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Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination
Abstract
Central to Ovid's elegiac texts and his Metamorphoses is his preoccupation with how desiring subjects interact and seduce each other. This major study, which shifts the focus in Ovidian criticism from intertextuality to intersubjectivity, explores the relationship between self and other, and in particular that between male and female worlds, which is at the heart of Ovid's vision of poetry and the imagination. A series of close readings, focusing on both the more celebrated and less studied parts of the corpus, moves beyond the more often-asked questions of Ovid, such as whether he is 'for' or 'against' women, in order to explore how gendered subjects converse, compete and co-create. It illustrates how the tale of Medusa, alongside that of Narcissus, reverberates throughout Ovid's oeuvre, becoming a fundamental myth for his poetics. This book offers a compelling, often troubling portrait of Ovid that will appeal to classicists and all those interested in gender and difference.
... Several scholars have recently viewed Ovid's works through the lens of the gendered gaze. In particular, Rimell (2006) discusses Ars Amatoria specifically, noting that the theater is "an exemplary arena for the vaunting of spectacular erotics" (63). (I engage with her argument about Medicamina in Chapter 3 below.) ...
... Surely her pride is put on by her image in the mirror, but she never sees herself before she has been made up!) 38 Kennedy (1993), 68. 39 See Rimell (2006) for a discussion of the ways in which looking in the mirror "threatens as well as bolsters selfidentity" (69) in Medicamina. ...
... Before it reaches the reader, however, that image must necessarily be filtered through the perspective of the poet-lover. In her discussion of specularity in Ovid's amatory works, Rimell (2006) argues: "Mirrors lend women the power to know and control appearances, yet in so doing, we are reminded, they expose the limits of female individuation: they are the snare she has set herself." 45 In other words, a woman may change her appearance to amend her self-identity, but that identity, then, must always be fundamentally constructed through visuality; she can only control her identity as long as she is viewing herself in the mirror, rather than being viewed by the poet-lover. Unfortunately for the puella of 2.17, the poet-lover is in charge of the memorialization of her beauty, and the reader's perception of it is entirely constructed through his remembrance, filtered through his gaze. ...
This dissertation considers the connection between love and memory (or, as often, forgetting) in Roman elegiac poetry, through the lens of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love). I argue that, by writing Remedia, the last poem in the corpus of Latin love elegy, as an ‘art of forgetting’ which purports to aid the unlucky lover by teaching him to forget love, Ovid underscores the significance of memory in the elegiac genre. By telling readers how to forget, Ovid reveals how previous poets, including himself, taught readers how to remember. I investigate the connection between love and memory in elegy by pinpointing elegiac modes of amorous memory production. My method of analysis extracts certain pieces of advice (praecepta) given by the didactic narrator of Remedia, who guides the reader to rid himself of love. Even as his purportedly curative precepts inevitably fail, they point to elegiac strategies for memory production. My chapters treat these methods of creating memory thematically, each outlining a different piece of advice for forgetting, paired with a corresponding strategy for memory production in the elegiac genre: strategies for memorialization after death (Chapter 1); strategies for rescripting the localized memory of love (Chapter 2); strategies for creating false memories of the beloved (Chapter 3); women’s strategies for epistolary memory production (Chapter 4); and strategies for scripting poetic memory through allusion and tropes (Chapter 5). I propose that Remedia offers a guide for the reader of elegy, underscoring the importance of these strategies of memory production for the program of the elegiac genre. In addition to considering how the advice Ovid gives recalls his own previous works (the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Heroides), I explore how Ovid’s Remedia receives the works of his poetic predecessors, including Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and even Homer. To investigate the broader cultural milieu of Roman memorialization and mnemotechnics, I utilize frameworks from social, poetic, and cognitive memory studies.
... See for example Carp (1983), passim, Anderson (1997), 370, Michalopoulos (2012, 228 and passim. Rimell (2006), 30, more appropriately speaks of gender-bending. ...
... 34. See Sharrock (2002), 98; Fabre-Serris (2011), 101, stresses Ovid's interest in relating both female and male perspectives, while Rimell (2006), 208 n.4, connects it explicitly, though in passing, to Tiresias. ...
... climax of Ars 2 (ad metam properate simul: tum plena uoluptas, / cum pariter uicti femina uirque iacent, 'hurry to the goal at the same time: then you'll find full pleasure, when woman and man lie together, equally beaten', Ars 2.727f.) is in my view only apparently mutual: at Ars 2.719-24, the praeceptor lingers only on the woman's pleasure, provided to her by the man through masturbation (see Rimell [2006], 91); see James (2003), 205: 'in fact it is no more than a restatement of the praeceptor's typical desire to be in control, to know what his puella is feeling, to keep her dependent upon him.' In James' reading (2003), 207, the passage fits Tiresias' verdict perfectly, showing that 'female sexual pleasure…is a sign of male sexual prowess.' 47. ...
The brief story of Tiresias’ punishment in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses ( Met . 3.316–38) becomes a privileged site for mapping the different ways readers can reinterpret episodes of the poem in the light of the rest of Ovid's corpus. Tiresias, the first human uates of the poem, who is punished with blindness for voicing what he should have kept silent, can be included among those punished artists who double the poet in the Metamorphoses : while Tiresias is condemned for having voiced his knowledge of both sexes, Ovid is exiled for giving amatory advice to, and therefore knowing, both men and women. Thus the Tiresias episode reads as a pendant to that of Actaeon in the same book (the latter explicitly likened to Ovid's fate in Tristia 2.103–8), with the pair suggesting a veiled allegory of the carmen and error that caused Ovid's exile.
... É necessário considerar que esse incentivo ao cultus da luxúria feminina, descrita através dos desejos por objetos preciosos, era desaconselhável à mulher mesmo na própria poesia elegíaca (RIMELL, 2006). Propércio, citado por Rimell (2006), por exemplo, aconselha sua amada Cíntia a não usar de artifícios: São recorrentes os elogios à beleza natural, o desaconselhamento à utilização de cosméticos (medicamina) e a crítica ao cultus feminino, pois "O Amor nu não ama a beleza artificial", e mais vale a "graça natural". ...
... É necessário considerar que esse incentivo ao cultus da luxúria feminina, descrita através dos desejos por objetos preciosos, era desaconselhável à mulher mesmo na própria poesia elegíaca (RIMELL, 2006). Propércio, citado por Rimell (2006), por exemplo, aconselha sua amada Cíntia a não usar de artifícios: São recorrentes os elogios à beleza natural, o desaconselhamento à utilização de cosméticos (medicamina) e a crítica ao cultus feminino, pois "O Amor nu não ama a beleza artificial", e mais vale a "graça natural". Os Medicamina não são, como em Ovídio, necessários, antes "adornos comprados" e, por isso mesmo, deselegantes ao corpo. ...
Este trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar uma tradução do proêmio do texto Medicamina Faciei Femineae, do poeta latino Ovídio. Circunscrito na literatura pelo seu caráter didático, o texto ovidiano recebeu, ao longo do tempo, pouca atenção da crítica literária, o que não aconteceu com outras obras, a exemplo da “Arte de Amar”. Elegemos o proêmio do texto Medicamina Faciei Femineae para traduzir e comentar sobre a presença da puella romana e de outras mulheres, às quais o autor faz referência. Refletimos, ainda, sobre certas analogias estabelecidas no texto ovidiano que parecem oferecer credibilidade aos ensinamentos por ele propostos.
... 47 Evidencia-se, portanto, que a Safo de Boccaccio não é simplesmente a poeta de Lesbos, que escrevera em versos não elegíacos, mas aquela que um poeta elegíaco romano específico, Ovídio, representa. Assim, a imagem de Safo retratada por Boccaccio se constrói com base na imagem observada em Heroides, a qual, por sua vez, aproxima-se do próprio eu poético de Ovídio, uma relação que foi bem apontada por Rimell (2006). Em nosso entender, a apropriação do instrumento pela poetisa descrita por Boccaccio retoma as palavras da personagem Safo da carta ovidiana, passagem em que a poetisa nos fala sobre a adequação da lira a seu caráter e ao deus Apolo-Febo: "Agradecida, eu, Safo, a poetisa, ofereço a ti a lira, Febo: ela convém a mim e a ti" (Heroides,XV,. ...
... Na boca sacra deste deus está a segura verdade" (Ars amatoria, II, v. 509-10). 51 Para Rimell (2006), tal associação entre poetas e deuses não revela um símile meramente decorativo, pois a figura de Apolo representaria, em obras ovidianas como Ars amatoria (II, v. 493) e Amores, o estímulo para a atividade de escrita. 52 Segundo apontou Sharrock (1994), o próprio Ovídio se apresenta em Amores e Ars amatoria como o "'Apolo de sua obra", na medida em que ele é "aquele que tem as chaves da sabedoria, poética e erótica" (p. ...
Em seu catálogo Sobre as mulheres famosas (De mulieribus claris), escrito entre1361-1362, Giovanni Boccaccio explora o universo mítico greco-romano, retratando a vida de figuras femininas notáveis (clarae) da Antiguidade. Estudos anteriores sobre o De mulieribus claris tendem a ser marcados por um viés dicotômico, que oscila entre apontar um caráter moralista (cristão) ou “meramente” literário nas biografias. Eruditas “pesquisas de fontes” (Quellenforschungen) – as quais são normalmente associadas à segunda perspectiva – destacam, entre outras fontes clássicas, a obra do poeta Ovídio(43 a.C.-17 d.C.). O objetivo central a que se dedica este artigo é investigar como a poesia do autor romano é aludida em De mulieribus claris, e explorar efeitos de sentido de tal presença no catálogo em estudo. Referências ao texto de Ovídio serão apreciadas, valendo-se de preceitos de teoria Intertextual aplicada às Letras Clássicas, em passagens de três biografias, a saber, Tisbe (XIII), Medeia (XVII) e Safo (XLVII). A observação da relação entre os textos dos autores antigo e moderno nos fornece indícios de como se dá o processo de ressignificação do material da Antiguidade na obra boccacciana, passando, de fato, tanto pela reinterpretação de elementos mitológicos no âmbito de uma perspectiva moral cristã, quanto por movimentos de referenciação que filiariamBoccaccio aos grandes autores da Antiguidade.
... In its staging of forms interpreting and engaging with other forms to generate unforeseen possibilities, it gives rise to a nonanthropomorphic, antihumanist model in which forms and structures speculatively grapple with other logics. " See also Rimell (2024). ...
Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression?
The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction, gender). Exceeding not just historicist contextualism, but also conventional notions of laughter and the logic of the joke, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis uses Aristophanes to fully embrace, in the practice of close or “too-close” reading, the etymological and conceptual nexus of crisis, critique, and literary criticism.
These exuberant readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria, together with the first attempt ever to grapple with the comic style of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, and Jack Halberstam, connect Aristophanes with contemporary discourses of biopolitics, necrocitizenship, care, labor, and transness, and at the same time disclose a quasi- or para-Aristophanic mode in the written textures of critical theory. Here is a radically new approach to the literary criticism of the pre-modern – one that materializes the circuit of crisis and critique through a restless inhabitation of the becomings and unbecomings of comic form.
... Love and breakup letters are age-old techniques for getting feelings and emotions out in the open. 1 The literature of love letters dates back to at least the ancient Roman period. 10 LBM is able to exploit this traditional device for the airing of feelings by asking participants to personify the concept under study and make this the object of the letter. As Gerber suggests, LBM helps participants express feelings they otherwise might struggle to articulate in more traditional interview-based approaches. ...
We have recently utilised Love and Breakup Letter Methodology (LBM)1, 2 in medical education research3, - the first time this has been reported in the literature. LBM was developed within the discipline of User Experience (UX) 4 , where it is typically used as a tool to capture what focus group participants like or dislike about technological features or sites.2 Research participants are asked to write a love or breakup letter before, or at the beginning of, the focus group.
... As Lovatt reminds us, Medusa symbolizes the monstrous-feminine, a figure who has been appropriated by both psychoanalysis and feminism (e.g., Sarton 1971;Cixous 1975;Rimell 2006), a "pin-up for female objectification . . . the petrifying image of a mask-like female face . . . a synecdoche for women in epic: monster, uncanny, associated with the divine, powerful, at the same time as she is raped, objectified, an object conquered and exchanged by men to give them power" (Lovatt 2013, 356-357). ...
This essay examines from an artist-researcher perspective the durational solo dance work Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments) , created for and performed at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (UK) in 2018. It asks how dance's presence in the archaeological museum might allow an alternative visibility for ancient female bodies previously rendered only partially visible by history. It makes a claim for dance in the archaeological museum as a subversive act of radical archaeology, in terms of how, by playing on notions of dismembering/remembering histories, it seeks to disrupt received notions of how we view and understand ancient history and culture.
... Ovídio aqui traça uma linha nítida que separa o autor empírico do eu poético, em que o AVCTOR se diferencia do ACTOR talvez de uma maneira inovadora na literatura latina. Para Rimell (2006), Ovídio pode ser apontado como um escritor protonovelista, ou mesmo proto-pós-estruturalista, ao manipular categorias de escrita feminina e de discurso amoroso. Já Kennedy (2002) trabalha com a ideia de dois autores nocionais: a figura lendária e Ovídio, aos quais acrescentaríamos a ideia de dois leitores nocionais: o destinatário -em benefício ou prejuízo de quem a carta é escrita -e o público leitor de Ovídio. ...
O objetivo principal do presente artigo é analisar a troca de correspondência entre Páris e Helena nas Heroides de Ovídio (carta 16 – Páris-Helena; carta 17 – Helena-Páris). Nesta análise, parte-se do princípio de que o autor processa uma atualização das figuras mitológicas de Páris e Helena, imprimindo nelas traços que as caracterizam como partícipes da sociedade romana tal como retratada na poesia ovidiana, evidenciando sua romanidade: ele enquadra-se no perfil de um amante elegíaco, que busca obter a atenção de sua puella; ela assume a postura de uma autêntica matrona da viragem do século I, pronta para atender ao apelo de seu amante.
... The potential for this liminality, however, is raised in the limited and controlled context of the puella, not in that with a rival, peer, or even male beloved. If the elegist wished the elegiac lover to be wholly effeminate, the 206 See Rimell (2006) 200-201 on Amores 3.6 and the swelling of the river with Ovid's carmina; she reads this as a sign of arousal on the part of the river. 207 Both Amores 3.7 and this passage suggest a deeper significance to the lover's desire for a puella who possesses talent as well as beauty. ...
As the question stands now in the study of Roman elegy, there exists no comprehensive examination of the poetic construction of the male body set against traditional Roman discourse on masculinity. This dissertation explores the complexity of gender within Roman elegy by assessing the fluidity of the male poet-lover???s gender identity as it is manipulated within the fluctuating poetic constructions of his body. While the persona of the author???the poet-lover???frequently asserts his subservience to the dominant puella (girlfriend), elegy???s poet-lover does not exhibit a static, unchangingly effeminate identity. At times the poet-lover is, indeed, effeminate, but at others he lays claim to an identity more masculine than that of the paradigmatic figure of the Roman soldier, whose identity is similarly entangled and destabilized by the elegiac discourse on the male body. The system of gender identity articulated in the amatory narrative thus presents a dynamic that is more complex than the simple inversion of traditional notions of masculinity can represent. I argue that the corporeal discourse on the male body shifts to represent the rhetorical needs of the lover in a given poem, needs which are mediated by his interaction with the puella, but also by his peers and rivals.
The more nuanced gender paradigm proposed here is formulated first by uncovering innovations in elegy???s treatment of the often conventionalized categories of the body (beauty, infirmity, and wounds) and second by analyzing the relative visual access granted to the range of elegiac male bodies. Through the adaptation of literary conventions and traditional signs, the poet-lover demonstrates the instability of traditional semiotics within normative Roman discourses. By extending the question of the lover???s elegiac and masculine identity to an examination of elegiac discourse on the male body and the interplay of this discourse with traditional Roman masculinity, this study elucidates the overall gender paradigm within which elegy operates. I conclude that elegiac corporeal discourse does not reflect a literary gender system isolated from that of the non-literary sphere, and that consequently the complexity and fluidity of elegiac identity in turn uncovers similar instability in normative Roman values and semiotics.
Ovide a donné à sa puella le nom d’une poétesse grecque, Corinne, célèbre pour avoir triomphé de Pindare à plusieurs reprises dans une compétition poétique. Dans cet article, je défends l’hypothèse que ce choix s’explique par le désir d’instaurer une autre compétition entre l’‘ancienne’ Corinne et un poète masculin, lui-même en l’occurrence, et de la gagner en créant une ‘nouvelle’ Corinne. La poésie latine est caractérisée par des pratiques allusives que l’on peut appréhender à travers les approches intertextuelles et métalittéraires développées par la critique contemporaine. Je fais la liste de toutes les allusions métalittéraires, non au contenu des poèmes mais à l’activité poétique (passée) de l’ancienne Corinne, en essayant de montrer qu’elles font sens, non pas globalement (pour comprendre dans leur totalité les poèmes où on les trouve), mais isolément (c’est-à-dire qu’on peut lire dans ce sens certains passages). C’est par accumulation que ces possibles allusions, parce qu’elles se confortent, peuvent être considérées comme éclairant, voire explicitant, le positionnement d’Ovide en tant que poète s’appropriant un nom célèbre de poétesse, en faisant une coquille vide… et la remplissant par d’autres contenus poétiques associées à une puella élégiaque à laquelle il a donné le même nom. J’analyse dans cette perspective les poèmes consacrés aux cheveux, au perroquet et à l’avortement de Corinne. Dans une dernière partie, je m’intéresse au fait que la liaison d’Ovide avec Corinne se caractérise par une violence physique sans précédent chez les autres élégiaques. Si elle est à prendre au premier degré, elle étonne chez un poète qui expliquera longuement comment développer des relations harmonieuses entre amants dans l’Art d’aimer. Si elle est à prendre seulement métaphoriquement, elle met, elle aussi, indirectement en évidence la violence de l’appropriation par Ovide du nom de Corinne. L’enjeu des Amores a été pour Ovide de se créer un nom dans la tradition littéraire: après avoir vidé de tout contenu poétique celui de l’‘ancienne Corinne’, il s’enorgueillit à la fois d’avoir donné un nom à sa puella, ‘sa Corinne’, et d’avoir acquis, lui-même, celui de nouveau grand poète.
En el presente trabajo se analizan las Heroidas 4, 9 y 17 en las que Fedra, Deyanira y Helena cuestionan la pudicitia de sus contrapartes masculinas: Hipólito, Hércules y Paris, respectivamente. En el análisis, se consideran las características de los héroes y el contexto ficcional en el que se compone cada carta para delimitar los alcances del pudor masculino. La hipótesis de lectura es que las heroínas escriben con la intención de enfrentarse a la tradición, que las considera impúdicas, y construyen el discurso epistolar a los efectos de presentar su conducta como la apropiada y la masculina como la inadecuada.
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid created a world of alternating images that reflect both the significance of visual communication and the importance of movement. In these stories, vision and movement are closely related to the characters’ genders, the plot, and the final transformations. The relationship between Ovid’s literary text and a movie as a narrative, wherein the medium of storytelling differs, allows for the application of feminist film theory, especially that of Laura Mulvey. This approach can be applied to the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s piece of art that combines both text and image in an exemplary manner. Atalanta’s story, which will be discussed, is chosen precisely because it highlights the multidimensional function of vision and movement, combined with the gender of the observer and the object of the gaze, as well as the transformation process.
This paper analyses the fragmentary apologia for pederasty by Thomas Cannon. Published in pamphlet form in 1749, it was suppressed and prosecuted, and lost to history until its recent recovery. The recovery of the text is only partial, as it was preserved in quoted excerpts in the wording of the indictment against it. Despite its fragmentary state, it is one of the earliest defences of same-sex love, and classical texts and examples naturally form a major part of its argument. Although Cannon’s treatise is important for the history of sexuality and translation studies, it has received limited attention from classicists, despite containing multiple translations from classical authors, together with Cannon’s editorial comments. This paper explores the contribution of the pamphlet to the history of sexuality, through a focus on Cannon’s translations.
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future development. The Critical Guide aims to stimulate reflection on how we engage with Latin literature. Texts, tools and territories are the three areas of focus. The Guide situates the study of classical Latin literature within its global context from late antiquity to Neo-Latin, moving away from an exclusive focus on the pre-200 CE corpus. It recalibrates links with adjoining disciplines (history, philosophy, material culture, linguistics, political thought, Greek), and takes a fresh look at key tools (editing, reception, intertextuality, theory).
The replication of conventionalised motifs on engraved gemstones of the Roman imperial period has often prompted their dismissal by scholars who deem them too frivolous, too plentiful, and too small to be taken seriously as image-bearing objects, or else prioritise their workaday capacity as seals. Foregrounding gems’ function as personal adornment, this paper uses examples excavated from Herculaneum to argue that the repetition of certain images was, in fact, central to their agency as markers of identity, signalling the gender, age, and in some cases, social status of their wearer through the propagation of easily recognisable visual paradigms. Where other studies have emphasised the ways in which Roman jewellery communicated identity publicly, this paper also brings the material properties of gemstones into play to consider alternative, more intimate modes of viewing and suggest how engraved gems enabled the private self-bolstering and imaginative negotiation of identity as much as – or perhaps even instead of – its outward expression.
On cover:
Late Roman wall, the portion immediately south of the West Gate (Porta Oea) with re-used blocks from first-century mausolea (Drawing by Francesca Bigi) and Tombstone of Regina from South Shields (Arbeia) (Tyne and WearArchives and Museums/ Bridgeman Images).
E-ISSN (online version) 2611-3686
ISSN (print version) 0065-0900
Set in nineteenth century Europe, InSEXts tells the story of Lady Bertram and Mariah, two women in a romantic relationship who can transform into insects in order to defend their nascent family. In the second arc of the series, The Necropolis, Lady Bertram, and Mariah are joined by Phoebe (a Black, transgender artist) whose friends are being transformed into art by members of the patriarchal art community, who value women only as silent and beautiful Muses. Allying with ‘Medusa’, a misidentified Javanese goddess who has been forcibly brought to Europe, Lady Bertram and Mariah thus enter a narrative replete with Greek and Roman mythology. In this paper, the author sets out to demonstrate that, through the receptions of Pygmalion and Medusa, InSEXts: The Necropolis effectively reflects Cixous’ ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, replicating the empowerment of female creativity which Cixous suggests. By mirroring these Ovidian intertexts and becoming ‘writing women’ themselves, comics creators Bennett and Kristantina allow their own characters to re-write and subvert traditional narratives, to tell their own stories that represent elements of Ovidian narrative to respond to and embody the kind of female creativity advocated by Cixous.
In this paper, I investigate the relationship between Penelope's letter to Odysseus (Her. 1) and the letters of Leander and Hero (Her. 18–19), especially Hero's letter to Leander (Her. 19). The peculiarity of this comparative approach lies mainly in the fact that whereas Penelope and Odysseus were one of the most famous couples in ancient literature and the protagonists of a great epic, the Odyssey, Leander and Hero were considerably less known in Rome during Ovid's time. To prove the close relationship between the letters of Penelope, Leander, and Hero, I present their numerous similarities, and then I suggest the reasons why Ovid took pains to compose the letters of Leander and Hero in a way so closely reminiscent of Penelope's letter to Odysseus.
In his Civil War, Lucan enters into intertextual game not only with epic and tragedy, but alsowith love poetry. A number of references to Roman elegy, the Heroides, and Ariadne’s lamentin Catullus (64) have been noted in Book 5, when Caesar arrives in Epirus and summons histroops from Italy. The aim of this article is to examine the functions of these elegiac referencesrelated to Caesar and to propose an interpretation slightly different from that found in earlierstudies. Using elegiac vocabulary, motifs, and topoi ( servitium and militia amoris) in 5.476–497, Lucan makes his audience perceive Caesar in the role of an elegiac mistress ( domina),who thereby imposes the role of lover on his soldiers. However, those roles do not correspondto their real meaning in the poem as Caesar is quickly forced to transform into a lover. This shiftis crucial for the intertextual game with love poetry. Nevertheless, the troops do not notice thechange, standing by the role they were previously cast in (5.678–699). In this way, they allowtheir leader to become a mistress again and continue the war.
Approaching the Ovidian story of Pygmalion, scholars mainly focus on the moment in which the artist carves his ideal woman out of ivory. But the reasons that led him to sculpt the statue tend to remain in the background. Ovid informs us that, before giving to ebur the shape of a uirgo , the ‘Paphian hero’ ( Met . 10.290), shocked by the lascivious conduct of the Propoetides, had declared war on the whole of womankind ( Met . 10.238–46): sunt tamen obscenae Venerem Propoetides ausaeesse negare deam; pro quo sua numinis iracorpora cum forma primae uulgasse feruntur;utque pudor cessit, sanguisque induruit oris,in rigidum paruo silicem discrimine uersae.quas quia Pygmalion aeuum per crimen agentesuiderat, offensus uitiis, quae plurima mentifemineae natura dedit, sine coniuge caelebsuiuebat thalamique diu consorte carebat.
The study of ornament in Greek and Roman art has been the focus of increasing scholarly interest over the last decade, with many publications shedding new light on the dynamics of ornatus in antiquity, and the discourses that shaped and situated it. Through an analysis of the depiction of gemstones in Roman wall painting, this article demonstrates the importance of ornamental details both to the mechanics of two-dimensional representation and to the interpretation of the images they adorned. I argue that by evoking the material qualities and sensual pleasures of real precious stones, painted gems served on the one hand to enhance the illusory reality of wall painting, and on the other to extol the delights of luxury and refinement—that is, of ornamentation itself.
Thanks to the recent publication of P.GC. inv. 105 + P.Sapph. Obbink, it has been determined that the relationship between Sappho’s work and Ovid’s Heroid XV is closer than the impression given to scholars, since the papyrus transmits a new poem in which Caraxus and Larichus, Sappho’s brothers, are mentioned, of which, the first one is referred by Ovid in his epistle. The objective of this paper is to present new intertextual relationships between the above-mentioned works in the light of the new poem.
In 1937 Salvador Dali painted what was to become one of his most acclaimed works, Metamorphosis of Narcissus. Surrealists saw in classical myth a vehicle for the dream-like free association of objects, below the level of rational consciousness, which their reading of reality calls for. While Echo is absent from Dali's picture, she is the title figure in Ernst's The Nymph Echo. In tracing the diverse receptions of Narcissus and Echo, then, this chapter investigates the way that Echo is at first marginalized, then brought into play to take over the major role ascribed to Narcissus. Freud's principle of “primary narcissism” is recast by Jacques Lacan. Lacan developed the model of the “mirror stage” in which an infant of six to eighteen months recognizes its own reflection as a whole rather than as the fragmented self that it had perceived hitherto.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara's famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus' description of the sea-monster Scylla's lair at Aeneid 3.432: resonantia saxa . The allusion tropes its own intertextual status as an ‘echo’ and contributes to the ludic confusion of the two Scyllas in this episode and elsewhere. The collision of the ‘tiny pebble’ with the Virgilian rocks further tropes the episode's elegiac and Callimachean recasting of epic material. The childishness of the game is also part of the self-conscious puerility of the Metamorphoses ' poetics.
This chapter examines how late Latin literature (fourth and fifth centuries AD) draws attention to words and enhances their expressive power in a period when the distinction between prose and verse was gradually disappearing. It considers both poets and prose writers whose literary taste was shaped by the scholastic tradition of grammar and rhetoric. The exegetical methods practised in schools promoted a tendency to a “miniaturization” of texts and a “jewelled style,” where single words acquire prominence and significance. Also examined are word placement within the structure of phrases, word sounds, synonymic sequences of words, lists and catalogues of names, and manipulation of individual words (including transposition of syllables in a word, anagrams, wordplay, sound play). Special attention is given to the relationship between words and things (etymologies) and to the hidden meaning of proper names, especially foreign and biblical names, which were considered stylistic adornments to language.
This paper attempts to make progress in the philological commentary on the "Cycle of Calpurnia" (Epist. 6.4 and 7; 7.5) in the letters of Pliny the Younger, focusing, on this occasion, on Epist. 6.7.
This paper examines the structure of the catalogue in Ovid's Ibis. In the catalogue's first half, Ovid highlights the important exilic themes of exile, nostos, and meter through repeating markers located at significant points, specifically a quarter of the way through and at the catalogue's center (identified by a couplet that forms a ring-composition with the catalogue's opening). In the catalogue's second half, Ovid emphasizes poets and poetry, divine punishment, dismemberment, and the consumption of one's own flesh and blood-again, recurrent themes in the exile poetry. Throughout, metapoetic language suggests both elegy and iambus, appropriately for the poem's genre-crisis.
This paper provides an advance of the philological commentary on the "Cycle of Calpurnia" (Epist. 6, 4 and 7; 7, 5) in the letters of Pliny the Younger, focusing on Epist. 6, 4 in this occasion. The author behaves like a real elegiac lover and a husband in love, because the letters he writes to his wife Calpurnia are much better understood through the lexicon and the amatory motifs of the "elegia lieta".
Ovid verbally portrays three different modes of `seeing'. In the Metamorphoses readers mentally `watch his various protagonists seeing or being seen. In the elegiac poetry readers are often induced to share the field of vision of his protagonists. In Amores 3.2 and Ars Amatoria 1.135ff., readers `look' with the lover and his mistress during `a day at the races', virtually becoming both protagonists. In the exilic poems Ovid is sole viewer. `Something he saw that ruined him' looms large in his imagination. The exile begins to rely solely on mental vision, `seeing' the sights of Rome, conjuring up distant friends into his presence. Readers `see' the lonely exile being comforted by his own inner vision.
In Amores 3.6 greift Ovid den römischen Gründungsmythos auf, die Vermählung der von Mars unfreiwillig geschwängerten und später verstoßenen Vestalin Ilia mit dem Flußgott Anio. Eine Rekonstruktion von Ovids "Arbeit am Mythos" zeigt, wie der Dichter durch erzählerische Abwandlung, durch Psychologisierung, Erotisierung und Ironisierung dieser "Vermählung" durchaus amphibolische Züge verleiht. Der Blick auf die antike Bildersprache metapoetischer Reflexion und auf entsprechende Intertexte eröffnet ein tieferes Verständnis für den merkwürdigen Umstand, daß Ovid ein so breit ausgeführtes und ernstes mythisches exemplum zum Kernstück einer Liebeselegie macht, indem er eine weitere, hinter der narrativen Oberfläche liegende Aussageintention erkennen läßt: Die Flüsse im "Flüssekatalog" verweisen durchweg auf große epische Stoffe und Werke, der Anio selbst auf die Annalen des Ennius; Ilia aber trägt Züge der personifizierten Elegie. Die Vermählung von Ilia und Anio ist daher auch insofern "amphibolisch", als sie nicht nur auf der Erzählebene die Verbindung zweier mythischer Personen etwas schillernd darstellt, sondern sich zugleich als poetologische Chiffre für das Zusammenfließen zweier verschiedener poetischer Stile, des elegischen und des epischen Dichtens, erweist. Der namenlose, von mehreren Zuflüssen gespeiste "Sturzbach" der Rahmenhandlung aber entpuppt sich als vorausgreifendes Bild für die neuartige Vermischung verschiedenster Gattungen in Ovids Metamorphosen.
Some scholars have read Virgil’s grafted tree (G. 2.78–82) as a sinister image, symptomatic of man’s perversion of nature. However, when it is placed within the long tradition of Roman accounts of grafting (in both prose and verse), it seems to reinforce a consistently positive view of the technique, its results, and its possibilities. Virgil’s treatment does represent a significant change from Republican to Imperial literature, whereby grafting went from mundane reality to utopian fantasy. This is reflected in responses to Virgil from Ovid, Columella, Calpurnius, Pliny the Elder, and Palladius (with Republican context from Cato, Varro, and Lucretius), and even in the postclassical transformation of Virgil’s biography into a magical folktale.
As he concludes poem 1.12, Propertius romantically asserts that Cynthia was prima and will be the finis. This article explores the supplemental readings that open up if we focus not on the temporal but on the geographical meaning of the word finis, a move invited by the poem itself and by the poems (1.8a, 1.8b, 1.11) with which it belongs interpretively, all containing several allusions to space. Drawing on both Lacanian and cartographic theory, I suggest that the poet's engagement with questions of fines reveals Propertius' response to a growing awareness and concern with issues of physical space and empire in the Augustan period.
This paper examines Tibullus 1.9, the closing poem of the Marathus cycle, in an attempt to depart from traditional interpretations of the elegiac puer as a real-life male beloved and establish the 'boy' as a distinct gender category in the genre, analogous to 'man' and 'woman.' The paper builds on Nikoloutsos 2007, which discussed Tibullus 1.4, the opening poem of the cycle. Challenging the autobiographical mode in which Tibullus's homoerotic poetry has commonly been analyzed, in that article I showed that the erotic discourse of 1.4 forges such a strong link between the theme of boy-love and the collection's central concerns (namely, elegiac composition, gender roles, economics, and the state) that any attempt to look into the poem for reliable information about same-sex practices in Roman antiquity is doomed to fail. Furthermore, I argued that in 1.4 Tibullus introduces a new strand in the collection, parallel to that about Delia and unique in the corpus of Augustan elegy. In this poetic strand, the puer is cast, like the puella in the heterosexual cycle, as a literary construct, a fictitious character with strong intertextual connections that serves as a vehicle through which the poet expresses his artistic and socio-moral ideology. Unlike a typical puer delicatus who is expected to be submissive, the puer that the god Priapus recommends in his erotodidactic speech in Tibullus 1.4 is demanding. He crosses gender and social boundaries and so defies binary categories, such as active/passive or elite/non-elite. As such, he highlights the precarious position of a man, such as the poet but also the reader/listener, in hierarchical spheres. Given the power asymmetries in both the private and the public domain, a man, as I argued, often can (or is forced to) play the role of the 'boy' (2007, 79).
This paper applies this theoretical model to poem 1.9; its aim is to contextualize further Tibullus's choice of the theme of pederasty and thus restore a neglected group of poems to visibility in contemporary scholarship on gender and sexuality in classical antiquity. I shall argue that far from being a flesh-and-blood boy, as he has traditionally been understood, Marathus is a scriptus puer modeled in accordance with the aesthetic principles of Latin elegy and the pressing social, moral, and political issues of a rather liminal period in Roman history. Published in late 27 or early 26 B.C.E., Tibullus's book 1 was the product of a period during which Rome changed, after a series of civil wars, from Republic into an Empire under Augustus. Fashioned discursively, Marathus operates as a medium through which Tibullus achieves self-expression and communicates to his reader his goals and ambitions as a practitioner of elegy, as well as his concerns and anxieties as a male and citizen in post-civil war Rome.
Although the subordination of the beloved to the protocols of writing elegy is an issue already explored in connection with the puella by Maria Wyke (2002, 1-191) and other critics, a separate study of the elegiac puer and his semiotic role in the genre is necessary for two reasons. First, it can shed more light upon elegy's engagement with the big ideological debates of its time. Second, it can help build intellectual bridges between feminist and queer classical scholarship. A dialogue between these two strands of scholarship, as this paper proposes, can enrich and at the same time complicate the theorization of the interconnection between power, sex, gender, class, economics, and poetic practice in late Republican and early Augustan Rome.
I begin my analysis by focusing on the way the relation between amator and puer is portrayed in Tibullus 1.9. My goal in choosing to do so is to show that homoerotic desire is in intimate relation with power, a finding that can effect a smoother transition to the examination of the dynamics and asymmetries of amor puerilis as a poetic practice in the section 2 below.
Tibullus 1.9 opens with the narrator's self-representation in the role of a betrayed amator who accuses Marathus of violating his...
Mieux vaut investir dans sa garde-robe que dans sa vie privée. (Caroll)
Heroides 11 has long enjoyed a favourable reputation among critics, largely because Ovid appears to show a tactful restraint in his description of Canace's last moments and to refrain, for once in the Heroides, from descending into what Jacobson terms ‘nauseating mawkishness’. Despite appearances, however, Ovid's wit is not entirely extinguished in this poem, for a devastating irony accompanies the certainty of Canace's imminent death. My objective is to demonstrate the nature of this irony by adopting a methodological approach which owes much to Kennedy's analysis of Heroides 1 in the light of the later books of the Odyssey. Kennedy's argument – that without knowing it Penelope is about to give her letter to its intended addressee – is based on two premises which are postulated by the epistolary mode of the poem. The first is that we are to imagine Ovid's heroines writing at a specific moment within a dramatic context; the second is that they have a specific motive for writing at that moment. In Kennedy's hands, this approach assumes the privileged position of the reader of Heroides 1 who, through access to the Odyssey, is alive to the ironies which Ovid's Penelope cannot realize. I propose to establish a similarly privileged position for the reader of Heroides 11, a position from which Canace's death can be seen to be both ill-timed and unnecessary. The key to identifying the ironic circumstances of Canace's death lies in reconstructing the background to the Canace and Macareus myth and the possible precedents which Ovid drew on in his treatment of the story. The situation is more complex than in the case of Heroides 1, however, since the literary sources familiar to Ovid and his readers have, in this instance, largely been lost to us and can only be reconstructed from fragmentary evidence.
The sea of love (a convenient heading under which to group the various marine and nautical metaphors, similes, parallels, allusions, and analogies applied to love and sex) was one of the more important amatory figures. It featured in both Greek and Latin from earliest until latest times, was employed in several genres of verse (dominating whole poems on occasion), appearing in prose as well, and reached an advanced stage of development in the hands of the Alexandrians and particularly the Augustans. The purpose of this article is to provide the first comprehensive and detailed study of the sea of love from the archaic period until late antiquity.
Of all the works attributed to Ovid but of disputed authenticity, the epistle of Sappho to Phaon is notoriously the one which has most perplexed scholars. Most philologists at the end of the 19th century asserted the Ovidian paternity of the epistle; but in recent years the discussion has flared up once again, especially following an important contribution, tending in the opposite direction, by R. J. Tarrant, and today, above all in Anglo-American studies, the pendulum seems to be swinging more in the direction of inauthenticity, according to the movement typical in debates of this kind. The present article obviously does not intend to discuss the whole question once again nor to reaffirm tout court the attribution to Ovid, but brings to the attention of scholars certain arguments which should not be neglected in the discussion (and which point in the direction of authenticity). I do not mean to underestimate the linguistic, stylistic, and metrical anomalies which scholars up to Tarrant and beyond have imputed to the epistula Sapphus, but rather to indicate some characteristics, above all of compositional technique, which have not been considered but which I think have a not insignificant weight in the debate on authenticity.
The amount of Ovid's surviving poetry is almost exactly equal to the sum total of poetry which has come down to us from Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius. Ovid wrote because he was a compulsive writer, ‘a poet utterly in love with poetry’ as Gilbert Murray aptly put it. He was the only classical poet to leave an autobiography, and in it he records that as a boy ‘I tried to write words freed from rhythm, yet all unbidden song would come upon befitting numbers and whatever I tried to write was verse.’ The quantity of Ovid's poetry, of course, cannot be made an excuse for lack of quality, but no indulgence need be begged and no allowances made for his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses. When the blow of exile fell on Ovid in a.d. 8 the Metamorphoses was substantially complete, much more so than the Aeneid had been when Virgil died in 19 b.c.
Beauty therapy as an industry is multi-faceted; as a set of practices it is complex. The beauty industry has been the subject of much critique but comparatively little empirical study. Based upon research with beauty therapists themselves, this article investigates the complex relationship between femininity and beauty. The beauty industry is located within debates about the body and leisure. The growth in the beauty industry is also linked to the commodification of body practices. Despite remaining critical of the role of beauty in the lives of women, we also emphasise the fact that women are not ‘cultural dopes’ (Davis, 1991). The actual experiences of beauty treatments and the testimonies of women involved in the industry paint a picture of competing discourses and contradictory outcomes. This is not least because both clients and therapists deny being concerned with beauty, but rather aim to provide ‘pampering’, ‘treatment’ or ‘grooming’. The beauty salon may be seen as the site of both compliance with, and escape from, a feminine ideal. The role of class, ethnicity and age in breaking down the monolithical concept of beauty and in fragmenting the experiences of beauty practices are also discussed.