Ovid's Erotic Poems. Ovid

he writes in exile in the collections entitled Tristia (Sad Things) and Letters from Pontus (the Black Sea, beside which he made his involuntary new home) about his loving, loyal, desperately missed third wife, whom he probably married around the age of thirty, when many Roman men contracted their first legal unions).

      But in the texts of the Amores and Ars Amatoria themselves lies the main evidence that Ovid’s love poetry was about itself, so that his freedom and achievement there went far beyond the necessary narrow limits of self-depiction or self-expression: it was creation in a broader sense that concerned him, creation feeding on the infinity of literary possibilities rather than the decidedly finite store of individual human experience. The writing luxuriates in rhetorical convolutions and send-ups of the love elegy genre that it technically inhabits, and is obviously determined to use all its contents as mere combustible material for verbal and dramatic fireworks.

      But in a stunt such as this, the indispensable thing, the thing that prevents the composition from being a mere pile of dry tiresomeness that over time will grow soggy and rot, is the spark of genius. If genius is above all the ability to create a new world, then Ovid is one of literature’s great geniuses; and if the genius of modernity is above all independent, individual creation, then Ovid is the foundational modern mind. Authors of all kinds had come before him, but in my opinion he was the first writer, and the erotic poetry seems a fitting prelude to the first writerly masterpiece, his epic Metamorphoses, in which the whole range of Greek and Roman mythology is a mere playground for his narrative skill.

       Ovid’s Life

      This poet’s biography, plausibly presented in one of his exile poems, looks at the beginning a good deal like that of a typical Roman author of the Republican Era, which ended when Ovid was still a child. His family belonged to the wealthy, land-owning Italian aristocracy and sent him to Rome to distinguish himself first as a student of famous rhetoricians and then as an advocate in the law courts and as a politician. Much later in life, he asserted that his undeniable natural impulse was toward poetry, and that this was the reason he shunned a political career, but he very likely perceived early on that politics was no longer the best choice for a really ambitious man.

      Though the senate, the popular assembly, and the law courts met as usual, important policy in these new Imperial times was decided within the emperor’s household, leaving orators in the public sphere to speak only on cue and to excite no one. No wonder Ovid evinced a stubborn interest in another branch of literature than political or forensic rhetoric. And given the opportunities a previous generation of poets had found to be celebrated in their own right (though their voices were hardly autonomous), no wonder this branch was poetry.

      This was because of the patronage of a remarkable man. Caesar Octavian, ruling under the title Augustus (roughly, “the Man Who Is the Source of Growth,” with sacral overtones), had ended a hundred years of on-and-off civil wars. After his decisive victory in the Battle of Actium (31 B.C.E.) allowed him to take control of Rome’s political system as the first of the Roman emperors, he propagandized—partly though poets—that under Roman governance the world was now beginning a golden age of peace and prosperity. This news, of course, would have made little impression had he not been a supremely able administrator.

      The most solid and lasting evidence of Augustus’s skill and judgment survives from his literary program. Employing his highly cultured friends Maecenas and Messalla as talent scouts, he fostered several geniuses, apparently never snubbing obscure origins or an uncongenial political past. Horace (65–8 B.C.E.) was actually the son of a freed slave and had fought in the losing Republic army against the forces of Julius Caesar, the new emperor’s adoptive father and quasi-predecessor. Nonetheless, under Augustus’s auspices and Maecenas’s management Horace was funded, defended, and not overtaxed with demands for court poetry. Another poet was Virgil, and it is arguable that his career could not even have started without the emperor’s help.

      Perhaps in part because Augustus was firmly settled in power and less in need of kudos by the time of Ovid’s early maturity, or perhaps because Ovid’s inherited status was higher, or perhaps simply because of his innate independence of mind, the poet’s erotic verses have a very different tone from that of anything by his older colleagues. Though Ovid was ostensibly pro-Augustan, his support was expressed in such flip connections that he must not have felt any great pressure to propagandize, or even to avoid constant irony about the very existence of the public sphere, which he depicts mainly as a stage for flirtation. An anticipated Triumph (a grandiose parade celebrating a major military victory) by a young relative and protégé of Augustus, reports Ovid in Book I of the Ars Amatoria, will be an ideal occasion for picking up a girl; a man on the make can plant himself next to one and identify each part of the pageant representing conquered places, peoples, and leaders:

      Tell her everything, and not just if you’re bid;

      If you don’t know, respond as if you did. (I.221–222)

      The content and tone of the erotic poetry is one basis for debate about the most intriguing juncture in Ovid’s life. In 8 C.E. he found Augustus to be something other than a benevolent dictator and patron of the arts. There is no way to know the precise nature of the poet’s indiscretions—as tantalizingly cited by himself in Tristia 2.207 as carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake”—that brought this change about (though Augustus’s daughter Julia, notoriously promiscuous, is a good candidate for involvement, and a conspiracy within the imperial household was harshly repressed around the time Ovid was banished), but whatever happened was so enraging to the emperor that it saw the poet exiled to the hardscrabble outpost of Tomis (modern Constanta, in Romania), toward the far end of the Black Sea. Ovid pleaded in hundreds of lines of exile poetry to be allowed to return, but Augustus’s anger was implacable—or more than implacable, as it survived his death, to keep Ovid at his immense distance from the Roman metropolis until the poet’s own death three years later.

      How could the emperor resist such appeals? Ovid’s poetic reports swell with images of the wild, barren, freezing country he has landed in and the dangers to the fortified outpost from attacking barbarians, whose poisoned arrows land in the street and stick in the roofs. But making the best of it, he learns (or so he claims) the local language well enough to compose a poem about the apotheosis of Augustus (imperial propaganda ascribed to him divine ancestry and a heavenly destiny); the locals, hearing a recitation, are sure (according to Ovid) that this will win a summons home. Interestingly, grave as the offense must have been to have brought a punishment this harsh and inescapable, the scandal never broke—into the historical record, that is. Perhaps the permanent exile of a popular, well-connected poet served mainly as a warning and helped keep the facts hushed up.

      In any case, Ovid’s several mentions of his erotic poetry as forming part of Augustus’s motivation are probably little more than an attempt to throw readers off the trail. If Augustus did object to the admittedly irreverent poems, then why hadn’t he done anything when they were published in at least one version each—we’re not certain at what point that was, but at least six years earlier than the blowup immediately before the exile? Why had it not been sufficient for Ovid to have carefully dismissed married women, in words reminiscent of religious prohibition, from among his pupils at the beginning of Ars Amatoria (I.31–43)? This would seem to correct poems in the earlier work, the Amores (such as the entire Poem I.4), that could be deemed disrespectful to Augustus’s morals legislation. These laws were aimed in part at adulterous wives and their corruptors—but not at men roving at large, nor at sex professionals, and the two categories seem to comprise the usual actors in Ovid’s scenarios. Not only sporting eroticism but also literary eroticism were sanctioned diversions for men. A statesman as proper as Cicero leaves us an example of the latter, cited with amused indulgence by another statesman, Pliny the Younger, more than a century later. At worst, Ovid’s taste for publicity was problematic, as the normal forum for “trifles” and “jokes” concerning sex was the private dinner party.

      Moreover, though Ovid may have been best known for his love poetry, his output as a whole speaks of a learned eclecticism that should have done the regime proud. His first extant book (the Heroides) comprised love letters of mythological characters, and, besides assorted minor works, he also