Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry

By Peter E. Knox

Having established his reputation as an elegist, Ovid turned to the composition of hexameter narrative. Although the Metamorphoses has often been treated as an appendix to the history of Augustan poetry, the principal lines of stylistic and thematic development continue in Ovid's work. Drawing upon the structure and content of Vergil's Sixth Eclogue, the Metamorphoses is an intricate and allusive poem that combines elements from the entire range of Roman verse composed in the Alexandrian manner. Professor Knox focuses in particular upon the contributions of elegy and epyllion, examining the manner in which Ovid exploits the diction of these genres in order to distinguish his poem from traditional epic verse. The study concludes with an investigation of the aetiological stories of the final book and the sustained evocation of Callimachus' Aetia at its close.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701178

Book preview

ITHE BACKGROUND

That the poet of the Amores and Ars Amatoria should compose fifteen books of hexameter narrative has often been counted a surprise. For many critics the Metamorphoses represents a departure from the poetic allegiances of Ovid’s earlier career, a venture into the epic genre and an uneasy compromise with Callimachean principles. The historian of classical literature inevitably succumbs to the urge to classify and categorize, and the conclusions thus reached tend to ratify themselves by the force of repetition. But the picture of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an epic, or in some cases ‘counter-epic’, that emerges from the handbooks bears only a faint resemblance to the impression the reader takes away from his encounter with the poem itself. Nevertheless, since the appearance in 1919 of Richard Heinze’s influential monograph, Ovids elegische Erzählung,¹ the question of genre has been the almost exclusive concern of critics.² The debate itself and the terms in which it has been conducted might have surprised Ovid. The discovery of Callimachus by the generation of Catullus meant more to the Augustan poets who followed than the importation of a collection of themes and clichés, bizarre and aetiological; for the poets who took the narrow road the heritage of Callimachus meant a new orientation. The association of scholarship with poetry became the means by which the modern poet was able to define and control his relationship to the past.³ The poet was free to select and combine elements from the entire range of his literary predecessors, and a single work might routinely incorporate the diction, imagery or style of a variety of genres. This phenomenon, the Kreuzung der Gattungen as it was termed by W. Kroll, is a distinguishing feature of the Metamorphoses.⁴ The rules of genre count, but only so that the reader may recognize when they are broken.⁵

Ovid was, in a very real sense, a true heir to the traditions of Augustan poetry, but it is also necessary to remember that by the time his first edition of the Amores was complete, Vergil, Tibullus, and perhaps Propertius were dead.⁶ In some aspects of the poetic movement which they represented he could not, or would not, participate. But, although Ovid does not deal with some of the serious issues that give a special intensity to the poetry of Vergil and Horace, the principal lines of stylistic development continue in his work. Considerations of diction and style have been almost entirely ignored in criticism of the Metamorphoses, and yet perhaps no other Roman poet so consistently reveals himself a product of his literary background.⁷ Even after Heinze had argued that the crucial difference between the Fasti and the Metamorphoses consisted in the generic distinction between elegy and epic, the reminiscences of elegy continued to provide an important focus for discussion of individual episodes.⁸ Ovid’s distinctive achievement in the Metamorphoses is that he draws on the entire range of Roman poetry composed in the Alexandrian tradition, including also, of course, the epyllion. An older school was inclined to view the Metamorphoses as a collection of epyllia arranged in accordance with a single theme, metamorphosis, which often has little more than a superficial relevance to the individual stories.⁹ The excessive concern of modern critics with the epic gravity of the Metamorphoses has obscured this point, but for Ovid at any rate the question of genre was not always so serious.

Ovid’s brilliant comic treatment of elegiac themes in the Amores is conventionally regarded as a failed attempt to continue Augustan elegy along the lines set out by Propertius in the Monobiblos;¹⁰ but in fact the comic attitude of the Amores as the collection now stands, in a significant paradox, is motivated by an altogether serious purpose.¹¹ In 25 B.C., at a time when the pressure to deal with Augustan themes was most intense,¹² the young poet struck an entirely different note, an older one:

arma graui numero uiolentaque bella parabam

edere, materia conueniente modis.

par erat inferior uersus; risisse Cupido

dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.

(Am. 1.1.1–4)

Ovid carefully incorporates the standard terminology of the recusatio,¹³ but the humorous tone distinguishes this version from its Augustan predecessors.¹⁴ In addition, while the alternative to elegy here is epic poetry, its subject is unexpressed: the Augustan themes, with which the form had become intimately associated, have been ostentatiously dropped,¹⁵ and allegiance to Callimachean standards is asserted once again only as a question of style.

The path that takes us from this early declaration of principle to the long hexameter poem is a curious one. The role that Ovid circumscribes for himself in the Amores is, in at least one important respect, considerably more modest than that which his predecessors assumed. In his fourth book, Propertius finally abandons completely the pose of poet-lover, successfully resolving the dilemma of how to deal with Augustan themes without appearing to abandon the principles expressed in the earlier programmatic poems. For Ovid the problem was different. The surviving three-book edition of the Amores is evidence that he too increasingly felt the urge to shed the persona of love elegist. But for Ovid this involved only a stylistic choice: he never intended to deal with the Augustan themes that forced themselves on Propertius. In the programmatic introduction to his second book, Ovid is again confronted with a choice between love-elegy and epic, but not on Augustan themes. The stylistic confrontation is couched in terms of the familiar comparison between the utility of epic and elegy in love affairs:¹⁶

quid mihi profuerit uelox cantatus Achilles?

quid pro me Atrides alter et alter agent,

quique tot errando quot bello perdidit annos,

raptus et Haemoniis flebilis Hector equis?

at facie tenerae laudata saepe puellae

ad uatem, pretium carminis, ipsa uenit.

(Am. 2.1.29–34)

Ovid adheres to this tactic throughout the Amores, as he insistently ignores Augustan Rome.

In the final programmatic poem as the collection now stands, Ovid’s recusatio deals not with the pressing need to treat contemporary issues in epic verse, but with a different genre which also treats of serious themes:

altera me sceptro decoras altoque cothurno:

iam nunc contracto¹⁷ magnus in ore sonus.

(Am. 3.1.63–4)

Ovid apparently harbored no doubts about his abilities or the direction his poetic career might take. His farewell to elegy at the end of the Amores suggests that at a relatively early stage of his career Ovid had determined upon an ambitious course:

corniger increpuit thyrso grauiore Lyaeus:

pulsanda est magnis area maior equis.

inbelles elegi, genialis Musa, ualete,

post mea mansurum fata superstes opus.

(Am. 3.15.17–20)

There is no indication that, having now turned his attention to tragedy, Ovid ever intended to return to elegy. The chronology of Ovid’s early career is uncertain, to say the least. Perhaps fifteen years intervene between the completion of the first edition of the Amores in about 16 B.C. and the appearance of the first two books of the Ars Amatoria. Within that period surely there falls the lost masterpiece, the Medea. The rest is an embarrassing difficulty that leads to redating. It has seemed unlikely to many scholars that a poet as extraordinarily productive as Ovid could have remained silent for so many years. In some chronological schemes the Heroides are made to fill that gap, but the basis for this dating is fragile. It depends upon the assumption that Amores 2.18, where nine of the Heroides are mentioned, was a new poem composed for the second edition. Ovid himself says nothing either in that poem or elsewhere in the collection to support this. It is more likely that Amores 2.18 belongs to the first edition and that the epistles there mentioned represent more of Ovid’s youthful production.¹⁸

Another explanation suggests itself. No trace of the poems Ovid omitted in the second edition of the Amores survives, a strange accident, given the circumstances of book production in the ancient world. A new edition could not be guaranteed to supersede an earlier version if it had circulated in many copies, as would be the case with a popular work.¹⁹ And in his poetic autobiography Ovid insists that his Amores were an instant success:

utque ego maiores, sic me coluere minores,

notaque non tarde facta Thalia mea est.

carmina cum primum populo iuuenalia legi,

barba resecta mihi bisue semelue fuit.

mouerat ingenium totam cantata per Vrbem

nomine non uero dicta Corinna mihi.

(Trist. 4.10.55–60)

Perhaps he is a bit too insistent. If Ovid’s immediate impact was as significant as Vergil’s, or Horace’s, or Propertius’, then it has left little trace. On the other hand, we do know that Ovid excluded many elegies from the second edition of the Amores. The grounds on which he eliminated poems may be easily surmised from the lines immediately following in his autobiography:

multa quidem scripsi, sed quae uitiosa putaui,

emendaturis ignibus ipse dedi.

(Trist. 4.10.61–2)

Evidently Ovid thought much of his earlier Amores not worth saving. Tristia 4.10.55–62 may be intended to put the best face on an awkward stage of Ovid’s career. The first edition of the Amores may have been easy to supplant if it had not been the great success that Ovid alleges and thus circulated in relatively few copies. Perhaps Ovid’s early certainty over the direction his poetic career might take did not last. The Medea, much admired by later generations,²⁰ represented a false start for Ovid, who composed no further tragedies. A poet may take some time to find new bearings, and when some years later Ovid did, it was in a return to the neoteric-elegiac tradition in which his career began. The second edition of the Amores, purged of its less successful efforts, represents that new beginning.

The publication of Books One and Two of the Ars in 1 B.C., together with the new edition of the Amores, marks a new and rather dramatic burst of activity. The urge to more substantial composition, aborted with the Medea, takes new shape in the Fasti and the Metamorphoses.²¹ There are indications that Ovid’s plan to describe the Roman religious year in verse antedated the Metamorphoses.²² The unfinished state of the work indicates in any case that in the poet’s mind it had to give way to the Metamorphoses. The original proem, removed to the second book during a later revision, reveals the playful stance of the poet of the Amores:

nunc primum uelis, elegi, maioribus itis:

exiguum, memini, nuper eratis opus.

ipse ego uos habui faciles in amore ministros,

cum lusit numeris prima iuuenta suis.

idem sacra cano signataque tempora fastis:

ecquis ad haec illinc crederet esse uiam?

(Fast. 2.3–8)

The proem as originally planned contained a dedication to Augustus. As part of his dedication Ovid draws upon the traditional formulation of the Augustan recusatio. His poem is an inadequate tribute; it does not deal with Caesar’s wars, but the theme is serious nonetheless:

haec mea militia est; ferimus quae possumus arma,

dextraque non omni munere nostra uacat.

si mihi non ualido torquentur pila lacerto

nec bellatoris terga premuntur equi,

nec galea tegimur, nec acuto cingimur ense

(his habilis telis quilibet esse potest);

at tua prosequimur studioso pectore, Caesar,

nomina, per titulos ingredimurque tuos.

ergo ades et placido paulum mea munera uoltu

respice, pacando siquid ab hoste uacat.

(Fast. 2.9–18)

The association of epic poetry with Caesar’s wars derives from earlier Augustan poetry.²³ The original proem to the Fasti reveals Ovid’s intention to return to a thoroughly Augustan programme. This is not epic poetry, but while declining to glorify Caesar’s wars and reasserting allegiance to Callimachean poetics, Ovid proceeds to treat Roman themes. His solution is essentially the same one that Propertius settled on in his fourth book. The result is perhaps disappointing, as Ovid himself may have realized, although his disclaimer is more than a little disingenuous:

deficit ingenium, maioraque uiribus urgent:

haec mihi praecipuo est ore canenda dies.

quid uolui demens elegis imponere tantum

ponderis? heroi res erat ista pedis.

(Fast. 2.123–6)

A number of reasons may have supervened to induce Ovid to stop.²⁴ But by the time Ovid was involved in the Fasti it had become impossible to write on the Augustan themes of the twenties. In A.D. 4 Augustus designated a new heir, one who seemed destined to last, and it would be impossible to exclude him from the program of the Fasti.²⁵ Augustanism had become for Ovid a literary motif. It was as much an inheritance from the past as the myths that