Stakes Is High: Roman Elegy, Hip-Hop, and the Ovid Movie
Back in the days when I was a teenager
Before I had status and before I had a pager
You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop
My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop
I said, “Well daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles?
The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin’ like Michael…”
(“Excursions,” A Tribe Called Quest)
On a cold morning this past December, I dragged my dad and brothers on an impromptu road trip from D.C. to Princeton to recover a book I had foolishly left on my desk and needed in order to complete a seminar paper. As if waking him up early to drive three hours for a single book wasn’t enough, I decided to fill that time playing one of my favorite hip-hop podcasts, What’s Good with Stretch & Bobbito, where two DJs and former radio hosts interview longstanding icons of hip-hop and Black culture. Over the course of the ride I saw my father, who had never allowed hip-hop to be played in the house when I was growing up, become interested in and compelled by the stories of Black Thought, Rakim, and Killer Mike. At one point, he paused the audio, and said “you know, I’m so surprised by how much reading they all say they do: these are clearly intelligent, engaged people, but I never get that sense when I hear the music.” My brother replied, “Well, they’re speaking a language you don’t speak, and really the only way to understand it is to listen to more hip-hop.”
My own first steps into the genre began when I was fourteen. It was the age when people stopped treating me like a child who happened to be Black, and started treating me like a “Black person.” It was the age when people started crossing the street when they saw me coming, the age I started staying in the car on road trips through Georgia, and the age I was first called a “nigger.” I felt alone. I grew up Jamaican-American and around few black people other than my family. I knew little of Black history, less of African-American culture and art. I had no tools to guide me in this new world.
I turned to hip-hop. It seemed like the easiest way to start connecting myself to other Black people. And when I first tried, I, like my father, didn’t understand. I realized that I had no orientation with this genre and its history, so I started making lists: artists, eras, styles. I worked my way through the canon of great emcees: N.W.A., Public Enemy, Rakim, Biggie, ‘Pac, Snoop and Dre, Nas and Jay-Z, Kanye — all the while reading about their lives and the times they lived in. Little by little, I began to understand, and before long, that understanding turned to love . Hip-hop gave me a lens through which to process my experience as a Black person in this country, but beyond that, it was beautiful, painful, profound. As I learned to love the genre, I learned to love myself, and I began to feel closer to my fellow Black and African Americans.
As I became more interested in classics and Latin literature, I started to realize that the way that I educated myself on the authors and texts was much like the way I had taught myself to appreciate hip-hop years earlier. And the more I read and analyzed Latin and Greek, the more I was able to analyze a verse the way I would an ancient poem. By now, the two live together in my mind: I am totally unable to think about one without my mind at least momentarily drifting to the other.
Others have had similar experiences of noticing similarities between ancient poetry and hip-hop, from Ralph Rosen’s “I Am Whatever You Say I Am” (2002) article about the satire of Juvenal and Eminem, to Brandon Bourgeois’ “Hype4Homer” project, which has done great work in helping deconstruct the idea that ancient poetry and modern verse are worlds apart through performance.
But for me, the connection of hip-hop and ancient poetry came through Roman love elegy. The parallels between the context and content of the two were incredible: the politics, the intertexts, the themes, the (mis)interpretations. They mirror each other so well, and I’ve long been thinking about how to talk about and teach them in conjunction with one another.
Look at Amores 1.1, a poem teachers love to use to illustrate Ovid’s poetic wit:
The joke is that the opening words of the poem both look and sound like the opening words of the Aeneid, “Arma virumque cano” (I sing arms and a man). They even sound alike: - u u/- u u/-; (dum di di, dum di di, dum), which tricks the reader into thinking the poem is a serious epic in dactylic hexameter. But mischievous Cupid takes a foot from his second line, placing the poet in the meter of elegiac couplets, which has one line of hexameter (six feet), followed by a line of pentameter (five feet) with a break (caesura) in the middle — the meter of love elegy (Conte: The Rhetoric of Imitation, 1986: 85–86).
I associate this passage with the beginning of the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut Ready to Die. The track begins with the sounds of a maternity ward as the rapper is born, then moves into soul singer Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” then into the father of all rap songs: the happy, bouncy “Rapper’s Delight.” Suddenly, the listener is hearing a domestic argument between the character’s parents over him getting caught shoplifting. The tone shifts: now two people are cocking their guns preparing to rob a train, with the gangsta style rap songs “Top Billin’” and “Tha Shiznit” playing in the background. Although these songs are supposed to represent certain eras of Biggie’s life up to the point of the album, their progression is similar to that of Amores 1.1: the song shows how the narrator-poet is suddenly thrown into a new world and into less socially acceptable poetry — “things done changed.”
Ovid’s story, the story of the privileged outsider dropping out of law school, moving to the city, breaking into, and climbing to the top of a poetry scene is the life story of Kanye (albeit in a different order) and the concept behind his debut The College Dropout. The MF DOOM track “Can I Watch?” features a story of the rapper trying to woo a woman, whom he offends and blows his shot, that sounds like it came straight from a Propertius poem. Biggie Smalls’ “Ten Crack Commandments” is a verse manual from a veteran of the drug dealing game — an orientation to the crime that defines his genre — similar to Ovid’s project in the Ars amatoria.
Apart from this coincidence of themes, there are fundamental similarities in terms of compositional techniques, allusiveness, and the creation of the competent reader/listener. As Q-Tip implies in the opening to A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, hip-hop has a tendency to evoke memories of past art forms and emulate them. At the beginning of “Excursions,” before a single rap is uttered, the listener hears a driving beat borrowed from jazz musician Art Blakey. This is a feature of the genre: “things go in cycles.” If we think about the technology of modern music production and consumption, many possibilities arise for the ancient poets. What if Ovid could have signaled the change in meter with a record scratch at the caesura in the second line? What if he could have taken a recording of Propertius and transplanted it into a line of the Amores? The most popular song lyric website today, genius.com (originally “rapgenius.com”), was founded to help listeners navigate the complex intertextuality of a hip-hop culture made up of artists obsessed with sampling and talking to each other with references to songs, media, and other cultural touchstones. This kind of effort does not merely create a web of allusions –it defines a community that can recognize them. How would the elegists — artists similarly obsessed with their swift, learned references and their sense of exclusion from mainstream traditions — fare in this new setting? And if we thought of them as countercultural inheritors of the Black American experience?
Beyond the classics, fans of hip-hop have developed an interest in its poetics, and engage it on its own terms The commentary culture that has arisen through Genius is amazing: how people debate the significance of references, discuss what words are being said in a line, or — like textual critics — or argue about what the artist should have said instead. Musicologist and journalist Martin Connor’s site, rapanalysis.com, is encyclopedic in its coverage of the formalistic aspects of rap, and Vox’s YouTube breakdowns of various rappers’ stylistic features, like their “Rapping, deconstructed: the best rhymers of all time,” do an incredible job engaging even casual listeners on the complexity and depth of the form.
To appreciate the full depth of similarities between the two genres, however, one must look at the contexts in which they arose. Latin elegy blossomed in a period of great civil strife as Augustus was consolidating his power. The republic was gone, and the new ruler of Rome was in the process of recreating the empire under his command. Building projects were underway, literature that praised Augustus and his family was being composed in great quantity, and the emperor was instituting legislation to help restore Rome to its former glory. A part of this program was a set of laws that governed the morality of the empire’s citizens, including the Lex de Maritandis Ordinibus (famously attacked by the elegist Propertius in poem 2.7) requiring Romans of the upper-classes to marry and procreate, and the Lex Iulia de Adulteriis Coercendis, which punished adulterers by banishing them to two separate islands.
Looking at these laws, it’s easy to see how a genre about running around the city pining for a woman (or women! or men!) whom the poet is not interested in marrying would be controversial and dangerous, and why few poets attempted it. This poetry was not only countercultural — it was politically defiant. Popularity — normally a good thing for a young rising artist — also meant running the risk of attracting the attention of a ruler unafraid to dispose of his enemies. The elegists never forget that Gallus, the originator of their committed suicide to avoid execution by Augustus, who issued a damnatio memoriae on both his images and his poetry. The association of elegy with Gallus made the genre even more dangerous for other poets than it might otherwise have been. (Although Catullus wrote love poetry in elegiac couplets, many do not consider him to be a “love elegist” like the poets who came after him, since he wasn’t writing in the same cultural context). And although the Propertius and Tibullus survived their risky poetic careers unscathed, Ovid was banished to the Black Sea in 8 CE, blaming a “poem and a mistake” (carmen et error). It is assumed that the Ars Amatoria was the poem, but it’s unclear what the mistake was, or if the poem itself was both. The genre was, in both subject matter and origin, inherently offensive to Augustus: after Ovid, we have no record of anyone attempting to compose elegy again. This poetic experiment came to an abrupt end 40-some years after its invention.
If we take September 16th, 1979 — the release date of the first rap song to hit the charts, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang — as the birth date of the genre, hip-hop is only 40 years old. And in its short life it has been a lightning rod for criticism of its aesthetics, its language, and influence, by religious leaders, other artists, moralists, and cultural pundits of all stripes. Wynton Marsalis once called rap and hip-hop “more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee,” and academics disagree over whether scholars of the genre merit space in the academy. But the staunchest critics of rap over the years have been politicians.
To understand the full political implications of rap and hip-hop music, we must go back to the Reagan presidency. The influx of drugs in the 1980s and the resulting economic decline (in no small part a result of racist districting policies) was very distressing to urban Black communities. In 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released what can arguably be called the first political rap song: the characteristic bouncing beats and light topics of early rap gave way to their more percussive “Don’t. Push. Me. Cause. I’m. Close. To. The. Edge./I’m. Try-ing. Not. To. Lose. My. Head.”
President Reagan signed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which led to a precipitous increase in the US prison population, especially with respect to Black males. These Acts not only served as the catalyst for the social conditions in which modern hip-hop developed, but also created a lasting genre-wide hatred of Ronald Reagan.
(Rise in Prison population from signing of the 1984 crime bill through the death of Biggie Smalls in 1997) Chart adapted from: https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf
By 1992, nearly half of all Black men in L.A. were put on lists by the city sheriffs on account of alleged gang affiliation. As the War on Drugs continued, the opinion on the initiative, once primarily defined by class lines, shifted towards a more racial divide.
With these shifts in the political landscape, rappers began developing a sharp political agenda. Although earlier artists were rapping, it is not until the late 1980’s that a recognizable hip-hop culture develops: most notably, the connection between the art form and sale and use of illicit drugs. In 1987, legendary hip-hop duo Eric B & Rakim released their debut album Paid in Full — an album some consider the first “modern” hip-hop album — which opens with a verse containing the line “I’m just an addict addicted to music/Maybe it’s a habit, I gotta use it.”
A year later, the rap group N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitudes), was preparing to release their debut album Straight Outta Compton, featuring the iconic “Fuck tha Police,” a commentary on racist policing in LA, a song that earned them a letter from the FBI, the ire of police unions and the secret service, and surprisingly, a lunch between group front-man Eazy-E and President George H.W. Bush. In 1992, rapper-turned-heavy-metal-singer, Ice-T released the song “Cop Killer,” a song protesting the Rodney King verdict, with his group Body Count. After enormous backlash, Ice-T and Warner Bros. pulled the record, which was never commercially released again.
Politicians from both parties started ramping up their rhetoric against hip-hop music, both because of the changing nature of its sound and message, and because it was reaching an audience it had never before: white adolescents. In the Bush reelection campaign, Vice President Dan Quayle incorporated rhetoric against hip-hop as part of his “family values” platform (cf. Tipper Gore’s well-known 1990 op-ed “Hate, Rape, and Rap”).
The fear of hip-hop as a force for moral corruption has persisted, alarming people other than US politicians. In 2018, China banned hip-hop from over concerns about the drug and sex culture it portrays. Black hip-hop alarmist and confused free-speech activist Thomas Chatterton Williams, both in his 2010 memoir Losing My Cool: How A Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture and his 2007 Washington Post op-ed: “Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop” (originally sensationally titled: “Yes, Blame Hip-Hop”), expresses deep anxiety over the association of hip-hop and Black culture, the negative influence of “street culture” on Black youth, its perceived anti-intellectualism and inverted sense of values.
A common response is to say “hip-hop is a music before it is a sociological lens, an urban newscast, an adolescent fantasy, or anything else, and it should be discussed as such.”
Both sentiments, pitted against one another in the Atlantic’s piece “Rap Isn’t ‘Black America’s CNN” — a rejection of Chuck D of Public Enemy’s signature epithet for the genre — miss the point. Williams is so terrified by hip-hop’s power in the Black community that he cannot see its potential “for good,” and Beck’s painfully white dismissal of the implications of the genre denies that it has any socio-political power.
But neither charge is true, and the artists will tell you that. The fans study their words as the ancient audiences studied, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. The narration of their experiences, or the creation of narratives set in “the streets” is not a politically neutral act. As De La Soul put it, the “stakes is high.” Their stories have the power to inform, to call out injustice, and to heal: in Rapsody’s song “2AM,” Ab-Soul said, “See music is the king of all professions, that’s partially / Cause even at crossroads it can bring Bone-Thugz-N-Harmony.”
The power of hip-hop and elegy underscores the same point: sometimes countercultural art is a necessary lens for critiquing a dominant political narrative. What makes both genres so compelling is that they could not have come from anywhere else. Elegy could only have been viable in Rome after the death of Gallus and Augustus’ moral legislation, and hip-hop could only ever have been the product of a post-War-on-Drugs, urban, Black America.
Part 2: The Problems With the Ovid Movie
So when a friend first sent me the trailer for the Ovid and the Art of Love — a modern telling of the poet’s life set in Detroit, where a young Ovid (played by Corbin Bleu) comes to Rome as a government recruit, drops out of school and becomes a poet, only to come into conflict with the emperor — my mind began to buzz in a whirr about all the possibilities of what Ovid would sound like in Detroit. The idea of pairing hip-hop and elegy under the politics of the Augustan era was one that I had been tossing around for a long time and I was thrilled that someone had actually run with it — and presented it to the movie-going public. It felt like a dream come true.
Then I watched the film. And I truly wanted to avoid doing what classicists do when they don’t like movies set in the ancient world, that is, pick apart all the “inaccuracies” that are ultimately inconsequential. But the film has many problems: the pacing is bad; the film is built around the “carmen et error” quotation, and devotes its first half to Ovid as the poet and getting in trouble for the Ars, and the second half on a half-baked conspiracy, which doesn’t actually end up being the error — I will not say what the actual mistake is, but it makes the viewer feel like they have wasted the entire previous hour of watching. The dialogue is often stilted and unnatural, and regularly feels like the characters are beating you over the head with the phrase “Roman values.” Reading some of the historical sources’ depictions of characters like Julia the Elder and Livia at times leads to unnecessarily misogynist portrayals of the characters, despite Von Hoffman’s attempts to brand her movie ‘feminist’. And the whole film often ends up feeling like a white liberal missionary attempt to “take Ovid to the streets,” while at the same time giving Ovid Black female friends, but only white love interests. Although the changes to the historical events don’t bother me, the inconsistent pronunciation of names and the weird insistence on inserting and then translating Latin are grating. In short: this is not how a classicist would have written this film; this is not how a Black person would have written this film; nor is it how all five Black classicists would have written this film. The trailer, the written description , and the film itself promise a modern adaptation of Ovid steeped in the world of hip-hop and slam poetry.
Although the film’s setting and premise set up a new and vibrant interpretation of Ovid’s early poetry, it is set in a version of Rome that is superimposed on Detroit — the daydream fabrication of Jamal, a young black student learning about Ovid’s love elegy — the illusion is shattered when Ovid (played by Corbin Bleu) reads prose translations of the Amores and Ars Amatoria in an underground spoken-word open mic. When I asked the director about this choice, she replied that she had “never even considered not using Ovid’s ‘own words.’”
She should have.
Unfortunate as it may be, there is no way to access Ovid’s ‘own words’ directly in English translation. One can create a facsimile of their content, but when working in another language, especially in prose, the sense of the poetic performance will always be doomed to lose much of what makes Ovid so compelling in verse. In Spike Lee’s Chi-raq (a movie not without its own problems), Lee attempts to bridge the translation gap by writing his dialogue in a loose rhyming iambic pentameter, as the narrator Dolmedes (Samuel L. Jackson) explains at the outset of the film:
In the year 411 BC — that’s before baby Jesus, y’all —
the Greek Aristophanes penned a play satirizing his day
And in the style of his time, ‘Stophanes made that shit rhyme
Transplanted today we retain his verse,
To show our love for the universe.
I am not suggesting that the film should have done as Chi-raq did and put all the dialogue in verse — in Chi-raq it is often tiring and at times forced — but Von Hoffman should have attempted to face the dilemma of recreating a poetry recitation in a more modern setting. Frankly, she had had a solution to her problem at her fingertips: in the film, Ovid and Vergil (played by Detroit artist Trae IsAAc) perform their lines at a hip-hop/poetry slam open mic — a cornerstone of Black artistic life. She even has Vergil and the Emcee Octavious [sic] (played by Michael Ellison, also known as slam poet/hip-hop artist MIKE-E) deliver slam-style lines (although Vergil’s lines are Augustan propaganda, rather than a transposition of the poet’s verses). Earlier, when Ovid’s friend Maximilius (Sam Haft) is explaining the poetry scene, he beat-boxes and spits lines the way one would expect a rapper to do, but when it comes to Ovid’s own lines, Von Hoffman decides to give them in bland prose. Watching Ovid follow up people delivering lines at an open mic, only to essentially give an erotic but limp speech to an audience, feels wrong. He shouldn’t even be on the stage. The audience shouldn’t accept that kind of performance. Later in the film, Ovid performs his prose to a non-diegetic hip-hop beat — a decision that teases how the performances could have been more gripping — or better yet, relevant to the setting at all. She is fascinated by the Black poetic traditions of hip-hop and slam poetry, but fails to use them where they matter most. The movie’s website features the Black poets and musical artists behind the film, but the creators fail to employ them when it comes to the most important artist in the film. Ovid and the Art of Love may ask the question, ‘What if Ovid lived in Detroit?’ and ‘What if Ovid wore high tops?’ but it doesn’t ask ‘What if Ovid could scratch a record?’ Or search through lyrics and annotations on genius.com? And these are the questions that count because, let’s be clear: Ovid was a poet.
Hip-hop poetics would have made for more compelling performances. More importantly, the themes and culture surrounding hip-hop would have explained the power and influence of poetry and the political implications of a genre that is fundamentally at odds with a morally conservative and authoritarian ruling elite. And furthermore, offering ‘Ovid’s words’ as bland English prose rather than Black poetry fundamentally undercuts one of the film’s major messages: a poet as relevant and creative as Ovid can come from a place like Detroit.
The film operates through analogies: Jamal attempts to understand the times of Ovid by looking at his own world. Rome and Detroit are merged into one city operating between the late first century BCE and early first century CE. Augustus shows distinctly Trumpian characteristics in trying to “make Rome great again.” The general societal strife in Rome turns into a (somewhat confusing) Occupy-Wall-Street-esque movement with unclear demands and goals.
The film does have a sense of other Augustan poets and a culture surrounding them, but is mostly unconcerned with or unaware of the existence of the broader genre of elegy, instead focusing on Ovid and his elegies. This is not just a poetic problem — it is a political problem too. The film never confronts the power and danger of joining one’s voice to a poetic tradition of anti-authoritarian social commentary — a move that defines both elegy and hip-hop. Had Hoffman recognized this, she might have felt more strongly compelled to put Ovid’s verses into hip-hop, and been more successful in making Ovid memorable. We’ve all seen how much Hamilton has done to revive interest in the founding fathers, and the resulting critiques that point how hip-hop can be used not only to engage but also sanitize.
In a sense, this film can be something of a warning about the limits and dangers of reception. Classicists often use reception studies as a band-aid for the problems of racism and end up trying to bridge the classical tradition to a people or perhaps form of performance at one specific moment, and thereby implicitly privilege the classical tradition. Von Hoffman’s act of reception not only makes the classicists’ error of not grounding hip-hop in a tradition, but makes the second error of not grounding Ovid in his tradition either. But despite not knowing the tradition, von Hoffman is actually quite astute in putting these two together, even if it is because she could only recognize the immediate similarities. And she’s doing something classicists by-and-large have not done in a while, that is putting traditions together that has the opportunity to shine a light on both. She deserves a very modest amount of praise for that. Two genres mirroring each other so closely is uncommon considering rappers were in no way trying to emulate Ovid or his fellow elegists. These parallels call for an investigation that’s beyond reception, and pairing them can show that the things that draw us to ancient poetry can draw us to modern poetry as well, and beyond just the surface level. And it can also do the inverse: readers who might not be able to pin down elegy might have a better understanding of hip-hop, and that can serve as a bridge like it did for me. This movie may not have been able to do it, but I’m still holding out hope that I’ll see Ovid spit from behind the mic.
Jermaine Bryant is a PhD student at Princeton University studying Latin poetry and Roman History, particularly the poetry and politics of the Augustan era. On an average day you can find him listening to music too loudly or wrangling some unsuspecting soul to talk about Propertius. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact him at jrbryant@princeton.edu.
This piece was originally commissioned as an Eidolon article, but later grew beyond the bounds of its initial project. Special thanks to Eidolon editor Sarah Scullin for her helpful edits, and thanks to readers Professor Sharon James, Professor Barbara Graziosi, Nicolette D’Angelo, and Paul Eberwine for their thoughts and edits.
