DUCS Talk Summary: Prof Roy Gibson on “Ovid’s Ars Amatoria: From Poison to Pariah”
Ovid’s Ars Amatoria has always had a paradoxical reception: while it achieved great success among the popular masses in Rome, it may have been the carmen that resulted in its own author being exiled from Rome by Augustus. But how has the Ars Amatoria been received by later cultures, and what change is happening now?
Prof Roy Gibson explored these issues in the fourth academic talk of this Epiphany term. Through tracing the reception of the poem through 19–20th century Anglo-American countries, he explored how the Ars Amatoria acquired its myriad interpretations and eternal appeal, culminating with the alt-right PUAs (Pick-Up Artists) and #MeToo movement.
Prof Gibson began with his experience at the Ovid @ 2000 Conference at Sulmona (Italy), Ovid’s birthplace, in 2017. This huge conference undoubtedly highlights that these are some of the best times for Ovid and his reception, given that Rome emitted an official pardon for Ovid — even Italy’s president was present at the celebrations!
However, Prof Gibson also stressed these are some of the worst times for studying Ovid. The Ars Amatoria has always been a difficult text and a battleground for competing interpretations and belongings to the text. Many difficult problems can be found in the Ars Amatoria, especially the rape scene at the end of Book 1. Yet it is only now, in the climate of #MeToo, where these previously shunned problems are being directly confronted and challenged.
The Ars has always had a reputation, but it fluctuates in different contexts. Edwardian England at the turn into the 20th century highlighted the sexual and immoral nature of the work. Canonical commentators like the Encyclopaedia Britannica and J. Wight Duff’s A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age uniformly stressed in their introductions Ovid’s excessively and corrupting influence, a “voluptuous, systematic, vade-mecum in wantonness”: Ovid’s sexual excess was dangerous to the establishment. This was largely a product of the conservative context, being confined to the educated class who were worried about the decadence Ovid could encourage.
The contemporary popular reception, on the other hand, was more open in different ways, but still focused on particular elements. Many contemporary texts “sexed” up the text, especially through the inclusion of sexually-emphasised images of female characters. Prof Gibson argued that the reason underlying this “sexing-up” was precisely because of the aforementioned prefaces and introductions to the poem, which singled out the illicitly sexual nature of the text. In this way, the text was used, on a more popular level, as a battering ram for sexual liberation.
Throughout the century, however, scholars started to let go of these preconceived notions and address the more troubling aspects of Ovid more directly. In 1945 and 1955, Wilkinson established Ovid as a respectable scholarly subject, talking away the “naughty reputation” which Ovid had acquired. Yet he was still not completely innovative, and could not completely divorce himself from the popular opinion: in his book’s blurb, he stresses that the reader will acquire literature both from “gross moral laxity” and the highest of Shakespeare. In this quotation, Wilkinson actually turns back to the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s definition, thus showing his reliance on this popular version yet, at the same time, omitting the part of the full quotation stressing its completely illicit nature. Nevertheless, he was ignored by the author of popular translations — such as those front-lining Ovid’s “gross moral laxity”.
It was only until with the publication of Amy Richlin’s book, “Pornography and Representation of Women in ancient Greece and Rome”, in 1980 that rape culture began to be confronted and challenged directly. It innovatively argued that if we simply gloss over the rapes in Ovid, then we are being complicit with that culture. Yet her book did not gain the momentum that it deserved at the time. Simultaneously, however, Ovid gradually gained more steam as a subject deserving of study. The reason behind the “coolness” in studying Ovid lay rather in the fact that Ovid was seen to be the only guaranteed poet who was genuinely subversive to Augustus. In the 1980s and 1990s, this presented a fresh break from the entrenched scholarship of Vergil, where you had to adopt either the pro- or anti-Augustus reading. These events were occurring in the context of the Thatcher-Raegan era, when anti-Augustan readings were aligned with the left, whereas pro-Augustan readings were associated with the right.
Ovid was undoubtedly anti-Augustan, and, to an extent, this allowed scholarship to move beyond such political interpretations onto other issues including gender and intertextuality.
The introduction of social media, and most recently the #ΜeToo movement, have fully opened up the path for directly confronting the controversial passages in Ovid. Prof Gibson discussed Donna Zuckerberg’s (sister of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook) book Not all dead white men as a case study. She devotes a whole chapter to Classics and Misogyny, focusing on how modern-day Pick-Up Artists use the tactics and ideas in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to justify and imbue gravitas to their own tactics. Yet the Ars was written in a very backwards society when it comes to gender, social norms and equality.
Thus, much positive scholarship is coming out on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, tackling the riskier sections and stressing its inappropriateness. However, the work is still being analysed and used in the wrong ways. Although Prof Gibson ended on a worrying note, he encouraged us to pursue the positive aspects and open Ovidian scholarship up to new, innovative ideas with this background knowledge.
If you would like to watch the full live-stream of this excellent talk, you can find it on the Classics Society facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/DUClassicsSociety/videos/2111952915559607/
Keep an eye out for our next talks!
Please note that this piece is the interpretation of a member of the audience at the talk, who tried his best to scribble down notes! The views expressed herein may not perfectly reflect the author’s ideas.
DUCS Talks Summaries are an opportunity for people who did not attend the talk to learn about it, for those who attended to clarify and expand on what they learnt, and for all to provide extra resources, research, and ideas.
James Hua
Academic Affairs Officer
Durham University Classics SocietyWith suggestions by Prof Gibson
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