Reading Ovid

by Peter Jones

  Her prayers are fulfilled, but mine aren’t.

  That charioteer won the prize: I still have mine to win.

  She laughed. Her eyes sparkled, and she promised – something.

  That’ll do for me here. Do the rest for me . . . somewhere else.

  Ovid’s sexy, witty and indiscreet elegiacs, which made pleasure the purpose of love and poetry, were quite unique. No Roman had ever written love-poetry like this, nor ever would again: the genre died out with Ovid. But around about AD 1, Ovid struck out in a new direction and started on Fastī (‘Calendar’), a twelve-book account of the origins of and reasons for Rome’s festivals and cults (only six have come down to us), and Metamorphōsēs, a vast ‘epic’ in hexameters, the metre used by Homer and Virgil. These were quite different in concept, but still used myth and legend extensively. Ovid had just about finished but not revised Metamorphōsēs (as he tells us in Trīstia 1.7) and was half-way through Fastī when, in AD 8, Augustus suddenly exiled him to Tomis on the Black Sea (modern Romania). Augustus’ decision was connected, Ovid tells us, with the Ars Amātōria and some error about which Ovid never comes clean but was clearly not prosecutable. Since Augustus had a moralistic streak to him, it may be that he regarded Rome’s leading poet as a bad influence, and took the opportunity presented by Ovid’s error (perhaps a sexual scandal of some sort) to justify banishing him. Ovid died in Tomis in AD 17, still writing poems asking for a recall (Trīstia and Epistulae ex Pontō) to which Augustus remained as hostile as his successor, Tiberius (AD 14–37). The whole episode makes one wonder what Rome would have been like had Mark Antony, and not Octavian-Augustus, won the battle of Actium in 31 BC and become first Roman emperor. Life, one feels, would have been rather more fun, and Ovid, surely, would never have been exiled.

  In all this it is apparent that, in strong contrast with today, the Roman ruling classes took poetry seriously as a potential political force. In such a milieu, a widely acclaimed poet like Ovid, making his living out of witty elegiac poetry, fascinated by sex, indifferent to, even defiant of, political projects, but composing at a time of imperial legislation regulating morals and family life, was not likely to come to heel merely to suit his masters. Least of all was he about to produce an epic like Virgil’s Aeneid, with its dignified Jupiter, strong sense of destiny and vision of Roman history reaching its climax with the Great Leader himself. Ovid talks about his own priorities at Ars Amātōria 3.121–8, where he says other people can get their pleasures from the past, but he is thrilled to be have been born now, not so much because of Rome’s material and politicial domination, sed quia cultus adest ‘but because this is a sophisticated/refined/elegant/cultured age’.

  Some features of this selection

  Ovid is an entertainer, the performing flea of Roman poetry, but that should not be taken to mean that he is lightweight. Far from it. One of the many things he does in his Metamorphōsēs is to take the fantasies of myth and, using them as a way of talking about human experience, ask ‘What if these stories involved real people? How might they work in real life? What would the characters be like and what would they do and say?’ He then applies all his ingenuity to humanise them and bring them vividly to life in a way his readership would enjoy. Having a more powerful and inventive imagination than perhaps any other ancient poet, he is able to find the contemporary human angle in even the most fantastic of ancient myths. This selection concentrates on stories of this sort.

  Since Ovid is particularly fascinated by relationships between men and women, he revels in myths in which he can explore such relationships, especially ones where powerful emotions and great passions – often amounting to abnormal psychological mind-sets (e.g. passage 8, Narcissus, and passage 15, Byblis) – are involved. He does this not only through what he makes the characters do and say (their actions regularly signal their emotional state of mind), but in the way in which he interprets their interior thought-processes. There is an issue here: it is often difficult to determine whether an Ovidian comment on a situation is supposed to be taken as an authorial comment, or rather as an insight into the thought-processes of the character concerned.

  Ovid is a master of pathos: he sees into the human heart, understands it all too well and can write sympathetically about the sufferings to which it is all too prone (although sometimes his exploitation of those sufferings can seem rather cold). He is able to see the funny side of human frailties, but is equally unflinching in his depiction of the catastrophic ruin that obsessive feelings (e.g. passage 15, Byblis) can bring. Being Ovid, he is also able to depict what we would call loving married relationships (passage 1, between Deucalion and Pyrrha, and passage 14, between Baucis and Philemon). Ovid was himself married three times, his last marriage apparently a devoted one.

  The transformations in Ovid serve a purpose. They can provide an escape-route for a character (e.g. Daphne being turned into a tree to escape Apollo), or a reward (Baucis and Philemon being joined in death as they were in life), or a punishment (e.g. Arachne being turned into a spider); sometimes they are central to the story (e.g. passage 17, Pygmalion, where the metamorphosis is the whole point); and sometimes they are simply a means of bringing it to an end (e.g. Adonis being turned into an anemone). Sometimes one can see a psychological point, the characters turning into a form appropriate to them (though obviously not in Adonis’ case; and e.g. Io may be transformed into a cow, but she seems quite relieved to reassume her original human shape. In a story not in this selection, the mighty Ajax, craggy defensive rock of the Greek army at Troy, is turned into a hyacinth. If one has no sense of humour, Metamorphōsēs is perhaps best avoided). Most interesting of all, Ovid loves trying to make poetic sense of the absurdities apparent in e.g. a stone turning into a human, or a woman into a spider. What would it really be like? How might it actually work? To these situations (as to everything else) he brings all his glorious imagination, ingenuity and sense of humour, the supreme poet of ‘What if?’ and ‘Why not?’

  But Ovid is not just a brilliant story-teller who grapples with trying to understand how humans in extreme situations might react and to persuade us this is how it must have been. He is a connoisseur of the literary world too. He knows how to compose in any style, from comedy (e.g. passage 14, Baucis and Philemon) to tragedy (e.g. passage 12, Cephalus and Procris), from the pastoral songs of rustic shepherds tootling away on their pipes (e.g. passage 3, Io and Syrinx) to romantics bemoaning their love (e.g. passage 9, Pyramus and Thisbe) and obsessives in the grip of uncontrollable passions (e.g. passage 15, Byblis); and he happily switches from one style to another within the same story. He makes constant references to earlier Greek and Roman literature (this reader will concentrate on Ovid’s references to Homeric epic in particular). He constantly revisits and reworks his own poetry (e.g. passage 13, Daedalus and Icarus, differs in many interesting ways from his version in Ars Amātōria). He makes little jokes about the act of writing (see notes on, e.g., 11.549, 551). Above all, he is a master of rhetoric, witty (juxtaposing unlikely ideas to amusing effect, e.g. when Deucalion says to Pyrrha that the two of them are the earth’s sole remaining turba [‘mob, crowd’], 1.355); brilliant at snappy, balanced expressions (should the deer-Actaeon return home, or hide? pudor hoc, timor impedit illud ‘shame inhibits the one course, fear the other’, 3.205); adept at intense word-games (e.g. passage 8, Echo and Narcissus); and able to soar into passionate registers with powerful emotional speeches in the high style which he promptly proceeds to undercut with a moment of low bathos (e.g. passage 9, 4.121–4). This facility did not meet with the approval of Roman literary critics, who wanted epic to be didactic, setting a good, wholesome example. They felt that Ovid was treating the epic genre flippantly, without an appropriate sense of seriousness or decorum: ‘too much in love with his own inventiveness’, pouts Quintilian (Institutes 10.1.88); ‘doesn’t know how to leave well alone’ moans the elder Seneca (Contrōuersiae 9.5.17), and ‘he was well aware of his faults – and adored them’ (2.2.12). Given Ovi
d’s reputation, those ‘faults’ never troubled his readers – let alone him. Ovid knew exactly what he was doing in taking a tradition and seeing what he could make of it, whatever anyone else thought.

  Ovid’s gods

  The West has inherited a Judaeo-Christian tradition which holds that there is one God, and He is good. But pre-Christian pagans acknowledged a multiplicity of gods, for whom ‘goodness’ was usually irrelevant, and epic took full advantage of them. In the Iliad of Homer (epic’s founding father in the Western tradition c. 700 BC), the gods loom large, constantly squabbling among themselves to support their human favourites and establishing the tradition that, morally and ethically, there need be little to distinguish the human from the divine, if the poet so wished. So in epic, men and gods interact in whatever way the poet requires. For Virgil in his Aeneid, Jupiter, the king of the gods, is a figure of some gravity: he has a serious plan in mind – the founding of the Roman race – and he ensures it happens. Ovid will have none of this. He provides no consistently intelligible account of divine activity, let alone any theory of divine morality, justice or vision. The gods act precisely as he wants them to, which, in this selection, often means (for males) pursuing beautiful women through woods and (for females) taking revenge for perceived slights to their honour. Yet while the gods can be selfish, petty and cruel, they can occasionally act with dignity as upholders of the moral order. In other words, Ovid manipulates these gods as earlier epic poets had done – for his own literary purposes.

  Women and woods

  There is a reason for the predominantly wooded locations of Ovid’s stories. Myths do not take place in cities: they take place (for the most part) in the Great Outdoors, especially in places where men hunted. Hunting was the sport of kings and their aristocratic followers, which is what characters in myth tended to be. It was physically hard, requiring fitness, muscle, speed, endurance and courage. It was not, in other words, a sport for aristocratic women, whose priorities were expected to lie elsewhere. But the deity of hunting was, interestingly, a goddess, Artemis/Diana; and there was something else odd about her too – she was a virgin, rejecting all male advances. The ancients put two and two together: a woman keen on this most manly of sports could not be a woman with ‘normal’ female appetites.

  For Ovid, therefore, a woman without interest in men is signalled by her enthusiasm for the sport of hunting. Further, if a woman goes off men, she immediately takes up hunting to prove it (see, e.g., Procris in passage 12, 7.744–6). The ‘rule’ is proved by the exception: when Aphrodite, the goddess of sex, is fired with amor for the youthful hunter Adonis, she immediately takes up hunting to be with him all the time. Naturally, it absolutely exhausts her, and she is only too keen to lie down at every opportunity and have a rest with her young lover in her arms (passage 18, 10.544–9).

  By the same token, however keenly a woman races about in the forest chasing things, she is still a woman, and therefore, in the woods and fields, far from the protection of home and family (where she ‘should’ be), vulnerable. Add in the sort of clothing any hunter or huntress will wear – as little as possible – and the dangers are immediately apparent. The huntress in her innocence will not recognise any of this; but any god strolling about the forest will not fail to see an opportunity. The irony of the situation is that the place where a woman goes to show that she is not interested in men turns into exactly the place where she will be most accessible to them.

  In such woods it is common to come across a locus amoenus, ‘idyllic spot’, one of literature’s favourite locations. It is characterised by its trees, shade, running water, breezes, grassy banks/meadows, caves, flowers etc. (wall-paintings from Pompeii offer a number of luscious examples). In the innocent ‘golden age’, when men lived at ease and free from labour, and in the fields of the blessed in Elysium, one cannot move for locī amoenī; nor in Ovid, where its appearance is usually marked by an opening like est locus . . . or fōns erat . . . Hunters and huntresses, sweating from the day’s work, are drawn to it like a magnet. But there is an ironic Ovidian sting in the tail. In Metamorphōsēs, its attractiveness is nearly always deceitful. Gods are everywhere, and the more peaceful and secret the location, the greater the hidden danger of stumbling across a deity unawares, and paying the price.

  Amor and rape in Ovid

  Amor, wholesome or obsessive, is at the centre of eight of the stories in this selection (Semele, Echo and Narcissus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Cephalus and Procris, Byblis, Orpheus, Pygmalion, and Venus and Adonis). Rape or attempted rape, defined in our terms, which occurs about fifty times in the fifteen books of Metamorphōsēs, occurs in three of the stories (Apollo and Daphne, Io, Arethusa). While the topic of relationships between the sexes (or should that be genders?) is as much a modern preoccupation as it was an ancient one, rape in particular makes for uncomfortable reading in today’s world, and raises a number of serious issues. It may, for example, be worth considering whether Ovid is offering any significant critique of rape or whether he simply endorses it as a fact of mythical life. Before engaging with that particular question, however, it is worth taking the following points into account:

  First, Ovid is not inventing the rapes contained in the myths he relates: they are built into the stories, which go back hundreds of years.

  Second, since many Romans regarded gods as slaves to their passions, amoral if not immoral, and happy to take their pleasure where they found it, they would not have been surprised by divine proclivities.

  Third, Ovid lived in a world where absence of female consent was not a necessary defining feature of rape (it is the defining feature in our world).

  Fourth, the audience for myth may have considered insemination by a god, whether by force or not, a great honour for a mere mortal, since it brought with it the prospect of semi-divine offspring.

  It is also worth checking carefully on the context in which rapiō, usually translated ‘rape’, occurs, since its basic meaning is ‘carry off, abduct, take’. The latter meaning is clearly more appropriate in e.g. passage 12, where the hunter Cephalus is raptus by Aurora, goddess of the Dawn (7.704, 725, 732). Then again, when Cephalus says that his beloved wife Procris was sister of the rapta Oreithyia, he comments that Procris was more digna rapī (7.697) – surely not that she would have made a better rape victim? In passage 13, Theseus escapes with his lover, who is called the rapta Ariadne – scarcely ‘raped’ if they were lovers (8.174). To complicate matters further, in passage 10 (5.576), Arethusa, who is about to describe how Alpheus tried to rape her, says she will tell the story of Alpheus’ amōrēs. Likewise, in the story of Apollo and Daphne, Apollo feels amor for Daphne (passage 2, 1.452, 474) and immediately attempts to – ‘rape’ her?

  Amor only rarely appears in relationships which might seem to us driven by ‘love’ in our broadest sense, possibly because in Ovid it usually has such strong sexual overtones (I emphasise here that I am concentrating on Ovid’s usage in this selection and not taking into account other writers’ views of amor). For example, it never occurs in passage 1, between Deucalion and Pyrrha (who seem old), and passage 14, between Baucis and Philemon (who are old). Cephalus uses amor of his relationship with his beloved wife Procris, but qualifies it as amor sociālis (passage 12, 7.800) and glosses it with mūtua cūra, and in the next line uses amor, unqualified, in its sexual sense (7.801). Orpheus talks of the divinity Amor existing among the gods, but again in the sexual sense, if that is how rapīnae (passage 16, 10.28) should be understood. If it is fair to say that amor in passage 2 (Apollo and Daphne), passage 3 (Io), passage 8 (Narcissus) and passage 15 (Byblis) is predominantly sexual, its use to describe the ‘first love’ of Pyramus and Thisbe (passage 9) and Pygmalion (passage 17) may be more innocent, but may not – after all, the innocent Atalanta feels amor for the first time at 10.637 (passage 18), but sociāre cubīlia and cupīdō (635–6) indicate what she actually has in mind; and Hippomenes falls for Atalanta when he sees her naked (10.578–82). For Ovid in these passages, th
en, sexual desire is at the root of amor, however sociālis it might subsequently become. It is a psychology which is not entirely unfamiliar in the third millennium.

  On issues like slavery, killing, poverty, war, child-labour, the treatment of animals (and rape), the difference between our world and the ancient world is very great indeed. This raises a historical issue (is it possible to understand the ancients if we do not do so on their terms?) and a literary one (is literature best judged by its capacity to appeal to the reader’s conscience, so that moral edification is the main index of aesthetic and cultural merit? Is literature ‘the handmaid of ethics’?). To put it bluntly, can we understand and enjoy the ancient world only if we personally approve of the way they did things? Finally, if Ovid’s account of rape challenges us, did it challenge the Romans? Was it Ovid’s purpose so to do? Is it relevant that only one of the rapes in Metamorphōsēs is carried out by a human?

  Ovid and epic

  Gravity and high seriousness are not Ovid’s priorities. So his Metamorphōsēs, though technically an epic, often lacks what we might think of as epic grandeur. Certainly the poem does not lack for emotion, pathos and human feeling, but the vast range of disparate myths Ovid includes and the tension between the setting of the stories in far-off times and places and the contemporary angle Ovid gives to his characters seem designed to generate amusing incongruity, as does the picture of gods behaving exactly like mortals, especially in affairs of the heart; and jokes keep breaking in anyway. The explanation might lie in the prevalence of Ovid’s favourite subject, amor, and his ‘neoteric’ way of handling poetry.