A Companion to Ovid E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1334

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A Companion to Ovid is a comprehensive overview of one of the most influential poets of classical antiquity.

• Features more than 30 newly commissioned chapters by noted scholars writing in their areas of specialization
• Illuminates various aspects of Ovid's work, such as production, genre, and style
• Presents interpretive essays on key poems and collections of poems
• Includes detailed discussions of Ovid's primary literary influences and his reception in English literature
• Provides a chronology of key literary and historical events during Ovid's lifetime

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD

Title page

Copyright page

Figures

Notes on Contributors

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Chronological Table of Important Events in Roman History and Literature during the Life of Ovid

PART I: Contexts

CHAPTER ONE: A Poet’s Life

Introduction

In His Own Words

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWO: Poetry in Augustan Rome

Introduction

The Roman Political Revolution

Poetry from Revolution to Empire

Professing Poetry in Rome

Public and Private in Augustan Poetry

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER THREE: Rhetoric and Ovid’s Poetry

Rhetoric: Its Conventional Usage and Its Wider Application

Young Ovid in the Classroom

The Early Love Elegies

Speech in (Female) Character

Rhetoric in Epic Context: Metamorphoses XIII

Ovid’s Most Difficult Audience: Addressing Augustus

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER FOUR: Ovid and Religion

Introduction

The Amatory Poems: Ovid as Priest

The Metamorphoses: Ovid’s Anti-Theodicy

The Fasti: Ovid as Victim

The Exile Poetry: Ovid as Victim and Priest

Ovid’s Religion

FURTHER READING

PART II: Texts

CHAPTER FIVE: The Amores: Ovid Making Love

Introduction

Components: Surprise, Sex, and Scherzando

Cohesion: Erotic Story and (Meta)poetic Statement?

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER SIX: The Heroides: Female Elegy?

Introduction

The Collection

Myth and Character

Contemporary Approaches

The Heroides as Epistles

Conclusion

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Ars Amatoria

Preliminaries

The Ars and Roman Love Elegy

The Women of the Ars and the Lex Iulia

The Ars, Society, and Augustus

The Ars and Erotodidaxis

The Ars and Didactic Poetry

The Ars and the de Officiis

Coda

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER EIGHT: Remedia Amoris

Introduction

The Metapoetic Frame

Praecepta

Genre(s)

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER NINE: Fasti: the Poet, the Prince, and the Plebs

Introduction

The Calendar

Ovid’s Calendar

Reading the Fasti

Haec Mea Militia Est

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TEN: The Metamorphoses: A Poet’s Poem

Great Expectations

Prospectus

Materials

Making

A ‘hero-free’ Epic

‘The sweet witty soul of Ovid’

Why Read the Metamorphoses?

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Metamorphoses: Politics and Narrative

Introduction

The Idea of Augustus

Metamorphic Narrative

Imperial Portraiture

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWELVE: Tristia

Introduction

Problems of Interpretation

Stylistics and Intertextuality

Chronology

Contents

Themes and Topics

Humor

Poetics

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Ibis

Introduction

Identifying Ibis

Genre

Curses!

Myth and Erudition

Conclusion

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Epistulae ex Ponto

Introduction

Chronology

Structures and Themes: Pont. 1–3

Structure and Themes: Pont. 4

The Recipients

The Poetry of Mores and the Role of Augustus

Present Poetry and Future Poetry

Ovid’s Character and the World of the Exile

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Lost and Spurious Works

Lost Works

Doubtful Works from Antiquity

Medieval and Renaissance Pseudepigrapha

FURTHER READING

PART III: Intertexts

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Ovid and Hellenistic Poetry

Introduction

Alexandria

Ovidian Aetiologies

Sufferings in Love

The Metamorphoses

Conclusion

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Ovid and Callimachus: Rewriting the Master

Introduction

Callimachus in the Canon

The Panel and the Frame

Acontius the Poet

Epigraph and Poet

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Ovid’s Catullus and the Neoteric Moment in Roman Poetry

Predecessors in Roman Poetry

Catullus and the Neoterics as Predecessors to Ovid

Catullus in Ovid’s Poetic Program

Ovid as Emulator of Catullus

Conclusion

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Propertius and Ovid

Introduction

The Role of the Love Elegist as Defined by Propertius

Humor

Cynthia and Corinna

Progressive Narratives

Propertius 4 and Ovid’s later works

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY: Tibullus and Ovid

Introduction

Tibullus in Ovid’s Elegiac Canon

Ovid as a Tibullan Erotodidact

Tibullus in the Amores

Looking to Tibullus from Tomi

Conclusion

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Ovid’s Reception of Virgil

Career and Genres

Virgil by Name

Virgil as Intertext

Subversion or Collaboration?

Ovid’s ‘Aeneid’ (Met. 13.623–14.608)

Virgil Outside Ovid’s ‘Aeneid’

FURTHER READING

PART IV: Critical and Scholarly Approaches

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Editing Ovid: Immortal Works and Material Texts

Immune to Time and the Elements

Carmina et errores: Ovid in Manuscript

Corrected and Emended: Ovid in Print

Nicolaus Heinsius, Verus Sospitator Ovidi

The Modern Critical Corpus

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Commenting on Ovid

Introduction

Antiquity

Middle Ages

The Renaissance

Early Printed Commentaries

Exegesis in the Nineteenth Century and After

Current Trends and Future Prospects

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Ovidian Intertextuality

Introduction

Mars’ and Ariadne’s Memories

Literary Existence and the Self-consciousness of Poetry

Speaking Volumes: The Heroides and Intertextual Irony

Intertextuality and Word Plays: Looking for Ovidian Subtlety

Intertextuality, Genre, Callimacheanism

Intertextuality and Augustanism: Ovid and the Aeneid

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Sexuality and Gender

Introduction

The Matrix of Poetry

Homosocial Desire and the Circulation of Female Sexuality

The Poetics of Gender

Conclusion

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Ovid’s Generic Transformations

Introduction

Generic Complications

Generic Impurities

Beyond Epic vs. Elegy

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Theorizing Ovid

Introduction

Ovid Against the Canon

Gendered Readings

Narratology and Ovid

Readers and Illusions: The Imaginary and the Real

FURTHER READING

PART V: Literary Receptions

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Ovidian Strategies in Early Imperial Literature

Introduction

Martial’s Ars Amatoria

The Authority of the Metamorphoses

The Ovidian Alternative

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: The Medieval Ovid

Introduction

Dante’s Ovid

Ovid in the Roman de la Rose

Ovid and Chaucer

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER THIRTY: Ovid in Renaissance English Literature

Introduction

Wanton Ovid

Heroic Error

Writing Ovidian Women

Milton’s Ovidian Errors

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Ovid and Shakespeare

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Ovid in the Twentieth Century

Introduction

Early Modern Ovid

Ovid after the War

The Late Twentieth Century

Postmodern Ovid

Conclusion

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Translating Ovid

Introduction

Shifting English Conceptions

Golding’s and Sandys’ Legacies

Expanding Perimeters

Contemporary Revisions

FURTHER READING

Bibliography

Index

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD

This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of periods of ancient history, genres of classical literature, and the most important themes in ancient culture. Each volume comprises approximately twenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

ANCIENT HISTORY

Published

A Companion to the Roman Army

Edited by Paul Erdkamp

A Companion to the Roman Republic

Edited by Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx

A Companion to the Roman Empire

Edited by David S. Potter

A Companion to the Classical Greek World

Edited by Konrad H. Kinzl

A Companion to the Ancient Near East

Edited by Daniel C. Snell

A Companion to the Hellenistic World

Edited by Andrew Erskine

A Companion to Late Antiquity

Edited by Philip Rousseau

A Companion to Ancient History

Edited by Andrew Erskine

A Companion to Archaic Greece

Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees

A Companion to Julius Caesar

Edited by Miriam Griffin

A Companion to Byzantium

Edited by Liz James

A Companion to Ancient Egypt

Edited by Alan B. Lloyd

A Companion to Ancient Macedonia

Edited by Joseph Roisman and Ian Worthington

A Companion to the Punic Wars

Edited by Dexter Hoyos

A Companion to Augustine

Edited by Mark Vessey

A Companion to Marcus Aurelius

Edited by Marcel van Ackeren

A Companion to Ancient Greek Government

Edited by Hans Beck

LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Published

A Companion to Classical Receptions

Edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray

A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography

Edited by John Marincola

A Companion to Catullus

Edited by Marilyn B. Skinner

A Companion to Roman Religion

Edited by Jörg Rüpke

A Companion to Greek Religion

Edited by Daniel Ogden

A Companion to the Classical Tradition

Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf

A Companion to Roman Rhetoric

Edited by William Dominik and Jon Hall

A Companion to Greek Rhetoric

Edited by Ian Worthington

A Companion to Ancient Epic

Edited by John Miles Foley

A Companion to Greek Tragedy

Edited by Justina Gregory

A Companion to Latin Literature

Edited by Stephen Harrison

A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought

Edited by Ryan K. Balot

A Companion to Ovid

Edited by Peter E. Knox

A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language

Edited by Egbert Bakker

A Companion to Hellenistic Literature

Edited by Martine Cuypers and James J. Clauss

A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition

Edited by Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam

A Companion to Horace

Edited by Gregson Davis

A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds

Edited by Beryl Rawson

A Companion to Greek Mythology

Edited by Ken Dowden and Niall Livingstone

A Companion to the Latin Language

Edited by James Clackson

A Companion to Tacitus

Edited by Victoria Emma Pagán

A Companion to Women in the Ancient World

Edited by Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon

A Companion to Sophocles

Edited by Kirk Ormand

A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

Edited by Daniel Potts

A Companion to Roman Love Elegy

Edited by Barbara K. Gold

A Companion to Greek Art

Edited by Tyler Jo Smith and Dimitris Plantzos

A Companion to Persius and Juvenal

Edited by Susanna Braund and Josiah Osgood

This paperback edition first published 2013

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Edition history: (hardback, 2009)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to Ovid / edited by Peter E. Knox.

p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to the ancient world)

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-4183-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 978-1-1184-5134-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

 1. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Epistolary poetry, Latin–History and criticism. 3. Didactic poetry, Latin–History and criticism. 4. Elegiac poetry, Latin–History and criticism. 5. Mythology, Classical, in literature. 6. Rome–In literature. 7. Love in literature. I. Knox, Peter E.

 PA6537.C57 2009

 871′.01–dc22

2008041557

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1522–23. © National Gallery Collection; by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery, London / CORBIS.

Cover design by Workhaus

Figures

1 The Fasti Amiternini

2 ‘St. Dunstan’s Classbook’

3 A fragment of the Metamorphoses

4 A medieval commentary

5 Regius’ commentary

6 John Lyly’s Euphues

7 Phaedra in a Renaissance translation

8 The ‘Flores of Ovide’

9 Golding’s Metamorphoses

10 Sandys’ Metamorphoses

Notes on Contributors

Benjamin Acosta-Hughes is Associate Professor of Greek and Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He works primarily on Hellenistic poetry, its reception of Archaic lyric, and its recall in Roman literature. He is currently editing a Loeb Library edition of Hellenistic epigrams.

Joan Booth is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She is the author of a commentary on Ovid, Amores II (1991), and of Catullus to Ovid: Reading Latin Love Elegy (1999). She is also co-editor (with Robert Maltby) of What’s in a Name? The Significance of Proper Names in Classical Latin Literature (2006) and editor of Cicero on the Attack: Invective and Subversion in the Orations and Beyond (2007).

Barbara Weiden Boyd is Henry Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores (1997), and editor of Brill’s Companion to Ovid (2002). She is currently writing a commentary on the Remedia Amoris.

Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry (1978), Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (1985), The Idea of the Renais-sance (with William Kerrigan, 1989), Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), editor of Sixteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (2004), and co-editor of Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (forthcoming).

Sergio Casali is Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. He has published a commentary on Ovid, Her. 9 (1995), and articles, notes, and reviews on Roman poetry. He is currently working on a commentary on Virgil, Aeneid IV, for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. A commentary in Italian on Aeneid II is also forthcoming.

Mario Citroni teaches at the University of Florence. His numerous publications on Latin poetry include a commentary on Book 1 of Martial (1975), Poesia e Lettori in Roma Antica (1995), and the edited volume Memoria e identità: la cultura romana costruisce la sua immagine (2003).

Jo-Marie Claassen has retired from teaching Classics at the University of Stellenbosch. She has published on Ovid and Cicero, exile in the ancient world and today, women and children in antiquity, the Classical tradition in South African architecture, academic development, and the use of the computer in the teaching of Latin. She recently completed an English translation of the verse drama Germanicus by the Afrikaans poet N. P. Van Wyk Louw.

Elaine Fantham taught for eighteen years at the University of Toronto before moving to Princeton in 1986 as Giger Professor of Latin. She is author of a commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, Book 4 (1998) and a number of articles on the Fasti. Since her retirement in 2000 she has continued teaching and publishing, most recently The Roman World of Cicero’s De Oratore (2004), An Introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2004), and a biography of Julia, daughter of Augustus, Julia Augusti (2006).

Joseph Farrell, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Virgil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (1991) and has published widely on Augustan poetry and other aspects of Latin literature and culture.

Laurel Fulkerson is Associate Professor of Classics at the Florida State University. She has written various articles on Ovid, particularly on the Heroides, and is the author of The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (2005). Her current work is on the portrayal of emotions in ancient literature.

John M. Fyler is Professor of English at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English. He is the author of Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (2007) and Chaucer and Ovid (1979), as well as of a number of essays on Ovid, Chaucer, and medieval literature. He also edited the House of Fame for the Riverside Chaucer.

Luigi Galasso teaches Latin language and literature in the Faculty of Musicology at the University of Pavia. He has edited the second book of Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto with a commentary (1995) and is the author of a commentary on the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2000).

Roy K. Gibson is Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester, and the author of Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3 (2003), Excess and Restraint: Propertius, Horace and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (2007), and the co-editor (with Steven Green and Alison Sharrock) of The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (2006).

Julia Dyson Hejduk is Associate Professor of Classics at Baylor University. Her research interests include Latin poetry, Roman religion, and women of ancient Rome. She has written one monograph, King of the Wood: The Sacrificial Victor in Virgil’s Aeneid (2001), a sourcebook in translation with commentary, Clodia: A Sourcebook (2008), and several articles on Virgil and Ovid. She is currently at work on a monograph involving religion and intertextuality in Ovid, Ovid and His Gods: The Epic Struggles of an Elegiac Hero.

Martin Helzle, Professor of Classics and Chair at Case Western Reserve University, has published extensively on Ovid. Most recently he published a commentary on Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 1–2 (2003).

Geraldine Herbert-Brown is an independent scholar. She is author of Ovid and the Fasti (1994), editor of Ovid’s Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium (2002), and has published articles on other Roman authors, including Lucilius, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus.

Stephen Heyworth is Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. He edited Classical Quarterly from 1993 to 1998; and in 2007 issued a new Oxford Classical Text of Propertius, as well as a companion volume, Cynthia, and edited a volume of papers, Classical Constructions, published in memory of Don Fowler. He has also published articles on Callimachus, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid.

Heather James is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (1997) as well as numerous articles on classical reception in the Renaissance, and is editor of the Norton Anthology of Western Literature.

Alison Keith is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. She has written extensively on the intersection of gender and genre in Latin literature, including Engendering Rome (2000), and is currently finishing a book on Propertius, Poet of Love and Leisure.

E. J. Kenney is Kennedy Professor Emeritus of Latin at the University of Cambridge. His publications include a critical edition of Ovid’s amatory works (2nd edn, 1995); editions with commentary of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura III (1971), Anon. Moretum (1984), Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche (1990), and Ovid’s Her. 16–21 (1996); a translation with introduction and notes of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (1998); The Classical Text (1974; Italian translation by A. Lunelli 1995); and numerous articles and reviews. He is at present completing a commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 7–9.

Peter E. Knox is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado. He is the author of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry (1986), as well as a commentary on selected Heroides (1995). Most recently he edited Oxford Readings in Ovid and has written articles on a wide range of topics in Hellenistic poetry and Latin literature.

Jane L. Lightfoot has been Fellow and Tutor in Classics at New College, Oxford, since 2003. All her books have been published with Oxford University Press: Parthenius of Nicaea (1999), Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess (2003) and The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (2008). She is working on a volume of Hellenistic poetry for the Loeb Classical Library.

Robert Maltby is Professor of Latin Philology at the University of Leeds. His research interests are in Roman comedy and elegy and the Latin language in general, especially ancient etymology. His main publications include A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (1991) and Tibullus: Elegies (2002).

Christopher Martin is a member of the English department at Boston University, where he serves as NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor. He has published Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare (1994) and the anthology Ovid in English (1998), as well as journal articles on literature of the Renaissance and other topics. He is currently completing a book on conceptions of old age in late-Elizabethan literature.

Charles McNelis is Associate Professor of Classics at Georgetown University. In addition to articles on ancient poetry and intellectual life, he has written Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War (2007) and is currently working on a commentary on Statius’ Achilleid for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series.

Mark Possanza is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Translating the Heavens: Aratus, Germanicus and the Poetics of Latin Translation (2004) and of articles on textual problems in Latin authors.

Efrossini Spentzou is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Gender and Genre (2003). She co-edited with the late Don Fowler Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (2002). She has just finished Reflections of Romanitas: Discourses of Subjectivity in an Imperial Age (co-authored with Richard Alston).

Richard Thomas is Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard University, where he writes and teaches on Roman and Hellenistic Greek poetry, reception, and Bob Dylan. Recent books include Reading Virgil and his Texts (1999), Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001), co-edited with Charles Martindale, Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006), co-edited with Catharine Mason, Bob Dylan’s Performance Artistry (2007).

Gareth Williams, Professor of Classics at Columbia University, is the author of several works on Ovid’s exile poetry, including Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (1994) and The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid’s Ibis (1996). Recent publications include a commentary on Seneca’s De Otio and De Brevitate Vitae (2004) and several studies on Seneca’s Natural Questions.

David Wray is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (2001) and articles on Roman and Hellenistic poetry.

Theodore Ziolkowski is Class of 1900 Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. In addition to Virgil and the Moderns (1993), Ovid and the Moderns (2005), and the forthcoming Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-century Literature and Art (2008), his recent works include Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (2007), Clio the Romantic Muse (2004), and The Sin of Knowledge (2000).

Preface

Another companion for Ovid … Arriving on the bimillenary of his exile to the shores of the Black Sea, perhaps this Companion is timely. More than one of the contributors to this volume has noted that we are living in another aetas Ovidiana, to borrow a famous, if somewhat problematic, phrase. Two excellent volumes of essays appeared in 2002, which offer readers of Ovid a wealth of information and provocation for future study. In preparing this volume I have had in mind the newcomers to Ovid’s works, be they students or scholars, and the emphasis of the chapters has been on utility. Vast as the sweep of subjects covered in this Companion is, there are inevitably omissions, many of them deeply to be regretted. In particular, it proved impossible to do justice to every aspect of the rapidly developing field of reception studies, so the papers in the volume focus on literary receptions, with a heavy bias toward literature in English. Ovid’s influence on the visual arts deserves a Companion of its own, which could not be included here.

I have allowed the contributors considerable leeway in approaching their topics, including some variation in matters of presentation, such as the use of BC or BCE to indicate dates. In the first instance thanks must go to all the contributors for their diligence, their forbearance, and their talents. I hope that my labors as editor have obscured as little as possible of their learning. I am deeply grateful to Sophie Gibson for soliciting this volume, and to Ben Thatcher and Hannah Rolls for their hard work in seeing it to completion.

Peter E. KnoxUniversity of Colorado, Boulder, November 2007

List of Abbreviations

Ovid’s works are referred to throughout the volume by the following standard abbreviations: Amores (Am.), Heroides (Her.), Ars amatoria (Ars), Remedia amoris (Rem.), Medicamina faciei (Med.), Metamorphoses (Met.), Fasti (Fast.), Tristia (Tr.), Ibis (Ib.), Epistulae ex Ponto (Pont.). All translations are the authors’ own, unless otherwise indicated. References to other authors follow standard conventions to be found in, for example, The Oxford Latin Dictionary or Liddell and Scott. The following abbreviations for journals and reference works are used here:

A&A

Antike und Abendland

A&R

Atene e Roma

AC

L’Antiquité classique

AJP

American Journal of Philology

ANRW

Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt

ASNP

Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia

AU

Der Altsprachliche Unterricht

BICS

Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies

BMCR

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

BNP

Brill’s New Pauly

CA

Classical Antiquity

CB

The Classical Bulletin

CFC(L)

Cuadernos de filología clásica. Estudios latinos

CJ

The Classical Journal

CL

Corolla Londiniensis

CML

Classical and Modern Literature

CPh

Classical Philology

CQ

Classical Quarterly

CR

Classical Review

CSCA

California Studies in Classical Antiquity

CW

Classical World

DBI

Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani

FGrH

Fragmente der griechischen Historiker

G&R

Greece and Rome

GRBS

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

HSCP

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology

ICS

Illinois Classical Studies

IJCT

International Journal of the Classical Tradition

IMU

Italia Medioevale e Umanistica

JHS

Journal of Hellenic Studies

JPh

Journal of Philology

JRS

Journal of Roman Studies

JWCI

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute

LCM

Liverpool Classical Monthly

LEC

Les Études Classiques

MAAR

Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome

MD

Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici

MH

Museum Helveticum

MLatJb

Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch

MLQ

Modern Language Quarterly

N&Q

Notes and Queries

OLD

Oxford Latin Dictionary

, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1982)

PBA

Proceedings of the British Academy

PCPhS

Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society

PLLS

Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar

POxy

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

PQ

Philological Quarterly

R&L

Religion and Literature

RBPH

Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire

RE

Real-Encylopädie der Altertumswisseschaft

RhM

Rheinisches Museum

RHT

Revue d’Histoire des Textes

RSC

Rivista di studi classici

SB

Studies in Bibliography

SEEJ

Slavic and East European Journal

ShS

Shakespeare Survey

SH

Supplementum Hellenisticum

, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones and P. J. Parsons (Berlin, 1983)

SO

Symbolae Osloenses

SSH

Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici

, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones (Berlin, 2005).

TAPA

Transactions of the American Philological Association

TLL

Thesaurus Linguae Latinae

TRF

Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta

, ed. O. Ribbeck (Leipzig, 1871)

WJA

Würzburger Jahrbücher der Altertumswissenschaft

WS

Wiener Studien

YCS

Yale Classical Studies

ZPE

Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Chronological Table of Important Events in Roman History and Literature during the Life of Ovid

Most of the dates of Ovid’s works are entirely conjectural. Those given below reflect a consensus view, but can only be considered approximate.

PART IContexts

CHAPTER ONE

A Poet’s Life

Peter E. Knox

Introduction

Late in his career, Ovid defined his place in recent literary history by drawing up a list of names (Tr. 4.10.41–54):

temporis illius colui fouique poetas,     quotque aderant uates, rebar adesse deos.saepe suas uolucres legit mihi grandior aeuo,     quaeque nocet serpens, quae iuuat herba, Macer.saepe suos solitus recitare Propertius ignes,     iure sodalicii, quo mihi iunctus erat.Ponticus heroo, Bassus quoque clarus iambis     dulcia conuictus membra fuere mei.et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures,     dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra.Vergilium uidi tantum, nec auara Tibullo     tempus amicitiae fata dedere meae.successor fuit hic tibi, Galle, Propertius illi;     quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui.

The poets of that time I cultivated and cherished, and for me poets were so many gods. Often Macer, already advanced in years, read to me of his birds, of poisonous snakes, or healing plants. Often Propertius would recite his flaming verse, by virtue of the comradeship that joined him to me. Ponticus, noted for epic, and Bassus, noted for iambics, were sweet members of my circle. And Horace, he of the many numbers, held our ears in thrall, while he tuned his fine-crafted songs to the Ausonian lyre. Virgil I only saw; greedy fate gave Tibullus no time for friendship with me. He was your successor, Gallus, and Propertius his; after them I was fourth in order of time.

The climate for poetry in Rome during Ovid’s lifetime was electric. Ovid places himself in distinguished company, including poets whose works, though lost to us now, were celebrated in their time: Aemilius Macer, the author of didactic verse (Courtney 1993: 292–9; Hollis 2007: 93–117), Ponticus, an epic poet (Hollis 2007: 426), Bassus, writer of iambs (Hollis 2007: 421), and Gallus, celebrated by Virgil in his Eclogues and widely recognized as the first Roman elegist (Courtney 1993: 259–70; Hollis 2007: 219–52). The selection cannot be random, and is not likely to have been limited only to poets whom he had met or heard. These are the names that mattered to Ovid among his contemporaries, whose works influenced his own forays into epic, didactic, invective, and the verse epistle. But when it comes to classifying himself in this company he is an elegist, following in the footsteps of Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, the same company he cites in his apology to Augustus (Tr. 2.445–66) with the concluding remark (467), ‘to these I succeeded’ (his ego successi). In the process he defined the canon, for when Quintilian turns to the chief exponents of elegy in Latin, it is these same four whom he names and no others (Inst. 10.1.93): ‘we challenge the Greeks also in elegy, in which Tibullus seems to me particularly polished and elegant, though some prefer Propertius. Ovid is more extravagant than both of them, just as Gallus is harsher.’ It is telling that Ovid thus classifies himself as an elegist, even after the achievement of his Metamorphoses, for the background of elegy informs even his hexameter epic: it is the wellspring from which he draws inspiration in all his manifold creative endeavors.

In His Own Words

Ovid is himself the source for most of what we think we know about his life; indeed, he provides more information about himself than most ancient poets. It is always hazardous to infer too much or too confidently from such references in a poet’s own work: as Ovid himself avers (Am. 3.12.19), nec tamen ut testes mos est audire poetas (‘nor is it the custom to listen to poets as if they were courtroom witnesses’). It is nonetheless possible to glean some data about his background and career, not only from the long autobiographical poem composed toward the end of his life during his exile on the Black Sea (Tr. 4.10), but also from numerous revealing remarks scattered throughout his works. His hometown was Sulmo (Tr. 4.10.3 Sulmo mihi patria est), now called Sulmona, situated in a well-watered valley in the Abruzzi of central Italy, and in Ovid’s time one of the chief towns of the tribe known as the Paeligni. He was born Publius Ovidius Naso on 20 March 43 BCE. The significance of this date was not lost on Ovid later in life, for as he notes (Tr. 4.10.6) it was in this year that the two consuls Hirtius and Pansa both fell in the campaign against Mark Antony at the head of the last army of the Roman Republic. Most of the poets Ovid names in his autobiography began their careers in the confused circumstances of the civil wars that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination. Virgil, who released his Georgics in 29 BCE in the immediate aftermath of Octavian’s victory at Actium, had earlier composed his book of Eclogues, in which the tenor of the times is refracted through the lens of Theocritean bucolic. Horace’s book of Epodes, probably published near the end of the Triumviral period, also meditates on the fears and apprehensions of that era. At about the same time, Ovid’s two surviving predecessors in elegy, Tibullus and Propertius, were producing books in which the harsh realities of the time impinge on their idealized visions of the life of love. Ovid, so far as we can tell, was touched by none of this. His career belongs entirely to the early Empire, a time of peace at least on the domestic front, and the great matters treated in his works are affairs of the heart and of character, rather than of state.

His first literary performances probably took place several years after the battle of Actium and the fall of Alexandria, perhaps around 25 BCE. The date can only be approximate, deriving as it does from information given by Ovid himself (Tr. 4.10.57–8):

carmina cum primum populo iuuenalia legi,     barba resecta mihi bisue semelue fuit.

When I first read my youthful songs to the public, my beard had been cut but once or twice.

We may suppose that Ovid was no more than about eighteen years old when this took place (Wheeler 1925: 11–17), but precision on this score is unimportant: the point that Ovid makes is about the precociousness of his venture into a life of poetry.

His family presumably preferred a different career path. As the second son of an old, equestrian family of considerable standing in the community, Ovid might have been expected to pursue a career in public life, where opportunities beckoned under the new regime in Rome. As recently as during the Social War of 91–89 BCE, Sulmo had aligned itself with the rest of the Paeligni against Rome, but there was a long tradition of alliance. In his move to consolidate power Augustus sought to draw on such communities throughout Italy to recruit new magistrates and senators. From Ovid we learn that he embarked on just such a course: he studied rhetoric in Rome and Athens, the traditional route to a political career (Wheeler 1925: 4–11). He held two positions on boards of magistrates, as one of the tresuiri capitales (Tr. 4.10.33–4; Kenney 1969b: 244), who exercised police functions in the city. And later he informs us (Fast. 4.383–4) that he held a seat among the decemuiri stlitibus iudicandis (‘Board of Ten for Judging Lawsuits’), an important judicial post that was commonly a precursor to seeking the quaestorship and a senatorial career. On Ovid’s testimony his earliest recitations of poetry took place at the very time when he was ostensibly embarking on a life in law and politics. He ironically remarks that his father had hoped for a more lucrative livelihood:

saepe pater dixit ‘studium quid inutile temptas?     Maeonides nullas ipse relinquit opes.’

Often my father said, ‘Why do you attempt a useless pursuit? Homer himself left no wealth.’

Perhaps his father might have gotten the joke, but if Augustus ever noticed this poem, he would not have been amused. Ovid abandoned public office for the life of letters, but his choices in that field were not bound to win him favor.

During the first twenty-five years of his career, a period extending roughly from the mid-twenties BCE to 2 CE, Ovid was occupied exclusively with elegy, issuing a stunning series of works: Amores, Heroides, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris. To this period too belong most of the lost works (Chapter 15), among which the tragedy Medea may be reckoned the greatest loss. The exact sequence of the release of these works is unclear and much disputed. The matter is complicated in the first instance by the fact that his earliest collection, the Amores, survives only in a three-book edition, which, Ovid asserts, has been reduced from an original five-book collection. There is no consensus about the date of either edition, or about the nature of the revision effected upon the earlier work, but opinions generally divide between those who argue that Ovid’s final edition collects the best poems from the first edition without the addition of new poems or extensive revision (Cameron 1968) and those who contend that the three-book edition was essentially a new work (McKeown 1987: 86–9). Ovid himself seems to suggest the former, when he describes his earliest work in the autobiography from Tomi (Tr. 4.10.61–2):

multa quidem scripsi, sed, quae uitiosa putaui,     emendaturis ignibus ipse dedi.

I wrote a great deal indeed, but what I considered defective I myself gave to the flames for correction.

Even if this inference is correct, it is not entirely clear where in the chronological sequence to date the release of the Heroides, a collection that itself raises intractable questions about composition and publication. The dates given above in the Chronological Table are thus tentative at best.

By the time Ovid completed the Remedia amoris, the last of his amatory elegiacs, in roughly 2 CE he was probably already deeply involved in the composition of his two large-scale narrative poems, the Fasti and the Metamorphoses. It is clear that he had not completed the Fasti by the year 8 CE, when his life changed drastically with the issuance of a decree of relegation by the emperor. Ovid himself refers to twelve books (Tr. 2.549–50), but only six survive and there are clear signs of revision to the existing poem during the period of exile. There is no reason to believe that the remaining six ever left the poet’s hand, and the poet’s words here carry no more weight than his assertion that the Metamorphoses was unfinished (Tr. 2.555–6):

dictaque sunt nobis, quamuis manus ultima coeptis     defuit, in facies corpora uersa nouas.

And though this work lacked final revision, I also told of bodies that changed into new shapes.

The composition of this masterpiece was surely the preoccupation of the years immediately preceding his exile.

We will never know what led Augustus to send Ovid into exile, or what sense of irony or private joke led him to choose the venue for Ovid’s relegation, remote and inhospitable Tomi on the shores of the Black Sea. The reason famously given by Ovid (Tr. 2.207), ‘a poem and a mistake’ (carmen et error), may invert the sequence, a hysteron proteron of sorts, if, as many scholars believe, the poem, which Ovid identifies as the Ars amatoria, was brought into the indictment later to provide cover for some other offense, the error that Ovid never explains. Many scholars cannot escape the suspicion that Ovid’s relegation was somehow related to the disgrace of Augustus’ granddaughter Julia, exiled on a charge of adultery in the same year (e.g. Syme 1978: 215–29). Others incline to a scandal of a more personal nature (e.g. Goold 1983), or attempt to relate the exile to changes in the climate for literature during Augustus’ dotage (Knox 2004). The consequences for Ovid were tragic, but did not sap his creative powers. A stream of innovative new works flowed from his stylus while he lamented life on the Roman frontier: the Tristia in five books composed during the journey to Tomi and in his first years there; that bizarre display of erudite invective known as the Ibis; and four books of epistles to friends and acquaintances, his Epistulae ex Ponto, the last book of which probably contains his final works. A common thread uniting all the works of exile is Ovid’s return to the elegiac mode, the measure in which he began his career and by which he defined himself. Ovid began writing just a few years after Octavian assumed the title by which he is best known to history, and his death came only a few years after the emperor’s. Ovid, perhaps the most Augustan poet and certainly the last, died at Tomi sometime during the winter of 17–18 CE.

FURTHER READING

Still fundamental for basic information and collection of the evidence about Ovid’s career are surveys such as Wheeler (1925), Martini (1933), or Kraus (1968). In the absence of new evidence, there is always a place for re-evaluation and recontextualization. For instance, Kenney (1969b) investigates Ovid’s use of legal language against the background of his public career, while Syme (1978) attempts to review Ovid’s network of friends and associates within the changing political landscape of Augustus’ later years. The subject of Ovid’s exile continually attracts new speculation: in addition to the works surveyed by Thibault (1964), papers by Goold (1983) and Knox (2004) may be consulted for recent attempts to set the relegation within the context of the times.

CHAPTER TWO

Poetry in Augustan Rome

Mario Citroni

Introduction