conversations with absent friends and lovers and such dialogue ‘is perhaps the single most important exilic form’ in which the ‘personality or reaction of the addressee, whether “real” or “imagined”, is almost as important as that of the exile’.57
Interestingly enough, in Ovid’s exilic poetry it is not his wife – whom he mentions often and with gratitude (Tristia 1.2.37, 1.3.16–17, 1.6.3) – who becomes ‘his desperate, unrequited, and ultimate love’.58 Rather, as Lyne phrases it, ‘Ovid revives the techniques of the amatory mode when framing his suit to Augustus and his longing for Rome.’59 In portraying himself as a kind of forlorn lover, then, Ovid transfers ego’s longing for the resistant puella to Augustus or, more often, to Rome itself in a cruel re-enactment of the stock paraclausithyron of earlier love poetry. In the very first poem of the Tristia, acknowledging the differences between his poetry’s potential entry to Rome and his own exclusion, Ovid ruefully laments: ‘Little book – I do not begrudge it to you – you are off to the city without me, going where your only creator is banned!’ (Tristia 1.1.1–2). Rome anchors Ovid’s elegiac poetry, but this time it functions as a site of melancholy rather than possibility since it necessarily reiterates Ovid’s loss; in one passage, the poet agonizes: ‘Rome and home haunt me. All the places I know and long for. Whatever of me is left in the city, I have lost’ (Tristia 3.2.21–22).
In Epistulae ex Ponto, Ovid even returns in his imagination to specific Roman sites; we see once again his attachment to – and knowledge of – various Roman monuments, although such structures now testify to the poet’s palpable longing for Rome rather than the ‘urban erotics’60 of his Ars Amatoria:
I return to the sites of the beautiful city
and my mind sees all of them with its eyes.
Now the forums, the temples, the theatres clad in marble,
now the paved porticoes float over me.
(Ex Ponto 1.8.33–36)
A.J. Boyle explains: ‘As the lover defined himself by his relationship to his inaccessible mistress, so the poet defines himself by his relationship to the inaccessible monuments of Rome.’61 Eventually, as if an elegiac lover giving up on his fickle domina, Ovid gives up on Rome, proclaiming that he is ready to ‘face death here, by the shores of the Black Sea’ (Ex Ponto 1.7.40).
Tomi accomplished Augustus’ goal of cutting Ovid off from Rome and the wider landscape of Greco-Roman culture, not to mention from the free-spirited ultra-sophisticated aristocracy whose mouthpiece the poet had become. Exile deprived Ovid of his former audience, one that was both appreciative and highly attuned to poetry, not to mention literate in Latin. Indeed, Ovid bitterly claims that the barbaric language is invading his mind and preventing him from writing, forcing him to communicate only by gestures.62 He laments that ‘I’m the barbarian here, understood by nobody’ (Tristia 5.10.37) and later that ‘writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark’ (Ex Ponto 4.2.33–34). Rome’s greatest living poet has seemingly lost his most sympathetic audience and so also his very identity.
Ovid returns elegy to its long forgotten origins in lamentation, noting that ‘a dirge best fits a living death’ (Tristia 5.1.47–48). In a letter addressed to his wife, Ovid even anticipates his imminent demise (Tristia 3.3.29–32) and writes his own epitaph:
I who lie here, sweet Ovid, poet of tender passions,
became a victim of my own sharp wit.
Passer-by, if you have ever been in love, do not begrudge me
the traditional prayer: ‘May Ovid’s bones lie soft!’
(Tristia 3.3.73–76)
It is significant that even in the lines Ovid envisions written on his tombstone, he wants to be remembered as a love poet. Ovid even uses a very specific word for ‘soft’ in the last line – the adverb molliter derived from the adjective mollis, a term associated with both writing about love and a ‘failure’ of masculinity. The audience that Ovid intends to capture with this epitaph, moreover, is not just any passer-by but a lover, someone who would have undoubtedly been familiar with Ovid’s erotic outpourings and advice. The irony of this epitaph is nicely reminiscent of the pre-exile Ovid: the poet admits that his poetic talent has caused his downfall but nonetheless he does not shy away from linking his literary identity directly to the genre that caused his downfall.
The Poet in Exile
The first two books of the Tristia ultimately fell on deaf ears and Ovid’s hopes of reprieve faded as the years went by. In Book 3, Ovid visibly shifts his focus from the misery of exile to the immortality of
his poetic achievement, a sentiment provocatively expressed in poem 3.7 when he proclaims: ‘there is nothing we own that isn’t mortal save talent, the spark in the mind […] my talent remains my joy, my constant companion: over this, Caesar could have no powers’ (43–44, 47–48). Perhaps consciously echoing Propertius’ pronouncement that while Augustus has greatness in war, he does not control love (2.7.5–6), Ovid’s claim to immortality here becomes an important declaration of the limits of the regime that so recklessly did away with its greatest living poet.
The exile poems vacillate between Ovid’s defence of poetry as a worthy occupation and his insecurity about the relevance of his Muse. As Ovid begins to aspire ‘to new, more rueful, forms of canonicity’,63 he simultaneously begins to negate his poetic talent. In one poem, he declares that his misfortunes can fill the whole Iliad (Ex Ponto 2.7.34), but in another claims that his talent is wasted because of disuse (Tristia 5.12.21–22), that his sorrows weigh him down so much that he no longer seeks poetic glory (37–44), and that his devotion to the Muses caused his unfortunate exile (45–50). Yet Ovid also expresses fondness and gratitude to his Muse:
Muse, thank you: for you offer solace,
you come as rest from my sorrow and as medicine.
You are my leader and companion; you take me away from Ister
and give me a place in the middle of Mount Helicon.
(Tristia 4.10.117–120)
While these lines offer some closure perhaps to Ovid’s doubts about his worthiness as a poet, it is also important to note that he praises his Muse for being able to transport him to a site of supreme poetic inspiration, one linked to the Greek epic poet Hesiod and also claimed by Propertius in 3.3. Heartbroken over his banishment from Rome, Ovid still uses his unfortunate situation to crystallize his position in the Greek and Roman literary canon. As a result, the exilic poetry contains Ovid’s most extensive survey of Greek and Latin poetry (Tristia 2), a poetic autobiography (Tristia 4.10) and a catalogue of contemporary poets (Ex Ponto 4.16), the two former of which we examined in Chapter 4. Especially notable for the current discussion is the fact that, as Ovid positions himself among the Roman elegists specifically, he reminds his audience that Gallus also suffered a precipitous downfall, but he is hasty to point out that Gallus was not punished for writing poetry but rather for his ‘indiscreet talk’ (2.445–446).
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