OXFORD GREEK AND LATIN COLLEGE COMMENTARIES Ovid Ars Amatoria BOOK 3 Edited by Christopher M. Brunelle St. Olaf College N ew York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2015 by Oxford University Press. For titles covered by Section 112 of the US Higher Education Opportunity Act, please visit www.oup.com/us/he for the latest information about pricing and alternate formats. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 http://www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 A.D. or 18 A.D., author. Ars amatoria. Book 3 / Ovid; edited by Christopher M. Brunelle. pages cm -- (Oxford Greek and Latin college commentaries) ISBN 978-0-19-998733-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Ovid, 43 B.C.T7 A.D. or 18 A.D. Ars amatoria. I. Brunelle, Christopher M. II. Title. III. Series: Oxford Greek and Latin college commentaries. PA6519.A8B78 2014 871’.01~dc23 2014020341 Printing number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper TABLE OF CONTENTS Map: Rome in the Time of Ovid viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Ars Amatoria Book 3 with Commentary 23 Bibliography 129 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks go to Barbara Weiden Boyd for her initial suggestion that I write this volume, for her sharp editorial eye, and for her deep knowledge of and delight in all things Ovidian; to Charles Cavaliere at Oxford University Press for his encourage­ ment and guidance; to Roy K. Gibson, who offered many helpful suggestions at an early stage of the project and whose stellar commentary has been a great benefit to my own; to my Latin students at St. Olaf for grappling with a draft of this commen­ tary in the spring of 2012; to St. Olaf College for a professional development grant in the summer of 2012; to my colleagues in St. Olaf’s Classics Department for their scholarly friendship; to the staff at St. Olaf’s Rolvaag Library and Harvard’s Houghton Library for their help in obtaining uncommon scholarly and literary works; to Julia D. Hejduk for reading and improving the entire work and for sharing her own schol­ arship; and to Serena Zabin for her intelligent and unflagging support throughout this project. INTRODUCTION Can the Ars amatoria be reduced to a one-liner? Perhaps: millihelen, n.: the amount of beauty required to launch one ship* This joke asks us to do three very Ovidian things. It asks us to appreciate the implau­ sible idea that passion can be quantified, that there can be scientific equations for love. It asks us to know our literary history, at least well enough to recognize Helen of Troy and to pick up a reference to ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ (without having to identify Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as the source). And, when we say it out loud, it asks us to enjoy the fact that jokes can be poetry: except for one extra syllable, the definition has the shape of a line from Shakespeare. Love as a paradoxical science, as a literary commentary, as a poetic education: Ovid’s Ars amatoria. In Ars 3, the last and longest book of his guide to seduction, Ovid claims to teach women how to find, catch, and keep a male lover. The Ars itself is one of the bright­ est gems of Roman literature, and Book 3 is the most eye-catching of all. The text offers generous helpings of Ovidian wit and absurdity as well as a smorgasbord of references to Roman culture and society: architecture, theaters, gladiatorial spec­ tacles, temples, baths, men’s and women’s clothing, hairstyles, cosmetics, music, poetry-reading, letter-writing, games, slavery, parties, sexuality, and sex. Ovid’s habit of self-promotion reaches its zenith here, as he includes himself in not just one but two catalogues of noteworthy poets. His elegiac treatment of myth also culminates here in the lengthy and compelling account of Cephalus and Procris. Ovid’s choice to educate women is both unusual and complicated, with a tone that alternates between description and prescription and an audience whose identity is never entirely stable. In short, there is nothing quite like it in ancient literature, and no other work opens the same sort of window onto Augustan culture. Ars 3 helps us see ancient Rome in a new light. The creation of the term millihelen is disputed; the author Isaac Asimov attributed it to himself. Ovid, Ars Amatoria THE DIDACTIC CONTEXT OF THE ARS The Ars amatoria takes a prominent place in the lohg and distinguished tradition of didactic poetry (from the Greek didaskein, ‘to teach ’), Every didactic poem is a lecture, a poetic event that happens in real time; far from simply offering a catalog of facts and advice, the didactic poet takes on the voice of an authoritative teacher, offering in­ struction on a particular topic to a chosen audience and couching his lessons in exam­ ples and illustrations drawn from daily life, mythology, and cultural history. Didactic verse is set in hexameters, the same metrical form used in the grand narrative epics of Homer and Vergil; though shorter than those epics, didactic poems comprise one or more volumes, each of perhaps eight hundred lines. Despite these common character­ istics, however, ancient writers never cared to recognize didactic as a separate genre with clearly defined rules. It may be more useful to consider didactic poems as mem­ bers of an extended family, linked to other works that share some of their traits (such as a focus on technical instruction) but lack other defining elements. Furthermore, none of these elements applies to every didactic poem. The teacher, who is almost always a man, often leavens his assertions of authority with admissions of inability or incompetence, the identity of his audience may shift repeatedly, and the poems narra­ tive direction may veer off onto topics that seem only tangentially related to the origi­ nal theme. Every such exception, however, adds to the poem’s persuasive realism, turning what might have been a dull recitation of advice into a rhetorically and dra­ matically engaging monologue, less a technical treatise than a one-man show. Ovid’s Ars is particularly indebted to three Greek didactic poets: Hesiod, Aratus, and Nicander. Produced in roughly the same period as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days are the earliest surviving instances of an­ cient didactic literature and a symbol of the tradition as a whole (as Ovid shows in two important programmatic passages, Ars 1.27 and 2.4). In the Theogony Hesiod, claiming the role of a poet inspired and instructed by the Muses, recounts the birth and history of the generations of gods, from primeval Chaos to the firmly estab­ lished hierarchy under Zeus; in the Works and Days he offers his brother Perses advice on the value of and the need for hard labor as well as an almanac of the agri­ cultural year, noting which tasks are suited to which seasons. It is in this same work that Hesiod’s didactic persona is particularly well developed, with a vivid account of his quarrels with his brother over property and several prominent notes of his own life as a farmer, traveler, and poet. All of these elements—divine inspiration, praise of hard work, and personal anecdote—resurface repeatedly and humorously in Ovid’s treatise. In a much more rarefied vein, the works of Aratus (third c. BCE) and Nicander (second c. BCE) highlight the scholarly refinement that typifies Greek Hellenistic poetry. Aratus’ Phaenomena (‘Appearances’) blends technical 2 description of the constellations with brief accounts of their mythological origins, as in ‘The tortoise is also small; Hermes, even while he was still in his cradle, cut out the shell and had it named the Lyre, which he brought into the sky and set down in front of the unknown figure’ (i.e. Hercules, 268-71). The final third of the poem offers a myriad of ways to forecast the weather from meteorological activity (shoot­ ing stars portend wind, 926-32, but many comets mean a dry year to come, 1093) or the behavior of animals (if a lone wolf howls, a storm will come within three days, 1124-28). Aratus developed an ornate style, with many rare words borrowed from Homer, and turned seemingly awkward material (e.g. the description of a regular hexagon inscribed within a circle, 541-43) into virtuoso poetry. These qualities ap­ pealed to his contemporaries as well as to later Roman poets, several of whom— including Cicero and Ovid himself—translated the Phaenomena into Latin. Meander’s Theriaka and Alexipharmaka deal with the seemingly even more intrac­ table topics of poisonous animal bites and their remedies, with recherche vocabu­ lary to match the abstruse subject matter. Even his brief stories include literary gymnastics; the burning thirst, for example, that accompanies the bite of a certain snake is explained through an aetiological myth that incorporates not just Zeus, Prometheus, and a donkey but also an acronym of Meander’s own name (Theriaka 334-58). The authority inherent in the poetic voice and the pleasure derived from harmonizing (or at least bringing together) the techniques of medicine and versifi­ cation help to explain the allure, in antiquity at least, of such works. Other poems of Nicander, now lost, also had direct and deep influence on Roman authors; Vergil used Nicander’s Georgika in his Georgies, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are indebted both in title and in content to his Heteroiumena (‘Things changed into other things’). In short, Greek didactic poetry ranges widely in style and content, and the strategies and topics of the Ars display a deep knowledge of that range. Two Latin didactic works also shaped Ovid’s work. Lucretius’ six-volume De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things,’ c. 55 BCE) puts into verse the philosophical system of the late fourth-century philosopher Epicurus. Addressed to Memmius, a Roman aristocrat, Lucretius’ description of the atomic nature of the physical uni­ verse seeks to assuage the human fear of death by demonstrating through a material­ ist ontology the absence of an afterlife and the baselessness of religion in general. Like Aratus and Meander before him, Lucretius transmutes a prose original into di­ dactic verse, with numerous remarks on the challenges of the poetic enterprise. Pub­ lished three decades before the Ars, Vergil’s four-volume Georgies (‘Farming’) echoes Hesiod (and Aratus) in its purported goal of offering a detailed guide to running a farm, but its constant incorporation of Roman culture and history—from the refer­ ences to Octavian that open and close the work to the accounts of Roman civil war that litter the text like the Roman weapons that Italian farmers will, Vergil claims, dig Ovid, Ars Amatoria from their fields in years to come (1.493-97)—turns the poem from dry lecture into an infinitely detailed and emotionally charged meditation on Roman life in general. An equally important but scantier category of didactic literature concerns ama­ tory instruction, both in verse and in prose. Latin elegy (discussed below) contains several striking instances of education in love. In Tibullus 1.4, the well-endowed god of fertility Priapus describes numerous strategies for the seduction of adoles­ cent boys, which the poet can in turn share with another man named Titius; both Propertius (4.5) and Ovid (Am. 1.8) tell of a lena (female pimp) offering devious advice to her puella, and both poets claim to be revolted by her teaching of such de­ ceptive practices. Other authors, most of them women, wrote more explicit prose treatises on seduction and sex, but only titles and a few scraps of them survive. Even so, plentiful references attest to their ancient popularity, and several early imperial writers (Martial 12.43, Suetonius Tiberius 43.2) mention the explicitly erotic appeal of the books of a certain Elephantis. Ovid, then, in crafting an instruction manual out of erotic material and imparting it both to men (Ars 1-2, cf. Tib. 1.4) and to women (Ars 3, cf. Prop. 4.5 and Ov. Am. 1.8) is not so much inventing a new art form as giving full and final expression to the diverse output of his less illustrious erotic predecessors. ELEGY The many-branched history of elegiac poetry can only be briefly sketched here. From an etymological standpoint its function was the expression of grief, or so the ancients claimed, deriving the term from the Greek e e legein, ‘to cry ‘ah, ah’.’ Mourn­ ing is prominent throughout the tradition, from Simonides’ fifth-century funeral epitaphs to Ovid’s lament over the death of Tibullus (Am. 3.9, esp. 3-4). But even from the beginning, poets defined the genre not so much by content as by meter: an elegiac poem is one written in elegiac couplets, in which a dactylic hexameter is followed by a pentameter. (The metrical details are discussed below.) Greek and Latin poets employ this format for nearly any topic. Tyrtaeus (seventh cent.) ex­ horts his fellow Spartans to martial valor, Solon (c. 600 BCE) writes political edito­ rials, and Callimachus (third cent.) crafts extended aetiological narratives. The element of desire appeared early, in the predominantly martial elegiacs of Archilo­ chus (seventh cent.), but it gained a particular interpretive influence over the genre from the fact that several of the poets who wrote about love in elegiacs also wrote about elegiacs as an inherently amorous medium. Thus, in his three-volume work Leontium (c. 330 BCE), Hermesianax of Colophon rewrites the history of elegy, citing seventh-century Mimnermus as the poet who invented the form in order to represent his longing for a woman named Nanno. Likewise, Ovid begins his Amores 4 (l.l) with an extended programmatic joke that requires his audience to be aware that elegiac form and amatory content are meant for each other. He had planned, he says, to write a martial epic in suitably grandiose hexameters, but Cupid’s theft of a metrical foot from every other line recast the work in elegiac couplets and thereby forced a shift in theme from war to love. In theory, elegy can do almost anything; in Ovid’s early practice, it can only sing of love. The works of Ovid’s elegiac predecessors in Rome underscore this connection of meter and material. Cornelius Gallus (c. 70-c. 26 BC), Sextus Propertius (c. 50-c. 15 BC), and Albius Tibullus (c. 50-19 BC) are the trio whom Ovid re­ peatedly cites as his immediate forebears (Am. 1.15.27-30, Ars 3.333-34, 535-38, Rem. 763-66, and Tr. 4.10.53-54). The earlier elegies of Gaius Valerius Catullus also play an important role in the formation of the canon, but Ovid never mentions him in the same way as the other three; rather, he saw him as a kindred spirit in pursuit of poetic glory (Am. 3.15.7-8). Each, in his own way, shaped his elegies to tell a similar story, the poet’s passionate and only intermittently successful pursuit of a single beloved woman along with the rejection of a more respectable public career. The man’s emotional subjection to his mistress (domina) is cast as a form of love-slavery (seruitium amoris), and his rejection of a settled life of marriage for a relationship free of external responsibilities tarnishes elegiac love as a reversal of standard Roman traditions, the mos maiorum. The Roman elegiac corpus is much more wide-ranging and nuanced than this or any brief description could imply; to take just one example, Tibullus also writes of his love for an adolescent boy named Marathus, and he articulates the military and political accomplishments of his patron Messalla, even finding room to applaud his road-construction projects (1.7.57-62). For all their approval of the bachelor life, Ovid’s Amores include a cameo appearance by his own wife (Amores 3.13.1)! Furthermore, Ovid’s own career belies the claim that elegy must represent love. In his hands the elegiac cou­ plet becomes what has been called a ‘supergenre’ (Harrison 2002 79), a poetic cat­ egory in which the strict metrical definition provides a surprising amount of room for a dazzlingly wide array of topics and stylistic approaches: the love poems of the Amores, the love letters of the Heroides, the didactic Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris, the Callimachean aetiologies of the Fasti, the laments from exile of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, and the peculiar curse cat­ alog of the Ibis. The inventiveness and self-awareness with which Ovid reshaped and expanded the notions of elegiac poetry are among the most prominent aspects of his poetic output. Nonetheless, Roman erotic elegy in general defines itself by the joy it takes in declaring that the goal of life is to be discovered in the passionate and private attachment between a man and a woman who are well enough versed in Roman culture to reject its traditional premises.