OVID`S LOVERS: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination

Transcription

OV I D ’ S L OV E R S
Central to Ovid’s elegiac texts and Metamorphoses is his pre-occupation
with how desiring subjects interact with and seduce each other. This
major study, which shifts the focus in Ovidian criticism from intertextuality to intersubjectivity, explores the relationship between self and
other, and in particular that between male and female worlds, which
lies at the heart of Ovid’s vision of poetry and the imagination. A
series of close readings, focusing on both the more celebrated and less
studied parts of the corpus, moves beyond the more often-asked questions of Ovid, such as whether he is ‘for’ or ‘against’ women, in order
to explore how gendered subjects converse, complete and co-create. It
illustrates how the tale of Medusa, alongside that of Narcissus, reverberates throughout Ovid’s oeuvre, becoming a fundamental myth for
his poetics. This book offers a compelling, often troubling portrait of
Ovid that will appeal to classicists and all those interested in gender
and difference.
v i cto r ia r i mel l teaches Latin literature at the University of
Rome, La Sapienza. She is the author of Petronius and the Anatomy
of Fiction (2002) and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion
to Roman Satire (2005). She has written numerous articles on Latin
literature, especially on the novel and Ovid.
OV I D ’ S L OV E R S
Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination
VICTORIA RIMELL
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi
Cambridge University Press
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© Victoria Rimell 2006
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Contents
Note on the text
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
page vi
vii
viii
Introduction Narcissus and Medusa: Desiring subjects and
the dialectics of Ovidian erotics
1
1 Specular logics: Medicamina
41
2 Double vision: Ars Amatoria 1, 2 and 3
70
3 Seeing seers: Metamorphoses 10–11.84
104
4 Co-creators: Heroides 15
123
5 What goes around: Heroides 16–21
156
6 Space between: Heroides 18–19
180
Conclusion
205
References
Index of passages discussed
General index
210
223
233
v
Note on the text
In quoting Ovid I have always used the Oxford Classical Text, unless
otherwise indicated. All translations are my own.
vi
Acknowledgements
This book was begun in Cambridge fog and finished in the golden light of
Rome. I feel extremely lucky to have benefited from the stimulations and
very different pleasures of both environments over the past few years. I’m
especially indebted to the Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche of the University
of Rome, La Sapienza, and the Italian Ministry for Universities (MIUR)
for appointing me to my present position. There are several people I would
like to thank: Roberto Antonelli, Francesca Bernardini and Piero Boitani,
along with my colleagues Luigi Enrico Rossi, Andrea Cucchiarelli and
Maria Broggiato, for welcoming me so warmly at La Sapienza; Alessandro Schiesaro, who first suggested I put all my thoughts on Ovid in one
place – I couldn’t have done without his wonderful support; John Henderson, whose humour helped me retain some small measure of sanity more
than once, for his speed reading and uncannily sound advice; Alessandro
Barchiesi, Philip Hardie, Charles Martindale, and the anonymous reader at
Cambridge University Press, for encouragement and very useful criticisms;
and my friend Jane Jones, for her big brain, big hair, and countless hours
of illuminating chats. I am also very grateful to Michael Sharp, and to my
editors Jackie Warren and Nancy-Jane Rucker.
A version of chapter 1 (‘Specular Logics’) appeared in R. Ancona and
E. Greene (eds.) (2005) Gendered Dynamics in Roman Love Elegy, reprinted
with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press, while chapter 4
revises Rimell (1999) ‘Epistolary fictions: authorial identity in Heroides 15’,
PCPS 45: 109–35.
vii
Abbreviations
A&A
AJP
ANRW
BICS
BMCR
CA
CJ
CP
CQ
CW
FGrH
GB
G&R
HSCP
JRS
LCM
MD
OLD
PCPS
RhM
TAPA
WS
Antike und Abendland
American Journal of Philology
H. Temporini, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt,
Berlin 1972
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Classical Antiquity
Classical Journal
Classical Philology
Classical Quarterly
Classical World
F. Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historike (1923– )
Grazer Beiträge
Greece and Rome
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
Journal of Roman Studies
Liverpool Classical Monthly
Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici
Oxford Latin Dictionary
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
Rheinisches Museum
Transactions of the American Philological Association
Wiener Studien
viii
Introduction
Narcissus and Medusa: Desiring subjects
and the dialectics of Ovidian erotics
Ovid’s structure is not merely like a Russian doll, one story inside
another, it is like a snake-pit, in which a pretty indeterminable number
of snakes are devouring and being devoured by each other.1
All love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts.2
This book explores the gaps in which same and other, male and female can
be seen to relate, converse, compete, and co-create in Ovidian poetry. The
chapters included span a large portion of Ovid’s corpus, starting with the
Medicamina, his little-read treatise on cosmetics in which women are made
up in men’s image and vice versa, and ending with the ‘double’ Heroides,
where heroes and heroines of ancient myth write to and from (over and
across and with) each other. I am interested here in the many (flash-)
points in Ovidian poetry where male and female artists/lovers are twinned
as vying, mutually threatening subjects, and where a narcissistic impulse
to collapse other into same/self is rivalled by a more complex dialectic
or exchange which seems itself to fire and propel desire. One of the core
aims of this study is to counter some curious imbalances and repressions
in recent Ovidian criticism: in particular, I discuss the extent to which
the dominant model for the Ovidian artist, the male viewer who spurns
woman and/or (re)creates her as artwork and fetish (Narcissus, Orpheus
and Pygmalion are key figures) has tended to foreclose investigation of the
relationship between gendered creativities in Ovid. For sure, we can all
spot competing models of the artist – from Echo, who turns repetition into
originality, pronouncing novissima verba with typical satiric, Ovidian wit,3
1
3
Hofman and Lasdun (1994) xii.
See Knoespel (1985) 8:
2
Paglia (1990) 14.
‘What emerges from Ovid’s account of Echo is the power of speech and the ability of Ovid’s own
written language to control that speech. Even though Echo is handicapped by Juno’s punishment,
her handicap paradoxically emphasizes the adaptability of speech. Ultimately it is the power of the
written language, Ovid’s own narrative, that emerges from the description of Echo’s language.’
1
2
v i c tori a rim el l
to spinner Arachne,4 tortured embroiderer Philomela,5 or the daughters
of Minyas, stitching rebellion into Metamorphoses 4 – but these are not
the characters usually identified with the poet himself, and feminist critics
have been more concerned with making such figures visible, rather than (in
addition) with scrutinizing how gendered readings and writings contend
and overlap. Male artists, however, are frequently construed as synonymous
with the poet. As Segal writes, for example: ‘Through Orpheus, Ovid
provides a metaphorical reflection of the creative and restorative power of his
own art’.6 For Anderson, Pygmalion ‘is the creative artist par excellence’,7 or
as Rosati puts it, reaffirmed many times over in Hardie’s recent book: ‘Ovid
is the poet Narcissus, the poet bent over in admiration of his own virtuosity,
triumphantly mirroring himself in the astonishment of his public’.8 For
Hardie, narcissistic desires (aligned with a bid to conjure up presences) lie at
the psychological heart of Ovid’s poetry, fuelling an obsession with sameness
and doubling (not least, between art and nature).9 Thus the Narcissus–Echo
plot can be seen to ghost-write a string of Ovidian couplings (Ceyx and
Alcyone, Leander and Hero, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Pyramus and Thisbe),
in which beloveds become mirror images of lovers.10 Indeed, Narcissus
reigns in recent criticism as the figure both for the poet (as he flits between
credulity and cynicism, primal magic and urbane irony) and for the desiring,
seduced, self-conscious reader. His myth offers a neat allegory for the move
from naı̈vety to knowingness, nature to art celebrated by postmodernism,
a field of thinking owed much of the credit for Ovid’s flight to stardom
at the end of the second millennium.11 We might even say that Narcissus’
psychodrama has come to define Ovidian poetics as obsessed with linguistic
surfaces and passing intensities, with visual display, duplicity and (obvious)
feigning.12
4
5
7
8
9
11
12
Also see Hinds (1998) 5–8, and Hollander (1981) on Echo as a figure of poetic allusion and as
an ironist or satirist (‘Echo’s power is thus one of being able to reveal the implicit’, Hollander
writes, 27). Echo’s story is one of several Ovidian myths to be appropriated by feminist thought: see
Berger (1996), Spivak (1993).
For a feminist reading of this tale see Miller (1988).
6 Segal (1989) 491.
See Joplin (1984), and Marder (1992).
Anderson (1963) 25, cf. Solodow (1988) 215, and Hardie (2002a) 23: ‘Orpheus and Pygmalion in
Metamorphoses 10 are the Ovidian figures for, respectively, the poet and the artist in their role as
primitive magicians.’
Rosati (1983) 50, Hardie (2002a) 28 et passim. Also see discussion of these models in Elsner and
Sharrock (1991). Leach (1974) is among the few to view Narcissus and his relatives differently: for
her, he is a model of artistic failure.
10 Hardie (2002a) 258–82.
Hardie (2002a), (2004).
As Hofman and Lasdun put it in their introduction (1994) xi: ‘there are many reasons for Ovid’s
renewed appeal. Such qualities as his mischief and cleverness, his deliberate use of shock – not always
relished in the past – are contemporary values.’
See especially recent summary of modern reception of Ovid in Hardie (2002b).
Introduction: Narcissus and Medusa
3
Yet the self-love of Narcissus is only one, limited model for Ovidian
desire and Ovidian representation. Ovid stages many different complications, variations or contestations of the Narcissus plot, and writes desire
as a fractured, competitive process. The emphasis on Narcissus as Ovidian
artist in recent criticism fascinates me especially because of the way in which
it grounds Ovidian illusionism and fiction in mimetic male desire. This
book offers a rather different (and at the same time often complementary)
take on Ovidian art and erotics, suggesting ways in which this experimental poet takes his readers far beyond Narcissus’ experience. Much valuable
work has been done already on how Ovid writes the decentred self, and
blurs or snags what are perceived to be traditional gender categories, especially of masculinity.13 What I would like to do here, however, is to draw
out discussion of what Miller calls the ‘split nature’ of elegiac subjectivity
by looking closely, in addition, at how Ovid construes intersubjectivity.14
Broadly, I want to rethink power in Ovidian poetry as relational (rather
than hierarchical), and to push against the tendency of Ovidian criticism
in the last thirty years to fall into polar camps. As Miller puts it in his
discussion of the Amores:
Depending on whom one reads, elegy is either in league with the Augustan political
regime (Kennedy 1993, 35–6; Newman 1997, 6) or implacably hostile to it and the
traditional values it sought to promote; either political allegory (Edwards 1996, 24)
or an apolitical, ludic discourse that gently mocks social custom (Veyne 1988: 31–
2, 104–8; Kennedy 1993: 95–6; Fantham 1996, 108); either exploitative of women
(Kennedy 1993: 38, 56, 73) or bent on satirizing Roman misogyny (Greene 1994).15
Similarly, the inclination of debate on gender in ancient texts has been,
almost entirely, towards analysing either female or male figures, either constructions of femininity or masculinity.16 This has much to do with a
reluctance, deeply engrained in the Western tradition, to entertain two
parallel (same but different) subjects, an aversion magnified by an AngloAmerican feminist ideal of a gender-neutral human subject. In this book,
I want to sidestep the kinds of questions that have repeatedly been asked
of Ovid in the last thirty years, by asking not (simply) about constructs
of femininity, or of masculinity, or about whether Ovid can be judged a
13
14
15
See e.g. Raval (2002), Keith (1999) and (2000), P. A. Miller (2003) or summary in Sharrock (2002a).
P. A. Miller (2003) offers a ‘symptomatic’ history of Roman erotic elegy, arguing that elegiac poetry
arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century. His
book provides a very interesting, more historically focused background to my discussions of Ovid’s
vision of the self.
16 Recent exceptions include Keith (1999) and Miller (2003). See n. 17.
Miller (2003) 30.
4
anti-, proto- or pseudo-feminist,17 but instead about relationality, about
the desiring subject in Ovidian poetry as a being-in-relation.18
For although in the Amores, Ovid’s first published work, erotic relations appear more straightforwardly formulated (at least, in parts) as
lover/beloved, and Corinna appears to be little more than elegiac subjectmatter, with no voice of her own, in the Heroides, Ars Amatoria, Medicamina,
and Metamorphoses, we can read varied experiments in juxtaposing canny,
rival lovers and in juggling unstable subject/object positions, experiments
which postpone any final determination.19 All these texts, with the exception of Heroides 1–15,20 were written between four and eight years of each
other, and make up the backbone of Ovid’s life’s work. The core elegiac
texts (Heroides, Ars, Medicamina, as well as the Remedia Amoris, which I discuss only briefly) are all concerned with how desiring subjects interact and
seduce each other, and it is this idea of imagining the intersection of male
and female worlds which perhaps distinguishes the originality of Ovid’s
contribution to Augustan literature, and takes the concept of the uneven,
sexy pairing visualized in the elegiac couplet as far as it can go. While elegy,
traditionally, has room ‘for one voice only’, tending to reduce everything
to the persona of the poet–lover,21 Ovid’s image-conscious poetry is often
focused on dialogue over monologue, moving at the borders of known
worlds, both real and imaginary.
17
18
19
20
21
For criticism which sees Ovid pushing against and reversing traditional gender roles see e.g. Hallett (1990) 193, Jacobson (1974) 7, Curran (1978) 213, Luck (1960) 418, Spentzou (2003), James
(2003). For an Ovid who demonstrates the mechanics of male discourses of power and domination
over/objectification of women, see e.g. Greene (1998), Leach (1964), Sullivan (1962). For more complex accounts, in which Ovid does the former to a certain extent (or pretends to), while ultimately
fulfilling the latter, or vice versa, see e.g. Raval (2002) and Green (1979–80), or Watson (2002).
Similarly, in ‘resisting’ readings of Ovid (e.g. Liveley 1999), there is often a strong sense that the
‘feminist’ (or almost, here, ‘tactical’) reading is the one which rejects and resists in order exclusively
to privilege another viewpoint, implying that the conventional reading is born of naı̈ve masculinism, rather than offering a way to analyse how attitudes and readings compete in the text. Keith
(1999), along with P. A. Miller (2003), is unusual in criticizing the limitations of the above positions,
in which the poet is interpreted as either promoting gender subversion and sexual liberation or as
reconfiguring a repressive sexuality.
This is an Irigarayan term (see especially Irigaray 2000): her work calls for the radical reevaluation of
the human subject as defined by difference rather than sameness. Many of my thoughts on Ovid in
this book have been complicated and enriched by her work, although I am by no means attempting
to recuperate Ovid as an utopian French feminist.
Miller (2003) sees the Roman elegists in general as ‘augurs of instability’, exploring ‘the interstitial
space between masculine and feminine, active and passive, for which traditional Roman discourse
has no terms’ (25); elegy thus becomes ‘a symptom of crisis in the Roman subject’s self-conception’
(26).
The publication date for these poems is uncertain. Traditionally they have been assigned to the same
period as the Amores, and dated at around 15 BC; however some scholars have placed them later,
between 10 and 3 BC.
As Barchiesi puts it: (2001) 31–2.
5
Thus, while in the Ars Amatoria especially, Ovid surely baits the kind of
deliberation which has preoccupied feminist critics of his poetry (‘whose
side is he on, anyway?’),22 this poetry does everything it can to foil our
verdict, or to show up its own ingenuousness (which is not to say that men
and women ultimately come out quits in the Ars, only to stress that the tussle
of ‘foe against foe’ in this text is without resolution). Ovidian desire often
works to break down boundaries, and thus to threaten autonomy, identity,
and to collapse difference into incestuous sameness, yet at the same time it
often resists and dodges Narcissus’ fate, recognizing that connectedness is
not synonymous with homogeneity, that the dynamic of relationality is also
the vim of creative process, both of writing and reading. Ovidian erotics
can be read as a constant battle to transcend a compulsive logic of the same
in order to sustain desire, or poetry itself.
In this way, Ovid discerns and wrestles with the fundamental problem
of what Irigaray calls the ‘specularisation’ underlying all Western philosophical discourse,23 confronting head-on the perilous implications of a
self-perpetuating mode which creates man’s desired object as the reassuring negative of his own reflection. Similarly, even in relationships which
appear to be self-contained, Ovidian sex depends on multiplications, triangulations, substitutions, go-betweens, which inevitably render mirroring
interactions much more complex than the Narcissus–Echo, subject–object
(male–female) prototype would suggest.24 Thus in the Ars Amatoria, Ovid’s
pupils are asked to negotiate a tangle of contrary advice, to perceive parallel scenarios through the eyes of men and women, husbands and lovers,
Echoes and Narcissuses, viewers and viewed; with Ovid’s lovers, we reach
a climax at the end of Ars 2 only to realize there is one more book to
come – yet the Remedia Amoris erases that end, too (and let us not forget the other appendix to Ars 3, the Medicamina).25 In the double Heroides,
22
23
24
25
In her discussion of the women-focused single Heroides, Sharrock (2002a) 99, distills this familiar
cross-examination as follows:
‘a crucial question is the extent to which we may be able to read a ‘woman’s voice’. What kind
of gendered voice is produced by a male author speaking through a female mask, but completely
subsuming his masculine authority into the female writing? . . . The same question arises when we
try to confront more widely the very high profile of women in the corpus: is it friendly or not?
How far is Ovid implicated in the exposure and objectification of women and denigrating violence
towards them, perpetrated in and by his texts?’
Irigaray (1985a) explains how logocentrism is incapable of representing femininity/woman other
than as the negative of men’s own reflection. Philosophical meta-discourse, she argues, is only
made possible through a logic of the same, a narcissistic process whereby the speculating subject
contemplates himself.
Just as, Miller argues (2003) 24, elegiac women ‘represent less simple identities than complex nexuses
of conflicting symbolic norms’.
For more detailed discussion of the relationship between reading, sex and counting games in the Ars
Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, see Henderson (forthcoming).
6
similarly, partnerships swell into love triangles and more messy relationshipmaps, while in (the aptly numbered) Amores 2, Ovidian aspirations and
desires stretch and splinter elegiac distichs/diptychs, producing a kaleidoscopic effect: multiple affairs, accomplices, scenarios and readings load the
book with epic potential, yet for the oversexed poet–lover, nothing is ever
satis.26
In this introductory chapter, I use the Medusa myth (which, as we’ll
see, feeds subtly into Ovid’s corpus throughout) as an illustrative way into
exploring how a narcissistic logic in Ovidian poetry is contextualized and
challenged, first of all by the troubling existence and (not quite visible)
vision of the Other (paradigmatically, Woman), and secondly by an ongoing
meeting/clash/interaction of desiring subjects and poetic drives, male and
female. This opening discussion is more abstract and theoretical than the
close readings of individual texts that follow, and it is also more literal in its
exploration of the Medusa and Narcissus myths, which often (particularly in
the case of Medusa, a figure who, in more ways than one, can rarely be seen
head-on) become shadows, reflections and backgrounds to understanding
erotic relationships in Ovidian poetry itself. Throughout the book, then,
I will be probing the limits of a fixation on the myth of Narcissus in
Ovidian criticism: readings of Ovidian desire and poetics as rooted (only)
in the paradigm of Narcissus have tended to reject and quell the Other (the
female), underemphasize the extent to which the Ovidian poet is identified,
often simultaneously, with other artist figures and with other models for
individuation, and suppress the horror of self-consciousness, as well as the
risk of incredulity (as dramatized in the parallel catoptric myth of Perseus
and Medusa told in Metamorphoses 4 and 5).
Medusa’s presence, insidious but little discussed, gnaws into and rivals the
Narcissus archetype, asserting two desiring/creative subjects whose intercourse spikes the paradoxes of Ovidian illusionism. Both myths, told in
Met.3–5, are fundamental models in Ovid for the birth of poetry and for
the individual’s path to subjectivity. Crucially, too, they both make the
mirror a symbolic tool for (painful, dangerous) self-realization, a idea Ovid
also explores in the Amores, Medicamina and Ars Amatoria. Narcissus, petrified with amazement in Met.3, comes of age and becomes a symbol of
Ovidian self-consciousness when he understands that he is seeing himself
in the reflective pool, while those who see Medusa in Met.4 and 5 look
(their own) death in the face, and are turned into perfect stone statues
26
satis, or rather non satis, is an important concept in Amores 2, shorthand for the games of excess
played throughout this book. See e.g. 2.10.12, 2.10.22, 2.13.28, 2.14.44.
7
(unless, like Perseus, they avoid looking at her straight on by using a mirror – in which Medusa, like Narcissus, may also see herself ). Medusa is a
paradigmatic female viewer and artist, and the myth of her rape, monstrous
transformation, and perpetual afterlife as global sculptress is located (alongside Narcissus’ transformation) at the core of the Metamorphoses. But while
Narcissus looks at and is in love with himself, the myth of Medusa always
involves encounters between spectators. Simply put, this is a myth about
looked-at woman becoming ultra-powerful viewer (snake-haired Medusa
still turns her audience on, and is compulsive viewing, yet her audience
is ‘castrated’ even as it is permanently fixed in the state of open-mouthed
arousal). But it is also, crucially, about the convergence and collision of
gazes, for her narrative culminates at the end of Met.4 in the moment at
which Perseus sees (or does not see) her gruesome face in his mirror-shield –
itself a giant, surrogate eye.
Indeed, although she gets only passing mention in one chapter of Frederik’s recent The Roman Gaze (2002), and is barely glimpsed in studies
of Ovidian spec(tac)ularity and desire,27 Medusa is everywhere in Ovid,
just as she looms large (alongside Narcissus) in twentieth-century philosophy and creative writing, in psychoanalysis and French feminist thought.28
This book attempts to engage with and encompass insights developed in
other fields of the humanities that have often tended to be neglected by
classicists; just as, in turn, it hopes to show that the classical foundations
of mythical archetypes and their treatment in authors such as Ovid cannot be sidestepped or underestimated in the elaboration of critical theory.
Medusa’s stage presence, I’ll argue, ensures that Ovidian desire does not
simply revolve around intoxication and restoration, possession, loss and
evanescence, but is infused with aggression, revenge, conflict, mystery, suspense, renewal, and above all, fear. And while desire’s mission, as Hardie
stresses, is usually to embrace and consume the other (this is, above all,
Narcissus’ fantasy),29 we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are
numerous places in the Ovidian corpus where we can recognize precisely
the opposite conclusion, where the poet is not only hampered in his quest
but obsessively concerned with privileging and revelling in the journey itself
rather than the destination, to the point that the apparent target is rendered
27
28
29
E.g. Rosati (1983), Hardie (2002a), Sharrock (1994), (2000a).
For an overview of Medusa’s impact on Western literature, philosophy and art, see Garber and
Vickers (2003).
Throughout much of Western philosophical thought, the notion that (male) desire can never be
truly fulfilled without the ‘possession’ of the other, is all-pervasive. See the critique of Levinas, Sartre,
and Merleau-Ponty in Irigaray (2000) 17–29.
8
redundant, cosmetic. The repeated and delusional displacements and substitutions that define Lacan’s desiring subject are often self-consciously
celebrated (as the real point, the real victory) in Ovidian erotics.
Perhaps the most flagrant instance of this occurs at the end (which is
also a middle and re-beginning) of Amores 2, where the poet, disgruntled
at a rival’s literal and slavish reading of his seduction campaign, blurts
out: si tibi non opus est servata, stulte, puella, / at mihi fac serves, quo magis
ipse velim (‘If you’re not bothered with guarding the girl for your own
sake, cretin, at least guard her for mine, so that I’ll want her all the more’
2.19.1–2). One spiteful Medusan look spells out the magic and cracks the
fantasy, evoking Narcissus’ disillusionment: yet the collapse of Narcissus’
deluded lust can coexist with Medusa’s fatal attraction (especially in a book
which sets up ‘straight talking’ as a painful trap for its readers, exposing
possibilities rather than dealing the bottom line).30 In other words, it is not
only the case, as Hardie emphasizes, that Ovidian poetry continually yearns
to substitute textual ecstasies/fallacies for actual bodily union, resulting in
concatenations of absent–presences: Ovid is also concerned, sometimes very
obviously, to shun and undermine the drive for possession/unity/symmetry
in order to animate dynamic relationships between subjects.
This opening chapter is followed by six close readings which work
through the Ovidian corpus, from elegiac didactic to epic to the late ‘double’
epistles, the last Augustan elegy we have. These texts, or bits of texts, are all
in different ways concerned (and I want to stress, more concerned than any
other of Ovid’s poems) with developing dialectical relationships between
desiring subjects. Ovid’s fascination with communication between lovers,
and with doubling, interaction, competition and exchange more generally,
might be seen to culminate in Her.16–21, when men and women get to
write simultaneously and side by side. But I do not so much want to plot a
teleology of Ovidian erotics as to suggest that when we review Ovid’s poetry
in the light of these ideas, accentuating parts of the corpus which have as a
whole received less critical attention,31 new or forgotten grains and colours
emerge. Together, Ovid’s experiments in partnering male and female add
30
31
See especially Am.2.7 and 2.8 (with Henderson 1991 and 1992), where we are caught out and lured
to re-read, only to pile up our suspicions. Conversely, Ovid points out in Ars 1.615–16 that what
was once feigned (being in love) can become true before you even realize it yourself. Similarly,
Medusa’s drop-dead gaze is infuriatingly paradoxical: on one hand she is an anti-Pygmalion, killing
off illusionism, while on the other, as Met.5 dramatizes, her story is emblematic of tales of wonder,
and she punishes a disbelieving audience by turning them into stupefied statues, frozen forever as
an object lesson in incredulity.
With the exception of the Metamorphoses. The double Heroides and the Medicamina in particular
remain very understudied.
9
up to an intricate and shifting examination of human (inter)subjectivity
which is ever concomitant with parading the origins, nature and scope of
poetry.
Chapter 1 looks (while trying not to squint) at the Medicamina, and considers how the poem relates to Ovid’s advice on make-up and mirrors, and
also to the catoptric encounter (rivalling that between Narcissus and himself/Echo) between Perseus and Medusa, elsewhere in the corpus – especially
the Ars Amatoria. I argue that this is a poem about male scopophilic desire
to create woman as same: in a straightforward reading of the Medicamina, Ovid’s cosmos of cosmetics enacts a specular logic in which women are
denied the pleasure of self-representation and permitted only the hysteria of
mimicry. In holding his own mirror up to women in this poem, Ovid turns
their tool for self-formation against them, like Perseus assaulting Medusa,
and the narcissus bulb face-pack which leaves faces as bright as a mirror only
rubs this in. Yet by stealing cosmetics and their accessories to colour his poetics, Ovid also adopts the worries and ambiguities invested in mirrors and
masquerade. Mirrors in the ancient world are highly paradoxical: they give
women the power to know and control appearances, but in doing so expose
the limits of female individuation – they are her weapon/shield/Achilles’
heel, or Narcissus’ trap. Ovid also exploits the Platonic idea that mirror
images share with semblances of all kinds an ambiguous mixture of being
and non-being, challenging the mentality that thinks in terms of here and
there, self and not-self. So while the Medicamina strives, like Pygmalion,
to forge women in man’s image, as same, as artwork, what it also does is to
turn that scopophilic gaze back on the supreme, imperialist, desiring (male)
subject. This is, of course, one of the many instances in Ovidian poetry
where the Narcissus tragedy gets replayed, albeit in a typically metaphorical
way. But here we have two subjects (and two Narcissuses/Medusas), not
one: and those two subjects, man and woman, never totally collapse into
unity, as in the Narcissus denouement. The mirror, now women and men’s
tool for self-formation, confuses subject/object, self/other, or rather (at the
same time), it fuels a battle for subject position. The (near-)sameness of
the narcissistic encounter produces the tense energy of desire, while risking
killing that desire, or castrating both desiring subjects – a threat which itself
adds sparkle to elegiac sport.
Chapter 2, on Ars Amatoria, tries to unscramble the difficult interactions
between the three books, and explores how this text revels in anxieties
germane to the art of relationships. Ovid’s textbook is littered with traces
of the two primordial mirror-myths, Medusa/Perseus and Narcissus/Echo,
models which are both interwoven and let loose, so that male and female
10
lovers/artists trade places or play multiple roles. Neat symmetries and chessboard patterns are arranged only to be confounded or messed up, with the
result that neither men nor women (artists nor readers, lovers nor rivals) can
keep the upper hand for long, and the sexes are propelled into seemingly
endless rounds of competition. While chapter 2 ranges at speed through the
Ars to trace the energetic criss-crossing between lovers and books, chapter
3 magnifies just one slow-motion episode in the Metamorphoses, Orpheus’
lethal backward glance at Eurydice on the boundary between upper and
lower worlds in Book 10. This chapter dissects the crucial moments of
realization and amazement at art and beauty that pepper Met.10. I argue that
Orpheus’ song, and the Ovidian narrative that frames it, continually revisit
instances of the uncanny, or mirror-stages, in which hierarchies of subject–
object are unbalanced or even non-sensical. Once again, the Medusa myth is
important here (both in Eurydice’s double death and in Orpheus’ murder
in Book 11), its theme of threatening confrontation infecting Orpheus’
apparent retreat into narcissism and boy love. In parodying the Ars Amatoria
(Orpheus gives us dangerous, criminal eros over Ovid’s ‘safe sex’32 ), Met.10
teaches us how metamorphosis, desire and Ovidian poetry itself are inspired
by points of suspension and movement between two states, identities and
subjects.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 move one step away from ocularcentrism to explore
other aspects of Ovid’s interest in the relational subject. In chapter 4 in
particular, our palette of images will be rather different from that which we
have seen so far: in Her.15, the relation between self and same/self and other,
is dramatized less in the contrast between Narcissus’ and Medusa’s/Perseus’
experiences (although the landscape of Narcissus’ myth is still very much
in evidence) than in the slippage between homo- and heterosexual desire,
within a complex love triangle created by (once-Lesbian) Sappho, Phaon
and Ovid. This strange epistle at the end of the single Heroides (in most
editions, ‘between’ the single and double Heroides), becomes the site for a
fascinating performance of Ovid’s agonistic affair with female predecessor
and ‘original’ voice of personal amatory poetry, Sappho. Our focus is now
on a single, hybrid, artist–lover, whose letter subsumes several layers of
dialogue. Sappho–Ovid’s often cacophonous duet, I’ll argue, takes us one
move closer to the lovers’ exchange of letters in Her.16–21. In assuming the
voice of Sappho, Ovid in many ways writes over and through his female
rival (and possible partner), aggressively asserting a hierarchy of male over
32
See Met.10.152–4, cf. Ars 1.31–4. There will be ‘no crime’ in Ovid’s song, whereas Orpheus will give
us ‘unlawful passions’ and the ‘deserved punishment’ of women, promising also tales of homosexual
instead of heterosexual love affairs. This is a point made by Janan (1988b) 116.
11
female, heterosexual over homosexual, writing subject over written object.
Yet ultimately that simple reading cannot stand. Ovid’s authorial identity is blatantly and inextricably intertwined with Sappho’s, so that the
question becomes not only ‘what is Ovid doing with Sappho/woman?’,
but ‘how does Sappho’s voice write Ovidian desire?’, ‘how do Ovid and
Sappho interrelate and to what effect?’ and ‘what does count as a genuine
Ovid/Sappho?’ Intertextuality in the letter now becomes a model and vehicle for intersubjectivity, and for authorial and sexual interdependency. This
is not to say that authorial identities ultimately fuse or blur into one, or
that Ovid and Sappho are (just) constructed as ‘equals’, but that Ovid’s
alliance/overlapping of writing voices hypes up power-play and involves
readers in a drama full of suspense. It is in and with this relationality, I
argue, that Ovid creates a space for desire and/as creativity, and makes
reading seductive.
Chapter 5 turns to Her.16–21, and focuses on how the double epistles
deal with the topic of marriage and coupling (the poems are themselves
set out as concatenations of imperfectly mirroring symmetries, constantly
playing out not just doublings but triangulations and multiple splittings).
Chapter 6, which in many ways is chapter 5’s Siamese twin, plunges into
the centre of the collection to pore over the state of Hero’s and Leander’s
relationship. It is interesting that in terms of the recent (feminist, womancentred) emphases of recent Ovidian criticism, the double Heroides look
(or have looked) pretty unsexy. As Harrison writes in the recent Cambridge
Companion to Ovid:
This second collection was perhaps stimulated by the (lost) male replies written by
Ovid’s contemporary Sabinus to the single Heroides (Amores 2.18.27–34, Ex Ponto
4.16.13–14), but was no doubt also intended to give a novel twist to a sequel to
a successful collection. Here we might see the reinsertion of the male as a prime
erotic mover as a reversion in some sense to traditional love elegy, but the generic
move upwards from the Amores is maintained overall in the continuing dramatic
and mythological framework, with material again derived from epic, tragedy and
Hellenistic narrative poetry.33
Thus putting a male writer back at the helm after the female voices of
the single Heroides is seen to constitute a move ‘up’ and back to ‘tradition’. Scope for locating a seditious, modern, female voice is now diminished, and likewise anxieties of communication (wrapped up in the satire
of intertextual games which so appealed to the postmodern reader) are
healed. We know the letter gets to its destination safely, because the lover
33
S. J. Harrison (2002) 83.
12
replies, while there remains little titillation for the unintended Ovidian
reader intercepting the ‘private outpourings’ of the female psyche. So do
the double letters diffuse and resolve everything that was foxy and enticing
about the single letters? What happens when Ovid writes elegy in dialogue?
How do male and female writers interact in the double letters? I suggest
in this chapter that Leander and Hero are not simply polarized, as critics have tended to suggest (male/female, powerful/trapped, strong/weak,
active/passive, present/absent, public/private, epic/elegiac), but perform a
complex double act, each writing from a shoreline looking out to sea,
reviewing the same memories, coping with the same vacillations of emotion and intent, reflecting, predicting and outwitting each other. Hero and
Leander invade each others’ imagery, script and role, while the Hellespont
provides the perfect fluid (yet demarcating) space in which this couple’s
rivalry and mutuality can operate, becoming a clogged reservoir of allusions, reflections, fantasies and dreams. Both writers, I argue, flit between
Narcissus-like and Echo-like roles, but Hero’s letter, whether she realizes
it or not, is also spiked with the powers of Medusa’s gaze, as her winking
lumen lights Leander’s path.
Finally, I should point out that I have tried carefully to avoid imposing
too homogenizing a frame on bodies of texts and images which churn up
inconsistencies and surprises together with pleasing harmonious patterns.
Although the essays in this book all cover and map the same territory, they
nevertheless pull in different directions, and offer up varying rhythms and
textures, as do the poems themselves. My writing style, too, is intended to
convey as far as possible the aesthetic, emotional and psychological impact
of these texts, together with their (not at all separate) cerebral thrills. I mean
to stress the extent to which it is difficult (and beside the point) to retain
a rigid sense of control over the maze of connections evoked in detailed
readings of Ovid’s work.34 For there is a sense, I think, in which classicists
(unlike modern poets and the general reader of Ovid in translation)35 have
tended to lose touch with the ways in which Ovid powers the imagination
and lets us revel with him in fantasy that can be as intense and frightening
as it is witty and fun. In particular, this book is meant to evoke the complex,
tangled and paradoxical nature of the Medusa and Narcissus myths, which
to various degrees (as literal references and allusions, but also as wavering,
mutating images and metaphors) scaffold my readings throughout. What
will emerge, I hope, is not just a jigsaw of precise and detailed arguments,
34
35
Despite the fact that, to an extent, this is of course what all criticism does.
See e.g. the collection of free translations of Ovid in Hofman and Lasdun (1994): the poets here all in
different ways emphasize the sensual beauty and visceral violence of Ovid’s language and narratives.
13
but a portrait of the proliferating and at times bewildering reflections that
characterize Ovid’s vision of the self, and of his own literary career.
*
da ng e rou s l iais on s
I want to begin at the beginning, where desire and poetry, come into being.
The Amores, Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses all open with acts of rape
(from the stripping and suggestive conquest of Corinna at Am.1.5, and the
assault of the Sabine women in Romulus’ theatre at Ars 1.101–34, to Apollo’s
primus amor for Daphne in Met.1.452–567). Or rather, they start with a look,
a scopophilia which both objectifies (turns into stone) in the manner of
Medusa, and represents the unnerving move from primal narcissism to
self-reflective subjectivity that takes place in the encounter with an other
(most obviously, woman, Medusa), spurring Perseus’ preemptive strike.
With Ovid, we undress Corinna as we look at her (ecce, Corinna venit /
‘look, here comes Corinna’ Am.1.5.9; stetit ante oculos / ‘she stood before my
eyes’ 17; nil non laudabile vidi / ‘I saw nothing I didn’t like’ 23), just as the
Romans spy and mark out their Sabine victims (respiciunt oculisque notant
sibi quisque puellam / quam velit / ‘they looked at them, and each one noted
with their eyes which girl he fancied’ Ars 1.109–10). Apollo’s hot pursuit
of Daphne and Ovid’s sly objectification of Corinna in Am.1.5 become
windows through which we view Tereus’ lustful visions of Philomela in
Met.6 (he first rapes her with his eyes: exarsit conspecta virgine / ‘he burned
with lust when he looked at her’ 6.455; spectat eam Tereus praecontrectatque
videndo / ‘Tereus gazes at her, and as he looks he feels her already in his
arms’ 478) in a tale which weaves a rival beginning and aition of poetry
into the Daedalean middle of Ovid’s epic.36 Violent male desire, aligned
with the runaway fantasies of a hyperactive poet, energizes a compulsive
cycle of competition and retaliation which animates much of Ovidian
poetry, forcing the hand of female creativity and setting the stage for an
illimitable opposition/alliance of gendered artists/subjects. While in the
Amores, poetess Corinna’s foray into adulterous epic at 2.11 (narrabis multa
49) is fantasized only to be suppressed or forgotten in a new triumph of
the capta puella at 2.12,37 in the Metamorphoses, violated Philomela learns
36
37
Note the parallelism between the similes comparing the heat of desire to burning stubble or corn
at Met.1.492 and 6.456, and the echo of ecce Corinna venit (Am.1.5.9) in ecce venit, referring to
Philomela, at Met.6.451. This is noted by Hardie (2002a) 260–3.
Cf. Am.1.5 (compare ecce Corinna 1.5.9, with ecce Corinna 2.12.2). In Am.2.12.17–24, Ovid reminds
us again how women (Helen, Lavinia, the Sabines) have triggered wars in history and myth.
14
to write and inspires the various spinners and seamstresses who pick up
Ovid’s narrative in the epic (as well as in the Heroides). So too, Medusa,
raped by Neptune and robbed of her beauty in Met.4, becomes a talented
sculptress, her ambitious, expert eye turning all it sees to marble. Her tale
begins as a familiar one of erotic pursuit:
excipit unus
ex numero procerum quaerens cur sola sororum
gesserit alternis immixtos crinibus angues.
hospes ait ‘quoniam scitaris digna relatu,
accipe quaesiti causam. clarissima forma
multorumque fuit spes invidiosa procorum
illa, nec in tota conspectior ulla capillis
pars fuit; inveni, qui se vidisse referret.
hanc pelagi rector templo vitiasse Minervae
dicitur; aversa est et castos aegide vultus
nata Iovis texit, neve hoc inpune fuisset,
Gorgoneum crinem turpes mutavit in hydros.
nunc quoque, ut attonitus formidine terreat hostes,
pectore in adverso, quos fecit, sustinet angues.’
But one of the princes asked to know
why just one sister wore snaky braids.
The guest replied: ‘Since it is such a fabulous tale,
I’ll tell you why. She was once a stunning beauty,
the jealous hope of many suitors. And of all
her assets, her hair was the most striking.
Or so I heard from a man who claimed he’d seen her.
They say that sea-king Neptune raped her in Minerva’s temple:
Jove’s daughter turned her face away, hiding chaste eyes
behind her aegis, and that the deed be punished as was due,
she changed the Gorgon’s locks to ugly snakes. And now,
to frighten fear-numbed foes, she wears upon
her breast the serpents she created.
Met.4.790–803
Just before this account, at the end of Met.4, Perseus tells of the ‘wondrous
valour’ by which he won Medusa’s snaky head. After stealing the single
eye shared by the Graiae, he trekked through rough, trackless woods to
where the Gorgons lived, past dozens of men and beasts petrified in the
act of looking at Medusa’s face. Armed with a reflective shield, he made his
attack:
se tamen horrendae clipei, quam laeva gerebat,
aere repercussae formam aspexisse Medusae,
dumque gravis somnus colubrasque ipsamque tenebat,
15
eripuisse caput collo; pennisque fugacem
Pegason et fratrem matris de sanguine natos.
But he saw Medusa’s horrid face reflected
in the bright bronze shield his left hand bore;
and while deep sleep disarmed her, and her snakes,
he cut her head clean off; the blood gave birth to
swift-winged Pegasus, and his brother.
4.782–6
Without pausing to admire this defeat, or extend an account ‘spoiled by its
brevity and vagueness’,38 Met.5.1–249 continues the saga (the first word of
the book, dumque, repeats dumque at 4.784): the banquet for the wedding
of Perseus and Andromeda (whom the hero saved from the sea monster in
Met.4.673–752), becomes the site for an epic battle which replays the scene
between Odysseus and the suitors during the feast at the palace of Ithaca.
Perseus has to resort to using Medusa’s head as a lethal weapon, and by the
end of the episode, the banquet hall is lined with corpses and statues.
verum ubi virtutem turbae succumbere vidit,
‘auxilium’ Perseus, ‘quoniam sic cogitis ipsi’
dixit, ‘ab hoste petam. vultus avertite vestros,
si quis amicus adest!’ et Gorgonis extulit ora.
‘quaere alium, tua quem moveant miracula’ dixit
Thescelus, utque manu iaculum fatale parabat
mittere, in hoc haesit signum de marmore gestu.
proximus huic Ampyx animi plenissima magni
pectora Lyncidae gladio petit, inque petendo
dextera deriguit nec citra mota nec ultra est.
...
hi tamen ex merito poenas subiere, sed unus
miles erat Persei, pro quo dum pugnat, Aconteus,
Gorgone conspecta saxo concrevit oborto.
quem ratus Astyages etiamnum vivere, longo
ense ferit; sonuit tinnitibus ensis acutis.
dum stupet Astyages, naturam traxit eandem
marmoreoque manet vultus mirantis in ore.
nomina longa mora est media de plebe virorum
dicere; bis centum restabant corpora pugnae,
Gorgone bis centum riguerunt corpora visa.
But Perseus saw he was outnumbered, and cried,
‘Since you force me to it, I’ll go to my own enemy for aid:
if any friend of mine is here, be sure to turn away!’
And with that he raised the Gorgon’s head up high.
38
Anderson (1997) 494.
16
v i c toria r ime l l
‘Try scaring someone else with your so-called magic tricks’,
yelled Thescelus, aiming his deadly spear, about to throw;
but in that very pose he stuck, a statue made of marble.
Ampyx, next, tried stabbing great-souled Perseus in the heart;
but as he thrust, his hand went rigid – frozen in the act.
...
Those men got punished as deserved, but there was one, Aconteus –
on Perseus’ side – who looked upon
the Gorgon’s face and hardened into stone.
Thinking he was still alive, Astyages pounced
with long sword drawn; the blade clanged as it struck.
As Astyages stood bewildered, the same uncanny power
took its hold, and there he stood, his marble face amazed.
It would take an age to list the ordinary victims;
two hundred men survived the fight; two hundred
saw the Gorgon and were petrified.
Met.5.177–86, 200–09
Unlike her close relative Narcissus, who, as we’ve seen, has been elevated
as the supreme model for poetic illusionism and for the insatiability and
emptiness of (Ovidian) desire, Medusa is a dispassionate statue-maker and
Pygmalion-nemesis who intends to stamp out life and presence, without
remorse.39 Like Narcissus, she enthralls, stupefies, and is finally killed (conceivably – we can never quite see) by her own glance, yet she does not waste
away into the landscape: the blood from her decapitated head spawns
new life in the shape of Chrysanor and Pegasus, from whose hoofprints
gushed the springs of the Muses, Aganippe and Hippocrene. Indeed, as an
aition of poetry to rival that of Narcissus, Medusa’s myth is knotted with
contradictions: the (once) beautiful, hideous, irresistible/repulsive Gorgon
both excites and castrates, paralysing men in permanent arousal/death. As
de Vos writes, echoing Clair and many other twentieth-century critics and
artists, ‘Medusa represents what may not be represented . . . she wanders
in a territory that belongs to both death and life, male and female, order
and chaos, the visible and the invisible.’40 While she is, as ‘the look’ itself,
an essential figure within the specular economies of Ovidian poetics, she
is also a blind spot, a mystery we can’t look at directly, existing, almost,
‘behind the mirror’.41 For while we see and feel her effect, and glimpse parts
39
40
41
Although in Met.5.203–6, as we have just seen, Astyages mistakes one of her petrified victims,
Aconteus, for a living man. On this occasion the effect of Narcissus’ and Medusa’s creativity is the
same, but its motivation very different.
De Vos (2003).
That is, Medusa might be a figure for male fear of and need to conquer the other via specular
duplication, but arguably she also fits Irigaray’s analysis of woman and especially the female genitals
as in some sense outside of any specular representation. She is not simply the horror of ‘nothing to
see’ (Irigaray 1985a, 47), but a complex, phallic-vulvic mystery that is never truly seen.
17
of her, especially her hair, the spotlight throughout Ovid is not on her but
on the faces of her astonished victims.42 We find her loitering in a twilight zone at the entrance of Hades,43 the only mortal Gorgon,44 yet still
not quite human (the snake is an earthbound creature, but can magically
shed its old skin and appear to recapture its youth),45 her vulvic head a
reminder of the gate to all mortal existence, the ontological threshold. Her
look is the model for all human interaction, especially between men and
women, but at the same time she’s the most blatantly fantastical monster
of all (Tr.4.7.11–20). She is both the sign (after Freud) of the possibility of
phallic womanhood, and a pre-castrated freak, an emblem of the inevitable
punishment of female power.46
Hence Medusa has appeared in twentieth-century feminist thought as
both a figure for the silencing of women, for women’s self-hatred, and for
the free-rein given under patriarchy to sadistic fantasies of women,47 but
also as an icon of resistance and rage at female subjugation, or even, faced
fearlessly, as a source of vibrant creativity.48 Meanwhile, in popular culture
since the early 1990s (and since ‘that dress’ that launched Elizabeth Hurley’s
career), the Versace brand, with its omnipresent Medusa-head logo, has
defined the paradoxes of a controversial, new-generation feminism which
celebrates empowerment in the act of attracting and manipulating a male
gaze.49
Similarly, when Medusa’s terrifying head is transferred to Athena’s shield
at Met.4.802–3, it becomes an apotropaic emblem and source of civic
and martial strength. As Garber and Vickers summarize in their recent
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
This is of course precisely her seductive appeal: like Tereus eyeing up Philomela in Met.6, we have
to imagine what we can’t see (fingit quae nondum vidit 6.492).
Snakes in general are threshold figures, especially in Ovid, where they are often metapoetic markers
of the ends of books (as the snake recoils, so we wind up the papyrus). See Barchiesi (1997) 190–3.
See Hesiod, Theogony 270–83.
See e.g. Hercules at Ovid, Met.9.266 (utque novus serpens posita cum pelle senecta / luxuriare solet
squamaque nitere recenti, / sic, ubi mortales Tirynthius exuit artus, / parte sui meliore viget maiorque
videri / coepit et augusta fieri gravitate verendus). Also Ars 3.77, Lucretius 3.612–14, Tibullus 1.4.35,
Lucan 9.717–18, Pliny, NH 8.41.99.
As Kofman (1985) puts it, women’s genitals ‘at once awaken and appease castration anxiety’. See
extract in Garber and Vickers (2003) 167.
See Cixous (1976).
See e.g. ‘The muse as Medusa’ (Sarton 1974), or ‘A navy-blue afro’ (McElroy 1975), also published
in Garber and Vickers (2003).
Madonna led the way in this during the 1980s and 1990s, and her original ‘Girl Power’ was inherited
by ‘daughters’ Britney, Christina, and the Spice Girls (themselves a craftily engineered, Medusan
blend of ‘scary’ and ‘baby’, pouting Posh and girning Ginger). See discussion in Sharrock (2002) and
de Lauretis (1984), alongside the extended critiques of ocularcentrism in Irigaray (especially 1974)
and Cixous (e.g. 1984). Elizabeth Hurley once said, laying claim to the fashionable feminist angle of
Versace’s vision, ‘Unlike many other designers, Versace designs clothes to celebrate the female form
rather than eliminate it.’ Of course, the sexual charge of the red-carpet Versace dress also hinges on
and exploits the ‘scariness’ of the beautiful woman.
18
collection, the Medusa myth seems to include, from its very beginnings,
a mass of conflicting and confusing elements.50 In particular, critics have
long debated the status of the mirroring moment that immediately precedes petrification. As Goodman puts it: ‘what or who, exactly, is turned
into stone by Medusa? Is it those who dare to look at her, or those at whom
she looks?’51 The identities of Perseus and Medusa overlap as well as collide:
in their first meeting, when Perseus uses a mirrored surface to look upon
the head of his enemy, he risks coming face to face with his own Medusan
reflection, that of the bulging-eyed, snarling, enraged warrior rushing to
attack.52 Then, in the aftermath of her decapitation, he uses her head as
a mask-like weapon, and becomes her lethal gaze.53 As Freud, Lacan and
Sartre have all recognized, there lies within the Medusa myth a kind of
identification between seer and seen, a meeting of looks rather than (or as
well as) a simple subject–object relation.54 For both Medusa and Perseus,
this encounter functions as a Lacanian mirror-stage, in which gazer and
gazed-upon are looked at in a dialectic of mutual reflection.55 Yet at the
same time, their clash reminds us of the problematics of perfect specularity,
the cracks that disrupt the operation of Lacan’s model. As Derrida posits in
Of Grammatology, the reflective interplay of apparently identical images is
always based on an inevitable disunity that already defines the first image,
creating an invisible otherness or ‘surplus’ that disrupts specular harmony.56
In the first chapter of this book, I discuss how this dazzling, enigmatic,
drawn-out flash of mirroring becomes the nub of the Medicamina, when
the woman Ovid makes over washes off her face-pack and emerges not
just as a female Narcissus, but as an embodiment of the mirror itself, a
gorgeously reflective face ready to stun men (or itself, as it gazes admiringly
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
Garber and Vickers (2003) 7.
Goodman (1996). See extract in Garber and Vickers (2003) 272.
Vernant (1991) 118, notes the affinities between the mask of the Gorgon and the facial mimicry of
the beserk warrior.
Met.5.178–9 captures this paradox: auxilium . . . ab hoste petam.
The architectonics of the Freudian and Lacanian subject depend fundamentally on seeing the self
exteriorized, for which the Perseus–Medusa encounter is a crucial model. For Lacan in particular, this
encounter replicates the instantaneous identification, the specularity and symmetry that characterize
the Imaginary order. For Sartre, Medusa is ‘the look’: his entire discussion of human relations is
developed within the context of the subject–object conflict which the look initiates. See especially
Sartre (1966) 555: ‘the profound meaning of the myth of Medusa is the petrification of Being-for-itself
in the Being-in-itself by the other’s look.’ Also see Laing (1970), and discussion in Barnes (1974)
22–8.
Lacan defines the essence of the Imaginary as a dual relationship, a reduplication in the mirror, an
immediate opposition between consciousness and its other in which each term becomes its opposite
and is lost in the play of reflections.
Derrida (1976) 36.
19
in the looking glass), as well as show them their own image (quaecumque
afficiet tali medicamine vultum, / fulgebit speculo levior illa suo / ‘whoever shall
treat her face with such a medicamina, will shine smoother than her own
mirror’ 67–8). We never quite forget that (this) woman, though cosmetically
preened (and pruned) was once wild: a landscape of devouring brambles, a
bitter fruit (Med.3–5), a Medusan glare. In the Ars Amatoria (as I discuss in
chapter 2), the look is everything, a complex concentration of written and
spoken expression (saepe tacens vocem verbaque vultus habet / ‘a silent face
often communicates voice and words’ Ars 1.574),57 and despite Ovid’s many
prescriptions of the order seduction should follow (the man should make the
first move, he should send the first letter, etc.), the contention of male and
female gazes destabilizes hierarchy and linearity in a way reminiscent of the
uncertainties of positioning germane to the Perseus–Medusa confrontation.
Thus in the two parallel passages about mutual mirroring at Ars 2.197–
202 (arguit: arguito; quicquid probat illa, probato 199) and Ars 3.513–14
(spectantem specta; ridenti mollia ride 513), we lose track of whose gaze is
dominant, and who looks first.58 In the Ars, one can be active in passivity,
vulnerable in the attack, a part of the spectacle one observes,59 just as in
looking (aggressively, objectifyingly) at Medusa, in meeting the eyes of an
other, we realize that we have become object to another’s subject. This is
precisely, as I suggest in chapter 3, what Orpheus learns in Met.10, when
his backwards look kills Eurydice for a second time, but also (figuratively,
in the simile at 10.64–71) turns him into stone – a scenario which repeats
Perseus’ first sighting of Andromeda chained to the rock in Met.4.673–7.
In the face of Narcissus’ (failed) desire, which achieves unity only in
tragic sameness, Medusa posits a radical alterity, and catalyses desire as a
disorganizing and dislocating force that is both cancerous and creative. In
embodying fear of the other, of the monstrous, the unlike-self, Medusa
thrusts unfamiliarity into our very I, and figures the dialectical relation
between same and other. Thus Hardie’s point that Ovid (like his readers)
plays Narcissus at successive stages of awareness, as both lover–poet
57
58
59
Cf. Am.1.4.19: verba superciliis sine voce loquentia dicam / ‘with my eyebrows I’ll tell you words that
speak without sound’.
Cf. Am.1.4.17–18: me specta nutusque meos vultumque loquacem; / excipe furtivas et refer ipsa notas /
‘keep your eyes on me, my nods, the language of my face. Catch my secret signs, and send me back
your own.’
Ars 1.277–8 presents a typical paradox: conveniat maribus, ne quam nos ante rogemus, / femina iam
partes victa rogantis aget / ‘if it suited us men not to ask a woman first, then she, already won, would
play the asker’. Compare the advice of Dipsas, a rather Medusan figure with flashing eyes (oculis
quoque pupula duplex / fulminat 1.8.15–16) at Am.1.8: et quasi laesa prior nonnumquam irascere laeso
/ vanescit culpa culpa repensa tua / ‘sometimes too, when you have hurt him, get angry, as if injured
first – charge met by counter-charge will cancel itself out’ 79–80.
20
nostalgic for a true, primordial feigning and pomo ironist delighting in
imperial artifice, might be recast as a tension between (gendered, same but
different) Narcissistic and Medusan creativities, between art as insubstantial (oral/mental) invention, and art as monumental permanence marking
representation as death.60
Yet Medusa further complicates this oscillation between eros and thanatos,
speech and writing, nature and culture, by incarnating and deconstructing
its tensions: hers is a healing/poisonous blood (much like Ovid’s pharmakon
in the Remedia Amoris)61 and the fons sacra born of her son Pegasus, which
rivals and reclaims the fount in which Narcissus’ fictions are reflected, is
also the birthing pool for Fama, the arch illusionist and relentless gossip
who whips up epic plots throughout the Metamorphoses. Indeed, as Hardie
points out, the only way anyone can ever really ‘see’ this miraculous spring
is through fama, literary tradition.62 Pallas Athena reports in Met.5.256–9:
fama novi fontis nostras pervenit ad aures,
dura Medusaei quem praepetis ungula rupit.
is mihi causa viae. volui mirabile factum
cernere; vidi ipsum materno sanguine nasci.
I’ve just heard about a brand new spring, which gushed
from the hard hoof of Medusa’s flying horse.
This is the reason for my journey; I wanted to set eyes
on this marvel; I saw the same horse being born of his mother’s blood.
Similarly, Pindar, Pythian 12 identifies Medusa and the Gorgons as the origins of a popular music entitled ‘the many-headed tune’.63 The Gorgons’
world, as Vernant puts it, is ‘one of disquieting noise’.64 The art of the
flute was invented by Athena precisely to simulate the shrill sounds she
heard escaping from the Gorgons’ mouths, yet interestingly, this innovation triggers a repetition of Medusa’s defeat and another round of poetic
competition: for when she plays the flute, her face red and puffed up,
Athena looks at her reflection in water and realizes she has become Medusa,
whereupon she throws away the instrument, which is then taken up by
Marsyas, who ends up flayed by Apollo for daring to challenge him in a
musical contest. The figure of Medusa (especially as she is bound up in a
mirroring relationship with Narcissus) has multiple faces, and her ability
60
61
62
See Hardie (2002a) passim, and Rosati (1983).
See Euripides, Ion 1005. Rem.323 (et mala sunt vicina bonis / ‘there’s such a fine line between faults
and charms’) might serve as the slogan of Ovid’s double-edged text.
63 Pindar, Pyth.12.12–23.
64 Vernant (1991) 124.
Hardie (2002a) 238.
21
to drum up strife and opposition while also incapacitating the dualistic
logic that turns her into death itself, makes her a powerful figure for Ovidian metamorphosis and for the elegiac rhythms which snake through all
Ovid’s texts.65 As the Gorgon’s petrified subjects also look (or symbolically,
according to Freud and Ferenczi, are)66 permanently animated/aroused, so
the vast majority of Ovid’s literal metamorphoses are tortures which punish by suspending victims in a state of painful semi-death (at Met.10.487,
for example, Myrrha pleads, mutataeque mihi vitamque necemque negate /
‘change me and refuse me both life and death!’). And each of Ovid’s elegiac
couplets, as visualized in the first poem of his debut work (Am.1.1.3–4, 17–
18) suspends difference in repetition, wedding tumescence with castration,
deflation with re-creation, in compulsive limping rhythm.
I will be suggesting throughout this book that the crackle of Medusan
magic in the Ovidian woman helps stage desire not just as a bland, incessant
game of absence and lack but also as a collision of creative energies and
convictions. Medusa shadows Ovidian erotics, playing Cupid’s evil sidekick
(just as Narcissus is hounded by his hellish double Tantalus), hurling snakes
in place of arrows to fire lethal ardour in her victims. Her gaze is embodied
in both the elegiac puella, with her flashing, enrapturing look (o facies
oculos nata tenere meos Am.2.17.12),67 and in the artifying glare of the poet
inspired by ‘traces of the Medusan steed’ (Fasti 5.8; cf. Ex P. 4.8.80) who
even rejects the potential self-destructiveness of his own creative might
(Medusa’s powers would fail on him, he claims at Ex P. 1.2.35–6).68 The
imaginative leaps of the exile poetry are arguably already present as sparks
65
66
67
68
Although it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss this in detail, Melanie Klein’s work on
the creativity of envy and aggression is perhaps useful here for understanding Medusa’s maternal
hybridity and paradoxical nature: Klein challenges Freud’s late writings, in which he comes to see
all human beings as living under the destructive force of a terrifying death-drive, arguing instead
that aggression, destructiveness, envy and mourning are crucial to the process of individuation,
and to creative development generally. Violent, murderous fantasies harboured by the child towards
the mother facilitate the containment of destructive drives and allow for a creative development
of projective and introjective processes, deemed vital by Klein for successful self-organization. See
especially Klein (1957).
See Freud (1922) and Ferenczi (1926).
Cf. parce . . . perque tuos oculos, qui rapuere meos / ‘spare me . . . by your eyes, that have taken mine
captive’ (Am.3.11b.45–8).
ipsa Medusa oculis veniat licet obvia nostris, / amittet vires ipsa Medusa suas / ‘if Medusa herself came
before my eyes, even Medusa would lose her power’. In affirming, at once, both Ovid’s tragic
powerlessness in exile and his successful survival as an artist in the most testing of circumstances,
these lines encapsulate the nervous paradoxes running through the Tristia and Ex Ponto. Kristeva
(2003) 43, talks of a ‘généalogie secrète entre le pouvoir des Gorgones et l’expérience esthétique. Elle
nous fait comprendre que si l’artiste parvient à éviter d’être la vittime de Méduse, c’est parce-qu’il
la reflète tout en étant une transubstantiation de son sang.’
22
in Ovid’s first elegiac verse, and I am conscious of the fact that, at either
end of a poetic career, the Amores and Epistulae Ex Ponto border and extend
this book’s central concerns. At Am. 3.12, Ovid boasts: per nos Scylla patri
caros furata capillos / pube premit rabidos inguinibusque canes; / nos pedibus
pinnas dedimus, nos crinibus angues / ‘it was we poets who made Scylla
steal her father’s treasured locks, and hide savage dogs in her groin. It is
we who have given wings to feet, and mingled snakes with hair’ (21–3).
Medusa (as the mythic figure we can never quite set eyes on) stands for
the most wondrous and magical of tales. Equally, Ovidian poetry can (like
Medusa herself ) control nature, destroy snakes (those quintessential gazers)
after pulling out their fangs (carmine dissiliunt abruptis faucibus angues
Am.2.1.25). And when in Am.3.6 these phallic powers (ostensibly) falter,
and the poet is unable to cross the stream to meet with his domina (just
as he fails to get an erection in the following poem, 3.7, where he lies,
a mere species, or spectacle, on the bed69 ), he wishes he had the wings
Perseus wore ‘when he carried off that head thick with dreadful snakes’
(terribili densum cum tulit angue caput 3.6.14). The Ars Amatoria develops
this anxious, double-edged poetic ego further, when it makes Perseus its
leading example of a successful lover (see Ars 1.53–5) – though at this point
the condition for winning Andromeda (conquering Medusa, and the snakelike sea monster)70 is repressed, only to come back to haunt pupils in Ars 2,
when it is revealed that women who appear to be ‘mild and gentle’ to their
lovers may in reality be ‘more violent than grim Medusa’ (torva violentior illa
Medusa 2.309).
In the Amores, Corinna’s hair is the focus for a stretching of tensions
between objectified puella and petrifying domina, between phallic and
impotent authors, narcissistic and Medusan desires. We can glimpse here
the beginnings of Ovid’s career-long interest in the possibilities of female
creativity and in the bitter thrill of male–female rivalry, or the relationship between two elements in a couple more generally.71 While at the start
of the collection Ovid looks forward to acquiring some well-turned out
subject-matter, aut puer aut longas compta puella comas (‘either a boy or a
girl with long and tidy hair’ Am.1.1.20), and Corinna enters at Am.1.5 with
69
70
71
Am.3.7.15.
In his fight with the sea monster about to attack Andromeda, Perseus is compared to an eagle
pouncing on a serpent in a field (Met.4.714–20).
I.e., in Ovid erotic relationships are always mirrored/enacted in poetic ones. In the Amores, the poet’s
relationship with Corinna and other girls gets dramatized on a small scale in the elegiac couplet and
on a larger scale in the diptych poems, e.g. 2.11 and 2.12, 2.7 and 2.8, which turn reading into a
game of comparing and contrasting, undulating back and forth, making connections between two
(or more) poems, a process which has us almost literally dancing to elegiac rhythms.
23
tresses combed in a centre parting (candida dividua colla tegente coma 10),
he still finds something to avenge (like malus ultor Orestes) at Am.1.7, and
tears her digestos capillos (11)72 commenting that her ‘disordered locks’ were
in fact ‘most becoming’ (nec dominam motae dedecuere comae 12), before
advising her to rearrange them (pone recompositas in statione comas! 68).73
At Am.1.11, he gets Nape, adept at ordering incertas crinos, on side, yet
Am.1.14 visualizes Corinna’s transformation from (coiffured) Narcissus to
(snaky, frizzy, poison-haired) Medusa, and from the inspiration for finespun, subtly coloured deductum carmen (see lines 5–10), to a fashion model
for tortured, imperial, post-Callimachean kitsch (at lines 45–50, she’ll have
to wear a gaudy blonde wig created from the shorn heads of German prisoners of war – a triumph that brings no glory for originality). Her hair used
to be malleable, passive, picture-perfect, the ideal elegiac materia (dociles et
centum flexibus apti 13), so beautiful Bacchus and Apollo could have lusted
after it:
formosae periere comae, quas vellet Apollo,
quas vellet capiti Bacchus inesse suo;
That luscious hair is dead – hair even Apollo,
or Bacchus, would have found desirable.
Am.1.14.31–2
This couplet evokes the description of Narcissus at Met.3.420–1 (spectat . . . /
dignos Baccho, dignos et Apolline crines / ‘he gazed . . . at hair worthy of Apollo
or Bacchus’), at the point at which he is naı̈vely in love with himself. But
now she has singed it into sinuous ringlets, and dyed it too, applying the
‘mingled poison’ to her own head (ipsa dabas capiti mixta venena tuo 44).
Like Medusa, Corinna has been punished for being ‘conquered’ by Ovid in
Amores 1.5 by having her best asset ruined and turned into venomous snakes,
whereupon the poet, Perseus-like, holds a mirror up to her metamorphosed
face:
72
73
Just as he can’t restrain himself from tearing the hair of Corinna’s Medusan praeceptor amoris in
Am.1.8.110–11.
Cf. Apollo in Met.1, whose unsatisfiable, narcissistic lust for Daphne translates as a desire to order
her messy hair (spectat inornatos collo pendere capillos / et ‘quid si comantur?’ ait / ‘he looks at her hair
hanging down her nock in disarray and says, “what if it were properly styled?” ’ 497–8). Note also that
Daphne’s gleaming eyes which shine like stars as Apollo looks at them (videt igne micantes / sideribus
similes oculos / ‘he looks at her eyes gleaming like stars’ 498–9) capture her hybridity as at once
Narcissus, object of narcissistic fantasy, and wild-haired, lightning-eyed Medusa, the virgin running
in vain from rape (Narcissus’ eyes are also twin stars at 3.420). Apollo’s undressing of Daphne with
his eyes, and the meeting and conquering of her gaze in lines 498–501, reminiscent of the primus
amor of Am. 1.5, also looks forward to the duel of Medusa and Perseus at the end of Met.4.
24
quid male dispositos quereris periisse capillos?
quid speculum maesta ponis inepta manu?
non bene consuetis a te spectaris ocellis:
Why cry over the loss of that thatch of hair?
Why are you so sad to put that mirror down, you silly girl?
You’re gazed upon by eyes not used to such a sight.
Am.1.14.35–7
As I discuss in chapters 1 and 2, this is precisely the move Ovid makes in
the Medicamina, when he warns women that ‘the time will come, when
you’ll hate to look in the mirror, and grief will prove a second cause of
wrinkles’ (tempus erit, quo vos speculum vidisse pigebit, / et veniet rugis altera
causa dolor Med.47–8), and also, even more overtly, at Ars 3.499–508, when
Ovid imagines his pupils holding a mirror up to her face, Athena-like, in
the middle of a temper tantrum:
vos quoque si media speculum spectetis in ira
cognoscat faciem vix satis ulla suam.
If you took a look in the mirror mid-passion,
hardly one of you would recognise herself.
Ars 3.507–8
Yet at the same time, like Narcissus, Corinna is reproved for her own
vanity, and her use of the mirror parallels Narcissus’ (failed) self-realization.
In Latin literature, the notion that Medusa is ever the modern, drop-dead
beauty74 is spelt out most clearly in Lucan, Bellum Civile 9, where she sets the
trend for all Rome’s fashion-savvy women in an image reminiscent of Ovid’s
Medusa-Narcissuses in his Medicamina, or of Versace’s eternal fondness for
‘big hair’ in catwalk shows driven by his Medusa-head symbol:75
ipsa flagellabant gaudentis colla Medusae,
femineae cui more comae per terga solutae
surgunt adversa subrectae fronte colubrae,
vipereumque fluit depexo crine venenum.
633
632
634
Medusa loved it when the snakes whiplashed her neck.
Just like women wear their hair today,
the vipers hang down her back, all loose, but
rear up from her forehead at the front. And
the poison flows when the hair is combed.
Bellum Civile 9.632–5
74
75
Benjamin (1999) imagines Medusa as ‘the face of modernity’, blasting us with the beauty of her
‘immemorial gaze’. See extract in Garber and Vickers (2003) 89.
See Garber and Vickers (2003) for a selection of Versace advertising images which play on the
Medusa–Perseus myth.
25
As I discuss in chapter 6, even the apparently picture-perfect symmetry of
Hero’s and Leander’s letters in Her.18–19 is stained with drops of Medusan
blood: although Leander declares that he is not another Perseus, and wants
to avoid looking at Andromeda at lines 151–3 (Andromedan alius spectet
18.151), the aliud lumen (Hero’s lamp/eyes, 18.155) that guides him over
the reflective waves is to prove lethal, and his wish for Daedalus’ winged
sandals (18.49) reminds us of Perseus’ flying shoes (a key prop in his plot
against the Gorgon), for which Ovid yearns in the crucial parallel scene in
Am.3.6. In her letter, meanwhile, Hero asks for Neptune’s understanding
on account of his own experience in love with a string of women starting
with Medusa: when she says the Hellespont is dangerous for pretty young
girls, she is thinking not only of Helle but also of Medusa, the beautiful
maiden transformed into a colubrine monster after being raped by the god
of ocean (Her.19.129–41). Yet still, an embittered Hero can’t resist stirring
the waters and voicing her wish to meet Leander mid-strait (19.167–8): her
letter blends dreamy yearning and passivity with bristling insecurity and
threat.
In Her.18–19, the still, mirroring waters of decorous elegy (as of Narcissus’ pool), enjoyed by Leander on his previous swim across the Hellespont (18.77–80) are now stirred up into dark, menacing, and unpredictable
waves. As I touch on further in chapter 6, the psychological territory of the
double Heroides, where Ovid writes from different positions simultaneously,
almost merges into that of the Tristia and Ex Ponto:76 as the poet sails into
exile, he (like Leander) faces the storms of his own torment, of Augustan
ire, and of past epics, and writes (from) foreign lands beyond Rome, beyond
pax Augusta, and beyond the conventions of Roman elegy. In Tr.4.7, the
unimaginable emotional chaos that threatens to engulf him as he is driven
into the ‘enemy territory’ and made to look upon Rome’s imperial might as a
vulnerable outsider is equated with the existence of the monstrous Gorgon:
credam prius ora Medusae / Gorgonis anguinis cincta fuisse comis . . . quam te,
carissime, credam / mutatum curam deposuisse mei / ‘I’d sooner believe that
the Gorgon Medusa’s face was garlanded with snaky locks . . . than that
you, my dearest, had changed and stopped caring about me’ (Tr.4.7.11–12,
19–20). The exiled Ovid is paralysed by ‘empty fears’ and ‘excessive dread’
(supervacui metus . . . nimium timor Ex P.2.7.6, 7), immersed in Medusan
battles where ‘slender arrows are dipped in serpent’s gall’ and ‘the human
head becomes an offering’ (Ex P.4.9.81–4). At the same time, he is disturbed
by visions of Rome’s dreadful, aggressive face – whether the flashing torva
76
Also see Rahn (1958) and Rosenmeyer (1997).
26
forma of a silver Augustus figurine at Ex P.2.8.21–2, or the hastily banished
vision of the femina princeps as vicious Gorgon at Ex P.3.1.124.77 This is
where Ovid tries to convince his wife to take his case to Augustus’ wife
Livia:
quid trepidas et adire times? non inpia Procne
filiave Aeetae voce movenda tua est,
nec nurus Aegypti, nec saeva Agamemnonis uxor,
Scyllaque, quae Siculas inguine terret aquas,
Telegonive parens vertendis nata figuris,
nexaque nodosas angue Medusa comas,
femina sed princeps . . .
Why are you so scared to meet her? It’s not evil Procne
or the daughter of Aeetes you need to charm,
nor Aegyptus’ daughter in law, or Agamemnon’s wife,
nor Scylla, terrorizing seas of Sicily with her groin.
It’s not Telegonus’ mum, with her inborn metamorphic skill,
or Medusa, her hair tied up and bound with snakes,
but the First Lady . . .
Ex P.3.1.119–26
The creative work required to compose a love letter to a beloved or
suitor in a relationship which is being blocked, is on the rocks, or is as yet
unconsummated (as displayed in Her.1–21), is precisely Ovid’s task in the
exile works, especially in the epistolary Tristia, poems which at once taunt
and seduce, addressing a deeply familiar audience and landscape which at
the same time has become strangely alien (a terra terra remota mea / ‘a
land far removed from my own’ Tr.1.1.128). The poetics of displacement
and anxiety developed in Heroides 16–21, Tristia and Ex Ponto reach their
apex in the riddle of Ibis, a Tarantino-esque acervation of vendettas against
a nameless enemy which summons up all of Medusa’s foreign, Eastern,
othering intensity: saxificae videas infelix ora Medusae / Cephenum multos
quae dedit una neci / ‘I hope you see the face of Medusa that turns to
stone, and single-handedly decimated all those Cephenians’ (551–2).78 As
77
78
Hardie discusses Ex P.4.4.43–50, in which Ovid realizes that as he imagines Rome, he cannot see
himself in the crowds, as an ‘inversion of Narcissus’ tragic recognition’ (Hardie 2002a, 314). But
this is just one aspect, and one stage, of a more complex revisiting and development of Ovidian
visuality and specularity in the exile poetry, in which Ovid’s Orphic, imaginative powers are liable
to backfire as they churn up new horrors and fears, new anxieties about the self in relation to
outside/object/other/past.
Unfortunately it is beyond the scope of a single book to explore in detail how the ideas discussed here
operate in all Ovidian poetry, and I have chosen to confine my (hopefully suggestive) comments on
the Amores, exile poetry, and much of the Metamorphoses, to the introduction and conclusion.
27
Williams and Hinds have noted, while the exile poetry obsessively rewrites
Ovid’s oeuvre, it also seems to stain the works that precede it, appearing
as an blowout of neurosis and rage that has been brewing in some form or
other since the Amores, from the comic suffering of the exclusus amator and
the self-destructive backstabbing of the Ars and Remedia, to the suspended
torture and semi-death that is Ovidian metamorphosis.79
e p ic ve n om
Ovid’s longest and most ambitious work, the epic Metamorphoses, is full
of Medusa’s offspring – vicious baby snakes born from the gore of her
head. The Gorgon’s lookalikes – Salmacis, Andromeda, Argus, Juno, Envy,
Minerva, Diana, Medea among them – all stare opponents down in this
text, and charge them up for battle.80 When in Met.1, Juno sets hundredeyed Argus to watch over rival Io (another raped woman rendered mute and
forced to write in silence), Jupiter hits back by sending storyteller Mercury
to conquer the beast: Argus is bewitched by the tale of Pan and Syrinx,
and when all his eyes are closed in sleep, Mercury slashes his nodding head
just where it joins the neck, sending it rolling down the cliff and defiling
the landscape with blood (1.713–21). Argus’ murder previews the cunning
beheading of Medusa by winged Perseus in Met.481 (which is also a story of
rival artists), but the Gorgon is just beginning to infect this narrative, for
as one darkness fills Argus’ multiple eyes, so Juno (like Minerva seizing the
Gorgon’s snaky tresses at Met.4.802–3) takes them and places them on the
feathers of her peacock wings, a Narcissus–Medusa revelling in the beauty
of her super-charged gaze:82
79
80
81
82
Williams (2002) 244, Hinds (1985). As Williams outlines, the obsessive tendencies of Ovid’s persona
in the Ibis can also be found allegorized in the Metamorphoses, e.g. in the myth of Aglaurus, 2.798–832,
while his ‘post-transformation grief’ in the Tristia and Ex Ponto resembles that of Niobe, Met.6.310–
12. Note also that the final line of Ex P.4, where Ovid claims again that he is a living corpse and
says that ‘there is no space now for a new wound’ (non habet in nobis iam nova plaga locum 4.15.52),
relives the terrible fate of Actaeon, who dares to look upon naked Diana and is torn apart by his
own hunting dogs until iam loca vulneribus desunt, and takes us back also to Tr.2.103–5, where Ovid
compares his own unwitting crimen to that of Actaeon.
See Keith (1999) 222, on the similarities between Medusa and Andromeda in the Met: ‘Andromeda’s
beauty attracts Perseus’ prolonged gaze [Met.4.672–7, cf. 5.22 and 4.205], much as the petrifying
sight of Medusa’s snaky head compels the eternal gaze of those who look directly upon her [4.780–1
cf. 5.177–209] . . . Both Medusa and Andromeda, as mesmerizing objects of the gaze, endanger the
men who look at them.’
Lucan, Bellum Civile 9.663 makes this literal (the sword Perseus uses to behead Medusa is still stained
with the blood of ‘another monster’, Argus).
In the Medicamina and Ars Amatoria, Juno, or her bird, the peacock, epitomizes the narcissistic
female: see Med.33–4, and Ars.1.627.
28
v ic tori a rim e ll
excipit hos volucrisque suae Saturnia pennis
conlocat et gemmis caudam stellantibus implet.
Saturnia takes those eyes and sets them
on the feathers of her bird,
loading its tail with starry jewels.
Met.1.722–3
The blood that pours from wounded and slashed serpents is the malignant
life-energy of the Metamorphoses. The primal attack on Olympus by snakefooted giants and the mixing of lower and upper worlds at Met.1.182–
4 inaugurates a bellum which will never, in poetry, be resolved. Jupiter
resolves to cut away the infection with a knife when he kills the Python
born of mother earth (1.190–1), yet it continues to spread, sustaining and
sustained by his own troubled, faithless marriage with vindictive Juno, and
by mirroring conflicts between resentful lovers and rivals (in particular, note
that the adjective torvus, used several times in Ovid for Medusa’s baleful
gaze, e.g. torva colubriferi lumina monstri Met.5.241, is also the buzzword
for Juno’s stare, e.g. Saturnia torva Met.4.464).83 Simultaneously, Ovid’s
golden, Augustan epic explodes into action at the end of Book 1 with a
climactic meeting of eyes, when Phaethon’s mother Clymene looks at the
sun, the blazing, cyclopic eye of the cosmos (spectansque ad lumina solis
1.767). This scene introduces the power of the visual to stupefy readers and
scorch the globe in Book 2, and looks forward to the passionate, vengeful
glares of Perseus and Medusa in Books 4 and 5 (a story which begins when
Perseus steals the single lumina of the Graiae, 4.775), and to the burning
up of Polyphemus’ sun-like eye, both in his lust for Galatea and in his
blinding by Odysseus’ giant poker, in Book 13.84 The jewelled yoke of
Phoebus’ horses, which reflects the sun’s rays at 2.110 (clara repercusso
reddebant lumina Phoebo) becomes Perseus’ sun-like, eye-like, helioscopic
shield which reflects the head of Medusa (se tamen horrendae clipei, quem
laeva gerebat, / aere repercussae formam adspexisse Medusae 4.782–3). We
83
84
torvus is a fairly rare adjective in Ovid, used a total of twenty-two times, of which four directly
describe either Medusa, or Minerva taking on the terrifying qualities of Medusa that are implicitly
or explicitly contained in her aegis (e.g. Met.2.752, 6.34). It is always associated with the angry,
intense, and aggressive gaze, and overwhelmingly with aggressive, dangerous animals (the boar and
the bull), and with women, especially Juno, Medusa, Minerva and Diana, at times when they are
enraged and intent on violent revenge. It also indicates a face contorted horribly in pain or grief
(e.g. Neptune at Met.2.270 and Hecuba at Met.13.542), and is associated with frowning, shaggyhaired tragedy at Am.3.1.12. Medusa, as the single figure most associated with the adjective, seems
to epitomize this kind of gaze at its most threatening, and her myth also synthesizes all the slightly
different meanings of torvus in Ovidian poetry (she is terrifying, angry, monstrous, vengeful, but
also tragically deformed, an image of grief and death).
Polyphemus, like the sun, has one eye (unum est in media lumen mihi fronte 13.851; soli tamen unicus
orbis 13.853).
29
can compare Narcissus’ repercussae imaginis umbra at Met.3.434, as well as
the shiny waves of the Hellespont at Her.18.77: unda repercussae radiabat
imagine lunae.
Phaethon is blinded by the eye of the sun (suntque oculis tenebrae per
tantum lumen abortae / ‘darkness came over his eyes from such an excess
of light’ Met.2.181), and almost becomes a double for Medusa’s victims
in Book 5, as well as an Icarus who fails to maintain a proper distance
from consuming lumina, unlike Daedalus and his close relative Perseus.85
Similarly, narcissistic Salmacis tests out the power of her own reflection in
a pool at Met.4.312, before unleashing it on Hermaphroditus, becoming at
once a snake-like Medusa (ut serpens 4.362)86 and an overheated sun (or its
laser-like reflection):
flagrant quoque lumina nymphae,
non aliter quam cum puro nitidissimus orbe
opposita speculi referitur imagine Phoebus.
her nymph eyes gleamed
like when a mirror held against the sun
reflects its shiny, dazzling orb. Met.4.347–9
We see Medusa (or her creations) everywhere in the universe of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses: her sun-eye illuminates the earth, her giant, rocky Atlas
holds up the entire heaven (4.661–2), the very sea-bed prickles with coral
that is a petrified representation of her tangled hair (4.750–2), while Medusan rivers hiss through wondrous landscapes, setting challenges for intrepid
heroes (e.g. Achelous at 8.881, 9.63–5),87 and every wide-eyed reaction to
death, metamorphosis, or fantastic fiction replicates the recoil of her victims
(the verb stupeo, and the adjective attonitus, litter this epic).88
In Metamorphoses 3, the founding of Thebes and the Dionysiac doublings of tragedy and civil war begin when Cadmus’ men are stunned and
then slaughtered by a snake they encounter in a primeval forest. Heroic
Cadmus kills the snake (like Apollo in Book 1, or Perseus in Book 4) and
just as he begins to be paralysed by fascination for his prey (dum spatium
victor victi considerat hostis / ‘while the conqueror stands staring at the
85
86
87
88
Both are master artists who use fake wings to achieve their greatest feat.
Cf. snake-slayer Cadmus, who becomes a snake in Met.4 (ut serpens 4.576).
We might also note that Nileus’ shield, engraved with the image of seven-forked Nile in gleaming
silver and gold (5.187–9) is a double for Athena’s shield, carved with the snake-head of Medusa.
I do not want to claim, necessarily, that every single occurrence of these words ‘alludes’ to the sight
of Medusa, more that the experience of seeing Medusa, as dramatized in Met.4 and 5, is the most
shocking and wondrous sight of all in Ovidian poetry (not only in Met.), and as such becomes an
important paradigm, often shadowing similar encounters.
30
bulk of his conquered enemy’ 3.95), and hears a voice condemning him
‘to be gazed upon like a serpent’ (et tu spectabere serpens 98), he is shielded
by Athena (presumably with her Gorgon shield),89 who advises him to
sew the monster’s teeth in the earth. The survivors of the suicidal army
born of these seeds become the Bacchus-worshiping anguigenae (‘snakepeople’ 3.531) who together with their creator Cadmus found the new city.
Throughout the ‘Theban books’ (Met.3 and 4), problems of self-identity
and self-knowledge faced by this new race are bound up in the crackedmirror clash of demon-eyed serpent(s) and serpent-killers, for which the
Medusa–Perseus encounter (and the painful path to subjectivity it models)
is the prime representation. The tale of Tiresias, which encompasses the
prophecy of Narcissus’ fate, begins with his interruption of two mating
serpents in the forest (3.324–38): it is from these snakes that he acquires the
gender-bending power and split identity that also defines shape-shifting
Bacchus, the puer aeternus with the head of a maiden (Met.4.18, 20).90 Just
as Cadmus comes close to experiencing the Dionysiac, Medusan logic that
turns all spectators into spectacles (as I’ve stressed, looking at the Gorgon always involves seeing oneself being seen, becoming object as well as
subject), so his grandson Actaeon and Echion’s grandson Pentheus are victimized for their voyeurism in the most violent way possible, at 3.155–252,
and 3.511–733.91 Diana, who first blushes like a cloud lit up by the rays of
the sun (3.183–4), and then casts back those rays when she ora retro flexit
(3.187–8), is a Medusa double and Saturnian avenger whose loose hair as
she bathes (3.169) is copied in the streaming tresses of Bacchic Agave as she
dismembers Pentheus (3.726–7). Pentheus above all is guilty of not believing Acoetes’ account of Bacchus’ serpentine power, his ability to envelop
everything in intoxicating vines (inpediunt hederae remos nexuque recurvo /
serpunt et gravidis distinguunt vela corymbis / ‘but ivy entwines and clings
to the oars, coils and snakes upwards, decking the sails in heavy, hanging
clusters’ 3.664–5).
So while, as Hardie puts it, ‘the city’s royal family finds its reflection
in Narcissus’ pool’,92 Theban identity is also refracted and fractured in
89
90
91
92
Pallas adest 3.102, cf. Athena coming to Perseus’ aid at Met.5.46–7 (bellica Pallas adest et protegit
aegide fratrem / datque animos / ‘then came warlike Pallas, protecting her brother with her shield,
and filling him with courage’).
Cadmus and his wife are finally metamorphosed into serpents, mirroring the pair of snakes Tiresias
encounters in Book 3 (see 4.576–603). Suitably, the metamorphosis occurs when Cadmus and his
family are reviewing (or re-reading, relegunt 570) the misfortunes of their house, and the transformed
couple ‘remember what they once were’ (603).
See Feldherr (1997) and Hardie (2002a, 167–72) on the shift from spectator to spectated as a recurrent
motif in Met.3.
Hardie (2002a) 166.
31
Medusa’s enraged, ecstatic face – or rather, in its multiple, imperfect representations. The fates of Actaeon and Pentheus, while operating in overt
parallel with the tragedy of Narcissus,93 also expand the Dionysiac poetics
of this book beyond the male autoeroticism and non-violent collapse of
other into self that is the core of Narcissus’ narrative: androgynous Bacchus
and bisexual Tiresias preside over a layered competition and compound
of male and female gazes which throw identities into turmoil and leave
behind a string of blinded, mutilated and tormented victims. The visual
battle between genders and fissured subjects in Books 3 and 4 is imagined
poetically in patterns of elegiac doubling and mirroring (most obviously in
the Narcissus episode, as Rosati has shown),94 and becomes an allegory for
and enactment of civil strife, the conflict of brother against brother, father
against son, which suspends alterity in sameness and vice versa.95
After Book 5, the Medusa–Perseus duel/partnership raises its ugly head
again in Met.6 with the myth of Tereus, Procne and Philomela, and in Met.7,
in the shape of Medea and Jason. In the first tale in a string of conjugal
couplings spanning Met.6.401–11.795, the Gorgon’s rage hamstrings narcissistic ambitions: Tereus’ solipsistic frustrations and projection of his own
desires onto silenced, Echo-like Philomela are counteracted and punished
by sisters who become rival artists, chthonic Furies who force the narcissistic rapist to know himself, in the form of his beautiful miniature, Itys. Their
violation teaches him what his lust for possession is really all about, and
writes a drama which replays Narcissus’ realization that other is contained
in himself (inque suam sua viscera congerit alvum / ‘he stuffs his own guts
into his belly’ 6.651). Like a Perseus–Medusa hybrid, with her streaming,
bloody hair and speechless, mask-like visage (6.656–7), Philomela hurls
Itys’ grisly Medusan head into his father’s face:
prosiluit Ityosque caput Philomela cruentum
misit in ora patris . . .
Philomela jumps out and thrusts the gory head of Itys
right into his father’s face . . .
Met.6.658–9
93
94
95
See especially Actaeon’s realization of his changed self in the pool at 3.200; cf. Narcissus’ revelation
that he is his reflection at 3.463.
Rosati (1983).
Compare e.g. vocat illa vocantem / ‘she calls him calling’ 3.382; qui probat, ipse probatur, / dumque
petit petitur / ‘he praises, and is himself what he praises; while he seeks, he himself is sought’ 3.425–6,
with the fratricidal scrap at 8.441–2 (Toxea quid faciat dubium pariterque volentem / ulcisci fratrem
fraternaque fata timentem / ‘then Toxeus stood hesitating what to do, wanting to avenge his brother
but at the same time fearing he would share his brother’s fate’), or at 9.407–9 (ultusque parente
parentem / natus erit facto pius et sceleratus eodem / ‘and his son shall avenge parent on parent, filial
and wicked in the same act’).
32
In his agony, Tereus calls on those (already present) snaky sisters (vipereas
sorores 662), vowing in his metamorphosed state to hit back with his own
armed look (facies armata videtur 674). The rape of Philomela and the
castration of her serpent-like tongue96 at the hands of a Perseus–Tereus,97
followed by Procne’s Bacchic fury and retribution (her head and face draped
with snaking, black ivy) synthesize the plot of Medusa’s creation, destruction and afterlife, setting it in tandem/conflict with the tragedy of Narcissus.
Medea, meanwhile, is a Medusan serpent-slayer whose magic song can
break snakes’ jaws (7.203) and turns the army born (like Cadmus’) of serpent’s teeth against themselves (212). She joins forces with Jason to anaesthetize the pervigilis dracon, guardian of the golden fleece (149), and uses her
potions to renew her father-in-law’s youth (like her own snakes shedding
old skin, at 237), but finally leaves an audience attonitus at her crimes (426),
escaping on a car drawn by winged dragons (350, 398). In Book 8, the boar
of Calydon is a servant of outraged Diana which, like Diana in Book 3, or
laser-eyed Salmacis in Book 4, is possessed of a flashing gaze (igne micant
oculi 8.284; emicat ex oculis . . . flamma 8.356): note that vengeful women
are compared to savage boars at Ars Amatoria 2.373.98 When the beast is
finally killed, it commands a fascinated audience (mirantes spectant 423),
and Meleager’s rash presentation of its head to Atalanta (the beheading is a
Medusan ‘castration’ in tandem with Scylla’s misjudged ‘castration’ of her
father’s hair at the beginning of the book) triggers a civil war, taking us
back to the battles that follow Perseus’ beheading of Medusa in Book 5.
In Book 9, the duel of snake-killer Hercules and river Achelous (who can
transform into a snake at will) reenacts the Medusa–Perseus conflict once
more, emphasizing in its narrative twists the extent to which snake-venom
corrupts seamless, unified mirroring or opposition, infecting everything
and everyone it touches. For while Hercules, true to form, defeats his
96
97
98
Note also that the scene in which Philomela’s amputated tongue twitches on the ground, still
trying to plead with Tereus, is previewed in the battle between Perseus’ army and his enemies in
Met.5 (compare luctantem loqui . . . linguam / abstulit 6.556–7, with the still-complaining tongue of
beheaded Emathion at 5.105–6: atque ibi semianimi verba exsecrantia lingua / edidit).
In a short note Freud (1922) posits that Medusa’s decapitation visualizes the castration complex.
When the little boy faces female genitals for the first time (with their snaky hair, experienced
subconsciously as both multiple, threatening, and castrated penises), he is shocked by her lack of a
penis, and realizes his own cannot be taken for granted. Medusa’s head, similarly, has a devastating
effect on the observer – the subject is struck dumb, paralysed, petrified, but also (permanently)
aroused. Note that Philomela’s tongue is compared to a snake’s tail, making a Freudian connection
between head and lower-body, mouth and genitals.
sed neque fulvus aper media tam saevus in ira est . . . / femina quam socii deprensa paelice lecti: / ardet et
in vultu pignora mentis habet / ‘but neither is the red boar so savage at the height of his fury . . . as
is a woman when a rival is taken in the bed she shares: she burns and her face betrays her every
emotion’ Ars 2.373, 377–8.
33
slippery opponent, tearing off his bull-horns in another replica of Scylla’s
castration of her father, he is finally killed by the Hydra’s poison delivered
in Deianira’s cloak, and takes on a snake-like form when (like Aeson) he
casts off his mortal frame, achieving immortality ‘just like a serpent, its old
age sloughed off with its skin’ (utque novus serpens posita cum pelle senecta
9.266). In Books 10 and 11 similarly, as I discuss in chapter 3, Orpheus’
confrontation with Eurydice as he returns from the underworld has strong
Medusan connotations, and the last we see of the poet in the upper world
is his bloody head resting on a sandy shoreline, just like the ora Medusae at
Met.4.741–3. As the epic closes in on the historical past in the final books,
it culminates in the self-realization of Actaeon’s, or Narcissus’ unpunished
relative, Cipus (cum vidit Cipus in unda / cornua 15.565–6; cf. ut vero vultus
et cornua vidit in unda 3.20099 ) and in Aesculapius’ command of the snake’s
healing, apotropaic powers in his foundational voyage, in snake-form, to
the Medusan caput rerum that is Rome. In Aesculapius, the giant, chthonic
Python, or the Furies’ hair of the early books of the Metamorphoses, becomes
a golden manifestation of sun-god Apollo’s child, and is no longer to be
feared, even when looked upon directly. The god instructs:
‘pone metus; veniam simulacraque nostra relinquam.
hunc modo serpentem, baculum qui nexibus ambit,
perspice et usque nota, visum ut cognoscere possis.’
‘don’t be scared! I will come and leave my shrine.
Just look upon this snake, which twines around my staff,
and fix it with your gaze, so you can recognize the sight.’
Met.15.658–60
The oculi micantes of the monstrous boar of Calydon, the vision of one’s
bestial self in reflective water, the devastating backwards glance of Diana
and Medusa (ora retro / flexit 3.187–8; retro versus protulit ora 4.656) – all
this is now without painful consequence, and translates into a beautiful
vision (oculos circumtulit igne micantes 15.674; caeruleas despectat aquas 699;
oraque retro / flectit 15.685–6). As the snake enters Rome, unfolding its scaly,
epic, papyrus-like coils (perque sinus crebros et magna volumina labens 721),
it becomes an obvious closural symbol for this end-book,100 simultaneously
‘putting an end to’ the pestilence that has plagued the city and the epic
as a whole (finem . . . / luctibus inposuit venitque salutifer Urbi 743–4).
99
100
I retain this line, which is deleted by Heinsius and Tarrant (on the grounds that it is repeated from
1.640–1), but kept by Anderson (1982). The repetition from 1.640–1 (the scene in which Io is also
terrified by her own reflection), is significant rather than gratuitous.
See Barchiesi (1997) 190–3.
34
The run-down of Caesar’s imperial achievements in the lines that follow
affirm the extent to which Rome’s power and identity are contingent on
conquering the other, on attempting to embody and project snake-like,
monumentalizing Medusan dread, whilst limiting the tricky, boomeranging
potential of the mirror in which that caput, in order to be represented at
all, is necessarily reflected.
Yet in doing so, the Metamorphoses must enfold the destruction of Troy
and Virgil’s Aeneid into its final volumina, as there is no eschewing the
binding of power with trauma, rebirth with death, in Medusan poetics.
As she foresees Caesar’s murder, Venus recalls, fearfully, the antiqua damna
of her race (774–6): the ‘falling walls of ill-defended Troy’ overwhelm her
(770). Ovid’s shiny, existential epic casts back and reshapes the identityformations of the Aeneid, a text also inaugurated and energized by Juno’s
Medusan furor, which blows Aeneas towards the dream of Rome on seas
churned up by chthonic winds and sexual jealousies. As Knox outlines in
his famous article, the tragic drama of Aeneid 2 hinges on the paradoxical
symbolism of the snake/snake-flame, which promises renewal in the midst
of destruction, a destruction to be both repeated and overcome/refracted in
the fall of Carthage (and in Dido’s Medean-Medusan promise of revenge),
and also in the war in Latium, provoked by twin poison snakes plucked
from Allecto’s hair in Book 7. As the serpents strangle Laocoon101 and flicker
throughout Book two, taking human form in sinuous Sinon and hissing
Pyrrhus (2.471–5), Aeneas’ narrative (fixated subconsciously, no doubt, on
winning/conquering his Carthaginian ‘other’, Dido)102 hints at the Trojan
capacity to appropriate and counteract Greek snakiness. In Ovid, incidentally, Perseus continues this role when he slaughters the snake-like sea
monster which ploughs towards the rocks like a swift ship at Met.4.706, fusing the parallel images of twin water-serpents and the Greek fleet heading
for Troy’s shores in Aen.2.205/256: ad litora tendunt . . . litora nota petens.103
The turning point is first the death of Androgeos at Aen.2.370–85, who
recoils as if he has stepped on a venomous snake when he realizes that the
‘Greek’ allies he finds himself among are really Trojans in disguise. Then,
at 2.679–86, Iulus’ hair catches fire with a snake-tongued flame that no
longer harbours bad omens (it is innoxia, 683, just like the innoxius serpent
which appears from Anchises’ tomb at 5.92). As Knox writes:
101
102
103
Note also that after killing Laocoon and his sons, the twin snakes take refuge in Minerva’s citadel
under her shield (which, we remember, is decorated with Medusa’s snakes): Aen.2.225–7.
On the simultaneous fantasy of the Dido and Aeneas relationship as incestuous, brother–sister
union, see Hardie (forthcoming).
Also compare ecce, Met.4.706, with ecce, Aen.2.203.
35
in this flame the pattern of the dominant metaphor is complete . . . the serpent has
cast its old skin. All previous significances of the serpent are here by implication
summed up and rejected in favour of the new. . . . Anchises does not realize its full
significance, but he is joyful (laetus 687) and prays that the omen be confirmed
(691). The confirmation comes in the form of thunder on the left, a falling star,
and finally Creusa’s prophecy to Aeneas of a new kingdom in the West.104
In Book 8, twin serpents sent by Juno are strangled by Hercules (8.289),
and in the battle of Actium, on Aeneas’ shield, Augustus stands high on
his stern, twin flames rising from his blessed brow (8.680–1), while queen
Cleopatra is pictured on the verge of defeat, hounded by twin snakes of
death (8.697), before the eye is drawn to Caesar’s triumphal march through
the gates of Rome. The Aeneid’s civilizing project is predicated on the
(barely disguised) repression, recuperation and refraction of otherness, culminating in the arming of Aeneas with the shield in Book 8, which will
allow him to deflect Dido’s/Juno’s vengeful glare,105 and to bounce back
the snake-infested trauma of Troy onto new enemies. His chosen bride
Lavinia appears in the text as a sexless absence, whose demure gaze will
never infringe upon the narcissistic duels and ambitions of war. Notice
that the Cyclopes at Aeneid 8.435–40 are ordered to stop forging the snaky
aegis of Pallas Athene in order to focus their attentions on Aeneas’ similar
shield:
parte alia Marti currumque rotasque volucris
instabant, quibus ille viros, quibus excitat urbes;
aegidaque horriferam, turbatae Pallidis arma,
certatim squamis serpentum auroque polibant
conexosque anguis ipsamque in pectore divae
Gorgona desecto vertentem lumina collo.
Elsewhere they worked flat out on Mars’ chariot and
its flying wheels, with which he rouses men and cities;
and eagerly with golden scales of serpents they polished up
the dreaded aegis, armour of wrathful Pallas,
the interwoven snakes, and on the goddess’ breast
the Gorgon herself – neck severed, eyes rolling.
Aen.8.433–8
104
105
B. M. W. Knox (1950) 357–8.
Philip Hardie points out to me that when Aeneas meets Dido in the underworld at Aen.6.450ff., he
strives to ‘soothe’ the ‘fierce-eyed queen’ (talibus Aeneas ardentem et torva tuentem / lenibat 467–8)
with the result that she lowers her gaze and is metaphorically turned into stone (471). Note again the
use of the adjective torvus. Aeneas here plays a Perseus figure who in (unintentionally) ‘conquering’
Medusan Dido, himself takes on and uses aspects of her specular power. This scene is also typical
of the way in which the Perseus–Medusa confrontation is recast by Ovid as a lovers’ showdown.
36
Not only is Aeneas’ shield set in parallel with Athena’s apotropaic armour;
it also itself contains the image of Catiline trembling at the sight of the
Furies (8.698–9), as well as Minerva defending herself (we presume, with
the Gorgon breastplate) at 8.699, a superhuman shield within a shield.
Yet as critics have long recognized, this is also an epic in which the
unconscious clamours for expression: the anxiety surrounding Lavinia’s
untapped sexuality catches light at 7.71–7, when her long hair bursts into
flame and sends black smoke billowing through the palace, perverting the
parallel omen of Iulus’ fiery head in Book 2 (although this time, crucially,
the serpentine connotations of flames are repressed), while we know all too
well that what Aeneas sees on Pallas’ swordbelt at 12.945 is the uncanny
vision of the Danaids slaughtering/castrating their husbands on the night
before their wedding. In the intertextual web that braces the final lines of
the Aeneid, the lost Pallas is intimately connected with the ghost of (Pallas)
Athene; when Aeneas says Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas / immolat / ‘Pallas
wounds you, Pallas sacrifices you with this spear’ (12.948–9), he not only
also hides, metaphorically, behind Athene’s shield as he steps into the shoes
of Achilles, who when he kills Hector cries, ‘Pallas Athene will conquer you
with my spear’ (Iliad.22.270–2), but absorbs and at once realizes/frustrates
the revenge impulses of all the Aeneid’s Medusan women: Juno, Amata,
Allecto, even Dido. For the epic began with Juno’s wish that she could kill
Aeneas in a reenactment of Pallas Athene’s punishment of Ajax (1.39–41),
but when Aeneas plunges his sword into Turnus’ chest he, too, is furiis
accensus (12.946), next to Juno, accensa at 1.29, and Dido, furiis incensa at
4.376.
th e lo ok o f im pe rial ism
In her analysis of the haunting, ever-changing appearance of Medusa
throughout Western art, Jean Clair calls the clever indirectness of Perseus’
attack on the Gorgon (that is, his use of the mirror-shield) ‘the lesson of
culture’.106 The detour of the ‘figurative’ enables him/us to make the dreadful and frightening more concrete, and to detach himself/ourselves from
it. Thus the other is caught without ever being seen.107 Those especially
skilled at this act of ‘exorcizing’ are called ‘heroes’ or ‘artists’, and succeed
in transforming Medusa into Narcissus by making her confront herself in
106
107
Clair (1989) 65.
Again, we might compare Irigaray’s analysis of patriarchy (1985a) in which she suggests that the
feminine is never defined on its own terms in Western culture, but always as mirror, reflection or
object.
37
the mirror-shield. Triumph over Medusa, Clair argues, entails the mastery
of fear and the founding of a new order and regularity. Thus Athena, quasimasculine and eternal virgin, protector of cities, helper of male heroes, a
child without a mother, hides herself behind the face of otherness, converting the uncanny Gorgon into an apotropaic symbol, a breastplate or
shield. I have suggested that we can trace this Persean, or quasi-Persean conquest through Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as through
his amatory texts. Ovidian poetry often stages the (male, epic) imperialist
project as a mission to behead/castrate and tame Medusa/the ‘other’ (as if,
at the same time, to rein in or disguise empire’s own annihilative might),
making narcissism the condition of its success and setting Narcissus against
Medusa. Indeed, this basic contest is a crucial aspect of and metaphor for
the ongoing, energizing conflict between genders and lovers in Ovidian
poetry.
Clair also suggests that the most disturbing, ugly representations of
Medusa coincide with times of upheaval and revolution in which human
knowledge and the belief in ratio are being questioned, whereas she often
reverts to, or takes on the guise of a charming, attractive and very much
humanized woman in eras of comparative stability and classical restraint.
The two faces of Medusa (the apotropaic mask and beautiful sign of the
anthropomorphization of nature on one hand, incarnation of chaos, fear,
and disorientation of the self on the other) co-exist throughout Western
history, but opposing elements in her myth are highlighted in a cyclic, fluctuating movement. However, one of the things that emerges from my readings of Ovid in this book is the extent to which Ovid allows a simultaneous
melting/ contention/interaction of Medusa figures (or, Medusa–Narcissus
figures) to explore, effectively, the neurotic tensions and nostalgias of high
imperialist culture. As we will see further in chapters 1 and 2, Ovid’s seductive women in the Medicamina, Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris seem
often to alternate between being, or seeming to be, pretty, manipulable
models in line with Pygmalion’s fantasies, and unpredictable, frightening
and ungovernable figures who might lash out or regain the upper hand
when you least expect it. The same edginess is often part of the appeal
of Ovid’s Heroides, too, as we will see in the later chapters (4–6). As I’ve
stressed throughout this introduction, and as Ovidian poetry shows us,
Medusa is a complex, deeply contradictory figure, whose image and association is always difficult to fix (let alone see). We have also explored the
extent to which Medusa and Narcissus are close cousins, two sides of the
same coin: both are imperial architects and visionaries, turning landscapes
into marble, and make individuation and the rise of technology contingent
38
on violence (in Medusa’s case her gaze is aggressive, deadly to enemies,
including herself ), and on tragedy (in the Narcissus myth, artification is
connected either with naı̈ve delusion or with the realization that what one
creates is after all superficial and empty).
In Ovidian poetry, the consistent intertwining of (echoes of ) Narcissus’
and Medusa’s myths ensures that subjects’ relationships with the mirror,
and with their own reflected, projected selves, are in different ways always
fraught and risky. Ovid’s beautiful, composed, cosmetically enhanced self,
like Rome’s stunning architectural landscape, is always both obviously artificial and prone to collapse: ‘The time will come when you’ll hate to look
in the mirror’, Ovid tells his audience in the Medicamina. While Augustan
Rome, especially in the Medicamina and Ars, is conceived as a narcissist’s
city, a hall of luminous mirrors, shiny metals and glossy marble (‘ours is
truly an age of gold’, as Ovid puts it at Ars 2.277), we are never allowed to
forget that there is black earth festering under that marble face-lift (the portico of Octavia is superficially rich in its marble coating, externo marmore
dives opus Ars 1.70; cf. nigra sub imposito marmore terra latet / ‘black earth
lies hidden under marble buildings’ Med.8). So too, there is a limit to how
far Ovidian style, as it calls attention ‘to the linguistic surface of texts’108 can
(or wants to) impose order on a primal, pre-linguistic (pre/extra-imperial)
world that is also the domain of the Eastern, the female, the Dionysiac.
In other words, although Ovidian poetics strongly identifies with an
imperialistic imagination, making narcissistic poet and artist figures triumphant Perseuses at war with a disturbing and exterior ‘other’, at the
same time it is inspired by and often almost synonymous with that same
terrifying ‘enemy’, an enemy that is no longer necessarily ‘outside’ empire,
but to be found, like a Trojan horse, a discomforting mirror-image, within
the walls of one’s own city and psyche.109 While in Ars 1, for example,
Augustus’ popular reenactments of Roman conquests in the East attract a
cosmopolitan crowd (ingens orbis in Urbe fuit / ‘the whole world was in
our city’ Ars 1.174), this symbolic, captive audience also mixes identities
and positions, so that many a local is now ‘overthrown’ by a ‘foreign love’
(quam multos advena torsit amor! 1.175), just as even a barbarian can play the
108
109
Hardie (2002b) 5.
As Habinek reminds us (2002) 46–7:
‘Because Ovid’s position as both subject and object of the imperial gaze in many ways resembles
our own, exploration of his politics invites uncomfortable self-scrutiny on the part of the critic – a
consideration that may explain why most studies of Ovidian politics limit themselves to examining
the degree to which the poet distances himself from the princeps, rather than considering the extent
to which his writing is implicated in Roman imperialism.’
39
imperialist narcissist if only he is rich enough (dummodo sit dives, barbarus
ipse placet 2.276). Ovid himself, we have seen, is inspired by Medusa’s horse,
Pegasus, born from her severed neck (Fasti 5.8), and the fearsome Gorgon
represents the limits and triumph of the poetic imagination (see again,
Am.3.12.21–33). In the exile poetry, moreover, as I mentioned earlier, the
dread and aggression associated with snaky Medusa is evoked to describe
both the tribes of Tomis (e.g. in Ex P.4.9.81–4) and Augustus’ wife Livia
back in Rome, whom Ovid’s coniunx is scared to approach on his behalf
(Ex P.3.1.124). The pluralism and narcissistic luxuriance that characterizes
(Ovid’s vision of ) Augustan Rome, as well as Ovidian erotic poetry, never
quite smother either the horror of difference, or the threat of (apparent)
sameness.
In Ovidian mythology, I suggest, it is the figure of Medusa who intrudes
into the imperial Narcissus plot to excavate the black beneath the marble,
the weakness beneath the pomposity, forcing us to confront the terrifying
otherness of the external world within ourselves. This terror of the primitive and of (female) earth, moreover, is fused throughout Roman imperial
literature with desire and nostalgia for the wild woman, the bit of rough, for
a rural landscape covered in unpruned brambles and thick, dark woodland.
When you control her and get her on your side, then, petrifying Medusa
is an icon for stylistic decadence, for the imposition of beauty and form
on the flux of experience, for the triumph of monumentalizing, imperialist
ambition. But she also reminds us of the complexities of that ambition
(rooted in, and nostalgic for a simpler, freer, more violent rural past) and
embodies its painful, repressed implications for the self. Medusa’s rage and
creative power, never reigned in or contained enough, spikes not only the
Ovidian puella, but also (inevitably) Ovidian poetics. Her entry into the
Narcissus myth does much to unsettle Hardie’s recent analysis of Ovid’s
mythic role-models and negotiation of the past:
Ovid’s fascination with the permeability of the boundary between image and
reality reflects not just a sense of his own powers as artist, but also registers a
reaction to contemporary political and cultural circumstances. What might be
characterized as a regressive and mystifying poetics, expressing itself in tales of
animated statues and the like, compensates for the hyper-sophistication of a late
Alexandrian artistic culture with a nostalgic attempt to reconnect with a primitive,
archaic, shamanist and Orphic model of the poet as magician, whose carmina
(‘songs’/ ‘spells’) can directly control the external world . . . Within a specifically
Roman context, Ovid makes his own distinctive contribution to the triumviral
and Augustan vates-concept, in which the poet reinvigorates his poetic authority
by appeal to numinous models of poetic production from the past, and by which the
40
poet mimics the princeps’ attempt to revive political authority through a transfusion
into the present of the charisma of the great Romans of the past, and also through
a claim to privileged access to the divine. Ovid’s reenchantment of his poetic world
should also be seen in the context of the visual representation of imperial power.110
For Hardie, then, as I outlined at the beginning of this introduction, the figures of Narcissus, Orpheus and Pygmalion, the great illusionists and magicians who can bring statues and reflections to life, are the key archetypes
for the Ovidian artist. Yet as I have stressed, when Ovid delves into mythological figurations and aetiologies of magic and make-believe, he confronts
Medusa’s metamorphosis, death and rebirth (and all the chaos, fury and
creativity she represents) alongside the enchantment and grief of Narcissus
(or of his artist-relatives Pygmalion and Orpheus). In Medusa, moreover,
antiquity is not (just) a sweet and safe escape, not least because in her the
past is immanent in the present, regression inherent in progress, cynicism
in sorcery, death in life. This is not to say that Ovid is more or less in
tune with an imperial agenda, however we might measure it, only to stress
that his poetry encompasses and toys with desires and fears which cannot
adequately be contained within the banks of Narcissus’ pool.
110
Hardie (2002a) 192.
c h ap te r 1
Specular logics: Medicamina
A mutual gaze without speech holds too much emotion, becomes
awkward, even hostile. When two animals look in mutual gaze, either
the submissive one looks away or the more powerful may attack.1
Men are real. Women are made-up.2
The Medicamina, which advises women on how to perfect their complexions, can be read as a distilled contemplation, a thumbnail sketch, of what I
will be discussing throughout this book: Ovid’s probing of the relationship
between self and other in the context of a high imperial culture which, like
the dressing table mirror, seems to breed self-awareness. Throughout Ovid’s
oeuvre, illusionism and the mapping of subject–object relations are linked
closely to the arts of mirroring and making-up: the Medicamina makes this
point most overtly, hence the logic of beginning here. Moreover, antiquity’s
central (and, as we’ve seen, related) myths of catoptric thanatosis, Perseus’
killing of Medusa and the tragedy of Narcissus, become animating subtexts
in the Medicamina both for Ovid’s imagining of the self-indulgent puella
at her toilette, and for the poet’s/readers’ experience of spying on her cosmetic routine. This is not the most obvious place in Ovid to go looking
for these myths – at least, not at first sight. But in making his reader’s relationship with the looking glass so central to identity-(re-)formation, as well
as concomitant with the creation of the elegiac puella and elegiac poetry
more generally, Ovid evokes the perils, magic, and power-play encapsulated in Narcissus’ and Medusa’s specular tales. In order to understand
the Medicamina, we must be attuned to its mythological and metaphoric
framework, as developed especially in the Metamorphoses and Ars
Amatoria.
1
Friday (1996) 26–7.
2
MacCannell and MacCannell (1987) 212.
41
42
However, very little has been written about this short, fragmented poem,
of which the final 100 lines or so are missing,3 and until quite recently
(with the arrival of Rosati’s commentary in 1985), it was mostly tagged as
a pedantic, plodding, grocery-list which made very little effort to sweeten
its didactic pill. In one of the few brief discussions of Ovid’s thesis on
cosmetics, Wilkinson synopsized:
After fifty or so spirited lines of introduction, he plunges into a series of versified
recipes, presumably taken from some prose treatise by a professional pharmacologist. It is hardly a matter of regret that after a further fifty lines our manuscripts
break off. One would like to think that Ovid broke off too.4
When it has been read at all (and it’s worth noting that Ovidian critics
in the last twenty years have left it well alone), the Medicamina has been
packaged as self-evidently frivolous, superficial and pragmatic. Thus for
Green,5 as for Wilkinson, when Ovid does his ‘science bit’,6 and dismisses
the hocus-pocus of seductive spells, he seriously intends to inform and
instruct. While few critics today would take Ovidian didacticism or claims
of authenticity at face value, it is not clear what else we might make of the
Medicamina, a poem which instructs on perfecting facades. In this chapter,
I want to consider the role this text might play within Ovidian poetics, and
within Ovidian landscapes of desire and relationality. We should begin by
reading through the poem:
Medicamina Faciei
Discite quae faciem commendet cura, puellae,
et quo sit vobis forma tuenda modo.
cultus humum sterilem Cerealia pendere iussit
munera, mordaces interiere rubi;
cultus et in pomis sucos emendat acerbos,
fissaque adoptivas accipit arbor opes.
culta placent: auro sublimia tecta linuntur,
nigra sub imposito marmore terra latet.
vellera saepe eadem Tyrio medicantur aeno;
sectile deliciis India praebet ebur.
forsitan antiquae Tatio sub rege Sabinae
maluerint quam se rura paterna coli,
3
4
6
5
10
Exactly how much of the poem is lost remains a mystery, but it seems likely that we have the first
half (concerned with skin treatments), and that a section of similar length followed about cosmetics
(introduced by lines 99–100).
5 Green (1979).
Wilkinson (1955) 188.
Intuiting the best traditions of modern cosmetics advertising.
cum matrona premens altum rubicunda sedile,
assiduo durum pollice nebat opus
ipsaque claudebat, quos filia paverat, agnos,
ipsa dabat virgas caesaque ligna foco.
at vestrae matres teneras peperere puellas:
vultis inaurata corpora veste tegi,
vultis odoratos positu variare capillos,
conspicuam gemmis vultis habere manum;
induitis collo lapides Oriente petitos,
et quantos onus est aure tulisse duos.
nec tamen indignum: sit vobis cura placendi,
cum comptos habeant saecula vestra viros.
feminea vestri poliuntur lege mariti,
et vix ad cultus nupta quod addat habet.
†pro se sibi quaeque parent, nec quos venerentur amores
refert. munditia crimina nulla meret.†
rure latent finguntque comas; licet arduus illas
celet Athos, cultas altus habebit Athos.
est etiam placuisse sibi cuicumque voluptas:
virginibus cordi grataque forma sua est.
laudatas homini volucris Iunonia pennas
explicat et forma muta superbit avis.
sic potius †vos urget† amor quam fortibus herbis,
quas maga terribili subsecat arte manus:
nec vos graminibus nec mixto credite suco,
nec temptate nocens virus amantis equae.
nec mediae Marsis finduntur cantibus angues
nec redit in fontes unda supina suos;
et quamvis aliquis Temesaea removerit aera,
numquam Luna suis excutietur equis.
prima sit in vobis morum tutela, puellae:
ingenio facies conciliante placet.
certus amor morum est; formam populabitur aetas,
et placitus rugis vultus aratus erit;
tempus erit, quo vos speculum vidisse pigebit,
et veniet rugis altera causa dolor.
sufficit et longum probitas perdurat in aevum,
perque suos annos hinc bene pendet amor.
dic age, cum teneros somnus dimiserit artus,
candida quo possint ora nitere modo.
hordea, quae Libyci ratibus misere coloni,
exue de palea tegminibusque suis;
par ervi mensura decem madefiat ab ovis
(sed cumulent libras hordea nuda duas):
43
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25
30
35
40
45
50
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44
haec, ubi ventosas fuerint siccata per auras,
lenta iube scabra frangat asella mola.
et quae prima cadent vivaci cornua cervo,
contere; †in haec solida†sexta fac assis eat.
iamque, ubi pulvereae fuerint confusa farinae,
protinus innumeris omnia cerne cavis;
adice narcissi bis sex sine cortice bulbos,
strenua quos puro marmore dextra terat;
sextantemque trahat cummi cum semine Tusco;
huc novies tanto plus tibi mellis eat.
quaecumque afficiet tali medicamine vultum,
fulgebit speculo levior illa suo.
nec tu pallentes dubita torrere lupinos,
et simul inflantes corpora frige fabas:
utraque sex habeant aequo discrimine libras,
utraque da nigris comminuenda molis;
nec cerussa tibi nec nitri spuma rubentis
desit et Illyrica quae venit iris humo:
da validis iuvenum pariter subigenda lacertis
(sed iustum tritis uncia pondus erit).
addita de querulo volucrum medicamina nido
ore fugant maculas: alcyonea vocant.
pondere si quaeris quo sim contentus in illis,
quod trahit in partes uncia secta duas.
ut coeant apteque lini per corpora possint,
adice de flavis Attica mella favis.
quamvis tura deos irataque numina placent,
non tamen accensis omnia danda focis.
tus ubi miscueris rodenti tubera nitro,
ponderibus iustis fac sit utrimque triens.
parte minus quarta dereptum cortice cummi,
et modicum e myrrhis pinguibus adde cubum.
haec ubi contrieris, per densa foramina cerne;
pulvis ab infuso melle premendus erit.
profuit et marathos bene olentibus addere murris,
(quinque trahant marathi scripula, murra novem)
arentisque rosae quantum manus una prehendat
cumque Ammoniaco mascula tura sale;
hordea quem faciunt, illis affunde cremorem:
aequent expensas cum sale tura rosas.
tempore sint parvo molli licet illita vultu,
haerebit toto nullus in ore color.
vidi, quae gelida madefacta papavera lympha
contereret, teneris illineretque genis.
...
60
65
70
75
80
85
90
95
100
45
Cosmetics for the Face
Learn from me, ladies, what efforts can enhance your looks,
and how best to preserve your beauty.
Cultivation ordered barren earth to bear the gifts of wheat,
and had those snarling brambles slain;
5
Cultivation rectifies the bitter juice of fruit, while
the split tree gains borrowed wealth.
Cultivation equals pleasure. High buildings are lined in gold –
black earth lurks under marble cladding.
Often, fleeces are dyed and re-dyed in the Tyrian cauldron;
10
India offers ivory to be cut into objets d’art.
Perhaps when Tatius was king, the old Sabine dames chose
to cultivate the family acres, not themselves –
when the matron, perched ruddy-cheeked on her high chair.
would spin her painstaking art with tireless thumb,
15
and pen in herself the lambs her daughter pastured,
set the twigs and cut logs on the hearth herself.
But your mothers gave birth to delicate girls.
You want your bodies sheathed in gilded gowns,
you want to wear your scented hair in fancy styles,
20
you want to show off hands that bling with gems;
you decorate necks with stones sought from Eastern lands,
so large the ear finds more than one too much to bear.
And nothing wrong with that: you must be anxious to look good,
for yours is the era of super-groomed men.
25
Your husbands are spruced up to female standards,
and the bride can scarce accessorize his chic.
They decamp to the country, and still they fix their hair; put them half way up
30
Mount Athos, and they’ll be preened for the occasion.
Whoever you are, there’s a certain thrill in pleasuring the self –
all girls delight in their own pulchritude.
Juno’s bird fans her much-praised tail-feathers, and
silently admires its own beauty.
35
This is how attraction sparks, not because of pungent herbs,
plucked by the witch’s hand for her evil craft.
Don’t trust grasses either, nor blends of juices,
and don’t try the toxic venom of a mare in heat.
Snakes are not split in two by Marsian spells,
40
and rivers don’t flow backwards to their source.
The moon will never be shaken from her chariot,
just because someone bangs Temesian bronze.
The first thing to do, girls, is to act the part:
A gorgeous face needs ‘personality’ to match.
It’s what’s inside that counts: old age will ravage beauty,
45
46
and lines will plough that pretty face.
The time will come, when you’ll hate to look in the mirror,
and depression will only make those wrinkles worse.
Good character endures and stands the test of time –
this is what lifelong love is made of.
Explain now, when dainty limbs have shrugged off sleep,
how faces can shine radiant and fair.
Take barley, the kind Libyan farmers send in ships,
and strip the grain from its cloak of chaff;
Line up the same amount of vetch, add ten eggs to moisten –
(but let the skinned barley weigh two pounds).
When this has all dried in the open air, get the slow ass
to crack it on the rough millstone.
Then grind the first horns to fall from a sprightly stag,
(add the sixth part of an ass).
And when you’ve mixed this with the dusty grain,
sift it all, straight away, in narrow sieves.
Add twelve narcissus bulbs, without their skins,
and let a strong arm crush them on a marble slab.
Finish off with gum and Tuscan seed, a sixth of a pound,
and nine times as much honey on top of that.
Whoever applies this treatment to her face
will shine smoother than her looking glass.
And don’t hesitate to roast pale lupin-seeds,
or to fry up beans that bloat the body;
Balance them out so they each weigh six pounds,
and let the black mill mash both up small.
Don’t forget white lead or the foam of red nitre.
nor the iris grown in Illyrian soil.
Hand them all to strong-armed youths to break them in:
(when ground, they should weigh one ounce).
A remedy taken from nests of squawking birds
is great for acne: halcyon cream they call it.
If you ask what measure of this I’m happy with,
I’d say one ounce, divided into two.
So that they’ll bind together and can be smeared on the body,
add Attic honey from its yellow combs.
Though incense appeases the gods and angry spirits,
don’t waste it all on burning altars.
When you’ve mixed this with wart-killing nitre, see there’s
a third of a pound exact on each side of the scales.
Add a pound, minus a quarter, of gum stripped from its bark,
and a medium-sized cube of oily myrrh.
When you’ve pounded this up, sift it through a narrow mesh;
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85
47
pour on honey to settle the powder.
I’d recommend adding fennel to the fragrant myrrh,
(you want five scruples of fennel, nine of myrrh).
To which add rose leaves, dried, as much as a hand can grasp,
and frankincense with salt of Ammon;
then, to the mixture, pour in the juice that barley makes:
weigh leaves and salt together to match the incense.
You only need leave this treatment on for minutes,
and not a trace of redness will remain.
I’ve seen a woman pound up poppies moistened with cold water,
and rub them on her tender cheeks.
...
90
95
100
The poem purports to address a female audience of ageing beauties, (soon
to be) past-it Venuses who will soon be forced to discard narcissism’s most
vital accessory (tempus erit, quo vos speculum vidisse pigebit / ‘the time will
come when you’ll be ashamed to look in the mirror’ 47). Yet in doing
so, the Medicamina does the charitable deed of performing, for them, the
function of a looking glass: this is how they really look. Indeed, how to
look at, not just how to ‘preserve’ beauty, is what Ovid’s audience is here
to learn (tuenda in line 2 has a double meaning). What we see in these
100 lines might be construed, I’ll suggest, as a mirror image, one fantasized
by a wannabe voyeur, or by a Perseus-poet unable to look (and cunning
enough to avoid looking) his vile Medusa in the eye. Ovid’s didactic poem
is all done with mirrors, those dubious and perilous tools for presenting
truth – especially in the hands of a writer who has made Narcissus a prime
incarnation of delusory desire and of self-reflexive, duplicitous poetics. In
this polished, specular poem which (in a gesture vindicated by the ubiquity
of cultus) employs and embodies women’s instrument of self-formation,
Ovid conjures up and re-presents the female face, imagining the lumpy,
malodorous pastes and potions applied in the reflective surface of his text,
which once removed, will reveal a complexion that shines ‘more radiant’
than her own mirror (quaecumque afficiet tali medicamine vultum / fulgebit
speculo levior illa suo 67–8).
By the end of the poem (as we have it), and by the time those crushed
narcissus bulbs have taken effect (64–5) the subject who has been ‘brought
into being’ alongside the composition of the poem itself (and alongside the
brewing and blending of ingredients to constitute the final medicamina),
will be able to rival, even usurp, the poet’s command and incarnation of
the speculum. Re-armed with a mirror-like countenance, the born-again
puella is more than a match for her maker, fulfilling Ovid’s fantasies of
48
agonistic ‘equality’ in Ars Amatoria 3 (ite in bella pares / ‘go into battle on
equal terms’ 3.3). As we read, the ingredients for this ritual, Gorgon-like
face mask become less and less mundane, until at lines 81ff., the subject is to
smear herself with golden honey, myrrh, frankincense, and incense which
might otherwise have been offered to a goddess (83–4). Ovid’s poem is a
(potentially inverted) version of the Pygmalion myth which narrates the
making-up and metamorphosis of an elegiac puella, the Narcissus–Medusa
hybrid who, since Propertius, has been hell-bent on capturing her master’s
and her readers’ eyes as soon as they so much as set eyes on her. With its
didactic, realist looks, it toys with the illusion of exposing the mechanics of
writing elegy (along with the Medusan ‘other face’ of sister Venus glimpsed
behind closed doors) – that is, with revealing the potentially unsightly
process of conjuring up an object of desire. This is precisely the trick Ovid
pulled off in the opening poems of the Amores, and in Ars Amatoria 1,
which began without a beloved. Yet in the Medicamina, the project is one
of (comic) palingenesis, as the challenge is to recycle, or make-over, the
same old girl. This is one he prepared earlier.
mak in g it u p
The Medicamina has an axe to (re)grind about the wonders of imperialist
cultivation: indeed, the message is banged out, aggressively, in the opening
lines (cultus 3; cultus 5; culta 7). And in terms of its in-her-face celebration
of cultus, in which medicamina and cosmetics play a fundamental role, the
poem could be said to read like a micro-manifesto of Ovidian poetics. Just
like the small, often convex mirrors found on the Roman woman’s dressing
table, this short, frivolous poem has a miniaturizing, epitomizing effect:7
the spotlight is on the puella’s face (no full-length mirrors in these boudoirs),
and we home in on some defining features of Ovidian poetry. Hardie opens
his recent book on Ovid by reminding us of the centrality of cultus (as well
as of spectacularity) to Ovid’s conception of both a lifestyle and a poetics.8
In dealing solely with cosmetics, an arena synonymous with cultus or ars,
the Medicamina offers up a prime showcase for authorial self-positioning
(as well as for the determination of Ovidian reader as viewer). The longsuffering puella is patched up to serve another stint as mannequin for Ovid’s
7
8
As McCarty notes (1989) 170, the metals and working methods of antiquity prohibited large mirrors.
To get around this problem, artisans often used a convex surface, so that a large scene could be made
to fit into a small space. Also see Grabes (1982) 43, and Thomson de Grummond and Hoff (1982) 52.
Hardie (2002a) 1. See especially Ars 3.113/127: simplicitas rudis ante fuit (‘in the old days there was
crude simplicity’) . . . sed quia cultus adest (‘yet because we live in the era of culture’).
49
poetics of artifice, making his predecessors Propertius and Tibullus (for
whom the natural look is always in) look drab and bygone by comparison.
This is where we are shown (alongside Ars 3.155–92) Ovid’s most explicit and
concentrated packaging of a twisted moral code, which not only privileges
contrivance and novelty over primitiveness and tradition, but also markets
cultus as a means to improve and emancipate nature.9 The Medicamina
takes steps beyond even the Ars Amatoria in its revelling in simulation and
self-pleasuring (for both sexes), and in doing so, rubs up against the ethos
of Tibullus 1.8 and Propertius 1.2 in particular. In 1.8, 9–16 Tibullus tells
Delia:
quid tibi nunc molles prodest coluisse capillos
saepeque mutatas disposuisse comas?
quid fuco splendente genas ornare, quid ungues
artificis docta subsecuisse manu?
frustra iam vestes, frustra mutantur amictus
ansaque compressos colligat arta pedes.
illa placet, quamvis inculto venerit ore
nec nitidum tarda compserit arte caput.
What good does it do to style those silky curls,
and try out different hair-styles?
Why paint your cheeks with bright red rouge, why
get your nails professionally trimmed?
To keep changing your tunic and your cloak is daft,
and so is cramping dainty feet in tight-laced shoes.
That girl’s attractive, though she’s fresh of make-up,
and takes no pains to sleek her hair.
Propertius, likewise, fixates on ‘unadorned’ beauty (see 1.2; cf. Prop 2.18):
Quid iuvat ornato procedere, vita, capillo
et tenuis Coa veste movere sinus,
aut quid Orontea crinis perfundere murra,
teque peregrinis vendere muneribus,
naturaeque decus mercato perdere cultu,
nec sinere in propriis membra nitere bonis?
crede mihi, non ulla tuae est medicina figurae:
nudus Amor formam non amat artificiem.
What use is it, my love, going out with the latest ’do,
or swinging floaty skirts of Coan silk?
9
See P. Watson (1982) on how, in refusing to accept in a straightforward way the moral idealism that
condemns wealth, Ovid appears to stand Augustan moralizing on its head, or rather to draw out its
apparent inconsistencies.
50
What’s the point of drenching locks in Syrian myrrh,
or selling yourself in foreign finery?
Why wreck all nature’s charm with purchased ornament,
and stop your figure showing off its own appeal?
Trust me, no medicine can improve your beauty:
Prop.1.2.1–8
For naked Love despises artificial looks.
In purporting to empathize with the requirements and desires of his female
audience, Ovid smashes all Propertius’ rules. There is no shame, he tells
us, in distending ear-lobes with precious gems, donning gold-embroidered
gowns, or sporting elaborate perfumed hairstyles: nec tamen indignum:
sit vobis cura placendi, / cum comptos habeant saecula vestra viros (23–4).
Incidentally, the changes Ovid makes to the elegiac puella, who unlike her
predecessors revels in self-perfection, is paralleled in recent feminist analyses
of the developing modern beauty industry: as Radner puts it, discussing
images used by cosmetics companies from the 1950s onwards, ‘the most
marked transition in the representation of women in advertising was from
the portrayal of the domestically oriented woman to a woman who sought
to please herself’.10 Moreover, whereas in Ars 1.505ff., Ovid advised his male
readers not to take the business of grooming to an extreme, but simply to
be ‘well-presented’ (just as women in Ars 3 are tipped to avoid viros cultum
formamque professos / ‘men who profess elegance and good looks’ 3.433),
here they too are given licence to dress up to the nines, and the implication
is even that it is men, not women, who have the prerogative on cultus (the
bride struggles to know what to add to compete with her groom: feminea
vestri poliuntur lege mariti, / et vix ad cultus nupta quod addat habet / ‘your
husbands are spruced up to female standards, and the bride can scarcely
accessorize his chic’ 25–6).
Authenticity in Ovid is always an act: hence the ‘bare’ face of any woman
treated with these medicamina will not glow naturally (nitere in propriis bonis
Prop. 1.2.6), but on account of the wondrous mask that has seeped into the
skin and still clings, as if by magic, to the pores (dic age . . . candida quo
possint ora nitere modo / ‘explain now, how faces can shine bright and fair’ 53–
4; tempore sint parvo molli licet illita vultu, / haerebit toto nullus in ore color /
‘you only need leave this treatment on for minutes, and not a trace of redness
will remain’ 98–9). If ‘natural’ is fake, so is nature itself, which can provide
examples of just the kind of narcissistic vanity that defines Ovid’s Rome:
the peacock, Juno’s bird, takes pleasure in self-display, and silently admires
her own beauty (33–4); and the Narcissus myth is an eternal reminder of the
10
Radner (1989) 302.
51
way in which natural, wild landscapes offer up more (watery) mirrors than
Venus’ bed chamber (rure latent finguntque comas / ‘they decamp to the
country, but still they fix their hair’ 29: how else is one to avoid a bad hair
day when out of the city?). Traditionally, the elegist claims to want to situate
himself in opposition to everything that the art of making-up represents:
luxury, hedonism, frivolity, wealth. Yet in Ovid, and in the Medicamina
in particular, age-old anxieties about women as consumers are sidelined in
favour of a celebration of the imperial cornucopia.11 Cosmetics play a vital
role in what Kennedy has termed Ovid’s ‘theatricalisation of eros’.12
For Ovid, then, making-up is the ultimate ars, standing for experimentation, mutability, masquerade.13 Just as the puella puts on a face-mask to
become a new woman, so the made-up poet deceives and dazzles his audience with a succession of guises peeled off and reapplied. Ovid trifles with
a wardrobe of looks, is seduced (or inspired) by dozens upon dozens of
women, all of a different ‘type’ (see Am.2.4), and can produce a new poem
for each day’s new style (nec genus ornatum unum est / ‘nor is there just one
form of adornment’ Ars 3.135; nec mihi tot positus numero comprendere fas
est: adicit ornatus proxima quaeque dies / ‘nor can I count up all the fashions
there are these days – every day adds more adornments’ Ars 3.151–2). The
Medicamina’s systematic denuding of the elegiac puella, its voyeuristic glee
at uncovering the unfinished opus of her face, is also an exercise in Ovidian
self-exposure: it is all too apt that the poet breaks off mid-glance (vidi,
quae gelida madefacta papavera lympha / contereret, teneris illineretque genis /
‘I’ve seen a woman pound up poppies moistened with cold water, and
rub them on her tender cheeks’ 99–100), allowing his audience, whether
intentionally or not, to catch him in as compromising a position as his
self-cultivating subject. At Ars 3.210, Ovid spells out the notion that ars
(with a lower-case or capital ‘a’) is synonymous with cosmetics, when he
advises women: ars faciem dissimulata iuvat – don’t forget, girls, load on
that mascara and read my Ars. We might imagine that the dressing table,
stacked with pots and paints, looks rather like the poet’s desk in the middle
of a writing session, and that spying on a girl while she is making herself
11
13
12 See Kennedy (1993).
See Habinek (2002) 50.
In Epistulae Morales 114, Seneca connects the cultivation of appearance in imperial Rome with an
interest in experimenting with language:
‘when prosperity has spread luxury far and wide, men began paying closer attention to their physical
appearance . . . and once the mind has acquired the habit of scorning the usual things in life,
regarding as mean that which was once customary, it begins to hunt for novelties in speech also: now
it summons and displays obsolete and old-fashioned words, now it coins neologisms or misshapes
words: now a bold and frequent metaphorical usage is made a special feature of style, according to
the fashion which has just become prevalent’ (114.9–11).
52
up is uncannily like discovering the poem you’re reading is unfinished, a
rude opus (Ars 3.228). The idea that the success of the completed, made-up
face depends on disguising the exhaustive, dirty work of creating it recalls
Horace’s famous portrait of creative genius in Epistle 2.2.122–5 in which
the poet in full flow looks playful and casual, whilst beneath the mask
he strains with the sheer effort of the role, like a dancer playing a Satyr
or Cyclops.14 Ovid’s fly-on the-wall documentary of his puella staggering
under the weight of her jewelry, or wearing a stinking face pack, is similarly
tortuous.15
Likewise, in Ars 3.205–8, when Ovid recommends his Medicamina as
further reading, the poet’s perfectionism is implicitly twinned with the
pains women should take over their own beauty: the line parvus, sed cura
grande, libellus, opus / ‘I have a book, a small work, but great in terms of
the effort it cost me’ (Ars 3.206), echoes the first line of the Medicamina
(discite quae faciem commendit cura, puellae / ‘learn from me, ladies, what
efforts can enhance your looks’). Ovid’s ars is not iners on women’s behalf
(Ars 3.208), in the same way as its inspiration will transform an unkempt
woman (compared to an unhewn, iners lump of rock) into a million-dollar
gem. The beginning of the Medicamina traces, through the muse of the
self-cultivating puella, a crude aetiology of Roman elegy – from the rustic
Sabines, Tatio sub rege (11), who cared for the rura paterna rather than
themselves and spun an altogether different opus (assiduo durum pollice
nebat opus / ‘she span her painstaking art with tireless thumb’ 14), to their
ancestors, the tenerae puellae who lust after flashier, more contemporary,
Ovidian texts (vultis inaurata corpora veste tegi / ‘you want your bodies
sheathed in gilded gowns’ 18). Writing a poem and creating a look are
analogous, corresponding, mirroring projects. The Medicamina shows us
how writing elegy is contingent both on fabricating a woman, and on
delving into the risks and fears evoked in sustaining a relationship with the
female. The rest of this chapter will cover the nitty-gritty of this partnership,
14
15
luxuriantia compescet, nimis aspera sano / levabit cultu, virtute carentia tollet, / ludentis speciem dabit
et torquebitur, ut qui / nunc Satyrum, nunc agrestem Cyclopa movetur. / ‘He will prune away excess,
smooth roughness with wholesome refinement, sweep away what lacks force, wear the look of being
at play, and yet be tortured, just like a dancer who plays a Satyr, or a clownish Cyclops’.
Especially given Ovid’s advice on the fine line between elegance and overdoing it in Ars 3.129ff.:
vos quoque nec caris aures onerate lapillis, / quos legit in viridi decolor Indus aqua / ‘you too, don’t
burden your ears with precious stones, which the dark-skinned Indian gathers up from green water’
(compare Med.21–2: induitis collo lapides Oriente petitos, /et quantos onus est aure tulisse duos). The
woman who ‘wants, wants, wants’ in Med.18ff. has clearly not heeded Ovid’s warning in Ars 3 and
checked her reflection in the mirror before going out (Ars 3.136: speculum consulat ante suum / ‘may
she check her appearance in the mirror’). Again, our critical gaze functions as her missing looking
glass, showing her how hideous she really looks.
53
focusing first on the mechanics of composition, before commenting in
detail on how the Medicamina operates within a context of cosmetic advice
given in the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris.
a rec i pe f or e l eg y
In composing a poem about the activity of measuring out raw materials
for recipes that also amount to this Medicamina, Ovid rubs our faces in the
poetic unsuitability of these ingredients, exposing the crafted patternings,
blendings and juxtapositions of his poetic process. Thus the weighing scales,
used to measure and balance out the vetch and barley, gum and Tuscan
seeds, roasted lupins and bloating beans, double as technology to churn out
distichs with textbook precision, again and again. Ovid’s model Augustan
puella is already a paragon of imperfect poise (a take-off of limping Elegia):
she wears earrings so huge that two are an excessive burden:
induitis collo lapides Oriente petitos
et quantos onus est aure tulisse duos.
You decorate necks with stones sought from Eastern lands
so large the ear finds more than one too much to bear.
21–2
Doubleness marred by lopsidedness is, likewise, the recipe required in lines
55–6, where two pounds of vetch, bulked up by ten eggs in the hexameter,
now outweighs the same, unadulterated portion of barley in the pentameter:
par ervi mensura decem madefiat ab ovis
(sed cumulent libras hordea nuda duas):
take the same amount of vetch, add 10 eggs to moisten:
55–6
(but let the skinned barley weigh two pounds);
By lines 79–80, we are well accustomed to the measuring rhythm (Ovid’s
lesson in metrics is sinking in), and the schoolmaster poet predicts our interrogation (si quaeris). We both know what’s coming next – an instruction
on calibration which doubles as visualization of the crafting and splitting
of prose (and prosaic stuff ) into two elegant couplets. As in the previous
two examples, the pentameter in this couplet is also labelled (for beginners,
ladies), as no. 2:
pondere si quaeris quo sim contentus in illis,
quod trahit in partes uncia secta duas.
If you ask what measure of this I’m happy with,
79–80
I’d say one ounce, divided into two.
54
Along the way, our practical lessons in learning ‘right weights’ (pondus
iustum 76) are accompanied by frequent, varied exemplifications of the
symmetry and counterpoise required, all appealing to the visual imagination
of the reader keen to perfect appearance. Lines 71–2 mark the equilibrium of
roasted lupins and fried beans, on either pan of the scale (utraque . . . aequo
discrimine . . . utraque), the shrinking of six into five feet drawn out by
comminuenda (‘to be pounded up small’ 72). Similarly, pariter at the centre
of line 75 is the fulcrum of a scale that will measure out one ounce, a iustum
pondus, in line 76. If we joint the dots in the perfectly proportioned couplet
at lines 91–2, we get an artist’s impression of the pharmacist’s scales (as well
as the vain woman’s smile), with fennel balancing myrrh (five and nine
scruples respectively) in both hexameter and pentameter:
profuit et marathos bene olentibus addere murris,
(quinque trahant marathi scripula, murra novem).
I’d recommend you add fennel to the fragrant myrrh,
(you want five scruples of fennel, nine of Myrrh).
Lines 93–6 establish a more complex pattern: a handful of dried rose leaves
mixed with salt of Ammon is to equal the amount of incense, a tricky
balancing act that demands rereading the initial instruction on measuring
incense in lines 83ff.: the combination of roses and salt in line 96 is somewhat
confused by the twinning of salt with incense in line 94, especially as the
formula is repeated, visually, in 96 (with sal and tus inverted):
arentisque rosae quantum manus una prehendat
cumque Ammoniaco mascula tura sale;
hordea quem faciunt, illis affunde cremorem:
aequent expensas cum sale tura rosas.
Add rose leaves, dried, as much as a hand can grasp,
and frankincense with salt of Ammon.
Then, to the mixture, pour in the juice that barley makes;
weigh leaves and salt together to match the incense. 93–6
The ingredients for Ovid’s Medicamina are spooned out in bullet-point distichs, leading readers by the hand through behind-the-scenes elementaries
in putting together the face of an aesthetically enticing opus. For women,
Ovidian self-fashioning, as Downing phrases it in his discussion of Ars 3, is
explicitly a kind of artefaction:16 learning about cosmetics, here as in Ars 3,
is not only facilitated by but also implicitly equivalent to an acquaintance
16
Downing (1999).
55
(even, an ‘imitative incorporation’ into)17 Ovid’s libellus. Yet the Medicamina also foresees the possibility (and the erotic thrill) of metamorphosing
puella into rival make-up artist, as well as or instead of the raw material
for elegiac sculpting. Ovidian narcissism, which tutors all boys and girls
in the art of making up themselves, threatens ultimately to put the poet
out of business. Whichever way we look, the art of wielding mirrors seems
destined never to have a happy ending.
an d n ow fo r you r c lose - up
The Medicamina raises the veil on what women do behind closed doors,
and breaks the spell of female masquerade. We can see that Ovid’s spiteful
eavesdropping on the secret ceremonies of making up plugs straight into
the kinds of misogynistic sketches of ageing women, or of perfectly powdered beauties caught just when their deceptive mask is slipping, which we
encounter in Plautus, Horace, Martial and Juvenal.18 As Naomi Wolf puts
it, ‘The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men and power.’19
For (male) fans of Ovid’s seduction campaigns, the poem is potentially a
gross turn-off, a spoof tutorial caricaturing the reader as a reluctant pupil
who has to be force-fed facts he’d really rather not know. In the Remedia
Amoris, Ovid recommends that one of the fastest ways to become repulsed
by your lover is to interrupt her unexpectedly in the middle of her beauty
routine:
tum quoque, compositis cum collinet ora venenis,
ad dominae vultus, nec pudor obstet, eas:
pyxidas invenies et rerum mille colores,
et fluere in tepidos oesypa lapsa sinus.
illa tuas redolent, Phineu, medicamina mensas;
non semel hinc stomacho nausea facta meo est.
Rem.351–6
Then, when your mistress is painting her cheeks with concoctions of dyes,
don’t be ashamed to go look at her face.
Boxes you’ll find, one thousand different hues, and
juices that melt and drip onto sticky breasts.
Such drugs smell of your table, Phineus: one whiff of them
has turned my stomach more than once.
17
18
19
See Downing (1999) 249, n.17.
See e.g. Plautus, Mostellaria 274ff., Horace, Epodes 12.7–10, Martial 2.41.11–12, 9.37, Juvenal 6.457–73.
These and other sources on ancient make-up are catalogued by Rosati (1985).
Wolf (1990) 4.
56
medicamina stink: women making up are foul Harpies, and at the same
time must be as blind as Phineus if they think their complexions look good
mid-facial. We might also read the Medicamina alongside Ovid’s heartfelt
advice in Ars 3.209ff., following his recommendation of this libellus:
non tamen expositas mensa deprendat amator
pyxidas: ars faciem dissimulata iuvat.
quem non offendat toto faex inlita vultu,
cum fluit in tepidos pondere lapsa sinus?
oesypa quid redolent, quamvis mittatur Athenis
demptus ab immundo vellere sucus ovis?
nec coram mixtas cervae sumpsisse medullas,
nec coram dentes defricuisse probem.
ista dabunt formam, sed erunt deformia visu:
multaque, dum fiunt turpia, facta placent;
Ars 3.209–18
....
tu quoque dum coleris, nos te dormire putemus;
aptius a summa conspiciere manu.
cur mihi nota tuo causa est candoris in ore?
claude forem thalami: quid rude prodis opus?
multa viros nescire decet; pars maxima rerum
offendat, si non interiora tegas.
225–30
Let no lover spy boxes arranged on your dressing table;
Faking it’s the best beauty aid you have.
Who wouldn’t be appalled at a face smeared in paint so thick
it slipped and dripped onto sweaty breasts?
What does that wool-oil smell like! Just because those juices
from a dirty fleece are sent from Athens . . .
I don’t approve of getting out a stag’s mixed marrow, not in public,
nor should you clean your teeth for everyone to see.
Such things may make you gorgeous, but they’re gross to watch:
There’s lots that’s ugly in the doing but lovely once it’s done.
...
So while you’re making up, let us think you’re sleeping;
much better to be seen when the canvas is complete.
Why must I know the tricks behind the whiteness of your face?
Shut that bedroom door! Why offer up a work half-done?
There’s lots men are better off not knowing; in fact, most things
you do would cause offence, if you didn’t keep them veiled.
Similarly, when Ovid in Am.2.17 marvels at Corinna’s drop-dead looks,
which rival those of Propertius’ Cynthia, he is careful to point out that she
will use a mirror to appreciate her reflection only once it has been perfected
57
(cur est tam bene nota sibi? / scilicet a speculi sumuntur imagine fastus, / nec
nisi compositam se prius illa videt / ‘How come she knows herself so well?
I’d bet she gets her arrogance from her mirror-image – and she never sees
that before she’s fully made-up’ 8–10). When we read between the lines
(and peep through the crack in the bedroom door), Ovid’s amazement
at Corinna’s superior self-knowledge is spiked with sarcasm, and his own
beguilement (o facies oculos nata tenere meos / ‘O face, born to capture my
eyes’ 2.17.12) is safely formulaic (mirroring Propertius’ opening line, Cynthia
prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis / ‘Cynthia was the first to capture me,
her victim, with her eyes’ 1.1, and coming a little too close to parroting his
disinfatuation of Amores 1.10.10: nec facies oculos iam capit ista meos / ‘those
looks of yours no longer capture my eyes’).
We might compare lines 33–4 of the Medicamina (laudatas homini volucris
Iunonia pennas / explicat / ‘the bird of Juno fans her much-praised tail
feathers’), laced with the echo of Ars 1.627 (laudatas ostendit avis Iunonia
pinnas / ‘the bird of Juno shows off her much admired wings’), which
makes Juno, as mere runner up in the beauty contest judged by Paris, a
prime example of the deluded woman who thinks she’s Venus.20 In both
texts, Ovid lets his readers play the hero and see the real her, warts and
all (you can’t miss those maculae and tubera, subtly erased and scraped off
in lines 78/85). Dysmorphophobia gets provoked in Ovid by the uncanny
and frequently mythologized realization that the mirror is always a flawed
instrument by which to obtain self-knowledge, and that another person
will always be able to see you more clearly, and more truthfully, than you
can see yourself. Mirrors lend women the power to know and control
appearances, yet in so doing, we are reminded, they expose the limits of
female individuation: they are the snare she has set herself.21 Similarly,
Ovid’s recipe in the Medicamina for reviving the femme fatale consists of
applying a miraculous mask which recalls the Gorgon’s vizard-like ugliness,
a lethal catoptric power which will always potentially be the death of her.22
20
21
22
As Bulloch (1985) 130 notes, commenting on Callimachus’ contrast of Athene with Aphrodite,
‘Aphrodite’s coquettishness and mirror were an early feature’ of the judgement of Paris. In Claudian,
Venus’ palace is literally a house of mirrors, so that rapitur quocumque videt / ‘she is captured wherever
she looks’ (nupt.Hon.108). Juno, by contrast, does not wield or control a mirror (or her mirrored
image).
Cf. Ars 1.646: in laqueos, quos posuere, cadant / ‘let them fall into the snare they themselves have
laid’; 1.655–8: neque enim lex aequior ulla est / quam necis artifices arte perire sua. / ergo, ut periuras
merito periuria fallant, / exemplo doleat femina laesa suo. / ‘For there is no law more just, that the
contrivers of death should perish by their own contrivances, so that perjurers deceive the perjured,
as they deserve, and woman feels the wound she first inflicted.’
Jane Harrison compares the Gorgon’s head to primitive ritual masks: ‘they are the natural agents of
a religion of fear and “riddance” . . . the function of such masks is permanently to “make an ugly
58
Yet like the Remedia, the Medicamina functions as the Ars Amatoria’s
mirror-text,23 performing an anti-seduction which cannot but seduce.24
The more we are told that the ‘unfinished’, Medusan puella is better left
unseen, the more we long to set eyes on her, just as in the Remedia, the man
who declares ‘I’m not in love’ is inevitably head-over-heels. In direct contrast to the Medicamina, which casts an unforgiving spotlight on the female
visage, magnifying those wrinkles, close-up, till they resemble gouged-out
furrows (45–6), Ars 2 instructs men never to highlight or reproach a woman
for her faults, particularly if she is past her prime or has a blemished complexion (Ovidian rhetoric has a cosmetic effect – the poet airbrushes flaws
with inventive language alone: nominibus mollire licet mala 657). Later on
in Ars 2, Ovid also goes out of his way to recommend the older woman
(utilis, o iuvenes, aut haec, aut serior aetas / ‘this age, or even older, is a
profitable one, boys’ 667): his readers are to keep on ploughing away at
this field (668), which bears many unforeseen advantages (experience, elegance, imagination, uninhibitedness). Yet although we subtly avoid seeing
the mature puella face-on in Ars 2, her superficially veiled vitia infect the
imagination all the more, and become comically grotesque once aligned
with their politically correct surrogates (fusca vocetur, / nigrior Illyrica cui
pice sanguis erit; / si paeta est, sit Veneri similis, si rava, Minervae: / ‘if her
blood is blacker than Illyrian pitch, then call her darky: if she’s got a squint,
compare her to Venus, if grey-haired, to Minerva’ 657–9). Despite (and
because of ) Ovid’s rhetoric, this woman is both seductive and repugnant,
both full of initiative and ultimately passive, both an easy lay and the girlfriend from hell. Ultimately, the Medicamina lures in its readers with a
similar satiric concoction, offering glimpses of a puella who is at once a
turn-off and a tease.
mi rror, m y rrh a . . . w ho ’s t he fai re st n ow ?
Traditionally, of course, mirrors were exclusively female accessories. They
lay, literally and symbolically, at the centre of the mundus muliebris, and
were frequently associated with effeminacy and general moral decay.25 As
23
24
25
face” at you if you are doing wrong, breaking your word, robbing your neighbour, meeting him in
battle; for you if you are doing right.’ See Harrison (1903) 187–8.
Downing (1999) stresses the point that Ars 3 is, similarly, a systematic counterpoint to Ars 1 and 2.
For discussion of Remedia Amoris as a poem of seduction see Sharrock (2002a) 160–1: Sharrock
also suggests here that the close way in which the Remedia participates in the discourse of the Ars
has contributed to the poor critical appraisal of it in much modern reading (‘it is “more of the
same” ’, and presents itself as poetry parvo discrimine). This statement might equally apply to the
Medicamina.
See Eur. Or.111f., Dion.Hal. Ant.Rom. 7.9, Diog.Laert.7.17, Gell. NA 6.12.5, Juv.2.99–101, Lucian,
Pisc.45, Macrob. Sat.3.13.4, Mart. 9.16, Sen. QNat.1.17.10 (this links the development of mirrors with
vice generally).
59
McCarty notes, Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (140) uses a mirror to
represent woman (alongside a male sword), and there is some evidence that
mirrors were thought to be essentially female because of their connection
to the moon (which is consistently a goddess) and hence also to monthly
rhythms.26 In Ovid too, all women are narcissists27 whose self-appreciation
is fully contingent on the use of a mirror. When giving out style advice to
women in Ars 3, Ovid reminds his readers that a looking glass is essential: nec
genus ornatus unum est: quod quamque decebit / eligat et speculum consulat ante
suum. / ‘There’s not one form of adornment; each woman should choose
what suits her, and check her appearance in her own mirror’ (3.135–6). Yet
at the same time, as we have seen, Ovidian men are given carte blanche
to steal women’s mirrors (if only because they are helping their girlfriends
get dressed). In Ars 2.215–16, for example, just when Ovid has instructed
his iuvenes to reflect their girl’s every move, he reassures them nec tibi turpe
puta (quamvis sit turpe, placebit) / ingenua speculum sustinuisse manu / ‘and
don’t think it shameful (it may be shameful, but it’s so much fun), to hold
a mirror in your freeborn hand’, just as in the Medicamina, women are told
that there is no shame in taking pleasure in the self (an indulgence which
naturally demands looking in mirrors), since these days men are equally
obsessed with their looks (nec tamen indignum: sit vobis cura placendi, /
cum comptos habeant saecula vestra viros / ‘but nothing wrong with that:
you should be anxious to look good, for yours is the age of super-groomed
men’ 23–4). The Medicamina lampoons the cultural ‘progress’ of Augustus’
gold-plated Rome as a self-interested scrabbling for control of the mirror
(as ultimate, effeminate luxury as well as a device to display the goodies of
empire). This internalization of an imperialist project which has nowhere
left to go is read in Ovid as an eroticized battle for subject position, a civil
war for which the Medusa–Perseus conflict, as well as Narcissus’ death-byself, become the core mythic subtexts.
A Perseus-inspired exploitation of the mirror as a weapon to deflect and
destroy the specular female look is endemic in Ovidian poetry. In Amores
1.14, for example, a poem we looked at briefly in the introduction, Corinna
wrecks her locks with curling tongs and is pictured agonizing over her
reflection in her mirror, which she then surrenders:
quid male dispositis quereris periisse capillos?
quid speculum maesta ponis inepta manu?
non bene consuetis a te spectaris ocellis:
ut placeas, debes immemor esse tui.
26
27
See McCarty (1989) 178.
E.g. Ars 1.613ff.: sibi quaeque videtur amanda; / pessima sit, nulli non sua forma placet / ‘every woman
thinks she’s loveable, even if she’s hideous. There is no woman who doesn’t like the way she looks.’
60
Why cry over the loss of that thatch of hair?
Why are you so sad to put that mirror down, you silly girl?
You’re gazed upon by eyes not used to such a sight:
In order to find pleasure there, forget who you once were.
Am.1.14.35–8
In Ars 3.507–8, as we also saw earlier, the poet holds up a looking glass to
expose his reader’s face mid-temper tantrum:
vos quoque si media speculum spectetis in ira,
cognoscat faciem vix satis ulla suam.
If only you could see yourselves mid-passion,
You’d hardly recognize the mirror-image of your face.
Here, the control-freak moralist applies precepts very similar to Seneca’s in
the de Ira, a text which advises the angry man to see himself in a mirror,
so as to face a shocking, unexpected, inner reality (velut in rem praesentem
adducti non agnoverunt se / ‘brought, as it were, face-to-face with reality, they did not recognize themselves’ 2.36.1–3). A parallel passage at Ars
2.489–92 recommends that a frenzied woman be treated with medicamina
(489, 491).28 Typically, Ovid has to create a monster before he heroically
hacks off her head: passion transforms the average girl into a demon, her
veins bulging black with bile, her eyes flashing fire ‘more savagely than the
Gorgon’ (lumina Gorgoneo saevius igne micant Ars 3.504). Even (or especially) a stunningly attractive woman can be wounded by her own look: in
Met.15.232–3, during Pythagoras’ speech about bodily change, Helen (who
in Ars 2.699–700 sits in parallel with the Gorgon’s mother) weeps when
she sees her wrinkles in the mirror (flet quoque, ut in speculo rugas adspexit
aniles, / Tyndaris et secum cur sit bis rapta, requirit / ‘Helen also weeps when
she sees the wrinkles of old age in her looking glass, and tearfully asks
herself why she should twice have been a lover’s prey’). Legendary stunner
Lais also laid down her mirror when faced with the prospect of decaying
looks (Anthol.Gr.6.1.18; cf. 11.54, 266). Medusa herself was once a beautiful
young woman, and dies when her look is turned against her by Perseus’
reflective shield.29
28
29
ergo age et iratae medicamina fortia praebe; / illa feri requiem sola doloris habent, / illa Machaonios
superant medicamina sucos; / his, ubi peccaris, restituendus eris / ‘come then, bring powerful medicines
for an angry woman; they alone can suppress savage rage; those drugs surpass the juices of Machaeon;
when you’ve sinned, it is with these that you must be restored to favour’ (Ars 2.489–92).
See Siebers (1983) 11, and Ovid, Met.4.793–803; cf. Lucan 9.669–70. Note that the idea of reflection
as a defence against and boomeranging of Medusa’s power is conspicuously absent in early sixthand fifth-century Greek representations (where Perseus simply looks away as he cuts off the head),
but develops later and is emphasized particularly in Ovid and Lucan. See Gantz (1993) 307. In art,
Medusa’s image ranges from extreme ugliness to serene beauty.
61
The Medicamina, meanwhile, which begins by showing the mature
woman what she really looks like in the mirror, replays Perseus’ trick of
stealing Medusa’s petrifying gaze and turning it against her. Ovid has transformed his subject into stone, tacitly associating her with Augustus’ marble
Rome: just as women need to whiten their swarthy complexions, to slap on
a mask to hide and improve what lies beneath, so the cosmetic facades of
Rome’s public buildings disguise rough, black, earthenware bricks (7–8).30
Romanization is specifically a white man’s project:31 Ovid’s preparations
cleanse and mask darker skins, and the poem strives towards the racial ideal
of the candida ora (52).32
In this visually epitomizing poem, Ovid’s Medusan gaze both represents
and stages the process of artistic creation. As I mentioned in the introduction, the link often made in Western literature between Medusa and art
is reinforced by, if it does not directly derive from, the fact that her son
by Poseidon is Pegasus, symbol of poetry’s birth.33 The Gorgon’s petrifying
skill models artistic reproduction, and her finished statues are perfect realist
artworks. In Met.5.200ff., for example (a passage I quoted in the introduction), Astyages thinks his metamorphosed enemy Aconteus is alive, and
attempts to stab him with his sword: when it bounces off the stone, he is
amazed (stupet), and is paralysed, as if merely looking at Medusa’s work
is as risky an act as meeting her eyes (marmoreoque manet vultus mirantis
in ore / ‘he stood there with a look of wonder on his marble face’ 206).34
The successful artist commands Medusa’s gaze not only in the act of creation (petrifaction) but also in his power to stun an audience. Thus elegiac
portraits of marble-skinned puellae typically recast a parallel- or reversePygmalion fantasy which literalizes artistic representation: line 10 of the
Medicamina (sectile deliciis India praebet ebur / ‘India offers ivory to be
cut into objets-art’) suggestively fancies the uncultivated female body as an
30
31
32
33
34
The same simile is used at Ars 3.231–2: aurea quae pendent ornato signa theatro, / inspice, contemnes:
brattea ligna tegit / ‘look closely at the golden images which hang in the decorated theatre, and you’ll
think them worthless; foil covers up wood’. Ars 1.70 also refers to Rome’s ‘marble-effect’ architecture
(externo marmore dives opus).
See Kaplan (1997) for discussion of the inseparability of the male/imperialist gaze in the history of
Western culture.
Colonized woman is implicitly a nigra terra (‘black earth’) at Med.8, while in the Remedia Amoris,
as we’ve seen, calling your girl nigra when she is fusca is the perfect way to give offence and to make
her seem ugly (327).
See Barnes (1974) 36. As I mentioned in the introduction, Pegasus is born from drops of blood from
Medusa’s severed head. Paglia (1990) 51, draws attention to the parallel birth of the Furies, who
according to Hesiod sprang from drops of blood falling to earth from Uranus’ castration of his son
Cronos – ‘cruel chthonian emanations of the soil’ – and suggests that this ‘motif of seminal splashes’
which recurs in Pegasus’ birth hints at the Gorgon’s half-maleness.
See Hardie (2002a) 180–1 on Astyages’ petrification.
62
unhewn chunk of ivory (like Ars 3.219–20),35 hinting at a Pygmalionesque
project (Pygmalion’s dream woman is sculpted from ivory).36 Looking in
mirrors generally is petrifying (this is especially true of the imperfect ancient
mirror, natural or artificial, which worked best when the subject stood very
still). Thus Medusa’s mythic ‘cousin’ Narcissus is also implicitly turned into
stone by his own gaze (adstupet ipse sibi vultuque immotus eodem / haeret, ut
e Pario formatum marmore signum / ‘he looks in speechless wonder at himself and stays there motionless in the same pose, like a statue carved from
Parian marble’ Met.3.418–19); in his grief at losing his beloved reflection
in the disturbed surface of the pool, he beats his breast marmoreis palmis
(‘with marble hands’) just as Hermaphroditus, struck by the mirror-like
power of Salmacis’ eyes, is likened to painted ivory (Met.4.332).37
Ovid uses his mirror-text apotropaically in the Medicamina, predicting
the threat of castration embodied in the wild woman, his untamed, Medusan subject. In his hands, the mirror becomes an instrument of objectification, and the male artist’s gaze, with its Medusan ambitions, is overtly
aligned with imperialist aggression. We are reminded again of Clair’s analysis of the conquest of Medusa (and, we might add, of Medusa-like figures) in
Western art, the idea that controlling her and converting her (back) into an
attractive and unintimidating woman continually represents and coincides
with renewed political order and stability.38 Cultivation is empire’s project,
and in Ovid’s opening lines, woman represents a colonized barbarian territory or one of many exotic imports to be processed by civilizing artistry: the
didactic discite (line 1) introduces steely-sounding reporting (cultus humum
sterilem Cerealia pendere iussit / munera / ‘cultivation ordered barren earth to
bear the gifts of wheat’ 3–4).39 We don’t need to put a great deal of pressure
on these lines to imagine that it is she that is to be ploughed into shape,40
then dipped and dyed like a raw fleece (vellera saepe eadem Tyrio medicantur
aeno 9), her sterile ‘field’ that is to be violently weeded of ‘devouring briers’
35
36
37
38
39
40
Ars 3.219–20: quae nunc nomen habent operosi signa Myronis / pondus iners quondam duraque massa
fuit / ‘the statues of industrious Myron, which are now famous, were once a hard mass and lifeless
weight’. Downing (1999) reads Ovid’s role in Ars 3 as an anti-Pygmalion, turning real women into
artefacts.
E.g. Met.10.247ff.: interea niveum mira feliciter arte / sculpsit ebur formamque dedit / ‘meanwhile,
with wondrous art he successfully carves a figure out of snowy ivory’.
For further discussion of how ‘Narcissus’ erotic delusion merges into artistic illusion’ in Ovid, see
Hardie (2002a), especially 143–72.
Clair (1989).
As Rosati notes (1985 ad loc.), pendere suggests a political–administrative metaphor.
The metaphor that associates woman with earth and sex with ploughing is as old as Homer. For a
recent summary, see Keith (2000) 36–64, or Dougherty (1998), and Du Bois (1988) 39–85. It is also
the metaphor used of aging women in particular in Ars 3 (e.g. continua messe senescit ager / ‘the field
gets old with constant harvesting’ 3.82).
63
(mordaces interiere rubi 4); and the bitter juices of her fruit that are destined
to be sweetened by intensive farming.41 Her pulchritude, we are later told,
will be violently ‘despoiled’ by age (formam populabitur aetas 45), calling
for surgery at the hands of Rome’s craftsmen, who will carve her up into
bite-sized titillations (sectile deliciis ebur 10). After this pugnacious opening, the comparison of Sabine dames of old (‘they would have wished to
cultivate their paternal acres rather than themselves’) with their ‘daughters’,
the delicate It-girls of Augustan Rome (11–17) recalls how the rape of the
Sabine women in Romulus’ theatre in Ars 1 marks the initiation of this
process of imperial cultus, signposting the beginning of Ovid’s strategies
of seduction in a text which commands the theatre as an exemplary arena
for the vaunting of spectacular erotics. Throughout the Medicamina, the
woman who has read Ars 3 is reminded of how much work there is to do:
after Ars 3.281ff., where women are warned of making asses of themselves
when their faces get distorted by braying laughter (ut rudit a scabra turpis
asella mola / ‘as when the mean she-ass brays by the rough millstone’ 290),
the scene at Med.58 hints at her continued bestialization (lenta iube scabra
frangat asella mola / ‘get the slow ass to crack it on the rough millstone’) –
the ‘joke’ for voyeuristic readers is always that the broad we catch brewing
Ovid’s potions needs all the help she can get.
Ovid’s programme for the cultivation of woman seeks to sanitize and
invade her sexual body, visualized as a thorny landscape ready to be pruned
(or literally, to be slain – interiere 3), a trunk to be split open (fissa 7), or
a fleshy rot seeping nasty juices.42 Lines 3–4 in particular predict the feral
woman’s specifically castrating power: those mordaces rubi, Ovid warns his
male voyeurs, are bound to eat you alive – so be sure to get your retaliation
in first. The simultaneous focus in the opening lines of the Medicamina
on the taming of the puella’s face and of her reproductive organs evokes
Freud’s reading of Medusa’s head as female genitalia, and the serpents of
her (pubic) hair as a writhing mass of castrating and castrated penises.43
41
42
43
Compare again the passage at Ars 2.489ff., when Ovid advises men to treat an angry woman with
medicamina, which ‘surpass the juices of Machaon’: illa Machaonios superant medicamina sucos (491).
Ovid’s (poisonous, medicinal) juices are added to, or in competition with, hers. The warning not
to trust mixtures of juices in Med.37 (nec vos graminibus nec mixto credite suco) might well read as a
tip not to trust medicamina generally.
Aeschylus’ Eumenides (52–4) pictures the eyes of the Gorgon dripping a foul ooze, which Jane
Harrison identifies with Gorgon’s petrifying power. Wilk (2000) argues very convincingly that this
element of Medusa’s image (along with the sticking out tongue, bloated round face and separating
hair) suggests a stylized representation of a newly decaying body. The Gorgon, in other words,
provokes and embodies the fear of death, and of good looks gone to rot.
As Camille Paglia suggests (1990) 47: ‘the Greek Gorgon was a kind of vagina dentata: in Archaic
art, she is a grinning head with beard, tusks and out-thrust tongue’.
64
For Freud, the terror of Medusa is a terror of castration which is linked
to the sight of something (specifically, he imagines, ‘the female genitals,
probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of
his mother’),44 and her decapitation is thus a retaliatory or self-defensive
neutering.45 Camille Paglia, whose analysis of the Gorgon in Western art
frequently echoes the Medicamina’s opening metaphor, stresses: ‘Medusa’s
hair is also the writhing vegetable growth of nature.’46
In line 39, Ovid denies the implication that the Medicamina are a miracle cure for fading beauty, or that there is any such thing as snake-splitting
sorcery (nec mediae Marsis finduntur cantibus angues / ‘snakes are not split in
two by Marsian spells’). Yet, as Sharrock discusses at length, Ovid’s opposition between magic and love, and between magic and poetry, is always
already collapsed into an identification: under the duplicitous sign of the
pharmakon (or here, medicamen) the discourses of love, poetry, magic blend
into one.47 Ovid’s Lucretian tirade against religio, here as in Ars 2.99–108
and Rem.249–90, is complicated and undercut by the barely disguised interconnectedness of ancient science and magic, poetry and spells.48 Indeed
medicamen, as it is used elsewhere in Ovid, is linked both with specular
magic and with the power to castrate (that is, to sever Medusan snakes). The
waters which androgynize Hermaphroditus, for example, are charged with
medicamen in Met.4.388;49 The same term is also used of Medea’s anti-aging
drugs at Met.7.262 (interea validum posito medicamen aeno / fervet / ‘meanwhile the strong potion is boiling in the bronze pot’), and of the remedy
used by Apollo’s son to resuscitate the torn body of Hippolytus (Met.15.533).
And at Met.14.285, Circe uses magic medicamina to turn Odysseus’ men
into pigs.50 Ovid appropriates witch-like powers in the Medicamina to
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
Freud (1922) 273.
Also see Eilberg Schwartz (1995), who discusses how turning female heads into sexual organs (as in
the famous Magritte painting, Le Viol), functions as a non-literal form of beheading. On decapitation
as castration also see Cixous (1981).
Paglia (1990) 14. See also 48: ‘woman’s genital wound is a furrow in female earth. Snaky Medusa is
the thorny undergrowth of nature’s relentless fertility.’ See also Downing (1999) on Ars 3: ‘it is the
natural woman . . . who especially repulses’ (241).
See Sharrock (1994) 56, and 50–86.
See also Ars 3.59 and the advice that follows: women are to be mindful of encroaching old age, and
live life today, for the years pass like flowing water, and cannot be called back (cf. Med.40: nec redit in
fontes unda supina suos / ‘nor does the wave stream backwards to its font’). Yet later on in the book,
they are told that old age can be cheated: Ovid works his magic, doing the equivalent of precisely
that which he denies can be done – turning back rivers to their sources.
motus uterque parens nati rata verba biformis / fecit et incesto fontem medicamine tinxit / ‘his parents heard the prayer of their two-formed son, and charged the waters with that uncanny power’
Met.4.387–8.
Cf. Medea in Her.12.99: ipsa ego, quae dederam medicamina / ‘I myself, who had given the charmed
drug’.
65
conduct parallel experiments on his puella, who may end up with a teenage
glow or a face like a hog: his concoctions of barley, seeds and other crops,
(themselves products, we might imagine, of his cruel weeding to increase
the productivity of woman’s soil and to butcher her Medusan looks in lines
2–3) are endowed with a specular magic of their own.51
Just as Ovid’s medicamen can mean both curative potion and noisome
drug, so the snake-like powers of his female subject, in Ars 3 and the
Medicamina, are both enervated and boosted by his instruction. A predictable objection to Ars Amatoria 3, Ovid claims, might be: ‘quid virus in
angues / adicis, et rabidae tradis ovile lupae?’ / ‘Why do you add venom to
snakes, betray the sheep to the mad she-wolf?’ (Ars 3.7–8). His first piece of
advice to girls in this book is to make the most of youth, and be mindful
of encroaching old age: in a passage exploited to reinforce the necessity of
reading the Medicamina, Ovid exclaims: quam cito, me miserum, laxantur
corpora rugis, / et perit, in nitido qui fuit ore, color / ‘how quickly, alas, is the
body furrowed by wrinkles, how quickly the colour fades, which once blossomed in that lovely face’ (Ars 3.73–4: compare Med.51–2 dic age . . . candida
quo possint ora nitere modo / ‘explain now, how faces can shine radiant and
fair’, and 97–8: tempore sint parvo molli licet illita vultu, / haerebit toto nullus
in ore color / ‘you only need leave this treatment on for minutes, and not
a trace of redness will remain’). Whereas snakes can slough off their age
with their skins, and stags are not aged by casting off their horns, women
have no way of halting the decline.52 Those crinkly white hairs (Ars 3.75–6)
bear no relation to serpents: yet Ars 3 and the Medicamina both focus on
how time can, after all, be tricked, with make-up, hair dye, and face-masks
blended with stag horn (Med.59), peeled off like a thin dry snake-skin to
reveal a brand new her.
Creating a Venus–Medusa (an enemy: portas reseravimus hosti / ‘we have
thrown open our gates to the enemy’ Ars 3.577) is a seductive project, as
I’ve stressed, and the price to pay for a good fight, a drama worth watching.
The masochistic elegiac lover cannot bear sweetness: suco renovemur amaro /
‘let us be refreshed by bitter juices’ (Ars 3.583). The opening lines of the
Medicamina, which shave off her brambles and sugar her tart juices, risk
51
52
The Gorgon herself, in her gory death, may be said to incarnate or produce a pharmakon-medicamen,
which befits her double, contradictory identity as beautiful/ugly, creative/deadly creature: Apollodorus 3.10.3 narrates how Asclepius took blood from one of her veins to revive the dead, and from
another to cause harm. Compare Zenobius, Cent.1.18. According to Euripides (Ion 999ff.), Pallas
gave Erichthonius two drops of the Gorgon’s blood, one of deadly poison, the other a powerful
medicine for the healing of diseases.
anguibus exuitur tenui cum pelle vetustas, / nec faciunt cervos cornua iacta senes / ‘serpents shrug off
their age with their frail skins, nor are stags aged by casting off their horns’ (Ars 3.77–8).
66
producing a bland, unrealistic artwork that looks more dead than alive and
is certainly no turn-on (again, the narcissism of cultus may well backfire).
In theory, the ideal (voiced at Ars 3.609–10) is to mingle fear with ‘secure
enjoyment’ (admiscenda tamen venus est secura timori), yet in practice, Ovidian elegy continually performs an unstable balancing act in which each half
of a coupling (and couplet) is alternately epicized and elegized, fortified
and castrated.53
Moreover, just as Ovid’s refutation of magic serves precisely to highlight
his poetic wizardry, so the opening claim in the Medicamina that he will
teach women how their looks might be preserved, not changed (et quo sit
vobis forma tuenda modo 2), is undercut by various hints in his recipes
of the (painful) process of metamorphosis. As well as the narcissus bulbs
threatening to take root in her soil at line 63, Halcyon cream (77–8) looks
towards Alcyone in Book 11 of the Metamorphoses, who loses her beloved
Ceyx and becomes a bird doomed to a life of eternal (elegiac) mourning
(addita de querulo volucrum medicamina nido / ore fugant maculas: alcyonea
vocant). The addition of myrrh to the heady mix in line 88 (et modicum e
myrrhis pinguibus adde cubum) is similarly ominous: in Met.10, this fragrant
substance is made from Myrrha’s tears, when she has been transformed
into a tree after committing incest with her father. At the start of her tale,
Myrrha wonders why she is not more scared of the Furies’ gaze (nec metues
atro crinitas angue sorores / quas facibus saevis oculos atque ora petentes / noxia
corda vident? / ‘have you no fear of the sisters with the black snakes in
their hair, whom guilty souls see brandishing torches before their eyes and
faces?’ 10.349–51), and revels in the power of her own beauty, as praised by
the nurse at 10.440 (et faciem laudat). That same youthful, beautiful face
is covered by dry, wrinkled bark in line 498 (mersitque suos in cortice vultus
/‘she plunged her face into the bark’), and when she gives birth to baby
Adonis, she becomes precisely the kind of ugly, aging woman whose tree
must be split open at the beginning of the Medicamina (arbor agit rimas et
fissa cortice vivum / reddit onus, vagitque puer / ‘then the tree cracked open,
the bark was split asunder and it gave forth its living burden, a wailing
baby boy’ Met.10.512–13; cf. fissaque adoptivas accipit arbor opes / ‘a cleft
tree gains adopted riches’ Med.6), a fate already predicted in the simile
at lines 372–7, when she is as indecisive as a great tree struck by an axe
which creaks from side to side before falling. Myrrha’s myth, which takes a
dangerously seductive, Medusan woman and makes of her disarmed body
a picture-book Adonis, every narcissist’s fantasy lover, might be said to
53
This is of course spelt out in Am.1.1.17–18 (cum bene surrexit versu nova pagina primo / attenuat nervos
proximus ille meos / ‘my new page of song rose well with the first verse in lofty mode, when the next
one unmans my vigour’).
67
mirror Ovid’s manufacture of an aestheticized, marble-skinned puella in
the Medicamina. Yet it also harbours a warning for the narcissistic, mirrorwielding beauty-queen that this poem wants, ostensibly, to honour and
(re-)create: that all beauty, in Ovid, ends in (Myrrha’s) tears, since Venus
and Medusa are two sides of one and the same coin.
For the puella herself, the presence in the Medicamina of changed faces
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses suggests that she risks becoming her ingredients.
We might note that the constituents for these medicamina often look like
substitutes for the face or body we really want to see. Lines 53ff., for example,
play out a transferred striptease: barley is to be separated from its chaff
and only be crushed when it is nuda (56); the narcissus bulbs must be
skinless, sine cortice (63), before they are pounded puro marmore (64), a line
reminiscent of Narcissus’ bare marble-like skin; and the bark is removed
from the gum at 87 (parte minus quarta dereptim cortice cummi). The subject
is to be sliced up, implicitly, in line 10 (sectile deliciis India praebet ebur),
just as alcyonea is split (secta) in line 80. Qualities belonging to ingredients
are to be transferred to the female face: thus lupin seeds (69) are pale, like
the girl’s desired complexion, just like the white lead, combined with the
blush of red nitre in line 73. The idea that the contents will be internalized
and identified with the woman’s body is also perhaps hinted at in line 70:
she is to add beans which bloat the body, presumably if ingested (et simul
inflantes corpora frige fabas / ‘at the same time fry beans, that will puff out
the body’). Ovid’s kitchen-table chemistry lets us spy on her spotty, warty,
greased up face (as well as visualize the goal of the perfect canvas) through
the mask he has her apply, just as the voyeur peeps through the chink in
the door and pieces together a complete image from a series of titillating
flashes of skin and colour. In fact, the recipes themselves seem to hint at
just such a scenario: line 89 (per densa foramina cerne / ‘sift it through a
narrow mesh’) could equally translate as ‘see (these things) through holes,
placed close together’. Looking is neither safe nor guilt-free, however: the
ground stag-antlers mixed with dusty grain at 59–60 recall the horns grown
from the head of Actaeon, who is changed into a stag and then torn apart
by hounds as a punishment for spying Diana bathing naked in the woods
(et quae prima cadent vivaci cornua cervo / ‘and the first horns that fall from
a sprightly stag’ cf. dat sparso capiti vivacis cornua cervi / ‘On the head she
had sprinkled with water she made the horns of a long-lived stag grow’
Met.3.194).54
54
Note that part of Actaeon’s punishment is having to look at himself in the mirror when he has been
metamorphosed (ut vero vultus et cornua vidit in unda . . . / ‘but when he saw his features and his
horns in a clear pool . . .’ 200), and the transformation is triggered when Diana throws water in his
face, disturbing the reflective stillness of her pool.
68
he re ’s lo oki n g at you
In many ways, then, Ovid’s Medicamina (especially when set against the
other amatory poems) aggressively asserts Irigaray’s mirror-tyranny, positing
woman as object and symbolically sealing off her access to subjectivity
by imagining the point at which her relationship with the mirror cracks.
The Narcissus myth, churned up in her face-pack (adice narcissi bis sex
sine cortice bulbos / ‘add twelve narcissus bulbs without their skins’ 63)
shadows her metamorphosis, as the didactic poet, in Lucretian mode, reveals
the heartbreaking truth of her reflection, the ultimate destructiveness of
self-love: while his act of looking (at her) is overdetermined as an act of
knowing, the (self-)knowledge she acquires through the act of seeing is
disempowering, depressing, even deadly. Yet at the same time, Ovid makes it
difficult, even impossible, for his (male) audience to relish its appropriation
of the mirror and of the Medusan gaze: under the camp reign of cultus,
everyone is caught in the Narcissus-trap of dressing to please themselves, and
no one can be said to escape the mirror’s pernicious, talismanic glare. The
moral of Medusa’s tale, which we will be seeing repeatedly in the chapters
that follow, is that there is no way to use the looking glass without also
being vulnerable to its powers.
Lines 21ff. undercut the imperialist objectification of puellae in the opening section of the poem: cultus erodes the separation of genders, and in line
21, far from embodying the imported product, or a landscape to be colonized and farmed, Roman ladies have become imperialists on a domestic
scale who seek out and exhibit the trappings of empire (induitis collo lapides Oriente petitos). In the anxious slashing of her mordaces rubi in line 4,
what Irigaray characterizes as the narcissistic motivations of Freud’s Medusa
complex (‘to castrate the woman is to inscribe her in the law of the same
desire, of desire for the same’)55 are given free rein: men are to view the
new, made-up Augustan girl as same, not other, as rival in the pursuit of
cultivated elegance.56 It is not clear who sets the trends, and who copies
whom: in lines 23–4, women must keep up with male grooming (sit vobis
cura placendi, / cum comptos habeant saecula vestra viros); in line 25 the husbands are preened according to feminea lex, yet these days there is little for
the bride to add to the cultus displayed (first) by men (et vix ad cultus nupta
quod addat habet). There’s no distinguishing subject or lover on the basis
of gender, and although 29–30 are gender-specific (illas . . . cultas), 31 opens
55
56
Irigaray (1985b) 46.
Ovid’s obsessive return to Naricissus performs a Mulveyan critique of the male gaze, turning it back
upon itself and making it visible, at that moment disturbing it. See e.g. Mulvey (1989).
69
the field once more (est etiam placuisse sibi cuicumque voluptas / ‘whoever
you are, there’s a certain thrill in pleasuring the self ’). These tips on beautification are for men, too, who are now voyeurs eager to watch and learn.
When it comes to cooking up medicamina, girls need a male accomplice
or two (here’s a handy opportunity to steal her recipe): at 64, she’s to let
a strenua dextra (‘strong right arm’) pound up the narcissus bulbs on pure
marble (in an image which comes close to suggesting masturbation),57 and
at 75, she is to hand over the second mixture to the ‘strong arms’ of young
men (da validis iuvenum pariter subigenda lacertis).
Both male and female readers, then, look on their mirror image in the
Medicamina, an experience which threatens as well as bolsters self-identity.
Men, like Narcissus, spy a (seductively repulsive) other, who by a process
of metamorphosis which itself parallels the transformation of Narcissus,
becomes and is revealed as same, as a version or reflection of himself. This
is a poem which flaunts its own success as a didactic work by forcing all
its readers, in different ways, to experience an epistemological revelation
modelled on the tragedy of Narcissus, the icon of self-love who comes to
know that his beloved other is in fact himself. Yet at the same time, the
poem resists this inevitability, for Ovid’s woman retains a dangerous flicker
of her Medusan power. Lines 67–8 (quaecumque afficiet tali medicamine
vultum / fulgebit speculo levior illa suo / ‘whoever shall treat her face with
this prescription will shine smoother than her own mirror’) hint at a finale
to match the Medusa–Perseus encounter (as well as Narcissus’ parallel flash
of realization): the puella who at the beginning of the poem was a Medusa
viewed in a mirror and stripped of her weapons will now (be seen to)
embody the shining mirror, more beautiful than ever. Mirrored gazes meet,
producing a baffling symmetry which reveals, in a moment, the specular
modalities of Ovidian erotics.
57
See Persius 4.35–6 for the use of bulbi to mean ‘balls’, and Adams (1982) 183, on the use of tero to
infer masturbation (see especially Priapea 83.34).
c h ap te r 2
Double vision: Ars Amatoria 1, 2 and 3
conscius, ecce, duos accepit lectus amantes.
Look, the knowing couch has taken in two lovers.
Ars 2.703
sed cuncta timemus amantes.
But we lovers fear everything.
Met.7.719
Ovid’s Medicamina might read as an accompanying pamphlet to his grand
Ars Amatoria – the epic in elegy that arms both male and female readerlovers for war, and then adds sulphur to the conflagration.1 But whereas
in the Medicamina, male and female subjects ultimately overlapped and
clashed in the same narrow, domestic space, fighting over one mirror, in
the Ars the sexes are set in parallel, and each have their own books and
worlds – Ars 1 and 2, ostensibly, for the guys, and Ars 3 for the girls. We
will see later on how Ovid sets up similar patterns, and explores similar
themes, in the ‘double’ Heroides, which develop male and female perspectives on the same relationships. However, as I will explore at length in this
chapter, the tease of the Ars Amatoria’s fiction is that lovers get to peep
into each others’ universes, learning similar tips and tricks, and sabotaging
each others’ attempts to get the psychological upper hand. Ovid gets us
hooked, like fixated fans, on an oversensitive backtracking and comparison
between books, on probing the nuanced differences and wild contradictions
between advice given to ‘men’ and to ‘women’, and on second-guessing its
lurking, potentially double-crossing motives and implications. Ovidian sex
is often painful to watch, not least because the didactic text lures readers
in, and makes maddened lovers of us all. Along with Cupid at Ars 1.170,
the reader ‘is himself part of the performance he is viewing’ (et pars spectati
1
As Gibson notes (2003) 85, the idea of love as a battle between lover and beloved is implicit in the
earliest occurrences of militia amoris (e.g. Sappho fr 1.2ff.), while arming the lovers against each other
seems to be a Propertian invention (3.8.33ff., 4.8.88).
70
71
muneris ipse fuit).2 The Ars is a didactic text about self-knowledge and selfimage that breeds anxiety, suspicion and self-doubt, a joke on the rhetoric
of knowledge which claims to teach the unteachable. As we will see at the
end of this chapter, its culminating tale of Cephalus and Procris is a fitting
finale to an education marred by double-takes and crises of credibility (vix
mihi credetis, sed credite / ‘you hardly believe me, yet believe’ 3.439).3
Yet while critics have looked hard at scenes, or individual books,
from Ovid’s Ars, explored erotic–didactic traditions, celebrated intertextual
labyrinths and metaliterary esprit, they tend to avoid relationships. This
is partly because scholarship has long assumed a separation between Ars 1
and 2 (addressed to men, and giving advice on how to get and keep a girl
respectively), and Ars 3 (giving comparable advice to a ‘female’ audience),
which has often been deemed to have been ‘tagged on’ afterwards with little
concern for integration, together with the Remedia Amoris. Yet as Sharrock
argues, the appearance of a two-book poem is duplicitous, whether or not
there were two editions. The notion that we are dealing with a three-book
work is hinted not only in the mirroring of advice to men and women,
and in the parallel examples of three-book amatory works like the Amores
(following Tibullus’ elegies), and the double Heroides (three pairs of letters)
but also in passages such as Ars 1.35–8, which lays out a three-step program
(principio 35; proximus 37; tertius 38), and 1.39–40, which puns on the meta
(of Book 2) as both the goal and the turning post for the poet’s speeding
chariot:4
hic modus, haec nostro signabitur area curru:
haec erit admissa meta terenda rota.
This is my limit, this the space my chariot will mark,
this the goal my flying wheel will graze. Ars 1.39–40
When the intercourse between books (especially 1–2 versus 3) is studied at
all, shallow conclusions are reached on the projected outcome of lovers’
2
Ovid’s amphitheatre is a panopticon. See Gunderson (1996):
3
4
‘The arena can be taken as an apparatus which not only looks in upon a spectacle, but one which
in its organisation and structure reproduces the relations between observer and observed . . . the
spectacle of the arena has a specular effect which makes a new spectacle of its own observers, revealing
and determining them through their relationship to the image of themselves produced by their
relationship to the arena’ (115–16).
Similar statements litter the Ars, and are classic Ovid: e.g. 1.79, quis credere possit?
See Sharrock (1994) 18–20. Also see the beginning of Ars 3 (Gibson 2003 ad loc.), where arma supersunt
in line 1 hints at the idea that the third book was an afterthought or supplement. The three-book
work is confirmed at Tr.1.1.112 (when Ovid imagines his book cases from exile, the text that teaches
how to love is a ‘three’, even though the books try to disguise themselves); cf. Tr.2.246 (e tribus unus).
For a recent analysis of the Ars as perpetuum carmen, see Henderson (forthcoming).
72
battles, and recent readers have been keen to pounce on the praeceptor as
a fake feminist who sets up women as victims/objects while seeming in
Ars 3 to betray a male audience. After weighing up the options (feminist
or woman-hater), Watson concludes that Ovid ‘stays on the side of the
male’ in Ars 3.5 Downing envisages a Narcissus–Echo (or in his terms, a
Pygmalion–puella) model, whereby the second half of Ars 3 is simply a
‘point-for-point counterpoint to specific precepts in the first two books’, a
‘mechanical process’ of ‘inverted citations’: he concludes that Ovid writes
as a misogynistic ‘anti-Pygmalion’ in Ars 3, turning repulsive real women
into inanimate artefacts and textual materia, and sees the worlds of Ars 1
and Ars 2 (where men are often encouraged to privilege personality and
wit over looks) and Ars 3 (where cosmetics are all-important) as neatly
opposed.6 Leach’s earlier article on Georgic imagery in the Ars Amatoria
has done much to influence feminist readings of the text: she suggests that ‘a
well-organised pattern of anti-feminist humor pervades the poem . . . Ovid
proceeds on the assumption that women are naturally uncivilised . . . like
animals and crops [they] respond in proper season to the right stimuli.’7
However, Leach chooses to ignore points where similar imagery is applied
to men (who become animals to be hunted, tender crops to be reaped, hay
to be burnt, timber to be cut and fruit to be plucked in Ars 38 ), and thus
not to read Ars 1, 2 and 3 together.
In his dense unravelling of the Cephalus and Procris tale, similarly, Green
rubbishes the two lovers’ innocence and Ovid’s veneer of equality, revealing
the transparency of male disloyalty in Ars 3, only to bury the embarrassment
of male readers’ identification with emasculated dud Cephalus: once we
have decided that Procris is a ‘conniving little trollop’, we can safely chuckle
over male double-standards and getting the boys off scot-free.9 Not so:
especially since male students in the Ars Amatoria are ever at the mercy
of contrary, unpredictable aurae, which at any point can sink their ship.
As Gibson reminds us in passing, if addressees in Ars 3 fail to benefit from
Ovid’s instruction, so do students in Ars 1 and 2.10 The praeceptor is ever the
lover himself, playing the jilted, bitter, infatuated and ambitious boyfriend
intent on manipulation, entrapment and reprisal.11 This is a teacher who
5
L. Watson (2002) 159: ‘on the whole Ovid’s precepts are presented with the advantage of the male
lover in mind’. Contrast Martin (1999), an unusual recent example of the opposite view, which claims
Ovid as the closest thing in ancient Rome to a feminist.
6 Downing (1999).
7 Leach (1964) 148, 151.
8 See Ars 3.562 (cingenda est altis saepibus ista seges), and 573–6 (ignibus heu lentis uretur, ut umida faena, /
ut modo montanis silva recisa iugis. / certior hic amor est, brevis et fecundior ille: / quae fugiunt, celeri
carpite poma manu).
9 Green (1979–80).
10 Gibson (2003) 21, n.53.
11 See Sharrock (1994) passim, especially 1–86.
73
definitely doesn’t practise what he preaches (haec ego, confiteor, non sum
perfectus in arte; / quid faciam? monitis sum minor ipse meis / ‘in this art, I
confess, I’m not perfect; what am I to do? I fall short of my own counsels’
2.547–8). Readers are never safe, even (or especially) under Daedalus’ skilled
leadership (me duce tutus eris 2.58), since the higher they fly, the farther they
fall.
While Sharrock begins to explore the complex dynamics between
books/lovers of the Ars, and comes close to entertaining dual subjects (‘that
character, the Reader, is in fact two: man and woman’),12 her objection
that erotic (and especially elegiac) discourse can usually only accommodate
lover and beloved, rather than two lovers, or (more convincing) can only
conceive of powerful women in male terms, combined with her decision
to concentrate her reading on Ars 2, immediately suspends further analysis
of this point. Myerowitz, meanwhile, underdevelops her point that women
in the Ars are often construed as rival artists (ensuring lovers are independent players) and that Ovid’s game is predicated on mutuality, opposition,
interaction, and argues at the same time that ‘women in the Ars are passive
objects of male eroticism’.13 In this chapter, I want instead to dive into the
challenges and risks of reading the books (and the gendered subjects) of
the Ars Amatoria together and side by side, and to highlight the sparks of
competition that flash between them. I will be mapping out how polarities and reflections are configured and complicated in the poem, and how
our dispassionate teacher drives us crazy in reading love – the Ars is perhaps the most difficult and frustrating of Ovid’s poems to read. In doing
so, my analysis will flit, often rather frantically, between passages, dancing along with Ovid’s Bacchic soundtrack even as I try to write down the
score.
c he c k mate s
This text will always present us with a basic problem: initially, about how
each book relates to its predecessor, as well as how differently Ovid deals
with male and female addressees. We always have to ask to what extent Ars
2 is a repetition/continuation of Ars 1, and likewise to what extent Ars 3
mirrors or is tagged onto Ars 1 and 2.14 Is each book just the same tale told
in different ways (with Ovid the wannabe epicist following in the footsteps
of Odysseus, who referre aliter saepe solebat idem 2.128)? Do Books 1 and 2
go together, or are they very different, and is Book 2 ‘between’ Ars 1 and 3
12
Sharrock (1994) 8.
13
Myerowitz (1985) 97.
14
See discussion in Sharrock (1994) 18–20.
74
(in what sense)? How does the balance (or lack of it) between 1/2 and 3
work out (especially when, as I noted in the introduction, the Remedia
Amoris seems to function in many ways as Ars 415 )? Is it really the case that
‘that which follows is not so good as that which went before’ (nec bona tam
sequitur, quam bona prima fuit 3.66), and is Ars 3 a belated thorn after the
neat garland of Ars 1 and 2 (3.68)? Or does poetry, with its powers to call back
those (elegiac) waves (3.63), cheat linear time to play by different rules? Just
as Ars 3 contains (we often imagine) asides and cheap jokes for male ears,16
to what extent do Ars 1 and 2 also nudge an (imaginary?) female readership
to read between the lines? Is it just the case that Ovid acts the sophist par
excellence, ‘playing the same game of love from opposite points of view’?17
When ars amatoria sanctions cross-dressing, even in print (girls in Ars
3.497–8 should call their male lover ‘she’ in letters to avoid detection), can
we ever be sure who Ovid’s ‘intended audience’ really is? Who, for instance,
is addressed in the tum sumus incauti at 3.371, ‘us men’, or ‘everyone, men
and women’, and is the line at 1.619 (blanditiis animum furtim deprendere
nunc sit / ‘and now is the time to ensnare the mind with crafty flatteries’),
after the interjection to puellae at 617, to be read as part of the aside to
women, or as a continuation of advice to men?
At points like these, we seem to see double, and are reminded simultaneously of Ovid’s warning at 3.764 (nec, quae sunt singula, bina vides /
‘don’t see double where there is only one’), and his caution at 3.496 that one
writing tablet can contain two hands (ne teneat geminas una tabella manus).
The question of to what extent Ovid plays the role of lena (especially the
lena of the Amores), and to what extent we can see a ‘male’ recuperation of
her role in Ars 3, is a fraught one that magnifies a wider, irresolvable issue
of whose side our poet is on.18 Ovid’s board game allegories in Ars 3.353ff.,
which involve threes and twos against ones, pose further riddles (especially
for us, as the details of these games are little known):19 the girl (and the
reader/poet?) is to throw three dice, and then reflect which side she should
15
16
17
18
19
For further discussion of the Remedia as part of the program of the Ars, see Henderson (forthcoming).
Also note that at the beginning of Ars 3, Ovid continues to address men as well as his female audience
(e.g. at 3.6, and 41–2). And at Rem.49–50, he tells readers that any instruction he gives (now and in
the past?) is intended for both men and women. Ovid also plays with the idea of a female readership
in Ars 1 and 2, e.g. 1.31f., 617f., 2.745f.
J. F. Miller (1993) 233.
See Myers (1996) and Gibson (2003) 19–21. In the Amores, the lena was only concerned with the
advantage of her female pupil: she banned involvement with poet-lovers, and recommended anger
as a weapon, whereas Ovid reverses both these precepts. Yet the question, especially when it comes
to the subject of ira, is always whether he means what he says, whether he is always willing aurae to
fan the flames even as he claims to want to suppress irrational passions.
For the basics, see Gibson (2003) 242–50.
75
best join, and which she should challenge (et modo tres iactet numeros, modo
cogitet, apte / quam subeat partem callida quamque vocet 3.355–6). But she
should also learn to play the ‘battle of the brigands’, when ‘one piece falls
before his double enemy, and the warrior caught without his mate fights on,
while the enemy retraces repeatedly the path he has begin’ (unus cum gemino
calculus hoste perit, / bellatorque suo prensus sine compare bellat, / aemulus et
coeptum saepe recurrit iter 358–60).20 Compare Ars 2.203–8, where men are
urged to throw dice badly (difficult to imagine, this, in a game of chance –
but a neat excuse for losing, in any case), in order to let her win (‘if the
piece is marching under the semblance of a robber’s band, let your warrior
fall before its glassy foe’ 207–8). If not, they’re told, ‘let no forfeit follow if
she loses’ (2.205). To what extent is Ovid’s association of male cunning and
power with an uncontrollable dice a joke that lays bare the real randomness
of his precepts, and of relationships more broadly? As Ars 3.371–80 warn,
board games are notorious for making lovers reveal their hidden passions
(nudaque per lusus pectora nostra patent / ‘in our games our hearts show clear
to see’ 3.372), and a civilized pastime can quickly descend into passionate
combat and tragi-epic display (resonat clamoribus aether 3.375; cf. resonat
magnis plangoribus aether Virg. Aen.4.668).21
The reflections that plague the cartoonishly elegiac Ars are by no means
always uniform and equilibrated, as Downing argues, even on a basic level,
where two inter-mirroring books battle a third (Thalia is always borne
on ‘unequal wheels’, imparibus rotis 1.264). I will suggest that, just as in
the Medicamina, Ovid toys in the Ars with the axiomatic catoptric tale
of Narcissus and Echo, yet allocates both roles to both men and women
(Narcissus himself is of course already a double figure, embodying both
desiring subject and loved object). Moreover, as Ovid’s instruction on cultus
transforms men gradually into Narcissuses over the course of Ars 1 and 2, he
sets them up to fall in love with and gaze at Medusas as well as Echos. As we
will see, the Perseus–Medusa confrontation is repeatedly staged in the Ars
as a drawn-out or ongoing collision, in which demonic stares boomerang
between lustrous surfaces, human and artificial.
We also glimpse traces of the (related) Salmacis–Hermaphroditus union,
and the figures of Medusa and Salmacis, with their coruscating eyes, are
copied in the characters of Juno, Athena, Dido, and Medea. The Gorgon
and her doppelgangers become Dionysiac figures, who together with the
raving Bacchants that inspire Ovid’s imagery and allegories, haunt the
20
21
Compare gemino hoste with gemini libelli (3.47).
Also cf. Virgil, Georg.3.150 (furit mugitubus aether), Aen.5.228 (resonatque fragoribus aether), and also
Ov. Met.3.231, 6.695. See note in Gibson (2003) ad loc.
76
cynical, neat mechanics of didactic courtship, and threaten to invert or crack
each looking glass. The Pasiphae of Ars 1, who seems to have been touched
and metamorphosed by the ‘horned god’,22 produces the Minotaur that is
Daedalus’ challenge and life sentence in Ars 2, while at 1.525, Ovid calls on
Bacchus for inspiration (ecce, suum vatem Liber vocat! / ‘look, Liber calls
his bard!), and at 3.667, his cry of desperation (quo feror insanus? / ‘where
am I borne in my frenzy?) mimics a series of deranged women:23 Procris
herself, as she pounces rashly on Cephalus in this same episode (Ars 3.731–2),
but also Dido (Aen.4.595), Byblis (Met.9.509), and Myrrha (Met.10.320).24
Seeing (and the Bacchants’ Theban blindness) is the dominant metaphor
in this text, introduced in Ars 1, where seduction begins in the theatre, and
by the myth of Paris’ judgement in the beauty contest, references to which
span the entire work. More often than not, though, the object of men’s
affection is not Venus but Juno, the woman judged but ill-rewarded for
her looks who is thenceforth bent on retribution. Yet throughout the Ars,
the roles of seer and seen (and subject–object positions more generally) are
precarious and confused. Lookers are always looked at (spectatum veniunt,
veniunt spectentur ut ipsae / ‘they come to the games to watch, but they also
come to be seen’ 1.99; cf. 2.503: cui faciem natura dedit, spectetur ab illa),
and eyes regularly meet across crowded rooms (atque oculos oculis spectare
fatentibus ignem / ‘you may gaze at her eyes with eyes that confess their fire’
1.573). The positions of male and female lovers in the Ars, as we will see in
detail in the sections that follow, appear to continually shift and overlap,
producing some striking contradictions, confusions and tensions that are
especially evident when we read Books 1 and 2 against Book 3, and vice
versa.
an eye fo r an eye
In the Ars, the idea of self and other/enemy collapsing into one, and/or
suffering the same fate, or of falling into traps he or she has set, is endemic,
embroidered by a relay of verbal and metrical patternings which enact a
nervous, ambitious mirroring between books, and between male and female
lovers: et qui spectavit vulnera, vulnus habet / ‘he who watched the wounds
22
23
24
Bacchus is insignis cornu (3.348), and Pasiphae runs to the woods like a Bacchant ‘sped by the Aonian
god’ (1.312).
As critics have noted (e.g. J. F. Miller 1993), we can trace an increasing ironization of teacher qua
teacher in the Ars: Ovid betrays a considerable lack of control over his material, a comic manipulation
of his didactic mask which is itself evidence of artistic control. On this point also see Durling (1958).
As Gibson notes (2003), Ovid also behaves like a tragic Medea or Dido at 3.671–2, when he casts
aside indecisiveness and settles on a course of action despite the personal consequences.
77
has himself been wounded’ 1.166; laesa Venus iusta arma movet telumque
remittit / ‘Venus when injured wages righteous war, and flings the weapon
back’ 2.397; victor erat praedae praeda pudenda suae / ‘the victor was his
own captive’s shameful prey’ 2.406; in laqueos, quos posuere, cadant / ‘let
them fall into the snare which they have laid’ 1.646; ergo, ut periuras merito
periuria fallant, / exemplo doleat femina laesa suo / ‘so, that perjuries may
rightly cheat the perjured, let the woman feel the pain of the wound she
first inflicted’ 1.657–8.25
Ovid makes the elegiac couplet (as well as the three-book schema), which
replays ad infinitum an (imperfect) mirroring of the hexameter line,26 function as a system to enact and configure every specular patterning. In his tit
for tat game that plays on elegiac doubleness, men are advised to ‘deceive
the deceivers’ (fallite fallentes 1.645). In Ars 1 and 2, the way to woo women
is to ape their every move: in Ars 1, pupils are instructed not to shy away
from union (iunge tuum lateri qua potes usque latus / ‘snuggle up against her
as much as you can’ 1.140; cf. nec . . . sit pudor . . . lateri continuasse latus
/ ‘don’t hesitate to join your side to hers’ 495–6). Moreover, while at this
point the male protagonist seems to be the active partner (illam respicias,
illam mirere licebit / ‘you might look at her, admire her’ 1.499), it is he who
must contrive, Echo-like, to mirror her (cum surgit, surges; donec sedet illa,
sedebis / ‘when she rises, you will too; when she sits, you sit’ 1.503). If we
look forward to Ars 2.197–202, Ovid again advises his pupils to mimic their
beloved’s actions and words. Yet this passage is also very reminiscent of the
experience of Narcissus in Met.3, an episode which, as Rosati has discussed
at length, is saturated with verbal repetitions and mirrorings:27
cede repugnanti: cedendo victor abibis;
fac modo, quas partes illa iubebit, agas.
arguet: arguito; quicquid probat illa, probato;
quod dicet, dicas; quod negat illa, neges.
riserit: arride; si flebit, flere memento:
imponat leges vultibus illa tuis.
25
26
27
The fate of the ‘biter bitten’ is proverbial, and is the traditional fear of the praeceptor amoris: see e.g.
Tib. 1.6.9f., Ov. Am.1.4.45f., 2.18.19f., 2.19.33f.
In Am.2.17.21–2, Ovid compares the unequal partnering of hexameter with pentameter to his relationship with Corinna, which he then likens to Vulcan’s courtship of Venus (Vulcan also incarnates
the uneven elegiac couplet since he walks with a limp): carminis hoc ipsum genus inpar; sed tamen
apte / iungitur herous cum breviore modo / ‘this kind of verse it itself uneven; and yet it’s right that
the heroic line is joined to the shorter one’. As Sharrock puts it (1990) 571: ‘reciprocity is reflected in
the basic structural unit of elegiac poetry, prone as it is to balance, anaphora, and many varieties of
repetition and echo’. On the elegiac resonances of the Narcissus–Echo story see Knox (1986) 19–23,
and Rosati (1983).
Rosati (1983) 1–50.
78
Give in if she resists: if you yield you’ll come out winner;
Just play the part that she has written for you.
If she blames, you blame too; approve what she approves,
affirm what she affirms; deny what she denies.
If she laughs, laugh with her, if she weeps, mind you weep too.
Ars 2.197–202
Let her dictate your every expression.
Compare Met.3.457–62, when Narcissus addresses his own reflection, just
before realizing that he is his mirror-image:
spem mihi nescioquam vultu promittis amico,
cumque ego porrexi tibi bracchia, porrigis ultro;
cum risi, adrides; lacrimas quoque saepe notavi
me lacrimante tuas; nutu quoque signa remittis
et, quantum motu formosi suspicor oris,
verba refers aures non pervenientia nostras.
You give me hope with your friendly face,
and when I stretch out arms to you, you stretch yours too.
When I smile, then you smile back; and I’ve often seen your tears
as I weep myself; when I beckon, you give a nod,
and, I suspect, from the movement of those perfect lips,
you even answer me with words that never reach my ears.
Ovid’s male pupils, then, are to play-act as Echo, or as Narcissus’ reflection,
in order to catch their prey, complicating passivity as aggression in disguise
and confusing subject/object roles. Who is it that makes the first move in
Ovid’s relationships, when in Ars 1, the cynical man on the pull is combating
a wound already inflicted?
In the first two books of the Ars, Ovid visualizes his male audience not
just as Narcissus’ mirror-image, but also as undergoing a gradual transformation into Narcissus himself, culminating in Ars 2, where, as Sharrock
argues, the Ovidian praeceptor suggests a homoerotic relationship between
himself and his pupil, addressing him as puer formosus, and flattering him
like an elegiac puella28 or abandoned heroine.29 At 2.209–16, Ovid comes
close to suggesting that men should themselves enjoy the accoutrements of
femininity in catering to their girlfriend’s every need: he should hold her
parasol when they are out walking, offer her the footstool, help her take off
her dainty slipper, and hold her mirror in his hand:
28
29
E.g. 2.112: ingenii dotes corporis adde bonis ; cf. Propertius 1.2.6, to Cynthia.
2.111: ut dominam teneas, nec te mirere relictum / ‘so that you might keep your mistress, and not
marvel to find yourself abandoned’.
79
nec tibi turpe puta (quamvis sit turpe, placebit)
ingenua speculum sustinuisse manu.
Don’t think it shameful (it may be shameful, but it’s sure to please),
Ars 2.215–16
to hold a mirror in your freeborn hand.
We are tempted to ask: ‘Please whom?’ Ovid declines to spell out here the
idea that the lover holds up the mirror for the girl, rather than using it (in
addition) to admire himself. There seems to be a fine line between flattering
and imitating women, as lovers inch ever closer to Narcissus’ tragic fate.
We should recall that Ars 1.505ff. had dictated firmly that men should never
be concerned with preening themselves, an activity for which a mirror is
essential, for fear of looking like a woman, or a eunuch Bacchant out only
to satisfy other men.30 Yet by Ars 2, it is clear that mirror-gazing Narcissus
is the unnamed model for the charming young lover, desired by both men
and women, who undertakes Ovid’s rite of passage to adult sexuality. Ars 3,
meanwhile, counsels women to avoid men who profess elegance and good
looks, or who spend time arranging their hair (3.433–4):31 when men and
women want the same flouncy robe, this is a recipe for war (as well as for
another reenactment of the Narcissus–Echo courtship). Look for example
at the reverberation at Ars 3.449–50, which as Gibson notes, reverses the
situation at 1.431ff., where it is women who are accused of habitual petty
theft:32
‘redde meum!’ clamant spoliatae saepe puellae,
‘redde meum’ toto voce boante foro.
‘give it back, it’s mine’ robbed women often cry;
‘give it back, it’s mine’ echo voices through the forum.
Ars 3.449–50
By Ars 3 (thanks partly, no doubt, to Ovid’s flattery in Ars 1 and 2), men
just love themselves (praecipue si cultus erit speculoque placebit, / posse suo
tangi credet amore deas / ‘especially if he is well-dressed and likes the look
of himself in a mirror, he’ll believe that goddesses could fall in love with
him’ 681–2). This is the same flaw that mars women in Ars 1.613 (nec credi
30
31
32
Ovid’s advice in Ars 1 is, however, typically slippery. Ovid’s first example of a ‘bit of rough’ is Theseus,
whose unaccessorized hair was no barrier to him whisking off Ariadne (1.509–10). Yet a mere 50 lines
later, it is girly Bacchus himself who ultimately comes out on top, when he steals away Ariadne on
the rebound from Theseus.
As Gibson notes (2003) ad loc., the phrase in statione, used here for styling the hair, suggests ‘feminine’
attention to the hairdo, cf. e.g. Am.1.7.68.
Gibson (2003) ad loc.
80
labor est; sibi quaeque videtur amanda; / pessima sit, nulli sua forma placet /
‘nor is it hard to be believed; each woman thinks herself lovable; even if
she’s hideous, there is none her own looks do not please’).
Of course, the Narcissus myth maps neatly onto Ovid’s project of selfknowledge in the Ars, and students/readers (like Narcissus’ underworld
equal Tantalus)33 are doomed to suffer repeatedly the Narcissus narrative
of naı̈vety and credence followed by intense and shameful self-awareness
(duc age discipulos ad mea templa tuos, / est ubi diversum fama celebrata per
orbem / littera, cognosci quae sibi quemque iubet / ‘come, lead your pupils to
my shrine, where there is a saying of global fame, which orders each to be
known to himself’ 2.498–500; cf. nota sibi sint quaeque / ‘let each woman
know herself’ 3.771): the path to success in love in the Ars is haunted,
after the Metamorphoses, by Narcissus’ tragedy. Yet, just as obviously, a
textbook that schools pupils in the art of acting and perfecting a look can
also produce top-class, Protean impressionists (and for men, at least, it’s
what’s inside that counts).34 After all, Achilles managed to enter Deidamia’s
chamber and rape her by dressing in drag (haec illum stupro comperit esse
virum / ‘when she was violated she found out he was a man’ 1.698).35
Similarly, the role of Narcissus (like that of Echo) can potentially be adopted
as a mask by both men and women, to be worn and dropped when it
suits.
In Ars 3, women too are instructed in the same mirroring strategies, first
at 461–2 (although here they do not physically copy men, but adopt the
same techniques and exchange equivalent things):
si bene promittent, totidem promittite verbis;
si dederint, et vos gaudia pacta date.
If they make fair promises, promise in as many words:
If they give, give back your bargained joys.
Then at 491–2:
iudice me fraus est concessa repellere fraudem,
armaque in armatos sumere iura sinunt.
I judge that fraud may be repelled by fraud, that
arming against the armed is allowed by law.
33
34
35
Readers are warned about this fate at Ars 2.605–6: o bene, quod frustra captatis arbore pomis / garrulus
in media Tantalus aret aqua! / ‘It’s just that Tantalus clutches in vain at the apples on the tree, and is
dying of thirst in the midst of water’.
At Ars 1.761ff., the wise man should change fashions as often as Proteus changes shape.
Note that Ovid’s address to Achilles (quid facis, Aeacide? 1.691) parallels the apostrophe to ridiculed
Pasiphae at 1.303 (quo tibi, Pasiphae?).
81
And finally at 513–14 (this time the mirroring is bodily, as it is in Met.3):
spectantem specta; ridenti mollia ride;
innuet, acceptas tu quoque redde notas.
Look at him who looks at you, send back his charming smile:
If he beckons, acknowledge and return his nod.
Indeed, at points throughout the Ars, we can read female characters approximating Echo’s role in her relationship with Narcissus. For example, when
Ovid, at Ars 2.441–2, adds sulphur to the flames of passion and goads a
woman’s heart, he hints at triggering another reiteration of the Narcissus–
Echo tragedy:
sed tamen extinctas admoto sulphure flammas
invenit et lumen, quod fuit ante, redit.
But add sulphur, and it sniffs out the smothered flames,
and the light that glowed there once, returns.
Compare the description of Echo at Met.3.372–4, enflamed by Juno’s wicked
spell:
quoque magis sequitur, flamma propriore calescit,
non aliter quam cum summis circumlita taedis
admotas rapiunt vivacia sulphura flammas.
And the more she chased, the more she fed the fire,
just as reactive sulphur, smeared round the tops of torches,
catches light in an instant from a nearby flame.
In the story of Ariadne’s abandonment at Ars 1.525ff., similarly, the heroine (or the poet?) repeats her own exclamation, ‘quid mihi fiet’ ait. / ‘quid
mihi fiet’ ait / ‘ “what will become of me?” she cried, “what will become of
me?” ’(536–7). Her wails are then ‘(re-)echoed’ by Bacchic percussion in the
lines that follow (sonuerunt cymbala toto / litore, et adtonita tympana pulsa
manu / ‘then all along the shore the cymbals clashes and drums were banged
by frenzied hands’ 537–8). She is so crazed with grief that she faints, losing
the blood in her body and breaking off novissima verba (539) just as bodiless Echo can only repeat the last words she hears (reddere de multis ut verba
novissima posset Met.3.361). Theseus’ parting has robbed her of her voice
(et color et Theseus et vox abiere puellae 1.551). Yet these are her own words,
not someone else’s, and Ariadne plays the roles of both Echo and Narcissus.
She pounds her soft (ultra-realistic) bosom with her hands (iamque iterum
tundens mollissima pectora palmis 535), just as Narcissus strikes his hard
‘marble’ breast at Met.3.481 (nudaque marmoreis percussit pectora palmis),
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yet Ariadne’s self-punishment is intensified by the excited hands of Bacchants, banging out the drumbeat of repetition. So too, Bacchus’ elopement
with Ariadne stages, for everyone to see, the Dionysiac/Oedipal subtext to
the Narcissus and Echo episode often recognized by critics in Metamorphoses
3:36 Ariadne acts out Pentheus’ part as the terrified object of the Bacchants’
look (in fact she is ‘to be gazed at’ for evermore, spectabere, as a star, 557)
while embodying (in her multiple identifications) the deranged doublings
that characterise both Narcissus’ and Bacchus’ gaze. For Dionysius has the
power to make his victim Pentheus see double at Euripides, Bacchae 918–
19, a line imitated by Vergil in the tragic stage simile applied to Dido at
Aen.4.470, [Pentheus videt] et solem geminum et duplices se ostendere Thebas,
and in turn alluded to in Narcissus’ confrontation of his own eyes at Ovid
Met.3.420 (spectat humi positus geminum, sua lumina, sidus).
Similarly, in the line I have just highlighted at Ars 3.513 (spectantem
specta . . .), the woman is actively looking, yet her gaze is secondary, for
she is the mirror-image of the man looking at her (spectantem), just as
in Ars 3.419–22 the beautiful woman who offers herself to be seen is like
a wolf on the attack.37 The syntax here renders woman both object and
subject: being looked at can itself be, paradoxically, a combative stance, as
the figure of Medusa proves. As we’ve seen already in the Medicamina, both
sexes in Ovid have sanctioned access to the magic of the mirror, the device
which notoriously confounds the distinction between self and other.38 A
comparable paradox takes shape in Ars 3.311ff., when women are advised
to develop their voices and become dangerously attractive Sirens to hook
their men (as well as, we imagine, to sink the ships Ovid steers).39 Yet this
risk factor is subdued or rivalled by the notion that women who sing use
their voice instead of their looks to seduce (pro facie multis vox sua lena
fuit / ‘for many voice in place of face has been their procuress’ 3.316), a
line which comes close to punishing clever, persuasive women with Echo’s
36
37
38
39
See Hardie (2002a) 165ff., and Feldherr (1997). In Met.3.421, Narcissus’ hair is digni Baccho, and
there seems also to be a mirror link between Narcissus and Bacchus: while Narcissus is duped by a
mirror image, effeminate Dionysus carries a mirror, which the Titans use to trick him before tearing
him to pieces. See Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant (1997) 223, 234–5. On the Dionysiac associations
of Lucr. 4.572–94, an important source for Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus, see Buchheit (1984) 144–6.
ad multas lupa tendit oves, praedetur ut unam, / et Iovis in multas devolat ales aves: / se quoque det
populo mulier speciosa videndam; quem trahat, e multis forsitan unus erit. / ‘The wolf draws near to
many sheep, so that she might prey on just one, and the eagle of Jupiter swoops down on many
birds. So, too, the beautiful woman should show herself off to the public, and out of many there
might perhaps be one she attracts.’
As Plato observes in the Sophist, mirror images share with semblances of all kinds an ambiguous
mixture of being and non-being (240a). McCarty (1989) 162, comments: ‘the mirroring vision is
precisely something that is there yet also not there, hence it challenges the mentality that thinks in
terms of here and there, or self and non-self ’. It is ‘ontologically ambiguous as well as fascinating’.
As Gibson notes (2003) ad loc, courtesans and prostitutes are often called or compared to Sirens.
83
fate by making them voice alone. Especially as they are instructed to start
practising by repeating ditties heard in marble theatres (et modo marmoreis
referant audita theatris 3.317). At his most sadistic (a malicious Cephalus,
say the gossips), the lover might get a kick out of hurting his girl and taking
away her voice, as we see in the middle of Ars 2:
o quater et quotiens numero comprendere non est
felicem, de quo laesa puella dolet!
quae, simul invitas crimen pervenit ad aures,
excidit, et miserae voxque colorque fugit.
How immeasurably happy is the man
for whom an injured woman pines!
At first, she refuses to believe the crime, then
slumps, poor girl, white-faced and drained of voice.
Ars 2.447–50
Compare Procris at Ars 3.699–702, another Echo impersonator rendered
mute by the revelation of a lover’s infidelity:
coniugis ad timidas aliquis male sedulus aures
auditos memori detulit ore sonos;
Procris, ut accepit nomen, quasi paelicis, Aurae,
excidit, et subito muta dolore fuit.
Some idiot gossip gave his wife, who listened nervously,
a blow by blow account of what he’d heard.
And when he said the name of ‘rival’ Aura – so it seemed –
Procris sank, struck dumb by the sudden, painful blow.
Yet (quite apart from the fact that it takes one to know one), packaging
woman as Echo is always, like everything else, a fraught game in the Ars,
as the following section explores.
fatal at trac t ion s
For in stripping his laesa puella of her voice by cheating on her in Ars 2.450,
Ovid’s lover also stirs a Medusan revenge. Look now at 2.451–4:
ille ego sim, cuius laniet furiosa capillos;
ille ego sim, teneras cui petat ungue genas,
quem videat lacrimans, quem torvis spectet ocellis,
quo sine non possit vivere, posse velit.
May I be the man whose hair she tears out in her fury;
may I be the man whose tender cheeks she gouges with her nails,
the man she stares at as he weeps, who she fixes with her angry eyes,
the one she can’t live with, but can never live without.
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When she tears his hair, scratches his cheeks and glares at him with livid
eyes (torvis ocellis 453), this is also the gaze that epitomized Medusa at
2.309 (ut fuerit torva violentior illa Medusa . . . / ‘though she might be
more violent than grim Medusa . . .’).40 Throughout the Ars Amatoria, in
fact, we can trace a Medusa–Perseus conflict whose antagonisms disrupt
the easy symmetries of the Narcissus–Echo tale. ‘Sharp goads must spur
on love’ (acribus est stimulis eliciendus amor 2.444), and Medusa’s wild
and bloated face, her hair streaming and hissing like a raving Bacchant, is
guaranteed to spice up any flagging romance. Ovid’s calls for peace at Ars
2.145ff. ring ridiculously hollow, especially after conflicting advice in Ars
1 (indeed he begins this new section at 2.143 by admonishing readers not
to trust appearances): while harshness causes hatred (odium) and savage
wars (2.146), Ovid’s so-called pacifism itself begins with hatred (odimus /
‘we hate’ 2.147), directed at wolves (i.e. women: see e.g 3.8, 3.419);41 the
‘gentle sparrow’ free from men’s attack (at caret insidiis homimum, quia
mitis, hirundo 2.149) turns up again at 2.383, amongst Ovid’s examples of
women enraged by male infidelity, this time as bloodstained Procne, the
hirundo who took revenge precisely for male violence. The lawless love of
2.157, non legis iussu lectum venistis in unum, has become the violata iura of
2.381.42 And at 2.169–72, the memory of an irate poet roughing up Corinna
in Amores 1.7 again stains his dove-white message (even though pupils are
afterwards encouraged to ‘avoid their master’s errors’ (2.173). It is always
the case that militiae species amor est (‘love is a kind of warfare’ 2.233).
In Ars 1.53, similarly, (although at this point, fledgling lovers are not
forced to look the Gorgon in the eye), Ovid promises that men will feel
like Perseuses in Rome, where there are thousands of Andromedas for the
taking. Yet Perseus’ association with a much more dangerous woman is
barely concealed, especially on re-reading: perhaps they would prefer an
older, sharper type? (1.65). In Ars 2 and 3, the middle-aged woman has a
nasty look about her, as I discuss below. The hunter should know where
the boar with gnashing teeth hides (1.46), just as a lover should find out
where girls hang out (try the Portico of the Danaids, for instance, 1.72,
which commemorates the slaughter of grooms on the night before their
40
41
42
The adjective torvus is also used of the boar at 2.190, transfixed by Milanion in his bid to impress
(and finally capture) Atalanta.
Lupa is often used to describe women who are predatory in a sexual or financial sense, especially
low-class prostitutes.
Although Ovid stresses at 2.154–6 that quarrelling is only done by husbands and wives, not lovers,
many of his examples thenceforth are based on conjugal couples, and the idea of there being two
separate kinds of love affair is very confused.
85
wedding). There’s no question about it: the knives are out, and Ovid is
already willing male and female lovers to stab each other in the back.
The possibility (or the promise) of encountering a Medusa in the Ars
is both scary and tantalizing, and the Ovidian lover is schooled to tread a
fine line between exciting competition and emasculating threat. The trick,
Ovid tells his readers in Ars 2.287ff., is to let her play the queen, to let her
think she is in control of the acts of seeing and being seen (perde nihil,
partes illa potentis agat / ‘waste nothing, let her play top dog’ 294). Let her
believe you are spellbound by her beauty, a victim of her Gorgon’s gaze
(attonitum forma fac putet esse sua / ‘be sure she thinks you’re awestruck
by her looks’ 296). We might recall that attonitus is the adjective used to
describe the effect of Medusa’s snake-hair, worn as an image on Minerva’s
breast, in Met.4.802 (ut attonitos formidine terreat hostes /‘so as to frighten
her fear-numbed foes’). In reality, he goes on to reveal, she is probably
‘more violent than Medusa’, but she too will play down her powers and be
‘mild and gentle to her lover’ (ut fuerit torva violentior illa Medusa, / fiet
amatori lenis et aequa suo 2.309–10). Compare Ars 3.553–4, where women
must pretend not to have a scary face:
dissimulate tamen, nec prima fronte rapaces
este: novus viso casse resistet amans.
But fake it, and don’t let your face betray your greed:
A new lover will run a mile if he sees the trap.
Or note Ars 3.281–90, where women should guard against a Gorgon-like
grimace when laughing at jokes:
quis credat? discunt etiam ridere puellae,
quaeritur atque illis hac quoque parte decor.
sint modici rictus parvaeque utrimque lacunae,
et summos dentes ima labella tegant,
nec sua perpetuo contendant ilia risu,
sed leve nescio quid femineumque sonet.
est quae perverso distorqueat ora cachinno;
risu concussa est altera, flere putes;
illa sonat raucum quiddam atque inamabile: ridet,
ut rudit a scabra turpis asella mola.
Who would believe it? Women even learn to laugh;
For this, too, they need to know the etiquette.
The mouth should gape just slightly, cheek dimples at a minimum,
and the edge of the lip should cover where the teeth begin.
Nor should they bust a gut with ungovernable giggles,
86
but chuckle with a feminine sort of trill.
One will distort her face with a hideous cackle,
another is in fits and looks like she’s weeping.
That one snorts – a harsh and highly unattractive sound,
like a foul ass braying at the rough millstone.
The idea that the lover pretends to be attonitus by his girl’s face at 2.296 is
undermined by the ensuing revelation, at 2.309, that she really is a Medusa.
Maintaining that your paralysis is a put-on is one way of defending yourself
(or at least your reputation) against a woman’s Gorgon-like powers. The
lover with a black belt in amatory arts must always wield a mask-like face
that is as impenetrable as Perseus’ shield (effice, nec vultu destrue dicta tuo
/ ‘see to it that facial expression doesn’t undo your words’ 2.312): thus
petrification can always be passed off as the ultimate self-control. Yet the
risk is always that a lover grows into the pose that at first is so artificially
worn. As we have seen, when in Ars 1 Ovid advises his students to play
the heartstruck beau (just as he did in the opening poems of Amores 1),
he warns: saepe tamen vere coepit simulator amare; / saepe, quod incipiens
finxerat esse, fuit / ‘yet often the pretender starts to fall in love for real, often
he turns into the role he has played’ (615–16).
Just as there seems to be space for complacency, Medusa’s feral face is
again unveiled in the description of a woman scorned at 2.373ff. She can
out-savage a red boar, a lioness, or a poisonous snake:
sed neque fulvus aper media tam saevus in ira est,
fulmineo rabidos cum rotat ore canes,
nec lea, cum catulis lactantibus ubera praebet,
nec brevis ignaro vipera laesa pede
femina quam socii deprensa paelice lecti:
ardet et in vultu pignora mentis habet.
A red boar on the rampage is not half as savage
when it circles rabid hounds with lightning jaw;
Nor is the lioness, as she feeds her newborn cubs,
nor the tiny adder wounded by a careless foot –
Nothing’s like a woman whose lover has strayed:
Her face says it all – she’s burning up with rage.
Ars 2.373–8
No dissimulating and playing the meek puella now: her face (and Medusa
is all face) betrays every emotion. However, a few lines later Ovid adds (ever
the mischievous tease), don’t let this put you off . . . (2.387ff.). Compare
Ars 3.7–8, where he resists male readers’ objections when they ask: ‘why add
87
poison to the serpents, or betray a sheepfold to the mad she-wolf?’ (‘quid
virus in angues / adicis et rabidae tradis ovile lupae?’).
In Ars 3, Ovid again ‘hates’ the Medusan woman while at the same
time making her essential to his militia amoris: mad moods are simply
‘not becoming’, being the antithesis of candida pax (3.501–2), especially
when the female face ‘swells up with passion, the veins blacken with blood,
and eyes flash more savagely than Gorgon’s fire’ (3.503–4). After all, Pallas
Athene, whose position here, as Gibson suggests, is linked to the appearance
of the Gorgon’s head on the goddess’ shield,43 threw away her flute when
she saw her own red, puffed-up reflection in a stream (505–6). Just so,
Ovid adds, replaying at the same time Narcissus’ delusion and Perseus’
revenge: ‘should you in mid-passion look in a mirror, scarce one of you
would know her own features’ (vos quoque si media speculum spectetis in
ira, / cognoscat faciem vix satis ulla suam 3.507–8).44 Moreover, the Gorgon’s
snaky hair (often in disguise, naturally) seethes through Ars 3: for good
reason men should not be allowed to see a woman’s tresses lawless (non sint
sine lege capilli 3.133), or unbound (3.235–8), and the poor slave forced to
play hairdresser weeps, bloodstained, over the ‘hated locks’ (plorat in invisas
sanguinulenta comas 242). The best way to satirize and demonize a woman,
especially if she is attractive, is to destroy her beautiful hair (remember that
Medusa herself suffered this fate, since before her metamorphosis, her hair
was her best feature).45 See for example Ars 3.165–8, where balding women
can buy new hair for old, and 3.245–50, when Ovid recounts how he once
burst in on a woman who’d yet to put on her wig (a head without hair
is as ugly as a bull without horns, he says at 3.249–50, which also serves
as another dig at the ridiculed Pasiphae of Ars 1.305–8, who when styling
her hair in the mirror, wished that horns grew on her brow).46 Yet even as
Ovid castrates his puellae by taming, artifying or removing their hair, his
contradictory ars allows for a covert reassertion of Medusan magic: while
men can do nothing about greying hair, women (like serpents, who simply
shrug off old skin 3.77) can stain it with ‘German juices’ (3.163–4). And in
the obsessive focus on hairstyles at Ars 3.129–68, he concedes that neglected
43
44
45
46
Gibson (2003) ad loc.
This line subtly hints at both naı̈vety and a tragic confrontation of reality: she does not recognize
(cognoscat), in the sense that she does not want to, but nevertheless does (?) acknowledge the truth
of her reflection.
See again Met.4.796–7: nec in tota conspectior ulla capillis / pars fuit / ‘nor was there any part of
her more worth looking at than her hair’. On Freudian and other interpretations of female hair as
symbol of desire, and on why ‘the objectification of woman as a sexual body necessarily requires
coming to terms with the presence of her head’, see Eilberg Schwartz (1995) 1–14.
Also compare the smug Am.1.14 (formosae periere comae 31).
88
hair, if it is contrived to appear dishevelled, is a very attractive look on many
women (et neglecta decet multas coma 153). Yet the problem is always that
the Ars Amatoria makes it very tricky to distinguish between a real Medusa
or wild, Dionysiac woman, and a woman who is merely trying on the mask
for size: indeed, the figure of Medusa, with her false, fixed face, epitomizes
Ovid’s trained actor–lover.
If we return for a moment to Ars 2, we can see that the misogyny that
surrounds the sexually mature woman and invests her with castrating,
paralysing (stiffening) powers, has its mythical incarnation in the figure
of the Gorgon:47 she is the trump card Ovid plays, as he concludes his
defence of the older woman with one final, dazzling exemplum:
scilicet Hermionen Helenae praeponere posses,
et melior Gorge quam sua mater erat?
et Venerem quicumque voles attingere seram,
si modo duraris, praemia digna feres.
Could you honestly rank Hermione over Helen,
and was the Gorgon better looking than her mother?
Whoever you are, if you want to try out older women just stick it out, you won’t be disappointed.
Ars 2.699–702
The Gorgon’s mother may be a push-over for a Perseus accustomed to
younger, deadlier women like her daughter (crucially, he’ll see her eyes
confessing defeat when they make love: aspiciam dominae victos amentis
ocellos; 2.691). Yet the hint at her continued fertility in line 668 (iste feret
segetes, iste serendus ager / ‘that field will bear crops, that field must be
sown’) harbours the threat of Medusa’s (re-)birth. This anti-Venus, at once
irresistible and (or because) repulsive, is more trouble than she looks. Ovid’s
appeal, far from reassuring his male readers, whips up the paranoid fear
of Medusa’s gaze which runs throughout his instruction in Ars 1 and 2,
books primarily geared, of course, towards hooking the daughters, not the
mothers. Yet as I have stressed, both male and female lovers in Ovid are (to
a greater or lesser degree) advised to attempt to manipulate the Gorgon’s
powers, to mechanize their surface appearance:48 the male reader uses her
47
48
Medusa causes death-by-erection: the state of being petrified is a kind of priapism (as well as,
paradoxically, a state of impotence). Ferenczi (1926) postulates, in addition to the idea that Medusa’s
snaky hair is a mass of castrated penises, that ‘the fearful and staring eyes of the Medusa head also
have the secondary meaning of erection’.
While it highlights some basic contrasts, Downing’s argument (1999) 235, that in the Ars Amatoria,
men (in Ars 1 and 2) mechanize and replace their inner lives, whereas women (in Ars 3) mechanize
and replace their superficial, surface appearance, oversimplifies the opposition of male and female in
89
stony stare to his advantage by predicting and (apotropaically) feigning it
himself (or so he claims), whereas the puella enhances the power of her gaze
by assuming a passive, kindly look, thus foiling attempts by her opponent
to forearm himself against her withering glance. As in the Medicamina,
Ovid’s fantasy of erotic interaction is a duel of (potential) equals in which
mirroring male and female contestants battle it out for control of the look.
Throughout the Ars, we are seeing, the catoptric myths of Narcissus and
Medusa, often plotted in tandem, make nonsense of stable hierarchies and
unequivocal advantage.
an d s o to be d
We cannot discuss the power games of Ars 1 and 2 (versus 3), however,
without looking closely at the ‘finale’ to male instruction, the sex scenes
at 2.703ff. For at first sight, at least, this passage seems to leave gender
wars behind and paint a progressive picture of harmonious equality and
mutual submission between the sheets.49 As James puts it, the episode has
‘often been cited as an example of a protofeminist manifesto of women’s
rights to sexual pleasure’.50 Ovid has been stressing the artistic skills of the
older woman, which ensures her ability to rival and provoke (both author
and male lovers): these women wrote the Kama Sutra, and no flat tabella
could outdo their live performance art (utque velis, Venerem iungunt per mille
figuras: / invenit plures nulla tabella modos / ‘according to your taste, they will
embrace you in a thousand ways; no picture could devise more modes than
they’ 2.679–80), just as, at Ars 3.321–4, educating women as artists invests
them with a power to animate stone that rivals Orpheus/Pygmalion.51 Far
from serving as bleating Echos, they need no help from the Muses to
49
50
51
this text. Ovid’s advice to men in the Ars is contradictory: at first (1.509): forma viros neglecta decet, /
‘a scruffy appearance is becoming to men’, but at the same time appearances, and the use of mirrors
to attempt to control how one is seen, are just as crucial for men as they are for women.
As Henderson puts it (forthcoming): ‘the idea that women must conquer you too, in bed, is to all
appearances a surprise twist, as the conclusion to two books of all-out predation, assault, seduction
and sexploitation’.
See James (2003) 205, and the discussion that follows. Throughout her interesting analysis of the
Ars, James is interested in the praeceptor’s misogynistic attitude towards women, but this leads her to
play down or ignore points at which male supremacy is undercut. For her (210–11), the puella ‘bears
all the risks of elegiac love’, while the male amator ‘risks only his time, money, and ego’.
A woman should learn to play the lyre, because ‘with his lyre Orpheus of Rhodope moved rocks
and hearts . . . At the sound of your music, most just avenger of your mother, the stones dutifully
formed walls by themselves.’ Compare Downing (1999), which argues that Ovid/male readers play
the anti-Pygmalion artist, turning real women into shackled statues: see e.g. 3.219–20, where an
unimproved woman is compared to the statues of Myron, which although famous, were once a
‘hard mass and lifeless weight’.
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be well-spoken (sponte sua sine te celeberrima verba loquentur / ‘of their
own accord, and unassisted, they’ll talk with eloquence’ 2.705) – thus two
desiring subjects have entered Ovid’s bedroom (conscius, ecce, duos accepit
lectus amantes 2.703). Lines 703–32 of Ars 2 celebrate the blissful, effortless
parity of the two sexes, and two experienced lovers, who generously give
and take pleasure:
conscius, ecce, duos accepit lectus amantes:
ad thalami clausas, Musa, resiste fores.
sponte sua sine te celeberrima verba loquentur,
nec manus in lecto laeva iacebit iners;
invenient digiti quod agant in partibus illis,
in quibus occulte spicula tingit Amor.
fecit in Andromache prius hoc fortissimus Hector
nec solum bellis utilis ille fuit;
fecit et in capta Lyrneside magnus Achilles,
cum premeret mollem lassus ab hoste torum.
illis te manibus tangi, Brisei, sinebas,
imbutae Phyrgia quae nece semper erant.
an fuit hoc ipsum quod te, lasciva, iuvaret,
ad tua victrices membra venire manus?
crede mihi, non est Veneris properanda voluptas
sed sensim tarda prolicienda mora.
cum loca reppereris, quae tangi femina gaudet,
non obstet, tangas quo minus illa, pudor:
aspicies oculos tremulo fulgore micantes,
ut sol a liquida saepe refulget aqua;
accedent questus, accedet amabile murmur
et dulces gemitus aptaque verba ioco.
sed neque tu dominam velis maioribus usus
desere, nec cursus anteat illa tuos;
ad metam properate simul: tum plena voluptas,
cum pariter victi femina virque iacent.
hic tibi servandus tenor est, cum libera dantur
otia, furtivum nec timor urget opus.
cum mora non tuta est, totis incumbere remis
utile et admisso subdere calcar equo.
Look, the knowing couch has taken in two lovers:
Stop there, Muse, at the locked bedroom door.
Unassisted, of their own accord, they’ll converse wittily,
nor will their left hands lie idle on the bed.
Their fingers will find what to do in those parts
where Love in secret dips his darts.
Heroic Hector did this with Andromache –
he didn’t just excel at fighting wars;
705
710
715
720
725
730
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Achilles tried the same with captive Briseis,
when he pressed the soft couch wearied from the foe.
By those very hands, Briseis, did you let yourself be touched,
hands forever stained with Phrygian blood.
Was this your fetish, slutty girl, to have limbs
caressed by a conquering killer’s paws?
Trust me, the pleasure of sex should not be rushed,
but gradually, slowly, coaxed along its way.
When you’ve found where she loves to be touched,
don’t let shyness stop you touching it:
You’ll see her eyes glint and flicker with light,
like the sun when it sparkles on still water;
then she’ll moan, and murmur lovingly,
sweet groans and words that fit the sport.
But don’t you spread your sail too full
and leave her flagging, and never race ahead;
Aim for the goal in tandem: that’s the greatest pleasure,
when man and woman lie in bed, both beaten.
This is the course you should keep to, as long as
leisure time is free, and no fear hurries on the secret work.
But when delay is risky, best to press on with all oars,
and spur on the galloping horse.
Ars 2.703–32
The advice of 725–32 is clear, it seems: this Tantric couple must orgasm
together, and a real man takes care not to out-race his partner, so as
to ensure both can lie vanquished together (727–8). Yet (alongside the
similar instruction given to women in Ars 3, especially), these lines put
up a disappointing, or misleading show. What is interesting about the
passage, first of all, is that it seems to depict not penetrative sex, but
mutual masturbation: indeed, this may be the only sure way in which male
and female lovers can be absolutely equal and symmetrical, as they are in
line 728 (cum pariter victi femina virque iacent). The emphasis throughout is on hands, fingers, touching, a foreplay that never ends – the joke
being that, first, we are only in Book 2, after all (meta at line 727, as in Ars
1.40, can mean turning post as well as goal: this finis is not to be rushed,
says Ovid, but it inevitably comes too soon), and secondly, that readers
looking for the big sex scene, the climactic point at which Ovid’s lover
conquers his prey, don’t get quite what they were hoping for. This is
not ‘warfare’, in a text in which militiae species amor est: we missed it,
because in this passage Hector and Achilles retire from the battlefield when
they enter the bedroom. Achilles collapses onto a ‘soft’ couch (mollis 712),
and is already ‘knackered’ (lassus 712):52 is he too tired to do anything
52
For this connotation of lassus see Tib. 1.9.55, Juv. 6.130, with Adams (1982) 196.
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more? Is ‘equality’ just an occasional side-effect of male exhaustion? In the
epilogue to Book 2, at 735–6, the graduate-lover is as great as Achilles, who
was famed for his right hand (quantus . . . Aeacides dextra . . . erat): but this
was not quite what we had in mind. There is never any point in this passage
when it is clear that the lovers have the kind of sex we are waiting for (and
critics have usually assumed they have anyway). In lines 725–32, we pick up
on Ovid’s usual sporting metaphors for sex: sailing in 725–6, rowing and
horse riding in 731–2. But at 725–6, both lovers are ships, controlling their
own path and speed, just as both are chariot racers at 727, and iacent at line
728 suggests that they are potentially both lying down flat at the moment
of plena voluptas (727). The final distich (731–2) does suggest penetration,
but this mock-epic scene is an afterthought, not the heights of pleasure,
advice to be followed only if the lovers fear interruption (cum mora non
tuta est).53
We might be also tempted to read a more loaded ecstasy into these lines
when we focus on the interesting image at lines 721–2, when the woman
shoots her worn-out partner a dazzling look, like the sun sparkling as it is
reflected in water (aspicies oculos tremulo fulgore micantes, / ut sol a liquida
saepe refulget aqua). This meeting of eyes is, as ever in Ovid, highly charged.
Here we are reminded of the Salmacis–Hermaphroditus episode (a close
double of Narcissus–Echo, again amalgamating subject and object, male
and female) in Metamorphoses 4. Compare Met.4.347–9, a passage I also
quoted in the introduction, where in the famous sex scene Salmacis’ gaze is
similarly likened to the blinding reflections of the sun on a shiny surface,
this time a mirror:
Salmacis exarsit; flagrant quoque lumina nymphae,
non aliter quam cum puro nitidissimus orbe
opposita speculi referitur imagine Phoebus.
Salmacis burned; her nymph eyes gleamed,
like when a mirror held against the sun
reflects its shiny, dazzling orb.54
If we read on, we’re reminded that, far from taking it slowly, Salmacis
is a woman who can’t bear to delay or have her joys postponed (vixque
moram patitur, vix iam sua gaudia differt Met.4.350; cf. Ars 2.717–18). No
dead heat here – she’s the sure winner (‘vicimus et meus est’ exclamat Nais
53
54
As Janka notes (1997) 500, line 731 plays on Virgil, Aen.5.15, 8.107f., and 10.294 (incumbere remis /
incumbite remis), while line 732 echoes Livy 2.20.2 (sibdit calcaria equo), Curtius Rufus 3.13.8 (equis
calcaria subdere), and Sen. Ep.94.23 (ignaviae subditum calcar).
The water in this scene is compared to glass (see Met.4.354–5).
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Met.4.356: contrast Ars 2.743–4, where Ovid’s aim all along was to conquer
the Amazon). Salmacis wraps around Hermaphroditus like a serpent from
the Gorgon’s bedazzling head (ut serpens Met.4.362), or, even more evocative,
a Medusan mass of octypus tentacles (Met.4.365–6).55 The beautiful boy
denies her the joy she craves in vain (Met.4.368–9). Moreover, the process
of grafting, which is a metaphor for Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’ violent
union at Met.4.375–6, has just been used by Ovid at Ars 2.649–50 (although
here the outcome is rather less certain, as every aura that spurs on, or blows
back Ovid’s boat can ‘shake the weakling shoot’). Just as Ovid compulsively
rehashes the Narcissus–Echo tale in the Ars Amatoria while also cracking
and complicating its fantasies, so he evokes the Salmacis–Hermaphroditus
metamorphosis here only to stop just short of its denouement. Nevertheless, the scene is tinged with Salmacis’ furious energies, reminding us of the
scariness of the older woman and destabilizing our impression of a couple
blissfully in synch. Ovidian sex is rarely without timor, as Ovid hopes in
2.730.
So is this the crescendo we’ve been waiting for, or is it a little too soft-focus
to be true? He may be ‘finished’ (finis adest operi 2.733), but how satisfied is
she, especially when we flick forward to the end of Ars 3, a Lover’s Guide for
women?56 Here Ovid seems to press replay on Ars 2, encouraging the girls
to revel in (this time obviously penetrative) sex, so that the act ‘delights
both alike’ (femina, et ex aequo res iuvet illa duos 3.794; cf. quod iuvet, ex
aequo femina virque ferant 2.682), and to express their excitement freely
(nec blandae voces iucundaque murmura cessent, / nec taceant mediis improba
verba iocis 3.795–6; cf. accedent questus, accedet amabile murmur, / et dulces
gemitus aptaque verba ioco 2.723–4). But now the focus is on the panoply
of potential turn-offs that might mar this climax, too (the drunk woman
up for sex is an ugly sight, turpe 3.765, and should make all efforts to hide
stretch marks, saggy breasts, blokeish height, etc. 3.771–86). Our praeceptor
now turns to those poor girls who have been denied or cannot feel pleasure,
probably because they are now too busy concealing their defects: infelix,
cui torpet hebes locus ille, puella, / quo pariter debent femina virque frui /
‘unhappy the woman for whom that place, source of joy for women and
men alike, is dull and unfeeling’ 3.799–800 – a reversal of 2.727–8: tum
plena voluptas / cum pariter victi femina virque iacent /‘then pleasure is
55
56
Ted Hughes’ version of Ovid’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus myth makes Salmacis’ resemblance
to Medusa more overt. He pictures her wounded by her own gaze reflected in a mirror: ‘Salmacis
groaned softly / And began to tremble / As the sun / Catches a twisting mirror surface / With a
splinter of a glare / Her own gaze flamed and hurt her.’
For recent discussion of how we read Ars 3 after the end of Ars 2, see also Henderson (forthcoming).
94
full, when man and woman lie conquered together’. They should fake it,
and fake it properly, he advises (although, beware, this Don Juan will always
know: a pudet! arcanas pars habet ista notas / ‘ah, for shame! That part of
your body has its secret signs’ 3.804). And one last thing: the woman who
after ‘love’s joys’ asks her lover for ‘reward’ (financial or sexual) should not
wish her prayers to have much weight (gaudia post Veneris quae poscet munus
amantem, / illa suas nolet pondus habere preces 3.805–6).57 Male students in
Ars Amatoria may have been duped into bedding a Medusa or a Salmacis,
but in return many a puella is doomed to frustration, taunted by Book 2’s
manual. Real erotic parity remains as tantalizing as Narcissus’ reflection.
Game over (lusus habet finem 3.809).
w in d u p s
Ovid is notorious for giving confusing, contradictory or unconvincing
advice, and for mystifying the distinction between reality and appearance:
not only is he inconsistent within the Ars itself, but he frequently refers
to earlier works, especially the Amores, in ways that prompt us to go back
and re-read, either because we recognize an antagonism, or because the poet
appears to resolve what seemed to be a riddle elsewhere. In doing so, he prods
readers to reflect on a multi-layered series of interrelationships (epitomized
by the relation between male and female), extending an experiment in
re-reading already finessed in Amores 2.
We might see our headache-inducing interrogations sketched (or
caricatured?) at Ars 3.471–2, where Ovid’s puella pores over the missive
received from her lover, trying to ‘deduce from his words whether or not
he is feigning or true’ (inspice, quodque leges, ex ipsis collige verbis, / fingat
an ex animo sollicitusque roget). We do some confused backtracking to the
Amores, too, for example at 3.415–16, where Ovid uses the figure of Danae
to prove to women that if they’ve got it, they should surely flaunt it: quis
Danaen nosset, si semper clausa fuisset, / inque sua turri perlatuisset anus?
/ ‘who would know Danae, had she always been a prisoner, and became
an old woman stuck in her tower?’ Yet at Am.2.19.27ff., as Gibson notes,
Ovid argued the opposite case, for keeping your puella in her garret and
having her play hard to get (she’s only attractive when she’s a challenge),
especially given that Danae did manage to meet a lover without stepping
57
munus can mean specifically sexual gift/favour/service: see e.g. Petron. 87.8, Cat. 61.227, with Adams
(1982) 164.
95
out of doors, when Jupiter himself seduced her.58 Who hasn’t read their
Amores as instructed (3.343)?59 Is this a point at which uneducated women,
or women with pretensions to learning who are easily provoked, are bound
to be caught out? (You should really aim poetry at both levels of female
audience, Ovid advises at 2.279–80). Lines 3.665–6, similarly, seem to nail
Ovid’s guilt in Am.2.7 and 2.8, while also reminding pupils that this is
a poet who makes fools of first-time readers:60 nec nimium vobis formosa
ancilla ministret; saepe vicem dominae praebuit illa mihi / ‘nor let too pretty
a slave-girl attend you; she has often played the mistress’ part for me’.
Meanwhile, just as competitive male readers of Ars 3 are free to sneer
at women exposed in all their flaws, something confuses them or shakes
their confidence. For instance, while in Ars 2, as we’ve seen, men are told
that older women are still fertile and fabulous in bed, readers of Ars 3.59ff.
are warned that they’ll get no attention from lovers when they’re old, and
that their fertility runs out all too quickly (tempus erit, quo tu, quae nunc
excludis amantes, / frigida deserta nocte iacebis anus, / ‘the time will come
when you who now shut out lovers, will pass the night a cold and lonely old
woman’ 69–70).61 Which version (if any) do we buy, and what might be
the (mixed) motives behind each account? Were men fools to be persuaded
by Ovid’s argument in Ars 2 (especially after warnings about the terrors
of male aging at 2.113ff., where a rose always leaves a spiky thorn behind),
hooked and blinded by the promise of great sexual technique? Was this
just a tactic by rival lover Ovid to divert their attention from all of Rome’s
ravishing younger beauties, a trick to get them to bed a Medusa, or to play
out an Oedipus tragedy (so closely paralleled by Narcissus) in which they
are paired off with women old enough to be their mothers (the mature lady
is a mater at 2.700)? To what extent does Ars 3 operate as a revealing mirror
in which to re-read Ars 1 and 2? Or are students safe to assume that advice
58
59
60
61
Gibson (2003) ad loc. Gibson also discusses here how, although Ovid seems to promise his female
pupils an attractive freedom, he is also teasing them with the suggestion that, if they do put themselves
out there in this way, they may well be taken for common street prostitutes. As he argues, ‘the
willingness of Ovid’s readers to identify with the puellae is being tested here.’ Also see introductory
comments at 35–6.
There is often opportunity in Ars 3 for men to hiss and patronize, prompted by potentially doubleedged compliments (e.g. 159–60: ‘ah, now kind nature is to you, whose defects may be made good
in so many ways’), or by outright insults that sound like whispered asides to a sniggering ‘secret’
readership (e.g. 255–6: ‘women plain and fair come to learn from me – but I always get more ugly
ones than beauties!’). And of course, as we have seen, beauty routines gross to watch are satire for
male readers (although this could well backfire and kill off all desire, as Rem.351–6 confirms: multa
viros nescire decet / ‘there are many things men are better off not knowing’ 3.229).
For discussion of the twists and turns of re-reading these two poems, see Henderson (1991 and 1992).
This is the typical taunt of the dumped lover, as Gibson notes (2003) ad loc.; cf. Horace, Odes 1.25.1ff.,
Prop. 3.24.31ff., Catull. 8.14ff. On Ovid as rival lover also see Sharrock (1994) especially 1–86.
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given in Ars 3 is simply a different breed of bait, transparently designed to
coax open that door, and to seduce reluctant women in their prime?
Ovid undermines, or flatters, ‘male’ and ‘female’ readers with equal gall
when he tells them, at 1.276, vir male dissimulat: tectius illa cupit / ‘the
man dissembles badly; she conceals desire better’, and at 3.31–2: saepe viri
fallunt, tenerae non saepe puellae, / paucaque, si quaeras, crimina fraudis
habent / ‘often men deceive: but tender girls do not; should you inquire,
they are rarely charged with cheating’. Although here, suspicious men are
alert to the possibility that girls really can and do deceive all they like and
get away with it – it is just that they are almost never caught. As Ovid
reminds us at 2.515, there is very little to aid lovers (readers), but much to
thwart them (quod iuvat, exiguum, plus est, quod laedat amantes). Similarly,
we can pick up on what at first seems a blatant double-standard between
Ars 2 and 3 designed to catch the girls off-guard and render them more
transparent (2.313 dictates: si latet, ars prodest / ‘if art is hidden, it avails’,
whereas at 3.397 women are told, quod latet, ignotum est; ignoti nulla cupido /
‘what is hidden is unknown; what is unknown no-one desires’). But the
instruction to men in Ars 2 is itself complicated by passages such as 2.427ff.,
in which deception, on the contrary, should be exposed: qui modo celebas
monitu tua crimina nostro / flecte iter et monitu detege furta meo. / ‘you who
were now concealing your crime, on my instruction, turn your path, and
on my advice, uncover your deceit’. The prospect that graduates in ars
amatoria often (but not always!) say the opposite of what they mean, that
their facial expressions and verbal articulations must be read according to a
mirror-logic whose reflections never stand still, is fundamental to Ovidian
erotics (innocent Corinna tries hard to look guilty at Am.2.19.13–14, and
the lover at a banquet talks in code, wishing a girl’s husband luck while
cursing under his breath, Ars 1.569ff., 601–2). This idea is exploited to
its limit by the play-off between the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris:
far from providing the antidote to poisonous Ars, the Remedia infects its
therapy with the stagesets, metaphors, and techniques of seduction, yet also
throws the spotlight back on its mirror-text to undercut what seemed to be
convincing advice, or to taint it with the memory of passion-killing tips,
so that a linear, polarizing reasoning is itself muddied.
Often disharmony between books or passages of the Ars is very difficult
to gauge, and may even perplex some readers/lovers and not others. At
2.349ff., for example, men are reminded that absence makes the heart grow
fonder, and various mythic examples illustrate the point; this absence (like
most strategies in the Ars) is a nuanced business – it must not be longer
than ‘short’, so as not to leave space for rivals (sed mora tuta brevis 357). Yet
97
‘short’ is a time-length which is never defined (the same strategy worked
with exemplar Penelope at 2.355, yet Ulysses, surely, was gone for years, as
3.15 confirms: est pia Penelope lustris errante duobus / ‘Penelope was faithful,
although her husband roamed the world for a decade’). However Ars 1.477
has already claimed that perseverance will overcome even Penelope, and
cautioned male lovers patiently to endure rivals (rivalem patienter habe
2.539) – not that Ovid himself could bear to endure such torture, he admits
at 2.549–50. Does the advice at 2.349ff. simply serve both husbands and
lovers simultaneously, or chip away at the confidence of both types? It is
difficult for male (as for female) readers hooked on this fiction to ever feel
smug, when every other line is (or seems) booby-trapped.
At 2.315–36, to give a further example, Ovid instructs on what to do if
your mistress falls seriously ill during a bitter autumn: if lovers are attentive,
compliant and appear distraught, they stand a good chance of making it
into her will if she fails to survive the winter (in tabulas multis haec via
fecit iter 332). They should ‘make many vows, and all aloud’ (multa vove,
sed cuncta palam 327), yet this kind of speech act was the undoing of
another famous trickster who made her appearance as victim back in Ars
1.457ff., when she swore out loud that she would wed Acontius (littera
Cydippen pomo perlata fefellit, / insciaque est verbis capta puella suis / ‘a letter
carried in an apple betrayed Cydippe, and the maid was deceived unawares
by her own words’).62 This was also, of course, Cephalus’ fatal error: if
only he hadn’t spoken his thoughts aloud and got caught! As we’ve seen,
Ovid’s advice in Ars 1.569ff. stressed the importance of covered speech, silent
communication, and of letting one’s rivals talk instead. What will Ovid’s
lover have promised if his mistress fails to die as planned? Might he have
been tempted to talk of marriage, feed her dreams of conjugal bliss (somnia
laeta 2.328), anything and everything she wanted to hear? The spiteful poet
concludes: don’t offer her cups of bitter juices, ‘leave them for your rival to
mingle’ (rivalis misceat illa tuus 2.336). Yet a lover who follows this advice
to the letter might well fall prey to Ovid’s poison pen.
As in the Metamorphoses, the theme of fatal misunderstandings (or at
least, here, potential misunderstandings) dominates the Ars Amatoria, and
comes to a head with the tale of Cephalus and Procris at 3.685–768 (also
told at Met.7.672–862).63 Ostensibly, the story is designed to warn women
62
63
Cydippe also writes Her.21, and it’s interesting that the double Heroides and the Ars Amatoria share a
similar shape (three pairs of two letters, and three books, with women ‘replying’ to the men in each
case).
Note that Rem.453, which recalls how King Minos fell for Procris after Pasiphae, perhaps suggests a
linear pattern in the Ars Amatoria: Pasiphae stars in Book 1, gives birth to the Minotaur in Book 2,
and is ousted by Procris in Book 3.
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against being oversuspicious, especially when they hear of a rival: sometimes, contrary to everything we’ve been led to expect so far, men are not
having affairs (at any rate, not with the woman you imagine). Procris mistakenly believes that when, as she is told, Cephalus calls for the breeze
(aura) to refresh him as he sits in a grove, he is beckoning a woman; she is
speechless with grief, and rushes to the wood like a Bacchant (one of many
in the Ars), thinking she will catch Cephalus red-handed. Sneaking up on
him, she hears him repeat his wish and realizes her error just in time, yet
when she rushes to embrace him, he thinks he is being attacked by a wild
animal, and pierces her breast with an arrow, leaving her to die in his arms.
Yet if we have read Ars 1 and 2, far from offering a soothing moral, the
tale fuels further distrust of Cephalus’ innocence and highlights the crime
of adultery (this is then reemphasized in the version of the myth told in
Met.7, where Aurora does carry Cephalus off, albeit, he swears, against his
will: Met.7.703–4).64 We have already looked at a similar passage in Ars
2.435ff., where readers were told that passion wanes when a rival (or at least
the suspicion of one) does not exist (et, si nulla subest aemula, languet amor
436), and that lovers like nothing more than to provoke jealousy, rage and
aggression in their mistresses. I also noted the close verbal parallels between
2.447–50, the sexy portrait of the woman scorned where the existence of a
rival is never in question, and 3.699–702, when the ‘false’ report of a rival
reaches Procris’ ears.
As well as casting doubt on the credibility of that passage in Ars 2 (do men
really want their faces torn by Medusan bitches, or would they be far more
likely, like Cephalus, to freak out and hit back if ‘attacked’?), the Procris
and Cephalus tale in turn gets re-read when we flick back to the previous
book, and when we consider the other surviving ancient accounts of the
myth, parts of which seem to seep into or shadow Ovid’s re-make, both here
and in Met.7.65 When Cephalus repeats his invocation to aura in 3.728 (or
the goddess Aurora, pronounced with a cute stammer,66 or cut off by the
wind before eavesdropping ears), does he mean the same thing the second
time, and can we not read innuendo in meos releves aestus (‘relieve my heat’
64
65
66
Gibson (2003) ad loc. also argues that ‘the temptation to doubt the innocence of Cephalus’ call to
aura is strong’ (358).
The main sources for the myth, apart from the passages discussed here in Ovid, are Pherecydes, FGrH 3F34 (=fr. 34 Fowler) ap.Schol. CMV Hom. Od.11.321; Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibl.3.15.1;
Hygin. Fab.189, 241; Ant.Lib. Met.41; and Servius, Ad Virg, Aen.6.445.
At Ars 1.598, Ovid tips off men to make their ‘crafty tongue stumble in stammering talk’ at a dinner
party (fac titubet blaeso subdola lingua sono), as the excuse of drunkenness lets them get away with
murder. Compare the echoing charms of female lisping at Ars 3.293–4 (quid cum legitima fraudatur
littera voce / blaesaque fit iusso lingua coacta sono).
99
3.697)? Especially as sexual pleasure puts the wind in a man’s sails at 2.725
(sed neque tu dominam velis maioribus usus / desere ‘but don’t you spread too
full a sail, either, and leave your mistress behind’)? Winds are proverbial for
their capacity to aid deception by blowing away lovers’ perjuries (e.g. Ars
1.634). In Ars 1.489–90, Ovid instructed men to hide their approaches in
cunning ambiguities, ‘lest someone intrude hateful ears to your words’ (neve
aliquis verbis odiosas offerat auris 1.489; cf. coniugis ad timidas aliquis male
sedulus aures / auditos memori detulit ore sonos 3.699–700): maybe Cephalus
is just not cunning enough.
Servius suggests that Cephalus’ constant moaning about aura attracted
the attention of the goddess to begin with (she presumably misheard
him), as she regularly hunted on Hymettus, and that they then began
an affair.67 And as Gibson notes, Aurora is associated through etymology
with aura.68 Our suspicions are raised when Ovid’s Cephalus wishes for
aura in the first place, given that the grove is already breezy (lenibus impulsae Zephyris auraque salubri / tot generum frondes herbaque summa tremit. /
‘gentle Zephyrs and health-giving breezes sway the varied foliage, and the
tips of the grasses tremble’ Ars 3.693–4). As our sources show, Cephalus
was a character traditionally known to have been guilty of infidelity: he has
already been introduced as a lover of Aurora at Am.1.13.39–40, and in Ars
3 itself (nec Cephalus roseae praeda pudenda deae. / ‘nor is Cephalus a prize
that shames the rosy goddess’ 84).69 The verbal ambiguities of Met.7.835ff.,
where the tale is also told, hint that Cephalus may indeed have been making
another attempt to hook up with Aurora on the morning of Procris’ death.
In retrospect, even Ovid’s opening comments at Ars 1.43–4 (haec tibi non
tenues veniet delapsa per auras; / quaerenda est oculis apta puella tuis / ‘she
will not come floating down to you out of thin air – the girl who you have
your eye on must be pursued’) read as a pointed joke (don’t think you’ll
get as lucky as Cephalus, who only had to mention aura to have a delicious
goddess appear at his feet).70
Moreover, this myth constantly thematizes a mutual distrust, competition and misunderstanding between lovers (hence its climactic position
at the end of the Ars). There is no innocent party here – both are guilty,
and both pay the price for suspicion and infidelity. For while we suspect
67
68
69
70
Servius, Ad Virg. Aen.6.445 ([Cephalus] labore fessus ad locum quendam in silvis ire consueverat et illic
ad se recreandum auram vocare. quod cum saepe faceret, amorem in se movit Aurorae).
Gibson (2003) 358. Cf. Priscian, Gramm.3.509.28 and the play at Pacuvius, Trag.363: terra exhalat
auram atque auroram humidam.
Cf. Hesiod, Theog.986–7, Paus. 1.3.1
Instead, Ovid instructs at Ars 1.45ff., she has to be hunted, like a stag, boar, or fish: Cephalus takes
this advice (wittingly or not) literally, and treats Procris as a fera (3.733).
100
Cephalus’ adultery, the notion that Procris is the blameless victim is just
as dubious.71 The daughter of Erechtheus has a shady reputation of her
own – she is a wife highly skilled in ars amatoria who had many lovers and
could be bought, as proven by Cephalus himself, who in some versions of
this complex myth (including Ovid’s in Met.7) dressed up as a merchant
and succeeded in seducing her.72 This story of tragic passion begins with
Cephalus’ paranoia, not Procris’, and we are reminded that the previous
passage in Ars 3 has been advocating female deception (616ff.). Moreover,
Cephalus’ trick makes of Procris not just a lapsed Penelope, but a Procnean, Dido-esque man-hater determined to get her own revenge (she is
described as genus omne perosa virorum, ‘loathing the whole race of men’
at Met.7.745).73 Indeed (in the second-century version given by Liberalis,
Met.41.6), Procris proceeded to pay back her husband with a disguise of
her own, dressing herself up as a male hunting companion equipped with
a javelin that never missed its mark and a hunting dog that caught whatever it pursued, which had been given to her by Minos (with whom she
had had an affair, also mentioned by Ovid at Rem.463).74 When Cephalus
saw his rival’s advantage, he requested that he sell the magic javelin and
dog, even offering half his kingdom in exchange. After repeated refusals,
Procris-in-disguise suggested si utique . . . perstas id possidere, da mihi id
quod pueri solent dare (‘if you’re determined to have them, give me that
which boys usually give’ Hygin. Fab.189.7), a proposition which can only
mean submitting to anal sex (men who prostituted themselves in this way
were universally condemned in the ancient world).75 Cephalus agreed, and
in a denouement which mirrors Ovid’s tale in Ars 1.689ff., where Achilles
puts away weapons and dresses in a woman’s robe to steal into Deidamia’s
chamber and rape her, Procris revealed her true identity.76 Of course, we
can never know for sure whether Ovid and Antoninus Liberalis shared
the same sources, and how unique the second-century account of Procris’
revenge really is, although the idea that the javelin and dog were acquired
in just this way is suggested strongly by Ovid at Met.7.687, where Cephalus
71
72
73
74
75
76
On this also see Green (1979–80).
Servius, Ad. Virg. Aen. 6.445; Hygin. Fab.189.2–3; Met.7.715–40.
On Procris as a Dido figure in Ars 3, see Gibson (2003) ad loc. on 3.684, 713ff. and 737ff.
Ant. Lib. 41, Ps.Apollod.3.15.1; cf. Hom. Od.11.321. When Procris met Minos on Crete, she cured his
embarrassing genital problem (he ejaculated snakes, scorpions and millipedes), by fashioning him a
goat’s bladder condom, much in the way that Daedalus made a cow-costume for afflicted Pasiphae.
Minos gave her the javelin and dog in gratitude. In Apollodorus, as Davidson puts it (1997) 178:
‘Procris is depicted as a promiscuous and venal woman with a penchant for sorcery.’
See Dover (1978) 99–109, 140–7.
As Green notes (1979–80), this part of the myth casts Met.7.747–56, where Procris brings back a dog
and javelin to Cephalus as presents, in a whole new light.
101
is ‘ashamed to tell at what price he gained’ the spear,77 a gift from Procris
(756), and admits that he too is capable of ‘yielding’ (succumbere) just like
his wife did, if offered great enough gifts (749–50). Ovid also alludes here to
Procris’ ‘revenge’ (laesum prius ulta pudorem / ‘having sufficiently avenged
her outraged feelings . . .’ 751).
In the (ironically romanticized) version told in Met.7, Cephalus’ passive role is suggestively emphasized: Aurora carries him away (rapit 7.704)
against his will, and the reminder that Procris’ sister Orithyia was raped by
Boreas (7.695) gets us musing about violent, penetrative winds and what
it really means for Cephalus to be continually summoning aura (and/or
man-eating Aurora). Naturally, the part of the myth covered in Ars 3 happens after this incident, leading some sources to claim that Cephalus was
enraged when he spotted Procris in reconciliation mode, and speared her
deliberately (just as she, apparently, had promised to ‘spear’ him):78 it is only
later sources that convey the death as accidental.79 Ovidian metaphor helps
propel the joke that Procris dies by her own crime (proving the adage of
1.658: ‘let the woman feel the pain of the wound she first inflicted’), as puellae throughout the Ars are referred to as prey to be hunted by well-armed
men, and the scene also reenacts Cupid’s routine of spiking his victims
and infecting them with love. Meanwhile, the actions of both Procris and
Cephalus together perform the controlled tactic of the poet lover, who
when introducing this passage, exclaimed (as if in the character of Procne
surprising her husband in the woods) quo feror insanus? quid aperto pectore
in hostem / mittor et indicio prodor ab ipse meo? / ‘Where am I borne in my
frenzy? Why do I rush with open breast against the foe, to be betrayed by
my own evidence?’ (3.667–8), yet went on to address Cephalus in a similar manner: quid facis, infelix?/ ‘what are you doing, luckless one?’ (3.735).
When Procris hurled herself at Cephalus, was she, like Ovid, acting the
part, and feigning wrath over a rival as the praeceptor advised (dolor et de
paelice fictus 3.677), just for the fun of kissing and making out?80 And
how dumb was Cephalus to pass up that opportunity, and misread the
signs? He should have known that Procris’ hysteria was simply proof of her
77
78
79
80
Anderson (1972) ad loc., and many other commentators believe, as Anderson puts it, that ‘this
covertly alludes to other details of the myth which Ovid decorously suppresses’. Yet the point is he
does not fully suppress them at all, and his politeness is a form of ironic mischief.
Pherecydes, FGrH 3F34
As well as Ovid, SPs. Apollod.3.15.1; Hygin. Fab.189.9, Servius, Ad Virg. Aen.6.445. But Cephalus
certainly suffers a hefty sentence for an ‘accident’: as Ps. Apollod.3.15.1 and Paus.1.37.6 tell us, he was
condemned to banishment for life, and retired to Thebes.
Especially given the phrase in amplexus ire, at 732, which as Gibson highlights (2003) ad loc., carries
the suggestion of sexual union. Cf. Ars 1.770, Met.7.616, 11.228.
102
adoration (or was that advice to women at 3.675ff. faulty, dangerous, even
a trap?). Both Procris and Cephalus are potentially canny performers getting what they really want, and when we allow this passage to be stained by
metaphor, the death-scene could read as elegiac revenge or reconciliation (is
the violent union and dramatic smooch at lines 743–6 the climax we were
missing, or half-missing, at the end of Ars 2?). Similarly, when the story is
told again in Met.7, Procris is both a deluded Narcissus figure (7.829–30:
she fears a mere nothing, an empty name), and appears as an Echo (a mere
vox, 7.843) to Cephalus. And if, either way, Cephalus has the last laugh, his
victory comes, manifestly, at the expense of ridicule and shame (plus, he
loses the girl in the end). Men’s triumph in Ars 3, if we can call it that, is
sour and double-edged at best.81 In his recent analysis of this episode in Ars
3, Gibson is rightly suspicious of the snares Ovid seems to set his readers,
asking, ‘Does the myth really suit the point the praeceptor wishes to make
about women’s hasty reactions? In this myth two people are hasty . . .’82
Yet he concludes that we are nevertheless ‘invited to admire the ingenuity
with which the poet makes the tale fit the lesson’.83 On the contrary, I suggest, Ovid’s cleverness lies in the slippery way in which he manipulates and
disorients both male and female audiences. Not only does this tale never
quite fit its lesson: it also calls into question what lesson we were meant to
grasp to begin with.
This rollercoaster reading of the Cephalus and Procris tale epitomizes
the experience of reading the Ars, and of playing the game of seduction
more generally. For the aura that charms Cephalus and leads to Procris’
deadly error blows randomly throughout this text, propelling, delaying and
sometimes threatening to wreck Ovid’s ship of poetry/love. Both male and
female lovers fear that aura will ruin their relationship (‘when the new graft
is growing in the green bark, if any breeze shakes the weakling shoot, it will
fall’ 2.649–50), just as flying per aetherias auras (2.59) is lethal for the young
Icarus, who also falls, from the sky (decidit, cadens ‘pater, o pater, auferor!’
inquit 2.91). While Ovid wishes, like Cephalus, for a light breeze (dum sumus
in portu, provehat aura levis 3.100, straight after the mention of Aurora’s
passion for Cephalus in 3.84), for women too, knowing how to manipulate
aura is ars itself, a concept which gets spelt out in the accusative auras: haec
movet arte latus tunicisque fluentibus auras / accipit / ‘this woman sways
her hips with skill, and welcomes the breeze with flowing robe’ (3.302).
Students of the art of love are at the mercy of aura, and can only passively
81
82
Compare Green’s conclusion (1979–80) 24, that the story shows ‘a husband should be allowed his
solecisms in peace’ and that ‘ars remained a male prerogative’.
83 Gibson (2003) 357.
Gibson (2003) 357.
103
spread their sails and hope for the best (quaque ferent aurae, vela secunda
dato! 2.64; cf. sed propera, ne vela cadant auraeque residant / ‘but hurry, lest
the sails sink and the breezes fail’ 1.373). Yet this is a fickle force which does
not always assist ‘perplexed vessels’ (nec semper dubias adiuvat aura rates
2.514). Ovid’s arousing but unpredictable breeze becomes a loaded token of
readers’/lovers’ insecurity, ensuring that the outcome of his staged contest
between books and genders is ever postponed, blown back onto elegiac
seas.
c h apt e r 3
Seeing seers: Metamorphoses 10–11.84
‘When I recognise myself in the mirror, it is already too late.’1
From the glinting masks and barbed edges of the Ars Amatoria, I want to
turn now to the tenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This chapter concerns just one married couple, Orpheus and Eurydice, whose relationship
culminates in a magical meeting of gazes at the dusky threshold of the
visible world. We will revisit the point at which the poet turns to face his
wife (flexit amans oculos 10.57), where the malevolent, irresistible power of
looking floodlights the scene and seems to capture or frame its movement,
like a blurred cinematic still, in an instant outside of time. This intricate
and hyper-ambitious epic is of course a very different text from the Ars and
Medicamina, yet we have already glimpsed how the elegiac works are tinted
and framed by the Metamorphoses’ mythological structures and extended
treatment of human subjectivity and desire. This instant at the beginning
of Book 10 might be read, I’ll suggest, as a culminating mythologization of
the ‘look between lovers’, the cryptic rules of which have been crafted, as we
have seen so far, in the Amores, Medicamina and Ars Amatoria. It also dramatizes most clearly the idea that this heart-beat of desire is symbiotic with
the uncanny moment of metamorphosis, of wide-eyed awe at beauty, art
and empire. What might be judged the defining moment of the Metamorphoses, and of the epic’s greatest poet–lover (‘symbol of artistic perfection’
and ‘persona for Ovidian poetics’)2 is also the creeping yet unrecordable
second in which all Ovidian characters fall in love, face death, or realize
who they are, or who they have become: it is the point of suspension and
interaction between two states, between self and other, a mirror-stage that
is the paper-thin juncture between elation and impending disaster.
In this chapter, then, I will be emphasizing (as I did in chapter 1) the close
connection Ovid makes between literary creativity, desire and relationality,
and expanding on my introductory remarks about the Medusan energies of
1
Salecl and Zizek (1996) 138.
2
See Knox (1986) and Segal (1989) 93.
104
105
the Metamorphoses. While recent critics have underscored Orpheus’ identity
as Apollonian illusionist, a Pygmalion and Narcissus double who can realize
every artist’s/lover’s fantasy of perfect mimesis,3 and whose poetry wants to
solve the dangers of desire,4 I want to stress the extent to which Met.10 also
tests and transmutes that identity and artistic ideal, wrapping identification
with alienation and making poetry contingent on wrestling the castrating,
creative forces of desire and/as alterity.
osc i ll at ion
Orpheus’ song in Book 10 is imbued with competition, contradiction,
transvestism, with guilty appropriations of and swerves into the alien. The
entire episode is defined (like elegiac verse)5 by the idea of oscillation,
the exploring of an intermediate space, time, position, state or emotion
between two points, for which Orpheus himself, strung between allegiances
to Apollo and Dionysus, and straddling upper and lower worlds, is the
overarching mascot. While in Ovid’s representation, Orpheus is the child
of Apollo (10.167 – in other versions he is the son of a remote Thracian king
Oeagrus), and is murdered by Bacchants at the beginning of Book 11, his
death so upsets Dionysus that he turns against his own followers, reflecting
Orpheus’ affinities with the god (he descends to the underworld, and founds
Dionysiac mysteries). As Jesnick puts it: ‘The triangular relation between
the two gods and their human counterpart is convoluted and profound.
Orpheus appears to be the earthly mirror of both these antithetical gods;
all his activities and the substance of his mythic persona depended on him
mediating between their polarities, between rationale and madness.’6 Or
as Harrison writes: ‘Orpheus reflects Dionysus, yet at every point seems to
contradict him.’7 Segal underscores the paradoxes of Orpheus’ song, which
3
4
5
6
7
E.g. Hardie (2002a) 23: both Orpheus and Pygmalion, Hardie stresses, are ‘vehicles for an unrealisable
desire for a regression to an absolute equivalence between art and reality’.
See Janan (1988b).
Orpheus’ song in Met.10 itself performs that shift from epic to elegy: see his speech at 10.148–54 (nunc
opus est leviore lyra 152). See Janan (1988b) for discussion of how Orpheus revisits and rebelliously
rewrites the Amores and Ars Amatoria in this book (see e.g. the restaging of Am.2.1’s swerve back to
elegy from epic, from war to love at 10.148–54, the parodying of Ars Amatoria’s promise to leave out
lawlessness and crime at 10.153–4, or the replay of Am.1.2 in the phrase vicit Amor at 10.26). However,
just as Orpheus’ song turns out not to respect the division between good boy-love and bad womanlove, so too it mixes powerful epic markers into its lyric tunes: Jupiter’s abduction of Ganymede, the
murder of a beloved stag, Furies rising from Hades to plant poisonous snakes in already passion-filled
breasts are all events which catalyse epic action in Virgil’s Aeneid, for example.
Jesnick (1997) 38.
Harrison (1903) 455. She opens her chapter on Orpheus with the statement: ‘Mythology has left us no
tangle more intricate and assuredly no problem half so interesting as the relation between the ritual
and mythology of Orpheus and Dionysus.’
106
on the one hand rejects nature, and on the other ‘embodies that universal
harmony that unites man with nature’.8 And as Paglia stresses, Orpheus’
Apollonian glorification of matter, as he rouses nature with his emotive lyre,
is as much about petrifaction as vivification: Apollo converts raw elements
into the ‘hard, harsh blocks of Western personality’.9
Metamorphoses 10 makes emphatic the extent to which the riddling paradoxes of Apollonian art stand in tension with, rather than in opposition to,
the volatile, metamorphic spirit of Dionysus. Thus the setting for Orpheus’
and Eurydice’s encounter on a pitch black path, nec procul telluris margine
summae (‘not far from the margin of upper earth’ 55) is a Dionysian collapsing of space, ‘a murky no-man’s land of matter half-turned to liquid’,10
in which we struggle to maintain a point of view. Yet borders are sharpened
as well as blurred (Paglia defines the Apollonian as ‘a line drawn against
nature’11 ). At first, at the beginning of the book, irregular elegiac rhythms
tune up (ad superas 11 . . . ad umbras 12; et hic . . . et hic 27); then they are
smoothed down, as lines and spaces merge (serius aut citius sedem properamus ad unam / ‘sooner or later we all speed to the one same resting place’ 33);
multiples or individuals become ones and couples, joined by Love himself
(haec loca 29 / sedem ad unam 33; nupta 8, vates 12 / leto gaudete duorum 39).
So too, it is important to note that many of the tales Orpheus tells in
Met.10 are staged at points of transition: as Orpheus flinches from women
and turns his eye to boys-becoming-men (‘enjoying the springtime, the
first flower of their youth’ 85), the sun is just entering watery Pisces, the
twelfth zodiac sign and fixed, liquid boundary between one year and
the next, between winter and spring (78). The flower born of the youth
Hyacinthus also blooms when Piscique Aries succedit aquoso (‘as the ram
succeeds the aqueous fish’ 165). In the first song, the story of Cyparissus
and his beloved stag, the Cypress tree that is the boy’s metamorphosed
form is said to resemble the posts at either end of the Circus Maximus in
Rome (adfuit huic turbae metas imitata cupressus / ‘amid this crowd came the
cone-shaped cypress’ 106), which marked both the end and the mid-point
of every race (an ambiguity Ovid plays on in the Ars Amatoria, as we saw in
chapter 2).12 The culminating scene of high passion, in which Cyparissus
spears the stag by mistake as it lies resting in a woodland clearing, takes
8
9
12
Segal (1989) xiv: ‘various versions of the myth oscillate between a poetry of transcendence that
asserts the power of poetry, song and imagination over the necessities of nature, including the
ultimate necessity, death, and a poetry that celebrates its full, valuable immersion in the stream of
life’.
10 Paglia (1990) 93.
11 Paglia (1990) 72.
Paglia (1990) 72.
The race-course metaphor has only just begun, in fact, and will be continued more overtly in the
tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes at 10.560–680.
107
place at high noon on a summer’s day, the mid-point between dawn and
dusk accented further by the contrast between the sun’s hot rays (which
singe the claws of the border-loving Crab on the left and right of the
golden line at 12713 ) and the deliciously cool shade of the forest. The passage begins: aestus erat mediusque dies (126), evoking immediate déjà vu
for the much-regurgitated archetypal scene of Ovidian erotics, the entry
of Corinna into the Amores at Am.1.5 (aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat
horam 1.5.1). Here, Ovid’s (and Corinna’s) striptease, and the erotic tango
we don’t quite get to see, begin and are framed by this soft-focus opening,
with its seductive lapping of half-lights, and glowing shadows pregnant
with as-yet-unsatisfied urges.14 Apollo’s and Hyacinthus’ heavily eroticized
discus contest in 10.174ff. also takes place at exactly ‘mid-point between
the banished night and the night to come, at equal distance from both
extremes’ – a line reminiscent of the scalpel-precision of Ovid’s measuring
in the Medicamina. It also sets the stage for Apollo’s skilled splitting of the
clouds with his discus at 179 (oppositas disiecit pondere nubes):
iamque fere medius Titan venientis et actae
noctis erat spatioque pari distabat utrimque;
Met.10.174–5
And now Titan was midway between the night just gone,
and the night to come, equidistant between the two.
The phrase noctis erat at 174 stands in perfect counterpoise to aestus erat in
the previous tale, and is mirrored again in the scene of Myrrha’s uncertain
plotting at 368ff. (noctis erat medium 368), and in the eerie folds of the night
in which she embarks upon her crime:
tempus erat quo cuncta silent, interque Triones
flexerat obliquo plaustrum temone Bootes;
It was the time when all is still, and between the Bears
Boötes had turned his cart with slanting pole;
10.446–7
Myrrha flits from delaying despair to steely resolve, from shame to longing,
moving back and forth within this dead time-zone that seems to envelop
and confound the forwards and backwards, future and past. The moment
lasts for a full nine (staccato, slow-motion) lines:
13
14
concava litorei fervebant bracchia Cancri. The crab loves the shoreline and also marks the beginning
of summer (as the zodiac sign Cancer).
For similar familiar scenes in the Met. in which a lover rests in the shade of the countryside only
to face some sudden violence or passion, see e.g. Callisto (2.417ff.), Narcissus (3.407ff.), Arethusa
(5.587ff.) and Cephalus (7.808f.).
108
at virgo Cinyreia pervigil igni
carpitur indomito furiosaque vota retractat.
et modo desperat, modo vult temptare, pudetque
et cupit, et quid agat non invenit; utque securi
saucia trabs ingens, ubi plaga novissima restat,
quo cadat in dubio est omnique a parte timetur,
sic animus vario labefactus vulnere nutat
huc levis atque illuc momentaque sumit utroque,
nec modus aut requies, nisi mors, reperitur amoris;
mors placet.
But Cinyras’ daughter was awake:
gripped by some wild flame, she renews her mad desires,
first despairing, then determined to go through with it,
now ashamed, now lustful – unable to decide.
Just like a great tree wounded by an axe, wavering
before the final cut, menacing this side and that:
so her mind, weakened by blows, leans one way,
then another, and then both ways at once.
No end or rest for her love can she find, apart from death.
So death it was.
10.369–78
The ‘motions’ of the split tree and Myrrha’s consciousness (momenta 376)
are also the brief, critical ‘moments’ in which spatial dynamics and time
itself are governed by different laws, where contrary thoughts occur simultaneously, and a dreamworld of sleep blends and remixes narratives. This
captured vacillation has already been staged in the reactions of Myrrha’s
nurse (et modo blanditur, modo, si non conscia fiat / terret / ‘and now coaxing, now frightening her, if she does not tell’ 416–17), and will be reenacted
in Myrrha’s delay at the doorposts of her father’s bedroom (cunctantem
longaeva manu deducit / ‘the woman leads her by the hand as she holds
back’ 462), in the hesitation of Atalanta as she is distracted by the final
apple (an peteret, virgo visa est dubitare / ‘the girl seemed to pause, debating
whether or not she should pick it up’ 676), and in the processes of Venus’
and Cybele’s deliberation, as they wonder whether to kill or metamorphose
the Propoetides, Atalanta and Hippomenes (dum dubitat quo mutet eos
235; dubitavit 697). This near-simultaneous combination of positions and
alternation between roles is also fulfilled in the final lines of the Orpheus
episode, when Orpheus and Eurydice walk side by side, with Orpheus at
the same time now leading, now following (hic modo coniunctis spatiantur
passibus ambo, / nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit 11.64–5).
This is the content, but also the effect of Orpheus’ song: as they burn
109
themselves up, his desiring subjects seem to stand still in time even as their
heads swim to a symphony of notes,15 just as his underworld audience stop
their repetitive tortures, in awe of his music (nec Tantalus undam / captavit refugam, stupuitque Ixionis orbis, / nec carpsere iecur volucres, urnisque
vacarunt / Belides, inque tuo sedisti Sisyphe, saxo / ‘Tantalus did not grasp the
fleeing wave, Ixion’s wheel stopped in wonder, the vultures did not pluck
at the liver; the Belides rested on their urns, and you, Sisyphus, sat down
on your stone’ 10.41–4).
The longing eye, like that of the artist, creates stillness in motion, and
lives in the instant of acceleration. We get another good example of this
in Met.10 in the Hippomenes and Atalanta tale: when Hippomenes sees
Atalanta sprint, a pink flush brightens her naked flesh like the play of
purple light thrown by a billowing awning onto the veined marble walls
of a hall (10.594–6), yet even as he turns her into stone, ‘the running
added a beauty all of its own’ (cursus facit ipse decorem 590). When they
race together, we focus on the ocular flash as they dart in tandem from
the starting blocks (uterque / emicat 652–3).16 Orpheus’ song in Met.10 is
not just interested, therefore, in desire as a problem, in the outcome of
desire as a destructive force,17 but also in revisiting again and again the
intimate interval and moment of interaction in which desire is created
and exists – which is also the gate of wonder and of (self-)transformation.
Note that Myrrha’s torment calls for an existence within precisely this
realm, ‘between the fear of death and the weariness of life’ (inter mortisque
metus et taedia vitae 482; cf. mutataeque mihi vitamque necemque negate /
‘change me and refuse me both life and death!’ 487), just as the Propoetides
suffer a punishment ‘mid-way between death and exile’ (si quid medium
est mortisque fugaeque 233) when they are metamorphosed into small, hard
stones.
loca plena timoris
As critics have recognized, all these (epic-length) instances of desire and
becoming take their cue from and obsessively refigure the fatal encounter
between Orpheus and Eurydice at 10.56–63.18 Let’s now look at this fascinating passage in detail.
15
16
17
18
Cf. Paglia (1990) 98: ‘Apollo says “stop!”, Dionysus says “move!”.’
Cf. again the lightning-gaze of the boar of Calydon: emicat ex oculis . . . flamma (Met.8.356).
As emphasized, rightly, by Janan (1988b).
See especially Hardie (2002a) 65, and Janan (1988b).
110
hic ne deficeret metuens avidusque videndi
flexit amans oculos, et protinus illa relapsa est,
bracchiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans
nil nisi cedentes infelix adripit auras.
iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quidquam
questa suo (quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?)
supremumque ‘vale’, quod iam vix auribus ille
acciperet, dixit revolutaque rursus eodem est.
Afraid of (her) failing, hungry for the sight of her, he
flicked back his longing eyes, and in an instant, back she fell –
and stretching out arms, flailing to catch or be caught,
the cursed figure grasped at nothing but thin air.
Now, dying again, she made no complaint against
her husband (what could she moan except that she was loved?).
She said one last ‘goodbye’ which hardly reached his ears,
and slipped right back to the place from which she’d come.
57
60
63
60
Vis à vis its Virgilian model (Georg.4.490–502), Ovid’s version of the tragedy
of Orpheus and Eurydice looks tight, rhetorical, diagrammatic: note the
neat balance of the pseudo-elegiac scales, between hic and illa, in 56–7, or
amans and amatam in 57/61, the unsentimental cut-to-the-chase of protinus
in 57, the banal wit of iterum moriens (60), picked up at the line just
following this passage (gemina nece 64), and the downsizing of Eurydice’s
plaintive five-line speech in Virgil to a mere (just about audible) vale at
62.19 Yet just as the fixed lines demarcating space and time in the tales I
discussed in the previous section serve also to circumscribe pliant, energypumped terrain, so the pared-down urbanity of the Orpheus–Eurydice
climax conceals moving parts, blind spots, and fierce emotions. Orpheus
may be the first to look back, but the question of who is in control of
viewing in this passage and who Ovid’s readers are watching at any one
time, is open to debate. Beneath the veil of visual clarity, we’re all feeling
our way in the dark.
For example, ne deficeret (56), as I have indicated in my translation, might
refer to Eurydice or Orpheus – the fear is (either/both) that she might grow
weak and fall back, or lest he might be pulling away from her and might
fail in his mission to return her safely to the upper world and to keep the
conditions laid down by the gods of the underworld.20 Indeed, the two
possible movements (he too far ahead, she too far behind) are mutually
19
20
As Anderson puts it (1972) 475, Ovid here ‘exploits every opportunity to circumvent pathos’. Mack
(1988) 5–10, offers a useful analysis of the Virgilian and Ovidian passages.
Note the possible legal sense of deficio (OLD s.v. 9d), referring to the failure to fulfil a condition.
111
dependent, for one entails the other. Thus in the first three words of the
description, the possible folding of subjects already holds in eternal suspense
the weight of guilt, and the issue of who fails, which dominate Book 10 as a
whole. Similarly, while most translations presume a change of person from
Eurydice (illa 57) to Orpheus in line 58 (it is he who is holding out his arms,
he who grasps at thin air) there is nothing in the Latin to dictate this shift.
Indeed, readers who look back to Virgil remember that in Georg.4.497–8,
it is Eurydice who holds out her hands in vain for Orpheus’ grasp (feror
ingenti circumdata nocte / invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas. /
‘I am carried off, cloaked in vast darkness, stretching out hopeless hands
to you, alas no longer yours’), and in Ovid the present participle intendens
follows naturally from relapsa est (modern editors must insert a comma to
indicate alteration of subject). Yet the gestures could fit either party, or both
(if we try to visualize the drama, it would be strange if either Orpheus or
Eurydice did not extend their arms to attempt to catch hold of the other,
as the concurrent active and passive action in prendique et prendere certans
suggests).21
Anderson argues that the actions of line 59 could only be that of Orpheus,
as ‘snatching at retreating air belongs among the formulaic motions of one
who sees a dream or vision of a beloved one (cf. Aen.2.790ff.) or has contact with the dead (cf. Aen.6.700ff.)’.22 We might note, with Anderson,
the parallel at Georg.4.500–2, as Eurydice fails to see Orpheus clutching at
the shades and trying desperately to talk to her (neque illum / prensantem
nequiquam umbras et multa volentem / dicere praeterea vidit). Yet the subject
of 59 must surely also be the subject of 58, returning us to the oddity of a
change of person at the start of that line: we must go back from where we
came, retracing our steps to check our subject is still there – have we lost her
(him?)? It is as if, in muddling the (barely distinguishable) acts of reaching
out and grasping air, of leaning forward and falling backwards, Ovid has
fused Virgil’s carefully separated lovers (vos quoque iunxit Amor, so the story
goes at 29), suggesting a breakdown of difference into symmetry and previewing the homosexual and incestuous temptations of the rest of Book 10:
for example, Myrrha too dreams of a geminatus amor (10.333), and redoubles her crime (facinus geminat 471; cf. gemina nex 64), her body ‘joined’
with that of her father (devota corpora iunxit 464). She mimes Orpheus and
21
22
Compare Atalanta’s wavering between active and passive positions at 10.609–10: talia dicentem molli
Schoeneia vultu / aspicit et dubitat, superari an vincere malit / ‘as he said this, the daughter of Schoeneus
gazed on him with softening eyes, unable to decide whether she preferred to be conquered or to
conquer’.
Anderson (1972) 479–80.
112
Eurydice’s ascent when she feels her way to her father’s bedroom in the
dark (altera motu / caecum iter explorat / ‘with the other hand she gropes
the blind path’ 455–6) and is caught in the spotlight, like Eurydice, when
Cinyras finally illuminates her face with his lamp (inlato lumine vidit / et
scelus et natam 473–4).
The repetition of infelix (59) in line 70, referring now to Lethaea in
Ovid’s convoluted, esoteric simile, again prompts a double-take, for while
‘the cursed one’ is now gendered female, offering perhaps a clue to the subject of 59, Lethaea, like Olenos, is a figure for Orpheus. The simile morphs
him into a split, androgynous, guilty/innocent hybrid in the very act of
transforming from single to plural, and from plural to single, composite
being to separate entities (quique 68; tuque 69; tuae, iunctissima quondam;
pectora 70–1; nunc lapides 71). Yet as well as describing Orpheus’ shock at
Eurydice’s second death, the simile also offers an allegory for their relationship and their interaction on the margins of Hades, encompassing two
not one (the gemina nex coniugis 64, is also a letum duorum 39). Like the
stories that follow, which frequently include justifications, defences and
reproaches of Orpheus’ action, together with accusations (made, withdrawn) of Eurydice’s guilt (he sings of ‘girls paying the penalty for their
lust’ 154), these lines hint that Orpheus’ (like Olenos’) culpability is superficial, and that the female partner, confident in her stunning looks, is really
the one to blame. They do, that is, if we read this peculiar passage in a
half-light, if we are seduced by (trying to solve) the windings and fibs that
underworld journeys are made of, and that Orpheus can never quite dismiss, despite his ambition at 10.19–20 to ‘lay aside all false and doubtful
speech’.
In his discussion of 56–63, which imagines Orpheus as the subject of
58–9, Anderson concludes: ‘Thus Ovid continues to place little emphasis
on Eurydice, but as much as possible to keep our eyes on Orpheus.’23 It is
true that those oculi of his have bewitching charms: When Orpheus breaks
the condition stated at 10.51 (ne flectat retro sua lumina) and turns his eyes
on Eurydice (flexit amans oculos 57), he is fired up by the visual powers of
Diana and Medusa, as they appear in Books 3 and 4 of the Metamorphoses.
Compare again oraque retro / flexit (Diana at 3.187–8) and retro versus
protulit ora (Medusa’s head at 4.656), which in Met.15.685–6 becomes the
now harmless backwards glance of the great serpent (oraque retro / flectit),
just as the ghost of Orpheus finally gets to look back safely at Eurydice at
23
Anderson (1972) 480.
113
11.66: Eurydicen suam iam tuto respicit Orpheus.24 Yet in the case of Diana,
we must remember that she casts back her gaze only after being spied on
by Actaeon, when her exposed nakedness makes her blush purple, like
clouds bruised by the laser-rays of the sun (3.183–5). Orpheus is both the
voyeuristic boy, unable to resist looking at what he shouldn’t (avidusque
videndi 56), and the aggressive goddess retaliating (in a move reminiscent
of the preemptive strikes of Ars 1 and 2) against a crime already committed.
He is both male and female, seer and seen (avidusque videndi 56 / voluitque
videri . . . nocens 68–9). As Orpheus takes the bait of Eurydice’s lovely face
(have her eyes been boring into the back of his head and casting their spell
all along?), he is also Lethaea, confisa figurae (69) ‘too trusting in beauty’,
or ‘too trusting of a ghost’,25 a Narcissus figure conscious of an admiring
audience, striving to grasp a mere umbra together with the whispered vale
of its bodiless voice (cf. ‘vale’ inquit et Echo 3.501), and fantasizing about
unity in death (nunc duo concordes anima moriemur in una 3.473; cf. leto
gaudete duorum 10.39).26
Read against the Diana and Actaeon myth in Met.3, the figurative metamorphosis of 10.64ff., in which Eurydice becomes the three-headed beast,
is already beginning to happen at line 58: for when the hunting dogs attack
Actaeon in stag form, he too turns his speechless face towards them as if he
is stretching out beseeching arms (circumfert tacitos tamquam sua bracchia
vultus 3.241; cf. bracchiaque intendens 10.58). Actaeon’s tragic death is woven
further into Book 10 in the first of Orpheus’ songs, when Cyparissus unwittingly kills his own stag in a forest grove much like Diana’s sacred haunt,
which is (already) densa cupressu (‘thick with Cypress trees’) at 3.155. It also
shadows the courtship of Atalanta and Hippomenes, when Hippomenes is
as stunned as Actaeon at spying this goddess naked (compare ut faciem et
posito corpus velamine vidit 10.578, with ‘nunc tibi me posito visam velamine
narres / si poteris narrare, licet’ / ‘Now you are free to tell of how you saw
me all unrobed, if you can!’ 3.192–3). Diana’s threat girdles Hippomenes’
vision, and this love affair encompasses all the crucial, perilous scenes in
24
25
26
See also the rather anodyne, unerotic version of the simultaneous gaze, the meeting of bright eyes,
in the Pygmalion story: erubuit, timidumque ad lumina lumen / attollens pariter cum caelo vidit
amantem / ‘she blushed, and lifting her timid lights to the light, saw the sky and her lover at the
same time’ (10.293–4).
figura is used to mean shade or phantom of the dead in Lucretius and Virgil (e.g. Aen.10.641,
Lucr. 4.38): does Orpheus look back because he is too trusting in his own beauty, or too trustful of
Eurydice’s ghost (i.e, he is sure she will not disappear?).
Anderson (1989) 3, identifying Orpheus with (Quintilian’s) Ovid, calls him ‘the perfect narcissist,
nimium amator ingenui sui’.
114
Ovid in which eyes meet, beauty stuns and partners compete to retain
just the right erotic distance between them, almost repeating the horrors of
Actaeon’s and Eurydice’s metamorphoses.27
So is Eurydice’s (?) pleading gesticulation at 10.58 the action of a familiar
who has become alien, of the lover who is being attacked? Or, from Hippomenes’ similar movement at 10.580, as he stands amazed at Atalanta’s
beauty (obstipuit tollensque manus / ‘stunned, he stretched out his hands’
580) are we simply to infer the gesture of a man desperate to touch the
object of his lust? But desire is always almost contiguous with fear, as we
saw in the chapter on Ars Amatoria: Atalanta’s streaming hair as she runs
is potentially devastating in its ability to mesmerize, so close to the windswept tresses of one of the Bacchants rushing to attack Orpheus (compare
terga iactantur crines per eburnea 10.592, with e quibus una leves iactato crine
per auras 11.6). The look of love and the look of hate (of aroused surprise
and girning aggression or horror, of beauty and ugliness) are sometimes
almost indistinguishable in Ovid: compare Venus’ evil ‘backward’ glance,
in which she conceives the idea of turning the Propoetides into bulls (ad cornua vultum / flexit 10.235–6), with that of Orpheus (flexit amans oculos 57).
Similarly, Cinyras easily mistakes his daughter Myrrha’s longing for dread
(361), while the hypnotizing appeal of one of Venus’ golden apples (de
tribus unum 664) is a hair’s breadth away from the lust-rousing blast of
one of the three Furies (e tribus una 313).
Despite declaring before Pluto and Proserpina at 10.20–2 that he hasn’t
come to Hades to ‘bind the three necks of Medusa’s monstrous offspring,
rough with serpents’ (non huc . . . / descendi, . . . uti villosa colubris / terna
Medusaei vincerem guttura monstri), Orpheus kills Eurydice with a quasiMedusan glare. When we look back from the vantage point of Myrrha’s tale,
his hunger to see Eurydice (avidusque videndi 10.56), alongside Cinyras’
eagerness to recognize his mistress (avidus cognoscere amantem 472) has
the power to make him commit murder: Cinyras’ glistening sword and
Orpheus’ piercing eyes are one and the same, just as the strings of the poet’s
lyre are also those of the bow – Apollo’s and Cupid’s weapon (citharam
nervis et nervis temperat arcum / ‘he strings the lyre and strings the bow’
108). Yet this is the same feral rage which finally turns Orpheus into Actaeon
at 11.25–8 and 37–43, as he holds out arms in vain and is torn apart by the
27
In particular, note that at the point Hippomenes challenges Atalanta to a race, he looks her straight in
the eye (constitit in medio vultuque in virgine fixo 601), and she looks back as she accepts the challenge
(molli . . . vultu / aspicit 609–10). Atalanta has many suitors executed because of the ‘witchery of her
beauty’ (tanta potentia formae est 573).
115
dog-like Bacchants, like a stag meeting its death in the arena (all eyes in the
audience on him now):
. . . structoque utrimque theatro
ceu matutina cervus periturus harena
praeda canum est; vatemque petunt et fronde virentes
coniciunt thyrsos non haec in munera factos.
just as the stag is doomed at the morning games,
sure prey for dogs as it waits there on the sand,
so they rushed upon the poet, and pelted him with
wreathed wands not made for such a purpose.
...
quae postquam rapuere ferae cornuque minaci
divulsere boves, ad vatis fata recurrunt
tendentemque manus atque illo tempore primum
inrita dicentem nec quicquam voce moventem
sacrilegae perimunt, perque os (pro Iuppiter!) illud
auditum saxis intellectumque ferarum
sensibus in ventos anima exhalata recessit.
The savage bitches seized these weapons, ripping apart
horned bulls that got in their way, then heading for the bard.
As he stretched out arms, mouthing words that for the first time failed,
his voice without effect, the wicked women struck (O Jupiter!) –
those lips, which held the rocks, and hearts of fearsome beasts enthralled,
breathed out his soul, which flew off on the winds.
Met.11.25–8, 37–43
In the simile at 10.64ff., too, Orpheus is the victim of that same monster,
which zaps him with the refracted/stolen power of his own mesmerizing
music: he stupuit (64), just as Ixion stops, as if petrified, at 42 (stupuitque
Ixionis orbis). Mirrored by his own triple identity in this simile (Orpheus–
Olenus–Lethaea), the poet comes face to face with three-headed Cerberus.
This is another crucial passage which I would like now to consider in detail.
non aliter stupuit gemina nece coniugis Orpheus
quam tria qui Stygii, medio portante catenas,
colla canis vidit; quem non pavor ante reliquit
quam natura prior, saxo per corpus aborto;
quique in se crimen traxit voluitque videri
Olenos esse nocens, tuque, o confisa figurae,
infelix Lethaea, tuae, iunctissima quondam
pectora, nunc lapides, quos umida sustinet Ide.
Orpheus was stunned by his wife’s double death,
just like that man who saw Hell’s three-headed dog,
its middle neck chained: the terror left him only with
65
70
65
116
his former state, once his body turned to stone.
Or like Olenus, who leeched onto sin, and wanted
to look guilty, and you – unlucky, vain Lethaea –
once two hearts joined forever, now
two stones held by dewy Ida.
10.64–71
70
We might note that Medusa and Cerberus are analogous ogres: Medusa’s
snake-hair is akin to Cerberus’ many heads, and both are ever-watchful
threshold creatures of Hades which must be put to sleep by valiant epic
heroes. Moreover, the initial instruction given to Orpheus at 10.51 (ne flectat
retro sua lumina / ‘that he should not turn his eyes backward’) was itself a
version of the taboo that masks Medusa, or outlaws looking on the spirits
of the dead and underworld gods28 (Medusa’s face is that of a bloated,
repulsive corpse, as Wilk argues29 ). Like Perseus, Hercules and Jason before
him, Orpheus succeeds in sending Eurydice-as-Gorgon/dragon/Cerberus
to her (second) death, yet at the same time he is petrified by the not-quitediscernable gaze that comes to meet his own. He isn’t quite the monsterslaying, monster-taming epic hero. Moreover, his inference at 10.20 that he
isn’t following in Hercules’ footsteps (the time he came to Hades to capture
Cerberus) is reaffirmed at the beginning of the simile, for Orpheus plays
an anonymous bystander, struck dumb at the sight of a beast which has
already been chained around its middle neck (to be dragged, we understand,
by an invisible Hercules, 65). Nor could Orpheus, a snake-charmer too at
11.21,30 save his new wife Eurydice from the poisonous snake that nips her
vulnerable ankle at 10.10 (unlike Apollo, who drives away and petrifies
the serpent that attacks Orpheus’ head as it lies exposed on the shores of
Lesbos at 11.58–60). Yet at the same time, Orpheus’ power to tame wild
beasts suggests strong parallels with Hercules, whom Orpheus instructed in
writing, poetry and the mysteries during the Argo voyage: both travel to the
underworld to retrieve dead souls, and Seneca in Hercules Furens compares
them directly.31 Everywhere we look in this passage, then, characters divide
and intersect, and three-headed creatures emerge. The outline of Cerberus
begins to take shape again in the image of Lethaea and Olenus joined at
the chest (iunctissima pectora 10.70–1), a two-headed monster mutated into
the tria colla by comparison with its guilty cousin Orpheus,32 the poet
destined to become just a head, rolling on another foreign shore: in the
28
30
31
32
29 Wilk (2000).
See Henry (1992) 16.
Here, snakes are among the wild beasts that form a triumphal train behind the musician.
Seneca, Hercules Furens 569ff.
When Perseus uses Medusa’s head against his rivals for Andromeda’s hand in Met.6, they too operate
as a single, monstrous unit, each of its two heads turned opposite ways.
117
chthonic imagination, the narcissistic ideal of perfect union is perverse,
a freakish disfigurement. Ovid writes this episode as the Gorgon’s ‘manyheaded song’33 – an orchestra of tuneless noise piercing ‘mute silences’ (muta
silentia 53) that will inspire, smother and be drowned out by Orpheus’ lyre
in what remains of Met.10.34
While in this passage Orpheus plays both Perseus and Medusa as he stares
Eurydice (back) down to Hades, the couple’s encounter also remoulds that
between Perseus and Andromeda in Met.4, itself a narcissistic remake of
Perseus’ (just avoided) direct confrontation of Medusa and the sea monster
(the key phrase visae correptus imagine formae at 4.676 is an exact repetition
of Narcissus’ experience at 3.416). Here, Perseus is stupefied by Andromeda’s
beauty (et stupet 4.676; cf. stupuit 10.64) but she herself is the image of a
marble statue, carved from the jagged rock to which she is chained (marmoreum ratus esset opus / ‘he would have thought her a marble statue’ 4.675),
just as Orpheus, Olenus and Lethaea are turned to stone. Orpheus is identified further with the object of his gaze (Eurydice–Andromeda) in the
figure of Lethaea (confisa figurae 10.69), for it was Cassiope’s fiducia formae
(‘confidence in beauty’ 4.687) which led to the offering of Andromeda as
sacrifice to placate Poseidon, when she boasted that her daughter was more
attractive than the Nereids. As these visions collide, the passage at 10.56–71
amounts to the most precise expression to be found in Ovid of the simultaneous recognition and loss, jouissance and fear, arousal and castration
experienced in the act of looking ‘in the mirror’.35 These lines are alive
with the metamorphic energy of that moment, churning perspectives and
setting the monarchist, reactionary stillness of Apollonian art36 against the
infectious morphability of Dionysus.
The ghosts of yet another marriage, that of Procne and Tereus (and
Philomela/Itys in between), traces out one more couple-splitting threesome
33
34
35
36
Pindar, Pyth. 12.12–23. Note that the magic of the number three is used to great effect throughout
Met.10: e.g. the three heads of Cerberus, the three furies that haunt Myrrha at 314, the three times
she stumbles on the threshold of the bedroom and the three cries of the screech owl at 452–3, or the
three golden apples used by Venus to distract Atalanta.
The idea that Orpheus’ song is in competition with the songs of other artists is an important element
in his mythology: he kept the oarsmen of the Argo in rhythm with his music, and when the Sirens
sang to lure the soldiers to their deaths, his exquisite melodies vied with and overpowered theirs, so
that the Argonauts listened to him alone.
Later on in Book 10, that castration is literal, when Adonis is speared in the groin by a boar, whose
‘lightning stroke’ attack resembles, as I have mentioned elsewhere, the Medusa-effect of the direct,
aggressive gaze: indeed Venus fears the eyes of wild beasts at 10.549 (oculos ferarum), against which
the dazzling beauty of Adonis’ face will be no match.
Plutarch calls Apollo ‘the one’, ‘denying the many and abjuring multiplicity’ (Moralia 5.247), while,
as Paglia writes (1990) 97, Dionysus is ‘hoi polloi, the many’, both ‘rabble and rubble, both democratic
non-rule and the slurry of uncountable objects rumbling through nature’.
118
which haunts Orpheus and Eurydice’s union from the beginning.37 Their
funereal wedding, in which torches splutter black smoke and fail to
light, evokes Met.6.428ff. (Eumenides tenuere faces de funere raptas / ‘the
Eumenides held torches stolen from a funeral’ 6.430), while Philomela’s
fate is roused again in the image of the snake darting at Eurydice’s ankle
at 10.10 (Philomela’s tongue, as I discussed in the introduction, is compared to a snake’s severed tail that moves towards the girl’s feet at 6.560).
Myrrha’s union with her father is also conceived as an anti-wedding, and
features a funereal screech-owl which cries three times (10.452–3), a bird
also present at the wedding of Procne and Tereus (incubuit bubo 6.432).
And the missing, cannibalized child of Tereus and Procne’s union (quaque
data . . . erat ortus Itys 6.436–7) is born finally in Orpheus’ imagination
at 10.465, when Cinyras ‘receives his own flesh into his evil bed’: accipit
obsceno genitor sua viscera lecto (cf. inque suam sua viscera congerit alvum /
‘he gorges himself with the flesh of his own flesh’ 6.651). Myrrha plays
raped Philomela, calculating Procne and innocent doppelganger Itys all at
once,38 distilling a morally ambiguous tragedy into the few, slow seconds
it takes to cross her father’s threshold and climb into his bed. In her, then,
it is tempting to see the three-headed monster rising again, this time from
the darkness of a bedroom.
Indeed, the snake-voice that is the hiss of Eurydice’s assailant, of
Philomela’s cut-out tongue, and of her own mouth as it struggles to speak,
lives in the underworld, in its twists and turns (falsi positis ambagibus oris
10.19), and in its guardians (nec uti villosa colubris / terna Medusaei vincerem guttura monstri 21–2). It is the sound of dumb silence (per muta
silentia 53) and the stillness of rocks (inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo 44), a
deadly, tuneless noise that could not be further removed from the honeyed,
life-enhancing lyrics of Orpheus’ song. Yet in the identity-defining experience at the gates of Hades, Ovid’s Orpheus in Met.10 becomes a hybrid
artist, inspired by and changing places with female artists, alternately reviving and hypnotizing his audiences (as in 44), and obsessed with the visual
shape of the written word as much as with the aural pleasures of music. In
Georg.4.511, Eurydice is already compared to a philomela, or nightingale,
mourning the theft of her chick from her nest by a watchful farmer (as
Hardie notes, the miserabile fatum of Philomela, inscribed on her tapestry
and read by Procne at Met.6.582, makes reference to the miserabile carmen
37
38
Note that Atalanta also refers to any potential marriage as a coniugium crudele (10.621) and has
preempted and forestalled a Philomela-tragedy by killing off multiple Tereuses in advance.
Compare the incestuous confusions mapped out at 10.346–8: (‘Do you realize how many relationships
and names you are mixing up? Will you be your mother’s rival, your father’s mistress? Will you be
called the sister of your son, the mother of your brother?’).
119
sung by Orpheus at Georg.4.514).39 So too, when Orpheus is beheaded by
the Bacchants at the beginning of Met.11, his tongue continues to mourn
in accompaniment to the failing magic lyre (flebile lingua / murmurat exanimis 11.52–3), just like the snake-end of Philomela’s tongue (radix micat
ultima linguae, / ipsa iacet terraeque tremens immurmurat atrae 6.558–9),
and Myrrha’s suicidal mutterings (murmura verborum 10.382). Finally, as
Orpheus’ head, Medusa-like with its sea-straggled, streaming hair, lodges
on the sands of Lesbos,40 he inches further towards the Sapphic domain
of female desire that seemed so tantalizing and not-quite-touchable at the
beginning of Book 10, as the poet stepped between worlds.
fu rthe r repe rc u ss ion s
Thus far, we have glimpsed some of the ways in which Orpheus’ songs in
Book 10 comment on and rewrite the encounter with Eurydice in lines
50–71, splitting and distending the incident (the moment) into many different aspects, and imagining multiple versions of the many-headed Cerberus. I now want to turn, finally, to the second of the tales, the tragedy of
Hyacinthus, which has a special place in Orpheus’ show not only because it
features his own guilt-ridden father, Apollo, but also because it includes one
of the several climactic points in the Metamorphoses in which the violent
power of the reflected image and look is harnessed with precision in the use
of the verb repercutere. In Ovid, this is where Apollo and empire triumph,
crafting matter into sharp, impressive shapes which gleam as they catch the
sun, spearing the eyes of viewers while at the same time summoning the
Furies and their seismic magic.
As in the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, the flirtation between
Apollo and Hyacinthus takes place as an athletic contest, implying an
ultimate winner and loser. As the couple strip, Spartan style, and slick their
bodies with olive oil, they turn themselves into Apollonian monuments
that already attract and reflect the spotlight:
corpora veste levant et suco pinguis olivi
splendescunt latique ineunt certamina disci.
quem prius aerias libratum Phoebus in auras
misit et oppositas disiecit pondere nubes;
recidit in solidam longo post tempore terram
pondus et exhibuit iunctam cum viribus artem.
39
40
Hardie (2002a) 268.
This scene is very similar to the one at 4.741ff. in which Medusa’s head is laid on the sandy shore
on a bed of seaweed that now suggests the salt-separated, wet and flowing hair of Orpheus.
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They strip, and when their skins are buffed
with luscious olive oil, the discus contest starts.
Phoebus held it steady, then sent it flying through
the air, splitting the clouds above with the iron weight.
After a long delay, it dropped back onto solid ground,
showing off the thrower’s skill and strength combined.
Met.10.176–81
As Apollo’s discus falls back down to earth, it traces the path of Eurydice
upwards and downwards from sky to underworld. Straightaway (protinus
182; cf. protinus illa relapsa est 57), the youth who at once combines Eurydice’s vulnerability and Orpheus’ impatient hunger, takes his turn:
protinus inprudens actusque cupidine lusus
tollere Taenarides orbem properabat; at illum
dura repercusso subiecit pondere tellus
in vultus, Hyacinthe, tuos.
Straight off the Spartan boy, reckless and eager to play,
rushed out to throw the disk – but then the
hard earth bounced it back and flung it
in your face, Hyacinthus.
10.182–5
We have seen already how reverberations pile up in Ovid, from the shiny,
sun-reflecting yoke of Apollo’s horses at 2.110 (clara repercusso reddebant
lumina Phoebo), and Narcissus’ reflected image at 3.434 (ista repercussae
quam cernis imaginis umbra est),41 to Perseus’ buffed shield (aere repercussae formam aspexisse Medusae 4.783) and the moon-lit waves of the
Hellespont at Heroides 18.77 (unda repercussae radiabat imagine lunae).
Together, these examples mark the ultra-fine line between reflection as protective, apotropaic, a safe alternative to full-on spectating (as in the case
of Perseus and his mirror-shield), and reflection as a laser-like, intensified
lightbeam (like the boomeranging rays of the sun which scorch the entire
globe in the tragedy of Phaethon in Met.2).
Here in Book 10, it is midday, and the sun is high overhead, at the peak
of its powers. Sun-god Apollo feeds the flames (longaque alit adsuetudine
41
Compare Narcissus’ action (marmoreis percussit pectora palmis 3.481; cf. cumque suos manibus percusserat ille lacertos 3.497), as if he is trying to re-create the reflection that eludes him, or before this,
the shocked, aggressive breast-beating of Diana’s nymphs when the goddess is seen naked (nudae
viso sua pectora nymphae / percussere 3.178–9), which are now copied by Venus at 10.723, when she
mourns the death of Narcissus–double Adonis (indignis percussit pectora palmis), and by Orpheus as
he creates new tunes at 11.5 (percussis nervis). Does Jupiter help inspire the reflections of the tale that
follows his when he beats the air on his cheating wings (percusso mendacibus aere pennis 10.159), just
as Diana’s nymphs create the drum-roll for the goddess’ deadly return of Actaeon’s glance?
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flammas 173), and the discus itself is a solar orbs, a giant eye that performs
an imaginable exchange of admiring, anxious looks between the lovers.
After the incident in Book 2 in which Apollo lost his own son Phaethon
(the parallel gives an incestuous air to his relationship with Hyacinthus,
linking the tale with those of Myrrha and Venus/Adonis, daughter–father
and mother–‘son’ affairs42 ), Apollo should know better than to let young,
overexcited boys play with or in the sun. It is his hand, he fears, that has
written his beloved’s death: his statement ‘in your wound I see my own
guilt’ (videoque tuum, mea crimina, vulnus 197) exposes Orpheus’ fault in
the analogous interchange with Eurydice. His art fails to heal the boy, just
as Orpheus’ musical powers cannot ensure his mission to Hades will be
successful. It is as if Hyacinthus is struck down by Apollo’s lustful gaze,
embodied in the discus-eye. Yet this admission of guilt is followed by selfexculpation (quae mea culpa tamen, nisi si lusisse vocari / culpa potest, nisi
culpa potest et amasse vocari / ‘and yet what is my fault, unless playing can
be called a crime, unless it is a crime to have loved’ 200–143 ), which brings
us back to line 61: quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam? / ‘What could she
complain about other than that she was loved?’.
In lines 185–6, the lovers blur into one (expalluit aeque / quam puer
ipse deus / ‘the god grows deadly pale together with the boy’), and unlike
Orpheus, who merely grasps at Eurydice, Apollo catches Hyacinthus’ limbs
as they collapse (conlapsosque excipit artus 186), and death is an embrace.
Yet just as Hyacinthus is being transformed (like Narcissus) into a beautiful
flower which can forever preserve his fragile, now innocuous loveliness, the
face of otherness raises her bristling head. As the boy dies, his drooping
neck is compared to a flower whose head has been snapped off by a gardener, in a scene reminiscent of Euryalus’ death in Aeneid 9, of Catullus’
‘castration’ at poem 11.22, as well as of Medusa’s decapitation. Apollo has
already demonstrated his suitability for the Perseus role, given his skill in
avoiding negative reflection (exhibuit iunctam cum viribus artem 181). Look
at 10.190–4:
ut, siquis violas riguoque papavera in horto
liliaque infringat fulvis horrentia linguis,
marcida demittant subito caput illa gravatum
nec se sustineant spectentque cacumine terram
42
43
See Hardie (2002a) 187–8, on the similarity between Adonis’ and Venus’ son Cupid. Cupid is kissing
his mother at 10.525–6 when one of his arrows scratches her breast, causing her to fall in love with
Adonis.
Tarrant (2004), following Merkel, deletes this couplet, but Anderson (1982) retains it (I use his text
here).
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Like when the gardener trims off violets, lilies, poppies
in their watered beds, and bristling with yellow tongues
they faint and droop their withered heads and can’t stand up –
so gaze upon the ground with tops bowed low.
The three-headed monster is back, in the plural (count them – violets, lilies,
poppies), the middle heads spiked with multiple tongues. The verb horreo
(or the adjective horrens 199) is most often applied to steely weapons,44 or
to the quivering of a boar’s bristles, and is used to mean ‘to regard with awe
or dread’. Yet as his neck sags and looks at the earth (a sign of guilt, or of
posed innocence? Myrrha terram tuetur at 389), Hyacinthus’ threatening
and threatened gaze is conquered once and for all. From the enigmatic scene
at which the poet lays eyes on Eurydice at 10.57, delineated subject–object
distinctions in this book tend to crack and break down. I’ve suggested that
Met.10 is not just interested in the vis and culpa of (paradigmatically) male
looking and its victims, but in the conundrum of identity, the mirrormoment, in which eyes meet – the instant of erotic passion in which ideas,
rhythms and forms burst into life, and in which subjects and poems are
monumentalized. In trying to penetrate and pick apart this space, I have
shown how Ovidian illusionism, incarnated in the poet Orpheus, is not
just narcissistic, but grounded in an elastic swing between sameness and
difference; not just reanimating, but exploitative of its power to fossilize and
vanquish. Orpheus’ compulsion to stare into the depths of Hades, to relive
the flash of desire, is precisely what breeds poetry and metamorphosis in
Book 10 and throughout the epic.45 This is what he knows, guiltily, at 153–
4, when he wants to sing of girls inconcessis ignibus attonitas (‘astonished
by forbidden fires’) – of girls falling prey, that is, to Medusa’s look,46 and
to the fascinating trick of his own song (ac primum attonitas etiamnum
voce canentis / innumeras volucres / ‘the first victims were countless birds still
spellbound by the poet’s voice’ 11.20–1).
44
45
46
E.g. Ovid, Met.8.285.
Similarly, as Janan argues (1988b) 120–4, the accident with the discus allows Apollo to create poetry,
turning him into an auctor (see 10.214), and inspiring a whole new genre, the linos, a mourning song
sung at various religious festivals in Argos and Boeotia.
As I mentioned in the introduction, Athena at Met.4.802 wears the Gorgon’s snakes on her breast
in order to leave enemies ‘astonished’ (ut attonitos formidine terreat hostes).
c h apt e r 4
Co-creators: Heroides 15
quippe ubi temperiem sumpsere umorque calorque,
concipiunt et ab his oriuntur cuncta duobus;
cumque sit ignis aquae pugnax, vapor umidus omnes
res creat et discors concordia fetibus apta est.
ergo ubi diluvio tellus lutulenta recenti
solibus aetheriis altoque recanduit aestu,
edidit innumeras species partimque figuras
rettulit antiquas, partim nova monstra creavit.
For life is conceived when moisture and heat unite,
and from these two elements all living things arise;
and though fire and water clash, their steam creates
all things, and inharmonious harmony is the recipe for life.
So when, muddied by the recent flood, the earth
grew hot from the burning rays of the high sun,
she gave birth to countless species; in part, she restored
the shapes of old, in part she issued creatures new and strange.
Met.1.430–7
In the Medicamina and the third book of the Ars Amatoria Ovid wrote for,
or made us imagine his writing for, an audience of women. In the Heroides,
the subject of my next three chapters, he delves further into (men’s fantasies
of ) the female psyche by imagining mythic heroines taking the advice he
gave in Ars 3 and composing letters to their male lovers. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the issue of how authorial and textual voices are gendered
has loomed large in criticism of Heroides 1–15 since the early 1980s. The
poems have long been a testing ground for Felman-esque questions about
what makes a voice female, what it means for a man to write ‘as’ a woman,
and whether one can ever write/read from the position of the ‘other’.1 This
is where the notion that Ovid’s counter-cultural poetics are bound up with
1
See especially Felman (1975) 3, and summary in Sharrock (2002a) 99–100. Lindheim (2003) discusses
this issue in the context of the Heroides specifically.
123
124
an allegiance to the feminine is perhaps most indisputable: it is through
these passionate, defiant, anxious heroines that the elegist stakes his claim
on the canon (and projects his own exilic, narcissistic fear of abandonment),2 often seeming to cheat time and unravel literary hierarchies by
presenting the women’s alternative accounts as predating their ‘appropriation’ by the great (male) epicists and tragedians. As the writers strive for
material presence, the letters’ seeping, female fleshiness (softened with tears
and blood)3 offers up a poetics of fluidity within which concrete borders
can move and smudge. Thus the complex ways in which our own unshakeable knowledge of those legendary texts is both ratified and disputed by
the heroines’/Ovid’s versions of events become symbiotic with an ongoing
dialogue between gendered utterances (or our interpretation of them). In
other words, reading (or eavesdropping on) Ovid’s letters becomes a loaded
act, invested with as much authority and privilege as vulnerability and constraint. The poems can often seem to position us as conventional readers
defending the status quo of master fictions, so that we too are responsible
for locking the heroines back into tired, old fates (in its secrecy and writtenness, the letter itself helps silence its author, and freezes her in a specific
moment of a story we already know). Yet at the same time, the heroines’
isolation feeds potent desires and assertions that often rebut our (now subjectivized) presumptions: their professed simplicity and naı̈vety, too (they
all write ‘for the first time’, and claim emotional transparency), is a deceptive
rhetoric liable to fracture complacency and tempt creative perspectives and
re-readings.4
In this chapter, I want to home in on Heroides 15, Sappho’s letter to
Phaon, because it is here, I think, that this interaction and competition of
voices in the ‘single’ Heroides is at its most immediate and perplexing.5 The
poem is a more complicated, and in some ways more ambiguous example of
2
3
4
5
In chapter 6, I will discuss the idea that the Heroides may be read as letters from exile in further detail.
Rosenmeyer (1997) is fundamental on this topic.
See e.g. Her.3.3–4, 5.72, 8.107–9, 14.6–8, 15.97–8, where the heroines tell us that tears are falling onto
the page and mingling with their words. At Her.11.1–2, blood drips onto the page.
See e.g. Desmond (1993) on Dido, and Smith (1994) with Spentzou (2003) 33–5, on the collection
in general. Spentzou argues that we still do not take the heroines’ challenges seriously enough, and
that readings which have concentrated on the intertextual intricacy of the poems depend on an
‘interpretative conspiracy’ between critic and reader (2), to the detriment of the heroines’ ‘own’
voices. For me, it is not so much a question of being able to decide either to comply with or to reject
the dominant discourses of canonic fictions, which Spentzou sees as ‘first-level messages’ beneath
which we can recuperate female truths: often these differing fabrics of reality can be seen to affect
and get woven up in each other, and it is the jolting shifts and dialogues, as well as the identity crises
that these create which interest me more.
See also Lindheim’s recent analysis of the poem (2003): ‘Heroides 15 provides something of a test
case for questioning the role of the gendered authorial voice in the construction of Woman and of
her desire’ (11). Lindheim argues that the fragments of Sappho’s own poetry in Her.15 point to a
view of female heterogeneity and realness that jars with the repetitive, generalized Woman of male
125
the kinds of dialogues and interchanges we have been looking at so far in the
Medicamina, Ars and Metamorphoses. While Sappho’s letter is of course part
of an exchange with Phaon, whose reply we can predict or imagine but never
see, it is also in itself dialogic, a sometimes harmonious, sometimes jarring
blend of the voices and desires of two love poets. For despite the mythology
that grew up around her, of which Phaon was a part, Sappho was of course a
real woman and a real writer, the Greek love poet par excellence. She already
has her own (far from silent) lyric song. Not only that, she was and is a figure
who, in her poetic persona at least, is famous for communicating her love for
women, not for the local ferryman. As we will see, her homosexuality further
complicates the exchange of gazes in the poem: Ovid’s Sappho is a split
character, attempting to relate to her (old) self as much as to Phaon/Ovid.
She looks very written at times, yet as the only heroine-writer, and as the
love poet often cited as Ovid’s influential predecessor, she can represent the
culmination and reification of the Heroides’ illusion of female authorship,
and functions as the crucial figure in a collection of poems in which the
Ovidian author writes in disguise. In what becomes finally a life or death
situation, her poem questions the definition and definability of authorship,
gender and identity. We are constantly asked, or prompted to ask: Just how
authentic, or how artificial, is Sappho in this posed, erotic alignment of His
‘n’ Hers, Roman and Greek love poets? What is it for an Ovidian author to
write through and over the poetess whose work he recommends should be
read alongside his own, and whose influence on his own writing and love
affairs he hints at on several occasions?6
For modern readers, the authenticity debate surrounding Her.15 seems
almost to be baited by the letter itself, which not only displays some unusual
features, but is also transmitted separately from the single epistles.7 Recently,
some scholars have argued that it cannot be the work of Ovid,8 and that
6
7
8
fantasy dreamt up by Ovid, here and elsewhere in the collection. Although my initial way into the
poem has much in common with Lindheim’s, I will be emphasizing how tricky it is for readers to
isolate Sappho’s Sappho from Ovid’s Sappho, or more generally, Sapphic lyric from Ovidian elegy,
and asking more directly what is at stake in confronting this difficulty in Her.15.
E.g. Ars 3.331, Rem.761, Tr.2.365. Jacobson even goes so far as to suggest (1974) 281, ‘when Ovid writes
in Tristia 2.365, “Lesbia quid docuit Sappho, nisi amare, puellas?” one almost senses that he considers her
his female counterpart’. Lefkowitz comments (1981) 36, that in the bibliographic tradition, Sappho
has a reputation as a teacher; ‘we learn that she had pupils, and therefore a school, according to one
commentary’. See Page (1974) 261A; cf. Dover (1978) 174–5.
However, as Tarrant acknowledges (1981) 135–6, the fact of separate transmission, although curious, is
not altogether surprising given that Sappho is a historical rather than a mythical character. Moreover,
a twelfth-century florilegium offers excerpts from our Her.15 between the last of the single letters and
the first of the double (see Dörrie 1971, 52–4), and it has often been said that this was copied from
a ninth-century exemplar, suggesting that the letter was transmitted from antiquity with the other
Heroides in its traditional position and that its detachment was a result of medieval intervention.
See Tarrant (1981), Murgia (1985) and Knox (1995) 12–14.
126
the mention of a Sappho letter at Am.2.18.26, 34 is either interpolated,9 or
refers to a lost Ovidian work on the same topic (I will discuss these lines
later: let it suffice to say here that I do not consider them incompatible
with the narrative we have in Her.15).10
Tarrant has led the way in discrediting Ovidian authorship on stylistic
and metrical grounds, using what is undoubtedly the idiosyncrasy of Sappho’s letter to support his ‘private opinion’ that it is ‘a tedious production
containing hardly a moment of wit, elegance, or truth to nature’.11 Tarrant
points out several interesting – if inconclusive – peculiarities of the letter’s
style and metre, but, in my mind, fails to prove the case against authenticity.
Rather, I agree with Rosati’s assessment that ‘one would have to attribute to
the presumed interpolator of the Epistula Sapphus a theoretical awareness
and an expressive capacity not only uncommon in general but also hard
to attribute to the writer responsible [as Murgia argues], for “an innocent
attempt to supply a missing poem as the author believed Ovid would have
done it”’.12 Indeed, in my reading, this poem’s experiment in performing
poetic and gendered identity as relational not only plays a crucial role in
Ovid’s wider exploration of intersubjectivity as discussed in this book, but
also (whether it was intended to be placed in its present position or not),
provides a fascinating ‘bridge’ between the single and double letters, and
offers a more self-reflexive commentary on the dynamics of the collection
as a whole.13 Viewed in this context, I would argue, Her.15 looks more
unmistakably Ovidian than ever.
I will also be emphasizing in this chapter that the interrogative thrust of
Her.15 depends fundamentally on the frame and site for this bitter-sweet
affair, the Ovidian love letter.14 The uncertainty surrounding the identity
9
10
12
13
14
See Murgia (1985) for a convincing rebuttal of Tarrant’s opinion that Am.2.18.26, 34 are interpolated.
11 Tarrant (1981) 134–5.
See discussion on pp. 153–4.
Rosati (1996b), quoting Murgia (1985) 466, n.24. Cf. Bessone (2003, 239) who argues that Heroides
15 ‘reveals the hand of an extraordinarily self-conscious poet: it is difficult not to attribute that
self-consciousness to Ovid’. Also see Courtney (1990).
Also see Rosati (1996b) on the possible ring composition between the beginning of Dido’s letter and
the end of Sappho’s, supporting the letter’s present position at the end of the collection.
The epistolary form was downplayed for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: e.g.
Palmer (1898) xi: ‘The epistles are really soliloquies, the epistolary setting being little more than a
mere form which gives an apparent reason for these soliloquies being committed to writing at all.’
Also see Wilkinson (1955) 86: ‘the choice of epistolary form for what are really tragic soliloquies
was not entirely happy’, and Kenney (1970) 389: ‘for all his versatility, Ovid was bound by the
essential limitations of the form he had chosen. The epistolary connection in Her.15 is pretty flimsy.’
Critics who make the letter itself crucial to their readings include Henderson (1986), Casali (1995b),
Kennedy (2002), who all draw on Derrida’s reframing of epistolarity as a much broader literary
mode, one that is often concerned (in its formal separation of writer and addressee) to highlight
and explore issues of communication more generally (see Derrida 1980).
127
and role of author (and also, we will see, of reader) in Her.15 is adumbrated by a detailed discourse of epistolary seduction in the Amores and Ars
Amatoria, where the love letter is situated at the core of Ovidian erotics
(at Ars 3.345, the Heroides are also a set-book for would-be lovers). Via a
series of pointed verbal tags, as well as reflections of themes and scenarios,
Sappho’s poem sustains a close relationship with Ovid’s commentary on
love letters in the Amores and Ars, so that we are almost encouraged to view
its challenges as a ‘test’ of knowledge acquired in Ovid’s earlier texts, as
well as of the educated reader’s loyalty to the Ovidian authorial persona.
This is an infinitely delicate exercise (and the fun or frustration of reading this poem), however, as Her.15 carefully interlaces Ovid with Sappho,
obscuring recognizability as well as singularity (or originality). While on a
literal level the poem seems to rehearse Sappho’s hilarious deficiency as an
elegiac seductress, on another her ‘failures’ are also Ovid’s, motivated by
an acute awareness of the fragility of his own posthumous reputation and
of the sheer denseness of literary influence. Her.15 stages authorship as a
volatile (and sexually charged) rivalry in which both parties can be seen to
betray their mutual dependency. For the reader, the quandary is always that
there is no right side to be on, no winning formula for reading this battle
of authorial egos. I see the hybridity or palimpsestic quality of Her.15 as
a further, significant development of Ovid’s interest in the intersubjective
foundation of the self. Although, next to the Medicamina, Ars Amatoria and
Metamorphoses 10, Sappho’s letter makes less overt reference to Narcissus and
Medusa, whose stories have so far provided a rich mythic framework for this
theme, it is equally interested in exploring (as much, now, through the play
off of lesbian and heterosexual as simply of male and female desire) the
moment in which difference threatens to collapse into sameness, and
the implications of that merger for the life (and poetics) of desire. As we
scrape away at the wax, identities fracture and slip, and repressed, belligerent
passions both feed and deeply trouble the narcissistic imagination.
So while this Sappho is, on the one hand, neatly elegized, remade in
Ovid’s vision, on the other she is the stubborn antithesis of the elegiac
puella we saw made up from scratch in the Medicamina: this poetess has
no cultus – her hair is a mess, she dresses down, and wears no perfume or
jewelry (Her.15.73–7). She is the black Andromeda, the ugly, wild-haired
Medusa, to the Medicamina’s white-skinned narcissist: as she says at 15.35–
6, ‘If I am not a fair-faced beauty, just think how Cepheus’ Andromeda was
pretty in Perseus’ eyes, although she was dark with the colour of her native
land.’ When in her letter she drops in references to the avenging women
of ancient myth (at 15.155, she sings of lost love Phaon, while Procne’s bird
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sings of murdered Itys), we get glimpses of the cruel dominae of the Amores
or the scary girlfriends of the Ars Amatoria, who are always threatening
to shipwreck their men. The way in which Her.15, and Sappho’s fearsome
talent, almost kill male lover Phaon off for good, also lets us see flashes
of her lesbian identity – yet her love for women is often expressed in the
(heterosexual) voice of Ovid, echoing the Amores and Ars.
My discussion of these tensions will be thematic. I will start by mapping
the relationship between Her.15 and passages which address letter writing
in the Ars Amatoria, as well as in Am.2.18, where Ovid imagines his friend
Sabinus replying to the heroines’ letters. Here I will be concerned in particular with how Sappho, composing elegy for the first time in an attempt to
seduce a man, writes both as a didactic lover and as a reader–pupil of Ars 3
(her ‘simplicity’ is paradoxically also her enviable originality: she herself was
the ‘first’ love poet). At Ars 3.331,15 she is recommended reading alongside
Ovid, yet while Her.15 is imprinted with echoes of Ovidian instruction, it
also tells the story of didactic failure. For despite her pedagogy, Sappho’s
brother Charaxus (refusing, perhaps, to take lessons from a woman) remains
inops (‘weak’, or ‘lacking’ 63), and was caught in love’s trap when he fell for
a prostitute – now he despises his sister, and gloats as Phaon leaves her (me
quoque, quod monui bene multa fideliter, odit / ‘because I warned him well,
and in good faith, now he hates me’ 67; gaudet et e nostro crescit maerore
Charaxus / frater / ‘joy swells in my brother Charaxus’ heart as he sees my
pain’ 117–18).
I will go on to look more closely at the character of Phaon, who appears
as a strangely artificial construction, a symbol for a conflict of poetic
types and influences: he is both an ephebic Narcissus figure immune from
the attentions of a Sapphic Echo, and the delicious, homoerotic fantasy
of an Ovidian poet(ess). Phaon, Ovid’s audience would have known, is the
famous ferryman who worked the route between Lesbos and the mainland,
and who was rewarded with irresistible attractiveness by Aphrodite when
he offered her a free ride, after she appeared to him in disguise as a poor
old woman.16 As such, he embodies the Ovidian poet in the Ars Amatoria
(Venus’ favourite, the expert lover and epic–elegiac sailor with Cupid at
the helm17 ), and also becomes an abstract figure for the rhythm of communication between epistolists:18 his movement back and across a body of
15
16
17
18
nota sit et Sappho (et quid enim lascivius illa? / “you should know your Sappho too – for who is more
wanton than her?”).
For sources on the story of Phaon, and his relationship with Sappho, see Knox (1995) 278–9.
Cf. Her.15.215 (ipse gubernabit residens in puppe Cupido).
Perhaps even in more literal terms: a ferryman would by definition also be called upon to transport
letters. Phaon is (should be) Sappho’s postman.
129
water marks out and literalizes what Altman calls the ‘bridge/barrier’ function of a letter.19 Leander’s role in Her.18–19 is very similar, as I’ll explore
in chapter 6, and the roles of Sappho and Hero overlap as heroines who
yearn for their partners to referre pedem (15.186: to return, and to turn back
a quintessentially Ovidian metrical foot by replying), just as they always
have. Phaon is now in Sicily (15.11), breaking his epistolary/romantic contract with Sappho in literal and metaphorical terms. I will also discuss in
detail the scene of Sappho’s dream (or narcissistic illusion) at lines 125–84,
where the rival power of male and female love poetry to make things real is
explored via Am.3.1’s site for a battle of personified poetic types (Elegia and
Tragoedia). Throughout, we will see, Ovid exploits his trademark topos of
continuity in change to rehearse poetic rivalry and influence, the death and
rejuvenation of elegy and elegist. Finally, I will be suggesting ways in which
motifs of tears and drowning enact the liquidity of authorial identity and
literary exchange in the letter, and explore how the prospect of Sappho’s
suicide (and Phaon’s departure) is confounded by the memory of Tibullus’
death in Am.3.9, and by Ovid’s nebulous and puzzling ‘reply’ to the poem
in Am.2.18.
p ost co de s
Heroides 15 is an immensely intricate poem which throws many questions
at its readers at once. We are interrogated from the first lines:20
Ecquid, ut aspecta est studiosae littera dextrae,
protinus est oculis cognita nostra tuis?
an, nisi legisses auctoris nomina Sapphus,
hoc breve nescires unde veniret opus?21
Tell me, when you looked at the script from my eager right hand,
did your eye know at once whose it was?
Or, unless you had read the author’s name, Sappho,
would you not know from where this short work came?
Her.15.1–4
19
20
21
Altman (1982). As Kennedy (2002) 221, summarizes: ‘Epistolary discourse must manipulate both
time and space in order to overcome these barriers so as to make communication relevant rather
than anachronistic at the moment when the letter is read.’
Baca notes (1971) 34, that Sappho’s interrogation makes the letter very unusual in its context. As
commentators such as de Vries (1885) have always recognized, this beginning is also striking for the
way it seems to echo (or predict?) Ex P.2.10.1–2, written to Macer, Ovid’s rival in the elegiac crisis
of Am.2.18: Ecquid ab inpressae cognoscis imagine cerae / haec tibi Nasonem scribere verba, Macer? /
can you guess from the figure pressed into the wax that Naso writes these words to you’. For a fuller
analysis of the relationship between Her.15 and Tristia see Hinds (1985), and Rosenmeyer (1997).
Here and throughout this chapter I use Knox’s text (1995).
130
If we didn’t know to be suspicious, we are now. But we had been warned,
for the sophisticated interpretative challenges of the Heroides often prompt
readers to return to Ovid’s manual on love and love poetry, the Ars Amatoria.
In Ars 1.437–86, Ovid schooled his male audience in letter writing as the
first step in a strategy of seduction. Treat the letter as a tool of the trade,
he lectured; the point is not sincerity, but the very opposite – a rhetorical
campaign of deceit and flattery designed to hook your prey. In Ars 3, as
I discussed in chapter 2, he lets girls into the secret, instructing them to
counter guile with guile (iudice me fraus est concessa repellere fraudem / ‘in
my judgement fraud may be repelled by fraud’ 3.491). In the early stages
of a relationship, he advises that women get either their slave boy or slave
girl (the gender is irrelevant) to write letters on their behalf (ancillae puerive
manu perarate tabellas, / pignora nec puero credite vestra novo / ‘write your
messages by the hand of slave or slavegirl, and don’t entrust your pledges to a
boy you do not know’ 3.485–6). At Ars 3.493ff., he offers a cheap alternative,
or an ultra-discreet shortcut: practice faking your own handwriting to make
it look like someone else’s (ducere consuescat multas manus una figuras / ‘let
one hand be accustomed to copying many styles’ 493), and change the sex
of the addressee, writing ‘she’ when you mean ‘he’ (‘illa’ sit in vestris, qui
fuit ‘ille’, notis 498).
Little wonder, then, that Sappho begins her letter by asking whether we
know who she really is! Ovidian love letters, and Ovidian seduction itself,
are predicated on the obfuscation and confusion of gender and identity.
Yet the intercourse between Heroides 15 and the Ars Amatoria implies that
it is not only the authenticity of the letter writer which is at stake, but also
that of its recipient, its reader: what Ovid hints at in Ars 3.498 is not merely
the cunning of the well-taught letter writer, who can pretend both to be,
and be writing to, a man or woman, but also the indecisiveness germane
to letter writing itself, especially in the days before the Royal Mail. One
feature letters have in common with didactic poetry is that they may be said
to model literary communication22 by addressing someone,23 thus making
explicit the activity of reading. Yet who that someone will actually be is
even more difficult to determine than in didactic poetry.24 A letter sent,
22
23
24
As discussed by Castle (1982) 43: ‘The letter symbolises and reifies communication while it does not
necessarily embody it.’
See Sharrock (1994) 6 et passim: ‘what is specific in didactic texts is the foregrounding of the act of
reading by the presence of an involved Reader who receives the text’s instruction. Didactic poetry
makes explicit the activity of readers by purporting to teach – someone.’
See Sharrock (1994) 6–20, and Konstan (1994) for discussion of the dynamic and slippage of
‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ readers in didactic poetry. The Ovidian letter, I suggest, writes into its
non-intended reading a more explicit illegality, even to the point whereby, if we follow the logic, an
illegal reader might have no chance of understanding such a subtle and specifically directed text.
131
via an intermediary, and in Sappho’s case across an ocean, is hopeful but
ultimately uncertain of its final destination, and of the interceptors it will
attract en route.
Perhaps the most decisive confirmation of this uncertainty and potential slippage of addressee comes in the first of the Heroides, which will
declare itself one of many sent by Penelope to Ulysses. In a phrase which
is particularly acute and ironic given the dramatic context (as Kennedy
has successfully shown, this is the eve of the slaying of the suitors, when
Penelope, unaware that her husband is already home, is on the verge of
yielding to one of her rabid husbands-in-waiting),25 she writes:
quisquis ad haec vertit peregrinam litora puppim,
ille mihi de te multa rogatus abit,
quamque tibi reddat, si te modo viderit usquam,
traditur huic digitis charta notata meis.
Whoever turns his foreign prow towards these shores,
leaves only after being interviewed by me,
and I give him the note inscribed by my own hand,
to deliver to you if he should ever see you.
Her.1.59–62
As Johnson puts it:
Everyone who has held the letter, or even beheld it, including the narrator, has ended
up having the letter addressed to him as its destination. The reader is comprehended
by the letter; there is no place from which he can stand back and observe it. Not
that the letter’s meaning is subjective rather than objective, but rather that the
letter is precisely that which subverts the polarity “subjective/objective”.26
The seduction of the published love letter is predicated on the idea that
anyone can imagine himself (or herself ) as beloved addressee, as Phaon.
Anybody, in other words, has the right to reply. Moreover, as Ovid suggests
in Ars 1.480–1, replying is even a condition of reading: don’t worry, he tells
25
26
On this reading of Her.1 see Kennedy (1984) and Henderson (1986).
B. Johnson (1980) 114; cf. Jacobson (1974) 5, where Ovidian elegy is defined as ‘both subjective
and denying subjectivity . . . Ovid stands outside the poems while at the same time being part of
them’. The Ars, he continues, is an ‘imaginative extension of this technique . . . the very form made
concrete the distance between the poet as poet and the poet as lover’. In the Heroides, Ovid ‘transfers
the subjective element to his heroines’. Instead of reading the character’s mind, ‘he becomes it’.
The impression of subjectivity, tied inevitably to the idea of authenticity, is what Fränkel (1945)
36, recognizes when he says ‘When we read the fifteen verse epistles, we come here and there upon
a passage the like of which we ourselves meant to write at some point in our life’. Readability
is writeability, a concept Ovid seeks to impress on his students throughout the Ars (use familiar
language to coax, he says at 1.465); thus he both emphasizes the appeal of his own casual, sugar-daddy
approach to instruction, and encourages shy students to have a go themselves, to write as well as
read.
132
his male readers, as long as a girl reads your letter, you can be sure she’ll
want to reply eventually (tu modo blanditias fac legat usque tuas. / quae voluit
legisse, volet rescribere lectis / ‘just see to it that she is always reading your
sweet-nothings. / She who has wanted to read, will want to answer what
she has read’ Ars 1.480–1). Replying becomes compulsive once reading has
taken place, because it is in reading itself that seduction is achieved.27
As if to entice readers’ creative powers further, Ovid in Amores 2.18.27–35
suggests that his friend Sabinus has composed answers to six of the heroines’ letters (including Sappho’s): quam cito de toto rediit meus orbe Sabinus /
scriptaque diversis rettulit ipse locis! / ‘how quickly Sabinus has returned from
the ends of the earth and brought back letters written in far-distant places!’
(27–8). In Heroides 15, the idea that we can (and are supposed to) write
back is made even more alluring by our compromised position as unintended readers of a poem renowned for its intimacy and lewdness.28 As
set-up voyeurs, we are privy to what is (in the epistolary fantasy) the most
self-revelatory and intimate of texts, designed for the lover’s eyes only. As
Perry states, ‘because letters reveal the self, reading letters intended for
other eyes is the most reprehensible invasion of privacy and consciousness’.29 Moreover, the cleverest illegal reader is one already schooled by
Ovid in epistolary detective work: Ovid advises girls: inspice, quodque leges,
ex ipsis collige verbis / fingat an ex animo sollicitusque roget / ‘examine it,
and in what you read, find out from the words themselves whether he is
faking, or writes from the heart in real distress’ Ars 3.471–2. He even gives
lessons in deciphering invisible ink (Ars 3.627–30) and counsels women
not to get confused by palimpsests (nec nisi deletis tutum rescibere ceris, /
ne teneat geminas una tabella manus / ‘nor is it safe to write an answer
unless the wax is quite smoothed over, lest one tablet contain two hands’
3.495–6). Yet at this point (the next ‘hands-on’ stage in the course after
Ars 3?), Ovid’s student needs all the help he can get, for as Altman reminds
27
28
29
See Chambers’ discussion (1984), e.g. 13: ‘seduction goes hand in hand with the readerliness or
readability of literature’. Sharrock’s analysis (1994) of the Ars Amatoria is often rooted in this idea:
Ovid’s audience is seduced by reading his instruction on how to seduce. See especially 26–7, 50–3.
Views on the poem’s sexual depravity abound. Sappho is renowned for her lustfulness, on which
Ovid models himself; at Ars 3.329ff., he recommends that his audience read a long list of authors,
including Sappho, adding as further advertisement, quid enim lascivius illa? / ‘could anything be
sexier than her?’(331).
Perry (1980) 130–1. Verducci writes (1985) 15: ‘perhaps the greatest and surely most original achievement of Ovid’s letters is the impression they create of psychological authenticity’. Cf. Day (1966)
68, on epistolarity in general as authenticating. Farrell (1998) 322–3, argues that in Ars 3 (469–98,
619–66), women are encouraged to think of letter writing as dangerously self-revelatory rather than
as a ‘safe-medium for the duplicity of seduction’ (322), which is the gist of his advice to men on the
same topic in Ars 1.
133
us, ‘pushed to its logical extreme, epistolary discourse would be so relative to
its I-You that it would be unintelligible to the “outside” reader’.30 Mistrust
and self-consciousness are the price to pay for an educated look through
Ovid’s peephole.
So as soon as we start reading Sappho’s letter to Phaon, good readers (and
pupils) of Ovid must revise a body of accompanying literature about the
tricky construction and reception of the love letter, that genre which comes
in the Ars to stand for the seductiveness of writing, and of Ovid’s didactic
oeuvre in particular. The problems we encounter in reading Heroides 15
(such as, to what extent do authorial identities conflict, fuse, or override
one another, what kind of readers are we meant to be, have been taught to be,
or desire to be, to what extent do we decide the fate of Sappho by reading
her / replying to her?) are stirred up by a lover’s discourse which fosters
suspicions about the identity, sex and motives of a letter’s author and reader.
Her.15 does not allow us to disentangle ourselves from its initial inquiry,
working to postpone decisions of authenticity and probing conceptions of
what does or might constitute a genuine Ovid/Sappho. But if this is an
advanced Ovidian lesson in the trials of seduction, we are on our own: no
instruction, no nudges in the direction of ‘correct’ response. In no other
genre, we are reminded, do readers ‘figure so prominently within the world
of the narrative and in the generation of the text’.31
fi rst loves
When Sappho asks us whether we can identify her from her handwriting,
she nudges us to recall her original self-image as a love poet in her poems,
alongside her reconstruction and perpetuation as the first and hottest love
poet in Ovid’s oeuvre, and to question our own ability (as illegal readers)
to comprehend the dynamics of authorial identity and motive throughout
this letter. Sappho, the lyric poetess, now composes elegiac songs (alterna
carmina 5–632 ), and the scene is set for her transformation. She cries, and
elegy (characterized as flebilis, ‘weepy’, in Amores 3.9.3)33 is suited to tears; the
shift from Greek lyric to Latin elegy represents a change in both emotional
state and sexual preference (15–16). As she learns to cope with the pain of
30
32
33
31 Altman (1982) 37.
Altman (1982) 37.
Note that the confusion of genres is marked in Sappho’s terminology, or lack of it: carmina is used
of both elegy (line 6) and of lyric (13, 14), as is opus (marked out at the end of lines 4 and 14).
Also see Tr.5.1.5 (flebile carmen); as I have mentioned already, Her.15 is full of exilic themes and
motifs, leading Verducci (1985) 145, to imagine that the exile poems were ‘ghostwritten’ by one of
Ovid’s heroines.
134
a heterosexual love affair, so she must learn new rules, a new language, a
new metre – in short, a completely new mode of emotional and literary
expression.
For Ovid’s Sappho, then, this is like falling in love for the first time. Everything is new, foreign, uncertain; feelings are raw, communication intense
and desperate, lust insatiable. At a point where elegy had, in Jacobson’s
words ‘reached the end of the road’,34 the only way to go, it seems, was
back down it.35 Indeed, in Am.2.18, Ovid frames the Heroides as a response,
or even a solution, to a crisis in elegy, precipitated by a constant peer pressure
to get back to composing ‘real’ poetry – a bit of tragedy, or some traditional
Homeric epic, preferably something macho and bellicose in the exemplary
style of Macer’s Iliad (‘While you are setting your poem in the time of
Achilles’ wrath . . . I am dilly-dallying in Venus’ lazy shade’ Am.2.18.1–3).
Ovid reports that tried his hand at tragedy with some success, but it wasn’t
him (risit Amor pallamque meam pictosque cothurnos / ‘love laughed at my
cloak and painted buskins’ 2.18.15). He either preaches about love, or is
ensnared by love itself (19–20) until he finds a third way: the composition
of a rather pessimistic (tragic) kind of love poetry in the role of characters from the traditional epic past – from Penelope (21), to Dido (25) and
Sappho, Lesbis amata (26).
In the Heroides Ovid gets to perfect stage presence in his very own costume drama, summoning literary gravitas via epic reference while revitalizing and re-grounding elegy in its Greek, and implicitly heroic, grandiose
origins. While retaining his own identity and ego in the shape and subject
of elegiac metre, he can rejustify his poetics as an interpretation, rather than
a rejection of Homeric epic: after all, Amor is as dominant a theme in the
Iliad as the anger of Achilles (nec tibi, qua tutum vati, Macer, arma canenti /
aureus in medio Marte tacetur Amor / ‘nor do you, too, Macer, so far as it’s
possible for a poet who sings of arms, leave golden Love untouched amid
your warlike song’ Am.2.18.35–6). Later, in his famous self-advertisement
in Ars 3.346, he pinpoints the real genius of the plan: by getting back to
his roots, and parading poetic influence and intertextuality for all to see,
he achieves the apparent antithesis and the impossible – originality.
Going back to beginnings ‘saves’ elegy by letting us visualize what it
is both to learn how to write love poetry, as a novice (as a woman), and
to experience the poetic expression of what is staged as true love, love that
causes wars, risks kingdoms, crosses oceans, or lasts a lifetime. Moreover, for
34
35
Jacobson (1974) 5.
See also Bessone’s interesting recent discussion of the many archetypes of ancient love poetry worked
into Her.15 (2003).
135
an audience already tutored by Ovid in epistolary seduction, the heroines’
letters exemplify the love letter’s key feature – well-faked sincerity: learning
how to write (what looks like) a heartfelt and persuasive love letter and
putting pen to paper (as if ) for the first time is what the Heroides entail
and show. Through the letters, Ovid enacts his role as both originator and
teacher, the figure who by definition is always original in his readers’/pupils’
eyes because he shows and tells them things that are new and unknown (the
epistolary fiction makes emphatic what is or might be foreign and arcane
to its unintended reader). Ovid’s Sappho, then, is a paradoxical cocktail of
new and old, difference and repetition, a paradigmatic figure performing the
Heroides’ core poetic strategy of faked and brandished new-ness.36 Placing
her at the end of the Heroides makes perfect sense in terms of the overall
strategy of the collection37 – as a historical figure she necessarily looks more
real and more faked here than a literary character, and as a love poet she
functions as a climactic locus for Ovid’s investigation of literary influence,
inheritance and competition.
As Sappho in Her.15 learns to write elegy, as if for the first time, she
must become Ovid’s pupil, tutored alongside her readers, who are picking
up ‘tips for first time writers,’ whether by negative or positive example.
The ultimate power-trip, you might expect, from an author indulging his
neglected masculinity to save face before his friend and rival Macer (see
Am.2.18). Sappho’s letter perhaps also represents the supreme challenge for
the Ovidian ego, an ego which is teaching here by example: how to seduce
(male) readers with a weepy Sappho who refers to her past sexual preference
for women, and who apologizes for being small, ugly and dishevelled (si
mihi difficilis formam natura negavit / ‘if malign nature has denied me the
charm of beauty’ 31; sum brevis / ‘I’m short’ 33; candida si non sum / ‘if
I’m not a pretty girl’ 35; iacent collo sparsi sine lege capilli / ‘my hair curls,
dishevelled, at my nape’ 73), especially as Ovid has given elaborate lessons
on the importance of good looks, hairstyles in particular (see Ars 3.133),38
and has dismissed women who cry all the time as ‘hateful’ (Ars 3.517).39
Yet at the same time, the more we are reminded of Ovid’s other works,
the more we also recall references to Sappho which highlight the extent of
36
37
38
39
On the heroine as a ‘paradigm of paradoxes’ see Brownstein (1984) xx.
See Rosati (1996b) on the suitability of the poem’s present location at the end of the collection.
Compare Her.15.73 with this line in Ars 3 (non sint sine lege capilli / ‘on no account is your hair to be
messy’).
Ovid’s men, on the other hand, are a cheerful lot and rarely get emotional (Ars 3.518); their tears,
faked or real, are a tool of persuasion, a rhetorical trick, e.g. Ars 1.659–60: et lacrimae prosunt; lacrimis
adamanta movebis: / fac madidas videat, si potes, illa genas / ‘tears too are useful: with tears you can
move iron: let her see, if you can, your dampened cheeks’.
136
her influence on Ovid. In the Heroides, it is clearer than ever that survival
(reputation) is contingent upon the security and legitimacy afforded by
origins, by a site and perspective within a literary tradition. In short, Ovid
needs Sappho, and trampling on her ego with a combat boot is a risky
business which could turn tragic. It is elegy and Ovidian identity themselves
which are at stake in this poem’s dramatization of Sappho’s rejection by a
man, her blunt, unattractive portrayal, and her progression towards what
seems an increasingly likely suicide. Her.15 is nothing less than a rehearsal
of the death of elegy and an experimental probing of the instability of
posthumous reputation.
An interesting crisis point occurs at 15.133–4, during Sappho’s recollection
of her wet dream. The couple kiss (129–30), and she fondles him, saying
things that seem almost like the waking truth (verisque simillima verba /
eloquor 131–2), so much so that she loses control and has an orgasm:
ulteriora pudet narrare, sed omnia fiunt:
et iuvat et siccae non licet esse mihi.
I blush to tell the rest, but everything happens,
I love it, and can’t help getting wet.
15.133–4
Sappho’s dream fosters the epistolary fantasy of physical presence, to the
extent that she can climax from the imagining itself, giving it some certain
hold in reality, despite the fact that she cannot finally make the dream come
true. Like a female Pygmalion, or lustful Narcissus, Sappho has crafted a
characterless, bodiless beauty who nevertheless is almost real, returning her
kisses and giving her as much pleasure as if he were alive. Her artistry is
defined by a simultaneous control and lack of control, a creativity bound
by limits: again like Pygmalion at Met.10.270–6, she must rely on Venus
(Her.15.213) to return Phaon to her, to make him real again, and the invention has left her talentless and robbed of creative power (dolor artibus obstat /
ingeniumque meis substitit omne malis 195–6).40 Yet in the context of Ovid’s
oeuvre, lines 133–4, which stand out for their X-rated appeal, perform a
quite different kind of poetic reification. When Sappho precedes ‘one of
the most explicitly lubricious lines in the Ovidian corpus’41 with the cautious ulteriora pudet narrare, she mimics Ovid’s false modesty in Ars 3.769
(ulteriora pudet docuisse / ‘I’m embarrassed to teach you any more’),42 where
the teacher–poet blushes at the clinical erotic instruction of an ostensibly
40
41
This may remind us of another silencing of Sappho’s voice in her own words, Catullus 51’s revision
of fr.31LP (Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi / vocis in ore / lingua sed torpet 7–9), and also, as Bessone
notes (2003) 221, of Catull.65.4 (tanti fluctuat ipsa malis).
42 Also cf. Rem.359, Fast.5.532, Met.14.18.
Verducci (1985) 165.
137
female audience. The phrase also achieves a similar effect to the familiar
punchline at Am.1.5.23–6 (singula quid referam? . . . cetera quis nescit? ‘Why
give all the details? . . . who doesn’t know the rest?’), as Verducci notes.43
In Amores 1.5, Ovid’s blasé rhetoric is a titillation, transferring all suggestiveness to the eye of the beholder, who is now lured in as voyeur. Line
133 of Her.15 points the finger straight at Ovidian innuendo, at the recollection (and enactment) of Ovidian instruction (though Sappho, unlike
Ovid at Am.1.5, does fast-forward to the gritty details, at least of her own,
masturbatory pleasure). At the point at which Sappho gets intimate (and
so vulnerable), in the context of an unrealizable creative fantasy, Ovid steps
in to assert the reality of his authorial presence and the stamp of his poetic
achievement.
Yet the poem which stages Corinna’s overdue but glamorous entrance
into the Amores is also picked up at Her.15.161–2, when a Naiad appears
before Sappho just as she has lain down, exhausted, on the grass:
hic ego cum lassos posuissem flebilis artus,
constitit ante oculos Naias una meos.
I wept, and had laid down my weary limbs,
when a Naiad appeared before my eyes
Compare with Am.1.5.2/17 (adposui medio membra levanda toro / ‘I laid my
limbs to rest in the middle of the couch’; ut stetit ante oculos posito velamine
nostros / ‘she stood before my eyes, having cast aside her clothes’). Ovid’s
Sappho rewrites Am.1.5 as lesbian erotica, suggesting an entire blue movie
with one discriminating gaze, and refining Ovid’s laddish striptease for
an altogether subtler audience. Though arguably, the scene of meeting a
(perhaps already naked) Naiad in a wooded grove next to an enticing pool
is already provocative enough: the Naiad’s advice to plunge into water is
vaguely evocative of Salmacis’ rape of Hermaphroditus, and the example
she gives of Deucalion dousing the flame of his passion for Pyrrha reminds
us that immersion in Venus’ element can be emasculating (and hence a
turn-off ) for men. As Sapphic desires trickle into Ovidian elegy, line 133
also reiterates Sappho’s own words, sung at fr.137LP (!"#$ %& %' ()*+,- .##/
0( 1$#2(3 / 456$7). The web of reference that spans this distich dictates
that we cannot recall Ovid without rousing (and arousing) Sappho. As
she says herself at line 43, meminerunt omnia amantes / ‘lovers remember
everything’: this is precisely what Ovid is ashamed to tell in a couplet
43
138
which dramatizes an eroticized battle between two authors in the pursuit
of authenticity and originality, the ability to be and make real.
In fact, Her.15 often looks just like one of the dreaded palimpsests Ovid
describes in the Ars Amatoria.44 When Sappho asks whether we recognize
her from her handwriting (even when a later author distorts her poetic
shape), Ovid whispers in the background, ‘Will you be able to tell me apart
from a fake, will you continue to remember me and preserve my original
identity?’ Ovid imagines and confronts us with his own death in the figure
of his predecessor, testing our devotion to the love poet (Sappho/Ovid) by
fictionalizing his readers as (his) lovers, as the (unintended but intended)
recipients of this love letter. Critics of Her.15 have tended to underemphasize
the extent to which the fates of Sappho (and, hence, of Ovid) are construed
in the epistolary fiction as determined by its readers, who have been taught
at length how Ovidian letters function in the Ars Amatoria and whose
knowledge, loyalty and love are now on the line. As Sappho puts it at
15.189–90: an potes / si moriar, titulum mortis habere meae? / ‘if I die, can
you bear to be called my murderer?’
Now the Ovidian instructor is concealed behind a tragic mask, all we
(and Ovid) can rely on is our memory, intuition and instinct. If we are
seduced by Sappho, or at least refuse to sully her name and reputation by
participating in even a parody of her death, we prove ourselves faithful to
the most famous love poet of all; we would do the same for Ovid, and we’re
prepared to prove it. But if our reply (or lack of it) lets her die, we help
Ovid pull the trigger, aiding and abetting his masculine and Romanizing
one-upmanship, proving once and for all that Ovid has taken love poetry
to new heights: if Sappho were alive today, you confirm, she’d seem crass
and hopelessly unrefined, and if she and Ovid were competing now, as
‘poet-lovers’, side by side, the sophisticated Ovid would more than show
her up. Verducci’s reading of this letter seems to relish the opportunity to
side with Ovid and kill off Sappho, in the hope that the poem comes off
as stridently and typically Ovidian: ‘Ovid omits nothing in her situation
that would reduce her dignity or degrade her infatuation’, she states.45 The
subject of the poem is ‘the failure of poetry’, so ‘it must be conceded that
Ovid’s poem is a victory of conscious craft over its subject. It is no shallow
victory46 . . . Ovid’s all too carnal Sappho, the libertine Sappho of the gossip,
the scandals, the legend and the comedies, becomes for her an occasion for
44
45
E.g. Ars 1.395–6, 3.495–6. Farrell (1998) 311–17 emphasizes that traces left in wax represent a far
greater risk to women than men. Men merely risk letting their mistresses know about each other,
whereas for women the letter can become ‘a document of incrimination’ (322).
46 Verducci (1985) 156.
139
the poetic exploration of the conventional notion of necessary “artistic
distance”.’47 The evidence for Ovid’s dismantling of Sappho’s reputation is
certainly all there for the taking. Attacking a woman by exposing her sexual
appetite, naı̈veté (stupidity) and bad repute is all too easy.48 But while it tries
on one level to maintain an illusion of creative distance, the creative drive
of Her.15 is precisely the lack of distance between Ovid and Sappho, the
interpretative dilemmas that arise from a collusion and interdependence
of authorial identities. The poem is preoccupied with the subtlety with
which authorial signatures are approximated and entwined, and with the
constructed play-offs of power that arise as a result of that intertexture.
c h an ge s of addre ss
As we have seen, Sappho’s change in sexual preference is directly associated
with her change of language and poetic shape: she can no longer compose
lyric, just as the girls of Pyrrha, Methymna or Lesbos (or so she claims)
no longer interest her (15.13–16). Phaon is both the motive and subject for
Sappho’s elegiac experiment, just as Ovid’s elegy is inspired and embodied
by his puellae. As Propertius in 2.1.3–4 writes, at a point where he has just
made plain, in programmatic terms, the radical ‘feminine’ image of elegy
(this is a mollis liber, ‘soft book’ 2.1.2), non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat
Apollo; / ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit / ‘it’s not Calliope, nor Apollo, who
sings these things to me – my girl herself creates the inspiration’.49 This
topos is re-employed at Her.15.206 (ingenio vires ille dat, ille rapit. / ‘My
genius had its powers from him, and with him they were swept away.’), but
now it is Phaon who takes the place of the girlfriends who once animated
Sapphic lyric and Roman elegy. Thus on the one hand, Ovid in Her.15
takes the ‘feminization’ of elegy to its ultimate conclusion by getting a
woman-loving poetess enact his novel dramatization of elegy in crisis. On
the other, Phaon is now the male motive and subject of elegy, a stand-in
for the Ovidian poet and for female inspiration: he could be well situated
to invigorate the genre, give it the traditional male energy for which Ovid
strives in Am.2.18 and which Tragedy urges in Am.3.1.50
Yet Phaon is responsible for destroying, as well as replacing, female creative power, as 15.206 shows. It is because of him that Sappho has lost her
47
48
49
50
See N. K. Miller (1980) e.g. xi: ‘the heroine’s text is the text of an ideology that codes femininity in
paradigms of sexual vulnerability’.
The theme is of course also fundamental in Ovid, e.g. Am.1.3.19, 3.12.16.
Am.2.18.1–18, Am.3.1.15–30, esp. line 25: cane facta virorum (‘sing deeds of heroes!’).
140
poetic talent, as well as her attractiveness (ille mei cultus unicus auctor abes /
‘you, the one cause of my adornment, are gone’ 78; dolor artibus obstat, /
ingeniumque meis substitit omne malis / ‘grief stops my art, and all my talent
is blocked by my pain’ 195–6). On one level it would seem that Sappho’s
inability to win over and control Phaon constitutes another obvious sign of
her inadequacy as an elegiac poet: getting Phaon back, and regaining her
talent, amount to the same thing. Through Phaon, meanwhile, Ovid flatters himself as Sappho’s lover while also rejecting her advances. Yet Her.15’s
experiment also hints that Ovidian elegy, like Sapphic lyric, falters when it
tries to erase and forget the female (is this what happens when Ovid sails
away from Sappho, and sings of desertos amores 15.155?). Through Sappho’s
lesbianism, in addition, we glimpse a vision of homoerotic elegy which
privileges sameness over difference to a dangerous degree. It’s perhaps not
surprising, then, that we catch flashes of Narcissus’ passion throughout
her letter. For example, when Sappho enters the grove, with its sacred
spring that seems itself to harbour a living numen (158), she encroaches
on the landscape of Metamorphoses 3.359ff.: Phaon is a classic Narcissusdouble, described by Sappho at 15.93 as nec adhuc iuvenis, nec iam puer / ‘he
wasn’t yet a man, but no longer a boy’ (compare Met.3.352: poteratque puer
iuvenisque videri / ‘he might seem either a boy or a man’). And as Sappho
mourns her loss, and fails to find her lover in the leaves of the forest floor
(she also play-acts a deserted, maddened Dido, revisiting the woodland site
of her doomed ‘marriage’ to Aeneas51 ), she too settles next to a pool that
shines with narcissistic reflections (est nitidus vitroque magis perlucidus omni
/ fons sacer / ‘there is a sacred spring, bright and more transparent than any
crystal’ 157–8; cf. fons erat inlimis, nitidis argenteus undis / ‘there was a clear
pool, with silvery bright water’ Met. 3.40752 ).
Yet Sappho (as a heroine, and as a woman composing an elegiac, that
is, plaintive, silent epistle) must also fulfill the role of Echo, and the poem
enacts the loss of her lyric voice (from Her.15.42: unam iurabas usque decere
loqui / ‘you used to swear that I was the only one ever to be graced with the
powers of speech’, to 15.110: nec potuisse loqui / ‘I could no longer speak’).
Only mournful, repetitive, elegiac song is audible in these haunts: Her.15.152
(et nullae dulce queruntur aves / ‘and no birds tweet their sweet complaint’)
51
52
See Aen.4.165–72.
Compare Lindheim (2003) 178–9 et passim, arguing that Ovid’s heroines continually strive to accommodate a masculine penchant for Imaginary identification, i.e. narcissism, in their lovers: ‘the heroines set their understanding of the narcissistic aspects of masculine desire to work in service of their
goal. Self-consciously they choose to act out roles that will satisfy the masculine subject’s demands
of the mirror image’ (179). Here, however, Sappho plays the narcissist herself, searching for, instead
of (or as well as ) being the reflection.
141
restages the confrontation of poetic types, Elegia and Tragoedia, in Amores
3.1, and almost quotes the fourth line of that poem (et latere ex omni dulce
queruntur aves / ‘and from every side comes the sweet complaint of birds’).
In Ovid’s grove, then, the birds are singing, while in Sappho’s they are silent:
only metamorphosed Procne cries for her lost Itys,53 just as Sappho sings
of lost love:
sola virum non ulta pie maestissima mater
concinit Ismarium Daulias ales Ityn.
ales Ityn, Sappho desertos cantat amores.
Just the Daulian bird, grieving mother, husband-killer
laments Ismarian Itys in her song.
She sings of Itys, Sappho of abandoned loves.
Her.15.153–5
Amores, of course, now refer also to Ovid’s oeuvre, left behind – whether we
read this as registering the progressiveness of the Heroides (this is Ovid ‘moving on’), or as spelling out how Ovid himself, like Phaon, has metaphorically ‘ditched’ Sappho in her hour of need. Sappho is herself trampling on
the Ovidian territory and elegiac crisis of Am.3.1, pursuing the memory of
Ovidian authorship (as she looks for dominum silvaeque meumque / ‘master
of the forest and of me’ 145) but also usurping it, lying where the elegist
had been (incubui tetigique locum, qua parte fuisti / ‘I have laid down and
touched the spot, the place you rested in’ 149).
The alignment of Sappho and Procne, Phaon and Itys, in the above
passage is particularly interesting. It extends the joke that Sappho is old
enough to be Phaon’s mother (linking up with lines 115–16: non aliter,
quam si nati pia mater adempti / portet ad exstructos corpus inane rogos / ‘just
like the loving mother of a lost son carries his empty frame to the funeral
pyre’), and accents the other references to Sappho’s maternal role in this
poem (70, 120). Yet Itys is also a son destroyed by and lost to his mother as
a result of Philomela’s ability to communicate through artistic creation, by
weaving a tapestry. Implicitly, Sappho is like Philomela as well as Procne,
as she is attempting to communicate in a similarly silent, written form, the
letter. Her epistle, too, is motivated by sexual betrayal and is the result of
her (sexualized) appropriation by Ovid, who has metaphorically cut out
her expressive, lyric tongue. Yet by censoring Sappho in the context of
Procne’s and Philomela’s tragic fight to express themselves, Ovid highlights
53
As Leander swims towards another watery death in Her.18, he is accompanied by the song of the
halcyons (79–82). In Catull. 65.11–14, the poet’s mournful verse is compared to the nightingale’s
song. Sappho also sings of nightingales (fr.136LP).
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the inevitability of reading male authorial aggression in(to) this poem, and
marks the obstinate power of the written word as epitomized in a woman’s
letter. This same passage also makes Phaon (like Itys and Tereus) the victim
of a vengeful, Medean poetess. Indeed, in harmony with her narcissistic
impulses, Sappho’s letter determinedly kills off a string of male relatives –
she mourns the premature death of her father (61–2), is estranged from her
brother (67), and experiences Phaon’s departure as the death (or murder?)
of a son (115–16). When Phaon leaves for Sicily, Charaxus snipes that she
shouldn’t grieve, as her daughter is still alive (120), and Sappho has already
written of how she worries endlessly about Cleis (70), recalling fr.132LP,
in which she swears she would give up everything for her daughter. Her
quiet refusal to stop privileging a female genealogy now culminates in the
sisterly conspiracy of Procne and Philomela, which casts shadows over the
sensual locus amoenus of lines 135ff. The desperate pleas of a lonely woman
in Her.15, voiced through and muffled by Ovidian elegy, barely conceal an
undertow of mutinous and antagonistic passions. Sappho’s is a noisy and
suspended metamorphosis.
The scene at Her.15.135–74 – an ancient grove with cave and spring,
emitting the sweet sound of birds – also recalls the fable of Procris and
Cephalus, told by Ovid in Ars 3.686ff., as well as in Met.7.661–865. As I
explored at length in chapter 2, this is a paradigmatic drama about rivalry
and misunderstanding in love. Procris overhears Cephalus calling to the
wind (aura) in a similar sacred grove (fons sacer et viridi caespite mollis
humus / ‘there is a sacred spring and ground soft with green turf ’ Ars 3.688;
cf. fons sacer . . . tenero caespite terra viret / ‘there is a sacred spring . . . the
earth is green with tender turf ’ Her.15.158, 160). Before she realizes her
‘mistake’, she assumes he is seducing a woman, and like Sappho, runs
wild like a Maenad (ut thyrso concita Baccha Ars 3.710; cf. Her.15.139–40),
returning to the wood alone to see the flattened grass where her lover had
lain (vidit ut oppressa vestigia corporis herba / ‘when she saw the mark of a
body on the flattened grass’ Ars 3.721; cf. cognovi pressas noti mihi caespitis
herbas / ‘I recognized the pressed-down grass of the turf I knew so well’
Her.15.147). Procris’ misjudgement is punished by a second error, when
Cephalus thinks for a moment that she is a wild animal and kills her with
his spear. We might be tempted to conclude that Sappho is also doomed
to pay for her impulsiveness with her life, that not trusting Phaon was her
tragic mistake. She is made to look especially naı̈ve, we might say, because
she obviously has not read Ovid’s instruction booklet, Ars 3, which warned
of just such a scenario. She is not even aware, in the context of her role
as Procris, of the irony of her final wish at 15.214 (aura dabit cursum / ‘the
wind will speed you on your course’).
143
Yet Sappho has already alluded to the myth in which Cephalus really did
cheat on Procris with Aurora (hunc ne pro Cephalo raperes, Aurora, timebam /
‘I always feared you would steal him in Cephalus’ place, Aurora’ 15.87), the
story also told by Ovid in Metamorphoses 7. By juxtaposing pointed allusions to two different stories about Cephalus and Procris, both of which
centre around the theme of suspected infidelity and misinterpretation, Ovid
invests the activity of reading itself with a great deal of power and responsibility, not to mention paranoia – especially when we have already played
similar games in the Ars Amatoria, as I discussed in chapter 2. Our reading ability is shaken at the very point at which its life-threatening power
is also verified: we, like Cephalus, are also in danger of misinterpreting
Sappho, sanctioning her death and practically reading her off that cliff.54
To a point, the Procris/Cephalus analogy encourages Ovid’s readers to feel
superior (Sappho, like Procris, is made to look unsophisticated and literalminded, next to her literary readers spotting irony and doubleness at every
turn). But Sappho herself dramatizes how easy it is for roles to be reversed
within the parameters of this multi-layered myth: for at 15.177–8, having
laid down in Phaon’s/Cephalus’ place at 149, she too calls on aura (aura,
subito / et mea non magnum corpora pondus habe / ‘come breeze, and bear
up the light weight of my body’). Like Cephalus summoning the breeze
at Met.7.837, Sappho also needs soothing in her labor (‘aura, veni’ dixi,
‘nostroque medere labori!’), but she also asks aura to bear her up before she
touches the sea, just as Aurora carried off Cephalus at Met.7.703–4: there’s
no mistaking this as an innocent summons. In short, nostalgia for Sappho’s
love of women in Heroides 15 takes us on another narrative tangent here,
sending us back and forth in tangled paths – in empathy with her torn
emotions.
o ld ly r ic s, n ew t u ne s
Another important point at which Ovid’s readers are challenged to decipher poetic influences and their hybridization can be found earlier in the
poem at lines 23–6, when Sappho compares Phaon to Apollo and Bacchus,
imagining herself in the role of Daphne or Ariadne:
sume fidem et pharetram: fies manifestus Apollo.
accedant capiti cornua: Bacchus eris.
et Phoebus Daphnen, et Cnosida Bacchus amavit,
nec norat lyricos illa vel illa modos.
54
Although, as I also discussed in chapter 2, Ovid’s retellings of the Cephalus and Procris myth make
it difficult to decide whether the lovers’ reactions can ever be defined as innocent misreadings.
144
Take up the lyre and quiver – you’ll look like Apollo.
Let horns spring up on your head – you’ll be Bacchus.
Phoebus loved Daphne, and Bacchus loved the Gnosian girl,
Her.15.23–6
yet neither one knew the lyric mode.
Phaon’s looks are such that he can be any god he wants, provided he
wears the appropriate costume – and appearances are everything in letters concerned with acting and image, with the pretence and vacillation
of identity. Yet for Ovid’s audience this is not just a superficial, decorative
simile, not least because both Apollo and Bacchus provide the stimulus
for writing love poetry at crucial points in Ovid’s oeuvre. Sappho uses the
same line ending here as Ars 2.493, when Ovid introduces Apollo’s role:
haec ego cum canerem, subito manifestus Apollo . . . / ‘while I was singing this,
Apollo suddenly appeared’. Ovid had previously denied Apollo’s influence at the beginning of Ars 1 (non ego, Phoebe, datas a te mihi mentiar
artes / ‘I will not lie and say my art was your gift, Phoebus’ 25). Yet at
Am.1.15.35–6, he wishes, mihi flavus Apollo / pocula Castalia plena ministret
aqua / ‘for me may Golden Apollo fill cups from the Castalian fount’;
at Am.3.8.23, he declares himself musarum purus Phoebique sacerdos / ‘the
unstained priest of Phoebus and the Muses’, and at Am.3.12.17ff., he indicates that Apollo has directed his entire career.55 Apollo’s advice-slot in Ars
2, which ends in the admonition sic monuit Phoebus: Phoebo parete monenti;
/ certa dei sacro est huius in ore fides / ‘so Phoebus advised: obey Phoebus’
counsels; the sacred mouth of that god contains the absolute truth’ (509–10),
is a mini-Ars in itself, as Sharrock describes in her extensive critique of this
passage.56 This intermission does not contradict, but rather confirms Ovid’s
declaration of independence in Ars 1: Ovid isn’t advised by Apollo, he is
Apollo;57 Apollo’s mini-Ars looks insignificant (and perhaps cliché, because
obviously repetitive) next to Ovid’s magnum opus, yet at the same time
Ovid can use Apollo as a vicarious mouth-piece for didactic arrogance and
omniscience. As both the god of poetry and the god of prophecy, Apollo
exactly fits the double function of the self-aggrandizing vates.
The gods Apollo and Bacchus are also paired in Ovid on several occasions:
as he gazes at his reflection, Narcissus’s hair is compared to that of Bacchus
and Apollo at Met.3.420–1: spectat . . . et dignos Baccho, dignos et Apolline
55
56
57
aversis utinam tetigissem carmina Musis, / Phoebus et inceptum destituisset opus! / ‘if only the Muses
had looked away when I first touched verse, and Phoebus had refused me aid when my attempt was
new!’
See Sharrock (1994) 197–290.
Sharrock (1994) 218–19: ‘Ovid’s claim might be dramatised thus: “I am the Apollo of this work; it
is I who hold the keys of wisdom, poetic and erotic”.’ See also Armstrong (2004) on the ‘fraught
relationship’ between Ovid and Apollo throughout the amatory works.
145
crines (hence the Narcissus plot in Her.15 is traceable from the very beginning). Similarly, in Am.1.14.31–2, vain Corinna’s hair is said to be worthy
of Apollo or Bacchus, before she overstyled it (formosae periere comae, quas
vellet Apollo, / quas vellet capiti Bacchus inesse suo / ‘Her beautiful tresses are
no more – such as Apollo could lust after, such as Bacchus could covet, for
their own heads’). In the famous passage at Ars 3.329–48 in which Ovid
declares the originality of the Heroides and modestly adds them to his ‘recommended’ reading list, which also includes Sappho, he ends by saying, o
ita, Phoebe, velis, ita vos, pia numina vatum, / insignis cornu Bacche, novemque
deae! / ‘so grant it, O Phoebus! So grant it, blessed souls of poets, and you,
horned Bacchus, and the nine goddesses too’ (347–8).
Like Apollo, Bacchus is a poetic sex symbol providing divine sanction
for Ovidian authority. In Ars 1.525–6, Bacchus summons his poet, and is
introduced as a love instructor on a par with Ovid (ecce, suum vatem Liber
vocat: hic quoque amantes / adiuvat / ‘look, Liber summons his bard: he
too helps lovers’). And at Ars 1.565–73, Bacchus donates the inspiration
and material for a type of written seduction that is couched alongside the
love letter: a dinner table spread with munera Bacchi is an ideal site for
risqué flirting, and the reader is advised to compose sweet nothings on it in
wine. As a synonym for wine, Bacchus here exceeds even Apollo in terms
of influence, becoming the very ink in which Ovid’s pupils are to practise
writing their first, clumsy love poems. As the god of passion, Bacchus ranks
alongside Cupid: at Am.1.2.47–8, Cupid’s opening procession is compared
to Bacchus’ victory in the Ganges, whereas at Am.1.6.60, Liber and Amor
are as fearless as Ovid in pursuit of his mistress (illa pudore vacat, Liber
Amoreque metu / ‘the first knows nothing of shame, while Liber and Love
know nothing of fear’). And crucially, in the last poem of the Amores, 3.15,
Bacchus is the energy that drives the poet on to greater things (corniger
increpuit thyrso graviore Lyaeus; / pulsanda est magnis area maior equis / ‘the
horned Lyaean has dealt me a blow with his heavier thyrsus: I must beat
the ground with mighty steeds, on a mightier course’ 17–18).
In imagining Phaon, her reader, as Apollo or Bacchus, Sappho might
seem to be fantasizing about being swept off her feet by Ovidian poetic
authority. In particular the summoning of Phaon as Apollo via the nod to
Ars 2 seems to conjure up Ovid’s presence and specifically Roman power as
poet. Phaon’s role as fate-predicting lover and Ovid’s position as vatic and
didactic writer overlap in an image which points up Ovid’s controlling role
as the ‘reader’ of this letter who writes (back) Sappho’s destiny. Moreover,
the idea that, in her ignorance, Sappho calls out to be directed at this
point, to be seduced by divine figures who have presided over the writing
146
of Ovidian texts, is made emphatic by her desire to play the role of Daphne
or Ariadne (25), both of whom are pursued against their will. After Bacchus
calls Ovid in Ars 1.525, Ovid recommends the god as a model lover who
burns so fiercely with lust that he terrified Ariadne and forced her to elope
with him when she was abandoned by Theseus: implicitamque sinu, neque
enim pugnare valebat, / abstulit: in facili est omnia posse deo / ‘and clasping
her to his chest, for she had no strength to fight, he carried her off: it’s easy
for a god to be all powerful’ (Ars 1.561–2). The story of Apollo and Daphne
as told by Ovid in Met.1 is very similar: there Daphne is Apollo’s first love
(primus amor 452) and an unwilling victim of his lust; when she tries to
escape, she is turned into a bay tree, doomed thereafter to accompany the
generals of Rome in triumphal procession and to guard Augustus’ doorposts
(560–5). Note too that Phoebus Apollo presides over the promontory at
Actium (conflated with Leucas in Her.15), from which Sappho is instructed
to make her potentially fatal leap (Phoebus ab excelso quantum patet aspicit
aequor / ‘Phoebus from on high looks down on the whole wide expanse
of sea’ Her.15.165). At this point, it seems, Sappho has never looked so
written, as she is made to consolidate a series of male, Roman fantasies,58
her identity fading in a welter of Ovidian tales.
Ironically, Sappho’s forced and now overtly sexual appropriation in
Roman elegy is at the hands of a god-poet famous for his lyre-playing,
which is exactly how Sappho has defined her Greek song and talent, now
lost (nec mihi, dispositis quae iungam carmina nervis, / proveniunt 15.13–14).
Her own poetic skill (her own divine inspiration), it seems, is being used
against her. Yet if we only go back to lines 9–10 we might spot that Sappho’s
description of her pining for Phaon (uror ut, indomitis ignem exercentibus
Euris, / fertilis accensis messibus ardet ager / ‘I burn, just like the fertile field
when its harvests are ablaze, whipped up by the wild east-winds’) is precisely how Apollo describes his lust for Daphne in Met.1.492–6 (‘and as the
stubble of the harvested grain is kindled, as hedges burn with the torches
which some traveller happens to have put too near, or has left at the break
of day, so the god was consumed by flames, and burnt in all his heart, and
fed his frustrated love with hope’).59 Sappho still looks Ovidian, yet the
balance of authority is suddenly not so simple, and her relationship with
Phaon/Ovid is caught up in a chemistry of attraction/repulsion: as well as
desired, objectified elegiac puella, Sappho can also stand alongside and even
58
59
Violence is the normative fantasy in Ovid: e.g. vim licet appelles: grata est vis ista puellis / ‘you may
use force; women like you to use it’ (Ars 1.673).
The line also echoes Virgil’s advice to farmers in Georg.1.84 (saepe etiam sterilis incendere profuit
agros / ‘it is often helpful to burn even sterile fields’).
147
above Ovid in the predatory, ascendant role of Apollo (lusting, still, after a
woman), the god to whom she plans to dedicate her lyre at lines 181–4. Just
as Sappho presents us with alternative ways of imagining her reader, Phaon,
so she reminds us that this letter always has more than its one, intended
addressee: its real audience is a highly sophisticated one, whose perspectives
on this poem are multiplied by colliding evocations of the poetic/sexual
power of both poet and poetess.
In lines 27–8, however, Sappho makes her strongest assertion of independence, as if clinging to her lyric/lesbian past and regretting her momentary
slip into a foreign tongue:
at mihi Pegasides blandissima carmina dictant,
iam canitur toto nomen in orbe meum;
Yet for me the daughters of Pegasus write the sweetest songs:
My name is already sung all over the world;
It is women who inspire her (and as I mentioned in the introduction,
Pegasus is born of blood from the head of Medusa, poetry’s most stunning
creatrix). Yet Sappho’s boast in line 28, followed by her declaration of
equality with her great male rival Alcaeus (29), is a brag repeated at various
places throughout Ovid’s work, most closely in the epilogue to Ars 2, when
Ovid asks his reader-pupils to sing his praises and remember to write ‘Ovid
was my maestro’ on any trophy they win (cantetur toto nomen in orbe meum
2.740). In Amores 1.15, a poem about rivalry and criticism addressed to Envy
(Livor edax 1), the elegist bites back with ambition: mihi fama perennis /
quaeritur, in toto semper ut orbe canar / ‘but my quest is eternal fame,
to be known in song forever across the globe’ (7–8).60 This line in turn
ironically transforms the formula of Am.1.3, where before we even knew
Corinna’s name, Ovid claimed: iunctaque semper erunt nomina nostra tuis /
‘my name shall ever be joined with yours’ 1.3.26). We are reminded that,
like Sappho, Corinna was (the name of ) one of the most famous female
poets of antiquity. In other words, Ovid’s signature, but also his ambition
for conjoined fame, is written all over Sappho’s allusion to her reputation,
reminding the reader who looks back that Sappho (qua poet) is just a
name (nomina 3; mensuram nominis ipsa fero 34), and that it is readers’
recognition which determines and directs poetic identity. In this letter it
is Sappho whom we read (nisi legisses 3) and Ovid who sings out (canitur
28), relishing the reality of this silent, written letter’s public declamation,
60
Also see Rem.363, Met.15.871–9, Tr.2.118.
148
alongside the reader-lover, who can always betray the letter’s privacy by
reading it out loud.
In lines 51ff., poetic rivalry is given a different edge. Phaon, who embodies
the beauty Sappho has lost with her lyric poetry, has his eye on the girls of
Sicily. She wishes she were Sicilian (Sicelis esse volo 52), and addresses her
competitors/sisters directly:
o vos erronem tellure remittite vestra,
Nisiades matres Nisiadesque nurus!
nec vos decipiant blandae mendacia linguae:
quae vobis dicit, dixerat ante mihi.
O send me back my wanderer from your lands,
you Nisean mothers and Nisian girls!
Don’t let the lies of a slick tongue deceive you:
What he says to you he’s already said to me.
Her.15.53–6
Line 55, which mirrors Am.2.9.43–5 (me modo decipiant voces fallacis amicae /
‘let only the words of a lying girlfriend lure me on’) warns an entire female
population against Phaon’s Ovidian wiles as well as figuring the repetition
of Ovid’s deception over and above Sappho’s. In Her.15.56, it appears that
Sappho has been taking Ovid’s textbook advice to heart; he warned his
ostensibly female audience about believing handsome young men in Ars
3.435, saying, quae vobis dicunt, dixerunt mille puellis / ‘what they say to
you, they’ve said to a thousand girls’. Like the slave-girl employed as postmistress in the Ars Amatoria, Sappho is made to pass on Ovid’s lessons,
fulfilling a truly heterosexual role as a reproductive woman and eroticized
intermediary for male creative power.
At Her.15.80, similarly, when Sappho tells Phaon of her undying love (et
semper causa est, cur ego semper amem / ‘there is always a reason why I might
always be in love’) she quotes Am.1.3.2 (aut amet aut faciat, cur ego semper
amem / ‘let her love me, either that or ensure that I love forever’), the poem
which initiates the love affair with Corinna. Only two lines previously,
she had addressed Phaon as her ‘author’ (unicus auctor 78). The phrase
at Am.1.3.2 is cunningly repeated by Ovid at Am.2.4.10 in a line that is
even closer to Sappho’s at 15.80 (centum sunt causae cur ego semper amem /
‘there are one hundred reasons why I should always be in love’), and which
in turn responds to the beginning and end of Propertius’ second book:
see invenio causas mille poeta novas / ‘the poet in me finds a thousand
new inspirations’ (Prop. 2.1.12); cf. mi fortuna aliquid semper amare dedit /
149
‘Fortune has ensured I always have some object for my love’ (Prop. 2.22.18).61
The gigolo bravado displayed by Ovid and Propertius here casts a dubious
light on Sappho’s previous declaration that Phaon is the only one for her
(ille mei cultus unicus auctor abes / ‘you, my one inspiration, are gone’ 78),
especially as Am.2.4.10 also inspires Her.15.19, where she reminisces about
the one hundred maids of Lesbos she once loved (atque aliae centum, quas
non sine crimine amavi).
As Sappho in the next couplet muses about her character traits spun out
by the sisters of fate (81–2), she touches on Ovid’s wish in Am.1.3.17–18
that his love for Corinna may be fated (tecum, quos dederint annos mihi fila
sororum, / vivere contingat teque dolente mori / ‘with you I hope I’m destined
to live the years which the sisters’ threads have spun for me, and to be
mourned by you when I die’). Line 96 of Her.15 (non ut ames oro, verum
ut amere sinas / ‘I’m not begging you to love, but to let yourself be loved’)
also echoes Am.1.3.3 (a, nimium volui: tantum patiatur amari / ‘ah, I wanted
too much – just let her suffer herself to be loved’). Sappho, like Corinna
(the other most famous female poet of antiquity) offers herself as materies
felix (Am.1.3.19) for Ovid’s letter, which will ensure that their names will
be joined like lovers in poetry: see once more Am.1.3.25–6 (nos quoque per
totum pariter cantabimur orbem, / iunctaque semper erunt nomina nostra tuis /
‘you and I, too, will sing together throughout the world, and my name shall
forever be joined with yours’). Again, Ovid returns to a beginning, here to
the start of his poetic love affair with Corinna in Am.1.3, in order to re-root
and rejuvenate elegy, and to idealize his rivalry with and dependence on
Sappho as a love affair in its most naı̈ve, intoxicating and original stage. Yet
it is precisely by means of these regressions to Ovid’s early career that the
poem allows subject–object positions to slide and reverse: frequently, the
absence–presence of Sapphic desire in Heroides 15 means that Sappho and
Ovid/Phaon seem to write/reply in tandem, pursuing the same goals, the
same girls . . .
the c ry in g g ame
In Heroides 15, tears both define and constitute elegy. They are the central
motivating factor for Sappho’s altered metric shape and mode of emotional
expression in lines 7–8 (flendus amor meus est: elegia flebile carmen. / non
facit ad lacrimas barbitos illa meas / ‘I must weep – for elegy is tearful
poetry; no lyre is suited to my tears’) and come to define the new Sappho
61
See Bessone (2003) 235–8 on the semper amare formula in Her.15.
150
in acute contrast to her old fiery image as described famously in Horace and
Plutarch,62 as well as by Sappho herself (e.g. fr. 48LP; cf. Her.15.9–10).63 In
Ovid’s formula, tears are to elegy what flames are to lyric. We are reminded
of how tears come to characterize elegy in Am.3.9, when Ovid uses a similar
phrase to the one Sappho adopts (flebilis Elegia 3) to comment on another
crucial poetic relationship, with Tibullus, the poet who (like the ardent
Sappho we knew) now lies burning on his funeral pyre. Sappho in tears
marks the death of one poetic shape and image and the appropriation of
a new genre.64 Yet we also cannot forget that in the Ars Amatoria, tears
function as a rhetorical device in a campaign of seduction and are to be
faked if necessary at critical moments to manipulate, persuade or distract.65
Let’s look first at lines 97–8, where Sappho really begins to emerge as
elegist, in tears:
scribimus, et lacrimis oculi rorantur abortis;
aspice, quam sit in hoc multa litura loco.
I write, and my eyes pour out tears like drops of dew;
just look how many blots there are just here.
Sappho proceeds to recount the time she last saw Phaon (15.99–116). At
first she could neither cry nor express herself (nec me flere diu, nec potuisse
loqui 110), suggesting perhaps that tears amount to a kind of speech or
writing; like Hinds and Farrell, we might wonder at what point the liturae
(‘blots’) in 15.98 become litterae (‘letters’), and are reminded that litura is
also used to mean the smearing of a wax tablet to erase (present or past)
inscriptions.66 When grief surfaces, Sappho remembers how she cried out,
tore her hair and beat her breast just like a mother carrying her son’s corpse
to the funeral pyre. Yet line 116 (portet ad exstructos corpus inane rogos /
‘she carries his empty frame to the high-built funeral pyre’) mirrors exactly
the description of Tibullus’s death in that tearful elegy, Am.3.9 (ardet in
exstructo corpus inane rogo 6). The possibility for ridicule and cheap
jokes in 15.116 is all here of course – Sappho is old enough to be Phaon’s
62
63
64
65
66
See Horace, Odes 4.9.10–12, Plutarch, Amat.18 (here Sappho is compared to the fire-spitting son of
Hephaistos).
Bessone notes (2003) 219–20, that Her.15.7–12 find an interesting parallel in Catullus’ self-portrait
as elegiac lover at 68.51–6.
Tears are emphatically a visual pun: this letter must be looked at to be/as well as read, just as men
must use their eyes to seek out a woman: quaerenda est oculis apta puella tuis / ‘you need to hunt out
the right girl with your eyes’ (Ars 1.44).
Ars 1.659–62.
See Hinds (1985) 30, n.12, and Farrell (1998) 338. For instances where litura means ‘erasure’ or
‘editorial correction’, see Caecina apud Ciceronem Fam.6.7.1, Horace, AP 293, Seneca, Dial.7.8.2.
Ovid uses it in this sense himself at ExP.2.4.18, 4.1.14, 4.12.26.
151
mother in Ovid, whereas in her own poetry she was heard to swear ‘I would
never share my bed with a younger man’ (fr.121LP). But through the tears,
and via the signposted implication of Am.3.9, we get more than a glimpse
of true Sapphic ardour, the fire that fuels Ovid’s hero, Tibullus, and makes
Sappho the mother of all elegiac poets (note that Elegia is compared to a
mourning mother at Am.3.9.1).67 Sappho may be blurred and watered down
in elegy, on paper, but there is no hiding Ovid’s powerful metaphorics of
literary influence and inheritance.
But how difficult is it (in the epistolary fantasy) to read a text which
describes its own illegibility68 (quam sit in hoc multa litura loco)? Tears
epitomize the energizing paradox of the love letter: they cultivate sincerity
and intelligibility, foster presence (lover sends beloved a bit of herself ),
yet they can also look contrived, obscure and obfuscated, make the letter
(literally and metaphorically) difficult to read. Ovid, who has had tears
in his literary tool-box for some time, makes his readers highly aware of
this tension, which further emphasizes their role as unintended readers
suspicious of their tendency to misunderstand, or be deceived. What we
see may not be what we get in a genre particular about making us visualize
a poet’s image and look at what is emphatically written (protinus est oculis
cognita nostra tuis? 2). This letter hints at the liquidity (or superficiality) of
authorial identity, signposting the possibility of its own distortion in the
process of transmission.
When, in her poetic grove, Sappho breaks down in tears, this is also,
in the same breath, the nearest she comes not just to writing but to being
elegy, in the tradition, of course, of elegy’s material girls: hic ego cum lassos
posuissem flebilis artus / ‘here I had laid my weary limbs and given way to
tears’ 161. Sappho is both the weeping woman (the weeping poem/letter)
and the weeping poet, mourning her lonely position as both writing subject
and written object.69 Does she need help? This is always the question in a
love letter which pleads, moves and addresses. As if by magic, in line 162, a
Naiad appears to assist her: constitit ante oculos Naias una meos / ‘a Naiad
appeared before my eyes’. I have already discussed this line’s interaction with
Am.1.5. But the handmaid of Venus also interjects to repeat her mistress’
entrance at the beginning of Ars 3 (et ante oculos constitit ipsa meos / ‘and
67
68
69
Compare Bessone (2003): ‘io credo che qui Ovidio faccia mettere in scena a Saffo la nascita dell’elegia,
e della sua poesia elegiaca, dal lamento funebre’ (117).
An illegibility embodied in femaleness and its connection throughout Western thought with the
fluid, the irrational, the chaotic.
Compare Lindheim’s Lacanian analysis of Ovid’s heroines in general (2003), whom, she argues,
continually perform the irreconcilable roles of powerful and helpless women.
152
she stood herself before my eyes’ 3.44), just in time to help Ovid out with
his female students, who like Ariadne (3.35), Phyllis (38) and Dido (40) (all
Heroides) could have done with his advice a long time ago. The scene that
follows line 162 also echoes the epiphany of Aphrodite in Sappho fr.2LP.70
Yet again Sappho is crying out to be heard while stepping into Ovid’s shoes,
praying to and being advised by Venus; her primary influence on Ovidian
epiphany is clear to see, while at the same time she is a teacher-turned-pupil,
learning and showing what it is to write elegy for the first time, and looking
not only to Venus but to Ovid for help.
The Naiad advises Sappho to jump off a cliff into the sea to extinguish
her fires (‘quoniam non ignibus aequis / ureris’ / ‘“since you are burning with
unrequited flame”’ 163–4), suggesting again that to water down Sapphic
ardour risks drowning the poetess (just as flebilis Elegia mourns the death
of Tibullus in Am.3.9). Harvey concludes that her predicted jump looks
like a ‘neutralisation of the threat that Sappho’s reputation represents’.71
Yet as Sappho becomes more and more desperate to be saved, and the letter draws to its close, what this leap entails and implies looks increasingly
blurred. I have already touched on the erotics of water in discussing the
Naiad’s appearance at 15.162, and we might also note that the aequor over
which Apollo presides at 165 is closely associated with the beloved ‘Lesbian
daughters’ Sappho addresses at 199–200 (Lesbides aequoreae 199),72 reminding us perhaps of Catullus’ nymphs (aequoreae . . . Nereides Catull. 64.15).73
Deucalion’s immersion in water kills his passion for Pyrrha at 167–8, but
what happens when a woman plunges into Venus’ element, into elegiac
waves? In curing Sappho’s love for Phaon, does Ovid’s remedia also rekindle her closeness to and desire for the female (and stage her rebirth as lyric
poetess, as she reaffirms her lyric identity even as she composes clumsy
distichs and gives away her chelys at 181–4)? Does Sappho really want to be
rescued, or is she already (with Ovid, in the spirit of Am.1.5) undressing
the Naiad with her eyes, yearning to plunge back into Narcissus’ pool? As
we have seen, Sappho’s transmission from Lesbos to Actium, the site of
Augustus’ founding victory, looks soaked in imperialist imagery – yet her
metamorphosis is complicated and contested both by the irresolute, interrogative structure of the letter itself (cur tamen Actiacas miseram me mittis
70
71
72
73
Sappho calls to Aphrodite from her original poetic grove, which blooms with roses and runs with
sacred streams.
Harvey (1996) 88.
Knox (1995) ad loc., finds this a perplexing epithet. He conjectures that it may be a way of referring
to the inhabitants of an island (cf. aequoreos Britannos Met.15.752)
Knox (1995) ad loc., suggests that Ovid may have a lost passage from Sappho referring to sea nymphs
in mind here.
153
ad oras? / ‘but why to you send me to the shores of Actium in my misery?’
185), and by the double poetic identity of Apollo, appropriated as Sapphic
lyricist and Roman Ovidian muse par excellence.
In particular, Ovid’s own ‘answer’ to Her.15 at Am.2.18, is puzzling. Here
Sabinus has returned from the ends of the earth and brought back with
him letters written by the errant lovers: Ulysses has replied to Penelope,
Hippolytus to Phaedra, Aeneas to Dido, Demophoon to Phyllis, and Jason
to Hypsipyle. On Sappho’s fate, Ovid writes, finally: det votam Phoebo Lesbis
amata lyram / ‘let the daughter of Lesbos, now loved, offer to Phoebus the
lyre she promised him’ (34). This line is even more vague than the list of
responses in 29–33, and seems to depend on our close engagement with
Her.15. It is usually interpreted to infer that Sappho’s love was requited74
(for she is amata75 ), yet in Her.15.181, she promises her lyre to Apollo only
if she goes through with the medicinal leap from the rocks of Actium.
For Knox and Tarrant, this can only mean either that the line refers to a
lost poem by Ovid on the same subject, but not to Her.15, or that it is an
interpolation.76 Yet if, on the basis of amata, we are to imagine a happy
ending here, it would reverse all we know of mythical Sappho’s fate in the
tradition thought to originate in Greek comedy: by all accounts we are
expecting Phaon to spurn her. We don’t straightforwardly assume when we
read Am.2.18 that Phaon’s reply (written by Sabinus) was positive, just as,
in the enigmatic preceding lines, we only get hints, not clear statements, of
Sabinus’ take on the stories of Dido, Phyllis and Hypsipyle. The passage as
a whole is a cleverly partial synopsis which seems designed to engage us in
precisely this kind of parallel reading exercise, and thus immerse us further
in the narrative dramas of these fictional love affairs. The line det votam
Phoebo Lesbia amata lyram seems to fuse exactly the two scenarios envisaged
by Sappho in Her.15.175–88, thus apparently alluding quite specifically to
the poem we have: either she will attempt suicide, hoping against hope
that she will survive and get rid of her passion, in which case she will
dedicate her lyre to Apollo (179–84), or she will be saved from this fate by
Phaon, who will be her Apollo (tu mihi Phoebus eris 188). Thus the act of
giving her lyre to Apollo seems to be compatible with both the tragic and
the happy ending imagined in Sappho’s letter: if she makes the jump and
lives, she dedicates the lyre,77 while if she receives a positive reply from
74
75
76
77
E.g. Rosati (1996b) 209–10.
Although we can’t rule out that amata is merely used as an epithet, as perhaps it has been already at
line 26, where some manuscripts give Lesbis amata, although the text is very uncertain here.
Knox (1995) 12–14; cf. Tarrant (1981) and Murgia (1985), who argues strongly against Tarrant’s
interpolation argument (see 471) but still believes that Am.2.18 proves our letter is not genuine.
Moreover, we can’t rule out a concessive quality to amata (although she was loved . . . ).
154
Phaon first, the implication is that she will also give thanks to the god,
but this time (in addition) in the form of divine Phaon himself (either
way, interestingly, she gives up her lyre, and by implication her lyric poetic
identity). Am.2.18 presents us with a riddle that plugs us deeper into the
confusions, uncertainties, and games of allegiance that characterize our
reading of Ovid’s Sappho, as I have emphasized throughout this chapter.78
It only exacerbates the paradoxes already present in Her.15, ensuring that
the poem ends on a cliffhanger just when we are sure its author is doomed,
and leaving us with the guilty possibility of misreading, of having misread.
∗
We have now seen how Her.15 accumulates a series of questions and problems about poetic influence and intent, staging a power struggle between
Ovid and Sappho whose poetic voices wrestle for visibility in a vacillating hierarchy. This, I’ve suggested, is what Ovidian erotics is all about:
Sappho’s poem offers its readers several different, competing love affairs,
making exemplary use of the potential disjointedness of the elegiac couplet to jigsaw together emotions, sexualities and genders. She shows us, in
a climactic way, the extent to which literary rivalries and sexual passions
are inseparable in Ovid’s amatory poetry, and how Ovidian intertextuality enacts intersubjectivity. Critics of this letter inevitably take sides, if
not as vehemently as Verducci, or as decidedly as Knox, then as subtly as
Harvey, who postpones Sappho’s fate until the final countdown. Yet as I’ve
argued, the Ovidian author has already written a complex and predicted
self-critique into his apparently macho campaign, warning readers against
rash judgement and preference even as he tempts and forecasts it. Critics
have continually underestimated the role of the letter’s dialogic structure
in scaffolding the complexity and risk invested in reading this poem. In
particular, Ovid manipulates the letter’s relationship with didactic poetry,
a genre which also addresses a reader with a view to a reply, to explore
intertextuality as a literary theme and the role of the reader in constructing
and determining authorial identity. There is no Ovid without Sappho, this
is what the reader must learn: Ovidian self-invention is staged alongside
and through Sappho’s original didacticism. Ovid looks back at Tibullus
in Am.3.9 and forward to the writing of his own posthumous reputation
78
It seems very unlikely that an interpolator seeking to insert his later Sappho letter into Ovid’s
Heroides as sketched in Am.2.18 (as Tarrant argues) would choose such an oblique and confusing
way to do so.
155
when he baits us to read and imagine the death of an author. Yet as critics’ responses have themselves shown, his is a hazardous strategy which
may rely too much on the loyalty and memory of reader-pupils eager to
please and comply. This is the surprise of Her.15, and its originality, as it
establishes ends in beginnings and vice versa: that there are real feelings,
real vulnerabilities exposed here, if only artificially, reminding us that there
must always be an element of jeopardy, unpredictability and loss of control
in Ovidian rhetoric, if the author is ever to survive.79
79
Similarly Spentzou (2003) 9 et passim, criticizes existing gendered approaches to the Heroides for
their reluctance to question Ovid’s authorial control. I agree, but do not necessarily envisage the
heroines’ success in making themselves heard above the silence of the letter in terms of an ‘escape’
from Ovid’s authorial control: we can see Ovid imitating, lusting after, riling the Bacchic dance of
feminine discourse in these poems just as much as he restrains and smothers it.
c h apt e r 5
What goes around: Heroides 16–21
omnibus invenies, quae nunc iactantur in alto,
navibus a portu lene fuisse fretum.
You’ll find, that for every ship now tossed upon the deep,
the sea was gentle as it left the harbour.
Her.17.235–6
In its present position, Heroides 15 appears to function as a ‘bridge’ between
the single and double epistles, serving as a platform from which the
project of twinning male and female writers/lovers in Her.16–21 is launched.
Whereas Sappho and Ovid ‘co-wrote’ an epistle which had no reply, the
double Heroides see three couples exchanging letters, and we get to watch
the strategies and reactions of both partners for the first time. The letters
of Paris and Helen, Hero and Leander, and Acontius and Cydippe, the
focus of my final two chapters, represent a culminating exercise in writing
mutually engaged, creative subjects. Yet criticism on Ovid’s ‘farewell’ to love
elegy in these poems remains scant (in part due to lingering uncertainties
over authorship),1 and has offered little analysis of gendered subjectivities.
Whereas the single letters have seemed either to offer a unique, subversive
view of female consciousness and writing power, or to show off Ovidian
gender-bending in a bid to challenge a learned, ‘unintended’ audience of
male voyeurs, the double epistles have been seen to situate their writers
and readers in unprovocative, emphatically conventional gender roles, and
to fuel little interaction beyond the passive mirroring of male letters by
1
However, I am in agreement with the many studies which argue convincingly that the double letters
are almost certainly the work of Ovid, writing late in his career. See Rand (1925), who suggests:
‘If [the double letters] are not from Ovid’s pen, an ignotus has beaten him at his own game’, plus
Clark (1908), Tracy (1971), who deals with most of the proposed objections, and a useful summary
of arguments in Kenney (1996) 20–6. Without doubt, the double Heroides read more like Ovid than
any other surviving poet, and as I argue here, develop in complex ways themes that are fundamental
to Ovidian erotic poetry.
156
157
female writers. They have received relatively little attention from feminist2
and (broadly) post-structuralist critics, and do not feature at all in Jacobson
and Verducci’s important monographs.3
These might look like textbook couples, then, performing just as Ovid
schooled in Ars Amatoria: the man is the wily, active, often aggressive
seducer, and is the first to send a letter, to which the woman replies.4
When in Ars 1, the poet makes the skill of writing love letters the first and
crucial step in seduction, he spurs on novices with an example straight from
the double epistles: littera Cydippen pomo perlata fefellit, / insciaque est verbis capta puella suis / ‘a letter carried in an apple betrayed Cydippe, and
the maid was caught unawares by her own words’ (Ars 1.457–8, clamping
Cydippe firmly mid-pentamenter; cf. Acontius at Her.20.66: insidiis esto
capta puella meis / ‘a girl captured by my treachery’).5 Men are back at the
Ovidian helm, and it shows: Paris, Leander and Acontius are cads, impulsive young heroes pursuing traditional girls who seem powerless, isolated
and trapped. In particular, the central pair, Hero and Leander, have often
been singled out (and praised) for the way in which they take us back to
a pre-Ovidian status quo. Although Palmer’s pronouncement that Hero’s
letter is ‘certainly inferior to the epistle of Leander’ would never make it
into print today,6 critical opinion has still tended to take Hero’s tepid suffering, Leander’s active masculinity, and therefore the relative dichotomous
simplicity of the poems as given.7 As Kenney puts it, Her.18–19 represent
‘a case study in egotism’ (i.e. Leander) versus ‘self-abnegation in love’ (i.e.
Hero),8 and the roles of Helen, Hero and Cydippe are ‘essentially passive,
however dynamic their rhetoric’.9 Hardie reads Hero literally as an absent
Echo, outlining the difference ‘between the more masculine, active outlook
of Leander, and the more feminine, passive, timorous outlook of Hero’.10
On either side of Hero and Leander’s poems (which I will read in detail
in chapter 6), male correspondents appear, unquestionably, to take the
upper hand: both pairs of letters are extended exercises in textual/sexual
entrapment and domination, and Helen and Cydippe struggle to assert any
power and free-will within multiple strata of debilitating constraints (their
husbands, or husbands to be, compete for control with suitors, who are in
2
3
4
5
6
8
With the noticeable exception, recently, of Spentzou (2003), a determinedly feminocentric reading
of the Heroides which makes little distinction between the single and double letters.
Jacobson (1974), Verducci (1985).
See Ars 1.437ff., especially 455–6 (ergo eat et blandis peraretur littera verbis, / exploretque animos primaque
temptet iter / ‘so send a letter speeding on its way, explore her feelings, and be the first to try the path’).
Here and throughout this chapter and the next, I use Kenney’s Cambridge text (1996).
7 Volk (1996) emphasizes the simplicity of Her.18–19 in more general terms.
Palmer (1898) 468.
9 Kenney (1996) 2.
10 Hardie (2002a) 142.
Kenney (1996) 15.
158
turn allied with the goddesses Venus and Diana). In what is by now a very
familiar pattern, Leander and Hero and Acontius and Cydippe perform
versions of the Narcissus–Echo plot: the middle couple are separated, like
Narcissus, by a tiny stretch of water (exigua prohibemur aqua Met.3.450) and
Cydippe is tricked and pushed into repeating Acontius’ words (verba licet
repetas 20.9; her goodbye, vale 21.248, mimics her partner’s at 20.242; cf.
Met.3.501: dictoque ‘vale’ ‘vale’ inquit et Echo). Helen has the entire weight
of Greco-Roman epic tradition against her, drumming out her destiny as
Paris’ stolen bride and dictating the future horrors of the Trojan war. Paris
promises to take her by force if not by persuasion, and his arrogant and
self-inflating missive treats her as a prize commodity he has already won.
At the end of the collection, wasted, bedridden Cydippe defends herself
in vain against Acontius’ piercing tongue and (literally) sharp wit,11 duped
and straightjacketed by (male) powers of reiteration. Her letter, Rosenmeyer
argues, ‘functions as an echo of Acontius’ master-voice’.12
Yet this is not the whole story. In an inversion of the basic stage-set
of Heroides 1–15, these women are far from abandoned – they are lusted
after, pursued, and receive the love letters their single counterparts long
for. And as the readers of and respondents to the letters, the heroines
of the double epistles are spotlit as making the crucial decision in their
relationships (rather than trying desperately to recapture a long-gone love
or lover). As Kenney puts it, ‘Helen, Hero, Cydippe all steal the show’.13
All three are pressured into flights of ingenuity and allied (as much, if not
more than their men) with the Ovidian poet in their battle to originate
within an epistolary world dominated by the voices of others and motored
by repetition. By comparison, the performances of Paris and Acontius (and
to a lesser extent Leander) look almost brutish and crude – or rather,
the male writers simply cannot sustain their penetrative, epicized rhetoric
once immersed in the geminum opus of the double Heroides, and in the
rolling diptichal poetics of elegy (often personified, here and elsewhere,
by their fickle, tempestuous, and not-quite-innocent beloveds). Although
(as Farrell among others has argued14 ), male and female writers in Ovid
retain their own idiosyncratic, gendered identities which can be traced
back in part to the prescriptions of the Ars Amatoria, the sheer density and
instability of elegiac metaphor, wound up in Ovid’s Penelopean text, invites
11
14
12 Rosenmeyer (1996) 13.
13 Kenney (1996) 2.
Acontius’ name means ‘javelin’.
See Farrell (1998). Farrell stresses the difference between male and female situations, although
this leads him to over-literalize female discourse in the double Heroides and to produce a naı̈vely
dichotomous summary of women’s letters (associated only with inscription, truth and disclosure)
on the one hand, and men’s letters (associated only with speech and duplicity) on the other.
159
elaborate colloquy and substitution. On the one hand, the male writers
want to command the gaze that preoccupied us in the first three chapters
(Paris, for example, is the all-powerful judge of beauty, while Acontius
allies himself with demon-eyed Diana and her ability to punish Cydippe
as she punished Actaeon). Yet on the other, Helen’s, Hero’s and Cydippe’s
looks, their eyes like gleaming stars,15 retain an uncanny Medusan power
to bewitch but also to turn the tables on the men who seem to want to
stare them into submission. Helen’s letter, for example, replays the fraught,
unstable meeting of gazes first explored in the Ars Amatoria and dramatized
climactically at the beginning of Metamorphoses 10, as we saw in chapters 2
and 3. Look at 17.77–8:
cum modo me spectas oculis, lascive, protervis,
quos vix instantes lumina nostra ferunt
When now you look at me, you naughty thing, I can barely
meet those daring eyes that bore into my own.
At 16.135–6, Paris remembers reacting to Helen’s beauty, and describes how
he was ‘dumbstruck’ (obstipui), and ‘astonished’ (attonitus), re-enacting
once again the paradigm of the Medusa effect described at Met.4.802 (ut
attonitus formidine terreat hostes). Acontius, in typical Ovidian form, is
turned on by angry women (20.71–2: ‘you can shout and be angry as much
as you like, as long as you let me enjoy you while you’re angry’), reminding us
of Ovid’s penchant for Medusan avengers in Ars 2.451–4 (cf. Ars 3.669–80),
as I discussed in chapter 2.
Symbolically, Acontius’ and Cydippe’s relationship ends not in waning and death (like Narcissus’ and Echo’s affair) but in marriage and the
foundation of the house of the Acontiadae (Callim. Aitia fr.75.50–2), and
Cydippe’s Echo-like gauntness and uphill struggles (like those of Leander)
become in addition a showcase for her creative, Callimachean crudentials
(gracilis 21.15; cf. Ovid at Am.2.10.23: graciles, non sunt sine viribus artus)16
Callimachus’ Aitia are barely hidden in Her.21: languor enim causis non
apparentibus haeret / ‘the langour clings to me, for reasons that do not
appear’ 13–14.17 In fact, Cydippe is just as much a Narcissus as an Echo
(reminding us that in the Metamorphoses, Narcissus’ fate already follows
and copies that of Echo). Just like Narcissus, her marble skin (21.218; cf.
Met.3.419, 481) is compared to that of an apple (Her.21.216; cf. Met.3.483
15
16
17
See 18.71–3, 20.55–6 (eyes like stars).
Cydippe also sees Acontius as embodying his letter: while his name means ‘javelin’, his epistle is
also a iaculum (21.212).
Also see 21.194 (nam lacrimae causa saepe latente cadunt).
160
non aliter quam poma solent). Her bloodless complexion is a dead ringer
for Narcissus’ (candida nec mixto sublucent ora rubore / ‘my face is white,
with no rising glow of red mixed in’ Her.21.217; cf. et neque iam color est
mixto candore rubori / ‘he no longer has that rosy colour mixed with
white’ Met.3.491),18 and is compared in lines 219–20 to a film of condensation on chilled silver – a unique image, Kenney argues,19 but still sharply
evocative of the thin surface of water in which Narcissus’ reflection is preserved, before (like the silver goblet at a banquet) it is touched by hot,
thirsty hands.
In fact, Cydippe’s identification with Narcissus is her (suicidal) secretweapon: she imagines Acontius setting eyes on her pitiful form and feeling
only sorrow in place of love (si me nunc videas / ‘if only you could see me now’
21.221), a version of events already told by tragic Echo in Met.3.494: quae
tamen ut vidit / ‘But when she saw his body’. Here it is as if hybrid Cydippe,
who writes and replies, steps into Echo’s shoes to imagine looking –
narcissistically – at herself as once-beautiful Narcissus. While her letter
milks reversability (facies, iurem ut contraria rursus / ‘you’ll make me swear
the opposite, a second time’ 21.225) and lands Acontius the role of Echo,
Cydippe herself comes close to swapping (or sharing) places with her keen
assailant. For Narcissus, as the beautiful youth doomed finally to suffer the
pain he himself inflicts, is already Acontius’ twin (in Callimachus, at least,
Acontius is the proverbial archer who finally feels an arrow from another’s
bow, fr.70Pf ).
Moreover, while the male and female writers of the double epistles might
be labelled as instigators and victims, respectively, of reproduction, it is
Paris, Leander and Acontius who find themselves discomfited, as well
as complicated, by what Spentzou calls the letter’s ‘pending’ economy.20
All three are impatient control-freaks, disgruntled with the deficiencies of
written communication, focused maniacally on an end-goal (for Paris and
Acontius, especially, the letter seems intended less as plea for interaction
on a plane which bans or delays physical union than a cool declaration of
their objectives, and an instruction to comply, or else). The women writers, meanwhile, warm to and enact the titillation of doubt, retardation and
circularity germane to the process of letter writing (and writing love letters in particular). Spentzou’s recent analysis of Her.17 captures this point:
‘Constrained by her royal bonds, Helen tries to consume her desire in her
letter. For her, a letter is more than just an irksome substitute for “real life”,
18
19
Met.3.491 already churns up the mix from 3.420–3 (spectat . . . decusque / oris et in niveo mixtum
candore ruborem).
20 Spentzou (2003) 130.
Kenney (1996) ad loc.
161
as the male correspondents . . . seem to believe, for it can be a proper stage
on its own, upon which life is acted, but with fewer constraints, and more
freedom, digressions and defiance.’21
In many ways, despite their intermittent wishes for union (e.g. 21.247:
quod cupio mihi iam contingere tecum / ‘because I long to join you soon’),
the heroines do not share the same yearning for presence that typifies the
men’s letters, and relish (just like Ovid at Am.2.18) the suspense teased
out in frustrated, postponed or fantasized communion. Trying out her
own elemental experiment in parallel/competition with Paris’ fire-water
fusion (his torch, Venus’ waves), Helen proposes: dum novus est, potius
coepto pugnemus amori; / flamma recens parva sparsa residit aqua / ‘instead,
while it’s new, let’s fight against a love we’ve begun to feel; a new flame
dies down when sprinkled with just a little water’ (17.189–90). Hero wants
Leander to stay on the shore as much as she longs for his return, while
docta Cydippe confesses her feelings but then asks Acontius, quid tamen
huc venias? / ‘but why should you come to me?’ (21.213). Her vacillations
re-enact Ovid’s laddish indecision in Am.2.10, when he finds himself spoilt
for choice between girlfriends (ipsa velut navis iactor quam certus in altum /
propellit Boreas, aestus et unda refert / ‘I’m tossed like a ship which steadfast
Boreas drives out into the deep, and tide and wave bring back’ 21.41–2; cf.
erro velut ventis discordibus acta phaselos, / dividuumque tenent alter et alter
amor / ‘I veer like a yacht driven by contrary winds, and I love now the
one, now the other’ Am.2.10.9–10).
The double letters, then, are not (only) about men regaining their rightful role as writers, about the uncertainty of our position as unintended
reader/repliers of Her.1–15 being washed away with the beloved’s return of
post, or about Ovid’s epistolary tricks being cancelled out by true, innocent
love, but (also) about testing the limits of creative power, and experimenting
in parallel writing/desiring subjects. The poems take a radical step beyond
the single Heroides because, having made the private female love letter spotlight the role of the reader in adjudicating fates of text and author, Ovid
now makes that reader Woman, whilst rendering explicit the idea that letters (and texts) receive replies. Yet this chapter will suggest that pointing
up how Helen, Hero and Cydippe don’t simply function as phantom-like
echoes in a series of neat, binary symmetries22 is just one aspect of a reading open to the fluid, non-linear logics of the double Heroides, and to the
maze of competitive/harmonious interactions traceable not only between
21
22
Spentzou (2003) 131–2.
E.g. in Spentzou’s reading (2003) 29, Helen’s discourse is ‘a striking act of defiance against the
professed will of her husband and king’ (36). She thus becomes an emblem for all Ovid’s heroines.
162
(would-be) lovers, but between poems and characters throughout the collection.23 In what follows, I will sketch out snippets of this interchange,
which I hope will help frame a more concentrated reading of the centrally
placed letters, Heroides 18–19, in chapter 6.
re t u rn of p ost
I’d like to begin with a basic overview of the nexus of threads that weaves
these three dialogues into a whole, before spinning out more intricate ways
in which straightforward patternings dissolve. First of all, the following
schema outlines the content of each letter and the shape of the collection:
Her.16 Paris to Helen
Paris declares his love for Helen, and tries to impress upon her that
she has no choice but to run away with him. He tells her his life story,
selling himself as a handsome, strong-minded nobleman, and claiming
that the chain of events from his mother Hecuba’s pregnancy to the
judgement of the three goddesses and the moment when he set sail for
Sparta all lead to this inevitable conclusion. Helen’s beauty rivals that
of Venus. His sister Cassandra has warned him of the terrible fires his
voyage to Sparta will arouse, but he believes the prophecy has come
true as metaphor: he is aflame with love. He then reminds Helen of the
luxury she would enjoy at Troy, and puts Menelaus down as a relative
of Atreus and Tantalus. He is tortured by watching her being caressed
by her husband at dinner: Menelaus does not appreciate her, and is
almost willing her to cheat on him. There are also precedents for his
plan (Helen herself was once stolen away by Theseus), and she should
not fear that her actions will trigger war.
Her.17 Helen to Paris
Paris has abused Spartan hospitality – he is trying to seduce a faithful
wife who has given him no reason to think less of her. Theseus’ actions
don’t mean she can be stolen away again. But she is not angry with him,
provided he is sincere. As for his sales pitch, her life in Sparta is just
as noble. It wasn’t a good idea to try to win her over with gifts: she is
23
Kenney (1996) 1, allows for some interaction between the protagonists (‘somewhere along the lines
of an Euripidean agon’), but adds that this is ‘admittedly limited’.
163
interested in people, not possessions. Had he proposed to her when she
was still unmarried, he would have been successful. As it stands, he is
simply too late. She doesn’t believe in the tale about the judgement, and
his praise of her beauty, too, is over the top. But still, she is very flattered.
She feels herself succumbing to him, yet she has never done such a thing
before, and is afraid. Even though Menelaus is away, word of their affair
will get out. She is wavering, they should fight their feelings. What’s
more, if she commits adultery, Paris himself will never trust her, and
she will miss her family in Troy. Her abduction is bound to trigger war.
Perhaps they should delay, and think it over.
Her.18 Leander to Hero
Leander wants to see Hero desperately, but is forced to write rather than
swim to her because the Hellespont is still blocked by a storm which
has raged for seven nights. If only Boreas had mercy on him, if only he
had Daedalus’ wings. He remembers the last time he swam to Sestos,
guided by the light of the moon, and then by Hero’s lamp; how they
embraced on the shoreline, the pleasures they shared that night, how
they parted, in tears. His heart is as troubled as the sea. These are wellknown waters, made famous already by the tale of Phrixus and Helle, the
girl who drowned in the strait and gave it its name. He envies Phrixus,
but needs no vehicle to cross, and only Hero’s lamp to light the route. It
is very frustrating that they are so near to each other, yet so far. Leander
promises to swim anyway if the storm continues. But all he needs is a
brief respite. When he makes it to her shore, the storm can rage on all
it likes.
The Hellespont
Her.19 Hero to Leander
If only Leander could come in person, rather than send a letter. There
is nothing for her to do here, as a woman, apart from be in love. She
spends every waking hour looking at the sea, chiding the winds and
waves, asking sailors whether they have seen him. At night, she puts out
her lamp to guide him (the lamp by which she also writes), and spins as
she waits. When she falls asleep, she dreams of embracing him on the
shore, of the night they would spend together. Then she accuses him
164
of delaying, of not being brave and quick enough to cross. She fears his
feelings have changed, that he has another lover, which would kill her.
No, it is just the jealous storm that blocks his path: perhaps the sea is
swollen with Helle’s tears. Why don’t the sea gods understand, when
they too have felt great passion? If he thinks he cannot make it to Sestos
and back, perhaps they can meet mid-strait. She is eager not to persuade
him to swim, because of the danger. She is also anxious after dreaming
that a dead dolphin was washed up on her shore. She ends by reassuring
him that she will never be safe unless he is.
Her.20 Acontius to Cydippe
Don’t worry, Acontius writes, this isn’t another deceptive note. He is
asking for her hand in marriage, and reminds her of the pledge she
made when she read the carved apple aloud. He did try to trick her, he
admits, but the motive was true love, inspired by her dazzling beauty.
Now he writes a second time, and writing is his weapon. She cannot
escape – he’ll even take her by force if it comes to that. Diana was his
witness as Cydippe read the apple, and she’s not to be crossed, as Actaeon
proves. In fact, it is Diana who is trying to prevent Cydippe’s marriage
by making her ill. If only he could be allowed to show off his bedside
manner, rather than her awful fiancé. She will be cured just as soon as
she honours the pledge. He would make an excellent husband, too –
wealthy and of good repute. If she accepts to marry him, he will make
sacrifices to Diana and present the goddess with an inscribed golden
apple recording his success.
Her.21 Cydippe to Acontius
She reads the letter silently, for fear of making more promises she does
not mean. She should not have read it at all, but fears Diana’s reprisals.
She is sick, emaciated, barely able to write, but manages it anxiously,
in secret. She is being punished for Acontius’ lying tricks: is this the
reward for her beauty? If only she had never gone to Delos, and all the
business with the apple had never happened. She blushed with shame,
she remembers, as soon as she realized what she had said. What glory is
there in tricking a naı̈ve girl? This is how Hippomenes won Atalanta, but
a real man would have used persuasion, not guile. In any case, a verbal
agreement is predicated on the intention of the speaker. The pledge is
165
therefore invalid. If his writing skill is so great, it should be put to better
use. But, she confesses, she still fears Diana’s wrath. The wedding has
been postponed three times, and she is near to death. She is still a virgin,
and her fiancé is getting suspicious, because she flinches when he tries
to kiss her. She now admits she has feelings for Acontius, but if only he
could see her in this wretched state, he’d let her renege on her promise.
But given that she respects the will of the gods, she will honour the
pledge.
In many ways 16–17 and 20–1 are non-identical twins: in both cases, the
women are being forced into a marriage, and both Paris and Acontius have
a goddess on their side. Moreover, Venus and Diana, related goddesses of
love and childbirth respectively, are linked in the letters by their control of
looking: stunning Venus is starred at in the beauty contest, but is able to
lure Paris’ gaze and use it, ultimately, to manipulate the course of history,
while Diana is seen naked by Actaeon in a similar woodland setting and
punishes him with metamorphosis and death, a tale used by Acontius
to scare Cydippe into deference at 20.103–4. Both pairs involve, or are
precipitated by, the throwing of a carved apple: the judgement of Paris
was designed to resolve the incident at the wedding party of Peleus and
Thetis, when Discord sends an apple as a gift which gets tossed among the
wedding guests. On it is written, ‘may the beautiful woman take me’, and
when Hermes picks it up and reads it aloud, the guests disagree as to whom
it refers (hence the beauty contest).24 Inspired by the idea of apple as tricky
wedding gift (and also by the similar tale of Hippomenes winning sprinter
Atalanta by enticing her to pick up a golden apple), Acontius lures Cydippe
into reading aloud the inscription on an apple (according to Ovid’s model
Callimachus, it says: ‘I swear by Artemis to marry Acontius’, Callim., fr
67Pf, though in Her.20–1 the actual wording is coyly suppressed).
Paris also has the success-story of Hippomenes in mind at 16.263–5 (di
facerent pretium magni certaminis esses . . . ut tulit Hippomenes Schoeneida
praemia cursus . . . / ‘if only the gods would make you prize in some great
contest . . . as Hippomenes carried off Schoeneus’ daughter, the reward of
his running’). He too already has a reputation as a lover who writes on, or
around, objects: in Her.5.21–2, Oenone reminds him that he has etched her
name onto beech trees (incisae servant a te mea nomina fagi / et legor Oenone
falce notata tua), and in her letter Helen recalls how he scrawled love notes
24
For extant versions of this tale see Lucian, Dialogues of the Sea Gods, and Philostratus, Love Letters
62.
166
in wine on the edges of a curved dinner table, of the type usually made of
tree-trunks25 (orbe quoque in mensae legi sub nomine nostro / quod deducta
mero littera fecit, AMO / ‘on the round surface of a table I too have read
beneath my name, which had been traced in wine: I LOVE’ Her.17.87–8).
Moreover, all three pairs of letters in the collection are propelled and
haunted by forces of repetition which are bound up both with tragic torture
and with writerly or erotic mastery. Going over and reworking the past has
already been thematized to an extreme in the single Heroides, and is of
course a major preoccupation of Augustan literature and politics generally.
It reaches its apex in the double epistles.26 There is much doubling between
the single and double letters, too: both Hypsipyle and Medea write to Jason,
for example, and Her.16 is the ‘response’ Paris should have written to Oenone
in Her.5 (in this letter, Oenone knows Paris has already conquered Helen,
as she spies them kissing on the ship as they near her shores, 5.68–70), while
Hermione (Her.8) asks Orestes to be more like his father-in-law Menelaus
(who is a shadowy presence in Her.16 and 17), and addresses her mother
Helen at 8.99. Meanwhile, the rehearsed seduction of Heroides 16 takes us
back full-circle to Dido’s epistle, which curses Paris’ actions ‘in advance’ and
wishes him Leander’s fate: if only he hadn’t abducted Helen, she wouldn’t
be suffering this plight (o utinam tum, cum Lacedaemona classe petebat, /
obrutus insanis esset adulter aquis! / ‘if only, when his ship was on the way to
Sparta, the adulterous lover had been overwhelmed by the raging waters!’
Her.1.5–6).
Within Her.16–21 themselves, matching double-acts Paris/Helen and
Acontius/Cydippe tell stories about male lovers controlling reduplication
in order to pressure and weigh down the objects of their affection: Helen
has been abducted once, so it can and will happen a second time; Cydippe
is beguiled again and again by the act of reading the apple, an inscription
copied first in Acontius’ letter and then in his final effigy, and both heroines are framed by the onus of canonic texts, from Homer and Virgil to
Callimachus and Ovid himself. In the central couple, conversely, Leander
becomes the victim of his attempt to retrace old paths when he is drowned
in the ‘well-trodden’ Hellespont, a strait which seems to incarnate Ovid’s
‘universal repository’ of narratives, as Barchiesi imagines it,27 becoming
25
26
27
See Kenney (1996) ad loc., and Juv. 1.137, with Mayor, Courtney ad loc., OLD s.v. orbis 2f.
As Barchiesi (2001) reminds us, the return is the most important political myth of the early Augustan
era. It is central not only to the Aeneid, but also to iconographic and symbolic programmes of celebratory art, accompanied, especially in Horace, by a vigorous campaign against moral degeneration
and the consumption of luxury goods.
See Barchiesi (2001) 25: ‘Ovid often behaves as if there were a universal repository of narrative already
textualised as stored – a place through which every new story must pass.’
167
a physical manifestation of writer’s block.28 Leander’s fate ‘balances out’
against Paris’ and Acontius’ clever-clever tirades, as if poems 18–19 form the
droopy pentameter between two strident hexameters. The image conjured
up by Hero of the two lovers swimming from opposite shores to meet in
the middle (19.167–8) could be extended to the collection as a whole, with
the waves of 16–17 and 20–1 rising on either flank before collapsing into
18–19’s liquid core.
Yet despite their quite different handlings of the same (old) topic, the
ultimate mythic icon of painful regression, Tantalus, plays his part in all
three duets. As the hellish figure who clutches in vain at fruits (poma) and
cannot touch the waters that torture him in his thirst, he is a direct model
for Leander, at the point where he is unable to cross the Hellespont,29
and perhaps an anti-model for Paris and Acontius, who get to torture others
(again and again) with alluring apples. There is the sense that Leander looks
(in vain) to Paris for tips on how to keep his passion with Hero alive, and
wants to step into his shoes (at 18.69, he tells Hero that she’s next in line to
Venus for looks, following Paris’ replay of the beauty contest at 16.137–40).
Meanwhile Paris reassures us that it is Menelaus, not him, who is related
to the Tantalus family through his father Atreus:
non dabimus certe socerum tibi clara fugantem
lumina, qui trepidos a dape vertat equos;
nec Priamo pater est soceri de caede cruentus
et qui Myrtoas crimine signat aquas;
nec proavo Stygia nostro captantur in unda
poma nec in mediis quaeritur umor aquis.
At least, with me, your father-in-law won’t terrify the sun’s
bright beams, or turn his frightened horses from the feast.
Priam’s father is not a blood-stained murderer,
nor does he mark Myrtoan waters with his crime;
No ancestor of mine grasps at fruits in the Stygian wave,
or looks for moisture in the midst of water.
16.207–12
Yet at the same time, Paris’ letter is marred by fear (the notion that joy
cannot come unmixed with metus, at 16.6, is symptomatic of the way elegiac
28
29
Ovid identifies the successful elegist as Acontius at Tr.3.10.73: just as he has writer’s block in exile,
so there are no trees or fruits here for Acontius to write on.
See Her.18.178–9, where Leander imagines himself as a Tantalus figure (‘I can almost touch her with
my hand, the one I love. But often, alas, that “almost” moves me to tears’). Kenney deletes the next
couplet, which spells out the allusion (velle quid est aliud fugientia prendere poma / spemque suo refugi
fluminis ore sequi? / ‘how different to this was the catching at elusive fruits, and pursuing with the
lips the hope of a retreating stream?’). He suggests, reasonably, that it is probably a scribal gloss, yet
clearly, the gloss makes explicit an already obvious idea.
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poetry and passions confound and swamp univocality). Even as he denies
his kinship with Tantalus, in the lines that follow (215–36) he subconsciously
turns his version of Amores 1.4’s dinner party, and the classic torment of the
exclusus amator, into a remake of the horrific banquet he has just mentioned
at line 208: while we still have in mind the history of sexual jealousy and
perverse feasts in Menelaus’ household, the scene evokes Thyestes’ tragedy,
with Paris cast in the lead role, Menelaus playing rival king/brother Atreus,
and Helen as Aerope. Look more closely at 16.215–34:
heu facinus! totis indignus noctibus ille
te tenet amplexu perfruiturque tuo.
at mihi conspiceris posita vix denique mensa,
multaque quae laedant hoc quoque tempus habet.
hostibus eveniant convivia talia nostris,
experior posito qualia saepe mero.
paenitet hospitii cum me spectante lacertos
imponit collo rusticus iste tuo.
rumpor et invidia (quid enim non omnia narro?),
membra superiecta cum tua veste fovet.
oscula cum vero coram non dura daretis,
ante oculos posui pocula sumpta meos.
lumina demitto cum te tenet artius ille,
crescit et invito lentus in ore cibus.
saepe dedi gemitus et te, lasciva, notavi
in gemitu risum vix tenuisse meo.
saepe mero volui flammam compescere, at illa
crevit, et ebrietas ignis in igne fuit;
multaque ne videam versa cervice recumbo,
sed revocas oculos protinus ipsa meos.
What crime! Your undeserving husband has you in his arms
for nights on end, enjoying your embrace;
But I get to see you only when the table’s laid,
and even then the time is agonizing.
I’d wish upon my enemies the kinds of dinner parties I endure
once the wine has been set before us!
Being a guest is torture, when that peasant drapes his arms
around your neck before my very eyes.
I am bursting with envy (why do I not admit it all?)
when he wraps your shoulders in his cloak to keep you warm.
But when, in front of everyone, you give him tender kisses,
I pick up my goblet and use it as a screen.
When he holds you tight, I flinch and drop my gaze,
and the heavy food swells up in my reluctant mouth.
I’ve often groaned; and you, you tart, I’ve noticed
220
225
230
220
225
how you can’t help giggling when I groan.
I’ve often tried to drown the flame in wine – instead,
it grew, and drunkenness fed fire to the fire.
In order the avoid the worst, I turn my head away;
but straight away you hook my eyes again.
169
230
This dinner party turns out to be a torture to rival the very feast Paris
swears has nothing to do with him. In particular, line 228, in which the
heavy food seemed to ‘grow’ in Paris’ ‘unwilling mouth’ (228), hints for
a second at the moment Thyestes realizes what he has eaten and begins
to gag on the mouthful he is unable now to swallow. It is as if Atreus (or
now, his son) had just revealed Thyestes’ self-inflicted nefas. Paris groans
(saepe dedi gemitus 229), and attempts, Oedipus-like, to look away (233),
his neck bent like a supine, flesh-fed Polyphemus (versa cervice recumbo
233).30 Compare what Seneca will write in his Thyestes (e.g. crescit pondus
et dextram gravat / ‘the cup grows heavy and weighs down my hand’ 986;
quis hic tumultus viscera exagitat mea? / ‘what is this rumbling that disturbs
my guts?’ 999; venit in medias voces gemitus / ‘in the midst of speech comes
groaning’ 951).31 At the same time, notice the double-entendre of rumpor
at 16.223 (Paris is so excited at watching the couple cavort in public that
he is fit to ‘burst’). Add to this the soundtrack of moaning at lines 229–30,
and the passing pointer towards, or spelling out of Am.1.5’s innuendo at
line 223 (quianam non omnia narro? / ‘and why shouldn’t I tell everything?’;
cf. singula quid referam? / ‘why should I give all the details?’ Am.1.5.23),32
and we have a rival scene of Ovidian voyeurism in which our ‘victim’ (and
his giggling accomplice and tease, Helen) revels in his own pain, or in this
case pleasure-pain.33 In this passage of Her.16, Ovid rewrites an all-male
tragic drama as a narrative of sexual jealousy with a woman at its heart,
just as Trojan war epic gets elegized throughout the Heroides as a frisky plot
of rape, lust and true love. Through the lens of Thyestes’ feast, the roles
30
31
32
33
Polyphemus is also a model for Seneca’s Thyestes, as he lies back after feasting, bent neck supported
by his hand, and belches: cf. Virgil, Aen.3.624, 3.630–3.
Also compare 16.235–6 (dolor est meus illa videre, / sed dolor a facie maior abesse tua) with Sen. Th.1003
(visis fugiet hic vobis dolor). The scene at 16.257ff., where Paris recalls an earlier, joyful feast when
he lay carelessly on his back (resupinus), drunk, fantasizing about Helen and singing of old loves
(cantabam veteres amores), is also very similar to Seneca’s image of Thyestes at the feast, before he
realizes its content.
The imagery here (and in Her.16 generally) is all of barely controlled or potential bursting out, rather
than of coy concealment, the reverse (in a sense) of Am.1.5, but at the same time a regurgitation
of Am.1.4: note that after quid enim non omnia narro? comes membra superiecta cum tua veste fovet
(224), a subtle reference perhaps to the scene at Am.1.4.47–8, when Ovid and his puella finger each
other under her robe at the dinner table. Quis cetera nescit, after the Amores?
I thank Philip Hardie for prompting this point.
170
of Paris and Menelaus (winner and loser, conquering hero and doomed,
feminized cuckold) start to blur into one another: as the quintessential
locked-out Ovidian lover, Paris and his rhetoric no longer look so secure
and invulnerable.
f ru i t m ac hi n es
Only in Her.20–1 is the inscribed apple a direct model for the letter, yet
this analogy offers an image for visualizing the circularity of the collection
as a whole: For when a line of a certain length is written not just on but
around a three-dimensional curvature (whether an apple in Her.20–1, or
a tree trunk or round table in Her.16–17), it’s not at all obvious where
it begins or ends; if the ends join up, a riff is created which might have
different rhythms depending on where we start singing. So too with the
double epistles, which knit circular designs within and between each other,
overwriting linearity and allying Ovid’s readers with Cydippe in their involuntary and seemingly exit-less participation in the apple game. Barchiesi
hits on exactly this when he says in passing of Ovid’s epistles: ‘A text
such as the Heroides, which emphasizes the arbitrary nature of beginnings
and endings, comes very close to evoking the ‘continuous’ poetics of the
Metamorphoses.’34
As ‘outside’ readers of these poems, we often have the impression that we
have stumbled upon an exchange at a point somewhere between its beginning and ending, and that the unidirectional thrust of the collection, in
which the men write and the women reply, is predicated on the blinkered
perspective of eavesdroppers (and on the literal assumption that each couple
writes only once). For in a relationship forged in letters, the active/passive
roles of writer and respondent are soon fogged, so that each missive functions as both continuation and reply. In the age of electronic mail and
textmessaging, we’ve all experienced anxieties about the etiquette of ending an exchange which seems to develop its own compulsive momentum:
one always feels bound to acknowledge the ‘reply’, to keep writing (even
when each e-mail becomes a dense patchwork or line-up of previous communication). As Helen puts it, non rescribendi gloria visa levis / ‘the glory
of writing no reply looks pretty meagre’ (17.2).35 The double letters play
34
35
Barchiesi (2001) 26. Kenney (1996) 2, imagines the Heroides occupying a space ‘between the Amores
and the Metamorphoses’.
Ovid also raises this issue of the compulsion of replying to a letter at Ars 1.481, as I mentioned in
chapter 2 (quae voluit legisse, volet rescribere lectis / ‘she who has wanted to read will want to answer
what she has read’).
171
directly on this ‘middleness’, both because they thematize repetition (when
did the duplications begin?), and because they often appear to start in medias
res, and in ways that loop back to other beginnings, middles and endings.36
For example, Paris’ flame is already nota (16.3), his letter a follow-up call
rather than a first declaration of love (line 10, habes animi nuntia verba
mei / ‘you have the words that bring the message of my love’, could refer to
previous letters as well as to the present one, while lines 13–14’s reference to
epistula nostra recepta might also, at least at first sight, indicate a previous
interchange37 ). Helen’s composition ‘ends’ mid-air, and Cydippe’s letter
is itself a double, an unfinished note gone back to and continued/revised
(inde meos digitos iterum repetita fatigat / ‘from where, taken up again, it
tires my fingers for a second time’ 21.27). Her.16 also takes us backwards to
the beginning of the Ars Amatoria and Amores: Just as Venus is Paris’ muse
and initiates the drama of Her.16–17, so she guided Ovid from the start
of Ars 1 (me Venus artificem tenero praefecit Amori / ‘Venus has set me over
tender love as master in the art’ Ars 1.7), and at 16.83–6, we revise the opening poem of the Amores as Venus provides Paris with his creative material
(Helen), and giggles (dulce Venus risit 16.83) before drawing back her ‘foot’
in the pentameter (rettulit illa pedem 16.88), revamping Trojan war epic as
a seminal elegiac romance. Compare Cupid in Am.1.1, who laughs while
stealing away the sixth foot of the hexameter: risisse Cupido / dicitur atque
unum surripuisse pedem (3–4).
Acontius’ letter also takes us back to the ‘beginning’ poem in the Amores,
where Corinna first steps onto Ovid’s stage: 20.55–62 sum up Cydippe’s
charms just as Ovid scrutinized his puella from top to toe at Am.1.5.17–25
(Acontius, like Ovid’s readers in Am.1.5, can’t see the whole (cetera 61) of
Cydippe’s body, but assumes flippantly: nec dubito totum quin sibi par sit
opus / ‘I don’t doubt that the work is alike in all its parts’ 20.62). Uror
is a key word in Her.16 (see 9–10), just as it is at Am.1.1.26, and Paris
becomes the apotheosis of love’s fire. I’ve already mentioned the use of
Acontius as paradigm in Ars 1: note too that the beauty contest staged and
restaged in Her.16 and 17 is Ovid’s prime lesson for pupils starting out on
the chase at Ars 1.247 (be careful not to make rash choices at nighttime
parties, he advises, as drink and darkness impair your judgement). Yet Paris
also headlines Ars 2 (5–6), triumphing in his conquest over Helen. It’s no
36
37
On this see also Barchiesi (1999).
This is a curious couplet: it appears to want to pull off the epistolary trick of collapsing past and
future (Paris is projecting into a future in which Helen is reading what he is now writing), but as
such it is strained – readers might be forgiven for assuming that Paris must surely be referring to a
previous letter, not this one.
172
surprise when he sings of veteres amores at 16.257, for he has already whisked
us back to Am.1.4 (as well as the first of the Heroides38 ), as he recalls the
tortured nights spent dining in the company of Helen and Menelaus, telling
stories of aliquis amor (243). Ovid’s own voice (as Paris hints: indiciumque
mei sub ficto nomine feci! / ‘I’ve given you a clue of who I am under the
made-up name!’ 16.245) has never yelled so loud.
Despite being tantalized as victims of repetition, the heroines to some
extent control that same dynamic, in that they embody and identify with
it: they all relish keeping the wheel spinning (and spinning their wool)
to fuel desire, foiling the teleological ambitions of their partners. While
the male writers of the double Heroides (Paris and Acontius in particular),
are fixed in their objectives, the women are confused, contradictory, mutable, the perfect vehicles for shifty amatory discourse (as exemplified, so I’ve
argued, in the Ars Amatoria). As she weaves and unravels the shroud for
Odysseus’ father Laertes, Penelope becomes the Heroides’ leading mascot
for this rebellion against linear time.39 Taking their cue from her, the heroines all assert, to some extent, an artist’s ability to break vicious circles,
while at the other ‘end’ of the collection, Cydippe turns her own tortuous
fate against her aggressor by morphing into the rolling, spherical apple that
now taunts Acontius with delay:40
concidimus macie, color est sine sanguine, qualem
in pomo refero mente fuisse tuo,
candida nec mixto sublucent ora rubore.
I am wasting away; my skin is bloodless, just like
the colour of your apple, I recall, and
my face is white, without a tinge of rosy blush.
Her.21.215–17
What appears to be passion-failure is in fact the classic pathology of lovesickness41 (Cydippe seduces Acontius with these bedroom scenes – just as
Helen cannot quite smother her glee at flirting with Menelaus in front of
Paris – and renders his argument at 20.107–28 non-sensical within the lore
38
39
40
41
Where a soldier draws the Trojan war on a dinner table in wine (Her.1.32: pingit et exiguo Pergama
tota mero).
A time that Spentzou defines as quintessentially male: ‘Penelope has blocked the male readers’ linear
determination by her erratic activity in her own cora – a tumbling, unpredictable space outside the
tempo and narrative of the all-powerful men’ (2003) 104.
In Aristaenetus 1.10.27 (Vieillefond) the apple is specifically a Cydonian apple, i.e. a quince, and
therefore puns on the name Cydippe (Rosenmeyer 1996, 17 n.22).
See e.g. abiit corpusque colorque Her.3.141; fugerat ore color, macies adduxerat artus, / sumebant minimos
ora coacta cibos 11.27–8; et color et macies et vultus Met.9.536; palleat omnis amans Ars 1.729.
173
of elegiac metaphor42 ). Moreover, although in this passage, Ovid seems to
have switched roles (in Aristaenetus, 1.10.51–2, it is Acontius who suffers
wasted limbs and a wan complexion), Cydippe finds a means to engineer
her own reversal even within these shackles. For Acontius, lured by this
vision of an apple-woman he cannot (in the epistolary universe) yet touch,
is locked, Tantalus-like, into his own Stygian contract. Inspired by, yet
also making a mockery of Acontius’ smug manipulation of reiteration,43
Cydippe declares:
promissique fidem, ne sim tibi vincta, remittes,
et cupies illud non meminisse deam.
forsitan et facies, iurem ut contraria rursus,
quaeque legam mittes altera verba mihi.
You’ll let me renege on my promise, lest I’m yours for keeps,
and you’ll long for the goddess to forget it all.
Perhaps you’ll even make me swear again, but in reverse
and send me words a second time to read.
Her.21.223–6
Similarly, at Her.17.22, Helen is bold enough to ask: an, quia vim nobis
Neptunius attulit heros, / rapta semel videor bis quoque digna rapi? / ‘Just
because the Neptunian hero took me by force, does that mean that, stolen
once, I can be stolen for a second time?’ She also turns the idea that one can
begin reading at various points on the epistolary sphere to her advantage
at 17.103–8:
tunc ego te vellem celeri venisse carina,
cum mea virginitas mille petita procis.
si te vidissem, primus de mille fuisses:
iudicio veniam vir dabit ipse meo.
ad possessa venis praeceptaque gaudia serus:
spes tua lenta fuit; quod petis alter habet.
Back then, when my virgin hand was courted by a thousand men,
I would have wanted you to come on speedy sail.
If I had seen you then, of the thousand you’d have come out top,
and even my husband will forgive that verdict.
You come late to joys already captured and possessed;
your hope has been slow; for what you want, another has.
42
43
Here Acontius argues that Cydippe is suffering because she is being punished by Diana for breaking
her oath, whereas Cydippe reveals that her ‘illness’ is really a come-on – she’s in love! The idea that
there is a thin line, or often no line at all, between pleasure and pain, falling in and out of love, is
of course exploited at length in the (interaction between) Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, as I
touched on in chapter 2.
E.g. nihil hic iterum iurabis amanti 20.1; verba licet repetas 20.9; en, iterum scribo mittoque rogantia
verba 20.33; recitetur formula pacti 20.151; nam quod habes et tu gemini verba altera pacti 20.155; lecta
tibi quondam nunc quoque verba refer 214.
174
Aping Paris’ own technique in Her.16 (si te vidissem / ‘if I had seen you’
17.105; cf. si tu venisses / ‘if you had come’ 16.139), Helen rehearses the
infamous beauty contest, but appoints herself as judge (iudicium, Paris’
verdict at 16.80, is used by Helen of Paris at 17.122 in her incredulous
summary of his story, and here of her own imagined judgment of his beauty).
She now claims for herself the ruling gaze that structured Paris’ conceited
letter.44 Indeed, Paris’ narcissism gives reader Helen all the material she
needs to see him as an Acontius-double, pricked by his own dart (missilibus
telis eminus ictus amo / ‘I’m in love, struck by arrows that were sped from
afar’ 16.40).45 If his own beauty is so dazzling (ut ego te cupio, sic me cupiere
puellae: / multarum votum sola tenere potes / ‘as I desire you, so many a
girl has lusted after me / only you can have the man of many women’s
dreams’ 16.93–4; forma vigorque animi, quamvis de plebe videbar, / indicium
tectae nobilitatis erat / ‘my beauty and mental vigour, although I seemed
an ordinary guy, were the sign of hidden nobility’ 16.51–2), then sooner
or later all hungry eyes will turn on him. As Helen pictures it at 17.180, it
was Paris’ looks which first grabbed her, and only then did he reciprocate
(inque vicem tua me, te mea forma capit / ‘your beauty takes me, and mine
in turn you’). Timing, invested with so much dramatic impact throughout
the Heroides,46 now looks unstable, serendipitous, a malleable property that
is even, sometimes, just a trick of the light. In Helen’s fantasy, it was an
accident of fate, rather than a cast-iron given, that Paris became judge not
judged, viewer not viewed.
At the end of her letter, Helen refracts Paris’ vaunted capacity to repeat
past rapes, reminding him of the vulnerability incurred just by stepping
onto this elegiac/epistolary roundabout.
tu quoque qui poteris fore me sperare fidelem
et non exemplis anxius esse tuis?
quicumque Iliacos intraverit advena portus,
is tibi solliciti causa timoris erit.
ipse mihi quotiens iratus ‘adultera!’ dices
oblitus nostro crimen inesse tuum!
delicti fies idem reprehensor et auctor;
44
45
46
See vidi 16.37; constitit ante oculos 16.61; fas vidisse fuit, fas sit mihi visa referre 16.63; te vigilans oculis
animi, te nocte videbam 16.101; ut vidi, obstipui 16.135; conspiceris 16.217; nunc oculos tua cum violarit
epistula nostros 17.1.
This trope of the biter bitten takes us back to Callimachus’ Acontius (‘the archer feels the point of
an arrow from another’s bow’ Callim., fr.70Pf ). When Ovid’s Acontius lusts over Cydippe’s eyes,
which he describes as ‘brighter than the stars’, he is using language which in Callimachus was used
of himself (fr.67.21Pf ), although this (by now) cliché comes filtered through Ovid (it is used of
Corinna at Am.2.16.44, and by Apollo of Daphne at Met.1.498–9).
See especially the now classic Kennedy (1984), which exposes the ironic timing of Dido’s epistle
(Odysseus is already hiding in the palace, in disguise).
175
And you, how can you hope that I’ll keep my vow,
and not be troubled by your own example?
Whenever a stranger docks ship at Ilion
he’ll be the focus of your anxious fears.
How often will you snap and charge me with adultery
forgetting how your crime is linked with mine!
You’ll be at once both censor and author of my crime.
17.213–19
When the heroines stick out their necks to sing to a different tune, they
are inspired by Ovid himself, whose love of recantation defined his doublecrossing professionalism in the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. If only
Paris was entrusted to him, he declares at Rem.65, Menelaus would keep
Helen, and Troy would be saved from defeat (crede Parin nobis, Helenen
Menelaus habebit / nec manibus Danais Pergama victa cadent). Yet later on he
adds (stirring up the waters) that Oenone would have grown old with Paris,
if a rival hadn’t got in her way (et Parin Oenone summos tenuisset ad annos,
/ si non Oebalia paelice laesa foret Rem.457–8), for ‘each love is vanquished
by a succeeding one’ (successore novo vincitur omnis amor Rem.462). This is
precisely the mode in which Helen exploits and subverts the orbital pulse
of elegiac discourse in Her.17. If Paris pursues this obsession, he’ll end up
being the casualty, rather than the possessor and commander of her beauty,
and will live a life of dread. When she plays her Medea card and casts Paris
as Jason at 17.233 (tale nihil timeo, sed nec Medea timebat / ‘I fear nothing
of this kind – but neither did Medea fear’), the narrative tangent almost
rings as a direct threat of tragedy to come.
In elegy (as Leander finds out quite literally in Her.18, tossed on high seas
and on the fickle passions of Hero’s couplets), omnibus invenies, quae nunc
iactantur in alto, / navibus a portu lene fuisse fretum / ‘every ship that hits
a fatal storm left the harbour on calm seas’ (17.235–6). Short-termist Paris
just wants to get into port (in portus 16.26), and cannot imagine the threat
of war that readers know is just around the corner (nec tu rapta time ne nos
fera bella sequantur, / concitet et vires Graecia magna suas / ‘and don’t worry
that, if you’re stolen, fierce wars will ensue, and mighty Greece will rouse
her strength’ 16.341–2). Ovid’s Ars has already exposed as delusory Paris’
boast that he is immune to his own strategies. Yet his arrogance ironically
helps highlight Helen’s capacity to break the mould within the confines of
restaging: while he feels at liberty to repeat (nam repeto 16.279), he spells
out the potential for tables to turn even as he seeks to shut it down: tot
prius abductis ecqua est repetita per arma? / crede mihi, vanos res habet ista
metus / ‘Out of so many women who have been carried off before, which
one has been sought back by arms? Trust me, your fears are groundless’
176
16.343–4. As that ‘repeated woman’ (repetita), reader Helen (with the help
of her Tantalean ancestors) delivers a canny reply that in the epistolary
imagination makes Paris a victim of his own reiterations.
c lose r an d c lose r apart
Sometimes, however, we catch the male writers playing women at their own
game. When Acontius begins his letter to Cydippe with the instruction pone
metum!,47 he is regurgitating Paris’ words, hauling us back to the beauty
contest retold at 16.67–8:
obstipui, gelidusque comas erexerat horror,
cum mihi ‘pone metum!’ nuntius ales ait;
I was stunned, and chill horror had stood my hair on end,
when winged Mercury said to me, ‘put aside your fear.’
But in so doing, he is addressing Cydippe as Mercury addressed Paris, giving
her the (male) role of judge. Moreover, in the same couplet of Her.16, Paris
himself is also ‘repeating’ (according to the linear numbering of the Heroides
from 1–21) the reaction of Oenone on hearing him tell her the very same
story back in Heroides 5 (attoniti micuere sinus, gelidusque cucurrit, / ut mihi
narrasti, dura per ossa tremor / ‘my chest leapt in amazement when you told
me the story, and an icy shiver rushed through my hard bones’ 37–8). In
anticipating, perhaps, the authoritative impact the tale will have on Helen,
as well as the extent to which it will enthrall and entertain, writer Paris
assumes the role of past reader, and past heroine/lover Oenone: despite his
silence in the single Heroides, perhaps he has received her letter after all – it
seems to have taught him a few things about female psychology and how
to really impress/trap a woman.
As we have seen, however, Paris is just the most recent of a long list of
suitors, as Oenone had predicted (see Her.5.99, 103, 132), and his involvement with fickle, unfaithful Helen is bound to mean he’ll be next for
the chop. The Trojan hero becomes emblematic of the instability of any
position, and especially of dominant masculinity, within a stormy system
of elegiac imagery which (among other things) ‘feminizes’ men as slaves,
impotents, failures. Familiar Trojan anxieties about appearing effeminate
(we all remember the sneers Paris and Aeneas suffered in the Aeneid)
are accented all the more in the hourglass shapes sketched in elegiac
47
Echoed also at 20.179: siste metum, virgo.
177
couplets.48 At 16.193–6, for example, Paris suggests that Helen’s delicate
looks and love of finery are more suited to Troy than Sparta – given what
the men wear, just think of the outfits donned by the daughters of Dardanus!
(cum videas cultus nostra de gente virorum, / qualem Dardanias credis habere
nurus? 195–6). If Paris succeeds in seducing his chosen woman, they could
soon be wearing the same clothes.
Paris also seems to draw on the voice of Homer’s Helen in his attempt
to get under her Ovidian skin: 16.357–8 (nec plus Atrides animi Menelaus
habebit / quam Paris aut armis anteferendus erit / ‘nor will Menelaus, Atreus’
son, have more spirit than Paris, or be judged better than him in arms’)49
are an ironic ‘echo’ of Helen’s words to Paris at Iliad 3.430–1 (‘you used
to boast that you excelled warlike Menelaus in the strength of your hands
and your spear’), which themselves summarize Paris’ previous bragging (is
Ovid’s couplet the ‘original’ vaunt, or is it ghostwritten by a woman, as
imagined by a man?). And 16.375–6 (tu quoque, si de te totus contenderit
orbis / nomen ab aeterna posteritate feres / ‘and you too, if the whole world
shall battle for you, will win fame among men for all eternity’) mimes
Helen’s outburst at Iliad 6.355–8 (‘Seeing that your heart is encompassed
by trouble because of me, bitch that I am, and because of Alexander’s
infatuation, on whom Zeus has laid an evil fate, hereafter we shall be a
subject of song to future generations’). Ovid’s Helen reads reworkings of
her own words, yet filtered through Ovid’s own musings on the conjoined
fame of lovers (see Am.1.3.25–6: nos quoque per totum pariter cantabimur
orbem / iunctaque semper erunt nomina nostra tuis / ‘so too, you and I
shall be sung all over the globe, and my name will be joined to yours
forever’). Helen is written into these lines as both witty, prototypical voice
and sculpted elegiac materia, while Paris’ implication of her separate glory
(tu quoque) swells with hindsight into a mutual ambition (nos quoque),
propelled by the interactive reputations (nomina) of epic and elegiac texts.
In fact, despite their apparent detachment, and the fixed hierarchy implicit
in their roles, Paris and Helen do get it together, in fluid and unexpected
ways. Et iam sermone coimus / ‘we already come together in speech’, Helen
writes at 17.181.50 There are flashes of dialogue even on the surface, when,
48
49
50
Marilyn Monroe apparently wore one heel shorter than the other to affect her trademark, hipswaying strut, just as Elegia walks with ‘one foot longer than its mate’ (pes illi longior alter erat
Am.3.1.10) to create her undulating curves.
Cf. 16.205–6: nec puto collatis forma Menelaus et armis / iudice te nobis anteferendus erit.
Cf. Narcissus–Echo at Met.3.385–7 (perstat et alternae deceptus imagine vocis / ‘huc coeamus’ ait,
nullique libentius umquam / responsura sono ‘coeamus’ rettulit Echo / ‘he stands still, deceived by the
answering voice, and cries, “Let us meet here”, and Echo, never to utter a sound more gladly, cries
back, “Let us meet”.’).
178
for example, Paris reports (or imagines) what Menelaus told Helen on his
departure:
†esset et† ‘Idaei mando tibi’ dixit iturus
‘curam pro nobis hospitis, uxor, agas.’
‘I trust you to oversee business’ he said as he departed
‘and to take care of our guest from Ida.’
16.303–4
Then at 17.159–62, Helen spikes up the script, setting the scene and adding
her own speaking part:51
omine laetatus dedit oscula, ‘res’ que ‘domusque
et tibi sit curae Troius hospes’ ait.
vix tenui risum, quem dum compescere luctor,
nil illi potui dicere praeter ‘erit’.
Happy at the omen, he kissed me and said, ‘Take care
of my affairs, my household, and the Trojan guest.’
I fought back a laugh, and barely keeping a straight face,
I could tell him nothing except ‘I will’.
Similarly, the instruction ‘perlege!’ (‘read it through!’), shared by both Acontius’ and Cydippe’s letters (first addressed to Cydippe by Acontius at 20.3,
then by her nurse at 21.109), takes its cue from Paris’ entreaty to Helen
(perlege 16.12), but ‘originally’ from Phaedra at Her.4.3, whose letter is the
model of poisonous epistolary deception (perlege, quodcumque est; quid epistula lecta nocebit? / ‘whatever may be written here, read it to the end; how
could it do any harm to read a letter?’). Paris, the pushy, macho abductor of
women, ventriloquizes as a heroine famed for her epistolary rape-fantasies,
whose letters will drive her to suicide and result in the murder of Hippolytus. Meanwhile, while admitting her trepidation before Diana’s lethal gaze,
Cydippe is sharp enough to slip in a crucial parallel to Acontius’ close relationship with the goddess (illa tamen iusta plus tibi parte favet, / utque cupis
credi, memori te vindicat ira, / talis in Hippolyto vix fuit illa suo / ‘none the
less, she favours you more than you deserve, and, as you’re so eager for me
to believe, avenges you with unforgettable wrath; she was hardly like this
with her darling Hippolytus’ 21.8–10). Acontius might, like Paris, be wearing spiteful Phaedra’s mask (he certainly shares her poison pen), but he’s
also lumbered with the ghost of Hippolytus, whom guardian Diana fails to
save (his grisly dismemberment mirrors that of metamorphosed Actaeon,
51
As Heyworth notes (1984) 104, in these parallel passages Paris draws attention only to himself, and
the irony that Menelaus instructs Helen to take care of him, while Helen remembers the other
instructions.
179
a victim of Diana’s ire and an important figure in Acontius’ ploy to terrify Cydippe into compliance at 20.103–4). Cunningly, line 10 of Cydippe’s
letter (‘she was hardly like this with her darling Hippolytus’) exploits an element of ambiguity in the myth of Diana and Hippolytus: was the goddess
not so nice to him in the end, or is she simply more protective of Acontius?
In the most familiar version of the story, Diana cannot or will not intervene
to prevent Hippolytus’ punishment (hence Cydippe’s reference might read
as a admonition against Acontius’ complacency), yet Callimachus, Virgil
and Ovid himself exploit a variant ending whereby Diana metamorphoses
Hippolytus into the Italian god Virbius.52 Acontius is already victim of
huntress Diana (at least, he’s been well-pricked by Amor’s arrows).53
What is emerging, then, is a rather different picture of gendered writers and
their communication in the double Heroides from the one with which we
started. In writing, triumphantly, as both man and woman, macho epicist
and compliant puella, male victim and machinating mistress, Ovid gets to
combine all these parts, but also to see them hybridize and interact through
a fertile and often contrary elegiac discourse. As we read alongside Helen,
Hero and Cydippe, logics unravel and gape open, repetitions jumble, and
narratives spin off into new dimensions. The women’s letters blow like a
storm wind through the collection, whipping up desire, alternately rejecting and seducing. While Acontius has been much feted in criticism as the
great success-story of elegiac poetry (followed close behind by Paris, the only
male writer of the single Heroides54 and the hero-rapist of the Ars Amatoria),
their female ‘victims’ participate in, postpone and undercut those victories,
reading and writing insecurity into every aspiration. Intertextually, above
all, we’ve seen these couples at each others’ throats, dodging and pointscoring – yet they also seem to raise each others’ game, and flirt like soul-mates,
through the post. By the time we turn to Hero and Leander, we’ve long
been dipping our toes in Hellespontic depths, ever since Paris set off in his
heat-wave on a caerulea via, and plunged with Venus into rolling seas.
52
53
54
For the first version, see Eur. Hipp., Hor. Carm.4.7.25–6, and for the variant see Callim. fr. 190 and
Pfeiffer ad loc., Virg. Aen.7.765–77, Ov. Met.15.492–546.
As Hardie notes in his discussion of Her.20–1 (2002a, 115), ‘there is a convergence between the
binding effects of Diana and Amor: both are divinities who use missiles to enforce their law’.
Paris’ writing is mentioned in Her.5.21ff. by Oenone, when she remembers him carving messages of
love to her on beech trees.
c h ap te r 6
Space between: Heroides 18–19
ire libet medias ipsi mihi saepe per undas,
sed solet hoc maribus tutius esse fretum.
nam cur hac vectis Phrixo Phrixique sorore
sola dedit vastis femina nomen aquis?
forsitan ad reditum metuas ne tempora desint
aut gemini nequeas ferre laboris onus.
at nos diversi medium coeamus in aequor
obviaque in summis oscula demus aquis.
I’m often tempted myself to wade into the surf
but the strait is normally safer for men.
Why else, when Phrixus and his sister rode this route,
did the woman alone christen the wide waters?
Perhaps you fear running out of time on your return, or
feel you can’t bear the burden of a double labour.
So let’s both set out from opposing shores to meet mid-sea,
and kiss as we join on the crest of a wave.
Her.19.161–8
And the sea can shed shimmering scales indefinitely. Her depths peel off into
innumerable thin, shining layers. And each one is the equal of the other as it
catches a reflection and lets it go. As it preserves and blurs. As it captures the
glinting play of light. As it sustains mirages. Multiple and still far too numerous
for the pleasure of the eye, which is lost in that host of sparkling surfaces. And
with no end in sight.1
In chapter 5, we got a sense of the overall shape of the double Heroides, and
of how the writers interact and react to one another. The pairs of letters,
I suggested, each conceive a relationship that lives and breathes as we read
and re-read, continually shifting and morphing, tracing harmonies along
with frictions and fears. In this final chapter, we will slow down a little, and
examine what I think are the most intriguing and difficult poems of the
collection, Heroides 18–19. As I have hinted, these letters are in some ways
1
Irigaray (1991) 46.
180
181
the ‘odd ones out’ in the book. Unlike the letters of Paris and Acontius,
Leander’s poem is not a courtship; he isn’t attempting to seduce, dupe or
entrap his lover, but is merely expressing his frustration at not being able
to meet with her as planned. Indeed Her.18–19, as they have been read by
modern critics, seem to exemplify the ways in which the double letters offer a
refreshing change from the Heroides proper (‘the living wine after the bitter
lees’, as Wilkinson famously pronounced2 ) and from the cynical deceit
germane to Ovidian love letters more generally. Yet as much as they take
us back to ‘beginnings’ (in more ways that one – as Rosati suggests, Hero’s
and Leander’s affair functions as a kind of foundation myth for Ovidian
love elegy, and for ancient erotic poetry in general),3 Her.18–19 also impede
and unsettle those same refluxes. In this pair of poems, Ovid chooses the
most successful, tragic and innocent love affair of ancient amatory verse to
exhibit his erotic system at its most saturated, sophisticated and evolved. Set
symmetrically centre stage in a collection obsessed with twinning, coupling
and reduplication, Hero and Leander dramatize the dilemma of return
alongside and as the issue of writing replies to letters which in Her.1–15 stood
alone, of staging a reciprocity between male and female artists. Leander’s life
is now at stake in the management of this ‘double labour’ (as Hero calls it at
Her.19.166). Just as in the Ars Amatoria and in Metamorphoses 10, the project
of male and female lovers confronting each other and communicating
directly, after learning all Ovid has taught them, is fraught with risk for
the integrity of the self. I have already mentioned (in chapter 3) how the
reflective waters of the Hellespont recreate the mirrored surface both of
Narcissus’ pool, and of Perseus’ polished shield, his weapon in conquering
the Gorgon. In terms of explicit references, these two fundamental myths
are only faintly visible in Her.18–19, yet they provide a crucial conceptual
backdrop to the challenges Hero and Leander try to avoid but ultimately
have to face. For the Hellespont, as we’ll see, is both the landscape for
Narcissus’ self-realization and at the same time (as Hero is well aware) the
element in which (or rather by which, in the form of sea-god Neptune)
beautiful Medusa is raped – the prelude to her metamorphosis, death and
revenge. And Perseus is the successful hero-lover Leander (who in many
ways is the quintessential elegiac amator) can never quite become.
To begin with, the double labour of swimming both ways across the
Hellespont is quite a feat in love elegy, which is often construed as ‘the
genre of monologue par excellence’.4 Moreover, the activities of swimming
2
4
Wilkinson (1955) 107.
Barchiesi (2001) 31–2.
3
Rosati (1996a). Compare Barchiesi’s reading of Her.20–1 (1993).
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back across the Hellespont and of sending a letter back across the strait
are equally perilous: it is hinted (although of course we can never know)
that it is Hero’s frustrated, often taunting letter which prompts Leander
to swim and thus drown, yet the swim itself functions as a metaphor for
literary response (his hand moves back and forth across the page, as his
arms rotate in front crawl5 ), the inevitable, tragically foreseen ‘failure’ of
which stands to achieve (after Icarus), the glory of poetic nomen. As Leander
cuts through the waves, he is also moved by the tergiversations of Hero’s
elegy, and the lamp by which she writes is at the same time the spluttering
light that barely illuminates his path (tremulum lumen 18.59; cf. sternuit en
lumen 19.151). Does he sink with her concluding cadence, iam dormitante
lucerna (19.195)? If we plunge into Ovidian allegory (and into Leander’s and
Hero’s imaginations), we glimpse the writer-lover’s fantasy of synchronicity
performed mid-strait.6 Her.18 and 19 often mirror as much as oppose each
other, playing out the romantic ideal (or the narcissist’s nightmare)7 of the
two lovers’ souls becoming one (just as when, in the parallel story of Ceyx
and Alcyone in Met.11, Alcyone swears that one inscription will unite them
in a single tomb). Both letters remember Leander’s last swim, and Leander’s
line at 18.58 (iactabam liquido bracchia lenta mari / ‘I struck out with pliant
arm on the liquid deep’) is echoed, or ‘quoted’ by Hero at 19.47–8 (inquam
/ ‘lentaque dimotis bracchia iactat aquis’ / ‘I say “and now he’s parting the
waters with a stroke of his supple arms”’). At this point, the epistles come
close to performing a duet: just as Hero is certain Leander is halfway into
his swim (she decides this after a ‘miminal delay’, postque morae minimum
19.47, whereas Leander dives in without delay – nec mora 18.57, and hopes
next time to follow his letter minima mora 18.218), so the nighttime scene
in Her.19 seems to correlate with his account of the previous crossing at
Her.18.54ff. After lighting her lumina (‘lights’/‘eyes’? 19.35–6), does Hero
look up (et modo prospicimus 19.51) and pray for her lover’s safety at precisely
the instant at which Leander lifts up his eyes to the light of the moon (lumen
18.59) to plead for a safe passage (hanc ego suspiciens 18.61)? When Hero’s ears
5
6
7
At 18.21, Leander says he would rather his hand swim than write (et quanto mallem, quam scriberet,
illa nataret), and the use of violent verbera to refer to swimming strokes at line 23 (hitting back at the
waves which beat the shores, planguntur litora fluctu 19.121) puns on verba (cf. 18.19: talibus exiguo
dictis mihi murmure verbis). His weary arms as he swims at 18.161–2 also foreshadow Cydippe’s at
Her.21.245 as she tires of writing (iam satis invalidos calamo lassavimus artus).
Similarly, modern e-mail romances (like You’ve Got M@il, starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, 1998),
and internet flirting generally, work best when the writers use chatrooms, and know when each other
is on-line.
Hero plays Narcissus (or is it Echo?) when she dreams of coming together (poetically, physically,
sexually) with Leander in the Hellespont (coeamus in aequor 19.167; cf. ‘huc coeamus’ ait, nullique
libentius umquam / responsura sono ‘coeamus’ rettulit Echo Met.3.386–7).
183
catch at incertas voces (19.53), is she picking up Leander’s speech at 18.61–74,
and is her vision of a figure in the waves at 19.59 just hallucination after all?
The letters also exhibit very similar internal development: Leander reminisces, Hero dreams; both gaze out from the shore, and write to speed
up the time apart; Leander remembers seeing Hero dipping her toes in
the Hellespont, while Hero in her letter wishes they could meet halfway; Hero’s recollection of Leander reaching the shore, and her covering
him with her clothes, follows Leander’s pattern, and both re-author fragments of Amores.1.5’s programmatic striptease (cetera nox . . . novit / ‘the
night knows the rest’ 18.105, and facta referre pudet / ‘it shames me to tell
what happened’ 19.64; cf. Am.1.5.23–5: singula quid referam . . . cetera quis
nescit? / ‘why tell all the details? . . . who doesn’t know the rest?’). At 19.22,
Hero is fully aware of her miming strategy when she admits: corripio verbis aequora paene tuis (‘I chide the waves in words almost your own’), a
line which cleverly alludes to and recopies Leander’s use of paene (already
a quote – hers?) at 18.179–80 (paene manu quod amo (tanta est vicinia)
tango, / saepe sed heu lacrimas hoc mihi ‘paene’ movet / ‘I can almost touch
her with my hand, so near is the one I love. But often, alas, that “almost”
moves me to tears’). The glass-like waters of the Hellespont, separating two
lands, set the stage for picture-perfect equilibrium. Hero even imagines
meeting with Leander mid-journey, at 19.167. And at Am.2.16, when Ovid
daydreams of being shipwrecked with Corinna and swimming together
with her, her arms wrapped around his neck (29–30) it is Leander’s feat
that inspires him (saepe petens Hero iuvenis transnaverat undas / ‘often the
young lover had swum across the waters to see his Hero’ 31). At the end of
the poem, far from promising to reach her soon, he urges Corinna to drive
herself to him (2.16.49–50), and her journey on horse and cart over hill and
dale (tumidi montes . . . curvis vallibus 2.16.51–2) towards a landscape already
saturate with running streams (2.16.34) replicates Ovid’s fantasy ride over
tumultuous seas.
Thus Hero’s and Leander’s apparently naı̈ve, hierarchical affair almost
becomes a joint creative project, an enactment of Ovid’s wish in Am.1.3
that by immortalizing Corinna (or his poetic material), they will both
enjoy the same global publicity, their names linked forever with the gods.
Yet despite Leander’s narcissistic impulses, the myths of drowning which
tug mercilessly at his limbs, most obviously that of eponymous Helle, ensure
that the prize of immortality is never harmoniously shared, always fiercely
contended: it is a woman who has already given her name to this strait,
just as Hero, we might fantasize, is already up in lights in Ovid’s Hero-ides.
Propertius stages a parallel fame game at elegy 2.26 which does much to
184
stimulate Ovid’s letters:8 Before imagining a life together on the high seas
(29ff.), he dreams of Cynthia shipwrecked and drowning, ‘like Helle tossed
on purple waves’ (qualem purpureis agitatam fluctibus Hellen 5), and watches
from the clifftops, as fraught as a Hero or Dido. He fears (in jealousy?) that
the sea will rob her of (or ‘take/adopt’) her nomen (quam timui, ne forte
tuum mare nomen haberet 7), yet it is his name she calls as she drowns (saepe
meum nomen iam peritura vocas 12; cf. Her.19.40, nil nisi Leandri nomen in
ore meo est / ‘nothing but Leander’s name is on my lips’), before a dolphin
comes to her aid (17–18).9 Propertius plays out a leadership contest with his
lover, getting in role as a vengeful Dido to Cynthia’s storm-weary Aeneas
(at Aen.4.382–4, Dido vowed that Aeneas would ‘drink his punishments’
mid-sea, and often call out her name: spero . . . / supplicia hausurum scopulis
et nomine Dido / saepe vocaturum).
So when, in Heroides 19, woman becomes writer rather than materies,
is this the point at which Ovid’s vision of female identity unleashes its
ambitious edge, when the tragic love poet risks sinking without a trace?
And is this venture precisely the thrill of these letters, poised as they are at
the oceanic apex of the double Heroides, the latest Augustan love poetry we
have? For in Her.18–19, the dilemma or danger of return becomes embodied
in both male and female readers/writers – both Leander and Hero are
feminized in elegiac waters, and both ‘reply’, smashing the subject–object
logic of the double letters at their (apple-)core. Yet at the same time, despite
its literally secondary, passive position, Ovid invests Hero’s letter with a
tragic, Phaedran power to write Leander to his death, and to drown him
in currents that muffle his name.
In this chapter, I will be discussing how these poems explore the fragility
of poetic nomen in a poetic environment which, for the first and last time
in the Ovidian corpus, sets male and female writers on facing shores. It is
tempting to read Her.18–19 as exilic contemplations on the Ovidian themes
of absent presences, failed successes and living deaths which seep through his
entire corpus, especially his erotic elegy.10 As Rosenmeyer points out (in her
work on Her.1–15), the exile poet and the heroine writing abandoned on the
windswept shoreline have much in common: the tear-stained, sea-sprayed
poem/letter is sent forth, to the lover, to Rome, as a loaded incarnation
8
9
10
Note that Leander compares Hero to the moon goddess (Cynthia 18.74) at 18.66 (quam sequor ipsa
dea est).
While in Her.19, Hero dreams that a dead dolphin is washed up on her shore, prophesying Leander’s
death.
See Barchiesi (1996b) 325 for a summary of recent criticism which suggests Heroides 16–21 could
have been written in exile.
185
of the writer, pleading for him to be reunited with his audience. In Her.18
Leander, like the exiled Ovid, is preoccupied with return, and both are
trapped by a harsh landscape and divine wrath. Ovid’s journey into exile of
course takes him down the Hellespont, where he reminisces about Leander’s
fate (his ship relegit, ‘travelled through’, or ‘reread/reviewed’ the waters of
the Hellespont at Tr.1.10.24, as if he is prompting us to reread his double
Heroides) while at Her.18.157, Leander swears that as long as he can see
Hero’s light, he could swim in ultima Ponti (‘to the ends of the Black Sea’).
His mission to get back to Hero raises exilic anxieties about poetic nomen:
he did it before, why can’t he do it now? Has he lost his talent, is he a
failure, will he leave his name on the waters, making a poetic success of
his tragic fate? Yet we must also recognize that Hero is just as much of an
exile as Leander, if not more so: she suffers the exile’s fate of tortuous mora
and tempus edax, removed from civilization and the distractions of the city,
dejected and alone, whereas, as she jealously reminds him, Leander is an
urbane gent, he’s where the action is. For Hero, to be a woman is already
to live a kind of exile.11
Once we start to read Her.18–19 as highly metaphorical and allusive
projects in exploring Ovidian identity, male and female writers become less
straightforwardly opposed than overtly competitive for creative power, yet
the more these lovers, as Hero suggests, contemplate meeting mid-strait, the
more claims to and definitions of such authority are blown this way and
that by hostile winds. Throughout this chapter, I will stress the extent to
which the location for the lovers’ dialogue, a strait congested with literary
memories and longings, fuels an unstable and intricate series of interactions.
The Hellespont (far from being a virginis aequor, ‘virgin sea’ 18.117) becomes
a radically overdetermined space, and an impressive vehicle and medium for
the dialectical operation of Ovidian erotics. In tune with Ovid’s diptychal
verse, I’ll argue, the waves between Leander and Hero erode dichotomies
and silt each letter with multiple motives and viewpoints.
mak in g wave s
Hero’s and Leander’s love affair is set in the most richly, cornily metaphorical
and allusive domain imaginable for ancient erotic poetry. The lovers are
parted by a strait, a body of water perhaps half-way between a river and a
sea, both of which are poetic loci loaded with metaphorical connotations.
11
In Ovid, trying to imagine female subjectivity and writing as an exile are parallel projects; both
demand that the poet think ‘outside’ his own experience.
186
As they write, the Hellespont is churned up by a typically grandiose literary
(sea-)storm, the regular inspiration for, and typifying scene of epic narrative.
Throughout Ovidian poetry, famous rivers (Inachus, Xanthus, Alpheus,
the Nile, the Tiber) are predatory males whose waters ravage vulnerable
women (in Am.3.6, for example, after being seduced by Anio, Ilia was so
ashamed that she had broken her vows as a vestal virgin that she lifted
up her dress and hurled herself suicidally into the river, the equivalent
of yielding to her rapist, who ‘bedded her as his wife’12 ). To get across
the strait involves sailing or swimming, both much used figures both for
Ovid’s poetic projects in Amores and the Ars Amatoria especially, and for
seduction or sexual relationships. Murgatroyd catalogues the evolution of
this nexus of metaphors from Alcaeus onwards, and notes that there seems
to have been a resurgence of interest in this imagery during the Augustan
era, especially in Ovid.13 Travelling across water is both the inspiration
and metaphor for writing about erotic escapade, and in Ovid adventures
in love always start with writing (in Am.1.1, he famously inaugurates his
subject–matter without first getting a girl, just as he advises his pupils in
Ars 1.437–486 to make letter writing the first step in their campaign of
seduction). In the first 15 Heroides, which all situate the heroine on the
shoreline awaiting replies, glimpsing the white sails of the postman sailor
spread wide to speed delivery is made to overlap with imagining unrolling
the pale parchment of the lover’s letter, which in the epistolary dream-world
embodies the distanced lover.
This system of metaphor is explicitly gendered: woman’s place is on the
shoreline (see Am.2.15: the sea isn’t for girls, they are advised to stay at home
reading, not writing. If Corinna goes sailing she’ll come back and he’ll have
to listen to her epic fictions, for sailors and adventurers on the high seas
are by definition also storytellers), while men travel and struggle to exert
masterful control over unpredictable waters chock full of monsters and
temptresses. The whole idea of men sailing is a turn-on for women (at Ars
2.353–4, Demophoon’s presence warmed Phyllis’ heart, but seeing him sail
off drove her wild).14 Women in water are out of their depth, yet seascapes
are often explicitly female or subject to female control: Venus rises from
the waves (as Her.16.24 and 19.159–60 remind us), men fish women from
the sea in Ars 1, while witches and sorceresses, like Callimachean poets, can
always part the sea and turn back rivers. Sexual women (not to mention
nymphs like Salmacis) are typically pictured bathing (Corinna has a bath
12
14
13 Murgatroyd (1995).
Am.3.6.81–2.
Phyllida Demophoon praesens moderatius ussit, / exarsit velis acrius illa datis.
187
to fake having sex in Am.3.7, and in Ars 3.619–20, the mistress who doesn’t
want to be caught red-handed writing love letters should also compose in
the bath, a titillating scene for Ovid’s readers, reminding us that a woman’s
bath is her private, female domain, the one place she shouldn’t be watched –
as Actaeon discovers when he sees Diana bathing in Metamorphoses 3.). In
sexual terms, the cliché runs that men sail their boats into women’s harbours
(see for instance Her.18.207–8: istic est aptum nostrae navale carinae / et melius
nulla stat mea puppis aqua / ‘you are the right dock for me; no waters are
safer for you than my keel’),15 and in Ars 1.373 and 2.725, sex is compared
to a ship race (men should be careful not to spread too full a sail, should
keep neck and neck with the girl). In Ars 2.343–4, woman is compared to
a river which will swell with a man’s nurturing, and at Rem.617–20, Ovid
compares the impact of a love affair on a man’s life to water seeping from
a river into parched soil.
In Latin literature, water is not just arousing, but potentially sexually
threatening to men – we need only think of the complementary tales of
Narcissus and Hermaphroditus in the Metamorphoses (quisquis in hos fontes
vir venerit, exeat inde / semivir / ‘whoever enters this pool as man, may he go
forth half-man’ Met.4.385–6). As Irigaray puts it in her thalassic, amorous
(and rather Heroine-like) dialogue with Nietzsche: ‘No rapture, no peril,
is greater than that of the sea. And the man has still to come who will
live that love out beyond the reach of any port. Letting go of his rock,
his ship, his island, and even of that last drop of oil on the water, and all
so that he can feel the intoxication of such vastness.’16 At the beginning
of Ars 1, Ovid tells his male students not to set sail on high seas before
they receive further instruction because they risk coming home castrated,
and in Rem.692, a rock lashed on all sides by waves is likened to a lover
assailed by female wiles. In Am.2.4, Ovid’s emotions undulate like a boat
in a strong current; in Am.2.9, being in love feels like sailing a boat about
to dock when a sudden squall blows you back out to sea, while in Am.2.10,
Ovid’s in love with two women, like a yacht swinging back and forth in a
cross-wind. And of course, not being able to traverse stretches of water is
tantamount to impotence, alongside male artistic failure: Am.3.6 and 3.7
are crucial intertexts for Her.18–19, as I’ll discuss below.
In other words, the scene of sailing and of crossing waterways more
generally is core to a symbiosis of writing and sex, author and lover in
Ovidian poetry. By the time Ovid is recasting the Hero and Leander
myth, the idea that a journey, especially by sea, might serve as a trope
15
See Adams (1982) 162.
16
Irigaray (1991) 47.
188
for writing (especially writing a love letter, which is sent across the waves by
a lover who waits on the shoreline), together with the much-ironized postCallimachean play on pursuing or not pursuing well-worn paths of poetry,
are heavily trafficked clichés. The waters of the Hellespont are adsuetae
(‘well-known’) to Leander (18.22), and his ‘usual path’ across the strait ‘is
worn like a road pressed down by wheels’ (iam patet attritus solitarum limes
aquarum / non aliter multa quam via pressa rota 133–4), a line which must,
as Barchiesi notes, be one of the closest Latin translations from the Aitia
prologue.17
Leander himself is something of a cliché, a prototype miles amator, in
Ovidian love elegy, and Her.18–19 paint a textbook elegiac affair (the lovers’
separation is a version of the paraclausithyron, and the motifs of ‘when we
first met’ reminiscences, the torch of love, the lover’s corpse recovered on
the shoreline, struggling to make it through a sleepless night, are all very
familiar).18 In Am.1.9, for example, Leander fits Ovid’s model for how to
survive durus amor: you have to be prepared to cross swollen seas and rivers
or icy mountains, and not give lame excuses like ‘it’s winter’ or ‘the wind’s
too strong’. In Ars 2.249–50, pupils are instructed to make their girlfriends
believe they’d do anything for her, i.e. that they’d be her Leander (saepe tua
poteras, Leandre, carere puella: / tranabas, animum nosset ut illa tuum / ‘often
it was in your power to be absent from your mistress, Leander: you swam
across, so that she could know your passion’)19
But the other reason Leander is the champion of Ovidian erotics is
because he is a failure, an unsuccessful swimmer victimized by the dominatrix elements, rather than an epic sailor riding high seas. In Tr.3.10.41ff.,
a foundering Ovid goes one-up on Leander in the failure stakes: both are
exile figures desperate to return over treacherous seas, but unlike his counterpart, Ovid can’t even start a journey, let alone fail to complete it alive, as
the sea is frozen stiff. Leander’s wimpishness (or gall) in avoiding the crossing for so long is very obvious indeed after Ovid’s comments on the bona
fide miles amator in Am.1.9, who makes no pleas about bad weather: for in
Her.18, that is precisely what he does – and whereas in Musaeus’ version it
is winter,20 here it is still summer (aestus adhuc tamen est 187), another line
which recalls the opening of Am.1.5, where Ovid is lazing around mid-day
17
18
19
20
See Barchiesi (1996a), who notes that the point is strangely not acknowledged by Kenney or any
other commentator: perhaps, he notes further, ‘he [Leander] is aware of more predecessors than we
are able to spot’ (46).
On Her.18–19 as a paraclausithyron, see Hardie (2002a) 138–42.
See also Am.2.16.31–2, Ibis.589f.
Musaeus, a late Greek (at least 500 AD) is the only prominent Greek poet in antiquity to have told
Hero’s and Leander’s tale.
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waiting for his mistress to come to him (aestus erat Am.1.5.1). At 18.165–6, he
almost confirms Hero’s fears that he is more interested in Ovidian fun and
games than in her embrace when he compares his swim to a horse race at
Olympia (cf. 19.12: flectitis aut freno colla sequacis equi / ‘now you turn with
the bit the neck of your eager steed’). However, as we’ve seen, Hero’s poem
also flirts with the low-lighting of Am.1.5: as her lamp flickers, blinking on
and off between elegiac verses (sternuit en lumen . . . sternuit et . . . sternet
et 19.151–2, 16021 ), she fills in the pentameter to Leander’s first hexameter
line (ponuntur medio cur mea membra toro? 19.158; cf. adposui medio membra
levanda toro Am.1.5.2), hurrying him on to finish his poem/swim (and get
to the sex) by writing some of it herself.
Moreover, much of Hero’s letter is taken up with taunting Leander for
being a drip and not taking to the water, and she suspects he has lost his
nerve, has fallen out of love, or is seeing other women. Look at Her.19.89–
114:
unde novus timor hic quoque illa audacia fugit?
magnus ubi est spretis ille natator aquis?
sis tamen hoc potius quam quod prius esse solebas,
et facias placidum per mare tutus iter,
dummodo sis idem, dum sicut scribis amemur,
flammaque non fiat frigidus illa cinis.
non ego tam ventos timeo mea vota morantes,
quam similis vento ne tuus erret amor,
neu non sim tanti superentque pericula causam,
et videar merces esse labore minor.
interdum metuo patria ne laedar et inpar
dicar Abydeno Thressa puella toro.
ferre tamen possum patientius omnia quam si
otia nescioqua paelice captus agis,
in tua si veniunt alieni colla lacerti
fitque novus nostri finis amoris amor.
Why this sudden fear, and what has happened to your courage?
Where has the mighty swimmer gone who scorned the power of the waves?
Wait, no, be as you are now, not as you were before;
set off only when the sea is calm and safe –
as long as you’re the same, as long as we’re in love, as your letter says,
and cold ashes don’t replace the flame of love.
I do not so much fear the winds that block my will
21
sternet at 19.160 means ‘she will smooth’ (from sterno), but (followed by et, in the same position
in the pentameter) it also registers as a third spluttering of Hero’s light (the third person singular
present of sternuo).
190
as the thought that, like the wind, your love will wander,
that I might not be worth it, that the risks will seem too high,
that I might seem reward too minor for your efforts.
At times I dread my native land will hurt my chances, that I’ll be called
no match, a Thracian girl, for a man from Abydos.
Yet I would suffer anything more gladly than see you
bowled over by some other woman’s charms,
see other arms clasped around your neck,
and a new love put an end to our affair.
At this point, Hero has just finished questioning Leander as to why he failed
to cross on the previous night, when the strait was calmer (19.71–2). Her
letter jumps from reassurance to anxious suspicion. In fact, Leander seems
to hint at certain points that his letter is disguised or deceptive, just as Ovid
recommends in the Ars: so in lines 19–20, he writes that he muttered words
under his breath as his hand spoke ‘other words’ (talibus exiguo dictis mihi
murmure verbis / cetera cum charta dextra locuta mea est), which might well
read like an invitation to read between the lines: what did Leander really
say to himself, and how different is the ‘written version’? As Hardie notes,
Leander takes the standard epistolary cliché of a ‘conversation’ through
writing with the addressee, and diverts it to the notion of a ‘conversation’
through writing with the letter itself,22 yet Ovid’s readers are left with only
part of this ‘dialogue’. Leander constantly prods the reader (in quintessential
Ovidian mode) to question the veracity of his writing, or his ability to be
straightforward and tell the truth: vera loqui liceat / ‘may I be allowed to
speak the truth!’ 66; si qua fides vero est / ‘believe me, it’s true’ 119; quis
credere possit? / ‘who could believe it?’ 123.23
In the passage I’ve already mentioned at Ars 2.249–50, where Ovid
instructs men on tricking women into believing they are deeply sincere and
would suffer saevi dolores to win their affections, it was ‘in Leander’s power’
to be absent from Hero (saepe tua poteras, Leandre, carere puella 2.249), as
if their tragic parting were a mere contrivance, set up to flaunt Leander’s
heroics and fire up Hero’s affections (in Musaeus’ rendition, claiming to
be able to swim the Hellespont is at first a ‘cunning device’). In Her.18, he
is well aware that the omen of his death will distress Hero, yet revels in
it anyway (18.201–2), and promises he’ll swim even if the storm continues
(193–4), only to moan that he needs a spell of fine weather in order to make
the crossing. Compare the following extracts:
22
23
Hardie (2002a) 138–9.
There are many parallels for this authorial interjection elsewhere in Ovid, especially in the Metamorphoses.
191
sic tumidum paucis etiamnunc noctibus aequor,
ire per invitas experiemur aquas.
Let the sea be swollen still for these few nights,
and I shall try to cross despite the waves.
18.193–4
scilicet interitus offenderis omine nostri,
litteraque invisa est hac mea parte tibi.
desino: parce queri, sed uti mare finiat iram,
accedant, quaeso, fac tua vota meis.
pace brevi nobis opus est dum transferor isto;
You are hurt, no doubt, by this omen of my death,
and don’t take kindly to this section of my letter.
I’ll stop: no more complaints. But I beg of you –
so that the sea gives up its anger, too, pray with me.
I need a brief window of calm until I cross;
18.201–5
When Leander pledges his letter and his hopes to the notoriously unreliable
winds and water, he recalls a well-known trope of female fickleness:
cumque minus firmum nil sit quam ventus et unda
in ventis et aqua spes mea semper erit?
Though nothing’s more erratic than the winds and waves,
must winds and waters ever be my only hope?
18.185–6
Compare Catullus 70.4 (in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua), Propertius
2.28.8 (quicquid iurarunt, ventus et unda rapit), and Ovid Amores 2.16.45–6
(verba puellarum . . . irrita . . . ventus et unda ferunt). While Hero’s letter
vacillates and provokes (she flits from accusation to reassurance, aggression
to affection, warning him not to cross and then demanding that he come,
whatever the weather), Leander’s letter is equally self-contradictory and
passive–aggressive when read against a backdrop of Ovidian erotics, and of
Roman amatory poetry more generally.
f lood lig hts
Ovid’s Hellespont is itself churned up with voices (raucis aquis 18.26), with
the swell of parallel love stories and drownings. The deaths of Helle, of
Ino and Melicertes, of Icarus and Endymion, Ceyx and Alcyone are all
woven into Leander’s letter, pointing, of course, to his own death (that’s
‘tragic irony’ to the power of ten). When Leander echoes Catullus’ countless
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kisses/stars/grains of sand in the passion-killing image of worthless weeds24
at 18.107–8 (non magis illius numerari gaudia noctis / Hellespontiaci quam
maris alga potest / ‘like weed in the Hellespont, I cannot count the joys we
had that night’) we are jogged to imagine the echoes of Ovidian predecessors
clogging up the strait, their precedent, our foreknowledge, threatening all
the time to snake around Leander’s legs and pull him down. It is as difficult
to count seaweed (much more tricky than counting kisses) as it is to untangle
and catalogue the mass of allusions and precedents here. The joke is always
that readers risk drowning in this tiny stretch of water, which rises over our
heads as we cross it, just as the trickling brook of Am.3.6 becomes a gushing
torrent as Ovid versifies.
At 18.40–2, the strait has been already scarred in love by Callimachus:
Leander complains that surely Boreas cannot deny having been burnt by a
notus Amor, or ignibus Actaeis (the first word in Hecale, in which Boreas also
seems to have figured, was Aktaie). The poem plots literary retrogressions
along with Leander’s return trip (note especially the cumulated backtracking in 18.117–23: repeto . . . respiciens . . . redeo . . . repeto). Despite the
ironic translation of the Aitia prologue at lines 133–4 (this is a well-worn
path he’s travelling) Leander also looks self-conscious in the way he is keen
to lay claim to the (Callimachean) originality and difficulty of his task:
the Hellespont is a clivus inertis aquae (‘a steep slope of lifeless water’ 122),
the swim so exhausting that the waters seem endless (bracchia . . . / vixque
per immensas fessa trahuntur aquas / ‘my tired arms . . . can scarcely drag
their way through the boundless floods’ 161–2) even though the strait is
in fact narrow (brevis aqua 174). Brevity, concision, smallness, are all recognizably Callimachean themes: Ovid makes the Hellespont, over which
Hero and Leander can ‘almost touch hands’, model the tantalizing membrane that separates Narcissus from his beloved, and the miniscule split
between houses dividing Pyramus and Thisbe. This is a tiny, Callimachean
strait with a big function: it adjoins two large bodies of water (the sea of
Marmara and the Aegean sea), while Helle’s golden fleeced ram connects
it with primal epic, as does its proximity to Troy.
Look also at line 150: publica non curat sidera noster amor (‘my love cares
not for mundane stars’), recalling the Callimachean distaste for anything
‘common’; Leander rejects the stock line-up of astronomical formations
(151–4) and instead follows aliud lumen (155: Hero’s lighthouse/reading
lamp/eyes). He may be repeating the same trip, but he’s also setting new
24
Seaweed is synonymous with worthlessness: see e.g. Virg. Ecl.7.42. Horace, Odes 3.17.10, Sat.2.5.8.
Also see similar comparisons in Ovid’s exile poetry, discussed e.g. by Kenney (1995).
193
trends, doing it his way – though even ingenuity is couched in terms we’ve
seen dozens of times before, and Leander seems almost to relish the twist
that precedents, ‘innocently’ dredged up from this clogged strait, add to
the danger, tempt and forecast his death. Towards the end of the letter, his
ambition to achieve poetic immortality seems to supplant his desire to make
it safely across the Hellespont: in line 168, he praises Hero as caelo digna
puella (‘a girl worthy of the skies’) and goes on to say that she must remain
on earth (only) long enough to guide him to the stars (aut dic, ad superos et
mihi qua sit iter 170). He envies Phrixus (143), yet he also fantasizes about
his own death, and about Hero finding his body washed up on her shore
(197–8). Leander’s letter is obsessed with nomina, for which the Hellespont
(the strait that tells a string of stories about naming and fame: nomine
crimen habet / ‘its name is its crime’ 18.142) is a tailor-made platform. He
even constructs the storm that blocks his path as a repetition of the scene
in which the waters took Helle’s name:
hoc mare, cum primum de virgine nomina mersa
quae tenet est nanctum, tale fuisse puto;
18.139–40
The waters were like this, I think, when first they
stole their name from the drowned girl.
Hero puts in her own bid for stardom at 19.127–8:
non favet, ut nunc est, teneris locus iste puellis:
hac Helle periit, hac ego laedor aqua.
This strait, as it is now, is hostile to tender girls:
Helle perished in these waves, which hurt me too.
Note that line 7 of Hero’s letter has already defined her as one of those
tenerae puellae. Leander is also galvanized by another famous drowning,
that of Icarus. Just as Daedalus’ flight of artistic genius is described in
Virgil as a swim (he enavit in Aen.6.16), so it is hinted at several points that
Leander’s swimming is akin to flying. Look for example at 18.49–50:
nunc daret audaces utinam mihi Daedalus alas,
Icarium quamvis hinc prope litus abest.
I wish Daedalus could give me daring wings,
though Icarus’ shore is not too far away.25
25
The poetic conflation of (Ovidian) seaweed with (Catullan) stars at 18.107–8 has already merged sea
and sky.
194
But while Leander aims (too) high, he never gets to christen the waters.
Hero’s letter spells this out:
nam cur hac vectis Phrixo Phrixique sorore,
sola dedit vastis femina nomen aquis?
But why, though Phrixus and his sister made this trip together
did the girl alone give her name to the wide waters? 19.163–4
Leander’s egotism and ambition must face female competition, and the
possibility of oblivion, head-on. This is a crucial point at which Leander’s
letter situates itself in the landscapes of Ovidian exile: in Tr.1.1.90, Ovid
fears his book will meet Icarus’ fate; in Tr.3.8.5ff. he wishes for Daedalus’
wings so that he could fly home and see his wife’s face again, and in Tr.3.4,
he tells a friend to shun fame, and to ‘live far from magna nomina’ (names
which, he hints, have been his downfall). While his sails were small, at
the beginning of his career, he never encountered stormy waters, just as
Daedalus survived because he kept a low altitude, whereas Icarus soared
to the heavens, and so left his name on the limitless waves (3.4.22). Hence
Tr.3.4 does the opposite of what it advises, suggesting that the tortuous, epic
existence Ovid suffers in exile will ensure a bright poetic afterlife. Icarus’
‘error’ is a small price to pay for everlasting esteem. The oversubscribed
Hellespont, however, is perhaps the one domain bound to reject Leander’s
bid for celebrity, however winningly romantic the circumstances of his
death.
Hero, meanwhile, may fit the wispy profile of elegiac puella (sum tibi
viribus impar / ‘I’m not equal to you in strength’ 19.5; ut corpus teneris ita
mens infirma puellis / ‘delicate girls are frail in mind as in body’ 19.7), but
in both letters she is shadowed by strident, savvy literary heroines. The
prototype for Hero’s waiting game is Penelope (although Leander may be
no Odysseus: non . . . ducit Ulixe genus 19.147–8), and at 19.38 we are taken
back to the deliberations of Ovid’s first heroine (feminea tardas fallimus
arte moras / ‘let’s trick the long hours of waiting with women’s art’; cf. nec
mihi quaerenti spatiosam fallere noctem / ‘as I seek to trick the hours of the
empty night’ 1.9). Delay is torture, and both lovers accuse their partners of
enjoying procrastination (Hero labels Leander lente morator, ‘slow delayer’
19.70). Moreover, the painful timing of Her.1, in which Penelope is unaware
of Odysseus’ presence inside the palace as she writes, is recalled in Hero’s
comment in lines 53–4: auribus incertas voces captamus et omnem / adventus
strepitum credimus esse tui (‘I hear strange noises and all the time I’m certain
that you have arrived’), as if she is suspicious of the same dramatic turn being
repeated. But instead of a happy outcome, we are conscious of the possibility
195
that Leander may already be drowning or dead as Hero writes/spins: we do
not know whether he first reads her letter, then swims, whether he never gets
to read it, or whether (if their actions are simultaneous) it is the flickering
of Hero’s desk lamp as she works, conflated with the guiding light of the
moon, which causes him to drown, both literally, when for a second he
loses sight of the light,26 and metaphorically, on the undulating passion of
her elegiac verse.
The Dido and Aeneas story (both in the Aeneid and in Heroides 7) is
another important intertext for these poems.27 In particular, the themes
of mora and amor, the delaying lover, the lover who wants to stay but has
to go, or vice versa, facing menacing seas, are intensively exploited. Hero
takes on the role of Jupiter or Mercury berating Aeneas for his mora and
questioning his heroism: in reply to Leander’s promise of minima mora
(‘the least delay’ 18.218), her letter begins by defining all mora as longa (‘all
delay that defers our joy is long’ 19.3). Yet she is also Dido, the frenzied
queen pacing the shoreline and looking down from her tower late into the
night, accusing her lover of infidelity, embracing his clothes for comfort
(see 19.31–2, recalling Dido’s emotions on seeing the clothes Aeneas has
left, at Aen.4.648ff.). Leander’s reminiscence at 18.55 (namque est meminisse
voluptas / ‘for I delight in the memory’) evokes Aeneas at Aen.1.203 before he
begins to tell the story of his epic sea voyage, and ironically after he survives
the sea storm (forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit), a line which is itself
echoed at Aen.4.335 at the point when is leaving Dido (nec me meminisse
pigebit Elissae).
Lines 77–8 of Heroides 18 (unda repercussae radiabat imagine lunae, /
et nitor in tacita nocte diurnus erat) trigger shimmering layers of allusion,
working flashbacks to Aeneas’ travels and to Narcissus’ self-love into Leander’s memory of the last swim (the idea that the full moon can light up all
kinds of recollections is suggested already in the use of Cynthia for the moon
at 18.74, which automatically conjures up Propertius’ puella): at Aen.8.23
(sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae),28 Aeneas’ hyperactive mind
is flitting over ideas, like a light from the sun or moon darting over polished
surfaces, and at Met.3.434–5, as we’ve seen several times already, Narcissus
realizes that the reflection he sees has no substance (ista repercussae quam
cernis imaginis umbra est. / nil habet ista sui). He begins to hit his own
26
27
28
Leander warns Hero, 18.216: lumen in aspectu tu modo semper habe / ‘just keep the beacon-light
where I can see it’.
As Hardie argues (2002a) 13: ‘Ovidian absent presences cluster particularly densely around reworkings of Ovid’s great narrative of unsatisfied desire, the Dido and Aeneas story in Aeneid 1 and 4.’
This is itself inspired by Lucretius 4.211–15, which explains how reflections are created in water.
196
breast instead (pectora percussa 3.482). In Her.18, the Halycon birds start
up their sweet lament on cue (81–2), just as the Naiads and Dryads mourn
Narcissus’ death (Met.3.505–7). Yet lines 79–80 (nulla vox usquam, nullum
veniebat ad aures / praeter dimotae corpore murmur aquae / ‘there was no
voice anywhere, no sound but the murmur of the waters my body thrust
aside’) are partly a version of Narcissus’ realization (there’s no voice coming
from the pool – water only makes a sound when you disturb its stillness), or
perhaps a vision of Narcissus’ tragedy without an Echo (who is all/just vox),
and partly an appropriation of Echo’s tragedy, at the point where Juno gags
her powers of speech and leaves her able only to repeat (Met.3.366–9). As
Leander composes his silent, plaintive letter, a lover bound like any other to
regurgitate the same old formulas, requote the same old lines (for us, those
voices are audible everywhere), he becomes not just an Ovidian heroine but
also an Echo, struggling to reply.
However, as we’ve seen, these same lines (18.77–8) also evoke the polished
surface of Perseus’ shield, showing us once again how the two mirrormyths, of Medusa and Narcissus, intersect. Look again at Met.4.783: aere
repercussae formam aspexisse Medusae. Leander may claim that he isn’t
following the loves of Perseus (at mihi, quod Perseus et cum Iove Liber
amarunt, / indicium dubiae non placet esse viae / ‘I don’t care for the loves of
Perseus, of Liber or of Jupiter, to direct me on my perilous route’ 18.153–4) –
this isn’t that kind of mission. Yet at the same time, he comes close to such
ambitions when he wishes for Daedalus’ wings at 18.49 (Daedalus, as I’ve
suggested, is an important parallel figure for Perseus, the other winged
trickster, who is given the gift of flight to enable him to outwit Medusa).
In his recollection of the last successful crossing, Leander (like Perseus) is
using light and reflection to his advantage, and this passage, read through
Met.3, could look like a narcissistic boast of his ability to create, to make
things happen. Yet the flash of Narcissus’ death, and of Perseus’ shield,
reminds us that he faces a very different challenge in attempting to cross
the Hellespont in a storm: in rough seas reflections don’t work in the same
way, if they work at all, and Hero’s flickering lights (her lamp, her eyes)
may well prove as lethal as the Gorgon’s gaze.
Leander, then, to go back to the Aeneid, is in some ways the opposite of
epic Aeneas: he delays reluctantly, just as Aeneas leaves Carthage against his
will; he pauses at first to wait for calmer seas and doesn’t want to leave Hero,
which is just what Dido demands of Aeneas. Note also the word sponte29
as he swims out to her at Her.18.76 (per mihi cedentes sponte ferebar aquas /
29
Francis’ palmary correction of MS nocte, followed by Kenney (1996).
197
‘I was carried along through waters that gave in readily to my stroke’),
contrasting with Aeneas’ Italiam non sponte sequor (Aen.4.361). Yet when
Leander drowns, this is precisely what Dido fears (and later, perhaps, hopes)
will happen to Aeneas if he sails in winter in Her.7 (non ego sum tanti . . .
/ ut pereas, dum me per freta longa fugis / ‘I’m not worth so much that you
should kill yourself running away from me over the long seas’ 45–6). And
lines 123–4 of Leander’s letter, as he remembers the previous swim, push
conflicting buttons, matching the ebb and flow of Hero’s sentiments in
Her.19:
invitus repeto patriam (quis credere possit?),
invitus certe nunc moror urbe mea.
I go back home against my will – who would believe it?
And now, just as reluctant, I linger in my home town.
18.123–4
With the hexameter he hints (again repeating Aeneas’ vow at Aen.4.34, more
directly this time) ‘I’m leaving you . . . for good’ (compare respiciens, 18.118,
directing us to move on to Aen.5: moenia respiciens 5.3). Yet there are doubts
(quis credere possit? – who would believe he could be such a coward, such
an Aeneas? Or who buys Aeneas’ excuse that he departs invitus?), while the
pentameter rectifies and consoles – it’s not that he doesn’t want to return
to Hero. As both double and antithesis of Virgil’s Aeneas, Ovid’s Leander
at once provokes Hero’s paranoia that she has seen him for the last time
(either because he is leaving her, or because he will be forced to delay on
opposite shores indefinitely), and feeds her longing for his arrival.
While in her letter Hero bristles with the despair of Virgil’s vengeful
Dido, she also resembles Ovid’s Salmacis, who is driven wild with lust for
Hermaphroditus when he dives into her pool, and plunges in after him.
Compare Met.4.344–5 / 353–4, with Her.18.57–8, as both boys take off their
clothes and enter the water:
nec mora, temperie blandarum captus aquarum
mollia de tenero velamina corpore ponit.
Without delay, charmed by the coolness of the stream
he threw off the clothes from his slender form.
Met.4.344–5
desilit in latices alternaque bracchia ducens
in liquidis translucet aquis . . .
He dives into the pool, swimming with alternate strokes,
Met.4.353–4
his body shining through the silky waters.
198
nec mora, deposito pariter cum veste timore
iactabam liquido bracchia lenta mari.
Without delay, I put my clothes and fears aside
and struck out with supple arm on the liquid deep.
Her.18.57–8
As soon as she sees his naked beauty, Salmacis can contain herself no longer
(she already tried asking for his hand in marriage at Met.4.325–8, but now
opts to take him by force). The glint in her eyes (lumina), compared to
the play of dazzling sunlight on glass (4.347–9), also flashes in Her.18.77–8,
when Leander describes the Hellespont’s glassy waves as they shine with
the image of the moon (which gives out its lumen, 74, a light paralleled by
spectatrix30 Hero’s lumina – her lamps, her watching gaze). Now she joins
Hermaphroditus in the pool:
veste procul iacta mediis immittitur undis
pugnantemque tenet luctantiaque oscula carpit.
Taking off her dress, she too dives into the middle of the pool;
She holds him tight as he struggles, steals reluctant kisses.
Met.4.357–8
Compare Hero’s (unrealized) vision at Her.19.161 (ire libet medias ipsi mihi
saepe per undas / ‘I’m often tempted myself to wade into the midst of the
wavers’) and 19.167–8 (at nos diversi medium coeamus in aequor / obviaque
in summis oscula demus aquis / ‘then, from opposite directions, let’s come
together in mid sea, and exchange kisses on the crest of a wave’). Neither
she nor Salmacis can bear another moment before touching a man’s wet
flesh (longa mora est nobis omnis quae gaudia differt / ‘all delay that defers
our happiness is long to me’ Her.19.3; cf. vixque moram patitur, vix iam
sua gaudia differt / ‘She can hardly bear the delay, hardly bear to have her
pleasure postponed’ Met.4.350).
In my earlier discussion of Ars Amatoria in chapter 2, I mentioned the
close affiliation between Salmacis and Medusa: both command powerful,
castrating looks, and Salmacis morphs into the Gorgon’s mass of serpenthair when, ut serpens, she entwines Hermaphroditus in her tentacle-limbs at
Met.4.362–78. In Her.18–19, too, more blurred memories of Medusa snake
before our eyes: at 19.129ff., Hero pleads with Neptune to empathize with
young love (he should understand, he was once infatuated with Medusa,
‘when her hair was not yet bound with snakes’ 134), yet the storm itself
seems to replay his violent passions, as if a monster is being re-created.
This strait is full of algae that could be mistaken (in Ovid’s imagination)
30
So she is called by Leander at Her.18.94.
199
for the Gorgon’s angues: at Met.4.740–52, Perseus lays Medusa’s head on
a bed of seaweed, which absorbs her monstrous power and is petrified –
its snaky tendrils both identified with her hair and victimized by her stony
gaze. Certainly, these weeds add extra hazards to Leander’s journey, as he
attempts to swim through countless ravelled tales.
bac k stro ke s
Thus throughout Her.18–19, we are turned on to the mass of ways in which
Leander’s voyage to Hero is a repetition and return. We have reached the
point where Ovidian elegy is about to cross its own metaphorical strait one
time too many, and the image of the eager, optimistic adolescent swimming
naked across the strait, as if in a time predating the invention of civilized
sailing and elegiac discourse on love, is overlaid by elaborate metaphors, and
the language of technology. Thus although Leander swims, he is frequently
compared to a ship or a sailor: the verb currere in line 6, as Kenney notes, is
usually used for sailing ships, not swimming bodies;31 his arms will be like
oars (remis ego corporis utar 18.215), he remembers swimming, exhausted,
like a shipwrecked man (120), promises that his body will be ‘both the crew
and the ship’ on his return journey (148), and claims he could keep up
with the Argo at lines 18.157–8 (hoc ego dum spectem, Colchos et in ultima
Ponti / quoque viam fecit Thessala pinus eam / ‘while my eyes are fixed on
this, I could go to Colchis or the farthest shores of Pontus, and where
the ship of Thessalian pine held its course’). In her letter, Hero claims that
Leander is afraid to swim like a sailor who is afraid of shipwreck (19.185–6),32
and although finde vias in 19.208 is used of swimming, at Her.16.31 (cf.
Prop.3.9.35), it refers to sailing.
The act of swimming is interesting, however, as it complicates Ovid’s
metaphor of sailing as writing/seduction: it is effectively an androgynous
act, mimicking yet removed from Ovid’s poetic and epistolary vehicle, and
necessitating full immersion in the eroticized and feminized waters of poetic
inspiration.33 As Hero comments, swimming is what the sailor/epic hero
fears the most: for he only ends up swimming if he has been shipwrecked
(19.185). The fact that Leander cannot or will not travel across the Hellespont
by boat is one of the most obvious problems he has in common with Ovid
31
32
33
Kenney (1996) ad loc.
natare = ‘to swim’ (19.185) but also ‘to swim for it’ i.e. be shipwrecked. See Kenney (1996) ad loc.
and compare Prop.1.7.8, 3.12.32, 4.1.116, and Juv. Sat.10.257.
Although there are of course examples of great heroes who swim (e.g. Odysseus at the end of Odyssey
5), and survive: a failed version of the epic hero tested to his limits by rough waters is part and parcel
of Leander’s characterization, within a complicating nexus of elegiac metaphor.
200
in Am.3.6, aside from finding the waters choked with weeds and clouded
with silt (3.6.1). Am.3.6 plays on the joke of framing sexual impotence as
a self-inflating literary manoeuvre, and this gag is repeated in the ensuing
poem, Am.3.7, in which the poet, exhausted not only after making love to a
string of other women but also after the Callimachean effort of composing
3.6, fails to satisfy Corinna in bed. The impotent Ovid, like Leander at
18.179–80, is as frustrated as Tantalus:
sic aret mediis taciti vulgator in undis
pomaque, quae nullo tempore tangat, habet.
The betrayer of secrets thirsts mid-stream,
surrounded by fruits he can never touch.
Am.3.7.51–2
Both Leander and Ovid imagine ingenious methods of traversing the
stormy water which, in both cases, has been transformed from a narrow,
unthreatening stream into a raging torrent (in 3.6.6, Ovid remembers it
barely covering his ankles, while Leander remarks that the Hellespont is
so narrow, he could almost touch Hero across it, 18.178). Ovid wishes he
had winged sandals like Perseus (as in Tr.3.8),34 Leander that he had wings
fashioned by Daedalus, and both lovers execrate the waters for not being
more benevolent, given the long history of hopelessly romantic rivers with
their tortuous passions.
As I mentioned above, Ovid recounts in Am.3.6 how the famous rivers
(Inachus, Xanthus, Alpheus, the Nile, the Tiber), are all predatory males
whose waters ravage vulnerable girls, and at line 83, he suspects that this
stream is also tumescent with passion (te quoque credibile est aliqua caluisse
puella / ‘it’s easy to believe that you too, have got the hots for some pretty
girl’),35 commenting that it has widened as he has been talking about rivers
in love, or the women rivers have fallen in love with. The more Ovid delays,
postponing the reunion with his girl, the more aroused the river (and the
reader) get, and the more that seduction becomes the point of the poem,
as the beloved pales into insignificance and Ovid self-consciously obstructs
his path with the swell of his own poetry (dum loquor, increvit latis spatiosus
in undis / ‘even while I speak, your waters have grown wider and deeper’
3.6.85). The poem becomes homoerotic, even masturbatory, especially as
the aroused man looking into water he cannot touch immediately brings not
34
35
As I mentioned in the introduction, this is also a point at which Ovid wishes, implicitly, for powers
that can rival Medusa’s (Perseus’ winged sandals were essential kit for his mission to bring back the
Gorgon’s head).
Compare, perhaps, Her.18.35, where the water of the Hellespont is tumidus.
201
just Tantalus but (his close relative) Narcissus to mind. Ovid’s verse seems
powerless to turn back rivers, until we discover that his carmina have been
working its magic all along in stirring up, not parting, the waters. In the
longest poem of the Amores after 1.8,36 Ovid sends-up his poetic torrent in a
textbook flourish of self-mockery: it’s an anonymous by-product of natural
drainage, a derivative and routeless stream dependent on flash floods and
the melting snows of dull winter; this is no heroic waterway – it has no
fama, no nomen (nomen habes nullum 3.6.91). Yet what an ego that can
make such put-downs the showcase for his claims to fame and seductive
powers.
Reading Her.18 against Am.3.6 makes Leander look less like an innocent
lover than a seasoned pro. He says himself that the one thing that kept him
going as he swam the river was meos amores (18.167; cf. Paris’ veteres amores
at 16.257). We might suspect that the rising waves of the Hellespont are a
metaphor for or manifestation of his (poetic) ardour, and that the more he
desires to cross, the more the waters rise, and the more time he can devote
to writing, which perpetuates the storm. In line 129, he seems to imply just
that when he says: cur ego confundor quotiens confunditur aequor? (‘why am
I disturbed when the sea is disturbed?’), and does so even more explicitly at
18.172: cumque mea fiunt turbida mente freta (‘and when the sea gets rough
my heart’s in turmoil too’). The murmur of the winds (obmurmurat 47) and
the water (murmur aquae 80) harmonizes with his voice, whispering away
as he writes (talibus exiguo dictis mihi murmure verbis / ‘speaking words like
these in the softest murmur’ 18.19). The waves ‘sing’ as he versifies (aequora
canent 137). Hero fears that Leander’s love will stray like a fitful wind (similis
vento amor 19.96), and by this point it is hard not to think of the storm
itself as a figure not only for passion, but for the faltering emotions of both
lovers’ letters.
Women are frequently associated in Greek and Latin literature with the
unpredictability and danger of the elements, and especially the sea: Hero’s
letter, in shifting tone between protectiveness and passive aggression, stirs
up a storm of its own: it is (her) invida hiems that drives Leander back
(19.120), and the foam seems to be made of a woman’s tears (forsitan ad
pontum mater pia venerit Helles, / mersaque roratis nata fleatur aquis / ‘perhaps
Helle’s loving mother has come to the sea, and is pouring out tears for
her drowned child’ 19.123–4). At 18.203–4, Leander writes that as soon
as he touches the shore to be reunited with Hero, he wants the winter
weather to rage again (cum tua contigero litora, perstet hiems 18.206, cf.
36
Both poems end with a similar curse: may you suffer terrible winters and parched summers.
202
19.82, et numquam placidas esse precarer aquas / ‘I’d pray for the waters to
never be calm’), which literally means that he wants to be prevented from
leaving her again, but metaphorically titillates his beloved with the promise
of unbridled lust: both the winds and her arms (she too collapses into
the elements) will keep him on the farther shore (me pariter venti teneant
tenerique lacerti 18.213). Leander claims to be looking for a gap in the storm,
yet in Ovid’s version of the tale, his tragedy is that such a lull would only
coincide with a waning of his desire. We might compare Her.7.169–80,
where Dido pleads with Aeneas to delay his parting until the sea is calmer
because she does not want him to leave while she is so in love with him
(that is, when the seas are so rough), and wants a little time so that passion
can fade naturally (dum freta mitescunt et amor / ‘until the straits and my
love quiet down’ 179) instead of being cut off.
So does Leander’s swim make him a failure in more ways than one, or
does he rise to the occasion after all? That is, in metaphorical terms, does
he drown because he is overcome by (and reaches the climax of ) his own
infatuation (and/or the passion of Hero’s letter), or because he is out of his
depth and neutered by pseudo-epic love, or because his desire for Hero has
waned, which is implicitly the reason he has dared to attempt the crossing?
Does he simply not have the passion to get across, perhaps because he is
too exhausted from being with the other lovers Hero is so paranoid about,
or because, like Narcissus, he is too much in love with himself?
The problem with Augustan elegy’s elaboration and complication of ‘sea
of love’ metaphors, one that Ovid exploits in these poems, is that they
become potentially contradictory. So for example, sailing into harbours is
a sexual act, yet if you are really riding the waves of passion in Ovid, that
consummation will be continually deferred – you’ll be blown out to sea
and won’t be able to reach harbour. In fact, at Prop.3.24.15–18 reaching the
harbour indicates falling out of love (nunc demum vasto fessi resipiscimus
aestu, / vulneraque ad sanum nunc coiere mea / ‘now at last, exhausted from
the wild sea swell, I have recovered my sanity, and my wounds have closed
up and healed’ 17–18). While Leander’s swimming is directly paralleled with
his writing (it’s a more obvious metaphor than sailing as both actions use
the hands), and therefore his inability to swim can always be seen as writer’s
block, as creative failure, at the same time staying in the domestic domain of
the shoreline, the site of female composition throughout the single Heroides,
is essential to his role as love elegist. Seas and rivers, after all, are the realm
of epic poets. The elegiac poet risks everything in taking to the water: is
it possible to keep his ingenious balance of feminine wiles and macho ego
in play when he puts himself at the mercy of an element which embodies
203
both epic male aggression and the castrating forces of elegy’s women? The
lover’s heart has to burn hot indeed for its flames to survive in cold water,
an obvious opposition which runs throughout Her.18, especially at 89–90
(frigora ne possim gelidi sentire profundi, / qui calet in cupido pectore praestat
amor / ‘so I don’t feel the chill of the icy deep, love comes to the rescue, hot
in my eager breast’). Being frozen is a frequent metaphor for impotence in
Latin literature, not least in Ovidian poetry.37
Leander’s position on the shoreline, composing his letter, is always an
ambiguous, borderline location to start with, just as the double Heroides
themselves occupy a kind of frontier zone between the Amores and the
Metamorphoses, or between Ovidian elegy and epic, as Kenney argues.38
The shore is gendered as the female domestic sphere, from which most
of the heroines in Her.1–15 write, but it is so close to the public sphere of
male epic composition that Hero can dip her toe in the strait and fantasize
about swimming out herself to meet Leander half-way. When Leander, in
both his and Hero’s memory of previous swims, arrives on Hero’s beach,
he is wrapped in Hero’s cloak (amictus 18.103; velamina, 19.61), just like
the Ovidian poet, dressed in drag to compose the heroine’s reply from
the opposing shore. The shoreline is also a reminder of the trickiness and
riskiness of epistolary communication in Ovidian erotics. In 19.27–8, Hero
searches the shore for signs of Leander’s reply, and when she finds nothing,
seeks out instead the trace of his footprints on the wet sand. The strait has
washed them away, just like a sponge on papyrus, or stylus on marks made
in soft wax, reminding us of a key feature of Ovidian letters that makes them
a wonderful tool for arousing mystery and suspicion – their susceptibility to
blurring or (partial) erasure. On the shoreline, the permanence and impact
of male writing is under threat: remember Ars 2.131ff., when Ulysses sketches
scenes in wet sand on Calypso’s shore, images which are then destroyed by
a wave. Calypso asks, ‘quas . . . fidas tibi credis ituro, / perdiderint undae
nomina quanta, vides?’ / ‘ “you’d trust these waves for your voyage? Look at
the great names they’ve destroyed!” ’ 2.141–2).
Yet (incomplete) expunction and blurring in Ovidian letters (especially
his sea-side postcards) also produce fascinating palimpsests – coded patchworks full of intrigue, incrimination and unintended dialogue. As the maestro warns in Ars 3.495–6: nec nisi deletis tutum rescribere ceris, / ne teneat
geminas una tabella manus (‘nor is it safe to reply except on tablets that
have been erased, lest a single page contain two hands’). This potential
interaction between a letter sent previously and another letter inscribed
37
E.g. Petron. Sat.132.8, Ovid, Am.2.1.5, and Am.3.7.13–14.
38
Kenney (1996) 2.
204
on the same tablet sets the scene for the experiment of the double letters,
especially the symmetrical-looking Her.18–19, in which Hero’s reply mimics (and contains the traces/origins of ) the structure and reminiscences of
Leander’s epistle; this is a ‘doubled labour’, as Hero comments, a fantasized union in the depths of the Hellespont (166–7). Yet the question is
always who is writing over whom, and which text has the greatest impact –
Leander’s half-erased strokes or Hero’s super/pre-imposed hand?
I’ve suggested that if we read Her.18–19 closely in the context of the
Ovidian corpus, both Hero and Leander look less like romantic innocents
than canny, accomplished writers well trained in ars amatoria. The Hellespont, precisely because it is the site for this elementary romance (its name
also associates it with the foundational epic voyage, the Argonautica) has
become a reservoir of narratives, images and metaphors, a figure for the
dubia aqua39 of elegy (or Ovid’s lover’s discourse) itself. Ovid chooses this
engulfing environment in which to stage an agonistic, quasi-exilic drama
about poetic nomen: a poet risks his reputation when he crosses a body
of water – it is always more of a dangerous challenge to write epic, and
drowning is not a hero’s death. Yet it is equally risky to stay on the shoreline, as the elegist does, always failing to take to the water (or diving, with
Venus, into its depths). We have seen how Hero’s and Leander’s Ovidian
efforts to reach celestial heights, even as the Hellespont’s algae weigh them
down, compound empathetic projection and emulation with coquettish
competition, distrust and disguise. Both lovers slip between the roles of
Narcissus and Echo, but their positions (watered down and fired up, too,
by Medusa and Perseus, Dido and Aeneas, Penelope and Odysseus, Salmacis
and Hermaphroditus, as well as by Helen, Paris, Cydippe and Acontius)
seem to shift with the winds and tides. While Hero may not literally step
into the water, her wish to join Leander in the Hellespont at 19.161 (ire
libet medias ipsi mihi saepe per undas; cf. plus libet ire mihi 18.92) triggers
undulation after undulation at the end of hexameter lines, as her letter
sinks towards its close (per undas 189; ad undas 191; per undas 199; in undis
207). Yet both letters beguile and extend mora, deferring actual union as
they stoke desire. Sometimes the lovers look like synchronized swimmers,
finishing each other’s sentences (or couplets) – at others, we catch snippets
of sarcasm, the occasional snipe, and avowals of individualism. Between
them, in this epistolary space, they dream up a marriage Ovid’s readers
(Narcissus-like) can see float and glimmer on the page.
39
See Her.18.52.
Conclusion
exit in immensum fecunda licentia vatum
Poets’ creative licence breaks all bounds.
Amores 3.12.41
This book has explored the interlocking of subjectivity, creativity and desire
in Ovidian poetry. Throughout his career, we have seen, Ovid is fascinated
by split, relational identities, by the state of being simultaneously joined
to and separate from an other (person, gender, culture). Moreover, I have
stressed that the very negotiation of that paradox, the process of projecting
outside of the world or self one inhabits, becomes synonymous in Ovid
with imagination and with the conception of poetic fiction. Ovidian erotics
is always an epistemological project, a mission to discover, dream, think
outside the box. This idea is perhaps most blatant in the exilic works, which
provide a kind of invisible frame for the readings in this book: the anxieties
a lover faces in relationships feed into the poet’s existential angst in the
Tristia and Ex Ponto, while the imaginative leaps demanded and inspired
by exile overlap with sexual fantasizing and with lovers’ (devious, besotted)
efforts to get inside each others’ heads. The horrors of the Black Sea on the
edge of empire bring to life a Medusan landscape already sketched out by
the ingenious poet in his earlier works.
I took an unorthodox route through Ovid to show this, starting out with
the Medicamina, where Ovid’s programme for the interaction of gendered
subjects is mapped in shorthand, and leading on through the Ars Amatoria, Metamorphoses and Heroides. It is in these texts, I argued, that the
dialectic between male and female, and between gendered creative drives,
is at its most exciting and overt. At times, in the Medicamina and Ars
Amatoria, we were looking at amusing sketches of a first-century ‘battle of
the sexes’, as elegiac lovers were constructed and schooled before our eyes;
yet as we widened our perspective, we saw those fantasy duels get much
more complicated, varied and all-encompassing. As well as showing off the
205
206
theatrical spectacle of sexual contest, which propels and entwines all the
didactic works (the Medicamina, Ars and Remedia Amoris), Ovid lets us
watch his subjects communicate, alternate and intermesh. Heroides 15 is
a very different exercise in doubling and interaction from the Ars Amatoria, and Heroides 16–21 vary the recipe again. Each of my six chapters has
attempted to illustrate the very disparate experiences (at least, as I envisage them) of reading this range of texts: sometimes, tracing relationships
has been a rather dizzying, anxious process, when Ovid gets us leaping
about, for example, between books of the Ars Amatoria. Yet in the middle
of the massive Metamorphoses, we found ourselves stuck for ages on a few
ekphrastic passages, while we seemed to get diverted by every wave when
crossing the Hellespont in chapter 6. Ovid’s eye is precociously cinematic,
and we have got a sense of how his poetry plays with camera angles, with
pace and movement, alternating close-ups (you can see his model’s pores
in the Medicamina), with big, wide-screen views. The pleasure in reading
this poetry lies not just in the thrill of intellectual recognition, the mental
hypertexting of words, lines, ideas, the flow and turn of narrative, but also
in the flash of image and pattern, the still spaces between words and lines
where we stop to relish a movement, a play of light, rush of emotion, or
something that is left unsaid.
It has become clear that the oscillation between two (or more) subjects/genders in these texts is continually paralleled by shifting affinities
between viewpoints, books, genres, positions and states. The archetype
for this is the elegiac couplet, which magnifies and reiterates the ongoing
tension in Ovid between sameness and difference, long and short, epic
and Callimachean/elegiac, success and failure, manly and feminine modes.
The self-contained nature of the couplet turns all the elegiac works into
elaborate jigsaws, and it sometimes seems as though each new poem is a
reincarnation, fusing many of the same pieces as its predecessor, in a different order. Ovid makes extraordinary use of the elegiac form, which is
moulded to tackle ‘practically every poetic topic’:1 its imperfect equilibrium (the pentameter, after Amores 1.1.1–4, is just a hexameter trimmed
at the edges) fuels all Ovidian poetry (elegiac or not), creating curves to
enhance poetic sex appeal, an engine for obsessive, never-ending rhythms.
The Metamorphoses is both an ambitious, Roman epic and a collection of
finely spun songs, just as the Heroides and Ars Amatoria straddle elegy and
tragedy/epic, while in the epic-tinged Tristia, the poet still has one foot in
the realm of the Heroines’ letters. The Heroides especially, as I outlined at
1
See S. J. Harrison (2002) 79.
Conclusion
207
the start of chapter 4, are a workshop for readers in this wavering between
genres and texts, as we weigh up the heroines’ accounts against their ‘official’ stories told by Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Callimachus, and so on. It has
been said before that no other ancient author, apart perhaps from Virgil,2
seems so conscious of his oeuvre, of the development of his career, and of
the links to be made between poems, books, lines, between his work and
that of previous authors.3 Ovid shows us how writing is always predicated
on relationality: you always write for someone, to someone, against past
and future writers. Intertextuality is an aspect of all interconnection, to
be construed in terms of relationships between people as well as between
words and things.
We have seen that the imperfect mirroring captured in the elegiac couplet models subject–object relations throughout Ovid’s texts. Echoes are
never quite perfect copies of the original sound, reflections rarely reproduce exactly the image of the looker, and all positions (active and passive,
winner and loser) tend towards instability. Ovidian poetry fixates on the
fine line between sameness and difference, and on the momentary bolt of
inspiration, realization or terror, that turns same into different and vice
versa. In the introductory chapter, I outlined how the myths of Narcissus and Medusa (and the dialogue between them) mythologize the various
aspects and effects of this symmetrical asymmetry, which we then saw dramatized as conflicts and contiguities (between, mostly, male/female lovers)
throughout Ovid’s oeuvre. Ovid’s reflections move, flicker and multiply,
as we saw for example in Heroides 18–19, when the moon and Hero’s failing lamp, in combination with the elements, could quickly turn Narcissus’
shiny pool into Neptune’s choppy sea, in remembrance of Medusa’s rape.
Ovidian poetry regularly overloads and shatters its own dualistic structures,
sending light bouncing between many different surfaces. This intrusion of
difference into Ovidian sameness (a difference embodied in the ultimately
foreign, fictional Medusa) entails that interaction between one and an other,
between two or more than two subjects/ideas, is never permitted to fully
collapse or disentangle. It is this, I have suggested, that sustains desire and
poetry in Ovid. Looking at an other who is both uncannily like and unlike
oneself constitutes a mirror stage essential for the emergence of an adult
subjectivity (and for the birth of the sophisticated Ovidian reader); but it is
also the experience of being awestruck by a beautiful woman, man or artwork. The path to subjectivity, always painful, even dangerous and horrific,
2
3
At Rem.395–6, Ovid claims that elegy owes as much to him as ‘noble epic owes to Virgil’.
Again, see the overview in S. J. Harrison (2002).
208
is inseparable in Ovid from the composition and appreciation of powerful
art, or from the personal challenges of entering into a sexual relationship, in
which gender difference is both accentuated and blurred. Medusa, and her
encounter with Perseus in Met.4–5, encapsulate the energizing paradoxes
of Ovidian poetry: she is a monster made from the collision of violent male
lust and female beauty, jealousy and revenge. Her poisonous/healing blood
pulses through all the texts I have considered.
The germ of metamorphosis, too, is contained in that first image in
Amores 1.1.1–4, where the second line gets chopped to become (hey presto)
a pentameter, the first line’s wasted, deforming limb. Ovidian metamorphosis is about what it is to move between two states, about observing
the movement that takes place in the procedure of transformation – the
moments of (re-)creation. Like the awkward, made-over Sappho of Heroides
15, most of the victims in Ovid’s epic are trapped in a mid-way position –
half human, half tree, plant, or animal. The innovations of the Metamorphoses’ great poet figure, Orpheus, are catalysed by his own experience,
vision and embodiment of this hybridity, as I discussed in chapter 3. And
in Met.3, before the tragedy of Narcissus, Teiresias earned his vatic powers
after being transformed into a woman and back again, and getting into
a debate with Jupiter and Juno about which gender enjoys sex the most.4
But tantalizing in-betweenness has defined Ovidian erotics and Ovidian
poetry from the beginning, ever since Corinna (doing a great impression
of Elegy herself, as she appears in Am.3.1) stepped into Ovid’s half-shaded,
half-lit bedroom at mid-day in Amores 1.5, a poem we have been prompted
to revisit throughout this book. The fragile, contradictory elegiac ego born
in the Amores – part macho genius, part sissy flop – is inherited by many
more of Ovid’s characters in the Ars, Metamorphoses and Heroides, subjects
always (stuck) in the process of becoming, of turning into something else.
As he moves between gendered subjects, Ovid explores the nature
and limits of poetic/sexual power. In this imaginary system, we find no
force untainted by vulnerability. Ovid’s lovers, and Ovid himself, regularly become victims of their own ruses, and in the exile poetry, the poet’s
own creations turn against him: at Tristia 2.105, his ‘crime’ is likened to
that of Actaeon, when he spied Diana naked, and at Ex Ponto 1.2.35–6, he
has already been ‘petrified’, as if by Medusa – poetry’s wildest invention
4
The answer was that women get the most pleasure, as Jupiter thought. Juno was outraged, and
cursed Teiresias with blindness, while Jupiter softened the blow by granting him the power to see the
future. See Met.3.316ff. Teiresias is the ultimate praeceptor amoris, achieving Ovid’s ambition in the
Ars Amatoria and double Heroides, to look at love and seduction from both male and female points
of view.
Conclusion
209
at Amores 3.12.23. Even his books are brothers out to kill their authorfather, replicating Theban civil war, at Tristia 1.1.107. There is something
recognizably Roman about Ovid’s tireless testing of weakness and failure,
of identities cracked and exposed by their relationality. In his specular,
heliotropic texts, so imperial in their ambitions, all energy can be refracted:
imperial aggression and pax romana alike are tinged with the fear of past
and future failure. Ovid’s anxious, fame-seeking lovers inhabit a poetics,
and an empire, grounded in the mythology of Troy’s fall and Trojan effeminacy,5 unable to escape confronting the female, the Medusan face that is
empire’s enemy, armour and weapon.
Ovid is often summed up as a worldly cynic who makes explicit what
earlier elegists had left shadowy. He turns elegiac conventions into tonguein-cheek comedy, ditches emotions for clever puns, and his graphic, literalizing style leaves little to the imagination. Cetera quis nescit (Am.1.5.25) –
who doesn’t know the rest?6 Ovid teaches self-consciousness, preaching
Narcissus’ self-recognition, modern readers have tended to home in on
this instant, finding a contemporary sensibility (urbane, disbelieving, allknowing) mirrored in Narcissus’ pool. By now, Ovid must be the most
overexposed, and (more than Virgil) most popular Roman writer we have:
even his most energetic critics often fear there can be nothing new to add
to a poet who himself revisits the same old stories, over and over. This
book has attempted to introduce difference into our familiar, twenty-firstcentury Ovid. At crucial points, I have turned to Medusa, the artist and
poetic fantasy we can never quite see, to illustrate this poet’s lessons in
reading and imagination. Medusa makes the wildest illusions real, rock
solid – she and her victims are no mere echoes or reflections. And if you
don’t believe in her, look out: when you realize your mistake, she will have
already captured a permanent snapshot of your awe. As aggressive as it is
seductive, this monumental poetry never stops moving, reminding readers
that the boundaries of creativity, as of empire, are all in the mind.
5
6
See especially Tr.1.2, which compares the scene of Ovid leaving his wife and daughter to go into exile
with the fall of Troy.
Ovid’s ‘over-explicitness’ was often until quite recently linked with what was deemed to be his
shallowness, as Hinds summarizes (1988) 4–11, commenting on G. Williams (1968) and Lyne (1980)
in particular. Hinds argues here that Ovid is less an explicit than a suggestive poet.
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ANTHOLOGIA GRAECA
6.1.18
11.54.266
60
60
APOLLODORUS
3.10.3
HOMER
Iliad
3.430–1
6.355–8
22.270–2
177
177
36
65
ARISTAENETUS
1.10.27
1.10.51–2
HORACE
Epistles 2.2.122–5
172
173
ARISTOPHANES
Thesmophoriazusae
140
Aitia
fr.70Pf
fr.67Pf
fr.67.21Pf
HYGINUS
Fabulae
189.7
59
CALLIMACHUS
160, 174
165
174
121
152
150
191
EURIPIDES
Bacchae 918–19
82
100
LUCAN
Bellum Civile
9.632–5
24
LUCRETIUS
4.211–15
CATULLUS
11.22
64.15
68.51–6
70.4
52
195
OVID
Amores
1.1.1–4
1.1.3–4
1.1.17–18
1.1.20
1.1.26
1.2.47–8
1.3.2
223
206, 208
171
66
22
171
145
148
224
OVID
Amores (cont.)
1.3.3
1.3.17–18
1.3.25–6
1.3.26
1.4
1.4.47–8
1.5
1.5.1
1.5.2, 17
1.5.10
1.5.17–25
1.5.23
1.5.23–6
1.5.25
1.6.60
1.7
1.8
1.9
1.10.10
1.11
1.13.39–40
1.14
1.14.31–2
1.15.7–8
1.15.35–6
2
2.1.25
2.4.10
2.9.43–5
2.10.9–10
2.10.23
2.11
2.12
2.15
2.16
2.16.44
2.16.45–6
2.17.8–10
2.17.12
2.17.21–2
2.18
2.18.27–35
2.19.1–2
2.19.27–30
3.1.4
3.6
3.6.14
3.7.51–2
3.7.83–4
3.8.23
3.9
3.12
3.12.17–18
149
149
149, 177
147
19, 168, 172
169
13, 208
107, 189
137, 189
23
171
169
137, 183–5
209
145
23, 84
19, 23
188
57
23
99
23–4, 59–60
145
147
144
6
22
148
148
161
159
13
13
186
183
174
191
57
21, 57
77
126, 134, 153–4
132
8
94
141
186, 200–1
22
200
187
144
150–1, 154
22
144
3.12.21–33
3.12.23
3.15.17–18
39
209
145
Ars Amatoria
1.7
1.35–8
1.39–40
1.43–4
1.44
1.46
1.53
1.53–5
1.65
1.70
1.72
1.99
1.101–34
1.140
1.166
1.170
1.174–5
1.264
1.276
1.277–8
1.305–8
1.373
1.437–86
1.457–8
1.477
1.480–1
1.489–90
1.495–6
1.499
1.503
1.505–24
1.525
1.525–6
1.535
1.536–9
1.551
1.557
1.561–2
1.565–73
1.573
1.574
1.598
1.613–14
1.615–16
1.619
1.627
1.645
1.646
1.655–8
1.657–8
171
71
71
99
150
84
84
22
84
38, 61
84
76
13
77
77
70
38
75
96
19
87
103, 187
130
97, 157
97
131
99
77
77
77
50
76
145
81
81
81
82
146
145
76
19
98
59, 79
86
74
57
77
57, 77
57
77
OVID
Ars Amatoria (cont.)
1.659–60
1.698
2.5–6
2.64
2.99–108
2.141–2
2.143–7
2.169–73
2.197–202
2.203–8
2.209–16
2.215–16
2.249
2.249–50
2.276
2.277
2.294–6
2.296
2.309
2.309–10
2.312
2.313
2.315–36
2.343–4
2.349–57
2.353–4
2.373
2.373–89
2.381
2.383
2.397
2.406
2.427–8
2.435–6
2.441–2
2.444
2.447–50
2.451–4
2.489–92
2.493
2.498–500
2.503
2.509–10
2.514
2.515
2.539
2.547–8
2.549–50
2.657
2.649–50
2.657–9
2.667–8
2.679–80
135
80
171
103
64
203
84
84
19, 77–8
75
78–9
59, 79
190
190
39
38
85
86
22, 84
85, 86
86
96
97
187
96
186
32
86
84
84
77
77
96
98
81
84
83, 98
83–4, 159
60, 63
144
80
76
144
103
96
97
73
97
58
93, 102
58
58, 88
89
2.682
2.691
2.699–700
2.699–702
2.703–32
2.725
2.733
2.735–6
2.740
2.743–4
3.3
3.7–8
3.15
3.31–2
3.44
3.69–70
3.73–4
3.75–6
3.77
3.84
3.100
3.113
3.127
3.129
3.129–68
3.133
3.135
3.135–6
3.151–2
3.155–92
3.163–4
3.165–8
3.205–8
3.209–30
3.210
3.219–20
3.228
3.231–2
3.235–8
3.242
3.245–50
3.281–90
3.290
3.293–4
3.302
3.311–17
3.321–4
3.345
3.347–8
3.353–80
3.371
3.397
3.415–16
3.419–22
3.433
225
93
88
60
88
89–94
187
93
92
147
93
48
65, 86
97
96
152
95
65
65
87
99
102
48
48
52
87
87
51
52, 59
51
49
87
87
52
56
51
62
52
61
87
87
87
85–6
63
98
102
82–3
89
127
145
74–5
74
96
94
82
50
226
OVID
Ars Amatoria (cont.)
3.433–4
3.435
3.439
3.449–50
3.461–2
3.471–2
3.485–6
3.491
3.491–2
3.493
3.495–6
3.496
3.497–8
3.499–508
3.501–8
3.504
3.507–8
3.513–14
3.518
3.553–4
3.577
3.583
3.609–10
3.619–20
3.627–30
3.665–6
3.667
3.667–8
3.669–80
3.681–2
3.685–768
3.699–702
3.764
3.769
3.769–812
3.771
79
148
71
79
80
94, 132
130
130
80
130
132, 203
74
74, 130
24
87
60
60
19, 81, 82
135
85
65
65
66
187
132
95
76
101
159
79
97–103, 142
83
74
136
93
80
Epistulae Ex Ponto
1.2.35–6
2.7.6–7
2.8.21–2
2.10.1–2
3.1.124
4.4.43–50
4.8.80
4.9.81–4
4.15.52
21, 208
25
26
129
26, 39
26
21
25, 39
27
Fasti
5.8
21
Heroides
1.5–6
166
1.9
1.59–62
1–15
4.3
5.21–2
5.37–8
7.45–6
7.169–80
15
15.2
15.1–4
15.7–8
15.9–10
15.19
15.23–6
15.27–8
15.35–6
15.42
15.52–6
15.61–2
15.67
15.70
15.73–7
15.78
15.80
15.87
15.93
15.96
15.97–8
15.110
15.115–16
15.120
15.133–4
15.135–74
15.145
15.149
15.152
15.153–5
15.155
15.157–8
15.161–2
15.163–4
15.165
15.175–88
15.177–8
15.181
15.185
15.186
15.190
15.195–6
15.199–200
15.206
15.214
16.3
16.6
194
131
123–4
178
165, 179
176
197
202
124–55
151
129
149
146
149
143–4
147–8
127
140
148
142
142
142
127
140, 148
148–9
143
140
149
150
140, 150
141, 142, 150
142
136, 137
142–3
141
141
140
141
140
140
137, 151–2
152
146
153–4
143
153
153
129
138
136, 140
152
139
142
171
167
OVID
Heroides (cont.)
16.9–10
16.10
16.12
16.13–14
16.31
16.37
16.40
16.51–2
16.61
16.63
16.67–8
16.80
16.83–6
16.93–4
16.101
16.135
16.135–6
16.137–40
16.139
16.193–6
16.205–6
16.207–236
16.217
16.224
16.243–5
16.257
16.263–5
16.279
16.303–4
16.341–2
16.343–4
16.357–8
16.375–6
17.1
17.2
17.22
17.87–8
17.103–8
17.122
17.159–62
17.180
17.181
17.189–90
17.213–19
17.233
17.235–6
18
18–19
18.6
18.19
18.19–20
18.21
18.22
171
171
178
171
199
174
174
174
174
174
176
174
171
174
174
174
159
167
174
177
177
167–9
174
169
172
172, 201
165
175
178
175
176
177
177
174
170
173
166
173–4
174
178
174
177
161
174–5
175
175
25
180–204
199
182, 201
190
182
188
18.23
18.26
18.40–2
18.47
18.49
18.49–50
18.55
18.57
18.58
18.57–8
18.59
18.61–74
18.66
18.69
18.74
18.76
18.77
18.77–8
18.80
18.89–90
18.92
18.105
18.107–8
18.117
18.117–23
18.118
18.119
18.120
18.122
18.123
18.123–4
18.129
18.133–4
18.137
18.139–40
18.142
18.148
18.150
18.151–5
18.153–4
18.157
18.157–8
18.161–2
18.165–6
18.167
18.168
18.170
18.172
18.174
18.178–9
18.179–80
18.185–6
18.187
18.193–4
18.201–2
227
182
191
192
201
196
193
195
182
182
197, 198
182
183
190
167
195
196
29, 120
195, 196, 198
201
203
204
183
192
185
192
197
190
199
192
190
197
201
188
201
193
193
199
192
192
196
185
199
182, 192
189
201
193
193
201
192
167, 200
183, 200
191
188
190–1
190
228
OVID
Heroides (cont.)
18.201–5
18.206
18.207–8
18.213
18.215
18.218
19
19.3
19.5
19.7
19.12
19.22
19.27–8
19.31–2
19.35–6
19.38
19.40
19.47–8
19.51
19.53
19.53–4
19.59
19.64
19.70
19.71–2
19.82
19.89–114
19.96
19.120
19.123–4
19.127–8
19.134
19.147–8
19.151
19.151–2
19.158
19.160
19.161
19.163–4
19.166–7
19.167
19.167–8
19.185–6
19.189–207
19.208
20.1
20.3
20.9
20.33
20.55–62
20.66
20.71–2
20.103–4
191
201
187
202
199
182, 195
25
195, 198
194
193, 194
189
183–5
203
195
182
194
184
182
182
183
194
183
183
194
190
202
189–90
201
201
201
193
197
194
182
189
189
189
198, 204
194
204
182
167, 183, 198
199
204
199
173, 176
178
158, 173
173
171
157
159
165
20.151
20.155
20.179
20.214
20.242
21.8–10
21.13–14
21.15
21.27
21.41–2
21.109
21.213
21.215–17
21.216
21.217
21.218
21.221
21.223–6
21.225
21.245
21.247
21.248
173
173
176
173
158
178
159
159
171
161
178
161
172
159
160
159
160
173
160
182
161
158
Ibis
551–2
26
Medicamina
1–100
1
2
3–4
3–7
4
6
7–8
8
9
10
14
18
21–2
23–4
25–6
29
29–30
31
33–4
39
45
45–6
47–8
51–2
52
53–4
53–64
41–69
52
47, 66
62
63–4
63, 68
66
61
38
62
61, 63, 67
52
52
52, 53, 68
50, 59, 68
50, 68
51
68
68
50, 57
64
63
58
24, 47
65
61
50
67
OVID
Medicamina (cont.)
55–6
58
59
59–60
64
64–5
67–8
69
70
71–2
73
75
75–6
77–8
78
79–80
80
83–4
85
88
89
91–2
93–6
97–8
98–9
99–100
53
63
65
67
69
47
19, 47, 69
67
67
54
67
69
54
66
57
53
67
48
57
66
67
54
54
65
50
51
Metamorphoses
1.452–567
1.492
1.492–6
1.497–9
1.498–9
1.713–21
1.722–3
1.767
2.110
2.181
3
3.155
3.178–9
3.183–5
3.187–8
3.192–3
3.194
3.200
3.241
3.316–23
3.352
3.361
3.366–9
3.372–4
3.382
13
13
146
23
174
27
27–8
28
28, 120
29
29–31
113
120
113
33, 112
113
67
33
113
208
140
81
196
81
31
3.385–7
3.386–7
3.407
3.416
3.418–9
3.419
3.420–1
3.425–6
3.434
3.434–5
3.450
3.457–62
3.473
3.481
3.482
3.483
3.491
3.494
3.497
3.501
3.505–7
4.312
4.332
4.344–5
4.347–9
4.347–76
4.350
4.353–4
4.357–8
4.362
4.362–78
4.385–6
4.388
4.420–1
4.464
4.656
4.661–2
4.673–7
4.675
4.676
4.687
4.706
4.740–52
4.741–3
4.750–2
4.775
4.782–3
4.783
4.782–86
4.790–803
4.796–7
4.802
4.802–3
5.1–249
5.105–6
229
177
182
140
117
62
159
23, 82, 144
31
29, 120
195
158
78
113
81, 120, 159
196
159
160
160
120
113, 158
196
29
62
197
29, 198
92–3
198
197, 198
198
29
198
187
64
144
28
33
29
19
117
117
117
34
199
33
29
28
28, 120
196
14–15
14
87
159
17, 27, 85, 122
15–16
32
230
OVID
Metamorphoses (cont.)
5.200–6
5.241
5.256–9
6
6.430
6.432
6.436–7
6.451
6.455
6.456
6.465
6.478
6.492
6.556–7
6.650
6.651
6.658–9
7
7.262
7.661–865
7.672–862
8
8.441–2
9
9.407–9
10
10.1–11.84
10.8
10.10
10.11–12
10.12
10.19
10.20
10.20–2
10.21–2
10.26
10.27
10.29
10.33
10.39
10.41–4
10.42
10.44
10.51
10.53
10.55
10.56–63
10.57
10.61
10.64
10.64–71
10.68–9
10.69
61
28
20
31–2
118
118
118
13
13
13
118
13
17
32
118
118
31
32
64
142–3
97–102
32
31
32–3
31
33
104–22
106
116, 118
106
106
118
116
114
118
105
106
106, 111
106
106, 112, 113
109
115
118
112, 116
117, 118
106
109–15
120
121
111, 112, 117
113, 115–17
112, 113
117
10.70–1
10.78
10.85
10.106
10.108
10.126
10.127
10.148–54
10.153–4
10.154
10.159
10.165
10.174–9
10.176–81
10.182–5
10.185–6
10.190–4
10.197
10.200–1
10.233
10.235
10.235–6
10.293–4
10.313
10.333
10.346–8
10.349–51
10.361
10.368
10.369–462
10.372–7
10.382
10.389
10.440
10.446–7
10.452–3
10.455–6
10.464
10.471
10.472
10.482
10.487
10.498
10.512–13
10.549
10.578
10.580
10.590–6
10.592
10.601
10.609–10
10.621
10.652–3
10.664
10.676
112, 116
106
106
106
114
107
107
105
122
112
120
106
107
119–20
120
121
121–2
121
121
109
108
114
113
114
111
118
66
114
107
107–8
66
119
122
66
107
118
112
111
111
114
109
109
66
66
117
113
114
109
114
114
111, 114
118
109
114
108
PROPERTIUS
OVID
Metamorphoses (cont.)
10.697
10.723
11
11.5
11.6
11.20–21
11.21
11.25–8, 37–43
11.52–3
11.58–60
11.64–5
14.285
15
15.232–3
15.533
15.565–6
15.658–60
15.685–6
108
120
33
120
114
122
116
114–15
119
116
108
64
33–4
60
64
33
33
112
Remedia Amoris
65
249–90
351–6
457–8
462
463
617–20
692
175
64
55–6
175
175
100
187
187
Tristia
1.1.90
1.1.107
1.1.112
1.1.128
1.2
1.10.24
2.103–5
3.4
3.8.5–6
3.10.41–2
4.7.11–12
4.7.11–20
5.1.5
194
209
71
26
209
185
27
194
194, 200
188
25
17
133
117
PLATO
Sophist 240a
1.1
1.2
2.1.3–4
2.1.12
2.22.18
2.28.8
2.26
3.24.15–18
57
49–50
139
148
149
191
183–4
202
SAPPHO
Fr.2LP
Fr.48LP
Fr.121LP
Fr.132LP
Fr.137LP
152
150
151
142
137
SENECA
PINDAR
Pythian 12.12–23
231
82
De Ira 2.36.1–3
60
Epistulae Morales
114.9–11
51
Thyestes
909–12
918–19
986
951
999
1003
169
169
169
169
169
169
TIBULLUS
1.8.9–16
49
VIRGIL
Aeneid
1.29
1.39–41
1.203
2
3.624
3.630–3
4.34
4.335
4.361
4.376
36
36
195
34–5
169
169
197
195
197
36
232
4.382–4
4.470
4.648–50
4.668
5.3
6.16
6.467–8
7.71–7
8.23
8.435–40
184
82
195
75
197
193
35
36
195
35–6
8.626–731
12.945
12.946
12.948–9
35–6
36
36
36
Georgics
1.84
4.490–502
4.511
4.514
146
110–12
118
119
General index
absent-presence 8
Achelous 29, 32
Achilles and Deidamia 80
Aconteus 61, 97, 157, 158, 159, 160, 164–5, 166,
167, 171, 178–9
Actaeon 27, 30, 31, 33, 67, 113–14, 159, 165, 187,
208
Actium, battle of 35, 152
Adonis 66, 117, 120, 121
Aeneas 184, 195, 196–7, 202
Aesculapius 33
Alcyone 66
amazement, at art/beauty 10, 17, 104, 159,
207
Androgeos 34
Andromeda 15, 19, 22, 25, 27, 84, 117, 127
angry women 60, 86–7
Apollo 13, 20, 23, 28, 29, 33, 105–6, 107, 114, 117,
119–22, 143–7, 152, 153–4
apple, as erotic/poetic symbol 159, 165, 167, 170,
172
Arachne 2
Argus 27
Ariadne 81–2, 143, 146
artist, models for in Ovid 1–2, 7, 209
Astyages 61
Atalanta 32, 108, 109, 111, 113–14, 119,
165
Athena 20, 24, 27, 30, 36, 37, 75, 85
Atreus 167, 168–70
attonitus 29, 32, 85
Aura 98–103, 143
Aurora 98–9, 143
authenticity
of Heroides 15 125–6, 153–4
of Heroides 16–21 156
boar (of Calydon) 32, 33
Angry woman as 86, 117
board games, in the Ars Amatoria 74–5
books, relation between in the Ars
Amatoria 9–10, 70–1, 103
Byblis 76
Callimachean poetics 23, 159, 188, 192
castration 7, 17, 21, 32, 63–4, 88, 117
Cephalus 76, 83, 97
Cephalus and Procris myth 71, 72, 97–103,
142–3
Cerberus 115–7, 119
Ceyx and Alcyone 182
Cipus 33
Circe 64
circular writing 165, 170–6
and the female 172–6
civil war 31, 32, 59
Corinna 4, 13, 22–4, 56–7, 59, 77, 96, 107, 137,
147, 148, 149, 171, 183, 186
cosmetics 9, 41–69
cross-dressing 74, 79–80, 177
cultus 47, 48–53, 63, 66, 68–9, 75, 127
Cupid 21, 70, 101, 114, 157, 171
Cydippe 97, 157, 158, 159–60, 161, 164–5, 166,
170, 171, 172–3, 176, 178–9
Cyparissus 106–07, 113
Daedalus 29, 73, 76, 100, 193, 196, 200
Danaids 36, 84
Daphne 13, 143, 146
death, of elegy 136
Deucalion and Pyrrha 137, 152
Diana 27, 32, 33, 67, 112, 113–14, 158, 159, 165,
178, 179, 187, 208
didactic poetry, Medicamina as 42
and letters 129, 130
Dido 34, 36, 75, 76, 166, 184, 195, 197, 202
dressing table 51
drowning, myths of 191–2
Bacchus 23, 30, 31, 76, 82, 117, 143–6
beauty contest 76, 159, 165, 171
blurring, in Ovidian letters 124, 128, 129, 150–4,
203
233
234
General index
Echo 1–2, 5, 9, 12, 31, 72, 75, 77, 78–83, 89, 92,
93, 128, 129, 140–1, 157, 158, 159–60, 196,
204
elegiac couplet 4, 6, 21, 22, 53–4, 66, 77, 128,
129, 167, 176, 206
elegiac puella, creation of 48, 52
elegy, creation of 53–5
e-mail 170, 182
Euryalus 121
Eurydice 10, 19, 33, 104–22
exile
exile poetry 21–2, 25–7, 39, 205, 208–9
Heroides 16–21 as exilic 184, 194, 204
exile and female subjectivity 185
imagination, power and limits of 9, 39–40,
205
imperialism, Roman 36–8, 40, 59, 68, 206,
209
impotence 22, 88, 200, 203
Irigaray, L. 5, 16, 68, 187
Itys 31, 117, 118, 128, 141–2
Itys’ head 31
Iulus 34
fama 20
feminist criticism 2, 4, 5, 11, 17, 50, 157
French feminism 4, 7
Anglo-American feminism 3
Freud, S. 17, 18, 21, 32, 63–4, 68
Lacan, J. 8, 18
Laocoon 34
Lavinia 35, 36
Leach, E. W. 72
Leander 11, 25, 129, 157, 158, 160, 163–4, 166–7,
175, 176, 179, 181–204
Lindheim, S. 124–5, 140
Livia (as Medusa-figure) 26, 39
look between lovers 76, 81, 92, 104–22
looking back 10, 19, 33, 114
love letters 19, 26, 94
lyric poetry 125, 133, 139, 146, 148, 150, 154
gaze, the 9, 12, 13, 16, 17–19, 21, 27, 28–9, 47–8,
60–2, 68, 82, 85, 88–9, 92, 104, 112–16, 117,
119–22, 159, 165, 174, 196, 198
genitalia, female
and Medusa’s head 17, 63–4
Gibson, R. 102
Gorgon see Medusa
Green, P. 72
hair 23, 32, 33, 79, 114, 119, 144–5
Corinna’s hair 22–4
Iulus’ hair 34, 36
Lavinia’s hair 36
Medusa’s hair 17, 29, 85, 87, 88, 93
pubic hair 63–4
Hardie, P. 2, 8, 19–20, 26, 30, 39–40
Harrison, S. 11
Helen 60, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162–3, 166, 170,
171, 172, 173–6, 177–8
Helle 25, 183–4, 193
Hellespont 11, 25, 163, 181, 183, 185–8, 191, 192,
193, 206, 209
Hercules 32–3, 116
Hermaphroditus 29, 62, 64, 75, 92–3, 137, 187,
197–8
Hero 11–12, 25, 129, 130, 157, 161, 163–4, 179,
181–204
Hippolytus 178–9
Hippomenes 108, 109, 113–14, 119, 165
homosexuality 10–11, 125, 127, 128–9, 140
Hyacinthus 106, 107, 119–22
Icarus, fall of , 29, 182, 193
illusionism 3, 6, 16, 41, 105, 122, 209
Jason 31
Juno 27–8, 34, 36, 50, 57, 75, 76
Knox, P. E. 34–5, 153, 154
Marilyn Monroe 177
marriage 11, 31
Medea 27, 31, 32, 64, 75, 76, 166, 175
medicamen 19, 64–5
Medusa 6–40, 41, 47, 59, 60, 61–7, 75, 82, 83–9,
94, 95, 112, 114, 116–17, 121, 122, 127, 147,
159, 181, 196, 198–9, 207, 208, 209
changing appearance of in Western art 36–7,
60–2
Meleager 32
metamorphosis 21, 27, 29, 66–7, 104, 109, 122,
208
Miller, P.A. 3
Minerva see Athena
mirrors 6–7, 9, 16, 18, 23–4, 34, 41, 47–8, 57,
58–62, 68, 78–80, 92
Mirror-stage 10, 18, 104, 207
Myerowitz, N. 73
Myrrha 21, 66–7, 76, 107–8, 109, 111–12, 114, 118,
119, 121, 122
Narcissus 1, 2–3, 5, 41, 47, 50, 59, 62, 67, 68, 69,
72, 75, 78–82, 92, 93, 94, 95, 102, 105, 113,
120, 121, 127, 128, 129, 136, 140, 144, 158,
159–60, 181, 187, 195–6, 201, 202, 204, 207
Narcissism 6–40, 47, 50, 59
nomen 184, 193–4, 201, 204
General index
Odysseus 15, 73
Oenone 165–6, 175, 176, 179
older women 55, 65, 95
Orpheus 1, 10, 19, 32–3, 40, 89, 104–22
Ovid
as post-modernist 2
as feminist/misogynist 72, 73, 89, 124
as anti-Pygmalion 89
palimpsest, Ovidian letter as 127, 132, 138, 203–4
Paris 76, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 166, 167–70, 171,
174–78, 179
Pasiphae 76, 80, 87, 97
Pegasus 16, 39, 61, 147
Penelope 97, 131, 172, 194
Pentheus 30, 31, 82
Perseus 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14–16, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25,
27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32–3, 34, 36, 41, 47, 59, 61,
69, 75, 84, 88, 116, 117, 121, 181, 196, 208
Phaedra 178
Phaethon 28
Phaon 10, 128, 139–40, 143–4, 145, 148
pharmakon 20, 65
Philomela 2, 13, 31–2, 117–19, 141–2
poetry
and desire 5, 10, 13, 205–9
and (inter-)subjectivity 9, 205–9
poets, modern, and Ovid 7, 12, 93
Polyphemus 28
Procne 31–2, 84, 117–18, 127, 141–2
Procris 76, 83
Pygmalion 1, 2, 9, 16, 37, 40, 48, 61–2, 72, 89,
105, 113, 136
rape 7, 13–14, 32, 80, 137, 178, 181, 207
regression 40, 167–70
repercutere 119, 120, 195–6
repetition 1, 166–7, 199–200, 209
rivers, in myth 186, 200
Rome, Augustan 38, 39, 59, 61
Sabine women 13, 52, 63
sailing, as metaphor 161, 186–7, 199–200, 202
235
Salmacis 27, 29, 32, 62, 75, 92–3, 94, 137, 186,
197–9
Sappho 10–11, 124–55, 156, 208
Sartre, J. P. 18
satire, Medicamina as 55–8
Scylla 22, 32, 33
sea, the 152, 187–8, 201
seaweed 192, 199
sex, metaphors for 92
see also sailing
Sharrock, A. 73
shield
of Aeneas 35–6
of Athena 17, 30, 35–6
of Perseus 14, 36, 60, 86, 120, 181, 196
siren song 82, 117
snakes 21, 22, 64, 65, 86, 87, 116, 118
in Metamorphoses 27–34
in Aeneid 34–6
as closural symbols 17, 33
specularization 5
Spentzou, E. 124, 155
‘split self’ in elegy 3
swimming 181–2, 186, 188, 193, 199–200, 202–3
Tantalus 80, 167–70, 200, 201
Tarrant, R. 126, 153, 154
tears 135, 149–52
Teiresias 30, 31, 208
Tereus 13, 31–2, 117–18
Thebes 29–31
Thyestes 168–9, 170
Tibullus, death of 129, 150–1, 152, 154
timing, in Ovidian letters 131
torvus 28, 35, 84
Trojan effeminacy 176–7, 209
Troy, fall of 34, 209
Venus 48, 57, 65, 67, 76, 121, 157, 158, 165, 171
Versace 17, 24
water 25, 152–3, 186–9, 191, 201–3
whiteness 61, 67, 127

OVID`S LOVERS: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination

Transcription

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