Afternoons With Ovid
Domestic Violence, Abortion, Sex, and Lies— The Amores (16 B.C.) Certainly Don’t Feel Out of Date
For at least as long as we are young — maybe longer — risqué authors carry with them an aura of fascination. I discovered Ovid, Latin literature’s preeminent naughty poet, just as my college roommate was reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. I liked neither author at the time: they hardly offered anything in the way of the kind of soul-connection in love I have always desired. But they were writing about sex, and so I found myself reading them all the same. Sexual honesty is such a rare commodity, particularly in the lives of teenagers, that even a whiff of the stuff is enough to create an appetite to keep reading. Whether the author is what any of us would call a good person, or treats his lovers well, seems to recede as a question. I still haven’t returned to Miller, but Ovid and his troublesome sex-poems remain perennially relevant — and not always in a nice way — in the world of Classics. The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman did a piece earlier this year about Ovid in the #MeToo era, particularly focusing on the plethora of well-written rape scenes in the Metamorphoses, and The Atlantic featured an interview this fall with Donna Zuckerberg, in part about the way misogynistic pick-up artists look to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria for rapey advice (which is certainly in there).
Some people like to get around Ovid’s rape material by reading it as ironic or with some other distancing mechanism. When I was a teen, I just called Ovid a louse and went back to Vergil. But the fascination of it persists. I’ve been part of innumerable classes on Ovid that have, in fact, been extremely intellectually exciting; I’ve read a lot of Ovid that I have to admit is superior art; and I don’t think the reception studies of any Latin author can compare with Ovid’s (Dante’s use of Ovidian stories as prefigurements of the Eucharist and the Crucifixion still strikes me as just about the most insane and interesting example of cultural repurposing I’ve ever seen).
But a lot of Ovid’s love poetry — particularly, as it turns out, the Amores — reads far less problematically — just as something deep and abidingly human. And even when it becomes problematic, the human truth of it all — the recognition that human sexuality, with all its pleasure and fun, is troubled and any honest description of our condition is likely to engage with this fact — makes us return. I can remember how exciting this was when I first discovered it — it was one of the things that kept me reading. I had loved the high-cultural glory of Latin — we were reading about virtue and justice when the kids in French class were learning to order croissants — but it was nice to see that the Romans were rather normal women and men under those togas and stolae. Amores 1.5 is the perfect poem for this realization: it’s not particularly inventive or unusual. It’s just a nicely executed poetic account of some afternoon sex. It’s been noticed that as a poem its interest in Corinna is entirely physical — she’s just a nice body — but that doesn’t, I’m afraid, make it any less human. It also has a lovely translation by Kit Marlowe — one of his best efforts:
In summer’s heat, and mid-time of the day,
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay;
One window shut, the other open stood;
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,
Or night being past, and yet not day begun.Aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat horam;
adposui medio membra levanda toro.
pars adaperta fuit, pars altera clausa fenestrae;
quale fere silvae lumen habere solent,
qualia sublucent fugiente crepuscula Phoebo,
aut ubi nox abiit, nec tamen orta dies.
The poem gives a brief account of Ovid taking off his girlfriend’s clothes and liking what he sees; it concludes with:
Cetera quis nescit? lassi requievimus ambo.
proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies!Who does not know the rest? After, we both were tired; may middays like this come to me often!
Marlowe renders it, “Jove send me more such afternoons as this.” This is the most famous poem of all the Amores, and it appears in undergraduate syllabi as one of the most perfect, compact, and readable examples of Roman love lyric. It’s not epic, and features no soul-baring raptures, but it records the pleasure of human sexuality — one of those “nihil novum sub sole” poems that are so strangely thrilling.
But what else is in the Amores? I had never read the whole work through, and I thought it would make a nice project as a way of getting a bit closer to Ovid, with whom I’ve had this repulsion-fascination for so long. A Loeb of the Amores became my companion during this past summer in Rome: whenever I was on the Metropolitana, I’d be reading my Ovid (one man started talking to me in Latin because of it, which was fun). I found all kinds of things in it to surprise me.
The first book, admittedly, is the slowest; it does contain the famous 1.5, some personifications which are familiar to lovers (cursing the wax tablets which bear bad tidings), quite a number of bland but charming observations about the life of a lover (it’s like military service, it keeps you up at night, it makes you lose weight, it’s actually hard work, etc.). Most surprising was 1.7, about domestic violence: Ovid has struck Corinna, and now regrets it (thankfully there’s no justification of the deed, or boasting that Corinna liked it — “Adde manus in vincula meas, meruere catenas!” (“chain these hands, for they deserve it”) the poem begins).
I was surprised to find that the Amores really aren’t just a random assemblage of love-poems: the poems appear not only linked but roughly chronological. Ovid falls in love with Corinna; he woos; Corinna has to evade her husband, and she and Ovid communicate stealthily at a party; then sex; then domestic violence; then she starts asking for more gifts; she says she is busy and can’t see him; etc. It forms a more or less linear narrative, told in snapshots. Ovid does what I always wished Catullus did: string his works together to create a kind of emotional arc.
This really picks up in the second book, the dramatic apex of the work. Ovid confesses in 2.4 that he’s really a bit of a lech who would swipe right for half the women of Rome:
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.I don’t really have a “type” — there are always a hundred reasons why I might love someone. If a woman goes by with eyes lowered to the ground, I’m smitten, and her modesty is my undoing; but if she’s forward, I’m captivated, because she’s experienced, and makes me hope she might be nimble in bed.
This poem goes on like this, giving examples of all the different ways he can fall in love with a woman, for fifty lines. But I have to confess — I’ve had this conversation with men before. “Kuhner I just love them all!” says the man who cannot commit. It’s amazing to think of people having this same conversation — and Ovid having it with his readers — two thousand years ago.
But you can imagine this trait getting a lover in trouble — and here comes 2.7, in which Ovid is accused of sleeping with Corinna’s slave Cypassis. This also reads like familiar territory: “If I say one nice thing about another woman, you think I want to sleep with her!” is basically Ovid’s defense. In the end he proclaims, “By Venus and Cupid’s bow I swear, I’m not guilty of what you accuse me of!” (per Venerem iuro puerique volatilis arcus,/ me non admissi criminis esse reum!). But even a stern old moralist like myself had to laugh when I turned the page to the next poem, written to Cypassis herself, asking her how the hell Corinna found out they were sleeping with each other. He then proclaims that he denied it all so well he deserves to sleep with her today (“Pro quibus officiis pretium mihi dulce repende / concubitus hodie, fusca Cypassi, tuos!”). It’s so shameless you really do have to laugh. And an example of the effects of juxtaposition — this being not just a collection of poems, but a book with a story. A few poems later (2.10), Ovid tackles the question of whether or not it’s possible to truly love two people simultaneously — a topic I’ve heard friends of mine opine about (on both sides) for decades now. This poem transitions into a lovely and funny hope that Ovid die in the saddle, so to speak (a fate I don’t think the gods gave him, alas):
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!”Let me wither away from having sex, and when I die, let it be in flagrante delicto; and I hope someone at my funeral will weeping cry, “Given his life, his death sure was fitting.”
The second book ends with a rather shocking turn of events — Corinna gets an abortion. There are two “abortion poems,” a topic previously unknown to me in ancient love-poetry. In the first (2.13), Ovid prays for Corinna’s health, as he learns that she has gotten pregnant and, without telling him, gone to get an abortion (whether by drugs or a kind of surgery he does not say). In the second poem, Ovid pours out an invective against abortion in general: “Quae prima instituit teneros convellere fetus,/ militia fuerat digna perire sua” (“the woman who first invented the ripping out of tender fetuses deserved to die by her own violent art”). His argument is the “if your mother had done the same thing, you wouldn’t exist, and so with everyone else,” repeated with quite a bit of force:
Si Venus Aenean gravida temerasset in alvo,
Caesaribus tellus orba futura fuit.
tu quoque, cum posses nasci formosa, perisses,
temptasset, quod tu, si tua mater opus…If pregnant Venus had violated Aeneas in her womb, the future world would have been without the Caesars. You too, with all your beauty, though you might have been born, you would have died if your mother had tried what you have.
As most Classicists know, there is a provision against abortion in the Hippocratic Oath, though today it is almost unheard of to read an argument against abortion which does not come from a specifically religious viewpoint. I was fascinated.
The third book feels less coherent: there are several poems about adultery, from both perspectives (3.4: a husband who can’t deal with his wife having an extra lover is “just too redneck” (rusticus est nimium); 3:14: “if you’re going to cheat on me, at least lie about it”) and also poems about impotence (3.7; kind of funny) and being an involuntary celibate for a day because a holiday for Ceres was observed with abstinence (3.10). We never get any kind of closure concerning the relationship with Corinna. This feels unsatisfying, and if we Classicists were ever to make a movie out of Corinna and Ovid, we’d have to supply a better Hollywood ending (I’m thinking we study Annie Hall for tips).
For all time, Ovid has been censured for his insincerity, and as the collection concludes the reader is left with the impression that Ovid is not really recording a particular love affair in his life, but is rather covering the gamut of possibilities in the love-elegy genre. Did Ovid’s one relationship with Corinna include adultery, impotence, sleeping with slaves, flirting with the husband present, an abortion, domestic violence, and everything else Ovid writes about? Probably not; it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Ovid was working from models for most of these poems (which we have lost). But they fit together the way Ovid presents them, and retain all their relevance today. There’s at least a season’s worth of Sex and the City material here.
So if you’re looking for a complete Latin work to read, the Amores is one I can recommend highly. It consists of fifty poems, about 2500 lines in total; but all the verses are lyric, which is one of the easiest forms of Latin poetry to read (once you are used to it). Ovid’s word order is difficult, and at times he is pithy to the point of being obscure, but all the sentences are short. This is a function of the lyric form: sentences are not enjambed from couplet to couplet. You never need to look on the next page to figure out where the verb is. Adjectives are almost never next to their nouns, but you really do get used to that. In short, if you’re looking to read an entire Latin work, and you’re as curious about love and sex as most of us seem to be, Ovid’s Amores is a great choice. It has all the interest that the topic can offer, while being less disturbing than the Ars Amatoria or Metamorphoses. There are also perfectly good translations available in print form or online: if you’re looking for a classic, Marlowe translated every single one of the Amores (!), and if you want an easy-to-access online version, the Poetry in Translation website has a good complete version.
[This is the first of a series of essays about Ovid at his bimillennial. For more information about the series, and links to future essays, click on the link below.]
John Byron Kuhner is the former president of SALVI and editor of In Medias Res.
