Selections from Ovid Amores II: An Edition for Intermediate Students 9781501349812, 9781501349843, 9781501349836

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Selections from Ovid Amores II

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The following titles are available from Bloomsbury Selections from Apuleius Metamorphoses V: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Stuart R. Thomson Selections from Cicero Philippic II: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Christopher Tanfield Selections from Cicero Pro Milone: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction by Lynn Fotheringham and commentary notes and vocabulary by Robert West Selections from Horace Odes: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by John Godwin Selections from Horace Satires: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by John Godwin Selections from Ovid Amores II: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Alfred Artley Selections from Ovid Heroides: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by John Godwin Selections from Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Anita Nikkanen Selections from Tacitus Annals I: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction by Roland Mayer and commentary notes and vocabulary by Katharine Radice Selections from Tacitus Histories I: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction by Ellen O’Gorman and commentary notes and vocabulary by Benedict Gravell Selections from Virgil Aeneid VIII: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Keith Maclennan Selections from Virgil Aeneid X: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Christopher Tanfield Selections from Virgil Aeneid XI: An Edition for Intermediate Students, with introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Ashley Carter Supplementary resources for these volumes can be found at www.bloomsbury.com/bloomsbury-classical-languages Please type the URL into your web browser and follow the instructions to access the Companion Website. If you experience any problems, please contact Bloomsbury at [email protected]

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Selections from Ovid Amores II: An Edition for Intermediate Students Poems 2, 4, 6, 10, 12 With introduction, commentary notes and vocabulary by Alfred Artley

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 as Ovid Amores II: A Selection This edition first published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Alfred Artley, 2018, 2019 Cover image © DEA / C. SAPPA / Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents Preface Introduction Text Commentary Notes Vocabulary

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Preface The text and notes found in this volume are designed to guide any student who has mastered Latin at beginner’s level and wishes to read Ovid’s text of Amores II in the original. This edition contains a detailed introduction to the literary and historical context of the Amores, as well as some general discussion of Ovid’s style and a brief section on the poems’ reception. The notes to the poems themselves focus on the harder points of grammar and word order; specific literary points are also discussed, and mythological references and allusions to other authors are also explained. Doubtless there are many other possible readings of the text that are not explored here, and students are encouraged to develop their own views of the text rather than simply learn the comments offered here. Love elegy is an intensely personal genre, so it is quite proper for each reader to formulate their own personal response. At the end of the book there is a full vocabulary list for all the words contained in these poems. I first encountered Ovid’s Amores as a callow adolescent via Peter Green’s sparkling translation (smuggled abroad on a school trip to Greece, as I recall, in a rather tepid attempt at subversion). Ovid’s work has continued to fascinate me ever since; his timeless artistic dexterity and wit never stale, and there is something disconcertingly contemporary about his poetic voice. Thus it has been a great pleasure to produce this edition, and though I have now moved on from Classical literature to practise law (Ovid perhaps would not have approved), I am delighted to think that my commentary will help to introduce a new generation of readers to the Amores, and I hope that the text will resonate with them too. As the poet himself observes, leve fit quod bene fertur onus: ‘a burden which is carried well becomes light’ (Amores I.2.10). vii

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During my work on this edition, I made frequent reference to the academic commentaries on the Amores by Joan Booth and J.C. McKeown, whose scholarship I gratefully acknowledge. Alice Wright and her team at Bloomsbury have been unfailingly efficient in seeing the book through the production process, and I should also thank the anonymous reviewer who read the text in draft form and made a number of helpful comments and suggestions. I am grateful to the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, who continued my Academic Visitor status so that I could work on this book; in particular, I should record my thanks to Professor Rhiannon Ash, my erstwhile Classics tutor at Merton, to whom I am greatly indebted for all her advice and assistance over the years. Alfred Artley June 2017

Introduction Life of the poet In chronological terms at least, Ovid is the Augustan poet par excellence: born in 43 BC , the same year that the future Augustus extorted his first consulship from a timid senate amid the chaos of civil war, he outlived the princeps by no more than a few years. Just as much as his older contemporaries Horace and Virgil, Ovid was shaped by the age in which he lived; but the Golden Age imagery of his predecessors, who celebrate pax Augusta after decades of civil war, gives way to something darker at the end of Ovid’s life. At the height of his success, with his magnum opus (the Metamorphoses) near to completion, he was banished by the Emperor to distant Tomis on the coast of the Black Sea, and his last collections of verse constitute a bitter lament upon his misfortunes, implicitly decrying the undue severity of the punishment imposed upon him by an autocratic ruler. Nearly all that we know about Ovid comes from what he himself tells us in his poetry; thus any definitive attempts to distinguish the historical Publius Ovidius Naso from the authorial persona are probably doomed to failure, and we must simply acknowledge the subjectivity of our source. Nevertheless, in terms of biographical reconstruction, we are fortunate that Ovid tells us a good deal about his life, even offering a short autobiography in verse at the end of the fourth volume of the Tristia (IV.10). In common with Virgil and Horace, Ovid was not a native of Rome, but from a municipium, an Italian town that held Roman citizenship, in this case Sulmo in Paelignum (modern Sulmona in the Abruzzo, about ninety miles from Rome); its citizens, however, had had to fight Rome to secure this privilege only two generations previously (the 1

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Social War of 91–89 BC ). Like Cicero, Ovid remained fiercely proud of his birthplace, celebrating it in verse (Amores II .16 ), yet did not see this as in any way conflicting with his sense of Romanitas. In maintaining these dual identities, we may conjecture that he was not untypical of his age (for the idea of two patriae, see Cicero De Legibus II .5). In terms of social status, his family also resembled Cicero’s; as domi nobiles they were probably a dominant force in the local politics of their town, but at Rome held only equestrian status, with no paternal ancestor having yet entered the Senate. Ovid’s father was apparently ambitious for both his sons, and had them educated in Rome. Beyond basic literacy and numeracy, education in this period concentrated heavily on rhetoric; traces of the rhetorical exercises that Ovid would have practised in his youth appear throughout his works (see section  5 below). At some point, Ovid also travelled abroad to continue his education in Greece, but he is clear that poetry was always his natural vocation, despite his father’s misgivings. A late life of the poet recounts a delightful (though probably apocryphal) story about Ovid’s childhood: as his father was chastising him as punishment for his ill-chosen ambitions, the future poet squealed out parce mihi, numquam versificabo, pater – ‘Spare me, father, I shall never versify again’ – a perfect pentameter line. Following the premature death of his elder brother, the family’s hopes rested on Ovid alone. Though he did hold two minor magistracies, at some point in his early twenties he decided not to pursue further public office, and did not seek election to the quaestorship, the most junior elected magistracy on the cursus honorum. By this time, he may already have had some reputation as a poet; his first public recitations must have been during his teenage years, or, as he puts it, ‘when my beard had been shaved once or twice’ (Tristia IV.10.57–8). According to his autobiography, he was married three times. His first marriage took place when he was very young and was no doubt

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arranged; the union was not a success, and the unfortunate woman is tersely dismissed as nec utilis nec digna – ‘Neither useful nor worthy’. He speaks more warmly of his second wife, who bore him a daughter (Tristia IV.10.71–2); but this marriage soon came to an end too, with the premature death of his wife. His third marriage, however, endured; this wife even makes a surprise appearance in III .13 in the last book of the Amores, where the two together attend the festival of Juno, patroness of Roman matrimony (such blatant contravention of the norms of love-elegy heralds the fact that Ovid will soon leave this genre behind). His devotion to his last wife comes through clearly in the exile poetry; she apparently stayed behind in Rome to agitate for his recall, and the picture of marital concord that Ovid frequently evokes was no doubt an implicit rebuttal of his perceived promotion of immorality in his earlier works. During the last two decades of the first century BC , Ovid was evidently at the centre of fashionable Roman society. He only glimpsed Virgil (who died in 19 BC , the same year as Tibullus) but was evidently on good terms with Propertius, a slightly older love elegist, and in time attracted a considerable following of his own. His first major work was the Amores, from which this selection is derived: five (later three) books of elegiac poems on the theme of love, featuring his elusive mistress Corinna. The amatory theme continues in his next work: the Heroides, a set of elegiac epistles from mythical heroines to their absent lovers (discussed in some detail in Amores II .18), and the Ars Amatoria, best described as a seduction manual set awkwardly in the didactic tradition of Virgil and Lucretius. A tragedy, Medea, is lost; but fortunately the poet’s hexameter epic, Metamorphoses, does survive, interweaving tales of transformation from the emergence of Earth out of primordial soup down to contemporary Rome and the apotheosis (deification) of Julius Caesar: the spirit of the murdered dictator was apparently seen rising to heaven, indicating that he had joined the gods.While most of the tales recounted in the Metamorphoses

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stem from the Greek mythological tradition, in the Fasti, an aetiological poem (concerned with the origins and causes of things) apparently composed alongside the epic, Ovid traces the history of the Roman calendar, explaining various Roman and Italian traditions and festivals. It was as he was putting the finishing touches to these works in AD 8 that calamity befell him. Sojourning with his influential friend Cotta Maximus on the island of Elba, he received news of his impending banishment from Rome. Precisely what Ovid had done to infuriate the emperor and why he was forced to leave Rome remain something of a mystery. Certainly, he was not subject to any formal trial, but instead simply banished by imperial fiat. Unlike formal exile (the equivalent to capital punishment for Romans of his rank), he was allowed to keep his property. His place of confinement was specified, though: Tomis (Constanza, in modern Bulgaria), on the West coast of the Black Sea. Though Ovid presents the town as populated by barbarian Getae, it was in fact of Greek foundation, a colony of Miletus in Asia Minor. Nevertheless, its position did mark the very limits of the Empire; the surrounding region of Moesia may only have been incorporated formally as a province as late as AD 6 following fierce fighting in the region. The remoteness of the location must have been particularly hard to bear for a poet who had thrived in the Roman metropolis; no doubt the Emperor specified Tomis precisely for this reason, but it is a frequent refrain throughout the exile poetry that the Emperor should allow his victim to go somewhere less isolated, even if there was no chance of a return to Rome. The mystery of Ovid’s exile has proved fertile ground for academic speculation, imagination readily supplying the answers to questions which scholarship cannot answer. Whatever the precise nature of the misdemeanour, the emperor was clearly offended, and exacted personal vengeance for what he perceived as a personal slight.

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Attributing his downfall to carmen et error, Ovid tends to be rather more forthcoming about the former: turpi carmine factus/arguor obsceni doctor adulterii, ‘because of the shameful poem I am accused of being a teacher of filthy adultery’ (Tristia II .211–2). The work in question was the Ars Amatoria, and apparently Augustus objected to its alleged promotion of immoral conduct. Yet the work itself had been published some years previously (c. 1 BC –AD 2), so it seems curious that the emperor took so long to object (given that Ovid was not banished until AD 8). Two possible explanations suggest themselves: either the moral climate had changed, with Augustus increasingly keen to maintain strict standards, or, more plausibly, the poem itself was little more than an excuse to condemn its author, whose real crime lay elsewhere. Political opponents were regularly banished under the early empire, yet punishment for words rather than deeds is virtually unparalleled before Ovid. Quite what Ovid had done remains beyond reconstruction, however. It was clearly something that had angered the emperor on a personal level: given the poet’s amatory predilections, some have speculated that he might have been conducting an affair with Augustus’ granddaughter Julia, who was also banished that same year. If the two events were connected in some way, it is more likely that Ovid was in fact privy to her alleged affair with Decimus Silanus, and his crime was perhaps not to have informed the Emperor sooner. Stranded in Tomis, he continued to write poetry, but the cheerful exuberance of his youthful works is replaced with a bitter catalogue of lament, as he rails against his inhospitable new home, begs the emperor to pardon him and petitions friends for help. Five books of ‘sad poems’, the Tristia, were the result, followed by four more of verse epistles, Epistulae ex Ponto. But all to no avail; the accession of a new emperor, Tiberius, in AD 14 brought no improvement in his fortunes, and Ovid apparently languished in Tomis until his death c. AD 17.

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Ovid’s world Full appreciation of most works of art or literature requires some grasp of the historical context of their composition and creation, so the following offers a brief sketch of the Roman world in which Ovid came to maturity and wrote the Amores. The frontiers of Rome’s empire had expanded considerably over the century preceding Ovid’s birth, but increasingly the chief threats to peace within the Roman world lay not without but within, as a succession of bloody civil wars decimated the ruling classes. At the time of the Social War (see above), one of the successful generals, P. Cornelius Sulla, turned his troops on Rome and had himself made dictator. He used the extraordinary powers of his office to proscribe (execute) his enemies; forty senators and 1,600 equestrians were murdered, and their property confiscated. Though he soon resigned his dictatorship in favour of a debauched retirement, his bloody success offered a pernicious precedent for later Roman politicians; increasingly it was military force and the loyalty of one’s troops that counted more than constitutional nicety in the world of late Republican realpolitik. This was certainly the lesson that Julius Caesar took from Sulla’s career, and in 49 BC he too led his veterans against Rome to thwart political machinations aimed at depriving him of his command (famously crossing the river Rubicon en route); his opponents fled to Greece, but Caesar followed and defeated the Republican forces under his great rival Pompey at Dyrrachium the following year. After mopping up the remaining pockets of resistance, Caesar returned to Rome in triumph, but unlike Sulla he showed no inclination to relinquish his power. Rather, by March 44 BC he had been proclaimed dictator for life, and was preparing a great campaign in the East. Chafing at this nascent autocracy, a group of senators, including many who had hitherto supported him, plotted his assassination, and he was duly murdered in the Senate House on the Ides of March.

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But the death of one presumptive despot did not herald the restoration of Republican liberty; like the Pompeians before them, the conspirators had underestimated their support in Rome and fled to Greece to raise help there. The Caesarean forces mustered in Italy, now led by Mark Antony, the dictator’s ‘Master of Horse’ (lieutenant) and the teenage Octavian, Caesar’s natural great-nephew and adopted son and heir. The Caesarean triumph at Philippi in 42 BC extinguished the last hope that the status quo ante would be restored – henceforth real power would lie with individuals who controlled armies, not the Senate and the annual magistrates elected in Rome. Yet the fighting was far from over: having established hegemony over the eastern and western domains of the empire respectively, Antony and Octavian failed to patch up their differences and further warfare ensued, culminating in the latter’s victory in a naval engagement at Actium in 31 BC . Caesar’s heir was now the undisputed master of the Roman world, and in 27 BC he was granted the new honorific surname ‘Augustus’; shunning the ill-omened title of dictator, he was simply referred to as princeps, ‘chief ’, recalling the traditional position of princeps senatus, or senior senator. This new title did not indicate any constitutionally defined power, but rather the ability to shape policy through auctoritas (influence), and it was precisely on this informal basis that Augustus dominated the Roman state so completely until his death in AD 14. Decades of violent turbulence were followed by incipient autocracy, then – but what effect would all this have had on the poet Ovid? Unlike Horace, he did not fight at Philippi, nor was his ancestral land requisitioned, as befell Virgil. Yet just because he lacked such direct connection to the civil wars does not mean that he was not profoundly affected by the violence. Indeed, his distaste for warfare and his preference for a life of love and poetry over military campaigns (see II .10.27) are common across his work, and this is readily explained as a reaction to the bloodshed of his early years. In many ways,

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Ovid’s view of war is quite modern: he has no illusions about military glory, but instead emphasizes the hardships and privations of a soldier’s life. Given how he deprecates warfare, one might expect to find Ovid as an enthusiastic cheerleader for Augustus on the grounds that the princeps had at last restored peace to the Roman world (the so-called pax Augusta), thus making possible a life of poetic composition and otium (leisure). Yet the poet’s support for the new regime is at best equivocal. Happy to remain an eques, Ovid was not personally disadvantaged by the diminished prestige of the senate and elected magistracies; rather the tensions arise more from Augustus’ moral programme, which placed emperor and poet squarely at odds. Though he declined the formal title curator morum (guardian of morals), Augustus nevertheless passed a raft of legislation that heralded far greater state intervention in what were hitherto matters of private morality. Much of this was motivated by a fear of depopulation, which was exacerbated by the high death toll in the civil wars; the senatorial and equestrian orders in particular had been ravaged by the fighting (for example, Caesar’s heirs proscribed approximately one third of senate after the dictator’s assassination). Many of the laws Augustus subsequently passed thus sought to encourage the birth of legitimate children: hence the ius trium liberorum, political and financial rewards for families with three children; unmarried men were burdened with extra taxes and the loss of privileges, on the grounds that by failing to reproduce, they had neglected their duty to the state (which, at a fundamental level, required manpower to maintain its defence). Alongside this were restrictive new measures to combat adultery (the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis, 18 BC ), which made this a crime against the state and added stiffer penalties for malefactors. Similarly, men and women were no longer permitted to sit together in the theatre to prevent improper liaisons developing.

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This programme of moral renewal might have pleased sober conservatives in the towns and cities of Italy, but can hardly have been welcomed in metropolitan literary Rome – for it is an important aspect of love elegist’s persona that his affairs are furtivus Amor, secret affairs between single men and courtesans or unmarried women, relationships based on pleasure for the participants, not social duty. As a genre, then, love-elegy finds itself in an awkward position vis-à-vis the Augustan regime: at once dependent on the peace it provides, yet railing against the perceived imposition of a moral straitjacket. As regards the literary context of the Amores, Ovid grew to maturity during a golden age of Roman letters, which for the first time had seen Latin poets reach the standards of the Greek masters. Rome was no longer content to cede precedence in culture to anywhere else, and the first century BC produced many of the finest Latin writers: Cicero, who as an orator rivalled Demosthenes; Virgil, whose Aeneid was a national epic fit to stand alongside the works of Homer; and Horace, whose Latin lyric verse was every bit as polished as his Greek predecessors’. Ovid’s work, then, should not be seen in isolation, but rather as part of a rich literary culture, the product of an extraordinary period of artistic flourishing. For all their apparent lightness and wit, his poems are in fact sophisticated literary creations, written in full consciousness of the literary developments that had preceded them and seeking to resonate with the same kind of erudite audience at fashionable poetic soirées. This is not to say that Ovid’s work is derivative or generic in any way, for he certainly took love elegy in a wholly new direction (see below); moreover, there is much to enjoy in the poems that is timelessly fresh and requires no great understanding of the context. Yet on a deeper level, there is a good deal to be gained by grasping the political and literary context of the work. It is no small part of Ovid’s genius that his poetry can operate so successfully on so many different levels.

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Latin love elegy For all its timeless appeal, the genre of Latin love elegy has a surprisingly short history, and all four poets in the canon (Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid) were writing in the latter half of the first century BC . There were certainly Greek models for both elegy and erotic verse, but the synthesis of the two was a distinctly Roman phenomenon. The elegiac metre in Greek was originally used for sung laments (the meaning of the word elegos), but was soon adopted by poets to treat a variety of other themes. As early as the seventh century BC , the philosopher-statesman Solon used elegiacs for political verse, while Mimnermus used the metre to celebrate the pleasures of love and youth. Such works would have been sung at symposia (drinkingparties), the poems accompanied by flute-playing. A large number of elegies from the Classical period are attributed to Theognis, and these cover a vast array of topics, from the light to the serious, the political to the erotic. A good deal of love poetry was written in other metres, though: Sappho, Alcman and Anacreon all used other lyric forms. In the Hellenistic period, Philitas of Cos wrote a longer elegiac work, Demeter, and appears to have written some erotic verse for his mistress, Bittis, too. The most notable elegist, though, is Callimachus, the Alexandrian scholar-poet; his Aitia (meaning ‘causes’) are known only in fragmentary form, but seem to have mixed epigram with some longer mythological narratives; his polished verses, rich in allusion and antiquarian learning, were much admired in antiquity, not least by Ovid. In his prologue, Callimachus also anticipates Ovid (see Amores II .1) by explicitly rejecting epic, preferring the finer texture of elegy instead; he talks of keeping his Muse slender, ‘better the cicada than the braying mule’ (Aitia, fr. 1). He was no love poet, though: the unifying theme of this work is explanation, linking things

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present to things past. Ovid’s most distinctly Callimachean work is the Fasti. Elegy was introduced to Latin verse by the poet Ennius (239–169 BC ); he was most famous for his tragedies and a long narrative poem tracing the history of Rome from the sack of Troy to his own era, but a number of elegiac epigrams are also attested. Much more important for the later development of love elegy, though, was Catullus (c. 84–54 BC ). He experiments with a wide variety of lyric metres, and is similarly eclectic in his choice of themes, treating everything from high-flown mythography to politics and scurrilous invective. The poems addressed to his pseudonymous lover, Lesbia, foreshadow later writers, though; each piece offers a snapshot of the relationship, tracing its progress from courtship and initial harmony through acrimony and estrangement to eventual renunciation. The vigour and raw emotion that permeate his verse offer an instructive contrast with Ovid’s work. None of his four elegiac poems form part of this amatory narrative, however, although 67 (addressed to an adulterous door) does have close parallels in Ovid and Propertius. The first bona fide Latin elegist (in Ovid’s view at least) was Gallus, who probably wrote in the 40s BC . A partisan of Augustus, he was the princeps’ first governor of Egypt, but seems to have overreached himself and incurred the emperor’s displeasure; recalled in disgrace, he was driven to suicide c. 26 BC . His poetry survives in only a handful of fragments, but he apparently wrote four books of erotic verse (also called Amores), featuring his mistress, Lycoris (identified as Volumnia Cytheris, sometime lover of Mark Antony). Fortunately, the works of Ovid’s older contemporaries Propertius and Tibullus do survive in substantial form. Propertius, a native of the Umbrian town of Asisium (modern Assisi), wrote four books of love elegy (c. 30–16 BC ), focusing on his mistress, Cynthia. His work is complex and allusive, and in this he was evidently hoping to emulate Callimachus. Yet his poems are far from dry or academic; instead

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there is plenty of organic emotion, veering from ecstasy to fear and jealousy, and the poet has a particular preoccupation with his own death. Non-amatory themes are increasingly prominent in his later work: history, art, and philosophy all feature, and Book III has touches of epic, hymnody and pastoral. His work is not without humour either, as at IV.8, where Cynthia discovers her lover at a debauched party with a pair of prostitutes. In common with Ovid, Propertius is not above showing some ambivalence towards the Augustan order: IV.6, for example, purports to celebrate the victory at Actium, but ends discordantly with praise of an all-night drinking session. Tibullus (c. 53–19 BC ) was a member of the literary circle gathered around Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, sometime patron of Ovid too. His first book of poems appeared around 27 BC , his second some years later (most of the poems in the third book attributed to him were probably written by other members of Messalla’s circle). His chief lover is named Delia, but a second girl, Nemesis, appears in Book II, and also a boy, Marathus – the only instance of homosexual love in Latin elegy. In common with Propertius, he also treats nonamatory themes, with poems in honour of his patron Messalla and celebrations of the blessings of peace. But his work lacks the frenetic vigour of his contemporary; he seems a gentler character, with poems that often meander in terms of theme, not necessarily focusing on single episodes. The absence of mythological allusion is also notable, and he is far less Callimachean in spirit than Propertius. For the late rhetorician Quintilian, though, he was the ‘most refined and elegant’ of the Latin elegists, with a smoothly sophisticated simplicity of syntax and artful choice of vocabulary that set him ahead of his rivals. Despite their differences, however, Propertius and Tibullus between them establish a common core that defines the generic boundaries of love elegy, and Ovid’s love poems are very much a response to theirs. Latin love elegy is a self-consciously literary genre, as much concerned with the business of poetry as with love itself. The mistress herself is a

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somewhat shadowy figure, attractive, often fickle, but otherwise hard to characterize. Rather than dilating on the beauty of the beloved, the love elegists instead tend to look inwards; many of the poems make no mention of the lover at all, but instead treat love much more abstractly. The poems often take the form of dramatic monologues, and exploit the theatrical possibilities therein to recount particular incidents in the poet’s career. The contrast between love and a war, between life as a soldier and life as a lover, is a favourite topic, as is the rejection of hexameter epic in favour of amatory verse; both themes indicate the status anxiety of poets developing a new genre. Many of the poems turn on a particular paradox: at times the poets hate the life of a lover, yet refuse to abjure it; they are men of rank and wealth, yet are ‘enslaved’ to their ‘mistresses’; they reject the serious business of war and politics, but for them love comes to be every bit as serious. Such then is the stock-in-trade of Latin love elegy. How Ovid responded to his predecessors and developed the canon is explored below.

The Amores In the poem before Amores I, Ovid tells us that the work originally spanned five books, but was later revised down to three – ‘though you may derive no pleasure from reading us, at least the burden will be lighter now two are removed’ (prol. 3–4). We know Ovid was giving readings of his poetry (presumably some of the early poems in the Amores) when he was still a youth, so he probably started work on them in the late 20s BC . There are not a vast number of datable references in the poems to assist us; the lament for the dead Tibullus (III .9 ) places this poem after 19 BC , while references to the defeat of the Sygambri in I.11.45–50 take us to at least 16 BC , if not 11 BC , the year in which the emperor’s stepson Drusus celebrated his ovatio over the German tribe.

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Fortunately, precise delineation of the dates of composition is far from crucial for our appreciation of the work; but it is important to distinguish between the separate phases of recitation and publication. Latin poets would in the first instance demonstrate their talents to the wider world through the spoken rather than the written word, reciting their poems at literary gatherings; thus even if we are reading the poems silently to ourselves, we must remember that originally they would have been read aloud instead. When in II .6 , for example, Ovid summons the birds to mourn Corinna’s dead parrot, once can well imagine how the poet might exploit the theatrical setting to cast the audience in this role. The regular use of exclamations such as en and ecce, the employment of direct speech and apostrophe (literally, ‘turning aside’, where the narrator unexpectedly addresses one of his characters – or even a ring, sent as a gift to the mistress, as in II .15): all these effects would be heightened in the context of a recitatio. Not only could the poets then take advantage of the dramatic potential of the performance, but they could also revise and amend their work depending on the audience’s response – perhaps not dissimilar to the way stand-up comedians operate today. Only when the poems had endured this process of recitation and revision would they be published, that is to say written out in a particular order on a scroll and copied for wider circulation. There was no hurry to do this; Ovid was not trying to make money from his work, and unlike many of the other Augustan poets he did not have a patron to satisfy. We do not know when Ovid gave this collection the title ‘Amores’ (literally ‘love affairs’). In his later poems, he only appears to refer to them once in this way (Ars III .343f), but this could equally be a general reference to love poetry rather than a specific title (in modern orthography, amores not Amores). McKeown suggests that Amores may have been adopted as a title for the later three-book edition, to distinguish these poems from Ovid’s other amatory oeuvre (the Ars Amatoria and the Heroides). In any case, it may be a nod to

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Gallus, whose works were possibly published under this name (Gallus in turn was perhaps recalling the Greek poet Phanocles, whose Erotes catalogued a series of homosexual mythological love stories). In some ways, the title seems curiously inappropriate for Ovid’s work, though, as often love in the sense of pure, raw, passionate emotion is hardly at the forefront of the poet’s mind; the focus is instead more literary, on the business of writing love poetry or other subsidiary aspects of the affair (II .18 is one of the best examples of this). As we have seen, the poems do not appear to be arranged in strict chronological order: the lament for Tibullus, who died in 19 BC , does not come until Book III, yet the victory over the Sygambri, which might be as much as eight years later, is treated as a recent event in Book I. In so far as the poems are concerned with Ovid’s liaison with Corinna, though, the collection does broadly trace the trajectory of the affair (as does the work of Propertius and Tibullus): Book I features the first flush of love and sexual conquest, Book II the affair at its most torrid (betrayal and infidelity), and Book III its conclusion and the lovers’ parting, with Ovid moving on not just from Corinna but also from love elegy more generally. That said, many of the poems would be equally at home anywhere chronologically, and the interest in the structure of the collection lies more in the contrasts between the themes (Catullus’ poems are arranged in a similar fashion). In II .10, for example, Ovid complains about the burden of loving two girls at once, yet the immediately in II .11 we find him heartbroken that Corinna plans to travel abroad; evidently her trip does not happen, however, because in the next poem Ovid is celebrating their union – only for him to castigate her for a rash attempt at abortion in II .13. That said, most of the poems function happily enough in isolation, as no doubt they had done when first read out at the literary parties to an appreciative (and probably somewhat inebriated) crowd. A crucial question which many readers of the Amores are bound to ask concerns the ‘historical accuracy’ of Ovid’s account. Is this a

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work of fact or fiction, or something in between? In particular, we may want to know more about the elusive ‘Corinna’, Ovid’s mistress. As with Tibullus’ Delia and Propertius’ Cynthia, this is also a pseudonym; but the closest parallel is perhaps Catullus’ Lesbia, which recalled Sappho, the female lyric poet from the island of Lesbia, for Corinna too was the name of Greek poetess. There are alternative explanations: metrically, it is identical with puella, while etymologically it recalls the Greek chore, ‘girl’. Both of these are plausible since Corinna as a character can easily appear so generic, an idealization of the elegiac lover. This is not to say she is perfect, for an elegist’s beloved never is; it is often the girl’s caprices and infidelities that motivate the individual poems (her haughtiness is assailed in II .17, for example). Like Cynthia and Delia, she was quite possibly a high-class courtesan or meretrix, but equally she may have been a freeborn married woman, as mention of her vir would suggest. In her behaviour and character too, Corinna is hard to distinguish from earlier elegiac mistresses, not least because she plays a rather less prominent role. Many of the poems do not even mention her; we may assume that she is the girl in question, but there are clearly other women in Ovid’s orbit. Book II of the Amores features her most prominently, but even so she is only named in seven of the twenty poems (in Book I, by contrast, she is named in just two). Yet even when his relationship with her is at its most intense, his attention is readily diverted; in II .2 for example, addressed to the eunuch chaperone Bagoas, the context suggests that Ovid has only just seen the girl for the first time; it is possible that he is recalling the start of his affair with Corinna, but equally plausible that it is another girl altogether. Given his catholicity of taste (II .4 ) and his admitted weakness for two girls concurrently (II .10), this would hardly be surprising. This lack of clarity on Ovid’s part need not be seen as a shortcoming, though. Rather he delights in tantalising us with snippets of

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information, keeping us guessing about the true nature of his affair – at II .17 .29–30, he clearly relishes the speculation about Corinna’s identity. In his autobiography, he does indeed claim that his early poetry was not a true reflection of its author: Believe me, my morals are very different from my verse: my life is restrained, but my Muse is playful. A good part of my works was false, fictitious; its author was more restrained. Nor is a book evidence of one’s life, but an honourable intention to bring great pleasure to the ears of the listener. (Tristia II .347–52).

Yet before we simply accept this verdict, we should pay close attention to the context of this comment; for it is part of Ovid’s versified plea to Augustus to pardon him, when he has every reason to try to whitewash his past conduct in the hope of securing his return to Rome. Surely if the Corinna affair was pure fantasy, he would have said as much to the emperor; yet even now, he still implicitly concedes that some of what he wrote was grounded in truth – hence the most he can say is that a magna pars was false. In fact, if we are to suspect some aspects of the Amores of being fictionalized, the evidence is more likely to come from the poems themselves, in particular where episodes bear such close similarities to those found in the earlier elegists, or else explore themes from epigram or comedy. The eunuch slave in II .2 , for example, is a familiar figure from the comic plays of Plautus and Terence, and Ovid brilliantly exploits the rhetorical opportunities the situation provides. Likewise, his lament for Corinna’s dead parrot clearly has an eye on Catullus’ funeral piece for Lesbia’s sparrow. As long as Corinna remained unmasked, he was of course free to mix fact and fiction – quite possibly this was one reason why he was so concerned to preserve her anonymity (though the illicit nature of the affair was no doubt significant too). Likewise, any attempts to separate the poetic

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persona ‘Naso’ from the historical Ovid are probably futile; what matters is that we set the poems in their appropriate literary and historical context – not whether particular incidents are faithful diary entries of a day in the life of the poet. Discussion of the ‘authenticity’ of Ovid’s narrative can be seen as part of a broader literary question: what was the poet’s attitude to his chosen genre? Ovid’s relationship with the genres in which he wrote is never straightforward; compare the Metamorphoses, a substantial hexameter work, yet whose very prologue seems to equivocate between epic and Callimachean lyric (cf. Metamorphoses I .4). With love-elegy, though, Ovid has no need to hint at other genres to achieve such a paradox; rather the genre is inherently paradoxical, in so far as Love, something traditionally viewed as ‘light’ and unimportant compared with statecraft and heroic virtue, becomes a matter of great seriousness for those whom Cupid strikes. In his explicit choice of the life of lover-poet over that of military service, law or political office, Ovid remains firmly in the tradition of Propertius and Tibullus (though not Gallus, of course; see above). Moreover, while his predecessors had expanded the subject-matter of love elegy (Tibullus, for example, digresses to celebrate his patron Messalla’s triumph (I .7); Propertius celebrates the opening of a new colonnade by Augustus (II .31)), Ovid rarely strays from traditional amatory themes. Rather, his innovation lies in his approach to these topics. One view of Ovid’s work is that his poems are simply a parody of his chosen genre. Yet while it may be true that a good deal of the wit depends on seeing how his work responds to and subverts his predecessors, there is a danger of oversimplification here, and crude contrasts are to be discouraged. Thus while Propertius’ tone can often be more serious than Ovid’s, there are plenty of lighter, more humorous instances in his poems too (see above). What perhaps distinguishes Ovid is that even where we might expect him to treat a theme seriously, he often refuses to do so. The cheerful erotic fantasy of his death in

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flagrante is a good example of this (II .10), such a contrast with Propertius’ morbid fascination with his own demise (cf. Propertius II .13B). Similarly, the descriptions of storms and sea monsters in II .11 are more redolent of literary flight of fancy than genuine anxiety at Corinna’s prospective voyage – hence the ease at which he moves on to imagine her joyous return. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that the servitium amoris theme is less prevalent than in other elegists; the pose of enslavement at the start of II .17 soon disappears, and by the end of the poem we are in little doubt that it is Ovid in control of the relationship. Rather than viewing the Amores as a mere parody of love-elegy, the better view is perhaps to see the poems as a kind of literary experiment, testing and probing the boundaries of the genre: an exercise in avantgarde literature avant la lettre. According to this view, what most distinguishes Ovid from his predecessors is that poetry itself (not love) is the primary focus. Where they reflected on their emotions through the medium of their chosen genre, in Ovid the roles are reversed, and his central interest is in the poetic art itself, not the purported amatory subject-matter (see II .18 for Ovid’s extended reflections on genre, addressed to his friend Macer). In this context, the relatively minor role played by Corinna is unsurprising; if she is not the poet’s primary interest or the real inspiration for his work, but rather a necessary construct for the exploration of the genre, then her lack of deeper characterization becomes readily explicable. Similarly, the absence of raw emotion is understandable; it is not human passion that drives Ovid to write literature, but literary interest that drives him to write about love. This interpretation could be characterized as ‘metapoetic’: Ovid’s Amores are not so much poems about love as poems about lovepoetry itself. In addition to the poems presented in Latin in this volume (and which are summarized in the commentary notes), you are also

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encouraged to read and compare the following poems in translation: II.1, II.9 (both parts), II.11, II.15, II.17, II.18. Each poem is summarized (with brief comments) below.

II.1 Prologue Presuming that his reader will be familiar with his earlier love poems, Ovid deftly reintroduces himself, identifies his audience and makes some bold claims about his chosen genre. His self-description as ‘Naso, famous poet of his own vice’ makes clear his artistic confidence at this point (1–2). Those of austere morals are warned to stay away; in such a context, the use of the language of a priest warding off the uninitiated or morally impure is richly ironic (3–4). Where other love poets explain their choice of elegiac over epic in terms of lack of ability to compose in a higher genre, Ovid has no such qualms. Rather, he explains, he was working on a fine epic narrative (a Gigantomachia, or Wars of the Giants), when a lock-out by his girlfriend forced him to return to elegy (11–18). This dramatic conceit gives the opportunity to celebrate the power of poetry (23–8). For poets to celebrate their art for the utility of its moral didacticism is conventional enough, but Ovid brusquely deprecates traditional epic themes of heroism (29–32). His approach is rather more subversive: the elegist’s reward for his art is often the girl herself (33–8).

II.9A and II.9B Antithesis is a favourite Ovidian device, and Ovid skilfully exploits this here with a witty doublet of addresses to Cupid, first reviling the god for continuing to harry his devoted follower, then turning abruptly to celebrate the ‘wounds’ inflicted by the god’s arrows.

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Both poems are rich in the imagery of war and power. II .9A presents Cupid as a general who continues to torment his most loyal soldier (1–4), and, in a tone of some bitterness, asks the god why he does not direct his arrows towards those as yet unconquered and thus win greater glory (5–16). Rather, Ovid pleads, he should now be allowed to ‘retire’, a situation illustrated with conventional images of a horse put out to pasture and (perhaps somewhat suggestively) a gladiator laying down his sword (19–24). All thoughts of peaceful retirement are swiftly abandoned in the second poem, though; in a dramatic volte-face, Ovid instead rejoices in the ‘sweet evil’ of love, and turns instead to conventional naturalistic imagery to show how whenever his passion begins to wane, the flames are soon rekindled (25–32). Now welcoming Cupid’s arrows, Ovid scorns the man whose life is free of love, and boldly savours not just love’s triumphs but its reversals and rejections too (39–46). Somewhat mischievously, he suggests that the uncertainties of war stem from the uncertainties of love, the war-god Mars taught as much by his stepson Cupid (47–8). The poem ends on a note of resolution, though: Ovid prays that girls too will fall within the love-god’s kingdom, and both sexes will unite in veneration (53–4).

II.11 This piece is an example of a propemptikon, or poem for a departing traveller. There are some parallels with Propertius I .8A, but Ovid’s version, switching from apparent fear for Corinna’s safety to future rejoicing at her safe homecoming, is far more complex and varied in tone. The poem opens with a retrospective curse on sea-faring, harking back to the Argo as the first ship (1–6). Turning to address Corinna directly, Ovid rehearses the conventional dangers of the ocean (such as Scylla and Charybdis, monsters familiar from the Odyssey) and

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wishes that girls would confine their exploration of the sea to paddling on the beach; rather than finding out for herself, Corinna should let others report back on the perils of the open sea (9–22). The tone changes abruptly in the middle of the poem, though: having called on the sea deities Galatea and Nereus to keep his beloved safe (33–40), he looks ahead to his joy at her safe return. There is no Propertian anxiety that Corinna may be unfaithful during her absence; instead Ovid blithely disclaims any concern as to the truth of her farrago (53–4), and ends cheerfully enough, calling on the Lucifer (the Morning Star) to bring the day of her return as soon as possible.

II.15 This is one of the most explicitly erotic pieces in the Amores. Written to accompany a ring that is given as love-token to his mistress, the poet goes on to fantasize about transforming himself into his gift, relishing the physical proximity to his beloved that this would entail. It shows how the future poet of the Metamorphoses was already fascinated by the artistic potential inherent in tales of transformation, but the voice is still that of the urbane, worldly elegist, always recognizing his flight of fancy for what it is. The poem opens conventionally enough with a dedication by way of apostrophe of the ring, expressing the hope that the band will be a good fit for the girl’s finger, in the same way as the couple are a good fit for one another (1–6). Rather more innovatively, though, Ovid moves from envy of his gift to outright metamorphic fantasy. Wishing for some magical transformation, he envisages how as the ring he would be able to touch his mistress’ breasts and slip off into her lap by the same magical art (7–14). There are darker hints of infidelity, though; Ovid likes the idea that his ring-persona will be pressed to the mistress’ lips to seal her letters, but equally hopes that he will not be forced to seal any correspondence that will grieve him (15–18). The

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final image is the most erotic of all: Ovid hopes that the mistress will continue to wear ‘him’ as she washes herself (naked), and imagines that the magical token will somehow develop male anatomy and ‘play the part of a man’ (21–6). The poet comes back down to earth in the final couplet, however; as though waking from his reverie, he asks why he is making these vain prayers and quickly sends his gift on its way as token of fides (27–8).

II.17 The notion of male lover as ‘slave’ to the female beloved is common enough elsewhere in elegy, though not so prevalent in Ovid; his only other treatment of the theme is at I.3. The present poem is also far less anguished than its Propertian and Tibullan counterparts (see, for example, Propertius II.13 and Tibullus II.4), and beneath the conceit of servitium amoris we have little doubt that it is really Ovid who is still in charge. The opening of the poem is conventional enough: Ovid acknowledging the disgrace of his ‘enslavement’ (and the inherent inversion of gender roles that this entails), but wishing that Venus would ‘burn’ him a little less forcefully (1–4). He then moves on to complain of Corinna’s haughtiness, occasioned by pride in her beauty and awareness of the power that this gives her (7–14). To support his argument that she should not despise him, he offers a catalogue of mythological exempla, citing goddesses who have joined with lesser gods or men (15–20), then concludes with a witty metapoetic joke: the elegiac couplet is itself a successful union of unequal lines, the ‘heroic’ hexameter and the shorter pentameter (21–2). Corinna is again depicted as the dominant force, dictating terms like a victorious general or giving judgement like a magistrate in the forum (23–4). But the latter part of the poem suggests that Ovid’s servitude is something of a pose, not quite as abject as it might seem at first. Ovid points out

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the high regard in which his work is held, and how many other women would like him to celebrate them in verse; one even claims that she is Corinna, and apparently would do anything to make this happen (27– 30). The subtext is clear enough: be more cooperative, or you may find that it is another girl whom I celebrate beneath the same pseudonym. Only you, ‘Corinna’, will be inspiration for my verse, he says (31–4); but the identity of the girl behind the name might be a more open question.

II.18 Like many of Ovid’s poems, this programmatic piece is more about poetry than love, reflecting on the poet’s literary career so far and reaffirming his commitment to elegy towards the end of the second book of the Amores. The piece is addressed to Macer, a friend and fellow poet; unlike the perfunctory nod to Graecinus in II .10, though, the device is not simply formulaic here. Instead, Ovid can contrast himself with Macer, who is apparently writing an epic on the Trojan War, and explain why he too is not writing something similar (1–10). On the point of attempting to compose something in a higher genre, Ovid was instead compelled to return to elegy by his mistress’ tearful entreaties (and kisses); as in the prologue (II .1), Ovid’s recusatio has nothing of the polite fiction espoused by other elegists that they would be unable to write in other genres. He claims that he had in fact begun writing a tragedy, symbolized by the tragic actor’s high boot (cothurnus); perhaps this was his Medea, now lost but well-known in antiquity (15–18). The other poetic projects to which he refers do survive, though; both were ‘permitted’ presumably as they continued the amatory theme. After a brief reference to the Ars Amatoria (19–20), Ovid spends rather longer on the Heroides, his series of elegiac epistles from mythical heroines abandoned by their husbands or lovers (21–6).

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This gives Ovid the opportunity to acknowledge another friend, Sabinus, who has apparently composed a series of ‘replies’ on the behalf of the fictional addressees (27–34). Returning to Macer at the end of the poem, Ovid closes on a witty, even provocative note: even in his friend’s epic narrative Love is not silent; Paris’ adultery stands as the cause of Trojan War. Indeed, Ovid suggests, Macer rather enjoys writing about such amatory themes; perhaps, to use the appropriate military metaphor, he is already coming over to Ovid’s camp (35–40).

Ovid the orator Many of the poems owe a considerable debt to Ovid’s early rhetorical training, and indeed some of the best examples of this are found in the selection presented here. Ovid himself noted the similarities between the two skills in a later work (cf. Pont. II .5.65f.), and is said to have incorporated some of the most famous aphorisms of his tutor Porcius Latro into his poetry. In the rhetorical schools, students would be given standard exercises to practise their technique; the more absurd or implausible the case, the better the orator needed to present it. A typical exercise might therefore be to write a speech in praise of a mythical or historical figure (encomium), but the individual chosen would be a paradigmatic villain (perhaps the child-killing sacrilegious Tantalus or Cicero’s antagonist, Catiline) – hence the pupil’s skill would be tested by his ability to vindicate the subject, excusing their apparent misdeeds and explaining how they had come to be misunderstood. Like a rhetorical exercise, each poem in the Amores typically has a single theme (this contrasts with Propertius) and often presents a kind of argument. Particularly appropriate in the context of love elegy is the suasoria, or speech of persuasion, but Ovid does not direct his honeyed words to his mistress alone. Husbands, door-keepers, and even a mountain torrent that obstructs his return to Corinna are all addressed

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at various points; in the selection here, II .2 is very much a versified suasoria, where the poet entreats the eunuch Bagoas to grant him access to the girl in his charge. The kinds of arguments employed are all consistent with what the rhetorical handbooks prescribe (fear and the prospect of material gain are apt to move a servile mind, we are told). The lament for Corinna’s dead parrot, meanwhile, closely follows the model of an epikedion, or funeral speech; this is a good example of epideictic oratory (for ‘display’ rather than persuasive purposes). Likewise II .10, in which the poet complains of the torment induced by loving two girls at once, recalls the progymnastic (preliminary) exercise of synkrisis, where the pupil would have to compare two subjects (often to bring out the merits of one or both). II .12 can also be seen as a kind of rhetorical excursus; the poet demonstrates his skill by arguing persuasively for an apparently absurd proposition, that his amatory conquest of Corinna surpasses a real military triumph (similar to the progymnastic exercise of confirmatio). II .9 similarly has hints of rhetorical controversia, where the poet-orator showcases his argumentative dexterity: first arguing vigorously for one side (that he be allowed to retire gracefully from amatory service) then switching abruptly to move the opposite view. Earlier critics who labelled Ovid as a ‘rhetorical’ poet sometimes did so disparagingly, as though his poems were merely versified school exercises. This is surely an exaggeration, for while his work may use the structure of rhetorical excursus, his application of this form to love elegy is highly innovative; oratorical elements do not detract from the poetic, but rather enhance it. Ovid’s synthesis of two apparently antithetical genres is characteristically bold, but effective nonetheless – hence why a proper understanding of the rhetorical models to which he is responding adds much to our appreciation of his verse.

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Ovid’s style (Individual literary points are explained in the notes; the following instead offers some comments on the poet’s style in the Amores more generally.) The rhetoricians also encouraged a sense of balance in composition, and Ovid’s couplets often capture this; typically, the pentameter either echoes the idea in the hexameter with a contrasting form of words or else offers a contrasting idea but with a grammatical form that closely parallels the preceding line. There is often a sense of balance or contrast within the line too, typically structured around the caesura. Consequently, literary tropes which emphasise this are popular: ●

●

●

adversative asyndeton, where the lack of a conjunction serves to highlight the contrast. Example: graciles, non sunt sine viribus artus (II .10.23) – sed or a similar conjunction is to be understood after graciles. chiasmus, a symmetrical arrangement of words. Example: et simulet lacrimas carnificemque vocet (II .2.36) – verbnoun-noun-verb. apo koinou, where a word found in one clause must be supplied in the other. Example: et magis haec nobis et magis illa placet (II .10.7)– placet is to be understood in the first half of the line too.

Other common techniques reflect the dramatic monologue form that many of the poems take: ●

●

rhetorical question, used to drive home an argument rather than make a genuine request for information. Example: quis minor est autem quam tacuisse labor? (II .2.28) exclamation. Example: felix, quem Veneris certamina mutua perdunt! (II .10.29)

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apostrophe, addressing someone or something not literally present in the dramatic situation (such as a mythical hero). Example: quod scelus Ismarii quereris, Philomela, tyranni (II .6.7)

Many of the other hallmarks of sophisticated ancient verse are in evidence too: ●

●

●

●

●

●

synecdoche, where a part stands for the whole. Example: puppis (II .4.8) – ‘stern’ meaning ‘ship’. metonymy, where an aspect or adjunct of something stands for the thing itself (there is a subtle difference between this and synecdoche). Example: Pergama (II .12.9) – strictly Pergamum was just the citadel of Troy, but is regularly used for the city as a whole. (This is also an instance of ‘poetic’ plural for singular.) alliteration: repetition of the same consonant sound (distinguish this from assonance, where the same vowel sound is repeated). Example: plangite pectora pinnis (II .6.3). litotes: a form of understatement; a negative is used to emphasize the contrary. Example: rustica non (II .4.13) means ‘sophisticated’. tricolon: a set of three. Example: quid folia arboribus, quid pleno sidera caelo,/in freta collectas alta quid addis aquas? (II .10.13–14). ‘Leaves . . . stars . . . water’: all three nouns are objects of addis. (This couplet is also an example of anaphora, repeating the same word, quid, at the start of successive clauses.) allusive adjectives, requiring background knowledge of relevant myths. Example: Erycina (II .10.11) for the goddess Venus, who had a famous temple on Mount Eryx in Sicily.

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For the most part, Ovid’s language is fairly conventional: he is not a great exponent of archaism (conscious use of old-fashioned forms), but does allow himself the occasional new coinage, such as nemorali (II .6.57). Abbreviated forms are sometimes used, such as lassarit (II .10.33) for lassaverit and ausim (II .4.1) for ausus sim; often this may be for metrical reasons. Some passive forms must be translated as active too, such as the passive imperative devertere (II .6.9); this is similar to the middle voice in Greek. Where appropriate, he may also use technical language for effect: the triumphal context of II .12 calls for technical military terms (such as signa movere, ‘go into battle’); in II .2 , legal jargon is required, as Ovid considers how a husband may react to allegations of adultery – culpa nec ex facili quamvis manifesta probatur (II .2 .55), ‘nor is guilt easily proven even when clear’. Elsewhere, he employs a more heroic register, epic gravity consciously jarring with amatory levity: thus Ovid equates his sexual conquest of Corinna to the sack of Troy (Pergama and bello . . . bilustri add a Virgilian twist). By contrast, the occasional vulgarism may be smuggled in too, often in the discreet form of a double-entendre: opus (II .10.36), for example, is a perfectly proper word for a poetic composition or other work of art, but can also signify a sex-act. Indeed, Ovid relishes the nuances in meaning afforded by such lexical ambiguities: mollis is another favoured term, literally just ‘soft’ or ‘gentle’, but figuratively ‘effeminate’ or ‘unwarlike’. Smooth and polished as his elegiacs may be, much of the joy of the poems lies in the ideas and ‘arguments’ themselves, not just the words used to express them. In particular, Ovid delights in both parody and paradox, now gently mocking conventions, now brashly maintaining absurdities; the poet teases us, often playing up the discord between style and substance. II .6 is apparently a serious, fulsome lament – but for a dead parrot, so that the piece becomes parodic. Similarly, II .2 trades on the paradox that Ovid, the Roman eques, finds himself grovelling in subservience to the eunuch slave who is keeping him

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from his lover. As well as the tensions within the poems (see II .9 for antithetical arguments presented side by side), the wit of the collection as a whole depends on the blatant contradictions the different poems express. Thus one could contrast the omnivorous lover of II .4 with the profession that only ‘Corinna’ will be the inspiration for his verse in II .17 (cf. the pledge of fidelity and undying love at outset of the affair in I.15–18). Similarly, the excitement of the amatory ‘triumph’ in II .12 will later give way to impotence and frustration in III .7 . The suasoria addressed to Bagoas (II .2 ) evidently fails, for the very next poem finds Ovid crudely reviling the eunuch for his failure to cooperate. II .7 and II .8 offer a similar pairing (also known as a poetic diptych): in the first Ovid vigorously denies that he has had an affair with Corinna’s maid Cypassis and ends with a great oath to Venus affirming his innocence, only for him to address the maid herself in the next poem, wondering how on earth Corinna has become aware of their affair. Ovid may have had some detractors in the ancient world (see Quintilian Institutio Oratoria X .1.88 and Seneca Controversiae IX .5.17, for example), and even his modern editor Barsby finds him lacking Virgil’s ear for sound and rhythm and Horace’s effortless ingenuity in word-order. Whatever the Amores may lack on these counts, however, the poems’ paradoxical wit and the absurd braggadocio of their narrator have timeless appeal and make them eminently readable to this day. Yet despite Ovid’s accessibility, we should not dismiss him as a mere dilettante, for beneath the banterous veneer is a considerable degree of sophistication that would not have been lost on more learned contemporary audiences. In particular, his creative dialogue with earlier authors sets him in the erudite tradition of Callimachus. McKeown catalogues instances of ‘double allusion’, where he returns to an earlier model (for example, an apparent allusion to Propertius or Tibullus may also contain a detail from the Callimachean model that was not found in the more recent version).

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Likewise, he sometimes ‘etymologises’: for example, Roma, nisi immensum vires promosset in orbem (II .11.17), ‘if Rome had not unleashed its strength upon the boundless earth’, playing on the supposed derivation of Roma from Greek rhome, ‘strength’. Though the uninitiated reader may miss such nuances, the fact that the poems can operate effectively on a number of different literary levels is surely much to their credit; as for their unobtrusive sophistication, Ovid himself later observed that si latet, ars prodest (Ars Am. II .313), ‘a skill is successful if it is hidden’.

Metre In common with almost all ancient verse, the rhythm of the elegiac couplet is determined by quantity (the length of the syllables) rather than stress (as in English verse). Each couplet is composed of a hexameter (made up of six metrical ‘feet’) and a pentameter (five ‘feet’). The basic unit of the metre is a ‘dactyl’, made up of a long syllable followed by two shorts (long and short syllables are now often referred to as ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ instead). The term derives from Greek daktylos, ‘finger’, which is of course made up of one long and two short joints. Often the two short syllables may be ‘resolved’ into a single long, and the resultant foot (two long syllables) is called a spondee. Of the six feet in the hexameter, the first four can be either dactyls or spondees; the fifth is always a dactyl, while the sixth is either a spondee or ‘long-short’ (troche); a pause (caesura) usually occurs half-way through the third foot. The pentameter is also made up of dactylic units, but arranged more rigidly in two half-lines each composed of two-and-half feet. In the first half-line, the first two feet can be dactyls or spondees; a single long syllable follows. However, the entire second half of the pentameter is fixed as dactyl-dactyl-long,

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and the caesura is always between the two half-lines. In Ovid, there is an additional rule that the last word of the pentameter is disyllabic (two syllables); often the final syllables of each half-line may agree or rhyme too. This gives a much stronger sense of closure at the end of the couplet than is found at the end of an epic hexameter. Compared to Greek, the Latin language has far fewer short syllables, so Latin elegists had to work hard to replicate the lightness of their Greek models – as a rule, the Augustan elegists are more successful in this than Catullus, and heavily spondaic lines are rarely used except to achieve a particularly dirge-like effect. Sometimes the pentameter may merely restate the idea in the preceding hexameter, and Ovid’s detractors claim that even in his hexameter Metamorphoses, his propensity to repeat himself from one line to the next remains; but equally one may counter that it is precisely by means of such verbal dexterity that the poet’s skill is made manifest. Moreover, the important idea within the couplet may well be delayed until the pentameter; Ovid is not afraid to keep us guessing for a while, or to unexpectedly dash our expectations of what we thought he was going to say. Ovid generally follows the metrical rules very strictly. Enjambment from one couplet to the next is rare, and the metre suits a more pointed, aphoristic mode of expression. The poet is putting on a show for us, his emotions subordinated to his artistry; contrast this with Catullus’ frequent irregularities and elisions, evoking a raw passion that could not be tamed within the bounds of metrical convention. The internal balance of the couplet encourages the poet to proceed by means of thesis and antithesis, and in the very first poem of the Amores he speaks of his verse rising in the hexameter and falling in the pentameter (Am. I .1.27). Within the pentameter symmetrical word order (chiasmus) is often used to emphasize a point, pivoting around the caesura. Weak pauses are rare in hexameter lines too: either there is a strong break in the middle of the third foot, or

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strong breaks in the middle of both the second and fourth feet. Regularity does not mean monotony, however; the light, fluent metre suits the conceit of a confident, fast-talking poet-narrator, and Ovid manages to achieve sufficient variation within the rules to maintain our interest, notably through varying the lengths of phrases within the couplets.

Ovidian afterlives Though Augustus apparently banned Ovid’s work from the public libraries in Rome following the poet’s disgrace in AD 8 (Tristia III .1.59–82, 14.7–14), the Amores nevertheless remained popular in antiquity. Yet while the amatory works are regularly cited by later writers, the genre of love elegy itself appears to peter out; in the first century AD, Quintilian accepts the same canon of four elegists (Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid) that Ovid himself had put forward a century earlier. Perhaps the poet’s exile served to discourage imitators; yet it was the Ars rather than the Amores that was supposedly the work at fault. Nor is it obvious that an atmosphere of greater moral austerity silenced the elegiac muse. Though elegy’s purported celebration of adultery remained problematic, the poems themselves are far less explicit than Petronius’ Satyricon or Martial’s epigrams, for example; II .15 is perhaps one of Ovid’s most risqué pieces, but remains fairly mild by the standards of other authors. More likely, perhaps, that Ovid seemed to have had the last word in love elegy. Did Ovid’s successors perhaps feel that any further attempt at love elegy would struggle to match the brilliance of the Amores? Or was it more that once Ovid had simultaneously appropriated and subverted the genre’s norms, no one could take it seriously any longer? Following the Christianization of the Empire, the monastic tradition of scholarship proved rather less enthusiastic about Ovid’s

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love poems, but fortunately his works survived to find new popularity from the twelfth century AD onwards. That a churchman such as William of St-Thierry sees fit to critique the Ars in this period is good evidence of its general circulation. Other scholars, however, found ingenious ways to justify Ovid’s inclusion in the curriculum. Thus the Heroides, ‘letters’ from abandoned women to their absent husbands and lovers, were taken as moral texts; the first poem, in the voice of Penelope, sets the standard for chaste wifely devotion, against which all the subsequent heroines should be judged (and in most cases found wanting). There were even fantastic additions to the poet’s biography; in one account, he was converted to Christianity by St Antony of Patmos and, still in his place of exile, became the first bishop of Tomis. Ovid’s works were widely read in the Renaissance, and the works of many of the most famous authors are littered with Ovidian references. Virgil may have been the paradigmatic poet for Dante, but the man from Mantua was rapidly eclipsed by the Paeliginian pretender as the latter’s work was rediscovered by a larger audience. It was the Metamorphoses (and to a degree the Fasti and Heroides) that proved most influential, however, in large part for their repositories of Classical myth to which learned authors might make reference. Given the relative scarcity of mythological references in the Amores, these poems proved less fertile ground for new generations of writers rediscovering Classical learning. The fourteenth-century Italian humanist Petrarch, however, wrote a series of love elegies inspired by ‘Laura’; the subjective focus on the author and his own emotions (while the object of desire remains elusive and idealized) is profoundly Ovidian, though the struggle to reconcile his love for a married woman with his Christian faith is certainly not. In English letters, John Donne’s love poems clearly have an eye on Ovidian models; the Earl of Rochester, a debauched Restoration poet-peer, is also indebted to the Roman praeceptor Amoris, but equally shows the influence of Propertius, Tibullus and

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Petrarch too. Shakespeare’s early narrative poems such as Venus and Adonis and Lucrece perhaps owe something to the Amores, but as with most other authors in this period, it was the metamorphic myths that were to be Ovid’s greatest influence on the bard: in Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the tale of forbidden love in Athens has little direct parallel with the Amores, but the asinine version of Pyramus and Thisbe presented by Nick Bottom and his merry men directly channels a famous myth from Metamorphoses IV. Though Ovid continued to be widely read in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his literary reputation declined: useful as they might be for drilling the schoolboy in Latin language, his poems were seen as frivolous in comparison to Horace and Virgil, not to mention the Greek tragedians. Victorian moralists no doubt disapproved of the amatory poems in particular; one nineteenth-century editor of the Tristia recommends this text instead for use in schools, on the questionable grounds that affairs of the heart will be of no interest to the adolescent scholar. Happily, Ovid has enjoyed a considerable renaissance of his own in the post-war period, as critics have come to appreciate that his apparent levity and wit in fact mask considerable artistic sophistication. Modern readers can readily empathise with his metropolitan urbanity; the tensions between poet and prince, artist versus autocrat, add a certain frisson to his work, and scholars look to tease out the hints of subversion, the echoes of an independent voice in an era of nascent autocracy. Contemporary morality now tolerates the amatory poems in schools too, and with their universal theme and timeless humour the Amores are in fact amongst the poet’s most accessible works. The prominent position of women in Ovid’s work, especially where they are given ‘speaking parts’ in the Heroides, Metamorphoses and Fasti has also prompted various feminist readings of the poems; certainly the female perspective is far more developed in Ovid than in any other comparable Classical writer, and his women, nymphs, and

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goddesses are all far than mere kopha prosopa (dumb characters, the non-speaking roles in a play). As for the Amores, though, such empathy with the female experience remains unrealised. The nature of love elegy is to offer a highly subjective male perspective, and consequently the elusive female lover is very much objectified. Corinna barely utters a word in any of the poems, and is instead simply the object of the male gaze, a foil for masculine pleasure. On another level, however, traditional gender roles are indeed subverted in love elegy, in terms of the servitium Amoris, where traditional male dominance is replaced with female control – the beloved is the domina (whence English ‘mistress’, though now with rather different connotations), the poetlover nothing more than her ‘slave’ (but see II .17 for Ovid’s questionable acknowledgement of his servitude).

A note on the text The text printed here is Merkel’s Teubner edition of 1907 (available online via Perseus). Our earliest manuscript for the Amores, known as R (Regius) dates from the ninth century, but only contains I.I and the first fifty lines of I.2 . A second Parisian manuscript from the tenth century (P, or Puteanus) fills in the rest, along with the Heroides. The eleventh century S (Sangallensis, from the Swiss monastery of St Gall) contains most of the poems, with some errors in common P and R but also evidence of a different tradition. The importance of a further manuscript (Y) was only realized in the 1960s, and this has now largely superseded S. There are also a vast number of Italian manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; these certainly attest the renewed interest in the Amores during this period, but plagued as they are with scribal errors and inept attempts at emendation, these later copies are of less importance in establishing a definitive text.

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Further reading Translations As an aid to comprehension of the Latin, Booth’s version in her commentary is very clear; also fairly literal, but rather easier to access perhaps, is Kline’s translation available online. Lee’s translation was for some years the classic version, but it is perhaps Green who best captures the spirit of the poems – the energy and wit of his contemporary English rendering necessitates considerable departure from the meaning of the original Latin, though. Those studying just the poems presented here are strongly encouraged to read the rest of Amores II in translation; not only will this help readers appreciate the shape of the collection overall, but should give a better sense of the variety of Ovidian poetics.

Commentaries Booth’s edition of Amores II has an excellent introduction; her comments on the individual poems are also worth consulting too, and the notes offer some help with translation as well as literary comment. Barsby’s introduction to his commentary on Amores I also has some useful material on Ovid and his amatory poetry more generally. McKeown provides the most detailed academic commentary on the Amores, with an extensive introduction setting Ovid and his poems in their literary and historical context; the notes exhaustively consider possible models in earlier authors, but mostly go well beyond what is required by first-time readers.

Secondary literature Renewed academic interest in Ovid over the last fifty years has spawned a prodigious amount of scholarly material, but readers are

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encouraged to focus in the first instance on mastering the Latin text, then develop their own ideas about the literature. Latterly, though, they may wish to consult some of the more accessible books and journal articles listed below. Armstrong, R. (2005), Ovid and His Love Poetry, London: Duckworth. Barsby, J. (1979), Amores I, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Barsby, J. (1996), ‘Ovid’s Amores and Roman Comedy’, in Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar Volume 9, 135–57. Booth, J. (1999), Amores II, Oxford: Aris & Phillips. Boyd, B.W. (1987), ‘The Death of Corinna’s Parrot Reconsidered: Poetry and Ovid’s Amores’, Classical Journal 82, 199–207. Boyd, B.W. (1997), Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cahoon, L. (1984), ‘The Parrot and the Poet: the Function of Ovid’s Funeral Elegies’, Classical Journal 80, 27–35. Davis, P.J. (1999), ‘Ovid’s Amores: A Political Reading’, Classical Philology 94, 431–49. Galinsky, G.K. (1969), ‘The triumph theme in the Augustan elegy’, Wiener Studien 82, 75–107. Green, P. (1982), Ovid: The Erotic Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hardie, P. (ed.) (1992), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houghton, L.B.T. (2000), ‘Ovid’s Dead Parrot Sketch: Amores II .6’, Mnemosyne 53, 718–21. Kennedy, D.F (1993), The Arts of Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kline, A.S. (2015), Ovid: The Love Poems, via www.poetryintranslation.com. Lee, A.G. (1968), Ovid’s Amores, London: Murray. Lyne, R.O.A.M. (1980), The Latin Love Poets from Catullus to Horace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, Ch. 10. McKeown, J.C. (1987–), Ovid, Amores: text, prolegomena and commentary, in four volumes, Liverpool and Leeds: ARCA .

Text 2 quem penes est dominam servandi cura, Bagoa, dum perago tecum pauca, sed apta, vaca. hesterna vidi spatiantem luce puellam illa, quae Danai porticus agmen habet. protinus, ut placuit, misi scriptoque rogavi. rescripsit trepida ‘non licet!’ illa manu; et, cur non liceat, quaerenti reddita causa est, quod nimium dominae cura molesta tua est. si sapis, o custos, odium, mihi crede, mereri desine; quem metuit quisque, perisse cupit. vir quoque non sapiens; quid enim servare laboret, unde nihil, quamvis non tueare, perit? sed gerat ille suo morem furiosus amori et castum, multis quod placet, esse putet; huic furtiva tuo libertas munere detur, quam dederis illi, reddat ut illa tibi. conscius esse velis — domina est obnoxia servo; conscius esse times — dissimulare licet. scripta leget secum — matrem misisse putato! venerit ignotus — postmodo notus erit. ibit ad adfectam, quae non languebit, amicam: visat! iudiciis aegra sit illa tuis. si faciet tarde, ne te mora longa fatiget, inposita gremio stertere fronte potes. nec tu, linigeram fieri quid possit ad Isim, quaesieris nec tu curva theatra time! conscius adsiduos commissi tollet honores — quis minor est autem quam tacuisse labor?

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ille placet versatque domum neque verbera sentit; ille potens — alii, sordida turba, iacent. huic, verae ut lateant causae, finguntur inanes; atque ambo domini, quod probat una, probant. cum bene vir traxit vultum rugasque coegit, quod voluit fieri blanda puella, facit. sed tamen interdum tecum quoque iurgia nectat, et simulet lacrimas carnificemque vocet. tu contra obiciens, quae tuto diluat illa, et veris falso crimine deme fidem. sic tibi semper honos, sic alta peculia crescent. haec fac, in exiguo tempore liber eris. adspicis indicibus nexas per colla catenas? squalidus orba fide pectora carcer habet. quaerit aquas in aquis et poma fugacia captat Tantalus — hoc illi garrula lingua dedit. dum nimium servat custos Iunonius Io, ante suos annos occidit; illa dea est! vidi ego conpedibus liventia crura gerentem, unde vir incestum scire coactus erat. poena minor merito. nocuit mala lingua duobus; vir doluit, famae damna puella tulit. crede mihi, nulli sunt crimina grata marito, nec quemquam, quamvis audiat, illa iuvant. seu tepet, indicium securas prodis ad aures; sive amat, officio fit miser ille tuo. culpa nec ex facili quamvis manifesta probatur; iudicis illa sui tuta favore venit. viderit ipse licet, credet tamen ille neganti damnabitque oculos et sibi verba dabit. adspiciat dominae lacrimas, plorabit et ipse, et dicet: ‘poenas garrulus iste dabit!’ quid dispar certamen inis? tibi verbera victo adsunt, in gremio iudicis illa sedet. non scelus adgredimur, non ad miscenda coimus toxica, non stricto fulminat ense manus.

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Text quaerimus, ut tuto per te possimus amare. quid precibus nostris mollius esse potest?

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4 non ego mendosos ausim defendere mores falsaque pro vitiis arma movere meis. confiteor — siquid prodest delicta fateri; in mea nunc demens crimina fassus eo. odi, nec possum, cupiens, non esse quod odi; heu, quam quae studeas ponere ferre grave est! nam desunt vires ad me mihi iusque regendum; auferor ut rapida concita puppis aqua. non est certa meos quae forma invitet amores — centum sunt causae, cur ego semper amem. sive aliqua est oculos in humum deiecta modestos, uror, et insidiae sunt pudor ille meae; sive procax aliqua est, capior, quia rustica non est, spemque dat in molli mobilis esse toro. aspera si visa est rigidasque imitata Sabinas, velle, sed ex alto dissimulare puto. sive es docta, places raras dotata per artes; sive rudis, placita es simplicitate tua. est, quae Callimachi prae nostris rustica dicat carmina — cui placeo, protinus ipsa placet. est etiam, quae me vatem et mea carmina culpet — culpantis cupiam sustinuisse femur. molliter incedit — motu capit; altera dura est — at poterit tacto mollior esse viro. haec quia dulce canit flectitque facillima vocem, oscula cantanti rapta dedisse velim; haec querulas habili percurrit pollice chordas — tam doctas quis non possit amare manus? illa placet gestu numerosaque bracchia ducit et tenerum molli torquet ab arte latus —

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ut taceam de me, qui causa tangor ab omni, illic Hippolytum pone, Priapus erit! tu, quia tam longa es, veteres heroidas aequas et potes in toto multa iacere toro. haec habilis brevitate sua est. corrumpor utraque; conveniunt voto longa brevisque meo. non est culta — subit, quid cultae accedere possit; ornata est — dotes exhibet ipsa suas. candida me capiet, capiet me flava puella, est etiam in fusco grata colore Venus. seu pendent nivea pulli cervice capilli, Leda fuit nigra conspicienda coma; seu flavent, placuit croceis Aurora capillis. omnibus historiis se meus aptat amor. me nova sollicitat, me tangit serior aetas; haec melior specie, moribus illa placet. denique quas tota quisquam probet urbe puellas, noster in has omnis ambitiosus amor.

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6 psittacus, Eois imitatrix ales ab Indis, occidit — exequias ite frequenter, aves! ite, piae volucres, et plangite pectora pinnis et rigido teneras ungue notate genas; horrida pro maestis lanietur pluma capillis, pro longa resonent carmina vestra tuba! quod scelus Ismarii quereris, Philomela, tyranni, expleta est annis ista querela suis; alitis in rarae miserum devertere funus — magna, sed antiqua est causa doloris Itys. omnes, quae liquido libratis in aere cursus, tu tamen ante alios, turtur amice, dole! plena fuit vobis omni concordia vita, et stetit ad finem longa tenaxque fides.

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Text quod fuit Argolico iuvenis Phoceus Orestae, hoc tibi, dum licuit, psittace, turtur erat. quid tamen ista fides, quid rari forma coloris, quid vox mutandis ingeniosa sonis, quid iuvat, ut datus es, nostrae placuisse puellae? — infelix, avium gloria, nempe iaces! tu poteras fragiles pinnis hebetare zmaragdos tincta gerens rubro Punica rostra croco. non fuit in terris vocum simulantior ales — reddebas blaeso tam bene verba sono! raptus es invidia — non tu fera bella movebas; garrulus et placidae pacis amator eras. ecce, coturnices inter sua proelia vivunt; forsitan et fiunt inde frequenter anus. plenus eras minimo, nec prae sermonis amore in multos poteras ora vacare cibos. nux erat esca tibi, causaeque papavera somni, pellebatque sitim simplicis umor aquae. vivit edax vultur ducensque per aera gyros miluus et pluviae graculus auctor aquae; vivit et armiferae cornix invisa Minervae — illa quidem saeclis vix moritura novem; occidit illa loquax humanae vocis imago, psittacus, extremo munus ab orbe datum! optima prima fere manibus rapiuntur avaris; inplentur numeris deteriora suis. tristia Phylacidae Thersites funera vidit, iamque cinis vivis fratribus Hector erat. quid referam timidae pro te pia vota puellae — vota procelloso per mare rapta Noto? septima lux venit non exhibitura sequentem, et stabat vacuo iam tibi Parca colo. nec tamen ignavo stupuerunt verba palato; clamavit moriens lingua: ‘Corinna, vale!’ colle sub Elysio nigra nemus ilice frondet, udaque perpetuo gramine terra viret.

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siqua fides dubiis, volucrum locus ille piarum dicitur, obscenae quo prohibentur aves. illic innocui late pascuntur olores et vivax phoenix, unica semper avis; explicat ipsa suas ales Iunonia pinnas, oscula dat cupido blanda columba mari. psittacus has inter nemorali sede receptus convertit volucres in sua verba pias. ossa tegit tumulus — tumulus pro corpore magnus — quo lapis exiguus par sibi carmen habet: colligor ex ipso dominae placuisse sepulcro. ora fuere mihi plus ave docta loqui.

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10 tu mihi, tu certe, memini, Graecine, negabas uno posse aliquem tempore amare duas. per te ego decipior, per te deprensus inermis — ecce, duas uno tempore turpis amo! utraque formosa est, operosae cultibus ambae; artibus in dubio est haec sit an illa prior. pulchrior hac illa est, haec est quoque pulchrior illa; et magis haec nobis, et magis illa placet! erro, velut ventis discordibus acta phaselos, dividuumque tenent alter et alter amor. quid geminas, Erycina, meos sine fine dolores? non erat in curas una puella satis? quid folia arboribus, quid pleno sidera caelo, in freta collectas alta quid addis aquas? sed tamen hoc melius, quam si sine amore iacerem — hostibus eveniat vita severa meis! hostibus eveniat viduo dormire cubili et medio laxe ponere membra toro! at mihi saevus amor somnos abrumpat inertes,

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Text simque mei lecti non ego solus onus! me mea disperdat nullo prohibente puella — si satis una potest, si minus una, duae! sufficiam — graciles, non sunt sine viribus artus; pondere, non nervis corpora nostra carent; et lateri dabit in vires alimenta voluptas. decepta est opera nulla puella mea; saepe ego lascive consumpsi tempora noctis, utilis et forti corpore mane fui. felix, quem Veneris certamina mutua perdunt! di faciant, leti causa sit ista mei! induat adversis contraria pectora telis miles et aeternum sanguine nomen emat. quaerat avarus opes et, quae lassarit arando, aequora periuro naufragus ore bibat. at mihi contingat Veneris languescere motu, cum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus; atque aliquis nostro lacrimans in funere dicat: ‘conveniens vitae mors fuit ista tuae!’

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12 ite triumphales circum mea tempora laurus! vicimus: in nostro est, ecce, Corinna sinu, quam vir, quam custos, quam ianua firma, tot hostes, servabant, nequa posset ab arte capi! haec est praecipuo victoria digna triumpho, in qua, quaecumque est, sanguine praeda caret. non humiles muri, non parvis oppida fossis cincta, sed est ductu capta puella meo! Pergama cum caderent bello superata bilustri, ex tot in Atridis pars quota laudis erat? at mea seposita est et ab omni milite dissors gloria, nec titulum muneris alter habet.

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me duce ad hanc voti finem, me milite veni; ipse eques, ipse pedes, signifer ipse fui. nec casum fortuna meis inmiscuit actis — huc ades, o cura parte triumphe mea! nec belli est nova causa mei. nisi rapta fuisset Tyndaris, Europae pax Asiaeque foret. femina silvestris Lapithas populumque biformem turpiter adposito vertit in arma mero; femina Troianos iterum nova bella movere inpulit in regno, iuste Latine, tuo; femina Romanis etiamnunc urbe recenti inmisit soceros armaque saeva dedit. vidi ego pro nivea pugnantes coniuge tauros; spectatrix animos ipsa iuvenca dabat. me quoque, qui multos, sed me sine caede, Cupido iussit militiae signa movere suae.

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Commentary Notes Poem 2 After affirming his commitment to love-elegy in the prologue, Ovid’s second poem is a dramatic monologue in which he attempts to persuade Bagoas, a eunuch chaperone, to grant access to the girl in his charge. The poem’s subject matter derives from the world of Roman comedy, where eunuch attendants are commonplace (for example, Terence’s Eunuch and Sceledrus in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus). Elegies addressed to the mistress’ servants are not commonplace in earlier love poets, but Ovid skilfully exploits the dramatic potential of such situations. Amores I.6, for example, takes the stock situation of the excluded lover (paraklausithyron), but where Tibullus (I.2.7ff ) addressed the door itself, Ovid speaks to the door-keeper. In this case, however, Ovid evidently fails, in spite of his argumentative ingenuity; the next poem finds him bitterly reproaching the eunuch for his failure to comply, and he cruelly mocks the unfortunate Bagoas for his compromised masculinity. For such an abrupt change of tone, a close parallel in this book is the Cypassis diptych (II.7 and II.8); in the former, addressed to Corinna, Ovid angrily denies an affair with Corinna’s maid, only to turn to the maid herself in the next poem, asking how Corinna can have discovered their infidelity – and begging for his sin again. The poem takes the form of a suasoria, a rhetorical exercise in persuasion, such as Ovid would have practised during the latter stages of his education – rhetoric was a core part of the Roman curriculum, and the more absurd the case, the better the opportunity to demonstrate one’s argumentative flair. Here, though the arguments are pushed to the extremes and wind up in self-contradiction: at 37–8 47

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the eunuch is encouraged to lay false charges of infidelity against the mistress which she can easily disprove, but barely two lines later Ovid enumerates the dire penalties for such informants. A good orator tailors his speech to his audience. The rhetorician Quintilian (Inst. Orat. III.8.39–40) lists three means of argument as appropriate to persuading ‘baser types’ or slaves: vulgi opinio, utilitas, and metus (popular opinion, personal gain and fear). Ovid certainly relies heavily on the latter two, dangling the prospect of reward in return for compliance – and grim punishment if not. This contrasts sharply with Amores III .4, where the poet is making a similar request for access, but this time to the girl’s husband rather than a slave attendant; consequently, rather more subtle and abstract arguments are employed. 1 quem penes = penes quem (this kind of inversion is called anastrophe): quem is a connecting relative, anticipating Bagoa (vocative). servandi. Note the use of the genitive gerund with an accusative object here (instead of a gerundival construction); this is increasingly common in Imperial Latin literature. cura is often used for an assigned task or responsibility; the curator viarum, for example, was responsible for road maintenance. Bagoas is the name of several Persian eunuchs; the practice of castration was more common in the East. 2 vaca: literally ‘have leisure’; so here ‘hold on a moment (in order that I may speak to you)’. 3 hesterna . . . luce: periphrasis: ‘yesterday’. spatiantem: the verb signifies a leisurely stroll. 4 illa, quae: ‘there where’. The relative is attracted into the nominative, agreeing with porticus (4th declension feminine). Danai . . . agmen: statues of the fifty Danaids stood in the portico of Apollo’s temple on the Palatine. In the myth, Danaus’ fifty daughters

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were compelled to marry the fifty sons of his brother Aegyptus, and in protest each bride (except Hypermnestra) killed her husband on their wedding night. Their betrayal of their husbands thus makes this portico an appropriate location for an extra-marital tryst. See McKeown ad loc. 5 protinus, ut placuit: love at first sight; this was apparently the first time he had seen the girl. scripto: ‘in writing’. 7 quaerenti: supply mihi: ‘in response to my asking why’. 8 nimium is to be taken closely with molesta, a prosaic word (‘boring’), revealing Ovid’s frustration. Compare English ‘jobsworth’. 9 sapis: sapio is literally ‘I taste’, but comes to be used of intellectual discernment too (hence sapiens). The tone here is colloquial: ‘if you have any sense’. 10 quem metuit quisque, perisse cupit: (literally) ‘whom anyone has feared, he wishes him to have died.’ The pompous, elliptical phrasing has a hint of menace; the patronizing tone likewise reflects the social gulf between Ovid and his addressee. 11 vir: the girl’s husband. Supply est. laboret (deliberative subjunctive): ‘why make the effort?’ 12 unde nihil . . . perit: Ovid contends that by sharing his wife with other men, the husband does not actually lose out, as the succeeding couplets explain. 13 morem gerere: ‘behave’. furiosus: blind passion makes him oblivious to his wife’s affairs. 14 castum: Ovid often uses a neuter pronoun or adjective to denote an object of affection. 15 furtiva libertas = freedom to commit adultery (stolen passion).

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16 ‘. . . in order that, what [freedom] you have granted to her, she may give in return to you’. If Bagoas allows his mistress sexual freedom, she may one day reward him with manumission. 17 conscius: party to the crime, ‘in the know’. velis: potential subjunctive, ‘you would like . . .’ . obnoxia servo: paradoxical. 19f These lines sketch various situations in which Bagoas should turn a proverbial blind eye (explaining dissimulare liceat). 19 secum: ‘on her own’. putato is a ‘polite’ third-personal form of the imperative. ‘Assume that her mother sent (the letter).’ 21 ibit: the mistress is the subject. 22 iudiciis . . . tuis: ‘if anyone asks your opinion’. sit: jussive subjunctive. 23–4 Most scholars believe that this couplet is an interpolation. 24 ‘You can snore away with your head placed in your lap.’ 25–6 nec . . . quaesieris: ne with perfective subjunctive expresses a prohibition. quaesieris is the ‘syncopated’ (shortened) form of quaesiveris. nec . . . time: the use of nec with an imperative (rather than the standard noli with infinitive) for a prohibition is unusual, but not unparalleled in Ovid (compare Ars I.67f). linigeram: the ritual dress of Isis’ devotees (on the grounds that linen was a purer product than wool). Attendance at the rites of Isis, from which men were excluded, would give the girl a plausible excuse to be out without her husband. Given that Isis was a model of chaste wifely devotion, there is some irony that her festival is now being used as a cover for adultery. theatra: a common location for romantic trysts, hence why Augustus banned men and women from sitting together there. curva indicates the building’s semi-circular shape. 27 commissi (genitive) to be taken with conscius, ‘aware of the crime’.

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29–30 ille . . . ille . . . alii: the conniving chaperone is compared favourably to the other household slaves. versatque domum: ‘runs the household’; verso may also have a hint of ‘subvert’ here too. verbera: the proverbial lot of slaves; Roman citizens could not be flogged. 31 huic: probably refers to the husband. causae . . . inanes: ‘false reasons’ (for favouring the slave). 32 ambo domini: both husband and lover. 33 cum bene (concessive): ‘though’. traxit vultum rugasque coegit: a frown of scepticism. 35 nectat: literally ‘weave’, so here ‘let her make up’ (jussive subjunctive). 36 carnificem: literally ‘butcher, executioner’, so here ‘villain’ – an insulting way of addressing a slave. 37–8 obiciens . . . diluat . . . crimine . . . fidem: the language of the law courts. 39–40 Ovid concludes the positive side of his case with a neat tricolon enumerating what benefits cooperation can offer: respect, money, and, most importantly for a slave, freedom. peculium was the slave’s personal money, held subject to the master’s consent. 41–54 The poet now turns to the negative side of his case, explaining what Bagoas has to fear from failing to do as he is asked – though the threats are not made directly. 41 indicibus: slaves who testified were often rewarded with their freedom, though, so here Ovid must envisage that any allegations Bagoas makes will not be believed and consequently he will be accused of calumny. 42 fide: there is some irony here, as by neglecting his guard-duties the slave is surely betraying his loyalty to his master. Striking too how the

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word reappears here in a positive context when Ovid had just a few lines earlier encouraged Bagoas to undermine his credibility (deme fidem, 38). 43–4 In the most common version of the myth, Tantalus, king of Sipylus, is punished for killing his son Pelops and serving him up to the gods at a feast to see if they will notice. In other accounts, though, it is indiscretion as to what he heard while dining with the gods that is his crime; garrula lingua indicates that Ovid has the latter in mind here. His eternal punishment remains the same as elsewhere, though; whenever he reaches down to scoop up water to drink or stretches out to pick an apple from the tree above him, the object of his desire escapes just out of his reach. 45–6 Ovid tells the story of Io in Metamorphoses I. Io (accusative Io) was the daughter of the river Inachus. Seduced by Jupiter, she was turned into a white cow. Juno sends Argus, a monster with one hundred eyes, to guard her (hence custos Iunonius), but he is lulled to sleep by Mercury (disguised as a shepherd) and killed before his time (ante suos annos occidit). illa dea est: Io subsequently wanders (in bovine form) to Egypt, where she regains her human form and is later identified with the goddess Isis. 47 vidi ego: emphasizing personal experience. compedibus liventia crura gerentem: ‘a slave with legs bruised by fetters’. 48–60 Ovid may have in mind the Augustan lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis (18 BC ), which prescribed harsh penalties for husbands who connived at their wives’ adultery. Men faced with clear evidence of the spouses’ misdemeanours were obliged to divorce them immediately or face prosecution. 48 incestum: ‘unchastity’, the literal meaning of the word (from in + castus), not limited to illicit sexual activity within the family.

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49 merito: ‘than what was deserved’ (ablative of comparison). 50 famae damna . . . tulit: ‘endured the loss of her reputation’. 51 nulli: dative agreeing with marito. 52 quamvis audiat: ‘even if he listens’ (rather than simply dismissing the allegations out of hand). 53 seu tepet: ‘if he is luke-warm’, so ‘if his passion for her is cooling’. securas ad aures: ‘on ears that do not want to listen’. 54 officio . . . tuo: the slave’s eagerness to do his duty has, paradoxically, made the master wretched. Compare English ‘officious’. McKeown suggests that there may also be a pun here on officium, used elsewhere in Ovid to denote the sex act (compare English ‘job’). 55 ex facili: ‘easily’. 56 iudicis . . . tuta: legal terms (cf. 37–8). 57–8 A husband will naturally believe the wife he loves and reject the evidence of a slave. licet: ‘granted, though’. sibi verba dabit: ‘will deceive himself ’. The idiom verbum dare derives from comedy, striking an appropriate tone in this context. 59 aspiciat . . . plorabit: note the mix of tenses here. 61–2 tibi verbera victo/adsunt: ‘flogging awaits you if you do not prevail.’ gremio vividly illustrates the wife’s privileged position. 63–6 A playful ending. Ovid and the girl are not planning anything criminal (tricolon of non), but just want to make love; note the switch to first-person plural verbs. 63 aggredimur: ‘attempt’. 63–4 non ad miscenda coimus/toxica: misceo and coeo are both regularly used to describe the sexual act, so up until the end of the

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hexameter, Ovid leads us to believe that they are not going to consummate their relationship after all – only for toxica, enjambed at the start of the pentameter, to reveal that he had something altogether different in mind. 64 Ovid is not planning to murder the husband, at any rate. fulmino is a metaphor evoking the thunderbolt. 65 per te: ‘with your permission’. 66 mollius: double-entendre. Ovid’s entreaty is gentle, with no immediate threat of violence – but he may also have in mind mollis as ‘effeminate’, precisely the insult with which he reviles Bagoas in the next poem.

Poem 4 This charming poem is an exuberant celebration of the poet’s voracious appetite for the female sex in all her forms, a splendid rejection of the elegiac convention whereby the poet expresses undying love to his beloved and to her alone (for example non mihi mille placent, non sum desultor amoris, ‘a thousand girls do not please me, I do not leap from one affair to the next’, Amores I.3.16–17). For all the contrition and self-abasement of the introduction (1–8), in the remainder of the poem the tone is anything but apologetic. In ‘a masterpiece of systematic exposition and artistic variatio’ (McKeown), he proceeds to enumerate how the entire spectrum of femininity attracts him, stressing the universality of his tastes through successive antitheses. He starts with matters of character (11–16), moves on to their varied talents (17–32) and concludes with physical attributes (33–46). Two Hellenistic poets, Rhian and Strato, had written similar pieces, pondering the attractive qualities of various boys, while Propertius

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(II.22) also confesses his philandering, but Ovid, as ever, pursues the theme to the extreme. It is not just more than one kind of girl he finds attractive, but all of them (48). odi (5) nods to Catullus 85, but the overall tenor of the poem is anything but tragic; rather we see Ovid the rhetorician once again, skilfully presenting faults as vices (see Quintilian Institutio Oratoria III.2.25). Whereas Propertius’ meandering selfappraisal suggests genuine emotion, the tightly disciplined structure of this piece gives it a ring of artificiality. Ovid tells us so much about himself that, paradoxically, we end up not really knowing what to make of him after all. 1–8 The poem opens with hyperbolic self-criticism, but keeps us guessing as to the nature of the poet’s vice for some time. 1 ausim = ausus sim. The perfect subjunctive may be used for modest assertions. mendosas: ‘motley’. menda is a fault or blemish. 2 arma movere: Ovid is fond of military imagery in his love elegy (for example, militat omnis amans, Amores I.9.1.) Given past experience, discerning readers may well wonder how far they should trust such pious expressions on Ovid’s part. 4 in mea nunc demens crimina fassus eo: an unusual form of words: ‘now, having confessed, in my madness I go on to level the accusations against myself ’. 5 odi perhaps recalls the famous opening to Catullus 85, odi et amo, where similar conflicting emotions are expressed. cupiens: Booth insists this should be taken concessively (compare Amores III .7.5), but there may be a causal sense too, ‘because of my desire’. 6 ‘Alas, how difficult it is to carry what you are keen to put down.’ Ovid often figures love as a kind of burden imposed on its subject. 7 vires and iusque should be taken together. mihi could be dative of agent with the gerundive, but is more naturally taken as dative of

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disadvantage after desunt. The unnatural word order perhaps reflects the poet’s anguished state. ‘For strength and power are insufficient for me to constrain myself.’ 8 puppis: literally ‘stern’, but here ‘ship’ – a common synecdoche (where a part stands for the whole). Storm imagery is also regularly used to evoke the lover’s emotional turmoil (compare X.9). ut simply introduces the simile. 9 certa . . . forma: ‘fixed kind of beauty’. invitet: generic subjunctive, ‘which (kind)’. meos . . . amores: poetic plural, but perhaps also evoking the very poems which he is engaged in writing. 10 As often in Ovid, the pentameter more or less restates or explains the point made in the hexameter. 11–12 uror: the fires of love are a poetic commonplace. oculos . . . modestos: internal accusative with the passive deiecta; ‘if some girl has her eyes modestly cast down on the ground’. insidiae is a hunting metaphor: ‘ensnares me’. 13 procax: ‘forward’. Cicero uses the term derogatorily (Cael. 49). rustica non: litotes. Ovid associates the countryside with a lack of sexual sophistication. 14 ‘Holds out the hope that she is lively in a soft bed.’ mollis is regularly used to describe amatory pursuits, the ‘gentle pleasures’ of love, so mollis torus virtually means ‘love-couch’. mobilis is an erotic euphemism. Note the nominative case here (Greek-style indirect statement construction). Both adjectives contrast with aspera and rigidas in the following line. 15 Sabinas: Sabine women were famous for their chastity, but shortly after Rome’s foundation they were, notoriously, seized by the Romans to be their wives. The suggestion here is perhaps that it will not be too

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difficult for Ovid to overcome such a girl’s resistance – which is only artificial in any case (visa est). 16 ‘I think that [she] wants [it] deep down, but is pretending not to.’ The subject of the indirect statement is omitted (ellipsis). ex alto makes more sense taken with velle, though the word order would suggest otherwise. Inversion of the normal word order for the sake of emphasis is called hyperbaton. 17 es . . . places: note the switch to the second-person (apostrophe), perhaps for the sake of variety. raras: ‘unusual’ (compare English ‘rarified’). dotata: literally ‘with a dowry’, so ‘endowed with’. The nuptial metaphor is of course splendidly ironic in the context. 18 rudis: the adjective is used to describe anything in primitive form, ‘unrefined’. Ovid may have in mind sexual experience here as well as higher pursuits. 19 est quae . . . dicat: ‘there is the kind of woman who’. dicat is generic subjunctive. Callimachi: the greatest of the Alexandrian elegists, whose lyric poetry was a major influence on Ovid. Callimachus’ artfully composed verses were anything but rustic, so the girl’s praise here is fulsome indeed. 21 vatem: ‘bard’. vates is the word Roman poets often use to describe themselves, and has a strong hint of self-congratulation. The term can also mean ‘seer’ or ‘prophet’, implying that their work is inspired by the gods. 22 sustinuisse: perfect infinitive, perhaps for metrical convenience; translate as present. For the sexual image, compare English ‘get a leg over’. 23 molliter: mollis is a key term in love poetry. Booth translates as ‘sensuously’ here, but there is also a sense of antithesis with dura,

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‘frigid’, in the following line, suggesting susceptibility to passion. The concept of mollitia has strong feminine associations, hence the pejorative application of the adjective to the eunuch Bagoas in the preceding poem (II.3.5). 25–30 Ovid discusses the seductiveness of singing, lyre-playing and dancing at length at Ars III.311ff. 25 flectit . . . vocem: A similar expression is found in Tibullus (I.7.31). facillima should be translated adverbially; the girl makes her vocal dexterity look easy. 26 oscula . . . rapta: ‘snatched kisses’, a common expression in love elegy. cantanti: ‘to her as she sings’. dedisse: compare sustinuisse (22). 27–8 Ovid savours the sensuous image of the lyre player; what else might such nimble hands do? querulas: ‘trembling’. habili . . . pollice: the technicalities of ancient lyre-playing are not altogether clear. The phrasing need not indicate that only the thumb was used to pluck the strings; pollex is commonly used in the sense of ‘fingers’ or ‘hands’ too (synecdoche). Translate: ‘with skilful hands’. 29 numerosaque bracchia ducit: ‘moves her arms in time to the rhythm’. In ancient dance forms, the movements of the upper body were often more important than those of the legs and feet. 30 tenerum: Ovid immediately imagines the dancer in his hands. ab arte: ‘with skill’. 31 ut taceam: concessive, ‘though I should be silent’. The rhetorical figure deployed here is called praeteritio; the speaker alludes to something precisely by denying that he will mention it. tangor is perhaps double-entendre: figuratively, Ovid is susceptible to all forms of femininity, but there is also the suggestion that he is no stranger to a more literal form of the feminine touch.

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32 illic: ‘in this situation’ (watching the dancer). Hippolytum . . . Priapus: antithetical paradigms. Hippolytus was the archetype of chaste masculinity. The son of Theseus, he was a devotee of the virgin goddess Diana and her sport of hunting. He rejected the advances of his stepmother Phaedra, who subsequently killed herself; the boy then died in a chariot crash as a result of his father’s curse. The image of this earnest youth watching this seductive dance is incongruous in the extreme. Priapus, by contrast, was a phallic fertility divinity. 33 tu: apostrophe. Compare 17. longa: ‘tall’. Ancient tastes favoured height, apparently. Compare Amores III .3.8 and Catullus 86. veteres heroidas aequas: another incongruous comparison. 34 et potes in toto multa iacere toro: multa is adverbial: ‘and you can lie covering the entire bed’. 35 habilis: ‘easy to handle’. brevitate sua: ablative of cause. Note how the tall girl has a whole couplet, while the short one has but a single half-line to herself. 36 voto . . . meo: ‘my desire’. Note the artful arrangement of the words here: longa brevisque is neatly fitted within the envelope of Ovid’s desire (chiasmus). 37 culta: here ‘well-groomed’, as opposed to sophisticated in manners or learning. Ovid offers advice to women on dressing to impress in Ars III, and also wrote a didactic poem Medicamina Faciei Femineae, ‘Cosmetics for the Female Face.’ The perils of cosmetics are illustrated in Amores I.14, though, where Corinna’s hair falls out after an illjudged experiment with dye. subit: impersonal, ‘it comes into my mind’. accedere: ‘be added’. 38 dotes: the same incongruous use of the term as at 17.

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39–40 candida . . . flava . . . fusco. A difficult couplet, in so far as the three colour terms are not normally applied to equivalent characteristics: candidus normally signifies pale skin, flavus golden hair, and fuscus could be either hair or skin-tone. As in the preceding examples, Ovid puts the more conventionally attractive quality first. The use of skin-lightening cosmetics indicates that fair skin was prized, while the relative rarity of natural blondes amongst Mediterranean peoples made them all the more appreciated. The precise signification of fuscus is unclear, and could mean anything from olive-skinned to black. Ovid perhaps had something of a penchant for darker girls; the hairdresser Cypassis is also described in this way (II .7.22). 42 Leda: notoriously raped by Jupiter in the form of a swan, was the mother of Castor and Pollux as well as Helen. She was certainly renowned for her beauty, but is not described as dark-haired elsewhere. nigra conspicienda coma: ‘conspicuous, notable for her black hair’. 43 seu flavent: supply capilli. croceis . . . capillis. capillis is ablative. Aurora was the goddess of the dawn, so ‘saffron’ suggests reddishyellow tresses the colour of the morning sky. 44 omnibus historiis: in other words, ‘to all the woman found in myth and legend’. 45 nova: ‘young’. 46 haec: (here) ‘the former’. moribus: ‘manners’, though Ovid can hardly intend ‘moral uprightness’ here; rather the older woman’s sexual experience perhaps makes up for her relative lack of beauty. 47 ‘To sum up, whichever girls anyone in the entire city finds attractive’. urbe: Rome. Ovid’s love elegy is superlatively urbane, rooted in the metropolitan capital of the empire (compare the pejorative sense of rustica, 13).

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48 in has omnis: omnis is accusative plural, ‘for them all’. ambitiosus: supply est. The adjective is regularly used of election candidates canvassing support, so appropriate in the sense of a rake’s progress around the city, but incongruous in that a political career was precisely what Ovid had abandoned to pursue the life of a love elegist (see Introduction).

Poem 6 The elegiac metre was originally used for poems of mourning, and was only later associated with love poetry (see Introduction); in treating a funerary theme, Ovid is thus returning the metre closer to its original subject matter. Laments for dead pets were not uncommon in Hellenistic poetry, while closer to Ovid’s time the most obvious parallel is Catullus 3, mourning the death of Lesbia’s sparrow. But what place does such a dirge have in a book of love poems? Catullus’ lament at least tacks back to the amatory theme at its conclusion (grief for the bird has perhaps rendered the mistress less attractive), but Ovid eschews any such connection, and instead the poem is a traditional epikedion or funeral dirge, albeit for a bird rather than a man. Thus it contains all the standard elements of the genre: (i) an introductory summons to the mourners; (ii) a lament for the unjust or premature death, thus celebrating the virtue of the deceased; (iii) a death-bed scene; (iv) words of consolation to the bereaved; (v) allusion to the tomb. All of this results in a charmingly absurd parody of the mourning ode, as the poet lays on the grief and eulogy with such hyperbole that we can hardly take it seriously. The bird is not so much anthropomorphized as heroized, with comparisons to epic heroes and visions of a parrotic Elysium. Alternatively, the parrot can be read as figuring an elegiac poet, hence the emphasis on its skill in speech

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(loquax), learning (docta), and ability to give pleasure to its mistress (placuisse). That the bird’s death then represents the end of the genre is perhaps a little stretched, but Ovid is certainly self-conscious as regards his literary artistry and we do well to be alive to such metapoetic possibilities (see Boyd (1987) and Houghton (2000), details on p. 38). 1 psittacus: ‘parrot’, identified by McKeown as an Indian Ringneck Parakeet. Eois imitatrix ales ab Indis: Eous is an unusual poetic term for ‘eastern’, derived from Greek heos, ‘dawn’; ales, literally ‘winged’, is also rare. The parrot’s exotic heritage marks it out as exceptional, and the theme persists throughout the poem. The feminine form imitatrix agrees specifically with ales; the bird itself is treated as masculine otherwise. Parrots were not unknown in Rome, and as today were renowned for their mimicry. 2 occidit: note the enjambment. exsequias ite: this was probably the ritual call of a herald, summoning the mourners to a funeral; its use here, for a parrot, instead heralds the parody of the traditional dirge for a dead man. frequenter: ‘in crowds’. 3 piae volucres: not just the deceased parrot, but the mourning fowls too are given human qualities. pietas, one’s sense of duty to friends, family and country as well as gods, was the cardinal virtue of no less a figure than Virgil’s Aeneas. plangite pectora pinnis: breast-beating was a traditional mourning gesture; birds often beat their wings anyway, so the gesture seems curiously appropriate. The alliteration and coincidence of natural word stress with the initial beat (ictus) of each new metrical foot give this phrase a strongly rhythmical feel: we can virtually hear the wings flapping. 4–5 Cheek-scratching and hair-tearing were also conventional gestures of grief, but adapt rather less successfully to the avian mourner. pro: (here) ‘instead of ’. maestis: transferred epithet.

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6 carmina vestra: birdsong. The birds do not need instruments to make music. The trumpet was evidently part of a conventional Roman funeral (similar to our ‘death knell’). 7 ‘As for the crime of the Ismarian tyrant that you complain of, Philomela.’ Philomela is vocative (apostrophe). According to Greek myth, Philomela was raped by Tereus, king of Ismarus in Thrace and husband of her sister Procne. He cut out the girl’s tongue to prevent her informing on him, but she was able to explain what had happened by weaving her story into a tapestry. In revenge, Procne killed Itys, her son by Tereus, and served him up to his father; as the sisters fled, Philomela was transformed into a swallow and Procne into a nightingale. This tale is a good example of the fluidity of mythological narrative, though; Roman writers often invert the sisters’ roles, and here it would seem to make more sense for Philomela to be the mother grieving for her dead son and thus the nightingale, a bird often associated with mourning. 8 ‘That complaint has had its due time.’ Philomela, as the nightingale, has been singing her lament ever since her transfiguration, but Corinna’s parrot represents a new loss. This conflation of the mythical with the mundane is an example of bathos: a sudden change of mood or tone for literary effect. 9–10 devertere: passive imperative (addressed to Philomela). The passive of verto is often used reflexively (like a Greek middle). magna, sed antiqua echoes line 8. 11 ‘All you who poise your flight in the clear air.’ quae is feminine plural (recalling ales). libro often means ‘shake’ or ‘brandish’, but here evokes the balance of the birds’ wings. 12 turtur amice: further apostrophe. dole: imperative. Turtledoves were another common domestic bird (depicted alongside

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parrots on a Pompeian mosaic). This bird takes on the role of chief mourner. 13 ‘Your life was full of perfect harmony.’ plenus here takes an ablative. concordia (often marital) is regularly celebrated on epitaphs. 14 tenax: the adjective perhaps evokes the bird’s talons too. 15 ‘What the youth from Phocis was to Argive Orestes.’ The reference is to Pylades, paragon of loyalty and friendship, who stood by his friend Orestes amidst all his troubles. 16 dum licuit: ‘for as long as it was allowed’, in other words ‘as long as you lived’. A note of pathos. 17–42 With the mourners now gathered, Ovid moves to the lamentation proper. 17–19 Note the anaphora of quid. fides, forma, and vox are all subjects of iuvat. Translate: ‘what benefit did you derive from’. 17 rari forma coloris: genitive of quality. 18 mutandis ingeniosa sonis: ‘clever at altering its voice’, perhaps not unlike the poet himself. ingenium is often used to describe poetic talent. 19 ut datus es: ‘as soon as you were given (to her as a gift)’. nostrae placuisse puellae: again, the parrot appears to be taking on the role of the elegiac lover. 20 avium gloria, nempe iaces: a pathetic contrast. 21 tu poteras fragiles pinnis hebetare zmaragdos. Evidently it was a green parrot. hebeto is used here in an unusual sense, ‘make to look dull’. fragiles is difficult, as real emeralds are far from brittle. Ovid may have some other green gem in mind.

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22 tincta gerens rubro Punica rostra croco: another vivid colour description. gerens may be translated simply as ‘with’. rostra is poetic plural. Punica is ‘scarlet’, the bright red colour of dye made from shells found off the Carthaginian coast. Punica and croco do not probably indicate different colours, rather that the bird looked as though it had dipped its beak in saffron. 23 in terris: ‘on earth’. vocum simulantior ales: ‘a bird better at imitating [human] voices’. A remarkable construction; simulo with a genitive is unparalleled. 24 reddebas: ‘you reproduced’. blaeso: no doubt the parrot’s speech impediment was part of its charm. 25 raptus es invidia: Death’s envy (of the deceased’s virtues) is a common theme in funerary poetry. fera bella: a pun: ferus may just mean ‘fierce’, but derives from fera, a wild beast, so fera bella could also be read as ‘wars between animals’. 26 garrulus: loquacity was traditionally viewed as unwarlike. Compare Drances at Aeneid XI.338f, or the elderly Trojan counsellors watching the battle from the walls of the city at Iliad III.150f. placidae pacis: life free from conflict was a common theme on epitaphs. The bird’s peaceful existence makes its premature death all the more surprising and undeserved. 27 coturnices: quails were known for their pugnacity, both in mating rituals as well as in bouts organized for human entertainment. 28 et fiant: not jussive, but potential subjunctive (with forsitan), ‘they may even become’. anus: ‘old’ (used adjectivally here because coturnix is feminine). 29 plenus eras minimo: ‘you were satisfied with very little [food]’. Ovid praises the parrot’s asceticism. prae with ablative: ‘because of ’; often used thus with a negative.

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30 ‘Your mouth did not have room for much food.’ Ovid’s conceit is that the parrot was too busy talking to eat much, but of course birds only peck at their food anyway, eating little compared to humans. The parrot’s restrained appetites nevertheless evoke a further comparison with the elegist himself, though. 31 causaeque . . . somni: perhaps simply descriptive of papavera (the opiates in poppy-seed were recognized for their sleep-inducing properties); the adjective need not suggest that Corinna gave the seeds to the parrot in order to make it sleep. 32 pellebatque: the imperfect here emphasizes the sense of tragedy: ‘used to [but no longer]’. simplicis umor aquae: litotes, almost as though we would expect such a cultured bird to drink wine. 33 ducensque per aera gyros: ‘wheeling through the air’. 34 miluus is three syllables. Kites were not popular in antiquity, and were believed to snatch offerings from the altars. auctor: ‘herald’. 35 armiferae cornix invisa Minervae: Minerva was the Roman goddess of war (identified with the Greek Athene), hence the epithet armifer. Ovid tells the story of how the crow fell out of favour with her by bringing bad news at Metamorphoses II.542f. 36 ‘But it (the crow) will only die in nine centuries.’ Crows were famed for their longevity. Ovid laments the iniquity whereby a bird hated by the gods can outlive Corinna’s beloved parrot for so long. 37–8 Note how these lines rework the opening couplet. ille: emphatic, ‘the famous’. extremo munus ab orbe recalls Eois ab Indis (line 1). 39–40 A ‘gnomic’ couplet, stating maxims or general truths (the adjective derives from the Greek gnome, meaning ‘thought, opinion’). manibus: best taken as ‘hands of death’. Line 40 is difficult, but the

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sense seems to be ‘inferior things fill their measures’, in other words ‘are not cut off prematurely’. 41 Phylacidae: Protesilaus, from Phylace in Thessaly. The first Greek to set foot on Trojan soil, he was killed immediately. Thersites is a paradigm of the inferior warrior, depicted unfavourably by Homer in the Iliad as ‘the most disgraceful of all the Greeks’ (Iliad II.216). 42 Hector’s funeral is described in the Iliad XXIV. The reference to Hector, the epitome of martial valour, marks a pointed contrast with Thersites in the previous line; the identification of the dead parrot with the warrior hero rather than the blatherer is all the more absurd. 43–8 Having concluded the lament with a couple of mythological exempla, Ovid moves to the death-bed scene, the only place in which we have any reference to Corinna. 43 quid referam: deliberative question, ‘why should I recall’. 44 Noto: the south wind was traditionally associated with storms and rain. The idea of prayers carried away by the winds (and so remaining unfulfilled) is a poetic commonplace. 45 septima lux: ancient medical opinion viewed the seventh day of an illness as critical. non exhibitura sequentem: ‘not destined to show [another day] following’, in other words ‘and this day was destined to be his last’. 46 ‘and your Fate now stood close at hand, her distaff empty’. Ovid turns back to addressing the parrot directly. The Fates (normally a trio) are conventionally associated with a person’s destiny, spinning the ‘thread of life’. The distaff was a wooden rod which held the unspun thread; the fibres would be twisted by hand then wound around a spindle. The fact that the distaff here is now empty indicates that that there is no more thread left to spin, so the parrot has come to the end of its time.

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47 ignavo . . . palato: either the bird’s mouth was now weak (as death approached), or else ignavo should be treated as negated, so ‘with no idle mouth’. stupuerunt verba: a striking phrase; stupeo normally has a personal subject. 48 moriens lingua: transferred epithet. ‘Corinna, vale’: the deceased’s last words are a common theme in epikedia. 49–58 These lines depict a bird paradise, an ornithological Elysium with the conventional features adapted to reflect the inhabitants. As often in funerary poems, the pleasant nature of the afterlife envisaged is supposed to offer some consolation to the mourners. 49 colle sub Elysio: Elysium is often thought of as a valley rather than a hill-top. nigra . . . ilice: the lush evergreen ilex, or holm oak, is a common feature of the poetic locus amoenus (pleasant place). nigra here is also in keeping with the underworld setting, suggesting the shade the trees provide as well as the dark colour of the foliage. 50 perpetuo: ‘all year round’. There are no seasons in Elysium. 51–2 siqua fides dubiis, volucrum locus ille piarum/dicitur: ‘if we may put any trust in matters uncertain, that is said to be the place for pious birds’. siqua fides is a favourite expression of Ovid’s, here (as often) used with some irony: what could be less credible than this bird paradise? 52 obscenae: perhaps the species described in lines 28–36; or else birds of ill omen. 53 innocui . . . olores: innocui should probably be understood in both its active and passive senses here, ‘doing no harm’ as well as ‘suffering no harm’. Swans were traditionally birds of good omen. late: ‘far and wide’. pascuntur is passive, but used in the middle sense: ‘feed, graze’. 54 et vivax phoenix, unica semper avis. Supposedly only one phoenix was ever in existence at any given time. This mythological bird was

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believed to live for 500 years, and when it died would be reborn from its own ashes. The ‘child’ would then carry the ashes of its ‘parent’ to the temple of the Sun. (See Metamorphoses XV.391–407) 55 explicat ipsa suas ales Iunonia pinnas: the peacock. According to legend, after her acolyte Argus, a hundred-eyed monster, was killed by Mercury, Juno took its eyes to decorate the wings of the bird. Peacocks were notoriously vain, opening their wings in response to flattery, so there is no redundancy in ipsa suas; in Elysium, the bird has repented of its vanity, and now displays its fine plumage of its own accord (ipsa). 56 oscula dat cupido blanda columba mari: a rare hint of eroticism in this poem. Doves are known for their gentleness. Unusually amongst birds, they also mate for life; here this bond continues into the afterlife as well – an appropriate vignette in the context. 57 has inter = inter has. nemorali: an Ovidian coinage. sede suggests both the abode of the dead and, more specifically for birds, ‘perch’. 58 convertit: ‘translates’. The parrot continues his mimicry in the Underworld. 59 pro corpore magnus: ‘great in proportion to its body’. Only a small tomb was required for the little bird – a pathetic touch. 60 par sibi: ‘equal to it [the stone]’. par has more than one sense here: the epitaph is an appropriately small poem on a small stone for a small bird, but nevertheless sums up the creature appropriately (in the sense of ‘equal to the task’), as it continues to talk in death. 61 colligor ex ipso dominae placuisse sepulchro: ‘from the very tomb I am perceived to have pleased my mistress’. That Corinna took the trouble to construct a funerary monument for the bird is a testament to her affection for it. The personal passive of colligo in this sense is unusual; there is a slight pun here, as the verb is also used to

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signify the gathering of the ash and bones from the funeral pyre to place them in the tomb. 62 ora fuere mihi plus ave docta loqui: a highly compressed form of words, ‘my mouth was learned at speaking more than a bird’. The parrot’s ability to replicate human speech transcends its taxonomical group. AVE is perhaps another pun, hinting at ave, ‘greetings’. Most parrots might only manage some such basic salutation, but this bird was capable of so much more. The text of the epitaph is perhaps also a reference to Catullus’ famous ave atque vale elegy for his brother (101.11).

Poem 10 Reflecting again on his polyamorous tendencies, Ovid treats a similar theme to that in II .4 (Propertius II.22A is also close parallel). But while the apparent basis for the poem is more specific, namely love for two girls at once, the poet continues to maintain a high degree of generality and we are told little that distinguishes the two as persons rather than fictional ideals. In some ways, the poem’s conceit perhaps relies on this artificiality, for were the poet to describe more definite characteristics of either girl, it might be possible to make some comparison between them – and Ovid’s point is precisely that such distinction is not possible. Thus, the poem is best seen as a kind of rhetorical exercise: an elegant excursus in parison, a fantasia on the elegist’s ideal female, but hardly a passionate cri de coeur. Even the opening cry of anguish at being torn apart by these competing desires can be seen as merely part of this pose. Ovid instead treats us to a dazzling display of poetic artistry, his verse rich in word-patterning and verbal effects. These are all typical Ovidian traits, but here are found in particularly heavy concentration

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(see notes below). The theme shifts abruptly in line 15, though: better to love two, than not to love at all, he claims, and thenceforth moves to a general celebration of the life of the elegiac lover, with only a brief glance back to the original idea of divided love at line 22. Unusually, this poem has a named addressee, Graecinus, though beyond the introductory reference to his claim that it was impossible to love two women at once, he does not feature again. Such redundant addressees are common in Propertius and Horace, with a friend’s name introducted honoris causa, but are rarer in Ovid, appearing in the Amores only here, at I.11 (Atticus) and II .18 (Macer). The individual named here is identified as C. Pomponius Graecinus, suffect consul of AD 16, evidently a long-standing friend and contemporary of the poet; three of Ovid’s Pontic letters from exile are addressed to him too (Epistulae ex Ponto I.6, II.6, IV.9). 1 tu mihi, tu certe: the force of the repetition is enhanced by the coincidence of ictus and accent here. The staccato phrasing and rhythm of the line as a whole add to the sense of indignance. Graecine: see above. 2 uno posse aliquem tempore amare duas: ‘that it was possible for someone to love two [girls] at once’. Note the artful arrangement of the words with the numerals book-ending the line. 3 per te ego: contrast. The repetition of te recalls line 1. deprensus inermis: Ovid often savours the incongruous possibilities of military imagery in love poetry (compare II .4.2 and II.12 passim). 4 ecce: somewhat colloquial, maintaining the fiction of an addressee. duas uno tempore: repeating the words of line 2, but reversing the order of the numbers. 5 utraque formosa est, operosae cultibus ambae: supply sunt. Note the elegant variation here, the parallel use of -osus adjectives and the

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chiastic structure. forma is natural beauty; cultus comprises clothes, make-up and the like: ‘style’. (Compare II .4.37.) 6 ‘In terms of artistic refinements, it is in doubt (whether) this one or that is ahead’ (indirect question with num omitted). 7 Paradox: hac and the second illa are both ablative of comparison. Note how the reversal of the cases of the pronouns reverses the sense. 8 Ovid’s pentameters often do little more than restate the idea of the hexameter in different form. 9 velut ventis discordibus acta phaselos: phaselos is a Greek nominative singular form. Storm-imagery is popular with the poets as a metaphor for their emotions, but phaselos, used here for a ship, is unusual (though Catullus uses the Latinized form phasellus at 4.1). The word means ‘kidney-bean’ literally, denoting a light vessel that would certainly be vulnerable to rough waters; the use of a Greek term is perhaps also a nod to the treatments of amatory pluralism by Hellenistic poets. 10 alter et alter amor: literally ‘one and the other love’, so ‘love for one and love for the other’. 11 geminas: the idea of ‘twinning’ is appropriate here, given the parity of the two girls. Erycina: a cult title of Venus, who had a famous temple on Mount Eryx in Sicily. sine fine adds a touch of mock-epic depth, echoing Jupiter’s prophecy about Rome at Aeneid I.279: imperium sine fine dedi, ‘I have given (them) empire without end’. 12 in curas: ‘to worry about’. 13–14 folia . . . sidera . . . aquas: three common images of the numberless. Note the crescendo through the tricolon, each image described in more detail than the last, together with variety in construction (datives arboribus, caelo, then in freta alta) and heavy

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assonance of a-sounds. collectas . . . aquas: perhaps rain-water collected in the impluvium of a house. The sense is, ‘Why go to the trouble of collecting water only to cast it into the sea?’ 15 Ovid unexpectedly changes tack here to another common elegiac theme: ‘Better to have loved and lost (or suffered) than never to have loved at all.’ sed tamen marks a strong contrast. hoc melius: supply esset. sine amore iacerem: iaceo is rich in meaning here, suggesting lying in bed alone as well as simply lying idle or dead, and also perhaps impotence. Ovid is fond of such double-entendres. 16 ‘May it be for my enemies to sleep in a bed deprived [of love].’ As McKeown pointedly observes, elegiac lovers do not tend to spend much time asleep in bed. hostibus: hostes normally signifies enemies on the battlefield, rather than personal enemies, for whom the usual term is inimicus. eveniat: subjunctive expressing a wish. vita severa: ‘a monastic existence’, the antithesis of the elegiac lover’s lifestyle. 17 viduo . . . cubili: transferred epithet. 18 medio . . . toro. Singletons can sleep in the middle of their beds, as they do not have to share them with anyone else. Note the word order, membra placed between medio and toro. Given the adverb laxe, there is almost certainly a double-entendre intended here (membrum virile: the penis). 19 at is used to mark a strong contrast with what precedes. saevus Amor: a common epithet (compare I.1.5). Ovid subverts the elegiac commonplace whereby the lover complains how emotion disturbs his sleep; the pentameter makes clear that it is passionate lovemaking rather than emotional anguish which will keep him awake. 21 mea: the first-personal possessive can indicate affection, somewhat ironic given that in the following line it becomes clear that his affection may not be confined to this girl alone. disperdat: where elegiac lovers

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would normally complain of love destroying them emotionally, the rest of the poem makes clear that it is in fact physical stamina with which Ovid is concerned here. nullo prohibente: ablative absolute. Ovid perhaps has in mind the husband or else a chaperone (as in II.2). 22 si satis una potest, si minus una, duae: ‘if one can be enough, if not one then two.’ This line links back to the original inspiration for the poem, simultaneous love for two girls, but for the rest of the poem Ovid trades on an ambiguity: where Graecinus, presumably, had discounted the possibility of feeling a strong emotional attachment to two girls at once, Ovid here reflects on whether he has the physical capability to satisfy their needs. 23 sufficiam: future indicative, ‘I will have the strength’. graciles . . . artus: graciles is concessive. Slender physique was an elegiac commonplace; pining away for the mistress, the lover has little appetite for food. 24 nervis: often used figuratively to denote strength. corpora: poetic plural. carent: careo takes an ablative (ablative of separation). Note the adversative asyndeton in both lines of this couplet. 25 ‘Pleasure will give the food for strength to my latus.’ in followed by an accusative expresses purpose. latus is literally a flank or side, but is often used to describe the seat of sexual vigour. For Ovid, the food of love is not music, but sex itself. 26 decepta: not ‘deceived’, but ‘disappointed’. In another sense, the girls are deceived, though, as each is probably unaware that she is not Ovid’s only lover. opera (ablative): ‘performance, efforts [in bed]’. For the sexual connotations of opera elsewhere in Ovid, see Ars I.366 and II.673. 27–8 This couplet deftly reworks a similar passage of Propertius (II.22.29–34), in which he had argued that Achilles and Hector were

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both undiminished in martial vigour despite a night of passion. Ovid neatly subverts this: now it is just more lovemaking that awaits in the morning. 27 consumpsi tempora noctis: ‘I spent the night-time’. The phrase is conventional enough, but consumo is particularly apt here in the context of sexual appetites. 28 utilis et forti corpore. This phrasing has strong sexual overtones. 29–38 Previous elegists too were much concerned with their own deaths (for the funerary origins for the genre, see Introduction), but where Propertius envisaged that the emotional strains of love might cause his death, Ovid instead foresees and even relishes death in the act of love-making. 29 felix, quem: ‘happy is the man whom’. certamina: ‘contests, battles’. Ovid may have wrestling in mind. 30 di faciant: ‘may the gods bring it about that’. This idiom is used regularly by the comic poet Plautus. leti: a common synonym for mors in higher genres of literature. The juxtaposition of registers adds to the absurdity here. sit is subjunctive following di faciant (ut is understood). 31–4 Elegists normally reject other ways of life in favour of love (and poetry): here Ovid deprecates alternative deaths. In both cases, the point is that the manner of death befits the life. 31 ‘Let him run through his breast on the weapons of his enemies.’ Honourable wounds were sustained at the front. adversis contraria: the two words convey essentially the same idea. This is an example of ‘pleonasm’, where more words are used than is strictly necessary to convey the meaning. 33 avarus: ‘greedy [merchant]’. We hear Ovid’s equestrian disdain for those who earned their living through trade. quae lassarit arando:

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‘which he has worn out with voyages’. quae anticipates aequora in the following line. lassarit is a contraction of the perfect subjunctive lassaverit. aro is a common metaphor for sailing (ploughing a furrow across the sea). 34 An unpleasant and dishonourable way to end a dishonourable life. Perhaps the crime Ovid has in mind is insurance fraud, where the value of a ship’s cargo would be inflated to secure a greater payout in the event of an accident. 35 at mihi contingat: ‘but may it be my fate’; at again marks a strong contrast (compare line 19). Veneris . . . motu: ‘sex’. languescere: ‘to grow weak, die’; there may well be a sexual innuendo here too. 36 ‘When I die, may I go [literally, be untied] mid-work’. solvo is a common metaphor for death in higher forms of poetry. opus, meaning ‘sex act’ (compare English ‘job’), sets a rather lower tone. Note the artful arrangement of words in this couplet, interposing languescere between motu and Veneris, then solvar et inter between medium and opus. 37–8 aliquis . . . lacrimans. For weeping mourners at the poet’s funeral, compare Tibullus I.1.61–66; Ovid’s cheerfully parodic subversion of the conventional ‘he died as he lived’ theme is a far cry from his predecessors’ self-indulgent melancholy, though. mors fuit: the somewhat prosaic vocabulary here perhaps reflects this (see note on leti, line 30).

Poem 12 Here we find Ovid in his amatory prime: strutting, crowing, confident, celebrating his victory over Corinna via the metaphor of a military triumph. Propertius also wrote a piece marking an amatory victory

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(II.14), and a comparison of the two helps elucidate the differences between the two poets. Propertius is far more personal, with some explicit details of his lovemaking with Cynthia. For Ovid, by contrast, the victory metaphor itself is now primary, and beyond the generic references in the third line to vir, custos and ianua, there is nothing to root this piece in the context of a real affair – instead, the poem takes the form of a playful rhetorical exposition, arguing how the amatory triumph surpasses a bona fide military one. Where Propertius’ delight in the present was tempered by the fear that his good fortune might not last, there are no such touches of uncertainty and human frailty in Ovid. Love and War (Venus and Mars) are traditional antitheses, of course, and Ovid takes mischievous delight in transcending the contrast. In the first book of the Amores, I.2 presents him as a prisoner in Cupid’s triumph, while I.9 tries to argue that life of a lover is not altogether different from that of a soldier (militat omnis amans, ‘every lover is a soldier’). To appreciate both the wit and the sheer audacity of this poem, it is important to appreciate the social and political context of its composition. Augustus had passed ‘moral’ legislation precisely to restrict the kind of amatory antics that Ovid here celebrates, while the military triumph, by contrast, was the highest accolade to which any citizen might aspire: drawn in a chariot with four white horses, acclaimed with the ritual greeting ‘Io triumphe!’ Such was the prestige the triumph conferred that after 19 BC no one outside the imperial family was permitted to celebrate one. Ovid does not simply equate his own adultery with military success, but rather tries to argue that his achievement surpasses that of a real triumphator – do we detect a subtle dig at Augustus here? In lines 13–14, the poet emphasizes his sole responsibility for the victory, me duce . . . me milite – might this be a reference to Augustus’ tendency to claim credit for the military successes of his generals (the emperor’s personal battle record was

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undistinguished)? Likewise, Ovid stresses at the end of the poem how his own victory was bloodless (sine caede, line 27), in sharp contrast to the bloody strife of civil war from which Augustus had emerged victorious. Even the Augustan foundation myth is subverted: in Ovid’s reference to Aeneas’ struggle to found Lavinium, the grandmother city of Rome, Virgil’s canonical version stressing Trojan and Roman destiny is set aside; instead it is Lavinia as the object of Aeneas’ affection who prompts the war (lines 21–2). As Booth observes, ‘the Augustan establishment might not have been amused.’ 1 ‘Surround my temples, triumphal laurels.’ ite . . . circum is equivalent to circumite. laurus is fourth declension vocative plural. The laurel garland, bestowed on victorious athletes at the ancient Greek games, was also awarded to Roman triumphatores. 1–2 The unexpected address to the laurels and the bald statement of success that follows (vicimus) make for a dramatic opening couplet. The perfect tense indicates that victory is complete. 2 in nostro est ecce Corinna sinu: note the artful arrangement of words here: Corinna is embraced by the words for ‘my embrace.’ noster is regularly used for meus in verse. ecce: ‘an exclamation of exuberance’ (Booth). 3–4 hostes and capi sustain the military metaphor. vir . . . custos . . . ianua firma: tricolon crescendo. The three traditional obstacles to the elegiac lover. A good example of the custos or chaperon is Bagoas in II.2. Whereas Propertius’ victory was over the girl herself, Ovid by contrast sees his triumph as over the forces that might have kept Corinna from him. 4 nequa . . . arte: ‘so that not by any skill’. A note of self-congratulation. Try as they might, Corinna’s guardians have failed to keep her from Ovid thanks to his sublime amatory technique (or maybe his

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poetic art?), which the poet here equates with military skill or stratagem. 5 Note that dignus is followed by an ablative. praecipuo . . . triumpho is virtually oxymoronic as a triumph was special enough in normal circumstances. Where Propertius had acknowledged that not everyone would accept that his amatory success was akin to Roman victory over the Parthians (II.14.23f), Ovid makes no such concession, instead claiming that his own success even surpasses a regular triumph. 6 quaecumque est: a difficult phrase. If taken to refer to praeda (and thus Corinna), it might seem somewhat uncharitable towards the beloved; yet if it refers to victoria, the hint of self-deprecation sits uneasily with tub-thumping confidence of the preceding line. The latter is probably the more plausible interpretation, with the phrase simply noting that this was not the usual kind of victory. sanguine praeda caret: unlike real warfare, no blood is shed in the amatory ‘combat’. There may be a note of indignation on Ovid’s part here: it was all very well for Augustus to condemn immorality at home, but no one died as result of it, in stark contrast to the vicious slaughter of the civil wars for which he had celebrated his triumphs. 7–8 non . . . muri, non . . . oppida . . . sed . . . puella: bathos. Note also how love is (appropriately) compared to siege warfare, not pitched battle. ductu . . . meo: ablative absolute, ‘under my leadership’. Note the artful ‘word-painting’ here, with ductu . . . meo enclosing capta puella, mimicking his embrace of the girl. 9 Pergama: poetic plural. Pergamum was strictly the citadel of Troy, but in verse regularly stands for the city as a whole (metonymy). bello . . . bilustri: temporal ablative, ‘in a ten-year war’. In the Roman calendar, a lustrum was a period of five years (at the end of which a census was supposed to held), so this is a grandly anachronistic way of expressing the duration of the war.

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10 ex tot: supply hominibus. Atridis: the sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus. pars quota laudis erat: translate: ‘how much of the renown belonged to’. The great heroes of the past had to share their glory, but Ovid’s success is indivisibly his own. 11 milite: ‘common soldier’. Successful generals (such as the heroes mentioned in the previous line) were in part dependent on their men for their military victories – but Ovid’s success was his and his alone. dissors: not attested elsewhere, so perhaps an Ovidian coinage – a rare word for a rare achievement. 12 gloria: emphatic enjambment, all the more striking because glory normally attached to civic and military successes; applying the term to the amatory context is bold. titulum muneris: ‘a claim on the reward’. titulus (compare English ‘title deed’) is also the word for the inscription on the base of a statue, such as the triumphator would be entitled to. munus is apt here too, indicating both the ‘gift’ of the triumph and the ‘military service’ that merited it. Catullus also uses the word in an erotic sense (61.221). 13 me duce . . . me milite: ablative absolutes, a variation on the theme of the previous couplets. hanc voti finem: ‘this object of my desire’ (finis is usually masculine, however). 14 eques . . . pedes . . . signifer: tricolon anaphora. 15 casum fortuna: the juxtaposition is somewhat awkward philosophically, but Ovid’s point is clear enough. Whereas in war a good deal is down to chance, amatory success if purely a game of skill. 16 ades: imperative. o cura parte triumphe mea: ‘triumph gained by own efforts’. Another striking apostrophe (compare line 1): readers may be forgiven for finding Ovid’s address to his own success somewhat overdone. parte is not from pars, but pario, ‘I produce’.

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17–26 Ovid catalogues a series of women who have provoked wars in the mythological past (note the tricolon anaphora with femina). The parallel is not entirely satisfactory, though, as these women (on Ovid’s account) were the cause of real military conflict, whereas in Ovid’s case the warfare is purely metaphorical. 17 nova is predicative: ‘nor is the cause of my warfare a new one’. 17–18 nisi rapta fuisset/Tyndaris, Europae pax Asiaeque foret. foret = esset (imperfect subjunctive of sum), so this is a mixed hypothetical conditional. The imperfect here captures a continuous past as well as a present counterfactual: ‘there would have been peace between Europe and Asia [and still would be].’ Tyndaris: ‘daughter of Tyndareus’, so Helen of Troy/Sparta. Such use of patronyms adds a touch of epic gravitas. Europae . . . Asiaeque: the Trojan war, taking place on the boundary between the two continents, is a viewed as a clash of civilizations, war between East and West. The war with the Parthians and Augustus’ defeat of Antony and Cleopatra were seen in similarly global terms. 19–20 The conflict between Lapiths and Centaurs was a famous incident from an earlier heroic age. Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, was celebrating his marriage to Hippodamia, to which the centaurs were invited, when one of their number, Eurytion, drunkenly attempted to rape the bride. With the help of Theseus, the Lapiths successfully drove out the miscreants. The exotic form of the centaurs made this combat a popular subject in ancient art, notably on the Parthenon metopes (part of the ‘Elgin marbles’ exhibited in the British Museum). silvestris: accusative plural (agreeing with Lapithas). populum biformem: the Centaurs, half-man, half-horse. turpiter alludes to the rape. adposito . . . mero: ablative absolute, ‘when the wine was served’, so in contemporary terms ‘under the influence’. merum strictly is

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unmixed wine (the ancients normally diluted their cups). Not for the first or last time, strong liquor led to violence. 21–2 Boldly ignoring Virgil’s canonical account in the latter half of the Aeneid (assuming he was familiar with it), Ovid here assigns a wholly different cause to the war between the Latins and Trojans. Neither fate nor the divine anger of Juno is mentioned here; instead it is the femina, Lavinia, daughter of king Latinus, whose hand Aeneas sought in marriage. As often the poet seeks to collapse the distance between epic and elegiac, martial and marital, but here this comes at the price of belittling Rome’s national mythography. iterum: to be taken closely with femina. nova bella: ‘fresh wars’. Having fought around their city for ten years for the sake of Paris’ marriage to Helen, the Trojans are now forced to begin another conflict over a similar issue. iuste Latine: the Latin king is presented favourably in the Aeneid too, where it is Juno who is responsible for breaking the truce between the two sides and Turnus who is the chief antagonist of the Trojans. 23–4 This couplet references the war that ensued after the rape of the Sabines; femina is collective. The Sabine menfolk attacked Rome to reclaim their daughters from their new ‘husbands’. etiamnunc urbe recenti: temporal ablative, ‘when the city was still fresh’, so ‘soon after the city’s foundation’. armaque saeva dedit: ‘caused a savage conflict’, but the image is of the women placing weapons in the hands of the combatants – as though they, not Romulus or his lustful tribesmen, bore responsibility for the war. 25–6 This naturalistic image contrasts with the three mythological exempla that precede, moving swiftly from Virgil’s Aeneid to the world of the Georgics. vidi ego: adds a personal touch, but perhaps should be taken ironically. Bulls fighting over a white heifer are a poetic commonplace, so Ovid is more likely to have been familiar with the image from Horace and Virgil than personal experience. nivea: ‘snow-

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white’ – a regular epithet for cattle. coniuge: the bulls are fighting to see who will have the heifer as his ‘wife’; a surprising humanization, given that it was precisely to elucidate human behaviour that Ovid has turned to the animal kingdom. Such mixing of terms serves to suggest that there is little to distinguish man and beast in such instances. 26 spectatrix: a rare form, the feminine of spectator. Translate: ‘watching’. animos: literally ‘spirits’, so here ‘courage’. 27–8 A slightly awkward conclusion to the poem. me quoque returns the reader to the focus on Ovid as the triumphant combatant, yet Cupido (Lust) as the cause of warfare marks a shift of emphasis from the exempla in the preceding lines, where the female herself was identified as the cause of conflict. qui multos: supply iusserunt. multos encompasses all the men mentioned in lines 19–26. me sine caede. Ovid ends with a pointed contrast between real and amatory warfare, weighing strongly in favour of the latter. signa movere: ‘go into battle’, a technical military expression. Note the sibilance and alliteration of m- sounds in the final couplet.

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Vocabulary

a, ab + abl. abrumpo, abrumpere, abrupi, abruptum accedo, accedere, accessi, accessum ad + acc. addo, addere, addidi, additum adfectus, -a, -um adpono, adponese, adposui, adpositum adsiduus, -a, -um adspicio, adspicere, adspexi, adspectum adsum, adesse, adfui adversus, -a, -um aeger, -ra, -rum aequo (1) aequor, aequoris n. aer, aeris m. aetas, aetatis f. aeternus, -a, -um aggredior, aggredi, aggressus sum agmen, agminis n. ago, agere, egi, actum ales, -itis f. alimentum, alimenti n. aliquis, aliqua, aliquid

from I break apart I am added to, towards, at I add ailing, indisposed I serve regular I see I am present hostile ill I equal, match sea air age everlasting I undertake column I drive winged food, nourishment someone, something 85

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alius, -a, -ud alter, -a, -um alter . . . alter . . . altus, -a, -um ambitiosus, -a, -um ambo, -ae, -o amica, amicae f. amicus, amici m. amo (1) amor, amoris m. an animus, -i m. annus, anni m. ante + acc. antiquus, -a, -um anus, anus f. apto (1) aptus, -a, -um aqua, aquae f. arbor, arboris f. arma, armorum n. pl. armifer, -a, -um aro (1) ars, artis f. artus, artus m. asper, -a, -um at atque auctor, auctoris m. audeo, audere, ausus sum audio (4) aufero, auferre, abstuli, ablatum

other second, another the one . . . the other . . . deep, substantial ambitious, eager both friend, girlfriend friend I love love or spirit, courage year before ancient old woman I fit suitable water tree weapons armed, armour-bearing I plough art, skill limb rough, coarse but and author, cause I dare I hear I carry away

Vocabulary

auris, auris f. autem avarus, -a, -um avis, avis f. bellum, belli n. bene bibo, bibere, bibi biformis, -e bilustris, -e blaesus, -a, -um blandus, -i bracchium, bracchii n. brevitas, brevitatis f. cado, cadere, cecidi, casum caedes, caedis f. caelum, caeli n. candidus, -a, -um cano, canere, cecini, cantum canto (1) capillus, capilli m. capio, capere, cepi, captum capto (1) carcer, carceris n. careo, carere, carui + abl. carmen, carminis n. carnifex, carnificis m. castus, -a, -um casus, casus m. catena, catenae f. causa, causae f. centum certamen, certaminis n.

ear however, but greedy bird war well I drink two-formed, hybrid ten-year stammering, lisping pretty, alluring arm shortness I fall, collapse slaughter sky, heaven white I sing I sing hair, tress I capture, captivate I grasp at prison I lack song, poem butcher, villain chaste chance chain cause, reason one hundred contest, battle

87

88

Ovid Amores II

certus, -a, -um cervix, cervicis f. chorda, chordae f. cibus, cibi m. cingo, cingere, cinxi, cinctum cinis, cineris m. circum, circa + acc. clamo (1) coeo, coire, coii, coitum cogo, cogere, coegi, coactum colligo, colligere, collegi, collectum collis, collis m. collum, colli n. color, coloris m. columba, columbae f. colus, coli m. coma, comae f. commissum, commissi n. concieo, conciere, concivi, concitum concordia, concordiae f. confiteor, confiteri, confessus sum conpes, conpedis f. conscius, -a, -um conspicio, conspicere, conspexi, conspectum consumo, consumere, consumpsi, consumptum contingo, contingere, contigi, contactum contra (adv.)

fixed, certain neck string food I surround ash around I shout I come together I restrain, compel I gather hill neck colour, skin-colour dove distaff hair crime I stir up agreement, harmony I confess, acknowledge shackle, fetter aware, privy I notice, catch sight of I use up, spend I happen, befall against, in return

Vocabulary

contrarius, -a, -um convenio, convenire, conveni, conventum converto, convertere, converti, conversum cornix, cornicis f. corpus, corporis n. corrumpo, corrumpere, corrupi, corruptum coturnix, coturnicis f. credo, credere, credidi, creditum + dat. cresco, crescere, crevi, cretum crimen, criminis n. croceus, -a, -um crocus, croci m. crus, cruris n. cubile, cubilis n. culpa, culpae f. culpo (1) cultus, -a, -um cultus, -us m. cum + subj. cum bene cupidus, -a, -um cupio, cupere, cupivi, cupitum cur? cura, curae f. cursus, cursus m. curvus, -a, -um custos, custodis m. damno (1)

opposite, facing I suit, meet I translate crow body I seduce quail I believe I grow charge, accusation saffron saffron leg bed blame I criticise well-groomed, adorned dress, attire when, since though eager I desire why? concern, duty, effort course, flight curving guard, chaperone I condemn

89

90

Ovid Amores II

damnum, damni n. dea, deae f. decipio, decipere, decepi, deceptum defendo, defendere, defendi, defensum deicio, deicere, deieci, deiectum delictum, delicti n. demens, -entis demo, demere, dempsi, demptum denique deprendo, deprendere, deprendi, deprensum desino, desinere, desii, desitum desum, deesse, defui deterior deus, dei m. deverto, devertere, deverti, deversum dico, dicere, dixi, dictum dignus, -a, -um + abl. diluo, diluere, dilui, dilutum discors, -dis dispar, -is disperdo, disperdere, disperdidi, disperditum dissimulo (1) dissors, -rtis dividuus, -a, -um do, dare, dedi, datus doctus, -a, -um

loss goddess I deceive, disappoint I defend I cast down crime, sin mad I take away finally I catch I cease, stop I fail, am lacking worse, inferior god I turn aside I say, speak worthy (of) I wash away, dispel different unequal I destroy I conceal, pretend not to separate, not shared divided, split I give learned

Vocabulary

doleo, dolere, dolui dolor, doloris m. domina, dominae f. dominus, domini m. domus, domus f. dormio (4) dos, dotis f. doto (1) dubius, -a, -um duco, ducere, duxi, ductum ductus, -us m. dulcis, -e dum duo, duae, duo durus, -a, -um dux, ducis m. e, ex + abl. ecce! edax, -acis ego emo, emere, emi, emptum enim ensis, ensis m. eo, ire, ivi/ii eques, equitis m. erro (1) esca, escae f. et etiam etiamnunc evenio, evenire, eveni, eventum exequiae, exequiarum f. pl.

I grieve, feel pain grief mistress master house, home I sleep gift, endowment I endow uncertain, doubtful I lead, move leadership sweet while two hard, harsh leader out of, from behold! greedy, voracious I, me I buy for sword I go cavalryman I wander food and also still I befall, happen, occur (for) funeral

91

92

Ovid Amores II

exhibeo (2) exiguus, -a, -um expleo, explere, explevi, expletum explico (1) extremus, -a, -um facilis, -e facio, facere, feci, factum falsus, -a, -um fama, famae f. fateor, fateri, fassus sum fatigo (1) favor, favoris m. felix, -icis femina, feminae f. femur, femuris n. fere fero, ferre, tuli, latum ferus, -a, -um fides, fidei f. fingo, fingere, finxi, fictum finis, finis m. fio, fieri, factus sum firmus, -a, -um flaveo, flavere, flavi flavus, -a, -um flecto, flectere, flexi, flexum folium, folii n. forma, formae f. formosus, -a, -um forsitan fortis, -e

I show short I complete I unfold at the edge easy I do, make false reputation I confess I tire, weary support, partiality lucky, fortunate woman thigh generally I bring, carry, endure wild trust, credibility, loyalty I make up end I happen, become strong I am yellow, blonde blonde, golden I bend leaf shape, beauty beautiful perhaps strong

Vocabulary

fortuna, fortunae f. fossa, fossae f. fragilis, -e frater, fratris m. frequens, -entis fretum, freti n. frondeo, frondere, frondui frons, frontis f. fugax, -cis fulmino (1) funus, funeris n. furiosus, -a, -um furtivus, -a, -um fuscus, -a, -um garrulus, -a, -um gemino (1) gena, genae f. gero, gerere, gessi, gestus gestus, gestus m. gloria, gloriae f. gracilis, -e graculus, graculi m. gramen, graminis n. gratus, -a, -um gravis, -e gremium, gremii n. gyrus, gyri m. habeo (2) habilis, -e hebeto (1) herois, heroidis f. hesternus, -a, -um

fate, fortune ditch fragile, brittle brother thronged, crowded, regular wave, sea I am in leaf forehead fleeing I flash death, funeral mad, raging secret, stolen dark talkative I double cheek I do, fare, conduct, wear gesture, posture glory graceful, elegant jackdaw grass pleasing heavy, difficult lap circle, circular motion I have nimble I dull, blunt heroine of yesterday

93

94

Ovid Amores II

heu hic, haec, hoc historia, historia f. honos, honoris m. horridus, -a, -um hostis, hostis m. huc humanus, -a, -um humilis, -e humus, humi f. iaceo, iacere, iacui iam ianua, ianuae f. ignavus, -a, -um ignotus, -a, -um ilex, ilicis f. ille, illa, illud illic imago, imaginis f. imitatrix, imitatricis f. imitor (1 dep.) immisceo, immiscere, immiscui, immixtum immitto, immittere, immisi, immissum impello, impellere, impuli, impulsum in + abl. in + acc. inanis, -e incedo, incedere, incessi, incessum

alas this, he, she, it story, legend honour, reward bristling enemy here, to here human low ground I lie (down) already door idle unknown holm oak that, he, she, it there image, likeness imitator I imitate I mix in, intermingle, join I send against, unleash I drive, impel in into, to empty, false I walk, go

Vocabulary

incestum, incesti n. inde index, indicis c. indicium, indicii n. induo, induere, indui, indutum ineo, inire, inii, initum inermis, -e iners, -rtis infelix, -icis ingeniosus, -a, -um innocuus, -a, -um inpleo = impleo, implere, implevi, impletum insidiae, insidiarum f. pl. inter + acc. interdum invidia, invidiae f. invisus, -a, -um invito (1) ipse, ipsa, ipsum iste, ista, istud iterum iubeo, iubere, iussi, iussum iudex, iudicis m. iudicium, iudicii n. Iunonius, -a, -um iurgium, iurgii n. ius, iuris n. iustus, -a, -um iuvenca, iuvencae f. iuvenis, iuvenis m. iuvo, iuvare, iuvi, iutum

adultery then informer information, evidence I put on I enter upon, undertake unarmed quiet, idle unlucky clever harmless I fill up, finish, satisfy ambush amidst, among from time to time envy hateful (to) I invite -self that again I order judge judgement of Juno quarrel, abuse power just heifer young man I help, please

95

96

Ovid Amores II

labor, laboris m. laboro (1) lacrima, lacrimae f. lacrimo (1) langueo, languere languesco, languescere, langui lanio (1) lapis, lapidis m. lascivus, -a, -um lasso (1) lateo, latere, latui latus, -a, -um latus, lateris n. laurus, laurus f. laus, laudis f. laxus, -a, -um lectus, lecti m. lego, legere, legi, lectum letum, leti n. liber, -a, -um libertas, libertatis f. libro (1) licet, licere, licuit lingua, linguae f. liniger, -a, -um liquidus, -a, -um liveo, livere locus, loci m. longus, -a, -um loquax, -acis loquor, loqui, locutus sum lux, lucis f.

work, effort I work tear I cry, weep I am faint, ill I grow weak I tear stone playful, licentious I tire, weary I lie hidden wide side, flank laurel praise loose, spacious bed I read death free freedom I poise it is allowed tongue linen-wearing clear I am bruised place long, tall chatty, talkative I speak light, dawn

Vocabulary

maestus, -a, -um magis magnus, -a, -um malus, -a, -um mane manifestus, -a, -um manus, manus f. mare, maris n. maritus, mariti m. mas, maris m. mater, matris f. medius, -a, -um melior, melius membrum, membri n. memini, meminisse mendosus, -a, -um mereor, mereri, meritus sum meritum, -i n. merum, meri n. metuo, metuere, metui, metutum meus, -a, -um miles, militis m. militia, militiae f. miluus, milui m. minor, minus misceo, miscere, miscui, mixtum miser, -a, -um mitto, mittere, misi, missum mobilis, -e modestus, -a, -um molestus, -a, -um mollis, -e

sorrowful more great, big bad, wicked early, in the morning clear, obvious hand sea husband male, mate mother middle (of) better limb I remember faulty I deserve, earn what is deserved, ‘deserts’ unmixed wine I fear my soldier military service kite smaller I mix sad, wretched I sent pliant, nimble modest, sober burdensome soft

97

98

Ovid Amores II

mora, morae f. mores, morum m. pl. morior, mori, mortuus sum mors, mortis f. mos, moris m. motus, motus m. moveo, movere, movi, motum multus, -a, -um munus, muneris n. murus, muri m. muto (1) mutuus, -a, -um naufragus, -a, -um ne + subj. nec, neque necto, nectere, nexi, nexum nego (1), negare, negavi, negatum nemoralis, -e nempe nemus, nemoris n. nerva, nervae f. niger, -ra, -rum nihil nimium niveus, -a, -um noceo, nocere, nocui + dat. nomen, nominis n. non noster, -ra, -rum noto (1) notus, -a, -um

delay morals I die death behaviour, manners movement I move much, many gift, duty, prize wall I change, alter shared shipwrecked in order that . . . not and . . . not I weave, bind, contrive I deny wooded indeed, truly grove, wood sinew black nothing too much, excessively snow-white I hurt, harm name not our I mark known

Vocabulary

novem novus, -a, -um nox, noctis f. nullus, -a, -um numerosus, -a, -um numerus, numeri m. nunc nux, nucis f. obicio, obicere, obieci, obiectum obnoxius, -a, -um obscenus, -a, -um occido, occidere, occidi, occasum oculus, oculi m. odi, odisse odium, odii n. officium, officii n. olor, oloris m. omnis, -e onus, oneris n. opera, operae f. operosus, -a, -um opes, opum f. pl. oppidum, oppidi n. optimus, -a, -um opus, operis n. orbis, orbis m. orbus, -a, -um + abl. orno (1), ornare, ornavi, ornatum os, oris n. os, ossis n. osculum, osculi n.

nine new, young night no rhythmic number, measure now nut I object obedient, indebted to inauspicious, unclean I die eye I hate hatred service, efforts swan all, every burden efforts careful, painstaking wealth town best task, job world, globe deprived of I adorn mouth bone kisss

99

100

Ovid Amores II

palatum, palati n. papaver n. par, -is pario, parere, peperi, partum pars, partis f. parvus, -a, -um pasco, pascere, pavi, pastum pauci, -ae, -a pax, pacis f. pectus, pectoris n. peculium, -i n. pedes, peditis m. pello, pellere, pepuli, pulsum pendeo, pendere, pependi penes + acc. per + acc. perago, peragere, peregi, peractum percurro, percurrere, percurri, percursum perdo, perdere, perdidi, perditum pereo, perire, perii, peritum periurus, -a, -um perpetuus, -a, -um phaselos f. phoenix, phoenicis f. pinna, pinnae f. pius, -a, -um placeo, placere, placui, placitum + dat. placidus, -a, -um

palate, mouth poppy seed equal I produce part small I feed, graze few peace breast, chest savings infantryman I drive (away) I hang (down) in the power of along, on, through, across I go through I run through I destroy I die, perish perjured, lying everlasting light ship phoenix wing pious, devoted I please calm

Vocabulary

plango, plangere, planxi, planctum plenus, -a, -um + abl. ploro (1) pluma, plumae f. plus, pluris pluvius, -a, -um poena, poenae f. pollex, pollicis m. pomum, pomi n. pondus, ponderis n. pono, ponere, posui, positum populus, populi m. porticus, -us f. possum, posse, potui postmodo potens, -entis prae + abl. praecipuus, -a, -um praeda, praedae f. preces, precum f. pl. primus, -a, -um prior, prioris pro + abl. probo (1) procax, -acis procellosus, -a, -um prodo, prodere, prodidi, proditum proelium, proelii n. prohibeo (2)

I beat full (of) I lament feather more of rain punishment thumb apple weight I put down, place people colonnade I can, am able afterwards, shortly powerful in comparison to, because of special, particular booty, plunder prayers first in front, better on behalf of, in defence of, in proportion to I approve, prove forward blustery, stormy I bring forth battle I forbid, keep away

101

102

Ovid Amores II

prosum, prodesse, profui protinus psittacus, psittaci f. pudor, pudoris m. puella, -ae f. pugno (1) pulcher, -ra, -rum pullus, -a, -um puppis, puppis f. puto (1) quaero, quaerere, quaesivi, quaesitum quam quamvis querela, querelae f. queror, queri, questus sum querulus, -a, -um qui, quae, quod quia quicumque, quaecumque, quodcumque quid? quidem quis? quisquam, quicquam quod quoque quotus, -a, -um? -que rapidus, -a, -um rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum rarus, -a, -um

I am an advantage at once parrot modesty, bashfulness girl I fight beautiful dark stern (of a ship) I think I ask, inquire than, how even though complaint I complain trembling who, which because whoever, whatever what, why? indeed who? anyone, anything because also what number? and swift I snatch rare, refined

Vocabulary

recens, -entis recipio, recipere, recepi, receptum reddo, reddere, reddidi, redditum refero, referre, rettuli, relatum regnum, regni n. rego, regere, rexi, rectum rescribo, rescribere, rescripsi, rescriptum resono (1) rigidus, -a, -um rogo (1), rogare, rogavi, rogatum rostrum, rostri n. ruber, -ra, -rum rudis, -e ruga, rugae f. rusticus, -a, -um saeclum = saeculum, saeculi n. saevus, -a, -um sanguis, sanguinis m. sapiens, -entis sapio, sapere, sapivi satis scelus, sceleris n. scio, scire, scivi, scitum scribo, scribere, scripsi, scriptum se secum securus, -a, -um sed sedeo, sedere, sedi, sessum sedes, sedis f.

fresh, new I receive, welcome I return, give back I relate, report kingdom I rule I write back I ring out strict, upright, hard I ask beak red coarse, unrefined wrinkle, frown coarse, unrefined century savage blood wise I taste, am wise/discerning enough crime I know I write himself, herself, itself = cum se free from care but I sit seat, place

103

104

Ovid Amores II

semper sentio, sentire, sensi, sensum sepono, seponere, seposui, sepositum septimus, -a, -um sepulcrum, sepulcri n. sequor, sequi, secutus sum sermo, sermonis m. serus, -a, -um servo (1) seu . . . seu . . . severus, -a, -um si si minus sic sidus, sideris n. signifer, signiferi m. signum, signi n. silvestris, -e simplex, -icis simplicitas, simplicitatis f. simulo (1) sine + abl. sinus, sinus m. siquid sitis, sitis f. sive . . . sive . . . socer, soceri m. sollicito (1) solus, -a, -um solvo, solvere, solui, solutum somnus, somni m.

always I feel, realise, notice I set aside, reserve seventh tomb, grave I follow conversation, speaking late I guard, watch if . . . or if . . . strict, austere if if not thus star standard-bearer standard wood-dwelling, wild plain simplicity, openness I pretend, feign without lap if in any way thirst if . . . or if . . . father-in-law I arouse alone I slacken, release sleep

Vocabulary

sonus, soni m. sordidus, -a, -um spatior, spatiari, spatiatus sum species, speciei f. spectatrix, -icis spes, spei f. sterto, stertere, stertui sto, stare, steti, statum stringo, stringere, strinxi, strictum studeo (2) stupeo (2) subeo, subire, subii, subitum sufficio, sufficere, suffeci, suffectum sum, esse, fui supero (1) sustineo, sustinere, sustinui, sustentum suus, -a, -um tecum taceo, tacere, tacui, tacitum tamen tango, tangere, tetigi, tactum tego, tegere, tegi, tectum tempus, temporis n. tenax, -acis teneo, tenere, tenui, tentum tener, -a, -um tepeo, tepere, tepui terra, terrae f. theatrum, -i n.

sound filthy, disreputable I walk, promenade appearance watching hope I snore I stand I draw I desire, am keen I am speechless I approach I am capable, satisfy I am I overcome I lift one’s own = cum te I keep quiet, am silent however I touch I cover time, temple (forehead) clinging, steadfast I hold tender I am warm, lukewarm land, earth theatre

105

106

Ovid Amores II

timeo, timere, timui timidus, -a, -um tingo, tingere, tinxi, tinctum titulum, tituli n. tollo, tollere, sustuli, sublatum torqueo, torquere, torsi, tortum torus, tori m. tot totus, -a, -um toxicum, toxici n. traho, trahere, traxi, tractum trepidus, -a, -um tristis, -e triumphalis, -e triumphus, -i m. tu tuba, tubae f. tueor, tueri, tuitus sum tumulus, tumuli m. turba, turbae f. turpis, -e turtur, turturis m. tuto tutus, -a, -um tuus, -a, -um tyrannus, tyranni m. udus, -a, -um umor, umoris m. unde unguis, unguis m. unicus, -a, -um unus, -a, -um

I fear frightened I dip, dye, tinge claim, title I raise, lift, carry off I twist bed so many whole, entire poison I draw, drag trembling sad triumphal triumph you trumpet I guard, watch over tomb, mound crowd shameful turtle dove safely safe your tyrant, king wet, moist fluid, liquid from where nail single one

Vocabulary

urbs, urbis f. uro, urere, ussi, ustum ut + indic. ut + subj. uterque, utraque, utrumque utilis, -e vaco (1) vacuus, -a, -um vale! vates, -is m. velut venio, venire, veni, ventum ventus, venti m. verber, verberis n. verbum, verbi n. verso (1) verto, vertere, verti, versum verus, -a, -um vetus, -eris victoria, victoriae f. video, videre, vidi, visum videor, videri, visus sum viduus, -a, -um vinco, vincere, vici, victum vir, viri m. vireo, virere, virui vires, virium f. pl. viso, visere, visi, visum vita, vitae f. vitium, vitii n. vivax, -acis vivo, vivere, vixi, victum

107

city I burn as, when that, though each (of two) useful, serviceable I have leisure, wait; have room for empty goodbye! poet as, like I come wind blow, lash word I manage, overturn I turn true old victory I see I seem lacking a companion I conquer man, husband I am green, verdant strength I visit life fault, vice enduring, long-lived I live

108

vivus, -a, -um vix volo, velle, volui volucer, -ris, -re voluptas, voluptatis f. vos votum, voti n. vox, vocis f. vultur, vulturis m. vultus, vultus m. zmaragdus, zmaragdi m.

Ovid Amores II

alive scarcely I want winged, flying pleasure you prayer, desire voice vulture face emerald

109

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112