text:
All posts tagged Catullus
Complete Letters of Pliny the Younger translated by P.G. Walsh (2006)
Gaius Pliny sends greetings to his friend Septicius Clarus
"On numerous occasions you have urged me to assemble and to publish such letters as I had composed with some care. I have now assembled them without maintaining chronological sequence, for I was not compiling a history, but as each happened to come to hand."
(Opening of the first letter in Pliny's Collected Letters)
The letters of Cicero
The letters of Pliny the Younger (61 to around 113 AD) are as famous as those if Cicero (106 to 43 BC) but different. Cicero lived in extremely turbulent times and was right at the centre of events, a personal friend of Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Brutus and other key players in the political crises which led to the civil war of 49 BC. Plus he had a highly developed interest in rhetoric, poetry and philosophy, plus he had an exuberant gregarious showman personality, all of which makes his letters a joy to read 2,000 years later.
Pliny's career
Pliny, by contrast, was a much more sober figure. His uncle (Pliny the Elder, 23 to 79 AD) was a confidante of the emperor Vespasian and a member of the imperial council. The nephew was a lifelong civil servant and administrator, moving smoothly up the ranks of the Roman administration: thus he progressed through the posts of quaestor, plebeian tribune and praetor during the reign of the emperor Domitian (ruled 81 to 96 AD) and then, under the long, peaceful rule of Trajan (98 to 117) his career really took off.
Pliny served as prefect to the military treasury then, after Domitian was assassinated in 96, prefect of the treasury of Saturn. Then, in 100, he was made suffect consul. It was on this occasion that he delivered a speech of thanks to Trajan in the senate and this speech has survived in its entirety; he called it the Panegyricus. In 103 Pliny was appointed to the college of augurs, all the more pleased because this was a position his hero, Cicero, had held. In 104, he was appointed curator of then Tiber (responsible for protecting against flooding etc). Finally, the peak of his career came with his appointment as governor of the province of Bithynia-Pontus in 109 (or 110), where he probably died in post a few years later (scholars think this because the letters abruptly cease in 113).
Pliny's letters
Pliny's letters are arranged into ten books. Books 1 to 9 contain 246 letters all from Pliny himself; book 10 contains 121 letters, some authored by himself, some by the emperor Trajan. All the letters were written between 97 and 112, during the principates of Nerva and Trajan.
The absolutely key fact to grasp is that, unlike Cicero's letters, Pliny's letters are not arranged in chronological order – instead, they have been carefully organised to display the breadth of Pliny's interests and the wide range of recipients. In this respect the letters are a calculating form of autobiography.
(Autobiography as we understand it didn't really appear in Latin until the Confessions of Saint Augustine in about 400 AD. Military and political figures had written commentaries on their careers and decisions – notably Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic Wars – and Cicero had pioneered a way of making a collection of letters build up into a kind of mosaic autobiography, a self portrait from multiple angles. But no autobiography as such till the Christian saint.)
Thus Pliny's letters are artfully grouped to show the author to best advantage, as advocate in the courts, politician in the senate, knowledgeable man of letters, as owner of numerous properties and estates, as devoted husband to his wife.
(In fact Pliny married three times: firstly, when he was about 18, to a stepdaughter of Veccius Proculus, who died at age 37; secondly to the daughter of Pompeia Celerina; and thirdly to Calpurnia. Of these three it's Calpurnia who we have letters to, in which Pliny recorded their marriage, conveys is love for her, and his grief when she miscarried a baby.)
Topics and subjects
The editor and translator of the Oxford University Press paperback edition of the letters, Professor P.G. Walsh, groups the letters under the following headings:
Pliny as advocate in the law courts (book 2, letter11; 2.14; 4.9; 5.20).
Pliny as politician, speaking in the senate, working with the emperor (8.14; 9.13 and book 10 throughout).
His wife
Pliny married three times but we have few references to the first two, whereas there are plenty of letters to the third, Calpurnia (4.19; 6.4; 7.5; sadness about her miscarriage 8.10).
The death or illness of friends
And the way illness prompts thoughts of suicide in some (1.12; 1.22)
Diatribes against enemies
Such as Marcus Aquilius Regulus, the noted informer under Domitian's tyranny, 'wealthy, leader of a faction' (1.5; 2.20; 4.2): the cumulative effect of the letters on this topic is to remind you how utterly toxic, rivalrous and dangerous Roman political life could be; everyone prosecuted everyone else for all manner of complex political or financial reasons, and if you lost the case you were liable to exile at best, execution at worst.
Roman social life
Visits to the theatre (7.24), dinner parties, particularly promoting the high-minded atmosphere at his dinner parties compared with the vulgarity of other peoples' (1.15; 2.6; 9.17).
Pliny takes a liberal humanitarian view (5.6; 5.19; 8.1; 8.16; 8.19), in one letter explaining that he is keen to manumit or free as many of his educated slaves as possible in order to populate his native town (Comum, by Lake Como in north Italy) with good citizens. No question of freeing his uneducated workers, though.
The Roman system of education echoed the three-part system of the Greeks:
primary school under a litterator till the age of 7
secondary school under a grammaticus until the age of 11
upon receipt of the toga of manhood at 14, a boy proceeded to the school of rhetoric where me would stay till 18, maybe longer. Children of the wealthy were often taught at home by tutors
Literary life
Attendance at other peoples' readings (1.13; 6.17) and his own works which include the Panegyricus (3.18) and his poems (9.34). Pliny describes the works of half a dozen contemporary poets, describes public readings, corresponds with his friends Tacitus and Suetonius.
He defends his poetry against the accusation of vulgarity, arguing that, if some of the subject matter is coarse and the language vulgar, this is to suit the genre, claiming like Catullus, Ovid and others, that his verse may be indecent but is no reflection of his upstanding life and morals (5.3).
Tacitus, Suetonius and Martial
The letters give the immodest impression that he is on friendly terms with all the major literary figures of the day. He is especially proud of his close friendship with Tacitus (born 56, 5 years before Pliny), to whom 11 letters are addressed. They worked together as prosecutors in the trial of Marius Priscus (2.11) and his description of the eruption of Vesuvius was written as a favour for Tacitus (see below). He sends his friend details of his involvement in another prosecution in the hope that Tacitus will include it in his Histories. Their relationship is one of 'devoted pupil to master'.
By contrast his relationship with Suetonius (born 69 i.e. 8 years younger) is one of patron to protegé. Pliny helps the younger man secure posts in the administration (3.8) or buy property (1.24). The letters track Suetonius's rising fame, as his early works of biography are published, till we find Pliny asking the younger man advice about technique for reading poetry in public recitations (9.34). Scholars think Pliny may have found Suetonius a job on his staff as governor of Pontus. And that Suetonius was close enough to the older man to have played a role in gathering his letters for publication.
Martial was about 20 years older than Pliny (born around 41 AD). He composed an obituary when he heard of Martial's death (3.21). From this we learn that Pliny contributed to Martial's travelling costs when the older man retired from Rome and went back to his home town in Spain in 97.
Pliny considered himself an orator and spent his leisure time revising his speeches, of which he is inordinately proud, for publication, a process described in now fewer than 15 letters; in the centuries-old debate between the two main styles of rhetoric – the Attic style, compressed and factual, or the Asiatic style, more flowery – he comes down on the Asiatic side, defending it for greater richness of vocabulary and figures of speech (9.26).
Pliny's style
Some of the letters comment on what the style of an ideal letter should be. In 7.98 he suggests to a young friend looking for advice about oratory that we look to letters 'for language which is compressed and unadorned.' In 1.16 he describes hearing someone else's letters read out as being like listening to Plautus or Terence without the metre. Walsh summarises Pliny appeared to believe letters should be written in a plain but educated style. This, Walsh points out, is why Pliny's letters make better material for teaching Latin than the more ornate and stylised speeches of Cicero or history of Livy (p.xxxii).
Pliny reveres Cicero
Walsh says Cicero was Pliny's 'idol' (p.xxii). Pliny refers to Cicero's integrity and also his, by this period, legendary eloquence. He was especially gratified to be appointed to the College of Augurs in 103 because this was a position Cicero had held some 170 years earlier.
Also, of course, in compiling a collection of his letters, Pliny must have had in mind the example of Cicero's correspondence, published by his secretary soon after his death in the 43 BC, considering what did and did not work. As it happens Cicero's 914 letters are the earliest surviving collection we have of the genre. Walsh makes the useful point that there can be considered three types of letter:
the verse letter, as developed by Horace in his Epistles and by Ovid, artfully in his Heroides, and then with pathetic pleading in his Black Sea letters
the philosophical letter, represented by the stodgy collection of Stoic teachings written by Seneca the Younger to his friend Lucilius
the genuine and general letter
But there's another element which struck me, which is boastfulness. Cicero was famously and often ludicrously self-important. I base this on a reading of his legal speeches and letters, his endless reminders in these and his philosophical writings that he single-handedly saved the Roman state against the Catiline conspiracy, and the fact that he wrote a long poem about this feat which was ridiculed by his contemporaries and later readers.
Walsh appears to take Pliny at face value when he describes himself as modest (pxxii) but, personally, I found some of the letters rather boastful, where he talks about people stopping talking when he comes into a room or his acolytes and devotees. Pace Walsh I found him quite full of himself and his views and this, in a roundabout way, is indeed a tribute to his idol Cicero who was notoriously self-promoting and boastful.
Two standout topics
So his correspondence offers a variety of subject matter and insights into the lifestyle, responsibilities and opinions of a senior official of the first century Roman Empire, but never quite the acute intensity and excitement of Cicero's letters. There are two standout moments in the correspondence:
1. Vesuvius
Pliny's father died when he was young and he was adopted by his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who was the author, among other things, of a natural history. Young Pliny picked up an interest in the natural world from his uncle and this is demonstrated at various moments throughout the letters.
The most famous passage is his extended description of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in August 79 AD and which Pliny witnessed at first hand. I was fascinated to learn that Pliny wrote this at the request of his friend Tacitus who included it in a now-lost part of the Histories. Letter 6.16 describes how his uncle, as commander of the fleet at Micenum had ordered a galley to go close to the shore so he could observe the huge ash cloud emerging from the volcano. Here he received urgent messages for help from friends at the threatened town of Stabiae so he took the galley into port, and went to see them. With remarkable foolishness, he dined and slept the night as the condition of the volcano deteriorated. He was woken in the middle of the night to discover the state of the sea was too disordered to set sail and it was here, on the beach, that Pliny the Elder and his party of friends, bombarded with falling pumice stones, all died of asphyxiation.
Latter 6.20 reverts to the experience of Pliny himself. Just 17 years old and left at Misenum with his mother, overnight on 24-25 August they feel all the buildings shake and the lad guides his mother out of the town, accompanied by a stream of panic-stricken townspeople. When the thick black cloud descends he takes his mother to one side, so they don't get trampled in the panic. When daylight comes they look about them at a landscape covered with ash as if by snow. At which point they trudge back into the town, to be greeted by blood-curdling prophecies of doom.
Absent from either letter is any description of the two towns famously devastated by the catastrophe, Pompeii and Herculaneum.
2. Christians
The famous exchange in a couple of letters where Pliny writes to his boss, the emperor Trajan, in his capacity as governor of Pontus, asking his advice what to do with the troublesome new sect of Christians which have begun to be noticeable in the province (Pliny's enquiry is letter 10.96 and Trajan's reply 10.97, introduction p.xxiii).
This raises the broader point that his correspondence with Trajan, which is gathered in the tenth and final book, is extremely illuminating for the directness and openness of their exchanges. Pliny writes to the emperor conveying his best wishes then briskly getting to the point of describing this or that problem; and we are sooo fortunate to have Trajan's replies, which come back with equally brisk and practical advice. With regard to the Christians, this little exchange is 'famous' because it tends to be quoted or summarised in just about every account of early Christianity, which is a lot.
Walsh's notes
The OUP World Classics edition strikes me as being outstanding. P.G. Walsh's 26-page introduction is a model of clarity and thoughtful analysis. There's a handy map of Bithynia and Pontus featuring all the places mentioned in book 10 when Pliny was governor there. There's an up-to-date bibliography and a simple clear timeline of Pliny's life.
But the glory of the book is its notes. The letters were arranged to offer a many-sided portrait of their author and the times he lived in. They are addressed to a very wide variety of friends, relatives, colleagues and so on and they make reference to all sorts of topics of contemporary interest, some of which are listed above. Walsh provides 80 pages of notes which give potted profiles of every one of the addresses and pick up and explicate every one of the numerous references, to people, places and events. Read slowly and carefully, Pliny's letters and Walsh's notes provide a fascinating overview of the man and his times.
Greek and French
Walsh explains that educated Romans frequently dropped Greek phrases or quotes from Greek classic literature (Homer or the playwrights) into their texts. It's interesting that he chooses to replicate this by using French tags in his English translation (though obviously keeping and translating into English actual quotes from Homer et al). The interest being that French tags in English play a comparable role to Greek tags in Latin, namely to show off your education and intellectual credentials. To swank, meaning: 'to display one's wealth, knowledge, or achievements in a way that is intended to impress others.'
'The Complete letters of Pliny the Younger', translated and introduced by P.G. Walsh, was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. All references are to the OUP World Classics paperback edition.
Complete letters of Pliny in the 1900 translation by J.B.Firth
Posted in Ancient history, Autobiography
Tagged ancient Rome, Asiatic style, Attic style, autobiography, Bithynia, Bithynia-Pontus, Black sea Letters, Brutus, Calpurnia, Catullus, Christianity, Christians, Cicero, classics, college of augurs, Comum, Confessions of Saint Augustine, Domitian, emperor Trajan, Gaius Pliny, grammaticus, Herculaneum, Heroides, Julius Caesar, Lake Como, Latin, letters, Letters from a Stoic, Letters of Cicero, litterator, Livy, Lucilius, Marcus Aquilius Regulus, Martial, Micenum, Mount Vesuvius, OUP World Classics, Ovid, Oxford University Press, Panegyricus, PG Walsh, Plautus, Pliny, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Pliny's Collected Letters, Pompeia Celerina, Pompeii, Pompey the Great, Pontus, Professor P.G. Walsh, Roman education, Roman Empire, Roman literature, Seneca, Seneca the Younger, Septicius Clarus, speeches, St Augustine, Stabiae, Stoicism, Suetonius, Tacitus, Tacitus Histories, Terence, The Complete letters of Pliny the Younger, the Gallic Wars, the Panegyricus, toga of manhood, Trajan, Translation, Veccius Proculus, Vespasian, Vesuvius
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/letters-pliny-the-younger-p-g-walsh/
Juvenal Satires
Juvenal wrote just 16 satires but they are considered among the best and most influential in Western literature. Tackling them now, for the first time, I discover that his poems are considerably more strange, gnarly and uneven than that reputation suggests, and also that the man himself is something of a mystery.
Potted biography
Decimus Junius Juvenal was probably born around 55 AD, the son of a well-off freedman who had settled in Aquinum near Monte Cassino, 80 miles south-east of Rome. According to two stone inscriptions found in the area, in 78 a 'Junius Juvenal' was appointed commander of a cohort and served in Britain under Julius Agricola (father-in-law of Tacitus the historian). The supposition is that this is the same Juvenal as our author, but scholars disagree. The satires contain a number of surprisingly detailed references to life in Britain which seem to reinforce this view, but…Nothing conclusive. (Introduction, pages 16 to 18)
The same inscription describes the return of this Junius Juvenal to Rome in 80, when he was made a priest of the deified Vespasian. A year later, in 81, Domitian became emperor and it is likely that Juvenal cultivated his position in society, writing verses. But in 93 a lampoon he'd written caused offence and he was exiled to Egypt (at least that's what some scholars believe; Introduction p.18 to 20).
After Domitian's assassination in 96, it seems that he was allowed back to Rome. Another decade passed and then, in 110-112 he published his first book of satires, containing satires 1 to 5.
Book 2 (published around 116 AD) consists of the long sixth satire against women.
Book 3 (around 120) consists of satires 7 to 9.
Book 4 (around 124) contains satires 10, 11, 12.
Book 5 (around 130) contains satires 13 to 16.
The dates of these publications are deduced from what seem to be contemporary references in some of the poems and are themselves the subject of fierce debate.
Unlike the satires of his predecessors in the genre, Horace and Statius, Juvenal's satires contain no autobiographical information. They are hard, external, objective.
Contemporary references to Juvenal are few and far between. Martial's epigrams contain three references to a 'Juvenal', the longest being epigram 18 in book 12 where Martial writes to someone named Juvenal, as to an old friend, gloating that while his friend is still living in noisy, stinky Rome, he (Martial) has retired to a beautifully quiet farm back in his native Spain. Scholars assume this is the same Juvenal, though there is no proof beyond the text itself.
The earliest satires are bitter and angry. In the later ones a change of tone is noticeable. Scholars assume this is because he went from being an utterly penniless poet, dependent on the good will of patrons handing out dinner invitations or a small portula or 'dole', to somehow acquiring a moderate 'competency'. We learn from these later poems that he owned a small farm at Tivoli (satire 11) and a house in Rome where he entertained modestly. How did he acquire these? Did a grateful emperor gift them to him, as Augustus gave Horace a farm and a pension? We don't know.
Scholars estimate that books 4 and 5 appeared in 123-5 and 128-30. It is likely that he survived the emperor Hadrian to die around 140, having lived a very long life. (Green refers to him as 'the bitter old man from Aquinum', p.10).
Soon after his death sometime in the late 130s, Juvenal's work disappears and isn't mentioned by anyone until the 4th century when he begins to be cited by Christian writers. Lactantius established the tradition of regarding Juvenal as a pagan moralist with a gift for pithy phrases, whose scathing contempt for corrupt pagan and secular society could be usefully quoted in order to contrast with the high-minded moral behaviour of the Christian believer – a tradition which was to hold true for the next 1,500 years.
Peter Green's introduction
If you've read my notes on Peter Green's translations of Ovid you'll know that I'm a big fan of his. Born in 1924, Green is still alive, a British classical scholar and novelist who's had a long and lively career, latterly teaching in America. Green's translations of Ovid are characterised by a) long, chatty, informative, opinionated notes and b) rangy, freeflowing, stylish translations. Same here.
At 320 pages long, the Penguin edition of the Green translation feels like a bumper volume. This is because, with characteristic discursiveness, it starts with a 54-page introduction, which summarises all scholarly knowledge about, and interpretations of, the satires. And then each of the satires are immediately followed by 6, 7 or 8 pages of interesting, chatty notes.
I found Green's introduction fascinating, as usual. He develops a wonderfully deep, complex and rewarding interpretation of Juvenal and first century Rome. It all starts with an explanation of the economic, social and cultural outlook of the rentier class.
Rentier ideology
At its most basic a rentier is 'a person living on income from property or investments'. In our day and age these are most closely associated with the large number of unloved buy-to-let landlords. In ancient Rome the class system went, from the top:
the emperor, his family and circle
the senatorial class and their family and clan relatives
beneath them sat the eques, the equestrian or knightly class
To belong to the senatorial class required a net worth of at least a million sesterces. To belong to the equestrian order required at least 400,000 sesterces.
Beneath these or attached to them, was the class Juvenal belonged to – educated, from a reputable family with maybe roots in the regional administrative class, who had come to Rome, rejected a career in the administration or the law courts, preferred to live by their wits, often taking advantage of the extensive networks of patrons and clients. Both Martial and Juvenal appear to have chosen to live like this. They weren't rentiers in the strict sense of living off 'income from property or investments'; but they were rentiers in the sense of not working for a living, not having a profession or trade or position in the administration.
Thus their livelihood depended on the existing framework of society remaining the same. Their income, clothes, property etc , all derived from finding wealthy patrons from the classes above them who endorsed the old Roman value and lived up to aristocratic notions of noblesse oblige i.e. with great wealth and position comes the responsibility to look after men of merit who have fallen on bad luck or don't share your advantages i.e. supporting scroungers like Martial and Juvenal.
What Juvenal's satires promote, or sometimes clamour for, is the continuation of the old Roman social structures and the endurance of the good old Roman (republican) virtues.
His approach to any social problem is, basically, one of static conservatism. (Introduction, p.23)
Green sums up the characteristic beliefs of the rentier class as:
lofty contempt for trade and ignorance of business
indifference to practical skills
intense political conservatism, with a corresponding fear of change or revolution
complete ignorance of the economic realities underpinning his existence
a tendency, therefore, to see all social problems in over-simplified moral terms (p.26)
The rentier believes that, because they are 'good' and uphold the 'old values' and traditional religion and so on, that they deserve to be rewarded with the old privileges and perks. They cannot process the basic reality of life that just being good, won't make you rich.
And so the enemy of this entire worldview, of all its traditional values and relationships, is change, and especially economic change.
For in the century leading up to Juvenal's time, Rome had not only transitioned from being a republic to becoming a full-blown empire but had also undergone sweeping economic changes. The old family farm, which was already a nostalgic fantasy in the time of Virgil and Horace, had long been obliterated by vast latifundia worked by huge gangs of shackled slaves.
But far more importantly, there had arisen an ever-changing and ever-growing class of entrepreneurs, businessmen, merchants, loan sharks, import-export buffs, hustlers and innovators who swarmed through the capital city, the regions and provinces. Sustained peace (apart from the disruption of the bad year, 69) had brought undreamed of wealth. Money, affluence, luxury was no longer restricted to the emperor, his family and the better-off senatorial classes, but had helped to create large numbers of nouveaux-riches. And these people and their obsession with money, money, money seemed to have infiltrated every aspect of Roman society.
It is this which incenses Juvenal and drives him to paroxysms of bile. He wants social relations in Rome to stay the same, ideally to revert to what they were in the fabled Golden Age, before money ruined everything. It is these floods of unprincipled money and the luxury, corruption and loss of traditional values which they bring in their wake, which obsess Juvenal. It expresses itself in different ways:
Money is the root of all evil. It corrupts all social relationships.
Patron and client
Applied to Juvenal's specific social position as an educated dinner-scrounger, parasite and hanger-on, he is incensed that the Grand and Noble Tradition of patron and client, which he likes to think applied some time back in the Golden Age, has now been corrupted and brought low by a flood of unworthy parasites among the clients, and the loss of all noble and aristocratic feeling among the patrons.
One of his recurring targets is the decadent aristocrat who has betrayed the upper-class code, whose money-mad, sexually profligate behaviour – adultery, gay sex, appearing on stage or in the gladiatorial arena – undermines all the old values Juvenal believes in.
Green makes the excellent point that very often writers who find themselves in this position, dependent on charity from patrons, don't understand how money is actually made. They've never run a business, let alone an international import-export business, so have only the vaguest sense of what qualities of character and responsibility and decision-making are required. This explains why Juvenal's portraits of the nouveaux riches are so spiteful but also generalised. Somehow these ghastly people have become filthy rich and he just doesn't understand how. With no understanding of the effort involved, of the changes in the Mediterranean economy or transport and storage or markets which are involved, all Juvenal has to resort to is abuse. The most hurtful spiteful sort of abuse is to attack someone's sex life.
The thought of other people having sex is, for many, either disgusting or hilarious. Sex has always been an easy target for satirists. Conservatives like Juvenal, concentrate all their disgust at the wider 'collapse of traditional values' onto revulsion at any form of sex which doesn't conform to traditional values (the missionary position between a married heterosexual couple). Hence the astonishing vituperation levelled at the vast orgy of deviant sex which Juvenal thinks Rome has become. He singles out a) deviant sex practiced by straight people, such as fellatio and cunnilingus; b) homosexual sex and in particular the stories of men and boys getting married: the way these couples (allegedly) dress up in the traditional garb of bride and groom, use the same priests reciting the traditional wedding ceremony etc, drives him to paroxysms of fury.
As so often with angry men, Juvenal's vituperation is especially focused on the sexual behaviour of women, and indeed Book 2 consists of just one satire, the unusually long sixth satire against women. As Green points out, the focus of Juvenal's fury is not women in general but aristocratic women for falling so far short of the noble values they should be upholding. What drives Juvenal mad is that their sexual liaisons are with men from the lower classes such as gladiators or actors. He contrasts their irresponsible promiscuity with the behaviour of women of lower classes who actually bear children instead of having endless abortions, and would never dream of performing on the stage or in the arena. There is a great deal of misogyny in the sixth satire but Green suggests that it is driven, like all his other anger, not quite by woman-hating alone but by the failure to preserve traditional values.
As mentioned several times, Rome saw an 'invasion' of new money and entrepreneurial rich. What gets Juvenal's goat is how many of them are foreigners, bloody foreigners, coming over here, buying up our grand old houses, buying their way into the equestrian class, even running for public office, bringing their bloody foreign religions. A virulent strain of xenophobia runs alongside all Juvenal's other rages and hates, in particular hatred of Egyptians who he particularly loathes. A recurrent hate figure is Crispinus ('that Delta-bred house slave', p.66) who, despite originating as a fish-hawker from Egypt, had risen to become commander of the Praetorian Guard!
Freedmen
Alongside loathing of the newly rich and foreigners goes hatred of freedmen, jumped-up social climbers who come from slave families or who were once slaves themselves! My God! What is the city coming to when ex-slaves rise to not only swanky houses on Rome's grandest hills, but even become advisers to emperors (as Claudius, reigned 41 to 54, had notoriously let state affairs be run by a small coterie of freedmen.) Unhampered by the dignified self-restraint and lofty morality of the old Romans, these base-born parvenus often acquired immense fortunes and thrust themselves into positions of great political power.
This, of course, is precisely the type who Petronius nails with his extended description of the grossly luxurious dinner party of the upstart arriviste Trimalchio, in his Satyricon.
It was not just economic and social power: Juvenal raged against the fact that he and his shabby-genteel friends were kept out of the seats reserved for Knights at the theatre and the games, while the same seats were filled with the sons of pimps, auctioneers and gladiators! They were everywhere, taking over everything! What could any decent person do, he argues in satire 1, except write bilious anathemas of these crooks and careerists and corrupters?
Bad literature
I find it the most predictable and least amusing thread in the satires, but it is a recurring theme that literature itself has been debauched by the collapse of these values. Somehow the old world of mythology, ancient myths and legends, all the twee genres of pastoral and idyll which accompanied them, none of these are appropriate for the current moronic inferno which faces the poet.
All this is entertainingly expressed in Satire 1 which is a justification of his approach i.e. rejecting all those knackered old mythological tropes and forms (idyll, epic, what-have-you) because these are all forms of escapism, in order to write blistering broadsides against the actual real world which he saw all around him.
In other words, wherever he looked, from the details of his own day-to-day livelihood to the counsels of the highest in the land, to the private lives of pretty much every citizen of note, Juvenal was aghast that a tide of money and corruption had tainted every aspect of Roman society, destroying the old aristocratic values, undermining traditional religion, destroying family values, turning the place into an Oriental bazaar run by foreigners who have imported their filthy decadent sexual practices.
Do Juvenal's 16 satires offer a solution or alternative to this sorry state of affairs? Of course not. The satirist's job is to flay abuses not fix them. Insofar as a solution is implied by the 16 satires, it is a return to traditional old Roman values and virtues. But as with so much satire, the pleasure comes not from hopes of solutions and improvements, but from sharing the sadistic glee of the demolition. He is a caricaturist, creating a rogues' gallery of outrageous portraits.
Juvenal does not work out a coherent critique of institutions or individuals: he simply hangs a series of moral portraits on the wall and forces us to look at them. (p.43)
In a similar vein, Green points out that, at moments the poems appear briefly to espouse formulas from one or other of the three main philosophies popular in Rome at the time (Stoicism, Epicureanism and Cynicism), but never enough make you think he understands or cares for them. Generally they're referred to in order to mock and ridicule their practitioners, as in the extended passage in Satire 3 which accepts the conventional view that most philosophers are homosexual and then exaggerates this idea for comic effect.
An unstructured torrent of bile
Juvenal's lack of any theory of society or economics, any understanding of business, his lack of any coherent philosophical framework, all these go to explain the lack of structure which critics have always lamented in the satires.
Instead of coherent argument, Juvenal is notorious for bombarding the reader with powerful, vitriolic, scabrous images in paragraphs or couplets which often bear little relation to each other. Each satire has a broad subject but, within it, Juvenal's 'thought' jumps all over the place. Juvenal:
picked a theme and then proceeded to drive it home into his reader's mind by a vivid and often haphazard accumulation of examples. He is full of abrupt jumps…and splendidly irrelevant digressions. (p.44)
He obtains his effects by the piling up of visual images, paradoxical juxtapositions rather than step-by-step development. (p.46)
A principle of random selection at work, a train of thought which proceeds from one enticing image to another like a man leaping from tussock to tussock across a bog. (p.47)
Green points out that, in addition, although we have many manuscripts of the satires, all of them contain textual problems and issues – at some points there appear to be gaps in the logic of sentences or paragraphs, some passages or lines seem to be in the wrong place.
This has made Juvenal's satires, over the centuries, a happy hunting ground for generations of editors, who have freely cut and pasted lines and passages from where they sit in the manuscript to other places where editors think they make more sense. Editors have even made up sentences to connect two passages which contain abrupt jumps. Green in his introduction laments that this is so, but himself does it quite freely, with interesting notes explaining each of his edits.
The point is that the problematic nature of all the manuscripts only exacerbate the issue which was always there, which is that Juvenal's poems lack the kind of logical discursive narrative you find (up to a point) in 'architectonic' poets such as Horace or Ovid. Instead they generally consist of illogical but fantastically angry, vivid bombardments of bile and imagery.
The best attitude in a reader, then, is not to look for cool, considered argument, which simply isn't there; it's to sit back and enjoy the fireworks. The pleasure is in watching a clever, learnèd man, with advanced skills in writing verse, exploding with anger and bile.
Juvenal's style
Green mentions 'Juvenal's technical virtuosity; his subtle control of rhythm and sound effects, his dense, hard, verbal brilliance.' (p.7) According to Green few Roman poets can equal his absolute control over the pace, tone and texture of a hexameter, and no translator can hope to capture the condensed force of Juvenal's enjambed hexameters, his skilful rhythmic variations, his dazzling displays of alliteration and assonance and onomatopoeia (p.59).
He goes on to elaborate that Juvenal's use of Latin was 'distilled, refined, crystallised.' Of the 4,790 words used in the satires now fewer than 2,130 occur here once only and nowhere else. His entire lifetime's work amounts to barely 4,000 lines. Rarely has a writer's oeuvre had less spare fat. This helps to explain the number of Juvenal's pithy phrases which went on to become well-known Latin tags:
quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (satire 6) = 'who will guard the guards themselves?', also translated as 'who watches the watchers?'. The original context dealt with ensuring marital fidelity by setting watchers to guard an unfaithful wife, but the phrase is now used to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power
panem et circenses (satire 10) = 'bread and circuses', meaning to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or policy but by diversion, distraction, by satisfying the basest requirements of a population
mens sana in corpore sano (satire 10) = 'a healthy mind in a healthy body', the phrase is now widely used in sporting and educational contexts to express that physical exercise is an important part of mental and psychological well-being
The 16 satires
Satire 1: A justification for satire (171 lines)
He's sick to death of rubbish poets declaiming the same exhausted stories about old mythology. He too has cranked out suasoria in the school of rhetoric. Why is he writing satire in the mode of old Lucilius? With Rome overrun by money and vulgarity, what else is there to do? Then gives a long list of types of social climber, frauds, embezzlers, men who rise by screwing rich old women, or pimp out their own wives, forgers carried round in litters, chiselling advocates, sneaky informers, the young buck who squandered his inheritance on horses, the lowly barber who used to shave Juvenal but is now as rich as any aristocrat, the distinguished old lady who's an expert in poisoning. Everyone praises honesty, but it's crime that pays.
Why, then, it is harder not to write satires, for who
Can endure this monstrous city and swallow his wrath?
Since the days of the flood has there ever been
Such a rich crop of vices? When has the purse
Of greed yawned wider?…Today every vice
Has reached its ruinous zenith…
Though talent be wanting, yet
Indignation will drive me to verse, such as I or any scribbler
May still command. All human endeavours, men's prayers,
Fears, angers, pleasures, joys and pursuits, these make
The mixed mash of my verse.
An extended lament on the corruption of the relationship of patron and client, and all the thrusting crooks who now join the morning scrum outside a patron's house for the 'dole', including many who are actually wealthy, but still scrounge for scraps. Describes the typical day of a client i.e. hanger-on, trudging round Rome after their patron, getting hot and sweaty and hungry. He rages against the greedy patron who feeds his cadgers scraps while he gorges on roast boar and peacock. One day he'll have a heart attack but nobody will care.
He ends by saying Lucilius in his day felt confident of shared civil values to name the guilty men; in Juvenal's day, naming an imperial favourite or anyone with pull could end you up as a burning torch illuminating the games. Better not name names, better restrict himself to using only the names of the dead, safer that way.
Satire 2: Against homosexuals and particularly gay marriage (170 lines)
The hypocrisy of bogus moralists, people who quote the great philosophers, who fill their halls with busts of the great thinkers, but don't understand a word. Most philosophers are effete fairies. He prefers the eunuch priest of the Mother goddess, at least he's open about it. Just recently Domitian was reviving laws about public morality while all the time tupping his niece; he forced her to have an abortion which killed her.
He has a courtesan address one such manicured, perfumed moralist for his hypocrisy, going on to say men are far worse than women; women wouldn't dream of licking each other's parts; accuses men of pleasuring their boy lovers 'both ways'. She laments how most women, when they marry, have to take second place to a favoured boy or freedman.
He describes the scandalous advocate who prosecuted a case before the public wearing see-through chiffon, 'a walking transparency'. It's a slippery slope which leads to involvement in the secret rites of the Mother Goddess, for men only, who wear elaborate make-up, wear women's clothing, use women's oaths and 'shrill, affected voices'. Throws in an insulting comparison to 'that fag of an emperor, Otho' who fussed over his armour in front of a mirror.
What about the young heir who went through a wedding ceremony with a trumpeter? Or the once-honourable priest of Mars who dresses up in 'bridal frills'.
O Father of our city,
What brought your simple shepherd people to such a pitch
Of blasphemous perversion?
When men marry men why doesn't great Mars intervene? What's the point of worshipping him if he lets such things happen? Mind you, they can't have children, so can't preserve the family name (and, Juvenal appears to suggest, do try magic remedies so that the passive homosexual can get pregnant. Can that possibly be true, can ancient Romans have really thought a man can get pregnant?)
Juvenal goes on that what's worse than holding a wedding ceremony to marry another man was that this blue-blooded aristocrat then took up a trident and net to fight in gladiatorial games. This really seems to be the most outrageous blasphemy of all, to Juvenal.
A digression to claim that nobody in Rome now believes in the ancient religion, Hades, Charon the ferryman and all that. But if they did wouldn't the noble dead, fallen in so many battles to make Rome great, be scandalised to welcome such a degenerate aristocrat into their midst? Wouldn't Hades itself need to be purified?
Yes, even among the dead Rome stands dishonoured.
Even the barbarians at Rome's borders are not so debauched; although if we bring them as prisoners to Rome, they soon learn our decadent, effeminate ways and, when released, take our corruption back to their native lands.
Satire 3: Unbricius' monologue on leaving Rome (322 lines)
His friend Umbricius is leaving Rome to go and live in Cumae. He's jealous. He gives Umbricius a long speech in which he says he leaves Rome to fraudulent developers, astrologers, will-fixers, magicians, the go-betweens of adulterous lovers, corrupt governors, conspirators. Above all he hates Greeks, actually Syrians with their awful language, flutes and tambourines and whores. Sly slick dexterous Greeks from the islands can turn their hand to anything. These are the people who now wear the purple, precede him at dinner parties, officiate at manumissions. They can blag anyone, which explains why they're such great actors, especially in women's roles. Mind you, no woman is safe from a Greek man in the house, 'he'll cheerfully lay his best friend's grandmother.'
This morphs into the misery of the client or hanger-on to dismissive rich men. He describes being kicked out of a prime seat at the theatre to make way for a pimp's son, an auctioneer's offspring or the son of a gladiator because they have more money. A plain white cloak is fine for the provinces, but here in Rome we must beggar ourselves to keep up with the latest decadent fashions.
And the misery of living in apartment blocks which are falling down or liable to fire at any moment. (Umbricius implies he lives on the third floor, as Martial does in one of his epigrams.) If your block goes up you lose everything, compared to the rich man; if his house burns down he is flooded with presents and financial aid to rebuild it from clients and flatterers and connections.
No, Umbricius advises to buy the freehold on a nice place in the country rather than a rented hovel in Rome. The worst of it is the noise at night from all the wagons wending through the winding alleyways. Insomnia's causes more deaths among Roman invalids than any other cause. He gives a vivid description of the muddy, jostling misery of trying to get through Rome's packed streets without being involved in some gruesome accident.
Walking at night is even worse, with the risk of being brained by a falling roof tile or drenched in slops chucked out the window by a housewife. And then the possibility of being beaten up by some bored, drunk bully. Or the burglars. Or some 'street apache' who'll end your life with a knife.
So farewell Rome, he begs the author won't forget him and, when he goes back to his home town for a break, will invite him round to celebrate a country festival.
Satire 4: A mock epic of the turbot (154 lines)
Starts off by ridiculing Crispinus for buying a red mullet for the ludicrous price of 60 gold pieces. Then morphs into a mock epic celebrating a fisherman in the Adriatic who catches an enormous giant turbot and carries it all the way to Rome to present to the emperor. This 100 lines of mock epic poetry contains a mock invocation to the Muses, extended epic similes etc. Then – and this appears to be the real point of the poem – it turns into a list of the emperor Domitian's privy councillors, each one a crook or sadist or nark or creep.
Satire 5: Trebius the dinner-cadger (173 lines)
Is dinner worth every insult which you pay for it?
In the miserable figure of Trebius Juvenal lists the humiliations the 'client' must undergo in order to wain a grudging, poor quality 'dinner' from his patron (here called Virro), at which he will be offered the worst wine, rocky bread and humiliated by sneering slaves, served half an egg with boiled cabbage while the patron eats a huge crayfish with asparagus garnish.
Now if you had money, if you got yourself promoted to the Equestrian Order, then at a stroke you'd become Virro's best friend and be lavished with the finest food. As it is, he serves you the worst of everything out of spite, to amuse himself. He wants to reduce you to tears of anger and frustration.
Don't fool yourself that you are his 'friend'. There is none of the honour of the old Republican relationship of patron and client. He simply wants to reduce his clients to the level of a buffoon, the stupidus of Roman pantomime who has his head shaved and is always being kicked or slapped by his smarter colleagues. He wants to make you an abject punchbag.
Satire 6: Don't marry (661 lines)
Postumus, are you really taking a wife?
You used to be sane…
Wouldn't it be quicker to commit suicide by jumping out of a high building or off a bridge? Surely boys are better: at least they don't nag you during sex or demand endless gifts or criticise your lack of passion.
Juvenal gives a funny account of the Golden Age, when humans lived in cave and women were hairier than their menfolk, their big breasts giving suck to tough babies. But long ago Chastity withdrew to heaven and now infidelity and adultery are well-established traditions.
Fidelity in a woman! It's be easier to persuade her to have an eye out than keep faithful to one man! Posh women are mad for actors and entertainers. If he marries his wife will make some flute player or guitarist or gladiator father to his children.
He profiles Eppia the senator's wife who ran off to Egypt with a gladiator, abandoning her children and her country. Then a searing portrait of Messalina, the nymphomaniac wife of Claudius, who snuck off to a brothel where, wearing a blonde wig and gilded nipples, she let herself be fucked by all-comers, all night long. A profile of Bibula who has her husband in thrall and goes on monster shopping sprees which morphs into a dig at Queen Berenice who lived for many years in an incestuous union with her brother, Agrippa of Judaea.
What point a beautiful wife if she is proud and haughty. Juvenal cites Niobe who was so vain she called down disaster on herself and her 12 children.
Modern girls doll themselves up like the bloody Greeks and express themselves with Greek language which (apparently) reeks of the bedroom.
Our provincial dollies ape Athenian fashion, it's smart
To chatter away in Greek – though what should make them blush
Is their slipshod Latin. All their emotions – fear,
Anger, happiness, anxiety, every inmost
Secret thought – find expression in Greek, they even
Make love Greek-style.
It may be alright for schoolgirls to act this way, but Roman women in their eighties!
A flurry of sexist stereotypes: Women want money money money. They'll take control of household spending, veto your business plans, control your friendships. She'll force you to include her lover's in your will.
Yet another shocking insight into Roman's and their slaves when it's played for laughs that a husband will order 'crucify that slave' and Juvenal paints it as typically feminine of a wife to want to know why, what the slave has done, before they're hustled off to be crucified.
And the mother-in-law! She'll egg her daughter on to every sin, adultery, spending all your money. Women are behind virtually all law suits, and insist on defending or prosecuting. And what about women athletes! And women fencers! And women who want to fight in the ring, 'helmeted hoydens', gladiatresses!
But bed is the place where wives are at their worst, endlessly bitching, about your boyfriends or imaginary mistresses, all the time hiding letters from her lover or making plans to visit her mother as an excuse to meet her lover. Bursting into tears if you accuse her, but quick to insist it was always an open marriage if you find her out.
What triggered all this corruption? In the good old days of relative poverty wives were too busy working, cooking, cleaning, darning to play the whore. All this wickedness is the result of a 'too-long peace'. The world Rome conquered takes its revenge by afflicting Rome with Luxury, from which all vices spring, money – filthy lucre – leading to 'shameless self-indulgence'.
He accuses religious festivals: the Floralia which celebrates fertility with phallus images and prostitutes; the worship of Venus; the mysteries of the Great Goddess whose frenzied worship makes women wet between the thighs, get drunk, bump and grind – then they call in the slaves to fuck them and if there aren't any slaves, a donkey will do. The shrine of Isis might as well be called the brothel of Isis.
Gladiator trainers keep the gay ones segregated from the straight, but in a rich woman's house queers are encouraged, man with kohl-ringed eyes, see-though clothes and hairnets. Mind you, half of them turn out to be straight after all, and well able to give your wife a good stuffing.
Juvenal accuses a specific fag of being a straight man in disguise. His friends tell him it's best to lock up a wife and bar the doors. And here comes one of Juvenile's most famous quotes. Yes, by all means lock up your wife and put a guard on the doors but will keep guard on the guards? 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' They, also, will be bribed by your whore wife to turn the other eye when her lover calls. Or will screw her themselves.
He profiles a generic aristocratic woman, Ogulna, who's mad about the games and attends with a big expensive entourage, example of women who spend everything you have then get you into debt.
Then the wives who love eunuchs, if they've been neutered the right way they still can get erections and no worries about abortions! Especially the big bull black ones!
Women will lavish your money on music, musicians and musical instruments. The temples are packed with woman asking the gods to favour this or that performer or actor or gladiator or whatnot.
But they're not as bad as the flat-chested busybody, who runs round town, buttonholing men, interrupting their conversations, an expert on every subject under the sun. overflowing with gossip about politics or military campaigns. Then goes off to the baths after dark, works out with weights, has a massage from an expert who oils her and makes her climax. Making her guests wait till she arrives late and proceeds to drink gallons on an empty stomach then spew it up all over the dining room tiles.
Worse is the bluestocking who holds forth about literature at dinner, comparing Virgil and Homer. God how he hates a female pedant and grammarian, always correcting your speech, 'a husband should be allowed his solecisms in peace'.
Juvenal gives a description of the elaborate process of an upper class woman putting her make-up on, looking ridiculous in face-pack and thick creams at home, reserving her ugliness for her husband. The kind of woman who has her wool-maid or cosmetician or litter bearers flogged till they bleed while she fusses about her eye make-up or the hem of a gown.
God, the number of helpers and assistants required just to do her hair till it stands up like a ridiculous pomade.
Then a passage ridiculing the absurd requirements of foreign religious cults and superstitions, Bellona, Cybele, requiring total immersion in the Tiber, crawling across the field of Mars on your hands and knees, going a pilgrimage to Egypt. Or admires the shaven-headed devotees of the dog god Anubis who run through the streets wailing for dead Osiris. Or a palsied Jewess arrives ready to interpret the secret laws of Jerusalem.
Then the fortune tellers, Armenians and Syrians, or the Chaldean astrologers, all knowing they'll get a credulous hearing from the rich woman of the house, the kind of woman who won't make any decision, who won't accompany or agree with her husband unless her astrologer says it's written in the starts, or the augur tells her it's written in the entrails of some chicken or pigeon or puppy.
Poor women go to the races to consult palmists or phrenologists, but at least they actually bear children, keep their pregnancies to full term. Not like rich women with their drugs to be made sterile or prompt abortions. Well, it could be worse, you could find yourself 'father' to a black child, obviously not yours, obviously fathered by a slave or gladiator.
If you start forgetting things, chances are you're being poisoned by your wife. After all, emperors' wives have poisoned their husbands and so set an example to us all! Beware step-mothers, scheming to kill the biological son and promote their boy. He cites the example of Pontia, daughter of Petronius, who is said to have poisoned her own two sons.
He doesn't mind the old myths about women who murdered in a white hot frenzy; what he loathes is modern matrons who cold-bloodedly scheme to do away with husbands or stepsons and care about their lives less than they do about their lapdogs.
Satire 7: The misery of a writer's, but especially a teacher's, life (243 lines)
Modern poets in Juvenal's day would make a better living opening a bakery or becoming an auctioneer. The emperor (probably Hadrian who came to power in 118) has let it be known he's looking for poets to patronise, but the run-of-the-mill writer looking for a decent patron, forget it! The modern patron begrudges funding even a small recital in an out of town hall. After all, he's probably a poet himself and ranks his work higher than yours!
It's a very contrast between the lofty diction the modern poet aspires to and the sordid reality of his own life, forced to pawn his coat and dishes for his next meal. Horace on the old days, and Lucan more recently, could write magnificent verse because they weren't hungry.
He gives an interesting sketch of the poet Publius Papinius Statius and how popular his public recitals were of his great epic, the Thebaid, reeled off in his mellifluous voice. But even has to make a living by flogging libretti to the head of the ballet company. Because:
Today the age
Of the private patron is over; Maecenas and co.
Have no successors.
Does the historian make any more, slaving away in his library, covering thousands of pages? No.
What about lawyers, huffing and puffing and promoting their skills? Look closely and you'll see a hundred lawyers make less than one successful jockey. He profiles an aristocratic advocate, Tongilus, 'such a bore at the baths', who is carried about in a litter by 8 stout Thracian slaves. For what's valued in a court of law is a dirty great ring, flash clothes and a bevy of retainers. Eloquence is dead. Juries associate justice with a flashy appearance. Cicero wouldn't stand a chance.
What about teachers of rhetoric, wasting their lives getting boys to rehash tired old topics in stale old catchphrases. Better to drop logic and rhetoric and become a singer, they get paid a fortune.
Juvenal profiles a typical nouveau riche building private baths and a cloister to ride his pampered horses round and a banqueting hall with the best marble and ready to cough up for a first class chef and a butler. But a teacher of rhetoric for his son? Here's a tenner, take it or leave it.
Really it's down to luck or Fortune as the ancients called her, 'the miraculous occult forces of Fate'. Luck makes a first class speaker or javelin thrower, if Fortune favours you can rise from teacher to consul.
In the olden days teachers were respected, even Achilles still feared the rod of his tutor Chiron as he turned man; but nowadays pupils are likely to beat up their teachers who go in fear. God, why be a teacher stuck in some hell-hole cellar before dawn, working by the light of filthy oil lamps, trying to knock sense into pupils who answer back, and all for a pittance, from which you have to give a cut to the boy's attendant to make sure he even attends lessons?
And if the pupils are awful, what about the parents? Expecting each teacher to be a 100% expert in all knowledge, buttonholing him on the way to the baths and firing off all kinds of impossible questions. All for a pittance which, nine times out of ten, you'll have to go to court for just to get paid.
Satire 8: Family trees and 'nobility' are worth nothing next to personal virtue (275 lines)
What good are family trees?
What good is tracing your family back through venerable ancestors if your own life is a public disgrace?
You may line your whole hall with waxen busts, but virtue,
And virtue alone, remains the one true nobility.
Prove that your life
Is stainless, that you always abide by what is just
In word and deed – and then I'll acknowledge your noble status.
Unlike the other satires which are often strings of abuse and comic caricatures, this one has a thread of argument and logic and is addressed to a named individual, Ponticus who is depicted as preening himself on his 'fine breeding'..
Juvenal claims nobility is as nobility does. A racehorse may come from the noblest ancestry imaginable but if it doesn't win races it's pensioned off to work a mill-wheel. Just so, claiming respect for having been born to a particular family is ludicrous. Instead, show us one good deed in order to merit our respect.
Lots of the most useful work in the empire, from soldiers on the frontier to the really effective lawyers in the city, are done by 'commoners'. He is surprisingly programmatic and non-ironic in listing the virtues:
be a good soldier
be a faithful guardian
be an honest witness in law cases
be a good governor:
set a limit on your greed and pity the destitute locals
have staff that are upright and honest (not some corrupt long-haired catamite)
have a wife above suspicion not a rapacious harpy
observe the law
respect the senate's decrees
This leads into a lament for the way Rome used to govern its colonies wisely, but then came 'the conquistadors', the looters, Anthony and his generation, and its been rapacity, greed and illegal confiscations ever since.
Then Juvenal goes on to flay aristocratic wasters, dissipating their fortunes with love of horseracing and gambling, to be found among the lowest possible company down at the docks; or reduced to acting on the stage (clearly one of the most degraded types of behaviour Juvenal can imagine). Or – absolute lowest of the low – appear in the gladiator fights and he names a member of the noble Gracchii clan who shamefully appeared as a retiarius.
This leads to a profile of the most scandalously debased of leaders, Nero, with his insistence on performing as a musician and singer onstage, not only in Rome but at festivals across Greece. Super-noble ancestry (membership of the gens Sergii) didn't stop Lucius Sergius Catilina planning to burn Rome to the ground and overthrow the state. It was an upstart provincial, Cicero, who saved Rome. Or Marius, man of the people, who saved Rome from invasion by Germanic tribes in 102 and 101 BC.
Achievement is what counts, not family. Juvenal ends with a surprising general point, which is that the very first settlement of Rome was carried out by Romulus who then invited men to join him, men who, according to the Roman historian Livy, were either shepherds, or escaped convicts and criminals. Ultimately, no matter how much they swank, all the 'great and noble' Roman families are derived from this very ignoble stock.
Satire 9: Dialogue with Naevolus the unemployed gay gigolo (150 lines)
According to green some scholars think this was an early work, added in to bulk out the book. This is one explanation of why it is, unlike any of the other poems, in dialogue form. A character named Juvenal swaps dialogue with a character named Naevolus.
Juvenal starts by asking why Naevolus, previously a smart man-about-town, a pick-up artists who shagged women by the score (and their husbands too, sometimes) is now so long-in-the-mouth, pale, thin and unkempt.
Naevolus explains that his time as a gigolo has ground to an end and brought him few returns, specially since he was working for a very tight-fisted gay patron, Virro (presumably the same dinner party host who enjoyed humiliating his hangers-on in satire 5). Virro seems to have got bored of him and dumped him.
There is an extremely graphic moment when Naevolus describes how difficult it was having to stuff his hard cock up Virro's anus, till he was 'stopped by last night's supper.' Yuk.
The dialogue becomes a dialogue-within-a-dialogue as Naevolus imagines a reproachful conversation with Virro. Why does he, Naevolus, have to send his rich patron gifts on his birthday? What's Virro going to do with his huge estates when he dies, will Naevolus get even a little cottage?
As it is Naevolus doesn't have enough to clothe and feed his one lousy slave. Naevolus reproaches Virro that he not only had to service the fat man but his wife too!
I sired you a son and a daughter: doesn't that mean
Anything to you at all, you ungrateful bastard?
(In the Roman context this means Naevolus has only provided Virro with heirs, but with the legal advantages of being a father.) So Juvenal interrupts to ask what Virro says in his own defence. Nothing, apparently, he's too busy looking for Naevolus's replacement, a mere 'two-legged donkey'. Suddenly Naevolus gets nervous. He begs Juvenal not to whisper a word of all this, or Virro will have him bumped off, knifed or poisoned, or his house burned down.
Juvenal mocks the idea that a master can keep any secret from his slaves who will, in turn, blab to everyone they meet. There's no such thing as secrecy in a slave society.
So Naevolus asks what Juvenal advises him to do. Juvenal replies a) there'll always be more customers for him, b) 'chew colewort; it's a fine aphrodisiac.'
the poem ends with Naevolus saying he doesn't want much, but then – surprisingly – including in his list of modest requirements a pair of brawny Bulgarian porters to carry him in a chair, a silver engraver and a portraitist, all of which seem wildly extravagant and commentators have worried about for the past 1,900 years.
Satire 10: The vanity of human wishes (366 lines)
This is the comprehensive overview of the futility of human ambition which formed the basis for the 18th century English author, Samuel Johnson's great poem, 'The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated'.
Mankind is gripped by a self-destructive urge. What man was ever guided by Reason? Any man with belongings is the toy of Fate. He invokes Democritus the laughing philosopher and Heraclitus the weeping philosopher and goes on to mockingly describe the progress of a modern consul through the streets preceded by his lictors. Democritus thought the worries of the people as absurd as their joys, the gods listen to neither. So what should we ask the gods for?
He gives Sejanus as an example, not only of Fortune turning her wheel to bring the second highest figure in the land down into the gutter, but at the fickleness of the change, since there was no legal process involved, it all resulted from one single letter from Tiberius in Capri to the Senate. And the mob? They don't care for proof or law, they just cheer the victors and jeer the losers. They all rushed to kick Sejanus's corpse or pull down his statues, but if Tiberius had dropped dead of a heart attack, the same mob would have been cheering Sejanus to the rafters as the new emperor. Fickle.
In the olden days, when their votes were vital for the election of consuls, praetors, governors and so on, the public took an interest in public affairs. But in 14 AD Tiberius transferred the election of magistrates from the popular assemblies to the senate, with the far-reaching consequences that Juvenal describes. After nearly a century of non-involvement, now the catchphrase is 'who cares?' Now there's only two things that interest the people: bread and the games. (Another famous tag, panem et circenses in the Latin.)
No, he'd rather be the small-time governor of some sleepy backwater, with no glory but no risk, than rise to the giddy heights of a Sejanus only to be be dragged to his death. Same goes for the first triumvirate, Pompey and Crassus and Julius Caesar – lust for ultimate power took them to giddy heights and then…catastrophic fall, miserable murder.
Setting off on a tangent, Juvenal claims what everyone seeks is eloquence, the gift of swaying crowds, but look what happened to the two greatest orators of all time, Cicero was beheaded at the insistence of his arch enemy Anthony, and the great Demosthenes was forced to commit suicide.
How many national leaders thirst for glory, for the spoils of victory, for triumphs and a triumphal arch.
The thirst for glory by far outstrips the pursuit of virtue.
Vladimir Putin thinks murdering thousands of men, women and children is a price well worth paying for restoring Ukraine to the Russian motherland. Killing pregnant women is worth it to get a place in the history books. 'The thirst for glory by far outstrips the pursuit of virtue.'
Yet countries have come to ruin
Not once but many times, through the vainglory of a few
Who lusted for power, who wanted a title that would cling
To the stones set over their ashes…
Or take Hannibal, one-time conqueror of the Mediterranean, vaingloriously vowing to capture Rome but, in the end, routed from Italy, then defeated in Africa and forced into exile to become the humiliated hanger-on of 'a petty Eastern despot' eventually, when his extradition was demanded by Rome, committing suicide by poison.
Same with Alexander the Great, at one point commanding the entire known world, next moment filling a coffin in Babylon. Or Xerxes whose exorbitant feats of engineering (a bridge across the Hellespont, a canal through the peninsula of Mount Athos) all led up to complete military defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC and Xerxes' miserable return to Persia.
Juvenal makes one of his jump cuts to a completely different theme, the triumph of old age over all of us. Men start out full of hope and individuality and all end up looking the same, senile sexless old dodderers. All your senses weaken, you can no longer appreciate music, you fall prey to all kinds of illnesses.
And senility. Old men forget the names of their servants, their hosts at dinner, eventually their own families, and end up disinheriting their children and leaving everything to a whore whose expert mouth has supplied senile orgasms.
But if you live to a ripe old age, as so many people wish, chances are you'll witness the deaths of everyone you loved, your wife, your siblings, maybe your own children. 'Perpetual grief' is the reward of old age. Examples from legend: Nestor outliving everyone he loved; Peleus mourning his son; if only Priam had died in his prime he wouldn't have seen all his sons killed and his city destroyed. And Mithridates, and Croesus.
Then he turns to specific Roman examples: if only Marius had died after his triumph for defeating the Teutons instead of going on to humiliation and then tyranny; if only Pompey had died at the peak of his powers instead of being miserably murdered in Egypt.
Then the theme of beauty. Mothers wish their daughters to be beautiful and their sons handsome but beauty brings great risks and he cites Lucretia raped and Virginia murdered by her own father to keep her 'honour'. Then handsome young men generally go to the bad, become promiscuous, sleep around, and then risk falling foul of jealous husbands. Even if he stays pure and virginal, chances are he'll fall foul of some middle-aged woman's lust, just look at Hippolytus and Phaedra.
Or take the case of Gaius Silius, consul designate, who Claudius's third wife, Messalina was so obsessed with she insisted they have a public wedding, even though she was already married to Claudius, precursor to a coup. With the inevitable result that when Claudius found out he sent the Praetorian Guard to execute both Silius and Messalina. (The story is told in Tacitus's Annals 11.12 and 26.)
Juvenal concludes the poem by answering the question he asked at the start of it, what should we pray to the gods for? Answer: nothing. Leave it to them to guide our destinies without our intervention. The gods give us what we need, not what we want. Humans are led by irrational impulses and blind desires so it follows that most of our prayers are as irrational as our desires. But if you must insist on making silly sacrifices and praying for something, let your requirements be basic and practical. Ask for:
a sound mind in a sound body, a valiant heart
Without fear of death, that reckons longevity
The least among Nature's gifts, that's strong to endure
All kinds of toil, that's untainted by lust and anger…
…There's one
Path and one path only to a life of peace – through virtue.
Fortune has no divinity, could we but see it; it's we,
We ourselves, who make her a goddess, and set her in the heavens.
So that's the context of another of Juvenal's most famous quotes or tags, mens sana in corpore sano – it comes at the end of an enormous long list of the futilities of seeking long life or wealth or power or glory. It is the first and central part of Juvenal's stripped-down, bare minimum rules for living.
Satire 11: Invitation to dinner at Juvenal's modest place in the country (208 lines)
This starts out as a diatribe against spendthrifts, against the young heirs who take out big loans and blow it all on luxurious foods. If you're going to host a dinner, make sure you can afford it.
This leads into an actual dinner party invitation Juvenal is giving to his friend Persicus. He lists the menu and assures him it's all 'home-grown produce': a plump tender kid 'from my farmstead at Tivoli'; mountain asparagus; eggs still warm from the nest; chicken; grapes, baskets of Syrian pears and Italian bergamots, and apples.
[This mention of the farmstead is what makes Green and other commentators deduce that Juvenal had, by this point, ceased to be the impoverished and consequently very angry satirist of the earlier works, has somehow acquired a 'competence' and so his tone is more mellow.]
Juvenal says even this relatively modest menu would have appeared luxury in the good old republican days, and lists various high-minded old Roman heroes (Fabius, Cato, Scaurus, Fabricius) and the tough old Roman legionaries they led, uncorrupted by luxury and money, who ate their porridge off earthenware bowls. Those were the days.
The gods were closer back then, their images made of humble baked clay, not gold, and so they warned us e.g. of the approaching Gauls.
How changed is contemporary Rome whose aristocrats demand obscene levels of luxury in food and ornamentation. Nothing like that for Persicus when he comes round, there won't be a pupil of Trypherus's famous school of cuisine where students are taught the correct way to carve antelope, gazelle and flamingo!
His slaves, likewise, are honest lads dressed practically for warmth, a shepherd's son and a ploughman's son, not smooth imported Asiatics who can't speak Latin and prance around in the baths flaunting their 'oversized members'.
[Green notes that the Roman historian Livy dates the introduction of foreign luxuries to the defeat of the Asiatic Gauls in 187 BC. Whereas Sallust thought the introduction of corrupt luxury dated from Sulla's campaign in Asia Minor in the 80s BC. Whatever the precise date, the point is the author always thinks things started to go to hell a few generations before their own time.]
And don't expect any fancy entertainment like the Spanish dancers who wiggle their bums to arouse the flagging passions of middle-aged couples, no such obscene entertainment in his modest home, no, instead he'll have a recitation of Homer or Virgil.
Like Horace, Juvenal tells his guest to relax. Discussion of business is banned. He won't be allowed to confide his suspicions of his wife who stays out till all hours, or the ingratitude of friends. 'Just forget all your troubles the minute you cross my threshold.'
Let all Rome (the Colosseum seated 300,000 spectators) go to the Megalesian Games (4 to 10 April) and cheer the Blues and the greens (chariot racing teams) and sweat all day in an uncomfortable toga. Juvenal prefers to let his 'wrinkled old skin' soak up the mild spring sunshine at his nice place in the country.
Satire 12: A storm at sea (130 lines)
The first 20 or so lines describe to a friend a series of sacrifices Juvenal is going to make, and the even bigger ones he wishes he had the money to make. Why? To celebrate the safe arrival in harbour of a dear friend of his, Catullus (not the famous poet, who died 170 years earlier, in 54 BC).
Juvenal gives a vivid description of a storm at sea, ending with the sailors seeing 'that lofty peak so dear to Ascanius' in diction which evokes Virgil's Aeneid with no irony or mocking. And he's just as sincere when he returns to describing how he'll burnish his household gods, make oblations to Jupiter, burn incense and so on.
Up to this point this combination of devout piety and picturesque description are very much not the viciously angry Juvenal of the Roman streets that we are used to. But in the final 30 or so lines Mr Angry reappears a bit, to make the distinction between his genuine, devout sacrifices and those of legacy hunters and it turns into a stock diatribe against this class of parasites who seek out the wealthy but childless and do anything, including making extravagant sacrifices for them when they're ill, in the hope of being included in their wills. May all their tricks and scams work but 'May they love no man and be loved by none.'
[Incidentally, this last section has a passage about elephants, saying the legacy-hunters would sacrifice elephants if they could but none live naturally in Italy except for those of the emperor's personal herd, near modern Anzio. Elephants are mentioned in quite a few Juvenal poems. At some level they fascinated him, maybe because they're the biggest animal and so attracted a poet interested in extremity and exaggeration.]
Satire 13: The futility of revenge, the pangs of a guilty conscience (249 lines)
On putting up with life's vicissitudes. Juvenal reproaches someone called Calvinus for making a big fuss and going to court about a loan not being repaid. Doesn't he realise the age he's living in? Honour long since departed. It's not like it was back in the good old days, in the Golden Age when there were only a handful of gods who dined modestly, back in those days youth respected the elderly, everyone was upstanding and dishonesty was vanishingly rare. The decent god-fearing man is a freak like the sky raining stones or a river issuing in milk.
While guilty people, whether they believe in the gods or not, tell themselves they'll be OK, the gods won't get round to punishing them yet and so on. In fact many make a histrionic appeal to the gods to vouchsafe their honesty, banking on 'brazen audacity'.
Juvenal mentions the three philosophies current in his day, Cynicism, Stoicism and Epicureanism, only to dismiss them all. Instead he mocks Calvinus for making such a fuss about such a common, everyday bit of dishonesty and goes into a list of far worse crimes starting with the temple robbers who steal devoted statues or plate and melt them down or sell them off. Think of arsonists or poisoners or parricides. If you want to find the truth about human nature you should visit a courtroom.
Many unusual things are taken for granted in the appropriate context, for example big breasted women in Upper Egypt or blonde, blue-eyed men in Germany, or pygmies in Africa. Well, so does this kind of embezzlement or fraud feel completely at home in its natural setting, Rome. What's the point of pursuing his legal vendetta. Rise above it.
Philosophy, by degrees, peels away our follies and most
Of our vices, gives us a grounding in what's right or wrong.
[This is surprisingly reflective and thoughtful of Juvenal, supporting the thesis that the poems are in chronological order and the later ones reflect middle-age and having come into some property and generally stopped being so vitriolically angry at the world.]
He goes on to say that paying off scores is for the small-minded. Anyway, people who break laws and commit crimes are often punished most of all in their own minds, by their own guilt. 'The mind is its best own torturer.' He gives examples of people who suffered the pangs of conscience but what's striking is:
how didactic he's become; instead of depicting bad behaviour with satirical glee, now he's lecturing the reader on good behaviour
how much he sounds at moments like a Christian, preaching about the power of conscience; when he says that he who meditates a crime is as guilty as he who commits one, he sounds like Christ ('I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.' Matthew 5. verses 27 to 28)
The guilty man is wracked with conscience, can't eat or drink or sleep. In fact it turns into a vivid proto-Christian depiction of the miseries of Guilt, interpreting the weather as signs from God, the slightest setback as punishment, the slightest physical ailment as payback.
Satire 14: The disastrous impact of bad parenting (331 lines)
Again this satire has a direct addressee, Fuscinus. Juvenal takes the theme that parents hugely influence their children, generally for the worse. 'Bad examples are catching.' By the time he's seven a boy's character is fixed for life. He gives examples of terrible parents starting with 'Rutilus' who is a sadistic brute to his slaves.
[As with so much Roman literature, the examples of brutality to slaves tend to eclipse all the subtler argumentation: here, Rutilus is described as ordering a slave to be branded with a red-hot iron for stealing a couple of towels.]
Or the girl who's brought up into a life of adultery and sexual intrigues by her mother. We are all corrupted by examples of vice in the home. This is a spur to good behaviour – that our bad behaviour is quickly copied by our children.
All this turns into a surprisingly preachy lists of dos and don'ts and turns into almost a harangue of bad parents, telling them to set better examples.
For some reason this leads into a short passage about the Jews who Juvenal sees as handing on ridiculously restrictive practices, circumcision and avoiding certain foods, along with taking every seventh day off for idleness, to their children. So Judaism is taken as an example of parents handing down bad practices to their children in an endless succession.
Then a passage attacking misers, characterising them especially by their recycling scraps of leftover food at revolting meals. And insatiable greed for more land, the kind of men who won't rest till they've bought up an estate as the entire area cultivated by the first Romans. Compare and contrast with pensioned off Roman legionaries who are lucky to receive 2 acres of land to support themselves and their families.
then he invokes the old mountain peasants and the wisdom of living simply and plainly on what a small parcel of land provides. [This strikes me as straight down the line, entry level, the good old days of the Golden Age clichés, such as centuries of Roman writers had been peddling.]
The logical corollary of praising the simple lives and virtues of his farming forefathers, is dislike and contempt for the vices of luxury which are attributed to foreigners, especially from the exotic East.
[I always thought Edward Said, in his lengthy diatribe against 'Orientalism', should have started not in the 18th century, but 2,000 years earlier, with the ancient Greeks writing pejoratively about oriental despotism (with Persia in mind), a discursive tradition which was handed on to the Romans who also associated decadence and luxury with the East (Cleopatra of Egypt, Mithridates of Pontus and so on), centuries of stereotyping and anathematising the East and the Oriental to which Juvenal adds his own contribution and which was merely revived, like so much other ancient learning, in the Europe of early modernity – xenophobic clichés and stereotypes which were dusted off and reapplied to the Ottoman Empire.]
Juvenal then gives an interesting portrait of the ambitious father of a modern youth, recommending all the ways he can get on and rise in the world, studying to become a lawyer, or aiming for a career in the army, or becoming a merchant. Juvenal reprimands this made-up figure, telling him to lay off inculcating greed and deceit quite so early; his kids will learn it all by themselves in good time. 'But', claims the made-up father, 'I never taught my son his criminal ways!' Yes, replies Juvenal, but you taught him the principles of greed at an early age, and all the rest follows. You set the spark, now watch the forest fire rage out of control.
And you'll have created a peril for your own life. For such a greedy offspring will grow impatient to see his parent snuff it so he can inherit his patrimony.
In the final passage he compares the life of a merchant with that of a tightrope walker at the circus and says watching greedy merchants trying to juggle their many deals is far more entertaining. He mocks harbours packed with huge merchant ships, prepared to go to the ends of the earth and beyond to make a profit.
Juvenal goes so far as to say these far-trading merchants are mad, as mad as mad Ajax at Troy, mad to risk his life and fortune and for what? Little silver coins printed with someone else's head. One minute he's at the prow of his mighty ship, laden with precious cargo; next moment it's sunk in a storm and he's clinging to the wreckage. Only a madman would commit his life and wealth to capricious Fortune and then…he's a beggar in the streets, waving an artist's impression of the storm which ruined him at passersby. Right at the end he cites Diogenes the Cynic, who abandoned all earthly possessions in order to have a calm mind. Compared to the merchant who risks losing everything and even drowning at sea:
The tub of the naked Cynic
Diogenes never caught fire: if it broke, he could pick up another
The following day – or put some lead clamps in an old one.
Alexander perceived, on seeing the tub and its famous
Occupant, how much happier was the man who desired nothing
Than he whose ambitions encompassed the world, who would yet
Suffer perils as great as all his present achievements.
And he concludes with another straight, unironic recommendation of the bare minimum required by philosophers and the old Roman tradition, in phrasing very similar to the barebones advice at the end of satire 10.
If anyone asks me
Where we're to draw the line, how much is sufficient, I'd say:
Enough to meet the requirements of cold and thirst and hunger
As much as Epicurus derived from that little garden,
Or Socrates, earlier still, possessed in his frugal home.
Satire 15: In praise of kindness (174 lines)
Addressed to Volusius of whom we know nothing. The poem opens by reviewing the fantastical beliefs of the Egyptians in their animal gods, then takes a comic view of Odysseus's telling of his adventures at the court of King Alcinous whose guests, if they had any sense, would dismiss such a pack of lies.
The point of this introduction is to contrast fantastical myths and legends with what Juvenal now intends to tell us about which is a real-life atrocity which happened in the recent past. In fact, Peter Green in a note tells us it took place in 127AD. Juvenal goes on to describe the rancorous feud which broke out between the neighbouring towns of Ombi and Tentyra (real neighbouring towns in ancient Egypt).
the fighting becomes savage, involving thousands. One of the leading Ombites stumbled, fell and was immediately seized by the Tentyrans who tore him to pieces and ate every morsel. This gives rise to a digression about cannibalism practiced by the Spanish in the besieged town of Calagurris who were reduced by starvation to eating human flesh. Then onto the Tauri in Crimea who worshipped Artemis by making human sacrifices of travellers who fell into their hands.
But the Tauri don't actually eat the victims they kill and the Spaniards had the excuse of starvation. nothing excused the horror of contemporary men tearing each other to pieces and eating each other's raw bodies. It triggers an outburst of virulent xenophobia.
And then, to our complete surprise, Juvenal turns mushy. Describing these horrors turn out to have been preparation for a hymn to tenderness and kindness.
When nature
Gave teas to mankind, she proclaimed that tenderness was endemic
In the human heart: of all our impulses, this
Is the highest and best.
We weep at funerals of children, or to see adolescents in court cases. 'What good man…thinks any human ills outside his concern?'
It's this
That sets us apart from the dumb brutes, it's why we alone
Have a soul that's worthy of reverence, why we're imbued
With a divine potential, the skill to acquire and practice
All manner of arts…
Who are you, O wise Stoic teacher, and what have you done with the angry, fire-breathing Juvenal?
When the world was still new, our common Creator granted
The breath of life alone, but on us he further bestowed
Sovereign reason, the impulse to aid one another…
Juvenal identifies this God-given sovereign reason with everything noble and altruistic in man, proof of his difference from the animals and that he has a soul. This makes him a Stoic, doesn't it?
Then, right at the end, the poem returns to the disgusting story of the Egyptian torn apart and eaten raw, and laments that man, blessed with all these gifts, creates swords and spears, man alone of the animals, goes out of his way to kill and massacre his own kind.
Satire 16: The military life (60 lines; incomplete)
The final satire in the series is incomplete. It is addressed to one Gallius, about whom nothing is known. Were all Juvenal's addressees fictional or real people? No-one knows.
the poem obviously set out to ironically praise the great advantages of the soldier's life. First is that you can beat up anyone you like and either be too intimidated to take legal action against them or, if you do, you'll end up in a military court where the judge and jury will find for the soldier and you'll end up being beaten up a second time.
Next advantage is that, whereas most people caught up in law suits have to endure endless delays and adjournments, a soldier will get his case seen straightaway. Plus, if you earn money as a soldier it is exempt from control by your father (which other earnings aren't). The reverse; doddering old fathers court their sons to get a cut of their pay…
Here the poem simply breaks off. Scholars speculate that Juvenal died before he completed it. or maybe the emperor Hadrian censored this mocking of the Roman army. But Green sides with the Juvenal expert, Gilbert Highet, who thinks the earliest version of the manuscript, from which all surviving manuscript copies derive, early on lost its final few pages.
Common tropes
1. Juvenal's position really is based on a profound belief that the olden days were best, the Golden Age of Saturn, when Rome's ancestors lived in mud huts and farmed small allotments, and lived frugally, and taught honour and respect to their sons and daughters.
Mankind was on the decline while Homer
Still lived; and today the earth breeds a race of degenerate
Weaklings, who stir high heaven to laughter and loathing.
(Satire 15)
2. The logical corollary of thinking his primitive ancestors knew best is Juvenal's virulent xenophobia, blaming Rome's decline into luxury and decadence on the corrupting wealth and example of foreigners, especially the tyrannies of the East (note p.238).
3. As usual, I am left reeling by the casual way he describes the brutal, savage, sadistic treatment meted out to Roman slaves. Branded with a red-hot iron for stealing a few towels, crucified for speaking out of turn, horse-whipped for trivial mistakes serving dinner. What a brutal, cruel, inhumane society. 'Cato, in his Res Rustica, recommends the dumping of worn-out horses' harnesses and worn-out slaves in the same breath,' (p.276)
Very simply, Juvenal is the Lionel Messi of satirists, producing high-octane, intense, bitterly angry and often very funny masterpieces of the genre.
Second thought is that Augustus had Ovid exiled, supposedly for the amorality of his 'Art of Love' which is a guide for pick-up artists. How things had changed a hundred years later when Juvenal not only mentions the places to hang out if you want to pick up women (or boys) but goes way, way beyond Ovid in his depiction of a pungently promiscuous society with, apparently, no consequences from the powers that be.
Final thought is that this is another brilliant volume from Peter Green, containing not just a zingy, stylish translation from the Latin but also long and fascinating introduction, and then encyclopedic notes which are full of fascinating titbits of information, opinion and insight. Of course most editions of ancient texts have notes, but Green's are distinguished by their length and engaging chattiness. Here's a random selection of brief but typical nuggets:
Women swore by Juno. (page 83)
After the sack of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 AD many Jews made their way to Rome and eked out a living as fortune tellers or beggars. (99)
No wheeled traffic was allowed in Rome for ten hours after dawn, so the city was incredibly noisy all through the night as farmers and merchants drove their carts through the narrow cobbled streets. (102)
Any of the (six) vestal virgin caught having sex was buried alive. (111)
Nine days after a funeral, offerings of eggs, salt and lentils were left on the grave of the deceased. (125)
It is hard to realise the influence which the Roman ballet (or pantomimus) exerted on Roman citizens. It was not only immensely popular but formed a centre for violent factions like those of the chariot races and sometimes led to riots and bloodshed. (153)
The secret rites of the Bona Dea were held at the home of one of the consuls. It was attended by women only. The house owner and all male slaves had to leave the premises. Even statues or images of men were covered up to protect the secret ceremonies. (156)
Eclipses of the moon were said to be caused by witchcraft. Beating pots and pans was said to put the witches off their wicked spells. (158)
A lawyer who won a case could advertise the fact by hanging palm branches outside his door.
People who survived a shipwreck often commissioned a painting of the event either to hang in a temple as an offering or to display to passersby in the street, if they were begging. (246)
the emperor kept a herd of elephants on a ranch at Laurentum, near Ardea. (248)
Among his many fascinating comments, one theme stood out for me:
Useless natural history
It's odd that 2,000 years of writers or scholars in the humanities continue to quote, praise or base their writings on the literature or philosophy of the ancient world, when the ancients' knowledge of the natural world, the world around them, its geology, and geography, and weather, and all the life forms we share the planet with, was fantastically ignorant.
As Green points out in a note, it is staggering that all the ancient authors whose writings have survived held ludicrous and absurd beliefs about animals and nature which you'd have thought the slightest actual observation by any rational adult would have disproved in a moment (note, page 238).
No, elephants do not get rid of their over-heavy tusks by thrusting them in the ground (satire 11). No, sparrows are not more highly sexed than other birds (satire 9). No, cranes flying south do not engage in pitched battles with pygmies in Ethiopia (satire 13). No, stags do not live to over 900 years old (satire 14).
'A collector of natural history fallacies would do quite well out of Juvenal' (note, page 291).
It is testament, maybe, to the way their culture preferred book learning to even the slightest amount of actual observation. And on a par with their credulous belief in no end of signs, omens and portents. Not only are these reported in all the histories as preceding momentous occasions but most official ceremonies in Rome, including whether to do battle or not, depended on the reading of the weather or flight of birds or entrails of sacrificed animals. It was an astonishingly credulous culture.
Only with Francis Bacon in the 1600s do we have an author who bravely declares that we ought to throw away most ancient 'learning' and make our own scientific observations about the phenomena around us. Such a long, long time it took for genuinely rational scientific method to slowly extract itself from deadening layers of absurd and nonsensical 'learning'.
Sixteen Satires by Juvenal, translated by Peter Green, was published by Penguin Classics in 1967, then reprinted with revisions in 1973. Page references are to the 1982 paperback edition.
Juvenal's satires in a modern English translation by A.S. Kline
Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Translation
Tagged A.S. Kline, Achilles, Agrippa of Judaea, Alexander the Great, ancient Britain, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, Aquinum, Ardea, Art of Love, Artemis, auctioneers, Augustus, Babylon, Battle of Salamis, Bellona, Bibula, Calagurris, Calvinus, cannibalism, Capri, caricature, Cato, Catullus, Chaldean astrologers, Charon the ferryman, Christ, Cicero, Claudius, Cleopatra, client, Colosseum, corruption, Crassus, Crispinus, Croesus, Cumae, cunnilingus, Cybele, cynicism, Decadence, Decimus Junius Juvenal, Democritus, Demosthenes, deviant sex, diatribe, Diogenes the Cynic, Domitian, Edward Said, elephants, Epicureanism, Eppia, equestrian order, Ethiopia, Eunuch, Fabius, Fabricius, fellatio, Field of Mars, First Triumvirate, Fortune, fortune tellers, Francis Bacon, Freedmen, Fuscinus, Gaius Silius, Gallius, Gauls, gay marriage, Gilbert Highet, gladiators, gladiatresses, God, Hades, Hadrian, Hannibal, Hellespont, Heraclitus, Hippolytus, Hispania, Homer, homosexuality, honour, Horace, humour, immigration, Jerusalem, Jesus Christ, Judaism, Julius Agricola, Julius Caesar, Junius Juvenal, Jupiter, Juvenal, King Alcinous, Lactantius, latifundia, Latin, Livy, Lucilius, Lucius Sergius Catilina, Maecenas, Marius, Matthew's Gospel, Mediterranean, mens sana in corpore sano, Messalina, misogyny, Mithridates, Mother goddess, Mount Athos, Naevolus, Natural History, Nestor, Niobe, Odysseus, Ogulna, Ombi, Orientalism, Osiris, Otho, Ottoman Empire, Ovid, panem et circenses, pantomimus, parvenus, patron, Peleus, Penguin books, Penguin classics, Persia, Persicus, Peter Green, Petronius, Phaedra, poems, poetry, Pompey, Pontia, Ponticus, portula, Postumus, Priam, Publius Papinius Statius, Queen Berenice, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, rentier, Res Rustica, rhyme, Roman ballet, Roman emperor, Roman Empire, Roman literature, Roman philosophy, Roman society, Rome, Romulus, Rutilus, sack of Jerusalem, Samuel Johnson, satire, satires, Scaurus, Sejanus, Senate, sex, Sixteen Satires by Juvenal, Slavery, slaves, Spain, Statius, Stoicism, stupidus, suasoria, Tacitus, Tentyra, the Bona Dea, the Crimea, The Floralia, the Golden Age, the Jews, the Megalesian Games, the Praetorian Guard, the Satyricon, the Senate, the Tauri, the Thebaid, The vanity of human wishes, Tiberius, Titus, Tivoli, Tongilus, traditional values, Translation, Trebius, Trimalchio, Trypherus, Unbricius, verse, Vespasian, Vestal Virgin, Virgil, Virgil's Aeneid, Virro, Vladimir Putin, Volusius, witchcraft, xenophobia, Xerxes
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/juvenal-satires/
Martial Epigrams
Readers and listeners like my books,
Yet a certain poet calls them crude.
What do I care, I serve up food
To please my guests, not fellow cooks.
(Book 9, poem 81)
The first thing you discover in the 1964 Penguin Classics paperback edition of Martial's epigrams, as translated by James Michie, is that this is very far from being a complete edition, in fact it represents only about ten per cent of Martial's total output.
Martial biography
Martial's full name was Marcus Valerius Martialis, the cognomen 'Martialis' indicating that he was born in March. He was born about 40 AD in the Roman province of Spain and came to Rome around 63, during the reign of Nero. Here, apparently, rather than embark on the cursus honorem or sequence of recognised public offices (quaestor, praetor, aedile, consul) or undertake a recognised profession such as lawyer and advocate, Martial preferred to live by his wits, making himself a witty entertainer and dinner party companion to rich patrons.
Amazingly, Martial seems to have been able to support himself this way for 35 years until he retired back to Spain about 98. (12.18 is a good-humoured song of praise to the simple life back in his home town far from the rigours of Roman life, apparently addressed to his friend, Juvenal the satirist.)
During all those years Martial was dependent on his wealthy friends and patrons for gifts of money, for his dinner, and even for his dress. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in his earlier career he used to accompany his patrons to their villas at Baiae or Tibur and to attend their morning levées. Later on, he owned a own small country house near Nomentum, and sent a poem, or a small volume of his poems, as his representative to the morning levée. He cultivated patrons far and wide and was especially proud at being invited to dinner with Domitian.
And yet, God, it was a shabby, humiliating and tiring sort of life, as his later poems convey:
Have mercy on me, Rome, a hired
Flatterer desperately tired of flattery…
Martial is best known for his twelve books of epigrams, published in Rome between 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian (81 to 96), Nerva (96 to 98) and Trajan (98 to 117). Martial wrote a rather terrifying total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets. This Penguin selection contains only about 150 of them. A notable feature of the Penguin edition is that it contains the Latin original next to Michie's translation of it (although this seems to be standard practice; the much more recent Oxford University Press selection does the same).
What is an epigram?
"An epigram is a short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end. The subject is usually a single thought or event." (Academy of American Poets)
It derives from the Greek epigraphein, meaning 'to write on, to inscribe' and originally referred to the inscriptions written on stone monuments in ancient Greece. Slowly the term became separated from the act of inscription and by 300 BC referred to any brief, pointed poem, generally about or addressed to someone.
In his 1,500 epigrams Martial is widely agreed to have taken the form to its highest point and every proponent of the epigram for the following 2,000 years to some extent echoes or copies him.
Two texts preface the selection, a 2-page translator's note by James Michie and an 8-page introduction by scholar Peter Howell.
Translator's note
In his translator's note, Michie says the selection is not intended as 'Martial's greatest hits'. Rather, the entries were selected to demonstrate Martial's variety. The texts of the twelve books of epigrams which have come down to us were not arranged logically or thematically, but to 'reflect the odd juxtapositions of life itself'.
Thus a scatological squib is followed by a deeply felt epitaph (for his 6-year-old slave, Erotion mentioned twice, in 5.34 and 10.61; for the dexterous slave boy Pantagathus, 6.52; or for Pompey the Great, 5.74); contrived panegyrics to Domitian (for liking his poems 4.8; for having impressive fish 4.30; for widening Rome's roads, 7.61) next to scabrous abuse of someone with bad breath (1.87); a pornographic poem about buggery (1.46) next to a poem lamenting the fickle condition of the dinner party hanger-on (2.27); extended descriptions of a country house (4.64) next to a vivid description of a sumptuous dinner (5.78); corruption at the chariot races (6.46) next to comic behaviour at a slave auction (6.66); insults to a rival poet (7.3) next to a jokey profile of a woman who seems doomed to marry only effeminate men (7.58); a bitter complaint against a noisy schoolmaster whose shouts wake him up early (school lessons started at dawn; 9.68) next to a shrewd criticism of a friend who's always complaining the world is going to hell (9.70); a fond poem to a friend who's mean and stingy but makes up for it by being a wonderful farter (10.15) next to the anecdote of the retired boatman who used his boat, filled with rocks, to plug a gap in the Tiber banks (10.85); a comic portrait of the superthief Hermogenes (12.28) next to a short but heartfelt summary of the Good Life (10.47). Variety.
There are a lot of poems about heirs and hangers-on waiting for the elderly to snuff it so they can inherit their money, a lot of anxiety about who cranky old people are favouring in their wills that's reminiscent of Dickens:
If you were wise as well as rich and sickly
You'd see that every gift means, 'Please die quickly!'
She longs for me to 'have and hold' her
In marriage. I've no mind to.
She's old. If she were even older,
I might be half inclined to.
(In his fascinating introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Juvenal's satires, Peter Green says this was an obsessive subject for authors of this generation. Professional legacy hunters were called captatores and he reminds me that an entire chapter of Petronius's Satyricon describes a visit to a town entirely populated by legacy hunters.)
There's a recurring theme criticising the kind of affected connoisseur who dismisses the moderns and only values 'the Classics', a type the elegiac poets also despised:
Rigidly classical, you save
Your praise for poets in the grave.
Forgive me, it's not worth my while
Dying to earn your critical smile.
Michie devotes half his note to an impressionistic prose summary of the cumulative portrait of late-first century Roman locations and people which Martial's epigrams depict, the Rome of:
shops, amphitheatres, law courts, lavatories, temples, schools, tenements, gardens, taverns, and public baths, its dusty of muddy streets filled with traffic, religious processions, , and never-ending business, its slaves, millionaires, prostitutes, philosophers, quacks, bores, touts, dinner-cadgers, fortune-hunters, poetasters, politicians and layabouts. (Introduction, page 9)
Michie makes the point that the epigrammatist, rather like the satirist, has to pretend to be angry and full of bile, but that a cumulative reading of Martial makes you suspect this was just a pose – or the kind of sentiment appropriate to the genre. For, as you work through these scores of short sharp vignettes, what actually comes over is Martial's 'great capacity for fun and for friendship, and an evergreen curiosity about people'.
Michie doesn't mention Chaucer, but Martial shares Chaucer's fascination with the huge diversity of real people of his time, their names and occupations, and shapes and sizes and ages and habits and mannerisms and verbal tics and sex lives and businesses. Thus a poem about typical scenes through the hours of the day:
The first two hours of the morning tax
Poor clients; during the third advocates wax
Eloquent and hoarse; until the fifth hour ends
The city to her various trades attends;
At six o'clock the weary workers stop
For the siesta; all Rome shuts up shop
At seven; the hour from eight to nine supplies
The oiled wrestlers with their exercise;
The ninth invites us to recline full length,
Denting the cushions. At last comes the tenth…
(Book 4, poem 8)
Michie also doesn't mention Baudelaire, but you could draw the comparison between the French poet's fascination with the endlessly teeming life of Paris, and Martial's endless snapshots of life in what was, at the time, the biggest city in the world, with its extremes of poverty and luxury, power and enslavements, stinks and smells and endlessly fascinating inhabitants. Maybe the thronged novels of Balzac are a better comparison and, in England, Dickens.
The introduction is written by historian and editor of Martial, Peter Howell, who makes a number of points:
Spanish writers
Martial was one of a generation of talented writers who hailed from the fully Romanised province of Hispania, which included Seneca the Elder and Younger; the latter's nephew, Lucan; Quintilian; and Columella.
A career choice
In their writings both Martial and Juvenal give the impression that they were forced by a social system which made if impossible for middle-class, well-educated men to earn a living by respectable means to become the hangers-on and flatterers of the rich, living from hand to mouth. But this was largely false. Friends urged Martial to take up the law or stand for public office, but he turned down both options.
Patrons and clients
The relation of patron and client evolved during the history of Rome. At the beginning it meant the relationship between a full Roman citizen and foreigners who wanted favours done for them within the legal and political system. By Martial's time a wealthy, well-connected patron prided himself on having large numbers of dependents, clients or hangers-on. The client acquired protection (for example, from lawsuits) and welfare (most often in the form of being invited to lavish dinners) but in return the patron claimed the client's support, in law courts, at election time, at social events, and their general flattery at all times:
Labullus, I court you,
I escort you, I support you
By lending an ear to your chatter,
And everything you say or do I flatter…
Clients were expected to be at their patron's house early in the morning to greet them, then accompany them on their day of social duties, at the end of the day receiving maybe a little cash, preferably an invite to dinner. (See poem 2.27 quoted below.)
Hence the many poems Martial writes about the lamentable plight of the humiliated client and the expressions 'parasite', 'dinner cadger' and 'hanger-on' which Michie uses to describe this social type, known in Latin (and in Roman theatre) as the parasitus.
For hours, for a whole day, he'll sit
On every public toilet seat.
It's not because he needs a shit:
He wants to be asked out to eat.
The parasite as poet
Martial was a cut above the average parasitus because he quite early became famous as a poet. The earliest surviving work of his is called Liber Spectaculorum, written to celebrate the opening of the Flavian amphitheatre (what came to be called the Colosseum) in 80 AD. But it was the terse, witty epigrams which he appeared to be able to knock out at will, many either flattering a specific client or appealing to their sense of humour, which kept him in free dinners for 35 years.
How Roman authors made money
A Roman author didn't make money by selling copies of a work. Copies had to be written out by hand and so remained limited in number. Instead there appear to have been two sources of income for an author:
Dedicate your work to a patron who would respond in kind with gifts – the ultimate patron being the emperor, the classic example being Augustus who worked through his minister, Maecenas, to give both Virgil and Horace gifts of property, land and slaves which made them comfortable for life.
It seems that some notable 'publishers' would pay an author for the privilege of having first dibs at copying a work they estimated would be popular and which they could guarantee selling copies of.
Thus by the time he came to publish what is conventionally known as Epigrams Book 1, in about 85, Martial must have been writing poetry for about 20 years and so is able to refer to himself as well known, even if all the other works he was known for, appear to have disappeared.
A Roman book
When all these authors refer to what is translated into English as 'a book', they mean a cylindrical roll of papyrus whose ends were often smoothed with pumice-stone and the whole roll wrapped in vellum (note, page 192). The wooden stave round which the papyrus was wrapped often had carved knobs at each end to secure the roll and make it easier to handle. The back of the papyrus was dyed yellow with cedar oil to preserve it from mould and moths (note, page 196). According to poem 1.117 a 'book' of Martial's cost 5 dinarii.
Reasons for Martial's popularity
Most contemporary poetry was long and long-winded, written about stock mythological subjects in elaborate and stylised verse. Thus Virgil's Aeneid gave rise to poets who tried to ape his success with long epics such as Valerius Flaccus, Statius and Silius Italicus.
By contrast Martial developed a form which was not just short but very short, but which managed to create drama in a very small number of lines (sometimes as few as two lines). Despite their shortness the epigrams, when collected into books, were arranged to offer a pleasing sense of variety and range.
Martial's epigrams are sometimes contrived in the sense of carefully structured to make a joke or damning point; but never contrived in the sense of striving to be grand and pompous. They are never pretentious.
No real people are skewered
The short poems of Catullus are packed with gleeful abuse of real individuals. The satires of his friend and contemporary, Juvenal, very much flay real life individuals, albeit under pseudonyms. But Martial, scathing though some of them may be, categorically states that he has not satirised any real people, even under fictitious names. Hence the large number of characters in the poem named Flaccus and Labulla and Lesbia and Cinna and Galla and Postumus. They're just bland common names used as pegs for the jokes.
Many of the poems are what used to be called 'obscene' and still was at the date of this translation (1964). In one of the first poems he uses the same argument that Catullus and Ovid had, namely that although his verse may be pornographic his life is pure.
Roman sexual attitudes
The attitude towards sex that emerges from Martial is one of cheerful permissiveness but not wild and orgiastic promiscuousness. (Introduction, p.16)
Sex is acceptable (unlike in, say, Victorian England) and prostitution is widespread. Adultery is theoretically forbidden but in practice also widespread. Homosexuality and bisexuality are regarded as natural, especially with teenage boys. The active role in male gay sex was through acceptable but for an adult man to take the passive role was more shameful. Poem 12.75 is an amusing squib listing all the types of gay boys he'd prefer to 'some bitch/Who'd make me miserably rich' (12.75). The poem about the woman who weighs men's penises erect and flaccid (10.55) is amusing but the long one complaining that his 'wife' isn't sexually adventurous enough is genuinely funny because so outrageous (11.104).
Howell entertainingly speaks up for the emperor Domitian (reigned 81 to 96). He says that Domitian had (as of 1964) the reputation of a Hitler (!) but claims this is the result of the works of Tacitus, Juvenal and 'other biased writers'. Apart from his paranoid vendetta against the senatorial class (which Tacitus and Juvenal and the other biased writers wrote for) Howell claims Domitian's rule was for everyone else 'calm and prosperous, marked by beneficial social and moral legislation' (p.16).
But Domitian liked Martial and awarded him the privileges of a father of 3 children although Martial was never, as far as we know, actually married and had no children. Hence Martial's numerous poems sucking up to Domitian (as Virgil and Horace and Ovid shamelessly sucked up to Augustus) (I especially like the panegyric to the imperial fish, 4.30); although Howell disapproves of how, following Domitian's assassination in 96, Martial quickly knocked off poems saying he'd never liked him anyway and praising the new regime.
Rhyming couplets
The great majority of Martial's poems were written in elegiac couplets, one hexameter followed by a pentameter, such as we've encountered in all the elegiac poets (Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid). The most important single thing about Michie's translation is he chooses to translate every poem he selects into rhyming couplets, quatrains or other rhyming forms. The precise metre varies from poem to poem, but pretty much all of them rhyme.
It's a bold decision. It aligns Michie's versions with the rhyming couplets of the Augustan Age of English verse, very roughly from the 1680s to the 1750s. On the upside rhyme in English poetry creates opportunity for humour and often prompts the author to ingeniously amusing collocations. Rhyme is associated with limericks and light verse of all types. On the down side, 'serious' modern poetry abandoned rhyme around the time of the First World War so the solid use of rhyme for all the translations signals and lack of…a lack of seriousness or depth, which, from what both Howell and Miche say about Martial, is maybe not appropriate in every instance.
The epigrams
There are all kinds of ways of grouping and categorising them, starting with the 12 books which Martial himself used as a structuring device. Very broadly there are two types of Martial epigram – ones you 'get', which have an appealing twist or sting or point which you can understand; and those which don't have such an obvious payoff, which presumably made sense in their time but seem flat or pointless or even incomprehensible to us today, even with extensive notes. If a joke needs extensive notes to explain it, it isn't a very good joke.
The poet as celebrity and showman
May I present myself – the man
You read, admire and long to meet,
Known the world over for his neat
And witty epigrams? The name
Is Martial. Thank you, earnest fan,
For having granted me the fame
Seldom enjoyed by a dead poet
While I'm alive and here to know it.
Insufferable amateur poets
Whether or not Apollo fled from the table
Thyestes ate his sons at, I'm unable
To say: what I can vouch for is our wish
To escape your dinner parties. Though each dish
Is lavish and superb, the pleasure's nil
Since you recite your poems! To hell with brill,
Mushrooms and two-pound turbots, I don't need
Oysters: give me a host who doesn't read.
To Domitian, pleading his moral probity
Caesar, if you should chance to handle my book,
I hope that you'll relax the frowning look
That rules the world. Soldiers are free to mock
The triumphs of you emperors – there's no shame
In a general being made a laughing-stock.
I beg you, read my verses with the same
Face as you watch Latinus on the stage
Or Thymele the dancer. Harmless wit
You may, as Censor, reasonably permit:
My life is strict, however lax my page.
Heterosexual sex
Lesbia, why are your amours
Always conducted behind open, unguarded doors?
Why do you get more excitement out of a voyeur than a lover?
Why is pleasure no pleasure when it's under cover?
Whores us a curtain, a bolt or a porter
To bar the public – you won't find many chinks in the red-light quarter.
Ask Chione or Ias how to behave:
Even the cheapest tart conceals her business inside a monumental grave.
If I seem too hard on you, remember my objection
Is not to fornication, but to detection.
'inside a monumental grave'?
I think what's going on is the narrator is buggering a boy who, as a result, is on the edge of orgasm. I'm happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood.
When you say, 'Quick, I'm going to come,'
Hedylus, I go limp and numb.
But ask me to hold back my fire,
And the brake accelerates desire.
Dear boy, if you're in such a hurry,
Tell me to slow up, not to worry.
Slave or paedophile sex
The eroticism of being blocked or prevented is taken a step further in this poem:
The only kisses I enjoy
Are those I take by violence, boy.
Your anger whets my appetite
More than your face, and so to excite
Desire I give you a good beating
From time to time: a self-defeating
Habit – what do I do it for?
You neither fear nor love me more.
Heterosexual smears
Lesbia claims she's never laid
Without good money being paid.
That's true enough; when she's on fire
She'll always pay the hose's hire.
Thumbnail sketches
Diaulus, recently physician,
Has set up now as a mortician:
No change, though, in his clients' condition.
You're an informer and a tool for slander,
A notorious swindler and a pander,
A cocksucker, gangster and a whore…
So how is it, Vacerra, you're so poor?
Chaucerian physicality
Hoping, Fescennia, to overpower
The reek of last night's drinking, you devour
Cosmus' sweet-scented pastilles by the gross.
But though they give your teeth a whitish gloss
They fail to make your breath any less smelly
When a belch bubbles up from your abyss-like belly.
In fact, blended with the lozenges, it's much stronger;
It travels farther and it lingers longer.
His cheap lodgings in a block of flats
Lupercus, whenever you meet me
You instantly greet me
With, 'Is it alright by you if I send
My slave to pick up your book of epigrams? It's only to lend:
I'll return it when I've read it.' There's no call
To trouble your boy. It's a long haul
To the Pear-tree district, and my flat
Is up three flights of stairs, steep ones at that…
Behaviour of a hanger-on and dinner cadger
When Selius spreads his nets for an invitation
To dinner, if you're due to plead a cause
In court or give a poetry recitation,
Take him along, he'll furnish your applause:
'Well said!' 'Hear, hear!' 'Bravo!' 'Shrewd point!' 'That's good!'
Till you say, 'Shut up now, you've earned your food.'
Or this poem about not only being a client, but being a client's client.
I angle for your dinner invitations (oh the shame
Of doing it, but I do it). You fish elsewhere. We're the same.
I attend the morning levée and they tell me you're not there,
But gone to wait on someone else. We make a proper pair.
I'm your spaniel, I'm the toady to your every pompous whim.
You court a richer patron. I dog you and you dog him.
To be a slave is bad enough but I refuse to be
A flunkey's flunkey, Maximum. My master must be free.
Miniatures of abuse
You ask me what I get
Out of my country place.
The profit, gross or net,
Is never having to see your face.
Marius's earhole smells.
Does that surprise you, Nestor?
The scandal that you tell's
Enough to make it fester.
Crude humour
If from the baths you hear a round of applause
Maron's giant prick is bound to be the cause.
Why poke the ash of a dead fire?
Why pluck the hairs from your grey fanny?
That's a chic touch that men admire
In girls, not in a flagrant granny…
Sarcasm about his readers
Caedicianus, if my reader
After a hundred epigrams still
Wants more, then he's a greedy feeder
Whom no amount of swill can fill.
Self portrait in retirement
Poor morning client (you remind me
Of all I loathed and left behind me
In Rome), if you had any nous,
Instead of calling on my house
You'd haunt the mansions of the great.
I'm not some wealthy advocate
Blessed with a sharp, litigious tongue,
I'm just a lazy, far from young
Friend of the Muses who likes ease
And sleep. Great Rome denied me these:
If I can't find them here in Spain,
I might as well go back again.
The Epigrams of Martial, translated by James Michie with an introduction by Peter Howell, was published by Penguin Books in 1973.
Selected epigrams of Martial translated by A.S. Kline (2006)
Complete epigrams in the 1897 Loeb translation
Tagged A.S. Kline, abuse, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient world, Augustus, Baiae, Balzac, Baudelaire, buggery, Caedicianus, captatores, caricature, Catullus, Chaucer, Chione, classical literature, client, Columella, cursus honorem, Diaulus, Dickens, dinner cadger, dinner party, Domitian, elegiac couplets, emperor Nero, epigram, epigrams, epigraphein, Erotion, Fescennia, Flavian Amphitheatre, Gay sex, hanger-on, Hedylus, Hermogenes, Hispania, homosexuality, Horace, humour, Ias, James Michie, Juvenal, Juvenal's satires, Labullus, lampoon, Latin, Latinus, legacy-hunter, Lesbia, Liber Spectaculorum, Lucan; Quintilian, Lupercus, Maecenas, Marcus Valerius Martialis, Martial, Martial's epigrams, Martialis, Nero, Nerva, Nomentum, obscenity, orgy, Ovid, Pantagathus, papyrus, parasitus, patron, Penguin classics, Peter Green, Peter Howell, Petronius, poems, poetry, Pompey the Great, pornography, Propertius, Roman literature, Roman theatre, satire, Satyricon, Selius, Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, sex, Silius Italicus, slave, slave sex, Slavery, Spain, Statius, Tacitus, the Colosseum, the Epigrams of Martial, Thymele, Tibullus, Tibur, Trajan, Translation, Vacerra, Valerius Flaccus, Virgil, wit
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/20/martial-epigrams/
Black Sea Letters by Ovid, translated by Peter Green
I lie at the world's end in a lonely wasteland.
(Black Sea Letters book 1, poem 3, line 49)
One cry for help, many addresses.
(3.6 line 42)
My review of Ovid's Tristia praises Peter Green's compendious notes and fluent, flowing translations of the 50 or so poems from exile which that volume contains. Alongside the Tristia, Ovid wrote another 50 or so verse letters from exile which were collected in a different volume titled Epistulae ex Ponto ('Letters from the Black Sea'). The difference between the two sets is that whereas the poems of Tristia sometimes address anonymous figures as part of his generalised lament about exile, each of the 'Black Sea Letters' is very much addressed to a specific, named individual, and the poems devote space to describing this person's career, relationship with Ovid, before he turns to his familiar refrain of asking them to intervene for him.
Green gives the collection a slightly different title, calling it the Black Sea Letters, and both his translations – of the Letters and Tristia – are included in the same Penguin paperback omnibus edition, which is collectively titled Poems from Exile.
The reason for Ovid's exile
In late 8 AD the Roman poet Ovid, at the age of 51, was sent into exile by the (ageing) emperor, Augustus. Although he wrote about 100 poems from his exile (which he endured from late 8 AD until his death in 17 AD) and describes his miserable plight endlessly, he nowhere specifies what crime he had committed to justify this harsh sentence.
He does mention that there were two causes: the official one, given out by the regime, was that the tendency of Ovid's light, sophisticated and fashionable love poetry, in particular the scandalous Art of Love – which is an extended guidebook on how to pick up and conduct affairs with married women – flew in the face of Augustus's legislative attempts to promote marriage and traditional morality (collectively known as the Leges Iuliae).
But Ovid himself, and all commentators since, regard this as camouflage, not least because the Art of Love had been published around 1 AD so had been in public circulation for nearly a decade when Ovid was suddenly summoned for an audience with Augustus, given a dressing down and told his fate.
No, the real reason is that Ovid saw something incriminating and failed to alert the authorities. He insists again and again and again that he committed no crime, intended no bloodshed or to break any laws; instead, in poem after poem he insists that he committed an error (he uses the original Latin word) of witnessing and seeing something, something criminal, something scandalous, something with infuriated the emperor but…what, exactly?
Infuriatingly, he never tells us. In an early poem in Tristia he tells us he was sworn to secrecy. In other poems he says he doesn't want to discuss it, it is best buried in darkness and oblivion. With the result that we have 100 or so poems self-pityingly lamenting his fate – and not one clear explanation of what it was that he saw that so infuriated the emperor. Leading to 2,000 years of scholarly speculation.
Peter Green's view is that Ovid was present at either a meeting of a group or cabal who discussed a plot to overthrow Augustus or a secret marriage which created an alliance between players and families which was a preparation for the overthrow of the dynasty.
The last decade of Augustus's long rule (from 31 BC to 14 AD) was troubled with military defeats, famine and unrest, and numerous plots.
In 2 BC Augustus surprised Rome by arresting his own daughter, Julia (who he had forced to marry his wife's son, Tiberius), and exiling her under very harsh conditions to a stony island off the coast of Italy, forbidden to have any visitors or travel anywhere. She was charged with adultery and treason. Augustus must have known for some time about Julia's sexual promiscuity – which was the official reason given for this surprise move; so it was (presumably) details of a plot to overthrow him which prompted Augustus's harsh action. We know that at the same time several of Julia's lovers were exiled and one was forced to commit suicide. The assumption is that her sexual activities overlapped with assembling a cabal of men who were conspiring to a) get her divorced from Tiberius, then b) get rid of both Augustus and Tiberius and crown Julia and her lover. All this occurred just before Ovid published the second edition of his stylish love poems, the Amores. The assumption is that Ovid's stylish, cynical, anti-establishment poems were popular among the promiscuous, privileged set which surrounded Julia.
What makes things a little confusing is that Ovid's actual banishment, 8 or so years later, coincided with Augustus exiling a second Julia, Julia the Younger, the daughter of the Julia I just described, Julia the Elder, and her husband Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Born in 19 BC, Julia the Younger was 27 when she was banished in 8 AD.
According to ancient historians Julia was exiled for having an affair with one Decimus Junius Silanus, a Roman senator. She was sent to Tremirus, a small Italian island, where she gave birth to a child. Augustus rejected the infant and ordered it to be left on a mountainside to die. Harsh, eh? Absolutely unforgiving. Silanus went into voluntary exile. The plot thickens when you learn that sometime between 1 and 14 AD, Julia the Younger's husband, Paullus, had been executed as a conspirator in a revolt.
So: modern historians theorise that Julia the Younger's exile was not actually for adultery but for involvement in her husband, Paullus's, revolt. And, to come back to Ovid, the view of people like Green is that Ovid's witty, cynical, erotic poetry formed a kind of soundtrack to the amoral lifestyle of this very upper class set and that somehow, during that fateful year of 8 AD, hanging out with Julia the Younger's people, he saw something take place which he failed, out of loyalty to the fast set, to report to the authorities, and it was this failure to speak out which was the error which he talks about obsessively in poem after poem.
But what it was, exactly…we're back at the dead end. Again and again he says he never planned anything, never intended bloodshed, was entirely passive, that he saw something incriminating without himself intending anything criminal. Again and again Ovid insists he made a mistake but didn't commit a crime. So you can see why scholars like Green speculate that what he saw, if it was just one activity, was either a group of conspirators discussing a seditious plan or swearing an oath or, the rather more florid speculation, that he witnessed the secret marriage of Julia the Younger which somehow bound her into the conspiracy to overthrow the emperor. Nobody knows.
Repeatedly Ovid compares himself to the mythological figure Actaeon, who accidentally stumbled into a clearing and saw the hunter goddess Diana bathing naked and so, as punishment, was transformed into a deer and torn to pieces by his own hunting hounds. Ovid says he was just as innocent as Actaeon, had no intent to do harm, stumbled upon a scene he barely understood, but has been just as harshly punished.
The condition of exile
Thus it was that in December 8 AD Ovid was ordered to make his way by ship from Italy, past all the islands and promontories of Greece, through the Dardanelles and into the Black Sea and onto the frontier settlement known as Tomis (modern-day Constanța in Romania), 70 miles south of the massive marshy delta where the river Danube empties into the Black Sea. And this was to be his home for the remainder of his life, for the next nine years (scholars think he died sometimes during the winter of 17/18).
Here in Tomis, as the Tristia poems make abundantly clear, Ovid fell into a deep depression, lost his appetite and weight, grew pale, suffered anxiety, often felt suicidal. The reasons included:
the miserable scenery about Tomis, which was flat and bleak and windswept
the extreme cold, such that during the long winter the Danube and even parts of the Black Sea froze over
the lack of even one person in the town who spoke Latin; almost everyone spoke one of the two or three local tribal languages – this was crushing for a man who had spent his entire life enjoying and playing with the Latin language, and whose art depended on reading his poems out loud to an audience and getting intelligent feedback; not in Tomis
but above all, the constant fear of attack by the fierce tribes who lived outside the town, who routinely swept into the area, looted all farmers' properties, either taking them off to slavery or murdering them on the spot – several times Ovid mentions being forced to buckle on a sword and take part in the defence of the town, which only survived these assaults because of its good defensive position and wall (which Ovid perpetually worries about being too low and too weak)
One minute he was a pampered poet sauntering through the salons of fashionable Rome, a few weeks later he was frozen, isolated, unable to talk to anyone, and terrified for his life
Poems of exile
In exile Ovid wrote two distinct volumes of poems. The Tristia (which can be translated as 'Poems of Desolation' or 'Lamentation') consists of five 'books' of 50 or so short poems (a page or two in length, with the exception of book 2 which consists of one 580-line poem, which is a sustained address to Augustus proclaiming his innocence and asking for his exile to be ended). I have reviewed the Tristia in the excellent translation by Peter Green.
The other set of poems he wrote is the Epistulae ex Ponto or 'Letters from Pontis' (Pontis being the name of the Roman province on the north coast of the Black Sea). Green translates this as Black Sea Letters. Both the Tristia and the letters are included in one excellent Penguin edition, translated with extensive notes by the America-based English academic Peter Green.
Black Sea Letters
The 'Black Sea Letters' is a collection of verse epistles describing Ovid's exile in Tomis written in elegiac couplets (the 'six-five beat' as he calls it in book 3 poem 3) and addressed to his wife and a wide variety of friends and contacts back in Rome.
The academic consensus is that the first three books were composed between 12 and 13 AD. They give every evidence of having been carefully assembled and ordered to create an artistic effect. The fourth book, by contrast, is believed to have been published posthumously, not least because it has a more miscellaneous feel.
The themes of the poems are identical with those of the Tristia ('same theme different title', as Ovid himself puts it in 1.1) namely:
the grimness of his place of exile, the cold, the wretched scenery, the lack of company
his deteriorating state of health
terror at the constant threat of violence from rampaging tribesmen
requests to intercede with the emperor on his behalf, if not to rescind his exile, to at least post him somewhere less bleak and terrifying: both the Julias were sent to islands off Italy, why can't he get the same?
excoriations of his enemies and critics back in Rome
So a lot of the subject matter is already very familiar from the Tristia. The main difference with the Tristia is that all these poems are in epistolary format which means that almost all the poems are addressed to named individuals, unlike the 50 poems in Tristia which all address unnamed, anonymous figures. Ovid highlights this difference in the very first poem of the collection.
Augustus features heavily in the collection, as he does in Tristia, as absolute arbiter of Ovid's fate. In between these begging passages, are appeals to Germanicus, nephew and adopted son of the emperor Tiberius, who was widely seen as a civilised, gracious, moderate influence.
All to no avail. No-one in authority gave any hint of relenting and Tiberius, when he replaced Augustus at the latter's death in August 14 AD was, if anything, even more adamant against Ovid. When his highest-ranking correspondent, the senator Paullus Fabius Maximus, died in the same year as Augustus, Ovid's last hopes petered out, and the collection ends on a deeply depressed note, the final letter being to an enemy who is bad mouthing him. Then…silence.
Books 1 to 3 were conceived of as one unit and are topped and tailed by poems to Ovid's publisher and editor in Rome, one Brutus. Green, as usual, gives very thorough summaries of other scholars who have found deeper patterns in the structuring of the three books. There's no doubt they were carefully arranged.
Book 1 (10 poems)
Letters to Brutus, Paullus Fabius Maximus, Rufinus, his wife, Cotta Maximus Messalinus, Publius Pomponius Graecinus, Messalinus, Severus, Flaccus.
1.1 To Brutus
The set opens with an envoi to Ovid's publisher, Brutus, asking him to accept this volume of verse letters and slip them into the gap created by Ovid's now-banned Art of Love. He argues that the works of more subversive figures (Mark Anthony and Brutus the assassin) remain publicly available. He makes some fancy comments about worshippers of Isis or the Great Mother but then bursts out in anguish:
I repent, I repent! If the damned have any credence,
I repent, I'm tormented by the thing I did.
Misery: his mind is melting like snow, being eaten away like rust, being eaten into like bookworms eat books, suffers a perpetual canker of anguish. Maybe, maybe, the all-powerful Jove will remit his punishment and move his place of exile to somewhere less appalling.
1.2 To Paullus Fabius Maximus (150 lines)
Ovid's most high-ranking contact, who had married a first cousin of the emperor and accompanied Augustus himself on a secret mission to Agrippa Postumus in exile. Ovid rehearses the same old themes, giving a vivid variation on the theme of the terrifying tribesmen who regularly assault Tomis's walls and fire off their poisoned arrows. The cold is endless, winter turns into winter. It's his fourth year and he weeps continually with misery.
What is my life? Stark bitterness never-ending,
torment exacerbated by time.
He dreams of home, of his wife, but that makes awaking even harder to bear. Often he prays for death. He asks Maximus to aid his exile 'with a kind word or two'. He optimistically claims that Augustus ('that god') can't possibly have known how bleak and horrible it was in Tomis, otherwise he wouldn't have sent him. And God forbid he dies and is buried there, far from all his friends and family, his spirit abandoned on a bleak windswept shore. Ovid's wife came from Maximus's household so, if only for her sake:
Speak up for me…Petition to have my place
of exile moved nearer home.
1.3 To Caius Vibinius Rufinus (94 lines)
A senior figure who shared in Tiberius's triumph of 12 AD and went on to serve as proconsul in Asia. The poem makes it clear that he has sent Ovid a consolatio or message containing philosophical precepts designed to cheer him up. Ovid thanks him and tells him it has been some comfort ('I was down but your message revived me') but cannot fully heal his heart. He gives examples from medicine, of which he obviously knew something.
But all humans want to return to the land of their birth, even to a wretched hole like Tomis, and he cannot find peace till he returns to Rome. Lines repeating the wretched flat landscape and continual fear of attack by tribals. Nobody in all history has been exiled to a remote of nastier spot.
1.4 To his wife (58 lines)
A sad poem to his wife saying he has aged, his hair is white, his face is lined, she'd no longer recognise him. It's not just age, it's 'unremitting hardship, distress of mind.' He embarks on an extended comparison (known as a synkresis) between himself and Jason who led the Argonauts because the land of Colchis that they sailed to was identified with the east coast of the Black Sea. But the comparison is designed to bring out how Jason was surrounded by comrades and friends, whereas it is Ovid's complete isolation, with no friends or support, which has ground him down.
He hopes to be reunited with her soon, soon, and vividly imagines the tears and hugs of their reunion.
1.5 To Cotta Maximus (86 lines)
By all accounts an unpleasant young man, Cotta was, nonetheless, rich.
Ovid apologises for the poverty of his verse, claims his talents have atrophied and the Muse cannot be persuaded to visit distant Scythia. This poem, like others of the same ilk, were forced out of his mind with no pleasure. Now he regrets having written so much frivolous verse. So why does he keep writing? Because he can't give it up. Every man has his vocation: Ovid's is writing. There it is. He doesn't expect fame or reward. He writes because it passes the long empty days and fills his mind, distracting him from his misery.
1.6 To Caius Pomponius Graecinus (54 lines)
Graecinus was suffect consul in 16 AD, an old friend of Ovid's. He is quoted in Amores 2.10 arguing that no man can love two women at the same time. Graecinus had now become a friend and drinking buddy of the heir apparent, Tiberius, so Green detects in this poem a cooling of the friendship, now that Ovid is persona non grata.
Ovid testifies to their friendship and Graecinus's interest in the liberal arts, says Graecinus was one of the bulwarks of his heart, repeats that it isn't 'safe' for him to describe his 'culpable error' explicitly.
Strikingly, Ovid lets slip that he has contemplated suicide, held a sword in his hand, but the goddess Hope intervened. He begs that Graecinus add some words in his favour to the emperor.
1.7 To Valerius Messalla Messalinus (70 lines)
Messalinus was a distinguished soldier and consul who accompanied Tiberius on his campaign in Pannonia. (Pannonia was a Roman province consisting of present-day western Hungary and parts of eastern Austria several Balkan states.) Ovid wrote Messalinus three poems/letters because of the poet's friendship with Messalinus's influential father, but all betray a certain nervousness as if he knew that Messalinus's closeness to Tiberius meant he would do nothing for the disgraced poet.
Ovid nervously acknowledges that Messalinus might not be pleased to receive a letter from him, or it might be inappropriate for him to reach out to a friend of the Caesar's. He nervously repeats that he committed no 'crime' just a 'folly', which leads him on to bless Augustus's clemency, mildness and restraint. Maybe they weren't that friendly, maybe he attended his brother's house more than his: still, would Messalinus mind lending his voice to his cause.
1.8 Severus (74 lines)
Opens, as always, with a brief summary of his woes – illness, depression, bitter cold and the ever-threatening natives with their poisoned arrows. He sadly describes how in his mind's eye he walks through Rome, visiting his wife and daughter, strolling past the theatres and temples. He remembers the scenery of the Field of Mars, canals, orchards which he helped plant with his own hand. Are they still there? In fact he'd love to be a farmer here, plough the soil and sow and water it – but that's impossible because of the endless raids by the barbarian Getans, murdering farmers, burning down their farms, carrying survivors off into slavery.
He asks Severus to intercede with Augustus with a modest request: to have him moved somewhere peaceful, not exposed to warfare, to somewhere he could farm land in peace.
The poem opens with a lament for the death of one Albinovanus Celsus. Green points out in his notes that both Cotta and Celsus had dodgy reputations, Celsus (according to Horace) for plagiarising other people's poetry. The fact that Ovid refers to them as his bestest friends reflects poorly on the poet.
Ovid tells Cotta that Celsus was one of the few friends to stick by him when disaster struck, came to visit him, put his arms round him, shed tears and restrained Ovid when he talked about suicide, telling him Augustus was merciful so he should live in hope of a reprieve.
He praises Celsus for his loyalty, laments his death, wishes he could have attended the funeral, praises Maximus for supervising the funeral obsequies with ceremony and honour. Well, just as he behave honourably and dutifully for Celsus – so should he now do the same for his suffering friend Ovid.
1.10 To Licius Pomponius Flaccus (44 lines)
Flaccus was brother to Graecinus addressed in 1.6 and was another high-ranking soldier and drinking companion of Tiberius. Suetonius claimed he was given the governorship of Syria solely for accompanying Tiberius on a long drinking session. He may or may not have shared the future emperor's predilection for kinky sex but his general profligacy makes it (deliberately) ironic that this poem is devoted to describing how Ovid's physical appetites have all atrophied.
He's lost his appetite, is pale and listless, has lost weight. Green speculates he might have had recurring diarrhoea caused by the bad or brackish water of the region (he claims never to have been a drinker of wine). He ends, as usual, by begging that Flaccus and his brother Graecinus put in a good word for him with 'Caesar's godhead', not to be allowed to return, just the milder request to be exiled somewhere less appalling and depleting.
Letters to Germanicus, Messalinus, Cotta Maximus Messalinus, Atticus, Salanus, Publius Pomponius Graecinus, Cotys of Thrace, Macer and Rufus.
2.1 (68 lines)
Ovid imagines Tiberius's triumph through Rome on 27 October 12 AD.
Ovid had obviously received an account of it, either by letter or from a visitor, because he describe the way the weather was rainy for days beforehand but cleared up at the last moment. It's noticeable that although it was Tiberius's triumph, Ovid chooses to not to name him but instead to address Germanicus, the much more charismatic figure ('flower of our youth in peace and war') who, he hoped, would intercede for him.
2.2 To Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus (126 lines)
Same addressee as (probably) Tristia 4.4. Same appeal, mentioning his father, praising Augustus and the health of his extended family – then asking Messalinus to use all his charm, exert all his influence, to win Ovid a change of exile.
2.3 To Cotta Maximus (100 lines)
The usual themes and pleas: notable because it describes the scene when Ovid was holidaying on Elba and Augustus's abrupt, angry summoning of the poet arrived along with rumour of what his offence was. Ovid describes how Cotta was shocked, disappointed, but then persuaded that Ovid had committed no crime, merely made an 'error' – and then it was all tears and condolence.
2.4 To Atticus (34 lines)
All that's known about this Atticus derives from Ovid's two or three poems to him, namely that the friendship was of long standing, back in Rome they went everywhere together, he criticised Ovid's work and, since Ovid's fall, had grown cool towards him.
2.5 To Cassius Salanus (76 lines)
Not much is known about this Cassius Salanus except that he was tutor to Germanicus. To paraphrase Wikipedia:
Germanicus Julius Caesar (15 BC to 19 AD) was a Roman general noted for his victories in Germany, and a powerful member of the Julian-Claudian dynasty. He was the son of Nero Claudius Drusus and Antonia the Younger and was the nephew of the future emperor Tiberius. In 4 AD he was adopted as legal son by Tiberius. His connection to the Julii was consolidated through a marriage between himself and Agrippina the Elder, a granddaughter of Augustus. The agnomen Germanicus was added to his full name in 9 BC when it was posthumously awarded to his father in honour of his victories in Germania. Germanicus was central to the line of emperors in that he was the older brother of Claudius, the father of Caligula and the maternal grandfather of Nero.
Obviously the later emperors were in the future. For Ovid's purposes, Germanicus had emerged as a young, successful, charismatic figure, far more open and sympathetic than his grouchy adoptive father, Tiberius. In the Black Sea Letters the reader can increasingly see Ovid adopting what Peter Green calls 'the Germanicus gambit' with more and more space given to praise of 'that Prince of the Youths' (line 41).
Green points out that, as the letters progress, old patrons are dropped (the family of Messalla Corvinus) or die (Paullus Fabius) and Ovid focuses on figures in Germanicus's circle. However, this didn't exactly endear him to the adoptive father, Tiberius – especially the way Ovid chose to end his poem describing Tiberius's 'Pannonian triumph' of 12 AD with a digression in praise of Germanicus, which – Green says – friends pointed out to him had offended more than pleased Tiberius.
This poem is interesting to me because of a throwaway reference to the fact that Ovid's heard that Salanus liked and praised the poems he's sent from the Black Sea and that his approval 'helped them'. This raises, for me, an issue Green doesn't clarify, which is: what was the status of these poems of exile? Was each of the five books of Tristia despatched as he completed them to Rome? Who published them, the shadowy Brutus addressed in poem 1 of the Letters? If the Ars Amatoria had been banned from Rome's libraries, how come the emperor allowed these poems, obsessed as they are with Ovid rehearsing his unhappiness and grievances, to be published? Were they copied and so freely available that someone he didn't know very well, like Salanus, came across or was given a copy?
If they were made generally available, what was the feedback from Rome? What did contemporaries make of them? Do we know?
And even more mystifying, how did Ovid find out what contemporaries thought? Green makes a passing comment to the possibility that a visitor to Tomis gave Ovid an eye-witness description of Tiberius's triumph. But this raises the huge question did Ovid receive visitors from Rome? He never mentions any in the poems. Or did Green mean something more like a visiting trader or merchant or government official?
Now I reflect on it, many of the poems in Tristia and the Letters respond to things he's heard about from Rome, from word that this or that individual is bad mouthing him or has insulted his wife. So he was receiving letters from Rome, but how many and how regularly? Ovid repeatedly asks people to write to him more but this begs the question of how much mail he received and how often.
Back to the poem itself, the sickly sweet over-praising of Germanicus is astonishing.
Also addressed in 1.6. Ovid is clearly replying to a letter in which Graecinus chided him, telling him to count his blessings, and that his 'crime' merited a much worse punishment (death?). Ovid replies, what's the point warning him now and being wise after the event? It's too late.
Ovid delivers a perfunctory blessing for Graecinus's family before delivering a far more powerful denunciation if he should abandon his hapless friend ('shame on you'). Then delivers a little list of mythological figures famous for the steadfastness of their friendship (Pylades, Orestes, Theseus, Pirithoüs) winding up by promising that, if Graecinus continues his support, and if Ovid's verse endures, then he will make his name immortal. As he has done.
Also addressed in 2.4. It's worth copying Green's summary of the poem as a good example of what had, by this stage, become a very stereotyped layout:
Ovid admits he exaggerates his fears (5 to 20)
he gives a list of adynata 'I'd sooner number the ears in a Libyan wheatfield' than reckon up all the woes he's suffered (25 to 30)
he parades the usual troubles and worries (31 to 48)
over-sensitivity produced by excess of suffering (37 to 45)
others achieved fame through the liberal arts, but they have destroyed him (47 to 48)
his prior life was blameless (49)
his friends have failed to be active enough on his behalf (51 to 52)
he was not on the spot when the storm broke (53 to 54)
he was forced to take ship at the worst possible time of year (with the stock comparison of himself to long-suffering Ulysses) (57 to 60)
his travelling companions robbed him (61 to 62)
his place of exile is a hellhole with constant threats to life, impossible to pursue agriculture (63 to 70)
endless cold, undrinkable water (71 to 74)
all that keeps him going is hope that Augustus's anger will abate (79 to 80)
he addresses 'you few friends', begging them to continue the battle on his behalf
In fact so standardised has this list of complaints become that you can almost feel him going through the motions. I wonder why he didn't just write the same stock letter and just change the first few lines of greeting and a few details in the middle and send them to everyone he knew back in Rome? Is it because he knew they'd be handed round, read widely, that he had to go to the trouble of making each one individually tailored to its recipient?
2.8 To Cotta Maximus Messalinus (76 lines)
Cotta has sent the poet two images in silver, two 'Caesars' (presumably Augustus and Tiberius) and one of Livia (Green debates whether they might have been statuettes or medallions).
The poem is one of the most embarrassingly fulsome acts of lavish sycophancy in Roman literature. He calls Augustus:
that Celestial being
he embodies our country's image
his virtues eclipse the boundless cosmos
imperishable glory of our era
lord of the world
Plus extravagant praise of Livia and his extended family, all leading up to grovelling begging to have his place of exile moved to somewhere less appalling.
2.9 To King Cotys IV of Thrace (80 lines)
Because in 12 AD Augustus divided the kingdom of Thrace between two client rules, King Cotys IV and his uncle Rhescuporis. Ovid is writing a celebration of Cotys because his kingdom would form a buffer between the Hellenised colonies of Moesia and the savage tribes of the hinterland. (According to the Wikipedia article, Ovid must be talking about Moesia Inferior, which you can see on the map [just about] forming a buffer between the coast at Tomis and the untamed interior.)
He hails Cotys and straightaway asks him to grant his plea to be moved to a less dire location. He argues that the great feature of power is to grant appeals for the powerless, otherwise what is the point of the sacrifices made across the Mediterranean by everyone from peasants to emperors to the mighty gods, unless they hear and grant appeals?
Let him be worthy of his noble father. The liberal arts, which he is known to cultivate (Cotys wrote poetry) soften a man's heart. In fact the writing of poetry creates a bond between them. As ever he mentions he is guilty of two offences, 1) writing the Ars Amoris 2) one which cannot be named.
2.10 To Macer (52 lines)
Precise identity unknown, maybe the companion of Ovid's Grand Tour of Greece when he was a student and, according to the poem, some kin with Ovid's wife. Macer is, apparently a poet, but unlike the foolish subjects which got Ovid into trouble, he apparently wanted to write another poem about the Trojan War. So Ovid repeats the stock trope that all poets are linked by their trade ('a cult they all share in common'). Then moves onto a vivid description of their tour round the sights of the Mediterranean (lines 21 to 42).
2.11 To Rufus (28 lines)
We know nothing about this Rufus except what Ovid tells us in this short poem (Rufus was one of the most common cognomina or surnames in ancient Rome). Green makes the point that the addressees of book 2 become more peripheral to the centres of power, more literary and familial as it progresses. He has worked through his list of influential powerful contacts and is getting to the bottom of his address book.
Briefly, Ovid thanks him for his tears of sympathy back in Rome when the news was announced. He thanks Rufus for guiding and advising his wife (apparently he was her uncle). And thanks him for carrying out Ovid's 'instructions'.
Book 3 (9 poems)
Letters to his wife, Cotta Maximus Messalinus, Paullus Fabius Maximus, Rufinus, an unknown friend and a group of unknown friends.
3.1 To his wife (166 lines)
The longest poem in the entire exilic corpus, complex and problematic. The first page (30 lines) gives a vivid portrait of how awful Tomis was, in the style of his earlier poems i.e. full and detailed. One of the best passages in the poems. Only at line 31 does he address his wife and then in bitter ungracious terms, accuses her of not doing enough for him. He says some call her a model wife, but she must up her game and work harder to get him freed. In return he will make her name last for ever, give her the immortality of other famous wives from mythology. (The massive irony is that we don't, in fact, know her name for sure.)
He goes on at length about how their marriage contract, her upbringing, the house she came from, and a host of classical examples, all demand she do more for her tragic husband's cause.
The poem ends with a passage about Livia ('possessing Venus' beauty, the character of Juno'), second only to Augustus in wisdom etc etc. Ovid advises his wife to be cautious about approaching her; do it now, when the city is at peace, when there have been no deaths, no public grief – not if she's busy and distracted with other matters; and only on an auspicious day, if the auguries are favourable; kindle a fire on the altar of Augustus, offer incense and wine – that's the time when his wife should make her approach.
Ovid tells his wife not to try to defend him, it's best to simply admit his guilt: but be free with tears, bow down, fall prostrate, reach out your arms, 'embrace those immortal feet!'
Worth noting that Livia was 71 when this poem was written (so much for Venus' beauty) and Juno was famous, if anything, for prolonged spiteful vendettas against heroes (Hercules, Aeneas). So, as Green points out, Ovid doesn't seem above to prevent ironic and ambiguous elements entering everything he wrote; even when he's trying to be grovellingly sycophantic, he still manages to give the impression that Livia is a monstrous ogre.
3.2 To Cotta (110 lines)
The fifth appeal to Cotta in the letters, with one more to come. Ovid praises Cotta for his loyalty to him and magnanimously forgives those friends who quickly abandoned him – he understands they were just scared to death of Augustus's anger. He gives the usual roll call of loyal friends from mythology (Orestes, Theseus) before letting slip that he has learned how to speak 'the native tongue'. This triggers a note by Green discussing just how much of the native tongues Ovid knew. His own testimony is mixed and confusing. Sometimes he writes that he's learned enough Getan to contemplate writing poems in it. Other times he emphasises that he can only make himself understood by sign language and that the natives laugh at his Latin and attempts to speak their language. Green's conclusion is that Ovid probably learned the local Greek-based pidgen or patois, used to facilitate trade but not the two local languages we know about, Getic and Sarmatian.
The poem is notable for introducing a mythical story, in the manner of the Metamorphoses, in this case he uses the device of having an local old man tell the story to him of Iphigeneia and Orestes, the point of which is to say that, if these local barbarians can value friendship, then how much more so should a civilised Roman like Cotta.
3.3 To Paullus Fabius Maximus / Eros (108 lines)
This is an interesting departure from the grind of repetitive poems. Same could be said of the opening section of 3.1 and the old man's story in 3.2.
Anyway 3.3 opens with Ovid telling Cotta about a dream he had, first painting the picture of a balmy evening, him sleeping and dreaming he had a visit from the god of Love, so familiar to him from his umpteen appearances in the Amores. And the poem turns into a dialogue with Eros, son of Venus, with his bow and arrow. Ovid blames Eros for inspiring him to write that 'stupid poem' which got him into so much trouble, then mounted a spirited defence that it was never intended to lure married women into adultery and thus (the key point, from Augustus's point of view) 'raise doubts about whose heir is whose'.
To which Eros gives a very tendentious reply, affirming that Ovid's poems never misled or corrupted anyone and concludes with an uplifting assurance that Augustus will change his mind and relent. This is all interesting, colourful and much more dramatic than most of the poems.
Then the poem concludes with grovellingly sycophantic praise and thanks to Cotta (93 to 108).
Green makes the interesting point that the setting – falling asleep on a divan – recalls the famous Amores 1.5.
3.4 To Rufinus (116 lines)
Ovid asks Rufinus to support the poem describing Tiberius's triumph which he sent him. In fact it goes on to be an extensive lament on what he missed out on, and how his poem must fall short, by virtue of not seeing it at first hand, but only hearing second hand reports.
Then he laments the poem will have been poor because he is simply unaccustomed to joy and celebration, seeing as he lives in a land of woes: he has forgotten happy words!
And then he claims it can take up to a year for a poem of his to travel the journey from Tomis to Rome so that, by the time it arrives, everyone is glutted and bored with the subject so his poem is ignored.
As with quite a few of these letters, Ovid repeats the idea that poets make up a secret fraternity (with the implication that he misses the support, the practical criticism and advice he enjoyed from belonging to the fraternity of Roman poets).
The last 30 lines of the poem claim to be direct inspiration from 'the god' who predicts a second German triumph for Tiberius (though not mentioning him by name; Ovid had a strange reluctance to do so) though he does mention Livia and tells her to hasten to make the elaborate arrangements for her son's soon-coming parade!
Cotta has thoughtfully sent Ovid copies of 'the clever speeches you made to a packed forum', which the latter has enjoyed reading and asks for more. In exile modes he laments the fact that he wasn't there in Rome to witness the speeches being given and no approval in person. In his mind's eye he can escape his wretched location 'among the shaggy Goths' and walk around Rome once more and meet and chat to Cotta like in the old days. Then he asks querulously, have people forgotten him? Do they still read his poems? Do they still talk about him?
Ovid tetchily writes to an unknown addressee asking why he insists on not being named in the letter: what has he to fear from the cosmically magnanimous Augustus – 'no god's more moderate than our Prince'? If Ovid sent letters not naming the addresses that wasn't out of doubt of Augustus's wisdom and mercy, but more out of his own panic fear when the bombshell struck. Now he's calmed down a bit he doesn't mind adding the name but will politely wait till his correspondent gives him permission to.
The poem mentions Augustus's establishment of a cult and shrine of Justitia Augusta, on 8 January 13 AD. Unsurprisingly, Ovid argues that 'Justice' must necessitate moderation of his punishment i.e. removal to somewhere less hostile.
3.7 To his friends (40 lines)
Now I'm out of words, I've asked the same thing so often;
now I feel shame for my endless, hopeless prayers.
You must be bored stiff by these monotonous poems…
For the first time Ovid acknowledges that maybe his exile won't be abated, he won't even be allowed to move somewhere nicer. Maybe all his pleas and poems and letters have been a waste of time. Why kick against the pricks and swim against the current? Hope brings only endless disappointments. Some wounds are made worse by meddling. Better than drown than prolong the agony of thrashing around in 'mountainous seas'. He adds the bitter sting that he expected hope and remedy from his friends' efforts but won't make that mistake again. So it's bitter recrimination as much as Stoic acceptance.
3.8 To Maximus (24 lines)
This is a spirited little number, one of the best of the poems because it is short and pithy and mostly empty of self pity. He wonders what present to send the addresses (one of the Maximuses, either Cotta or Fabius) and the poem consists of a miserable list of all the facilities and goods Pontus does not possess, until he comes to the sting in the tail and says the one thing it is notes for is its poisoned arrows. So he's sending a quiverful so that they may 'be reddened with your enemies' blood!'
3.9 To Brutus (56 lines)
Green repeats the scholarly consensus that the first 3 books of Black Sea Letters weren't just assembled at random but carefully arranged to form a pattern of addressees. The most basic proof of this is the way the collection starts and ends with a poem to the same person, Ovid's publisher in Rome, Brutus.
Ovid writes in reply to Brutus who has, apparently, told him that critics back in Rome are criticising Ovid for the monotony of theme of his poems. (Green humorously summarises the message of the entire Black Sea Letters as 'Get me out of here!')
He gives an insight into his poetic practice i.e. initial creation, then going back over the verse to amend words and phrases. He apologises to Brutus but says, know what? He can't be bothered any more. It hardly seems sane taking the immense trouble required to polish his poems amid savage Goths who don't understand a word of Latin.
As to the accusation that his Pontic poems are monotonous, well, guess what?
Cheerful, I wrote cheerful verses; sad, I write sad ones. (line 35)
Of what should I write but the faults of this bitter region,
what pray for, but to die in a better place?
One last point: when a poet makes something up he is free to introduce the themes and variations he wants. But Ovid's theme was dictated by his pitiful situation. He didn't write these poems to achieve high poetic repute but a bread-and-butter practical means to a practical end. The variation, such as it is, came from varying the exact content to be appropriate to each addressee:
Not to make a book, but to send the appropriate letter
to each person – this was my object and my care.
In fact, in his commentary Green comes down quite hard on Ovid, accusing him of, ultimately, defeating his own ends by boring his readers with the monotony of his subject matter and complaints until they stopped listening. Better if he'd made the effort to diversify his subject matter; that might have had more impact. Maybe. Unlikely, though.
Letters to Sextus Pompeius, Cornelius Severus, Brutus, Vestalis, Suillius, Graecinus, Albinovanus, Gallio, Carus, Tuticanus and an unnamed enemy.
Scholars think that books 1, 2 and 3 of the Black Sea Letters were carefully assembled and shaped by Ovid, a literary operator to the end. However, the scholarly consensus is that the fourth book of letters was added later, possibly after his death, for several reasons:
it's longer than all the others, 16 poems 880 lines
its addressees are new to the series
Ovid's wife is conspicuous by her absence
in some places Ovid displays embarrassment at not having communicated with new addressees before
So it's considered a mopping up exercise, collecting the best of the rest.
What the new addressees almost all have in common is service under or support for Germanicus (see 2.5, above), for example Sextus Pompeius, recipient of four epistles, related to Augustus and an adherent of Germanicus.
Because when Augustus died in August 14, Ovid stood no hope of clemency from Tiberius, sterner than Augustus and under the powerful dominance of his mother Livia. So Ovid turned his hopes towards the emperor's adopted son, the famously charming, civilised and accessible Germanicus.
4.1 To Sextus Pompeius (36 lines)
Pray accept a poem composed, Sextus Propertius,
by one who owes you his life…
Pompeius takes over the role of prime addressee performed in earlier books by Fabius Maximus and the sons of Messalla Corvinus. Ovid sounds nervous and embarrassed that he hasn't written to him before, saying he meant to, often wrote his name by mistake at the head of previous letters etc. In a moment of weird hyperbole, Ovid claims that Propertius made him into a work of art.
4.2 To Cornelius Séverus (50 lines)
What you are reading, Séverus, great bard of mighty monarchs,
comes to you all the way from the long-haired Goths…
Séverus was an epic poet (he wrote an epic poem about the Sicilian War) and in the same literary circle as Ovid, that of Messalla Corvinus. Like many of the other poems, he apologises for not having addressed a poem to him before but, interestingly, writes that they have been keeping up a correspondence in verse. What happened to all those letters to and from Ovid for those ten long years?
The poem is an opportunity to complain that his inspiration has left him, he is ploughing the seashore. He has writer's block because he has no intelligent audience or critical feedback. Paradoxically this poem about poetic barrenness throws up one of the most quotable lines in all the 100 exilic poems:
Writing a poem you can read to no-one
is like dancing in the dark.
(lines 33 to 34)
4.3 To Unnamed (58 lines)
A generic poem castigating a close friend, known since boyhood, who has not only not written to him, but denied they were ever a friend of his. Traitor and dissembler. Ovid warns him just how fickle Fortune is, as light as a breeze, and lists great men brought low (Croesus, Pompey). One day he might fall low and need other people's help, then he'll regret abandoning his friends.
A variation on a stock poem or subject, the laudatio consulis i.e. in praise of someone about to be appointed consul for a year. Scholars point out it resembles stock letters that Cicero sent to about-to-be-installed consuls. It invokes and plays against the conventions of the form. Also notable because Ovid introduces the figure of Rumour which gives the sense, not often mentioned in the poems, that he was, all the time, carrying on a busy correspondence in prose with friends and family back in Rome.
He paints a scene of himself walking along the barren seashore when the voice of the allegorical figure of Rumour whispers in his ear that the coming year will be one of joy for 'the consul will be Pompeius, your dearest friend in the world' and this leads him into a vivid imagining of the sights and scenes involved in a consul's entry into power, which Ovid conjures up to console himself.
The poem is an envoi, conceived as a messenger sent to Pompeius who has now commenced his consular year (14 AD).
Go, lightweight elegiac, to our consul's ultra-learned
ears, take this message for the man of honours to read.
And paints an interesting picture of how the poem-messenger must make his way through the throng around Pompeius as he performs his duties, until he can speak to him and remind him of its sad author. Interestingly, Ovid says he owes his life to Pompeius, that he 'ensured safe passage for [Ovid] through the wilds' and has, subsequently, given him 'life-sustaining gifts.'
The imperial family feature in the poem as those Pompeius must praise and placate but it's interesting that Germanicus gets the longest mention, 6 lines, Augustus 2, and Tiberius isn't mentioned at all.
Ovid's publisher and literary confidante whose full name we don't know. He says he's moving into his second five-year spell in exile (14 AD) and that he's heard the new that Augustus is dead (August 14) so it must have been written about October-November of that year. Ovid optimistically writes that Augustus 'had begun to forgive my unwitting error'. Seems optimistic. He says he's sent Brutus a poem celebrating the new deity i.e. the deification of Augustus. He mentions it in other exile poems, too. it hasn't survived, but it would have been a treat to see just how oleaginous Ovid could be.
The poem praises Brutus for being compassionate and so surprising many by his forensic ferocity in prosecuting law cases. And implies he's fat ('the great frame of yours!') And claims that 'the greater part of [his] private circle] abandoned him, denying all knowledge of him.
4.7 To Vestalis (54 lines)
Vestalis was the 'son of a native prince' and 'scion of Alpine kings', who rose through the ranks of the Roman army and was appointed prefect to the coast of Pontus i.e. across the Black Sea from Tomis.
Since you've been posted to the Black Sea's shore, Vestalis,
to keep the peace in these sub-polar lands,
you can see for yourself the kind of country I lie in,
can testify that mine are no feigned complaints.
The poem turns into a long list of Vestalis's achievements as a soldier and commander, vividly describing various battles and victories, notably Aegisos. To quote A.S. Kline's notes, "Aegisos was a Moesian town on the Danube delta. The modern Tulcea, it lies about forty miles inland from the southern mouth of the delta and about seventy miles north of Tomis. It was retaken by Roman forces led by Vestalis in AD12 after a Getic incursion." hence this poem in praise of Vestalis, comparing him to Ajax before Troy:
conspicuous in your gleaming armour,
ensuring your brave deeds could not be missed,
with great strides you charged the swords, the strong position,
stones thicker than wintry hail,
and neither the downflung rain of javelins could halt you
nor arrows envenomed.
4.8 To Publius Suillius Rufus (90 lines)
Ovid was connected to Rufus twice over. He had married Ovid's step-daughter, Perilla, in around 12 AD, 5 or 6 years after Ovid's relegatio; and he was quaestor to Germanicus, Ovid's last best home of forgiveness.
This explains why the poem morphs into an appeal to Germanicus, in three parts: a) Ovid cannot offer Germanicus money but he can offer him poetic immortality:
Let opulent houses and cities present you with temples; Ovid's
gratitude will be shown through his sole riches – verse.
b) His (Ovid's) praise will amplify his fame and reputation. This launches an extended example of the common trope that poems of praise are the best and longest lasting monument. Not only famous contemporaries but the great men of legend and even the gods themselves are to some extent kept alive – we have heard of them – because of poetry.
Than time
there's nothing in existence has greater strength.
The written word defies the years.
c) Germanicus is himself an author – they have 'rites in common' – and so all the more should free Ovid from his horrible exile among 'the savage Goths'.
4.9 To Graecinus (134 lines)
Same addressee as 1.6 and 2.6, Graecinus was an old friend of Ovid's but also a drinking buddy of Tiberius's so had probably made the sensible move of dropping his old friend.
Graecinus was appointed suffect consul in 14 AD so in this poem Ovid: a) imagines the scene of his installation, saying how much he'd have liked to have been there to offer congratulations in person; b) hopes Graeconus will use his position to intercede with the emperor.
Ovid then goes on to celebrate the happy fact that Graecinus will be replaced as consul by his brother, Lucius Pomponius Flaccus. Since Flaccus served as commander of a district on the Black Sea coast (where he distinguished himself in a campaign of 12 AD), Ovid asks Graecinus to get his brother to confirm Ovid's descriptions of the miserable climate, warlike tribes and so on.
Ovid describes how he is esteemed in Tomis, how his behaviour has won him privileges and exemptions. He goes on to describe how he has a shrine to the entire royal family, Augustus, Livia, Tiberius and the two adopted grandsons Drusus and Germanicus. He asks Graecinus to ask anyone how zealous he is in offering incense to this little group of statuettes every single morning – poor desperate grovelling man.
It's an unusually long poem and ends with a vision of Augustus, now deified, up in heaven looking down on Ovid, appreciating the poems on his deification which Ovid mentions having recently written.
4.10 To Albinovanus Pedo (84 lines)
Ovid says he's writing this in his sixth summer. If he departed Rome in December 8 and arrived in the spring of 9, this makes it 15 AD. Albinovanus Pedo was a soldier who'd served under Germanicus. Some of his exploits are described in Tacitus's Annals and, rather amazingly, he wrote an epic poem about the huge storm which wrecked Germanicus's fleet in the North Sea in 16.
Anyway, this poem is unusual because, although it raises some super-familiar topics about Tomis – the bleakness of the flat plain, the sea freezing over, the barbarian Goths with their poisoned arrows – there is, surprisingly, no pitiful begging and pleading for help. On the contrary, Ovid, for once, boasts about his toughness, his duritia, at having survived it all.
compare any flint or steel, dear Albinovanus,
to my endurance?…
All things but me, then, time that great corrosive,
will destroy: even death holds off, quite overcome
by my toughness…
He has heard that people back in Rome simply don't believe his stories about the cannibal tribes or the sea freezing over, let them come and see for themselves! In fact he goes on to give a technical explanation of why the shore-sides of the Black Sea do freeze over in the winter which Green, in his notes, points out is, unlike most natural history written by the ancients, scientifically correct.
4.11 Junius Gallo (22 lines)
Gallo was a noted rhetorician and friend of the elder Seneca. In one of his typically full and fascinating notes, Green tells us that Gallo's senatorial career was cut short years later, in 32 AD, when he suggested that ex-praetorians should be given seating privileges in the theatre. 'Tiberius reprimanded him, removed him from the Senate and sent him into exile.' Crikey! This fact is more interesting than the poem, a striking insight into the immense importance of hierarchy and precedence and procedure in ancient Rome. Sent into exile! For suggesting a minor change in the seating plant at the theatre?
Anyway, in this short poem Ovid greets Gallo, apologises for not having written earlier, and commiserates on the death of his wife. He laments it takes so long for his letters to travel to Rome (Green, in his notes, says the period of a year is a gross exaggeration). So Ovid speculates that, given this long delay in Gallo's letter reaching him, maybe he has remarried!?
4.12 To Tuticanus (50 lines)
Although Ovid describes him as an old friend ('through all the long years we've enjoyed together/I've loved you like a brother') and that they developed a very close relationship through sharing and critiquing each other's poems, Tuticanus hasn't appeared in any earlier poem and so Green detects a (by now fairly familiar) tone of embarrassed apology in this poem.
Ovid tries to make a joke by pointing out that it is impossible to fit Tuticanus's name, which consists of a double trochee, into the tight metrical scheme of his elegiac metre. Ovid runs through the various distortions he could make of his friend's name to fit it in, but says they'd all be laughed at. You don't have to totally understand the metrical variations which he describes to grasp the point that the kind of verse Ovid (and his contemporaries) wrote was extremely strict in every single syllable of its beats and measures. So when he read his poetry aloud to a literary audience and they critiqued it, as often as not it would be about the strict mathematical count of the metre as about the things we moderns care more about (metaphors and sentiment). Maybe it can be summarised as saying that Roman poetry as considerably more mathematical than we are used to.
Tuticanus has clearly asked in a poem what Ovid wants, but by now, demoralised and defeatist, Ovid confesses he doesn't know:
I can find nothing to do, or want, or not want,
nor do I clearly know what's best for me.
4.13 To Carus (50 lines)
We know little about Carus except that he, too, was a poet and, according to this poem, a tutor to Germanicus's two young sons (Nero and Drusus III). Well-placed, then.
But this poem is noteworthy because in it Ovid claims he has mastered enough of the local lingo to be writing poetry in it and to have become 'a Getic bard'. Green doubts this means Ovid had become fluent in the local tribal language. More likely he had mastered the bastardised Greek or Greek patois used at this remote trading post. Thus Ovid's verse technique, based on counting syllables, would still work in a language which retained Greek syllable counts. It is extremely unlikely this syllabic technique could be applied to a non-Mediterranean language based, more than likely, on stresses and beats.
Anyway, he tells Carus he's had a popular hit among the natives with a poem praising the imperial family, describing how Augustus's soul had gone to heaven and his virtues been inherited by his wise and good successor (as usual, he can't bring himself to use Tiberius's name). Then he jokily describes the scene of assembled Goths, who have listened in silence, at the poem's end breaking into applause, nodding and shaking their quivers full of arrows – a cartoon scene.
Then he has one of the Getic leaders asking why, when he writes such wonderful praise of Caesar, Caesar doesn't recall him to Rome.' But it's too late. This is his sixth winter. Ovid asks Carus to intercede for him with Germanicus, but it's half-hearted. His sixth winter is approaching. He's worn out.
Same addressee as 4.12. It quickly becomes an angrily desperate plea to be moved somewhere, anywhere but wretched Tomis. But this leads into a new and interesting topic: turns out that his incessant bitching about how dreadful Tomis is has vexed the locals. Which leads into a self-pitying lament that whatever he writers, his poetry seems to get him into endless trouble. Maybe he should cut off his fingers so he can't write any more. Rather unconvincingly he now addresses the 'men of Tomis' and assures them that, deep down, he loves them, it's just their land and its wretched climate he hates. Nice try, Publius.
Then he moves on to positive praise of the way the people of Tomis have welcomed, celebrated and even honoured him. (My God, it would be fascinating to know more about this.) He has been granted a tax exemption. A wreath has been placed around his head 'by popular acclamation'. Tomis has proved 'ever loyal and hospitable'. If only it wasn't so close to the frozen pole!
4.15 To Sextus Pompeius (42 lines)
For once this is a poem of thanks to someone who clearly has given Ovid material aid, and more than once. He writes that he owes all his welfare to him, after the gods he takes first place, his kindnesses have been as many as grapes in a vineyard.
In exchange Ovid describes himself as a chattel and a possession which now belongs to Pompeius, going far beyond the dutifulness described in a usual client-patron relationship. Ovid's abandonment of himself to Pompeius is abject, complete.
He then apologises for writing the same old thing; whatever subject he sets out to address it always comes back to the same old rut, his plea for forgiveness.
4.16 To anonymous (52 lines)
The final poem in book four and therefore the entire Black Sea Letters is an angry execration of an unnamed person who is bad-mouthing him back in Rome. He adopts from the start the pose he has created before that Ovid is dead – the fashionable man-about-Rome who wrote all those witty poems died the day he was sent into exile and everything since has been written by a corpse. So what on earth is the point of calumniating and criticising a dead man?
The poem opens with an impressive roll call of contemporary poets (listed below), long and exhaustive, leading up to the defiant conclusion that Ovid was, and knew he was, head and shoulders among this packed competition. But what does any of it matter? Ovid is dead now. So, Malice, sheathe your bloody claws. Ovid has lost everything. What's the point stabbing a dead body?
There is no space in me now for another wound.
1. Ovid more of a hanger-on than we thought
The letters shed light on the real nexus of relationships Ovid navigated back in Rome and it is not a pretty one. More than once you get the impression Ovid was a hanger-on to much more important, powerful, rich men, leading figures in politics or the army, who indulged the wimpy poet because of his quick tongue and his outrageous wit, but never really liked him and, now he's in trouble, have promptly dumped him and wouldn't dream of jeopardising their standing with the old or new emperor for such a hanger-on. Not flattering.
2. Why repetition works for love but not for exile
It's difficult not to get worn down by the sheer repetition of the same half dozen tropes repeated in almost all the 100 poems, illustrated by the same half dozen metaphors and the same half dozen mythological references (endlessly comparing himself to storm-tossed Ulysses, long-suffering Philoctetes, Capaneus, comparing his dutiful wife to Penelope, Andromache, Evadne et al).
But there's a point to be made here: the Amores mercilessly reshuffled half a dozen tropes about love – about the poet being a slave for love, shackled for love, love's servant, love's soldier, love's long-suffering victim, twanged through the heart by love's arrows etc – and these are endlessly enjoyable.
My suggestion is that from Ovid's time right up to the present, we are so indoctrinated by the mass media with the importance of 'Love' that we accept reading the same love tropes in poetry, reading the same love stories in novels, watching the same half dozen love plots (competition for the pretty girl, marriage then infidelity, torn between two lovers etc) without complaint.
As a Darwinian materialist I see the never-ending and enormous obsession of all our media and cultural productions with 'love' and sex as reflecting the central concern of human beings (when regarded as mammals just like all the other mammals on the planet) which is to mate, to nest and to reproduce.
When Ovid applies the same half dozen tropes about love (in the Heroides, Amores, Art of Love) we lap it up, the repetition doesn't seem to matter, the expression of the same old love plaint seems fresh and new and heartfelt each time we read it.
But when he applies the same technique of endless repetition of a half dozen tropes regarding a different subject, namely his unhappy exile in windswept, tribe-infested Tomis, we react with growing boredom and exasperation.
It's because this highly specific situation doesn't have anything like the same basic, animal, evolutionary interest for us that sex and love do. This is why we mostly remain on the outside of his poems and don't take them to heart as we do his love poems. And helps to explain why the constant repetition eventually becomes really wearing.
The extent of repetition with variation is comparable in both cases: but one subject is core to almost everyone's central purpose as human beings (love and sex), the other is marginal and niche.
3. More poets than you'd expect
Neither Green nor anyone else I've read makes much of this last point, but a surprising number of the people Ovid writes too wrote poetry. It was clearly a really common activity among the educated classes of Rome which must, therefore, have created a highly qualified audience for Ovid's recitations, and plenty of feedback and criticism. Only towards the end did I start listing people he writes to who are described either in the poem itself or in Green's notes as poets and then discovered that the final poem in the entire book, 4.16, includes a handy list of the poets among Ovid's contemporaries:
Cornelius Severus (4.2) author of an epic poem about the Sicilian Wars
Albinovanus Pedo (4.10) wrote an epic poem on Theseus and on the exploits of Germanicus
Tuticanus (4.12) wrote a Phaeacid a reworking of the Phaeacian books in Homer's Odyssey
Carus (4.13) wrote a poem about Hercules
Domitius Marsus (4.16) wrote an epitaph on Tibullus
'bombastic' Rabirius (4.16) wrote an epic on the civil wars which the critic Velleius Paterculus thought equal to Virgil
Clutorius Priscus (4.16) wrote a lament on the death of Germanicus
Julius Montanus (4.16)
Sabinus (4.16) wrote verse replies to Ovid's Heroides and 'an almanac in verse'
an unnamed poet (4.16) 'who versified Rome's wars in Libya'
Marius (4.16) who could turn his hand to anything
Camarinus (4.16) wrote an epic account from the death of Hector to the end of the Trojan war
Rufus (4.16) a lyric poet, 'one man performer upon Pindar's lyre'
a 'Sicilian friend' (4.16) wrote a Perseid
Lupus (4.16) who described Menelaus and Helen's adventures on the journey back to Sparta
Turranius (4.16) author of unnamed tragedies
Gaius Melissus (4.16) developed a new type of social comedy
Lucius Varius Rufus (4.16) wrote tragedies, a panegyric to Augustus, an epic On Death, and was commissioned by Augustus, along with Plotius Tucca, after Virgil's death, to edit and produce a publishable version of the Aeneid
Graccus (4.16) composed a poem on Thyestes
Proclus (4.16) an imitator of the Greek poet Callimachus and so one of the 'neoteric' poets, most famous of whom was Catullus
Grattius (4.16) author of a 540-line poem on hunting and the training of hunting dogs
Fontanus (4.16) 'tossed off the amours of nymphs and satyrs'
Capella (4.16) 'crammed phrases in the elegiac mould'
Cotta Maximus (4.16) rich, powerful patron and dabbler in poetry
Where are they now? Well, Green dolefully informs us, of the 16 poets I've mentioned above, who Ovid references in 4.16 (plus two or three I haven't mentioned because they are referred to by work not name), none of their works have survived intact, with the one rather sad exception of the hunting poem by Grattius.
The collected works of all the others, including all those epic poems about death, the Trojan war, the civil war, all those plays…all vanished into oblivion.
Peter Green's translation of Ovid's Black Sea Letters was included in Ovid: The Poems of Exile, published by Penguin Books in 1994. All references are to this 1994 paperback edition.
Black Sea Letters translated into English by A.S. Kline
by Simon on December 2, 2022 • Permalink
Tagged A.S. Kline, Actaeon, adynata, Aegisos, Agrippa Postumus, Agrippina the Elder, Albinovanus, Albinovanus Celsus, Albinovanus Pedo, Amores, ancient Rome, ancient world, Andromache, Art of Love, Atticus, Augustus, Black Sea, Black sea Letters, Brutus, Caesar, Caius Pomponius Graecinus, Caius Vibinius Rufinus, Caligula, Callimachus, Camarinus, Capaneus, Capella, Carus, Cassius Salanus, Catullus, Celsus, classics, Claudius, Clutorius Priscus, Colchis, consolation, Constanța, Cornelius Severus, Cotta, Cotta Maximus, Cotta Maximus Messalinus, Cotys IV, Cotys of Thrace, Croesus, Dardanelles, Darwinian materialism. Darwinism, Diana, Domitius Marsus, Drusus III, duritia, Elba, elegiac couplets, Emperor Augustus, emperor Tiberius, Epistulae ex Ponto, Eros, error, Evadne, Evolution, execration, exile, Field of Mars, Flaccus, Fontanus, Gaius Melissus, Gallio, Gallo, Germanicus, Germanicus Julius Caesar, Getae, Getans, Goths, Graccus, Graecinus, Grattius, Great Mother, Greece, Hector, Helen, Hercules, Homer, Horace, ISIS, Italy, Jason and the Argonauts, Jove, Julia, Julia the Younger, Julian-Claudian dynasty, Julius Montanus, Junius Gallo, Justitia Augusta, King Cotys IV, Latin, Latin poetry, laudatio consulis, Leges Iuliae, Letters from Pontis, Libya, Licius Pomponius Flaccus, Livia, Lucius Pomponius Flaccus, Lucius Varius Rufus, Lupus, Macer, Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Marius, Maximus, Menelaus, Messalinus, Messalla Corvinus, Moesia, Moesia Inferior, neoteric poets, Nero, Odyssey, Orestes, Ovid, Ovid's exile, Ovid: The Poems of Exile, Pannonia, Paullus, Paullus Fabius, Paullus Fabius Maximus, Penelope, Penguin books, Perseid, Peter Green, Phaeacid, Philoctetes, Pindar, Pirithoüs, Plotius Tucca, poem, poems, Poems from Exile, Poems of Desolation, Poems of exile, poetry, Pompeius, Pompey, Pontus, Prince of the Youths, Proclus, Publius Ovidius Naso, Publius Pomponius Graecinus, Publius Suillius Rufus, Pylades, Rabirius, relgatio, Rhescuporis, River Danube, Roman Empire, Roman poetry, Romania, Rome, Rufinus, Rufus, Rumour, Sabinus, Salanus, Sarmatian, Scythia, Severus, Sextus Pompeius, Sextus Propertius, Sicilian Wars, Silanus, Sparta, suffect consul, Suillius, synkresis, Tacitus, the Aeneid, the Black sea, Theseus, Thrace, Thyestes, Tiberius, Tibullus, Tomis, Translation, Tremirus, Tristia, Trojan War, Turranius, Tuticanus, Ulysses, Valerius Messalla Messalinus, Velleius Paterculus, Venus, Vestalis, Virgil
Posted by Simon on December 2, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/12/02/black-sea-letters-ovid/
Tristia by Ovid
How wretched to live among tribal natives
for him whose name was once a household word.
(Tristia book 4, poem 1, lines 67 and 68)
What I seek is not praise but pardon.
(Tristia book 1, poem 7, line 31)
There's nothing we own that isn't mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind.
(Tristia, book 3, poem 7, lines 43 and 44)
America-based British academic Peter Green has published an impressive number of books about the ancient world – numerous histories and essays, along with many translations from ancient Greek and Latin.
Among these are two volumes of translations of the Roman poet Ovid for Penguin books: a portmanteau volume titled The Erotic Poems of Ovid, which includes Amores, The Art of Love and The Cure for Love, and this volume, The Poems of Exile, which includes Ovid's last two works, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto ('Letters from the Black Sea').
These fairly long works (Tristia 103 page, Letters 90 pages) were, as the title suggests, written during Ovid's 10-year-long and miserable exile at a town called Tomis, on the Black Sea (now the coastal resort of Constanca in Romania).
(Apparently it is important to distinguish between exile (deportatio) – where the banished person lost their Roman citizenship and all their property – and Ovid's condition, which was the lesser punishment of relegatio, whereby he retained his citizenship and his property – very important for the ongoing life of his wife and daughter back in Rome, see note p.225 among others.
Ovid's career
Born in 43 BC Ovid was a fluent and prolific poet who made his reputation with a series of books about love, treated in a cynically witty, urbane style:
first there was a set of letters supposedly written by women from myth and legend (the Heroides)
then the stylish Amores ('Love poems') which followed in the line of elegiac love lyrics pioneered by Catullus and developed by Tibullus and Propertius. The Amores were published in 16 BC
but most successful, and scandalous, was the Ars Amoris ('The Art of Love') which I thought might be a philosophical-moral treatise but turns out to be an extremely cynical, worldly guide to picking up women, preferably married women, for an illicit affair, closer to the world of Tinder and modern pickup artists than Plato or Castiglione. The Ars Amoris was published around 1 BC
Around the age of 40, Ovid made a significant shift in subject matter to produce the vast Metamorphoses, an encyclopedic collection of ancient myths and legends linked by the common topic of physical transformation i.e. tales of men and women who were changed by the gods or magic or fate into flowers, trees, animals, rivers and so on.
The poem contains flattering references to the emperor Augustus (who effectively ruled Rome single handed between 27 BC and his death in 14 AD) and leads up to a description of the apotheosis (conversion into a god) of Augustus's adoptive father, Julius Caesar and then fulsome praise of Augustus himself. Metamorphoses was published in 8 AD.
Ovid was half way through writing a work which contains even more flattering references to Augustus and his extended family, the Fasti, a long poetic account of the Roman calendar which sets out to explain the origins and aspects of Rome's numerous religious festivals, anniversaries and important dates – when he received an angry summons to the emperor's personal presence, was given a fierce dressing down and instructed to pack his bags because he was being sent into exile (or to be precise relegatio). He was ordered to go and live in the wretched frontier town of Tomis, in the only partly-pacified province of Moesia, on the coast of the Black Sea in modern-day Romania.
Born in 43 BC, Ovid was 51 in late 8 AD when he was sent into exile.
Ovid's exile
Why? What had he done which was so outrageous? For the last ten years of his life (8 to 18 AD) Ovid wrote these two books – 50 or so letters in which he pleaded with all his friends back in Rome to beg the emperor to change his mind and rescind his banishment, and 50 or so poems in which he gave poetic expression to the changing moods of an exile. But although he refers to the causes of his exile quite a few times, he never specifies exactly what it was.
To be precise, Ovid attributes his exile to two causes. One was that his recklessly cynical and amoral pickup guide The Art of Love offended against the very serious efforts of Augustus to restore traditional morality among Rome's aristocracy, particularly when it came to marriage – banning adultery and rewarding fidelity and especially the parenting of children who should be brought up in a traditional, settled married environment. The Art of Love, as a guide to how to start and maintain adulterous affairs, flew straight in the face of everything Augustus was trying to achieve.
But Ovid himself thinks Augustus's citing of this poem as a cause for exiling him was a smokescreen for a deeper reason. This he refers to repeatedly as his error but, infuriatingly, tells us his lips are sealed and he won't explain it. For 2,000 years scholars have been forced to speculate.
Political – maybe was present at discussions about a coup to overthrow Augustus; maybe he was a witness to a secret marriage of Julia – either way Ovid's hints imply that he himself was never part of a conspiracy, never carried out any action: but that he witnessed something and then, apparently, failed to report it.
The Tristia are accessible and enjoyable
I really struggled with Anne and Peter Wiseman's prose translation of Ovid's Fasti, several times thinking I'd have to give up reading the work altogether. It was only when I switched to A.S. Kline's online verse translation that I was able to finish wading through the often very obscure and confusing text.
By contrast Peter Green's verse translations of the Tristia and The Letters from Pontus are a delight to read. Above all, unlike long sections of the Fasti, it's obvious what they're about. Whether he's describing the long stormy journey by sea to Tomis, or sending his book back to Rome, or praising his wife for her loyalty, or castigating an old friend for abandoning him, or begging Augustus for forgiveness, or saying his frivolous love poetry didn't deserve to bring such a harsh fate down on their author's head – the subject matter is obvious and the development of the argument almost always easy to follow.
Peter Green's translation
This is immensely helped by Peter Green's fresh, zingy, accessible translation. In fact there are two very strong points about this edition. One is the translation, which has an enjoyably flexible, rolling rhythm about it. The second is Green's notes. Wiseman's notes for the Fasti were sensible but fairly brief, restrained, limited. By contrast Green's notes are almost long as the texts themselves (Tristia text 103 pages, Green's notes 90 pages).
Green is gloriously unbuttoned, chatty, opinionated, fluent, garrulous. Tristia is divided into 5 books and each book gets a page or so of introduction explaining when it was written, describing Ovid's changing tone of voice and approach as the books progress.
Then each poem in each book gets a page introduction to itself, before we get onto notes for specific references: these introductions describe what the poem is about, how it differs from other poems or echoes or repeats certain themes, how it riffs off this or that ancient genre or trope. Green freely discusses contemporary history, Ovid's family relationships, the climate and people of Tomis, the theories of other scholars (for example, whether the poems are arranged in careful order or are more random) and so on, in a buttonholing garrulous manner which I found immensely interesting and entertaining.
And it is all immensely helpful for understanding how the tone and approach of the books changed over the long 10 years during which they were written; at understanding the genres or rhetorical conventions of Latin poetry which they invoke, copy or modify; for understanding the complex matrix of cross references Ovid sets up between them; and, on the simplest bucket level, understanding the historical events, the real historical people or the mythical personages which the poems refer to.
Instead of a set of standalone, isolated factual explications, Green's notes are more like one vast essay of commentary and explication. His notes are easily as interesting to read as the poems.
1.1 (128 lines)
Little book – no, I don't begrudge it you – you're off to the City
without me, going where your only begetter is banned!
This is the envoi to book 1 and addresses the book as a sentient being which he is sending to Rome to argue on his behalf. This was an established literary convention (used by Catullus and Horace among others) but differs from its predecessors in introducing the recurrent theme that the book will argue for forgiveness and an end to his exile.
'You gods of sea and sky' – what's left me now but prayer? –
'Don't, break up our storm-tossed ship:
don't, I beseech you, endorse great Caesar's fury!'
Description of the violent storms which Ovid endured on his journey by ship across the Mediterranean in December 8 AD, with some poking fun at traditional descriptions and epic conventions around describing storms at sea.
Nagging reminders: the black ghost-melancholy vision
of my final night in Rome,
the night I abandoned so much I dearly treasured,
to think of it, even now, starts tears…
Ovid paints the scene of his departure from Rome, the weeping and wailing of his servants and family, especially his (third) wife. With typical irony (and mocking epic convention) he compares himself briefly to Aeneas leaving Troy. More to the point he emphasises that his error was a mistake and not a deliberate crime.
Dipped now in Ocean, the She-Bear's stellar guardian
is stirring up stormy seas: yet here am I
constrained, not by my will, to plough the Adriatic…
Another description of his stormy journey, notable for the description of the figurehead of Minerva at the prow of the ship (Roman and Greek vessels carried painted figureheads of gods, to whom the crew prayed if they got into trouble).
Friend, henceforth be reckoned the foremost among my comrades,
who, above all others, made your fate your own,
who first, I recall, when the bolt struck, dared to support me
with words of comfort…
Ovid praises the handful of friends who stuck by him when most of his fairweather friends bolted as soon as Augustus's wrath struck his home. This passage, and Ovid's plight generally, remind me much of Oscar Wilde's sudden, fateful reversal of fortune, from talk of the town to almost complete abandonment by all but a handful of real friends:
Before my house's downfall
visitors thronged the place, I was à la mode
if not ambitious. The first tremor sent them running…
In the second half of the poem Ovid wittily but bitterly compares himself to Ulysses who made a long and painful journey by sea, but the poet uses the extended comparison to bring out obvious differences, namely that Ulysses was a rough tough warrior, whereas Ovid is a sensitive poet unused to rough conditions; and that Ulysses was heading home to his loving wife and family whereas Ovid is heading away from everything that he loves.
Not so dear was Lyde to the Clarian poet, not so truly
loved was Bittis by her singer from Cos
as you are deeply entwined, wife, in my heart…
In praise of his wife's loyalty, including the (repeated so often as to become hackneyed) comparison with Ulysses' loyal wife, Penelope. It ends with another theme which was to be repeated scores of times, the notion that his exile has killed off his former self, old Ovid is dead, and the old poetic exuberance borne of his high-flying social life is extinguished – but still the old dead suffering ex-poet can still squeeze out a few last lines:
Alas, my verses possess but scanty strength, your virtues
are more than my tongue can proclaim,
and the spark of creative vigour I once commanded
is extinct, killed off by my long
misfortunes. Yet in so far as our words of praise have power
you shall live through these verses for all time.
Reader, if you possess a bust made in my likeness,
strip off the Bacchic ivy from its locks!
Such signs of felicity belong to fortunate poets:
on my temples a wreath is out of place.
A poem to a friend who's stuck by Ovid, but which is really about the condition of the works Ovid leaves behind him in Rome. The poem claims that Ovid threw his copy of the Metamorphoses into the fire, and that it was unfinished, had yet to have a final revision:
…because the poem was still unfinished, still
in rough draft… it lacks my final hand:
a job snatched from me half-done, while still on the anvil,
a draft minus the last touch of the file.
A poem of bitter reproach to an old friend who dumped him when trouble struck, scholars identify as the poem Macer, related to Ovid's third wife, with whom he travelled through Greece and Asia Minor when he was a student. The poem opens with the rhetorical trope called adynaton meaning 'impossibility', similar to the modern saying 'when hell freezes over'.
Back from the sea now, back to their sources shall deep rivers
flow, and the Sun, wheeling his steeds about,
run backward; earth shall bear stars, the plough cleave heaven,
fire shall give forth water, and water flames,
all things shall move contrary to the laws of nature,
no element in the world shall keep its path,
all that I swore impossible will happen now: there's nothing left
that I can't believe. This I prophesy after my betrayal by that person
who, I'd believed, would aid me in my distress…
Reader, should you peruse this work without malice, may you
cross life's finishing-line without a spill!
A poem to a faithful friend, notable for reminding friends who hesitate to support him that Augustus has demonstrated a capacity for clemency and respects those who stay loyal to friends and cause, even if they opposed him. Ovid says he wishes now he had never taken up the wretched art of poetry, seeing as where it's led him. And repeats other recurring tropes: that the cynical amorality of the Ars Amatoria had nothing to do with his own private life which was chaste and faithful; and that it was a joke, a joke for God's sake.
1.10 (50 lines)
I have (may I always keep!) blonde Minerva's protection: my vessel
bears her painted casque, borrows her name.
In contrast to the earlier poems about storms at sea, this is a poem in praise of the good ship Minerva which brought him to a harbour in eastern Greece where they docked, Ovid unloaded and continued his journey by land, but the second half of the poem is an envisioning of the voyage back the ship will take, studded with famous placenames and historical references and calling down blessings on the good ship Minerva.
Every word you've read in this whole book was written
during the anxious days
of my journey: scribbling lines in mid-Adriatic
while December froze the blood…
A poem highlighting the contrast between the lazy peaceful couch on which he composed his great works back in Rome, and the storm-tossed ship on which he tried to write poems on the blustery, brine-drenched journey East.
If these lines fall short – as they do –
of your hope: they were not written, as formerly, in my garden,
while I lounged on a favourite day-bed, but at sea,
in wintry light, rough-tossed by filthy weather, spindrift
spattering the paper as I write.
Book 2 (578 lines)
Book 2 stands out because instead of a set of 10 or so shorter poems it is one longer poem of 578 lines. Green cites earlier scholars who consider the poem a suasoria, meaning:
Suasoria is an exercise in rhetoric: a form of declamation in which the student makes a speech which is the soliloquy of an historical figure debating how to proceed at a critical junction in his life. (Wikipedia)
Or maybe a legal argument, to be presented in court. It consists of:
the exordium – attempt to placate the judge (Augustus) (lines 1 to 26)
the propositio – outlining the speaker's aim (27 to 28)
the tractatio – the handling or treatment in which the case is unfolded at length (29 to 578); this can be sub-divided into:
probatio or proof of evidence (29 to 154)
epilogus 1 or first conclusion, entering a plea for mitigation of sentence
refutatio or rebuttal of the charge (Ovid argues that his poetry never corrupted anyone because to the pure all things are pure and to the corrupt, anything is corrupt) (207 to 572)
epilogus 2 or second conclusion, again calling for clemency
In other words, even more than
These poems were composed in 9 to 10 AD. The first excitement of the journey into exile, undertaken in December 8 AD and vividly described in book 1, is over. He has spent one winter in Tomis and now knows the role freezing bitter cold is going to play in his life. And it is dawning on him that this exile isn't for a year or so, isn't a game which will come to an end – but is the bitter condition for the rest of his days.
'I'm an exile's book. He sent me. I'm tired. I feel trepidation
approaching his city – kind reader, lend a hand.'
Book 3 poem 1 repeats the conceit of book 1 poem 1 in conceiving the book as envoy except that whereas in book 1 Ovid had been outside the book, sending it as the author, this poem speaks in the voice of the book itself. This allows the book itself to find its way through Rome in order to seek out readers, a library to stay in, and the palace of the great Augustus (who, for the umpteenth time, Ovid begs for forgiveness). In so doing, the poem provides an interesting and historically useful guide to the layout of the Rome of his day. He is as conscious as ever of the role the Ars Amoria plays in his personal disaster, something so well known that he has his book tell anyone encountering not to fear:
'Have no fear: I won't turn out an embarrassment to you:
no instructions about love, not one page,
not a syllable. So bleak my master's misfortunes, he shouldn't
try to camouflage them with light verse,
though that sport of his green years, that frivolous disaster
he now – too late, alas! – detests and condemns.
See what I bring you'll find nothing here but lamentation,
verse matching its circumstances…'
The book's tour of Rome, appropriately, at Asinius Pollio's library
So it was my destiny to travel as far as Scythia,
that land lying below the Northern pole,
and neither you, Muses, not you, Leto's son Apollo,
cultured crowd though you are, gave any help
to your own priest…
Ovid makes the theme clear: he is a soft poet, not used to a hard life ('an escapist, born for leisured comfort'), his erotic poetry was a joke, a pose, he was never a libertine in real life ('my poetry's more wanton than my life'). But now all that's dead and gone.
The journey to Tomis was so stormy and colourful it helped to distract him from the misery of exile, even inspired him a bit. But now the hard fact of exile has hit him and his existence has settled into a monotonous drudge – it's cold, it's boring and it's dangerous. Now 'weeping is my only pleasure'. Now he yearns for death.
In the poem he knocks at the door of his own sepulchre door, which he finds stubbornly shut against him. (Green makes the typically illuminating comment that this is an inversion of the trope of the paraclausithyron, the image of the poet keeping watch morosely outside the locked door of his beloved, well established in the elegiac tradition and which Ovid had himself used in the Amores.
If perhaps you're wondering why this letter's drafted
by another's hand, I've been, am, sick,
sick, and at the unmapped world's remotest limits,
scarce certain of my survival.
Ovid is ill and depressed. He lists the tribulations of exile: cold climate, impure water, depressing landscape, no proper housing, bad diet, no doctors to treat his illness, no friends' conversation to distract him. He addresses his wife, swearing she's the only woman he thinks about, he said her name during the delirium of his illness. He imagines his death. He writes his own epitaph.
3.4A (lines 1 to 46)
Ah friend, my dear care as always, though in harsh circumstances
first truly assayed, after my world's collapse,
if you've any respect for the lessons experience has taught me,
live for yourself, keep far from all great names…
A poem to an unnamed friend, advising him to live a discrete, retired life, not to make grand acquaintances, not to fly too high lest, like poor Ovid, he be blasted by Jove's thunderbolt. (The comparisons of Augustus with Jupiter, and the decision to exile Ovid falling on him like the god's thunderbolt, appear in virtually all the poems, quickly becoming a part of their standardised litany of complaint.) He warns his friend to:
Live without rousing envy, enjoy years of undistinguished
ease and delight…
3.4B (lines 47 to 78)
A region that neighbours the polar constellations
imprisons me now, land seared by crimping frost…
The poem begins by lamenting the frozen waste he finds himself in, such that Rome and its familiar landscapes now linger on only in his memory. Next to them, his wife, whose image haunts him. And then his loyal friends. He asks them not to forget him, to do what they can to lend a hand to his cause.
Our friendship was new and slight: you could have denied it
without any trouble. (You'd have not, I think,
embraced me more closely had my vessel been driven
on by a favouring wind.)
While some of his old friends have abandoned him, the (unnamed) addressee of this poem stuck by him despite being a new acquaintance. Ovid thanks and praises him, then asks that he use his eloquence to argue his cause before the emperor.
Again and again and again Ovid insists he did no wrong, he merely witnessed something and failed to report it: he committed no crime except simply having eyes. Here there's one of the longest passages describing this, 10 lines of exculpation, emphasising that he committed an error but – as he repeats just as often – shying away from explaining the nature of this 'error'. God, I can see why it's driven 2,000 years of scholars mad with frustration.
The bond of friendship between us, carissimo, you neither
wish to dissimulate, nor could if you so wished…
To his best friend, praising his loyalty, saying he's shared everything with him – except the nature of the 'offence' which got him banished. If he'd shared it, his friend would have joined him in exile, indicating what a toxically powerful secret it must have been.
He repeats the claim that he, Ovid, didn't do anything, merely witnessed something – so that it's his eyes which are to blame. He says that even to hint at his crime would be 'great risk'. He says it is better buried in deepest night. He asks his friend to help and intercede on his behalf with angry Jupiter.
Go quickly, scribbled letter, my loyal mouthpiece,
and greet Perilla for me. Her you'll find
either sitting in the company of her sweet mother
or among her books and poems…
A sweet and touching poem to his step-daughter, Perilla (his wife's daughter by an earlier husband), now a young woman. Surprisingly, it turns out that she is a poet too, her talent spotted and nurtured by her dad. They often read their poems to each other. He praises her and tells her, if she's worried about his fate, that she'll be fine so long as she doesn't set out to teach anyone about love (Ovid's writing of The Art of Love having been given out as the official reason for his banishment).
It ends with a triumphant assertion of the supremacy and triumph of art. Age may wither her, the emperor's punishment has blasted him – everything can be taken from them, and yet:
Look at me – I've lost my home, the two of you, my country,
they've stripped me of all they could take,
yet my talent remains my joy, my constant companion:
over this, Caesar could have no rights…
Caesar will die, yet so long as Rome exists, Ovid will be read. It must have been an optimistic claim, made to keep his spirits up and yet, 2,000 years later, amazingly… it's true!
Now I wish I were high aloft in the car of Triptolemus
who flung the untried seed on virgin soil…
He wishes for the paraphernalia of various mythological figures so he can fly back to Rome, then pulls himself up short. Fool! Instead of old legends he should be petitioning the real Augustus in the here and now. If not to end his exile at least to move him somewhere else. The wretched climate, the lack of all amenities and civilised companionship is sapping his spirit, making him ill. God, why didn't Augustus just kill him outright and be done with it?
Here too, then, there are – who would credit it? – Greek cities
among the wild place-names of barbary: here too
colonists, sent out from Miletus, founded Greek outposts
on Getic soil…
An aetiological poem i.e. one which explains a modern custom, practice or place name in terms of a myth or legend. In this case Ovid derives the name of his exile town, Tomis, from the old story that the witch Medea, having fled her homeland, saw the sail of the ship of her father, Aeëtes, approaching and, in panic, conceived a plan to delay him so she could make a getaway. The plan? To rip to shreds her brother and scatter his body parts about the shore, thus forcing her father to collect them together for a proper funeral pyre. In Latin the (false) etymology relates tomé, a noun meaning the act of chopping up, with Tomis.
Green's notes tell us that a) aetiological poems were a speciality of the Hellenistic poet, Callimachus (305 to 240 BC) and b) Roman aetiological poems almost always get the etymology and derivation of words wrong. Odd that we, 2,000 years later, know more about their customs and, especially their language, than they did.
If anyone there still remembers exiled Ovid, if my
name survives in the City now I'm gone,
let him know that beneath those stars that never dip in Ocean
I live now in mid-barbary, hemmed about
by wild Sarmatians, Bessi, Getae, names unworthy
of my talent!
A long vivid poem giving a rare description of what Tomis was actually like, or the landscape around it. To be precise Ovid focuses on the bitter freezing winter weather and the way the many mouths of the river Danube which enter the Black Sea close to the town freeze over. Not only that but the sea itself freezes: he knows, he's walked on frozen waves.
But it's worse, it's not just that it's cold: normally the river acts as a barrier against barbarian tribes but when it freezes they can ride over it and raid nearby villages. Some peasants flee, leaving their farms and possessions to be looted by the raiders. Some are shackled and led off to slavery. Some die in agony because the raider's sharp arrowheads are dipped in poison. What they can't steal, the barbarians burn to the ground.
Whoever you are, vile man, who scoff at my misfortunes,
and with bloody zeal fling charges at me – you
were born from the rocks, by wild beasts' udders nurtured
with flints, I'll swear, in your breast…
A bitter recrimination against some (unnamed) enemy who is bad mouthing and savaging his character back in Rome. Why make a miserable man more miserable? Ovid laments the coldness, the isolation, he can't speak the natives' language, he suffered cruelly on the journey out, now he lives in terror of the violent tribesmen. O vile calumniator, why hit an unfortunate man when he's down?
West winds now ease the cold: at the year's closure
a longer-than-ever winter must yield at last,
while the Ram (that bore Helle – and dropped her) now equalises
the hours of darkness and light…
March 10 AD. The first half of the poem is a vivid celebration of the sights and sounds of spring back in Rome and the Italian countryside, spring flowers, children playing in the fields, men exercising, the roar of crowds at the theatre.
Then the volta or 'turn' to contrast his sad isolated existence. For Ovid Spring means the very slow thaw of the ice, some water runs a bit free in the cistern. Wine left outside no longer freezes solid in the bottle. The Danube flows again and the Black Sea becomes navigable and so, once in a blue moon, a ship may arrive from Rome and Ovid will avidly question the captain for even the slightest scraps of gossip which can, for a moment, revive his link to his long-lost homeland.
My birthday god's here again, on time – and superfluous:
what good did I get from being born?
Cruel spirit, why come to increase this wretch's years of exile?
You should rather have cut them short…
The Greeks considered the genethliakon or 'birthday poem' a genre in its own right, with its own rules and stock imagery. It's here to mark Ovid's birthday. He was born on 20 March 43 BC so, if this poem was written in 10 AD, he was 53.
But Ovid deliberately reverses all the conventions of the birthday poem. For example, he curses the birth god (the natalis) who oversaw his birth. It would have been more merciful to have let him die as a baby, or never be born at all, rather than endure this misery. Instead of the customary toga and ritual thanksgivings on his birthday, he'd prefer an altar of death.
Patron and reverend guardian of men of letters, you always
befriended my talent – but what's your attitude now?
In the days before my downfall you used to promote me –
and today?
Scholars consider the addressee of this poem to have been Caius Julius Hyginus, director of the Palatine library, patron of young poets, and a close friend in the old days back in Rome. The poem echoes the themes of books and libraries announced in poem 3.1, in other words they form bookends ti the volume.
Ovid hopes Hyginus is still supportive of his work. Books are like children, they can remain behind in the city even when the father is exiled. Ovid refers to the fact that his erotic poems (The Art of Live, The Cure For Love) have been banned and removed from all libraries, but hopes the others are read.
Interestingly, he is at pains to emphasise that the Metamorphoses was left unfinished (a claim which consciously or unconsciously compares him with Virgil's famously unfinished masterpiece, the Aeneid).
Then he turns to the present book, 'a missive from the world's end', and asks Hyginus to be indulgent and remember the context of its writing: Ovid fears his talent has withered, he has forgotten his Latin, here in a place surrounded by barbarian tongues and threatened every day with violent attack, he worries all his stylishness has been rubbed off him. Please make allowances.
Whatever defects there may be – and there will be – in these poems,
hold them excused, good reader, by the times
in which they were written. An exile, I was seeking solace,
not fame…
In the envoi to book 4 Ovid asks the reader's indulgence, and to consider the miserable exile. His only true and steadfast companion is his Muse. He tells us how slaves, chained rowers, slave girls, manual labourers, sing songs to pass the time, as did the legendary figures Orpheus and even Achilles, sulking in his tent.
And so Ovid in exile. He ought to curse the avocation which led him to write the love guide which led to his downfall, but he can't: he's hooked. Writing transports him away from his miserable situation, drugs him, like the potions which numbed the lotus eaters.
What is he drugging himself from? The horrible situation of living in a walled defensive town liable to attack at any moment from barbarian tribes. He describes the way the way the alarm goes and he has to buckle on a sword although he's 60 years old! He repeats the description of the way the raiders capture, shackle and lead off to slavery local farmers, or just shoot them with poisoned arrows and leave them to die.
Once again he laments that there is no-one at all to read his poems to who will understand them let alone appreciate them. Sometimes he waters the paper with his tears. Sometimes he crunches them up and throws them in the fire. What has survived he presents in this book and craves our indulgence.
Already fierce Germany, like all the world, confronted
by the Caesars, may well have bent her knee
in surrender…
He imagines the full panoply of celebrations surrounding what he assumes must be Tiberius's victories in Germany, including the sacrifices in temples and the great public triumphant procession through Rome, all under the guiding vision of beneficent Augustus.
The poem switches to meditate on the process of imagination itself, by which he is imagining and visualising all this, for his imagination, his mind's eye, can go where he, alas, never again can.
He asks the stars of the new constellation to turn their eyes upon his wife, 'sweetest of wives'. He hopes she is missing him. Then addresses her directly and asks a series of rhetorical questions itemising her grief (when she looks at his untouched pillow in their marital bed, does she weep?)
Yet, to be honest, he wishes he had died. Then she would have something simple and pure to weep over, instead of his agonising shame, and the fact that he lives, but forever inaccessible to her. She supported him and was so proud of his achievements, for so long. Please don't be ashamed of him, now. Defend him. Intercede for him.
O you who with your high birth and ancestral titles
in nobility of character still outshine
your clan, whose mind mirrors your father's brilliance
while retaining a brilliance all your own…
An appeal to Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus, the eldest son of Ovid's patron (recently deceased), Messalla Corvinus. Ovid sings Valerius's praises but as the poem proceeds it becomes clear he never really knew the boy and is trying to curry favour because of the connection with his (now dead) father.
This leads Ovid into embarrassed contortions, and apologies, before going on to the usual litany of self-exculpation ('it wasn't a crime, it was an error') before begging Valerius to intervene with Augustus to ask for his exile to be, if not revoked, that at least he be moved somewhere better, safer from raids by barbarians, hot for blood and plunder, some of whom are cannibals.
A sycophantic poem addressed to Messalinus's younger brother, Marcus Valerius Cotta Maximus although, as with all the Tristia the addressee is not explicitly named – because Ovid knew it would do nobody any good to be associated with his disgrace, his exile, his crime. This young man was loaded and well connected. Ovid politely, discreetly, begs for his help.
Do what you safely can: rejoice in your heart that I'm mindful
of you, that you've been loyal to me; still bend,
as now, to your oars to bring me succour…
Believe me I'm failing; to judge from my physical condition
I'd say my troubles have a scant
future remaining – I lack my old strength and colour,
there's barely enough skin to cover my bones;
yet sick though my body is, my mind is sicker
from endless contemplation of its woes…
Two winters have passed (of 9 and 10 AD) so scholars think this poem was written in 11. Ovid is tired, worn down, sick in mind and body, and has one hope left – 'that my troubles may be soon cut short by death'.
Twice has the Sun approached me after the chills of icy
winter, twice rounded his journey off
through the sign of the fish.
The sign of the Fish enters the Sun in February so scholars date this poem to 11 AD. Ovid reproaches a dear old friend (unnamed like all the addressees of these poems) for not writing to him, hoping he has written, but that the letters have got lost on the long, fraught journey to the outer reaches of the empire.
Already my temples are mimicking swans' plumage,
and hoary age bleaching my once-dark hair;
already the frail years are on me, the age of inertia,
already my infirm self fins life too hard…
He has grown old. Ships, racehorses, charioteers, old soldiers, all these get to be pensioned off – why not an old poet? Why can't an old poet be set free from his miserable exile and allowed to return?
At my time of life I shouldn't be breathing this alien
air, or easing my thirst at Getic wells,
but dividing my days between those peaceful country gardens
I once possessed, and the pleasures of human life,
the human round…
Ovid is ferociously angry with an unnamed enemy who has been bad-mouthing the powerless poet back in Rome. Ovid calls down vengeance on him – 'then luckless sorrow will perforce take arms' – and promises that his angry words will travel the world and last for generations to come – as they, indeed, did.
I'm sequestered on this wasteland where the northern stars circle
high and dry above my gaze, nevertheless
my clarion message will go forth to countless peoples,
my complaint shall be known world-wide;
whatever I say shall be heard, across deep waters;
my lamentation shall find a mighty voice.
4.10 (132 lines)
This is the best known of all the 100 or so exilic poems for the simple reason that it is a versified autobiography, detailing Ovid's early life and career, his decision to choose poetry and art over a career in public service, then the inevitable story of his erotic poetry – emphasising, as always, the clear distinction between his promiscuous poetry and his respectable personal life. And then on to his notorious 'error' and so into exile.
He dwells on the deaths of his elder brother, which left him maimed. Later the deaths of his father then mother, and he thinks them lucky to have led long blameless lives. Maybe from Elysium they can hear him when he assures them (for the umpteenth time) that his exile was caused by an error not a crime.
When a youth the older poets were like gods to him. Old Macer read him his latest poems. Propertius and he had 'a close-binding comradeship between us'. Horace, 'that metrical wizard', held them spellbound to the sound of the lyre. Virgil he only saw, never spoke to. Tibullus died young, before he could make his acquaintance. He thinks of the elegiac poets as being, in chronological order, Gallus (whose entire oeuvre is lost), Tibullus, Propertius then himself (interesting that he doesn't mention Catullus).
He lists his three marriages, the first wife 'worthless and useless', the second wife died young, and now his long third marriage. His daughter makes him a grandfather. He is growing old when the thunderbolt falls, and he is sent into exile.
The cause (though too familiar to everyone) of my ruin
must not be revealed through testimony of mine.
After a long and gruelling journey (again and again he compares himself to Ulysses) he arrives in his wretched place of exile and now, his only remaining solace is writing poems, when he can. Again, he repeats the idea that everything else is lost, but his talent, his gift, and the Muse which brings it, remain.
Yet another Black Sea booklet
to add to the four I've already sent!
The fifth and final book of Tristria is different in tone from the previous four, more resigned, more limited in ambition, with less zest and irony. More tetchy, irritated, and desperate. Only one poem is descriptive (i.e describes Tomis). The other 13 are all addressed to specific individuals, half of them to his wife (more than in the previous four books put together) begging them all to get Augustus to revoke his exile or, at least, assign him somewhere warmer, safer and closer to Rome.
His references and analogies become increasingly repetitive. In every single poem he repeats that he did nothing wrong, he committed no bloodshed, it was a simple 'error', he merely witnessed something by accident, by mistake.
In every poem Augustus is compared to Jupiter (reasonably enough). Ovid repeatedly compares himself to Capaneus, one of the heroes of the war against Thebes who, as he led the attack on one of the city's gates shouted that not even Jupiter could stop him now, so Jupiter promptly zapped him with a thunderbolt.
Or to Philoctetes, suffering from a wound which would never heal, for ten long years abandoned on the inhospitable island of Lemnos.
I don't correct these poems, let them be read as written:
they're no more barbarous than their place of birth.
He warns his reader that this is not a book of sexy, frivolous poems as by Gallus, Tibullus or Propertius. They are grim and bleak, like his circumstances: 'A dirge best fits a living death'.
He imagines a critical reader wondering why he's bothering to write such depressing poems, and defends it as a form of crying out in pain, an action he then defends by giving half a dozen mythological examples of legendary figures crying out in unendurable pain.
He defends his erotic poetry against the charge of immorality by pointing out the only person who ever suffered because of it was him.
(Green makes the droll point that, alone of all the Augustan poets Ovid was singled out for immorality therefore undermining Augustus's reforming legislation about marriage; and yet, as far as we know, Ovid was the only one of the famous poets to be married: neither Virgil (gay), Horace (promiscuous bachelor), nor Propertius were.)
To his wife, increasingly desperate, sick and depressed.
It's a barbarous land that now holds me, earth's final outpost,
a place ringed by savage foes.
He accuses his wife of not putting herself out as she should on his behalf. Has she deserted him, like everyone else? He tells her to approach the emperor directly. If she won't then he will and at line 45 the poem changes to a hymn of praise to Augustus. All the double-edged irony and wit which you can discern in the earlier references to Augustus has evaporated. Now he is on his knees, spouting extravagantly excessive praise and openly begging.
O glory, O image of the country that flourishes through you,
O hero to match the very sphere you rule.
He says it's not the cold, nor the lack of culture among a people none of whom speak Latin, it's the fear of attack by uncivilised barbarians, living in a small settlement protected only by one low wall, that he's seen fighting at close quarters, that he lives in constant anxiety and insecurity. He begs Augustus to move him to some less terrifying place of exile.
A poem celebrating Bacchus, god of wine, on his feast day, the Liberalia, 17 March (described in Ovid's poetic version of the Roman calendar, the Fasti) then asking him to intercede with Augustus.
From the Black Sea's shore I have come, a letter of Ovid's,
wearied by sea-travel, wearied by the road.
Weeping he told me: 'See Rome, for you it's not forbidden –
alas, how better far your lot than mine!'
Ovid repeats the conceit of having the poem speak in the first person as a letter, all the way from the shores of the Black Sea to the (unnamed) recipient in Rome, a letter able to go where he, alas, cannot, sealed with a signet ring wet with his tears.
But he emphasises that he accepts he was wrong, accepts punishment, like a broken horse doesn't strain against the leash. He just wishes the great god who punished him will show mercy.
The letter rehearses Ovid's grievances and bitter experiences before going on to describe the addressee as his best friend, remembering how he stuck by him when almost everyone else abandoned him, how he visited Ovid and wept and tried to console him for his sad fate.
A poem to his wife. It's her birthday so he describes going through the rituals to celebrate a birthday, namely wearing a white toga, building an altar from turf, hanging a woven wreath, lighting a fire and sprinkling wine and incense on it. He sends her a fleet of good wishes, may she have a long untroubled life. He says she has a strength of character to match Penelope or Andromache, she is a paragon of 'uprightness, chastity, faithfulness'.
He introduces a series of classical comparisons with the thought that all those famous women from antiquity were famous because of their husband's suffering and their loyalty – Andromache, Penelope, Evadne (wife of the recurring figure of Capaneus, blasted by Jupiter), Alcestis, Laodamia.
But she doesn't deserve to be famous for her husband's suffering and her share of it, and so the poem ends with a plea to Augustus to forgive him, for his wife's sake if not his own.
Poem to an unnamed friend. Ovid recriminates the friend for dropping him, now he's in trouble, now he's become a 'burden'. Ovid compares him unfavourably to a raft of mythological figures famous for their loyalty. For the umpteenth time he invokes a familiar set of similes to indicate the sheer number of woes he suffers, as numerous as reeds which soak sodden ditches, or bees on Mount Hybla (famous for its honey), or ants carrying grains to their nest, or grains of sand on the seashore, or ears of wheat in a field.
A short letter to an unnamed friend in which he describes himself as wretchedly miserable and gives a rare description of the native inhabitants, great hordes of tribal nomads, Sarmatians, Getae, hogging the road on their horses, each bearing a bow and quiver full of poisoned arrows, fierce faces, harsh voices, shaggy hair and beards, quick to argue and stab each other with the knives in their belts.
These are the people Ovid lives among, the elegant esteem he won for his light love verses back in Rome long, long forgotten and irrelevant in this harsh environment and violent, illiterate society.
Some scholars divide the poem in two, because this second half switches from describing the grim natives of Tomis and whirls us back to Rome where he hears that his poems are now recited and applauded on the stage (the translator, Peter Green, speculates that this is for the pantomimi where an actor declaimed verses while dancers danced; sounds like ballet).
He curses his poetry which got him into such trouble, and yet he has nothing else. Here in this windswept waste amid violent, illiterate tribals, writing poetry is the only consolation he has, the only last slender link with distant Rome and his former life.
Then about language: not a single person in Tomis speaks Latin, none. Some speak a very debased form of Greek, legacy of when the town was founded centuries ago by Greeks. But most speak only the local tribal tongues. When he talks to anyone it is in pidgen-Sarmatian. He worries not only that he's lost his style, in the absence of Latin speakers to listen to and comment on his poems – he worries that he's forgetting Latin. And so he spends his time conversing with himself and doing writing exercises and writing these poems, holding at bay the collapse of his language skills and talent.
Thus I drag out my life and time, thus
tear my mind from the contemplation of my woes.
Through writing I seek an anodyne to misery: if my studies
win me such a reward, that is enough.
Angry poem to an unnamed person who has been spreading malicious lies about him, a 'vile wretch' than whom no-one is lower. Once again Ovid curses this person, then emphasises the non-criminal nature of his error, praises the emperor's clemency (hoping against hope), and hopes for the end of his exile and recall.
The early part of the poem is an interesting invocation of the goddess Fortune, whose wheel is always turning, and Nemesis, 'hot for revenge'. Ovid says he has certainly been brought from the pinnacle of fame to miserable exile, but what makes his unnamed critic so confident the same thing won't happen to him?
For Ovid hopes that Augustus will apply his mercy and recall him, at which point the critic will be amazed to see his face, one day, in Rome and then Ovid knows things which will secure that his critic is sent into exile!
A poem to a friend who stayed loyal, Ovid claims more or less the only friend who stayed loyal and so he wishes he could a) name him (but that is forbidden for the friend's own safety), b) devote every poem he ever writes in future to his friend's praise.
The poem is factually interesting because it (unconsciously) brings to the fore the thought that whatever Ovid did (his notorious error) may actually have merited death. Therefore his relegatio already exemplified Augustus's mercy, and that this may account for why no further mercy(i.e. relenting and letting Ovid return; even moving his place of exile to somewhere less inhospitable) may have been impossible for Augustus.
Behind all this is the most common interpretation of his fate which is that it was tied to something he saw being enacted in favour of Julia and her so-called 'party', meaning the aide of the extended Augustan family which wanted the succession to pass to a male on her side of the family.
Tiberius had had two sons by Julia, Augustus's daughter – Gaius and Lucius, who died in 4 and 2 AD, respectively. Agrippa Postumus, Julia's son by her first husband, Agrippa, had been unadopted and exiled in 7 AD. Julia herself was sent into exile in 8 AD, the same year as Ovid, ostensibly for immorality and widespread adultery, though conspiracy theorists from that day to this speculate that she was involved in some kind of plan to overthrow Augustus and replace the heir apparent with someone from her side of the family, or possibly a male contender who she married in the hypothetical secret marriage that Ovid hypothetically witnessed or knew about but didn't report.
Both the Roman historians, Cassius Dio and Suetonius refer to a series of plots in the final years of Augustus's rule, the most serious in the spring or early summer of 8 AD. Green thinks Ovid's error was some kind of passive involvement in one of these (note p.212).
Thus the speculation engendered by Ovid's frustrating failure, in over 100 poems of exile, to spell out what his offence was.
If it was a secret marriage, or a vow, or some kind of ceremony binding the Julia party, this explains the unremitting opposition to Ovid of the man who emerged during these years as the (reluctant) heir apparent, Tiberius, and of his scheming mother, Augustus's second wife, Livia.
If Ovid's error had somehow proved him sympathetic to the Julia party then not only was this the reason for his relegatio but explains why Livia made quite sure that Augustus, even if he contemplated mercy, never enacted it. And that when Tiberius came to power in 14 AD, Ovid stood no chance.
It explains why Ovid never mentions Tiberius in any of the 100 exile poems, but does mention Germanicus and Drusus, heirs in the Julian line. (Indeed, in exile Ovid reworked the first book of the unfinished Fasti to introduce a new dedication to Germanicus, Tiberius's nephew, who Augustus had forced him to adopt in 4 AD – presumably in the hope that he would intercede with Augustus.)
It explains something which comes over in the notes – though not explicitly in the poems – which is that his friends back in Rome, in varying degrees, saw the way the wind was blowing, saw that Tiberius's rise to power was becoming unstoppable, and so shifted allegiance to the coming man.
For all his contacts back in Rome, then, defending Ovid not only risked angering the old and visibly ailing emperor Augustus, but alienating the new master.
Ovid tells his addressee he's been in Tomis for 3 winters, watching the Danube freeze over. He ponders time: has time in general slowed down or is it only for him? In which case, is time subjective? (Well, the experience of it obviously is).
Once again he laments his location and, above all, the endless threat from marauding tribes whose only language is rape and pillage and the feeble defences (a good defensive site and a low wall) which is all that stands between Tomis and violent death. Their poisoned arrows litter the streets. Farmers dare not farm for they will be raided at any moment. Over half the population of the town are tribals, their chest-length hair, their shaggy bears, their trousers, fill him with loathing.
He knows that the townspeople regard him as the outsider, the oddity, with his soft hands and strange foreign language. Here he is the barbarian. OK, he admits, maybe it was right for him to be exiled…but to a place like this? It is cruel.
The poem starts out feeling terribly sorry for his wife who, he's learned, has been called 'the wife of an exile' as a deliberate insult. He grieves at the shame he's brought upon her and tells her to be steadfast.
Then he switches, for the umpteenth time, to consider his fate. He does this to try and console his wife by making a fine legal distinction, namely that the emperor could have had him a) executed or b) fully exiled (deportatio), deprived of all rights and Roman citizenship. Instead Ovid was c) given the milder punishment of relegatio and so has retained life and estates and civil rights; to that extent, the emperor showed clemency, a punishment fitting his error, not a crime. To that extent the bastard who called his wife 'the wife of an exile' was wrong. So there! Little comfort, the modern reader might feel, to his lonely, distant wife.
Then in a move which feels pitifully grovelling, Ovid turns to praising the emperor, claiming his decision was just and mild, and that is why he devotes his poems to praising him:
Rightly then, Caesar, and to the very best of their powers
my poems (such as they are) proclaim your praise…
But if the interpretation that Ovid had seen something (as he repeatedly says, he didn't do anything, his error was simply to witness, to see something) which somehow linked him with the Julia party, implicated him in a secret marriage or plan or collaboration which, in effect, was a conspiracy against the emperor and his chosen successor, Tiberius – if this was the case then it's sadly obvious to the reader that absolutely no amount of grovellingly sycophantic hymns to Augustus would ever change Ovid's plight. And they didn't
Reply to a friend who appears to have told him to buck up and write poems. Ovid sullenly replies there are two kinds of poems, the best ones, the real ones, require happiness and peace of mind to emerge, as inspiration (a commonplace of Roman poetry also mentioned by Horace, Tacitus, Juvenal among others). Here, in the grim outback, surrounded by barbarian tribesmen, the best he can do is squeeze out these exile elegies which are, in reality, mere vehicles for his complaints and grievances.
As to cheering up, should Priam have had fun fresh from his son's funeral, should Niobe have held a party after all her children were killed?
Chief among the Forces undermining the peace of mind needed for composition are fear, constant fear of attack and violent death. Beside, long rusting has eaten away his talent. He is a field that's been long unploughed and returned to stones and weeds. He is a rowboat kept out of the water that has cracked and rotting. So that explains the poor quality of the poems he now sends to Rome, such as this one itself.
Finally, a young poet is fired by ambition for renown, to be famous, numbered among the immortals. Now all that has soured to nothing. Now he wishes to be unknown, never to have been famous. His poems got him into this mess. He bitterly blames the Muses for ever inspiring him.
No-one in his remote outpost, a place of savage jabber and animal outcry', even understands Latin, let alone the wonderful refinements and tricks he brought to it. Lastly, he admits his inspiration does still drive him to write – but he still has his standards and most of it ends up in the fire. Only 'scraps of my efforts', such as this very poem, survive because they have a practical purpose.
[What, 2,000 years of fans and scholars have wondered, were those poems he consigned to the flames about and how good were they? Unless this is another trope, developed solely for literary purposes, to illustrate his feelings of disgust and failure, just as he claims to have consigned his own draft of the Metamorphoses to the flames in 1.7. (note p.214)]
Of all the Tristia poems this one is most like a letter in format, starting with the standard salutation ('Good health and greetings from Ovid in his outback') ending with the standard 'Farewell'. In between the short poem addresses a loyal friend, possessed of 'oak-touch loyalty', complaining that:
he's sick, the mental illness has penetrated his body, to give him a searing pain in his side (Green and scholars suspect pleurisy, triggered by the freezing climate)
this friend doesn't send him enough letters to alleviate his bleak isolation
Ovid hopes the friend has not forgotten him, it's merely the errancy of the postal service not delivering the letters. He remembers their many happy conversations, talking late into the night. Now letters between them can recreate that intimacy and intelligence. Please write.
The final poem in the volume is to his wife, 'dearer to me than myself'. It's odd because it defines her, praises her, for sharing his suffering; it is this, her role as wife to a famous poet and tragic figure, which will make her immortal, just like Penelope, Andromache and Alcestis, Evadne and Laodameia.
To be good when there are no tribulations is easy; but to be faithful, as she has been, after the wreck of a god's thunderbolts, 'that is true married love/that's loyalty indeed.'
He praises her continually and now – the poem veers in subject matter – wants her to return his devotion by appealing on his behalf. It is a sincere love poem, and that he ends the entire book with it is moving – even though a modern critic, particularly feminist, may find it objectionable, the extent to which he defines his wife solely in relationship to him. But then, he was in a dire situation.
Terms of rhetoric
Green is chatty, loquacious, garrulous, sprinkling his introductions and notes with foreign phrases (not just Latin – French and the like), references to modern poets (T.S Eliot crops up a lot [pages 217, 220, 224], so we can deduce he is an influence on Green's translating style) and mention of ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical devices. These always interest me but I have a terrible memory for them. So here's an (incomplete) list:
adynaton – a figure of speech in the form of hyperbole taken to such extreme lengths as to insinuate a complete impossibility: 'pigs will fly' (note p.216)
apologia – a formal written defence of one's opinions or conduct
chiasmus – ('to shape like the letter Χ') reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words: 'By day the frolic, and the dance by night'
circumlocution – the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea; in ancient poetry it refers to poets' habit of referring to people in terms of their relationships to someone else ('the son of…', 'the wife of…' etc) or to a place ('the Phrygian hero'); this can often make ancient poetry difficult to read – it's particularly common in Ovid's Fasti which is why I found it such a demanding read (note p.219)
genethliakon – a poem in honour of a birthday in association with a gift or standing alone. Callim.
hysteron proteron – a figure of speech consisting of the reversal of a natural or rational order: 'putting the cart before the horse' (note p.218)
laudatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in praise or commendation of someone or something
propemptikon – a poem that wishes a departing friend or relative all the best for a prosperous trip overseas, such as 1.1
recusatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in which the poet says he is unable or disinclined to write the type of poem which he originally intended to, and instead writes in a different style; the Hellenistic poet Callimachus introduced the trope of saying his poetic gift was too modest to attempt great epics, so he would write frivolous love poems instead, and this trope was copied in Augustan Rome by Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid
synkrisis – the juxtaposition of people or things with the aim of comparing them: a famous exampe is the juxtaposition of the long speeches by Caesar then Cato in Sallust's account of the Catiline conspiracy
variatio – varying a theme with digressions, examples and so on
zeugma – (note p.220) any case of parallelism and ellipsis working together so that a single word governs two or more other parts of a sentence: 'She filed her nails and then a complaint against her boss'
After struggling through both the Metamorphoses and especially the Fasti, Tristia came as a welcome relief. Although a hundred pages long in the Penguin translation, it's made up of short, discrete poems which you can pick up and read in a few minutes. You can immediately grasp what they're about, what he's saying, and immediately empathise with his feelings.
All this is hugely helped by Peter Green's easy-going, demotic translations and his free approach to rhythm and metre which means you barely notice you're reading poetry, in the best sense, meaning each poem flows smoothly, seems well phrased and expresses its meaning, conveys its purpose, easily and enjoyably. Surprisingly accessible and enjoyable.
And strongly helped by the fact that the editorial apparatus around the poems is so ample and informative. Not only the introduction to the entire volume, but the extremely useful introductions to each individual poem accompanied by useful notes, but also a long Glossary of named individuals and places. Altogether it makes for a full and thorough and rich and informative experience. Other translations are available, but this is one of the best, most compendious, most enjoyable volumes of Roman literature that I've read.
Peter Green's translation of Tristia by Ovid was published by Penguin books in 1994. All references are to this 1994 paperback edition.
Tristia translated into English by A.S. Kline
by Simon on November 30, 2022 • Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation
Tagged A.S. Kline, adultery, adynaton, Aeëtes, Aeneas, aetiological poem, Agrippa, Agrippa Postumus, Alcestis, Amores, Ancient Greek, ancient literature, ancient poetry, ancient Rome, Andromache, Anne and Peter Wiseman, Apollo, apologia, apotheosis, Ars Amoris, Asinius Pollio, Augustan Rome, Bacchus, banishment, barbarians, Bessi, birthday poem, Bittis, Black Sea, Caesar, Caius Julius Hyginus, Callimachus, Capaneus, Cassius Dio, Castiglione, Catiline Conspiracy, Cato, Catullus, chiasmus, circumlocution, Constanca, Cos, deportatio, Drusus, ellipsis, Emperor Augustus, envoi, epilogus, Epistulae ex Ponto, epitaph, erotic poetry, error, etymology, Evadne, exculpation, exile, exordium, fasti, Friendship, funeral pyre, Gaius, Gallus, genethliacon, Germanicus, Germany, Getae, Greek mythology, Helle, Horace, hyperbole, hysteron proteron, Jove, Julia the Elder, Julius Caesar, Jupiter, Juvenal, Laodameia, Laodamia. Mount Hybla, Latin, Latin literature, laudation, Lemnos, Leto, Letters from Pontus, Letters from the Black Sea, Livia, Lucius, Lyde, Macer, Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus, Marcus Valerius Cotta Maximus, Medea, Messalla Corvinus, Metamorphoses, metre, Miletus, Minerva, Moesia, Muses, natalis, Ovid, Palatine library, pantomimi, paraclausithyron, parallelism, Penelope, Penguin books, Perilla, Peter Green, Philoctetes, pickup artist, Plato, pleading, poems, poetry, Politics, probation, propemptikon, Propertius, propositio, Publius Ovidius Naso, recusation, refutation, relegatio, relegation, rhetoric, River Danube, Roman calendar, Romania, Rome, Sallust, Sarmatians, Scythia, suasoria, Suetonius, synkrisis, T.S. Eliot, Tacitus, the Aeneid, The Art of Love, the Black sea, the Fasti, the Getae, the Heroides, the Liberalia, The Poems of Exile, Thebes, Tiberius, Tibullus, Tinder, Tomis, tractatio, Translation, Triptolemus, Tristia, Troy, Ulysses, variation, verse, zeugma
Posted by Simon on November 30, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/30/tristia-ovid/
The Cures For Love by Ovid
All my songs offer wise advice, so obey the singer.
(The Cures For Love line 703)
The Cures For Love (Remedia Amoris) follows naturally on from the three short 'books' which make up The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria). It's the same kind of length as one of those books (814 lines, 24 pages in the Penguin paperback edition, translated by Peter Green), has the same gaily mocking tone, and directly relates itself to its predecessors. If the previous three books had claimed to be guides for men and women on how to gain lovers, this one teaches how to cope with a love which has gone wrong.
It is addressed to 'disappointed gallants' and describes lovers so miserable they have committed suicide. For those who find unlearning passion impossible, who long to throw off love's shackles but can't (line 298) that he writes:
I am your public deliverer, will lighten hearts hard mastered
By passion
Thus he adopts a pose throughout of the book of doctor and healer of broken hearts. (He makes a point of emphasising his advice is for both men and women, although all the examples are cast in the form of male strategies; but he does remember this vow from time to time and repeat that his advice is meant to be unisex.)
As soon as you feel love getting a grip on your heart, throw it out, burn it off. Act quickly.
Rule 1 – always be busy. Love springs up where there is leisure and time to kill. Have things to get you up to do: public business, the law courts. Or become a soldier, go fight the Parthians.
Or farming. For a page he channels the spirit of Virgil's Eclogues with descriptions of chores on the Roman farm.
Or hunting. Hunting deer across country, or setting traps for small birds.
Or simply leave, go away, go a journey. You'll cry but ignore all excuses, reasons for delay, and just do it. Travelling companions, sightseeing, practical arrangements – all will take your mind off a love gone bad.
Don't rely on magic. Their tricks didn't do either Medea or Circe any good. Just a plain and simple prayer to Apollo, his patron, will do.
Dwell on your grievances, how she:
took all your gifts and gave you nothing in return
bankrupted you
cheated on her promise
kept you waiting outside her door all night
shags any old travelling salesman, everyone except you
Dwell on her imperfections:
her stumpy legs
her skinny arms
she's fat
she's dark
Distort the truth: if she's innocent, say she's 'naive'; if she's experienced, call her 'saucy'; if she's a bit plump, call her 'bloated'.
Whatever talents she doesn't possess, call for those ones: if she can't sing, ask her to sing; if she can't dance, call on her to dance; if she's clumsy, suggest a going for a walk; if she has udders for breasts, recommend her not to wear a bra.
Kill the image you have of her as a perfect woman. Destroy it, trample it underfoot in order to expel her from your heart.
Make an unannounced surprise early morning visit, before she's covered her face with paint. Observe how plain she is without her makeup. Look at the pots of disgusting gunk it takes to get her looking even passably presentable. Cultivate your disgust.
[Digression on poetry in which he rebuts critics who accuse him of immorality. He doesn't write for respectable housewives but for sad loser men and courtesans. Also he is not setting out to write an epic in hexameters; he is writing naughty love poetry in elegiacs. He is already famous and will become even more so, since he has many more poems ready in his head. So Envy can take a hike.]
What about sex with the woman you're trying to get over? Well, it obviously risks making you fall in love with her all over again? So he recommends various ant-aphrodisiacs.
Have sex with another woman before a date with your girl, then you don't be mad for it, in fact you'll be a bit jaded, maybe disgusted with the subject and so can remain aloof and not be tempted.
If you do have sex, choose an unsuitable, ungainly position. Keep the shutters open so critical sunlight reveals all her physical flaws, spots and wrinkles. Memorise every fault in her body. Disgust yourself.
One lover was put off by sight of his girl's slit, another by the wet patch she left on the sheet when she got up. Watch her having a dump. Yuk. None of these by themselves will sever the bond, but cumulatively will shift your mind from love dependency to disgust, revulsion and so to freedom.
Moving onto a major strategy, he suggests having two mistresses and so diluting the power either one, individually, has over you. He distorts the story of Agamemnon replacing Chryseis with Bryseis to make it fit his thesis (though it doesn't). But his point is clear. Having two mistresses reduces your emotional dependence on an individual. If one chucks you, it's no longer the end of the world.
How are you meant to get these other girls? Why, read his Art of Love, of course.
How to find them you ask? Read my handbook,
And your boat will soon be scuppers-deep in girls!
(lines 487 to 488)
Cultivate detachment, even if you don't feel it. Ignore her calls. If you go and she's locked the door against you, laugh it off. If she calls you in a crowd, ignore her. She presses you to an assignation, say you have another engagement. Habit makes it easy; we fall in love by habit so we can detach ourselves by cultivating habits of indifference until they become real. If you're bursting with desire, work it off with a prostitute.
If this doesn't work for you, if withdrawal and detachment is not your style, try an alternative strategy: throw yourself full tilt into the affair, see her every chance you can, go round her house all the time, have all the sex you can, glut yourself till you begin to sicken, till you become sick of the sight of her house and her.
Don't be alone. Be always in company. Invite friends round. Have an open door policy. Talk, drink, socialise. Days will pass and you'll forget your lover.
Avoid other young people who are in love. Being in love is contagious, like the plague. Be with happy, sociable people, but shun anyone who's all loved up.
Avoid the places you used to go to together, and avoid places you know she frequents. 'Shun scenes of bygone pleasure.' Burn her letters. Remove all mementoes. It's hard, but make a conscious effort to change the habits of the affair.
And don't go round bragging how you're not in love any more. That tells everyone that you are. Just let go and let her dribble away from the realm of your desires. Let love 'fade on the breeze and die' (l.654).
Don't hate her. That's as bad as loving her. Often it's a symptom of lasting love, certainly of enduring passion. Don't take her to court, don't litigate to get your presents back, this keeps the wound alive. Let her keep everything. Walk away. Strive to reach a state of complete detachment, indifference, until you can meet her with the same politeness you extend to any other acquaintance. 'Until you're heartwhole' (752).
Ovid shrewdly remarks that breaking off a love affair is often difficult not so much because we love them as because we want to be loved. It is the horrible emptiness of no longer being loved which is so hard to take. So…inure yourself to it by degrees rather than jumping into an ice cold pool. And replace that hole in your life with friends and family and conviviality and activity.
Rather inevitably he comes round to poetry. Don't read it. Don't read Sappho, Callimachus, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius or, though it pains him to say so, even his own poems. They'll only reopen the wound.
And rivals? Well, you'll have to overcome your jealousy. He gives half a page of examples of jealous lovers from mythology. But it's no good tormenting yourself with the thought of her in someone else's arms. This may be the hardest task but it is the best testament to having escaped love's net. When you can greet her new lover with perfect cordiality and shake his hand, you're nearly there. When you can greet him with a cordial kiss, you're cured!
Although questionable in detail, and no doubt guilty of sexism in numerous ways, nonetheless this is the most impressive of the four books of love. Suggestions like avoiding the places you used to go to together and avoiding her friends and family so as to extirpate all memory of a miserable love – these strike me as very relevant today and, unlike a lot of the stock clichés of the earlier pickup books, indicate a genuine depth of experience and empathy. They aren't particularly gender-specific or even heteronormative i.e. the lessons apply equally well for the use of women or LGBTQ+ people i.e. anyone trying to get over a love affair or stop themselves getting sucked into one.
The Erotic Poems of Ovid, translated by Peter Green, was published by Penguin Books in 1982. All references are to the 1982 paperback edition.
The Cures for Love in English translation by A.S. Kline
Tagged Agamemnon, ancient literature, ancient Rome, Apollo, Ars Amatoria, Bryseis, Callimachus, Catullus, Chryseis, Circe, elegiac metre, Latin literature, love, Medea, Parthians, Penguin books, Peter Green, poetry, poetry in translation, Propertius, Remedia Amoris, Roman literature, Roman poetry, Sappho, sex, The Art of Love, The Cures For Love, The Erotic Poems of Ovid, Tibullus, Translation, Virgil's Eclogues
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/14/the-cures-for-love-ovid/
The Art of Love by Ovid
ego sum praeceptor Amoris
I am Love's teacher
(The Art of Love, book 1, line 17)
Ovid the pickup artist
Anyone expecting a treatise on the philosophical types of love à la Plato or Castiglione, or expecting a text about sentimental or romantic forms of love, will be very disappointed and possibly repelled. This is a hard-headed book by a professional pickup artist and consists of practical advice to young men on where and how to pick up, chat up, seduce and take to bed women married or single, young or old.
'Love' suggests a steady state, an ongoing condition. That bores Ovid. He is interested in the chase, the pursuit. His premise is that any woman can be seduced but only if you have technique, and that's what he's going to teach. Any fool can try to chat up a woman just as any fool can try his hand at sports, angling or taming horses. But all these things have a technique, an expertise, traditions and methods to guarantee success. He, Ovid, the teacher of love, pickup artist extraordinaire, seduction guru par excellence, is going to share his top tips with the excited young reader.
Vexing Augustus
Over half of Peter Green's immense introduction to the Penguin edition of Ovid's love poems is taken up speculating about why the emperor Augustus abruptly exiled Ovid to the furthest outpost of the Roman Empire, to the miserable frontier town of Tomis, on the Black Sea. To cut a long story short, Green thinks it's because Ovid was witness to some kind of meeting or evidence about a conspiracy to overthrow Augustus in 8 AD and didn't report it. In his wretched Letters From Exile Ovid hints at the nature of his crime, but to the immense frustration of scholars for 2,000 years, nowhere spells it out explicitly. He simply insists that he, personally, was never treacherous, never acted against the emperor or planned to poison or kill or hurt anyone. It wasn't enough. Augustus, and his successor Tiberius, refused to rescind Ovid's exile and he died miserably in Tomis in 17 or 18 AD.
The point is that Green has to piece this together, and present it as a theory, because Augustus and his people gave it out that the official reason Ovid was banished was for corrupting morals, that Ovid had deliberately undermined Augustus's programme of moral revival, and they cited this poem, The Art of Love, as the prime example of his corrupting influence.
To grasp the background to this you have to know that, once he had secured a position of complete power, Augustus set about a wholesale programme or reviving Rome in every way: building new roads and aqueducts, encouraging the building of cities in the provinces and roads connecting them, reviving trade. And in Rome, building a grand new forum, rebuilding the temples of various gods, encouraging the revival of ancient religious ceremonies and rituals.
And when it came to the population of Rome, Augustus embarked on a campaign to reform morals and, above all, to encourage the upper classes to marry and have many sons. The series of civil wars from 91 to 31 BC had decimated many venerable old families. Augustus embarked on a series of laws designed to revive them.
In 18 BC he passed the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus (all laws passed under Augustus began with 'lex Julia' because he saw himself continuing the Julian family of Julius Caesar). This law required all citizens to marry, and granted numerous benefits to fathers of three children or more; conversely, there were penalties for the unmarried and childless. Senators were forbidden from marrying freedmen (ex-slaves).
A year later Augustus passed the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis. This law punished adultery with banishment. The two guilty parties were sent to different islands and part of their property was confiscated. Fathers were permitted to kill daughters and their partners taken in adultery (!). Husbands could kill unfaithful partners, under certain circumstances, and were compelled to divorce adulterous wives (!). Augustus himself invoked the law against his own daughter, Julia (Julia the Elder, who was banished to the island of Pandateria in 2 BC) and then against her eldest daughter (Julia the Younger who was exiled in 8 AD).
In 9 BC Augustus passed the Lex Papia et Poppaea which encouraged and strengthened the institution of marriage. It included provisions against adultery and against celibacy after a certain age. Specifically, it forbade the marriage of a senator or a senator's children with a libertina (an emancipated slave), with a woman whose father or mother had followed one of the ars ludicra (i.e. been a dancer, actor, gladiator, or other entertainer), with a prostitute, and also the marriage of a libertinus with a senator's daughter. The provisions against celibacy included, for example, a provision that any unmarried person could not inherit a bequest or legacy; to qualify for the bequest, they had to marry within 100 days. All else being equal, candidates with children were preferred in elections or court cases over candidates with none.
So: Rebuilding Rome, ongoing military campaigns (to pacify northern Spain, parts of Gaul and Switzerland), reviving venerable religious ceremonies, erecting fine new public buildings, enforcing sexual morality, these were all key policies of the new emperor – and, in the Art of Love, Ovid mocks every single one of them.
Ovid's book says that being a layabout sex pest is a much more worthy lifestyle than being a boring old soldier. He mocks the empire's military campaigns. He thinks the gods are a load of lies and fancy stories. He thinks the only use of Rome's fine new buildings is for hanging round so you can pick up women. And above all, he targets married women. The Art of Love encourages and gives tips about precisely the kind of marital infidelity and sexual aberrance which Augustus passed laws and went to great lengths to try and prevent.
Let me instruct you in all
The way of deceit.
In line after line, topic after topic, Ovid seems to be deliberately, calculatedly, spitting in the face of everything Augustus dedicated his life to achieving. The only wonder about all this is why it took till 8 AD for Augustus to banish Ovid given that the Ars Amatoria was published around 1 BC i.e. 8 or 9 years earlier. And also the fact that, by the time of his banishment, Ovid himself had moved on from his erotic period and had only just published the Metamorphoses, his huge collection of ancient myths and legends, far more acceptable to Augustus and his regime, although with a strong, amoral emphasis on sex and violence.
Hence Green's elaborate theory that the accusations of corrupting public morals which the regime used to justify exiling Ovid so far away were really just a cover for something else, in Green's view Ovid's passive participation in some kind of political conspiracy against Augustus.
Comparison with Oscar Wilde
So, in a way, reading the Ars is like reading Oscar Wilde. Obviously you can just read Wilde for the immediate pleasure of his wit and style but…the experience changes when you learn that many passages of his work were read out in court and interpreted in a blunt, literal sense in order to be used as evidence against him, evidence that he mocked Victorian values, mocked decent 'morality', and promoted irresponsible sensuality and gross immorality i.e. homosexuality.
What made Wilde's defence so difficult was that he had written all these subversive thoughts, albeit in a wonderfully witty style. Wilde thought his style would save him but it didn't. Therefore, reading Wilde with this in mind can be unintentionally harrowing, because each time he pokes his tongue out at conventional Victorian values you shudder for the wretched fate it was to bring him (two years hard labour in a series of grim prisons, which utterly broke his spirit and led to his early death).
Same with Ovid. Having read Green's very long introduction, which dwells on the miseries of his Black Sea exile, means that, every time Ovid pokes his tongue out at and mocks all the po-faced solemnities of official Roman morality, you shiver a little with a premonition of what is to befall him, the miserable fate that all these witty little jokes would end up bringing down on his head.
The theatre's curving tiers should form your favourite
Hunting ground: here you are sure to find
The richest returns, be your wish for lover or playmate,
A one-night stand or a permanent affair.
As ants hurry to and fro in column, mandibles
Clutching grains of wheat
(Their regular diet), as bees haunt fragrant pastures
And meadows, hovering over the thyme,
Flitting from flower to flower, so our fashionable ladies
Swarm to the games in such crowds, I often can't
Decide which I like. As spectators they come, come to be inspected:
Chaste modesty doesn't stand a chance.
(lines 89 to 100)
Back to the poem itself, the first 30 or so lines make up the proem, an ancient term for preface or prologue. It is here that Ovid explains his aim of systematically teaching the technique of the pickup artist. It does include a half line invocation of the goddess Venus, but in an almost insultingly cursory manner, compared to the five lines he spends explaining that this book isn't theoretical – he has lived and practiced all the tricks he describes himself. He emphatically insists everything the book is based on personal experience and is fact.
There follows a brief, 10-line partitio ('a logical division into parts or heads', 'a descriptive programme of contents') where he lays out the subject matter the poem will address, which is easily summarised:
Book 1 is about finding and wooing a woman
Book 2 is about keeping her
The text contains a book 3, just as long, in fact longer than either book 1 or 2, so the fact that it isn't mentioned in the partitio makes scholars think it was a later addition.
After the proem and partitio, book 1 is divided into two halves: part one is a description of all the best places in Rome to pick up women, namely the colonnades, foreign temples (the synagogue is a good place), the theatre, the circus (for chariot racing), during triumphal processions, at dinner parties and at coastal spas, notably the notorious resort of Baiae.
Part two lists ploys and strategies for winning women. Cultivate their maids (but don't end up sleeping with them) so they'll put in a good word for you at the opportune moment, like when the mistress has been snubbed by another lover.
Don't let the target woman con you into giving them expensive presents: he lists some of the scams women use to try and wangle gifts from their lovers, and how to resist them. (This was a prominent theme in the elegiac love poems of Tibullus and Propertius, too.)
Soften them up with love letters. Use language carefully, softly, sweetly. And persist: Time breaks stubborn oxen to the yoke, Time accustoms wild horses to the bridle. Same with women.
Be clean in your personal hygiene, though not effeminately so: 'Real men shouldn't primp their good looks' (line 509). Take exercise, work up an outdoor tan. Hair and beard demand expert attention. Trim your nails and your nose hairs. Avoid male body odour.
Don't drink too much at dinner parties (though it can be handy to pretend to be more drunk than you are as this gives you licence to be more forward than a sober man would be, in order to test the waters). Become knowledgeable in the language of secret signs. Drink from her cup, accidentally brush your hand against hers. If she's with a companion, butter him up. Let him have precedence, award him the garland so he looks favourably on you.
Promise anything; lovers' oaths don't count.
Don't be shy about promising: it's promises girls are undone by. (1.631)
You can't flatter too much, every woman is vain of her appearance.
Undermine them with devious
Flatteries: so a stream will eat away
Its overhanging bank. Never weary of praising
Her face, her hair, her slim fingers, her tiny feet.
Even the chaste like having their good looks published,
Even virgins are taken up with their own
Cute figures.
(1.619 to 624)
Look pale and thin to prove your sincerity. Lean and haggard, reek of sleepless nights, make yourself an object of pity so passersby comment, 'He must be in love.'
Mocking Romulus
Describing the theatre as a good location to pick up women leads Ovid into an extended comparison with the legend about early Rome, that Romulus and his band of earliest settlers invited members of the nearby Sabine tribe to a very early version of a theatrical entertainment and then, at a pre-arranged signal, all the Romans grabbed a Sabine woman and ran off with them. The so-called Rape of the Sabine Women. It was a traditional story, told in many texts, what makes it Ovidian is the way he satirises and mocks Romulus's high-minded speeches, and makes the entire story a kind of justification for the contemporary theatre being a good pickup location, an ironic mocking use of 'tradition' to justify his current cynical activities.
Ever since that day, by hallowed custom,
Our theatres have always held dangers for pretty girls.
In his notes (p.341) Green points out that Augustus, as part of his programme of restoring Roman values and traditions and religions, took the figure of Romulus very seriously indeed, in fact he had for a while considered renaming himself Romulus before the negative connotations outweighed the positive and he settled on the title 'Augustus' (awarded him by the Senate in 27 BC). So in this passage Ovid is going out of his way to take the mickey out of a figure very dear indeed to Augustus's heart, and remodel him as a sponsor for Ovid's own brand of cynical sexual predatoriness. Can you imagine how furious Augustus must have been?
The gods are expedient
Book 1 contains a line which became famous, it's line 637 in Green's translation:
The existence of gods is expedient: let us therefore assume it.
This sounds like a grand philosophical statement. In fact it's more to do with the fact that the gods of the Graeco-Roman pantheon behaved scandalously, indulging human passions, mad with lust or jealousy…so let's copy them with a clear conscience. Jupiter seduced umpteen women so…so can I! Again, you can imagine Augustus reading this kind of thing and grinding his teeth with anger.
Just when you thought it couldn't get much more offensive, it stops. Book 2 is about keeping your beloved and is considerably more emollient and less sexist than Book 1. Obviously it has the same underlying ideology, which is that women are passive animals while men are the smart manipulators, which 50% of the population may find grossly offensive, but a lot of the actual advice could have come out of a contemporary advice column. Maybe…
To be loved, you must prove yourself lovable.
(So much so that Green in his notes is regularly lampooning the triteness of some the agony aunt truisms he spouts. Maybe. Maybe not.)
Ovid opens Book 2 with ironic cheers for the man who has followed his advice and managed to 'bag' himself a lady love. Well done, sunshine. But now the real challenge in this whole business is how to keep her. So that's what this book will be about:
If my art
Caught her, my art must keep her. To guard a conquest's
As tricky as making it. There was luck in the chase,
But this task will call for skill.
Don't mess with witchcraft, aphrodisiacs or drugs. Didn't work for Medea or Circe. Instead (surprisingly) cultivate the life of the mind.
… to avoid a surprise desertion
And keep your girl, it's best you have gifts of mind
In addition to physical charms…
Then build an enduring mind, add that to your beauty:
It alone will last till the flames
Consume you. Keep your wits sharp, explore the liberal
Arts, win a mastery over Greek
As well as Latin. Ulysses was eloquent, not handsome…
Be pleasant. Be tactful, be tolerant and understanding. Keep clear of all quarrels and recriminations. Love is sensitive and needs to be fed with gentle words. Leave wrangling to wives; a mistress should hear what she wants to hear.
He emphasises the distinction between married couples who have law to keep them together, and the kind of couples he's describing where 'love substitutes for law'. a) the kind of thing calculated to get Augustus's goat b) a shrewd distinction. Married couples have not only the law, but shared responsibilities for raising children and the expectations of family, plus social reputation, to keep them together; illicit lovers have none of that. So it behoves them to be more considerate and tolerant. In another throwaway line which mockingly equates Rome's mighty military enterprises with his frothy adulterer's handbook:
Fight Parthians, but keep peace with a civilised mistress.
Do not use brute force. Go with the natural bend of the bough, don't force it. Go with the current. Laugh when she laughs, cry when she cries, approve what she approves, criticise what she criticises. Open her parasol, clear a path through the crowd. Help her on and off with her slippers. Don't bridle at menial tasks like holding her mirror for her. Always be early for dates. If she asks for you at her country residence, Go, no matter what the weather or obstacles.
About now I began to wonder what the point of all this is? The aim doesn't appear to be to have sex at all. Sex isn't mentioned anywhere in Book 1 and only appears a bit in the last couple of pages of Book 2 (see below). It's nice, but it doesn't appear to the be the prime aim. It feels more as if the whole point of the chase is the thrill of the chase itself and the achievement of…. what exactly? Winning a woman's what? Heart? Allegiance? Devotion? When he writes that 'Love is a species of warfare', I don't take it in the sexist sense to mean warfare between men and women, but warfare between male suitors for.. for what? For the beloved's love? All the elegiac poets complain bitterly when their lady love is taken off them by another man: the embittered poem to The Rival is a genre unto itself.
Is it just about a sense of possession, of ownership? Is it about winning a woman as a trophy and then….then not really knowing quite what to do with her?
Anyway, the reference to Parthia allows Ovid a passage comparing the soldier of love with the actual soldier in the army, and make witty comparisons with the hardships both have to endure, a trope which is beginning to feel done to death in the Amores and here, let alone in all the other elegiac poets.
It may sound ludicrous but the rhetoric about the need to humble your pride, humiliate yourself, debase yourself before your beloved, accept that no task is too great to please her is reminiscent of Christian rhetoric, with its emphasis on humility and service. At moments Ovid steps out of the 1st century BC and sounds like a medieval troubador or Renaissance lover.
(Personally, as a Darwinian materialist, I would venture that this is because human nature is finite and only capable of a fixed array of emotions, feelings and strategies. The same kind of rhetoric is found in communist propaganda, which tells you to mortify your bourgeois pride in order to throw in your lot with The People, accepting any task, no matter how humble, for the sake of the Revolution. I appreciate the contexts are wildly different but the same phrases and attitudes can be found in numerous ideologies and religions. We humans think we're fabulous but are, in practice, very limited, very predictable animals.)
Back to Ovid's Top Tips for Lovers: Don't give your mistress costly presents – give small ones, but chosen with skill and discretion. Poetry? Girls might be impressed by it as by a cute little gift, but what most women really want is money, rich presents. That's why this is truly 'the Golden Age', he says, with heavy irony.
Very casually he mentions slaves that are going to be manumitted, or about to be flogged, or sent to a chain gang. As usual, I find references to slavery profoundly disturbing (as I do the references to upper class women scratching the faces of their slave maids or stabbing them with pins, if they make a mistake). The context is that if you were thinking of forgiving your slaves their punishments, wangle it so your mistress pleads for mercy, then do what you were going to do anyway.
Praise her beauty. Praise anything she's wearing. Compliment her hair, or her dancing, or her singing. Lay it on with a trowel. Praise her technique in bed. The one golden rule is don't overdo it and get caught out obviously lying. Then your reputation's ruined.
If she gets ill, attend her sick room, cry, be all sympathy, bring an old crone to purify the room.
The key is to be always present, get her accustomed to you, hearing your voice, seeing your face. Then, when you've reached peak presence, arrange to be absent and make her miss you. Absence makes the heart grow fonder…up to a point. Not too long. In a page-long passage he doesn't blame Helen for eloping with Paris but Menelaus for going off and leaving her by herself (2.357 to 372) (a theme he explored in some detail in the Heroides supposedly written by Helen and Paris).
In a very throwaway manner he says, obviously he's not imagining you're restricting yourself to just one lover. God forbid! So in order not to get caught out, don't give X presents that Y might recognise; make sure you erase all previous messages from a wax tablet letter you send lover Y; don't meet different lovers in the same places, cultivate different locales for each.
If she catches you out, deny everything, if that fails go for it, in bed. Hard 'cocksmanship' is its own proof that a) your not shagging anyone else b) you're still devoted. Some aphrodisiacs might work and he gives a characteristically Roman quirky list of foodstuffs and ingredients (white Megarian onions, colewort, eggs, Hymettus honey, pine nuts).
If things get boring you could strategically let slip that you're seeing someone else. Handled correctly, with the right kind of girl, this could lead to terrible scenes and recriminations, sure, but if you navigate your way through the tears, beg forgiveness, take her to bed and have great make-up sex, this can rejuvenate a relationship.
The last couple of hundred lines become chaotic. I found this with Horace's last few epistles, as well. Roman poets are not great at structure. Their poems often take unexpected turns and detours. Out of nowhere the god Apollo appears by Ovid's side and delivers a 20 line lecture, telling lovers to employ the famous motto over his oracle in Delphi, namely to know yourself. So if you're handsome, always present your profile; if you're clever, fill the space at dinner parties with brilliant talk; if a good drinker, show it and so on. It's puzzling and random that Apollo pops up like this, given that he was name-checked in the opening lines of the poem as a god who had not inspired the poet (who insists everything he teaches derives from his own experience).
After this interruption, there's a more puzzling digression as he appears to say that all lovers should know when to quit. It is not gentlemanly to become a bore. Know when to leave, before she starts complaining that you're always hanging around (2.530). You'd have thought this – advice on how to end a relationship – would come right at the end of the book.
Instead the book still has 200 lines to run and continues with a section on how to cope with a rival, which is accept him with sang-froid – advice Ovid immediately goes on to say he finds hard to follow himself. He advises lovers to let their mistress have another lover and turn a blind eye. Snooping, opening letters, eavesdropping, those are the mean-minded activities of a husband, a lover should rise above them.
There's more contradiction here, because Ovid had (unnecessarily and briefly) asserted that he doesn't have in mind, he never has in mind, respectably married matrons. And yet here and at many other places, he mentions the husband of the ideal target of all this seduction technique. It's a flat contradiction which has no clever or literary impact – it just comes over as confused and contradictory, either badly planned or contradictory passages have been cut and pasted together, for some reason.
The final section seems repetitive. He (again) advises flattery: if the mistress is black as pitch call her a 'brunette' to flatter her; if she squints, compare her to Venus; if she croaks, tell her she's like Minerva; if she's a living skeleton, call her 'svelte'.
Never ask a woman her age, specially if she's past her girlish prime. Anyway, age is good, it brings experience, sophistication and skill. They know a thousand different positions. And then he surprised me by making the most explicit reference I've read in any Roman poet. Green has Ovid saying he likes it when both partners reach climax during love making. That's his main objection to sex with boys, he loves making his mistress gasp with sex, and making her climax (2.683 to 691).
He gives sex advice: touch her where she wants to be touched; watch her eyes assume that expression, rapture, gasps and moans. Take your time. Don't hurry to climax and don't come before your mistress.
Book 2 ends with a comic conclusion in which he says he excels all the soldier heroes of legend for his skill and excellence in teaching, so may every man who uses his advice to win and keep a mistress carve a trophy with the words: 'Ovid was my guide'!
This feels like a very neat tying up of the poem and many scholars feel it was the original ending, emphasised by the fact that two of the heroes he mentions – Achilles and Automedon – were mentioned right at the start of Book 2.
But there then appear 2 additional lines, claiming that now – the girls want his advice, which most scholars think were tacked on in order to justify the later addition of Book 3.
A prologue explaining that he's equipped men against women, now he's going to do the reverse and offer the girls the benefit of his 'wisdom'. The same kind of sweeping generalisations he made against women in books 1 and 2 he now makes for women. It reminds me of Cicero the lawyer, arguing sometimes for, sometimes against, the same client. It makes you realise the extent to which this poem obviously, but maybe Roman literature as a whole, was always much more of a rhetorical exercise than we are used to. Was always more of a performance of the poet's skill in a certain style, in a certain metre, on a certain topic – than anything like our notion of poetry in particular as expressing genuine personal feelings and views.
All this explains his sudden volte-face and attempts to prove the opposite of what he was asserting a few pages back.
Men are often deceivers, girls hardly ever.
I was president of my school debating society. I recognise the signs of being given a topic you don't have much sympathy for, and being told to present a case, first for it, then against it. You don't win prizes for sincerity. You win prizes for the skill with which you select and present your points.
He invents the notion of Venus appearing to him and complaining that men are benefiting from his 2 books of advice; give the girls a chance.
In fact, his advice kicks off by not being particularly woman-friendly. He spends a couple of pages striking the carpe diem note i.e. your youth will pass, you'll grow old and wizened and grey-haired so seize the day, give into love. Maybe your lover will turn out a cheat and a liar, who cares? What's lost? Have a shower and move onto the next one. Some goods wear out with use, but your privates won't wear out (line 92) so let your lovers come to the well a thousand times.
I naively thought the book would be a guide to women on the art of seducing men, so was disappointed when it turned out to be more like a woman's magazine-type set of articles about how to make the most of yourself. Don't overdo jewellery and accessories. Advice on the best hairstyle to match the shape of your face. A page on different colours for dresses. Shave your armpits and your legs. Clean your teeth. Make-up, powder and rouge. Mascara. As traditional, the best make-up remains unobtrusive (3.211).
Keep all this hard work hidden. 'There's a lot men are better off not knowing.'
Beauties don't need him, his advice is for the less than perfect, the ugly or plain or short (just as his advice to men wasn't to the handsome and rich, who need no help, but the less well-off and physically ordinary). He goes on to give advice for the skinny, the pale, the swarthy, those with skinny calves or ugly feet, buck teeth or bad breath.
Learn to cry on demand. Learn to walk elegantly with a nice sway of the hips (3.302).
Girls should know how to sing and play a musical instrument. And, of course, poetry, leading into a much-cited passage mentioning the appeal of various poets, the love poetry of Catullus, Tibullus or Propertius, the heroic history of Virgil ('the most publicised Latin poem of all time') maybe even his own products, the Amores and Heroides (proudly boasting that the heroic epistle is an art form he invented himself).
A girl should know how to dance. And how to play board games, which leads into a page about Roman board games which is infuriatingly light on detail (apparently, historians don't know how to play even one single Roman board game). Ovid points out the key thing about playing is to maintain control while men, all too easily excited by games, lose theirs.
A confused section contrasts women's limited social freedoms with men being able to exercise on the Field of Mars and go swimming in the Tiber; which quickly cuts back to places women can go to, a surprisingly large amount i.e. temples, the colonnades, the theatre, the circus, the forum. Somehow this morphs back onto a passage about poets and how they used to be respected in olden times, not so much nowadays. As towards the end of Book 2, it feels like Ovid is just cutting and pasting passages in willy-nilly, with no logic and unnecessary repetition. Somehow the passage about poetry ends with the conclusion that a good place to find a husband is at your last husband's funeral, when you're there with dishevelled hair and tear-stained eyes, which some men find very sexy.
Beware of smart-looking young beaux with a handsome profile and rings on their fingers – they're cheaters and users.
By line 470, sensing that he's becoming chaotic, Ovid tells himself to rein his muse in and try and be more structured in how he's presenting this advice.
How to handle letters from passionate lovers i.e. wait a bit then get your maid or boy to reply. Don't be taken in by feigned passion.
Riskily he refers to Augustus as 'our great leader' and just as he places men in various positions, advises a woman to do the same to her prospective lovers.
Confusingly there's now a third section about poets, this time including some famous lines about how they get their inspiration from heaven, the God is within them etc. Sure, but why weren't these three separate passages about poets gathered together and ordered more logically?
Back to lovers. Lock them out sometimes. Make them sweat. When things are getting boring drop hints that you have another lover, he has a rival. Juice him up. Pretend your husband's a tyrant who's having you watched. In the middle of an assignation have a maid come running in shouting, 'The master's coming,' and then both bundle him out the window in a panic. That'll keep him interested.
He gives a couple of pages on how to evade the watchful eye of your husband or guardian, by smuggling messages in and out, arranging illicit meetings, using a friend's apartment, dates at the theatre or circus, let alone the baths, or the religious ceremonies supposedly restricted to women only etc.
Don't trust girlfriends. Or your own maid. Ovid confesses to having seduced many a maid when her mistress just made herself too unavailable. The theme of jealousy prompts him to insert a lengthy telling of the story of Cephalus and Procris (3.687 to 746). This feels like padding out and is immediately followed by a note to himself to stop all these digressions.
Final burst of advice: regarding parties, already arrive late, after dark, when the torches have been lit. Eat sparingly and daintily. Final part is another surprisingly candid section of sexual advice. Just as he recommended different hairstyles and dress colours for different faces and physiques, here he runs through half a dozen different sexual positions which are appropriate for different body types (if you have a pretty face, do it missionary position; if a strong back, from behind; if you're petite, ride him like a horse etc).
This and the parallel passage in Book 2 are the only descriptions I've read in the 50 or so Roman texts I've read. As this is a guidebook, they're brisk and practical. As in Book 2, his ideal is that man and woman climax together. He is aware of the fact that many women can't climax (at least not through penetrative sex) and so suggests they pant and moan and pretend, 'put on an act!' something, as I understand it, hundreds of millions of women have done through the ages.
And with that it's over and he, very weakly, ends with a straight repeat of the lines at the end of Book 2, telling his girl disciples, like the boys before them, to inscribe on their trophies of successful loves, 'Ovid was my guide.' It was funny the first time round. Here it's indicative of Book 3's very belated, tacked-on and ragbag structure. No wonder he tells himself frequently throughout the book to leave off digressing, to get back to the point, to pull his socks up.
I wonder if a powerful woman ordered him to add a Book 3. Livia, maybe?
The Ars Amatoria isn't a bit sexist, it is made of sexism. Has there ever been a more sexist book? The entire text is based on the assumption that women are prey, like wild animals, to be stalked and captured, that they have little or no will of their own, that their main characteristics are vanity about their looks and shopping, which is why the pickup artist should focus on relentless flattery and know how to gracefully handle endless demands for gifts.
As the Amores set out to capture and record every possible aspect of the love poem, as the Metamorphoses set out to record every single Greek myth which involved bodily change, so the Ars Amatoria is, in effect, an encyclopedia of sexist and misogynist attitudes.
I could list the ways Ovid dehumanises women, reducing them to game (as in big game, animals to be hunted), birds to be caught, wild animals to be stalked, fish to be hooked, or soil to be ploughed, wild land to be tamed, and so on.
At a less metaphorical level, he is straightforward insulting about women's natures:
If you're wise
Gull only girls, they're no danger. In this one deception
It's good faith that ought to make you blush.
They're cheats, so cheat them: most are dumb and unscrupulous: let them
Fall into the traps they've set themselves.
If Augustus was driven to fury by Ovid's calculated mockery of Rome's religion, venerable founder, and sexual mores, what must the formidable Livia have made of this unrelenting abuse of women as a sex? Did she have any input into the decision to banish the scandalous poet?
I imagine modern women readers will struggle with such continual libel, objectification, undermining, insult, sexism and misogyny without being overcome with disgust. Towards the end of Book 1 Ovid sinks into the darkest hole of all when he repeats the lie of the ages, that when a woman says no she doesn't mean it: all women, deep down, want to be overcome, by force if necessary.
It's all right to use force – force of that sort goes down well with
The girls: what in fact they love to yield
They'd often rather have stolen. Rough seduction
Delights them, the audacity of near-rape
Is a compliment.
And goes on to mention two women from Greek mythology who were raped and then fell in love with their rapists. Wow. Needs no comment from me.
Just one comment about Green's style. As I mentioned in my review of his translation of the Amores, Green uses an exaggeratedly demotic, Jack-the-Lad register, and this turns out to be really appropriate for this poem, which is a long hymn to Jack the Lads. I now understand that Green's very demotic style – which I initially thought inappropriate for the Amores – turns out to be very appropriate for the Art of Love, bringing out the vulgarity and crudity of a lot of the thought, more so than a smoother, more 'literary' translation might have done.
Many women adore the elusive,
Hate over-eagerness. So, play hard to get,
Stop boredom developing. And don't let your entreaties
Sound too confident of possession. Insinuate sex
Camouflaged as friendship. I've seen ultra-stubborn creatures
Fooled by this gambit, the switch from companion to stud.
This is a vivid translation of often very repellent sentiments.
Anticipations of the Metamorphoses
Ovid is most known and read for his epic masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, a long poem in 15 books which chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. What makes it distinctive is that it tells the story via a series of classic Greek myths or legends, in particular, stories about humans metamorphosing into plants and animals of which, when you come to study it, there turn out to be a surprising number.
I mention it here because, unexpectedly, and not really directly relevant, the Ars Amatoria contains fairly long passages which anticipate some of these stories. Thus there are extended accounts of:
the legend of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, and how she was impregnated by a bull, conceiving the half-man, half-bull monster, the Minotaur (1.289 to 327)
Bacchus coming to the rescue of Ariadne, abandoned on her desert island by Theseus (1.525 to 564)
Daedalus devising his plan to escape imprisonment on Crete by creating wings for himself and his son Icarus, and flying to freedom (2.20 to 97)
the creation of the world and the universal drive to procreate among animals (2.467 to 489)
Vulcan trapping his wife in adultery with Mars (2.561 to 592)
the legend of Cephalus and Procris (3.687 to 746)
Let others worship the past; I much prefer the present,
Am delighted to be alive today.
This is actually quite a striking departure from convention, because it was axiomatic for pretty much all writers and thinkers in the ancient world that the past contained a matchless Golden Age and the present was a sad, fallen age of degeneration and decline. In this handful of words Ovid rejects that entire tradition and hapless, sorry-for-itself way of thinking and strikes an exuberantly Nietzschean note: Rejoice! The present is all we have, so: Make the most of it.
Ars Amatoria in Latin
Ars Amatoria in English translation by A.S. Kline
Wikipedia article on pickup artists
Tagged Achilles, adultery, Amores, ancient poetry, ancient Rome, aphrodisiacs, Apollo, Ariadne, ars ludicra, Augustus, Automedon, Bacchus, Baiae. Romulus, banishment, Black Sea exile, Black sea Letters, carpe diem, Castiglione, Catullus, Cephalus and Procris, Circe, cosmetics, Crete, Daedalus, drugs, elegiac metre, elegiacs, exile, Field of Mars, Helen, Icarus, Julia the Elder, Julia the Younger, Julius Caesar, Letters From Exile, Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis, lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus, Lex Papia et Poppaea, libertine, libertinus, love, love poems, make-up, Mars, Medea, Menelaus, Metamorphoses, Minotaur, misogyny, mistress, morality laws, objectification, Oscar Wilde, Ovid, Paris, partition, Pasiphaë, Peter Green, pickup artist, Plato, poems, poetry, praeceptor Amoris, predatory behaviour, Proem, Propertius, Rape of the Sabine Women, river Tiber, sex, sexism, slave, Slavery, slaves, The Art of Love, the Black sea, The Erotic Poems of Ovid, Theseus, Tiberius, Tibullus, Tomis, troubadour, Venus, Venus and Mars, Victorian values, Virgil, Vulcan, witchcraft
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/11/the-art-of-love-ovid/
Amores by Ovid
The Peter Green edition
I read Ovid's Amores in the 1982 Penguin edition, which also includes Ovid's later works, The Art of Love and the Cures for Love, all translated and introduced by Peter Green. This edition contains an awesome amount of editorial paraphernalia. The introduction is 81 pages long and there are 167 pages of notes at the end, so that's 248 pages of scholarly apparatus (not counting the index). The text of the three Ovid works only take up 180 pages. So in the Penguin/Peter Green edition there's a hell of a lot of information to process. And in doing so, it's possible to get caught up in the matrix of interconnections (this passage from an Amor resembling that passage from the Art of Love and so on) and the web of mythological references and end up quite losing yourself in what is quite a deceptively huge book.
Ovid's Amores
Ovid's Amores (Latin for 'loves') is a set of 50 short love poems written in the elegiac metre – pairs of lines or couplets in which the first line is a hexameter, the second line a pentameter – a format which had become traditional in late-Republican Rome for this kind of subject matter. Poets such as Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and several others whose works are now lost (notably Gallus), had used the elegiac metre for this kind of personal love poem, generally addressing poems to a beautiful but inaccessible and capricious lady. Catullus (born 84 BC) addressed poems to Lesbia, Tibullus (b.55 BC) to Delia, Propertius (b.55 BC) to Cynthia and Ovid (b.43 BC) to Corrina.
A.M. Juster in his introduction to the love poems of Tibullus suggests that Ovid took the form to such a peak of clever irony, witty pastiche and knowing self-mockery that he hollowed out the form and ended the tradition; nobody after him attempted such a long sequence of love poems in this format and metre.
A little epigram at the start of the work tells us that Ovid's Amores were initially published in five volumes in about 16 BC. The Penguin translator, Peter Green, devotes some of his huge introduction to speculating that these were very much a young man's poems and that some time in middle life, Ovid went back, deleted some, rewrote others, and republished them in the three-volume edition we have today.
The Amores' contents are very straightforward. The poet writes in the first person of his love affair with an unattainable higher-class woman, Corinna. Each poem picks a different incident or mood in this love affair then explores or develops it with rhetorical, logical and poetical skill. The sequence builds into a showcase for the poet's skills at handling different subjects and feelings.
In line with the idea that Ovid was the most sophisticated and knowing poet in this tradition, many scholars doubt whether the 'Corrina' addressed throughout the poems ever actually existed, but was merely a literary pretext for the poet's powers.
Ovid's sequence feels more unified and planned as a narrative than those of Tibullus or Propertius; both those poets include in their works lots of poems on unrelated subjects. On closer examination, so does Ovid, addressing a number of husbands, lady's maids, and women he's pursuing who are evidently not Corrina. Nonetheless, the sequence somehow feels more smooth and structured than those of his predecessors.
Of course, if the other poets were describing actual events, the order of their poems is likely to be as scrappy and haphazard as real life generally is; whereas, if Ovid was making the whole thing up, he could afford to be more carefully structured and calculating.
Carefree Ovid
Unlike all the previous Roman authors I've reviewed, the key thing about Ovid is that he grew up in times of peace. Born in 43 BC, Publius Ovidius Naso was just a toddler during the civil wars which followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, and just 12 when Octavius won his decisive battle against Anthony at Actium in 31 BC, which brought 60 years of civil wars to an end.
This may explain the tone of frivolous irresponsibility which marks most of Ovid's poetic career. Green makes the point that from about 25 BC (when he's thought to have started the Amores) through to 1 AD (when he published the Cure For Love) Ovid devoted the best years of his maturity to writing about sex.
OK, he also wrote the 21 love letters of the Heroides (themselves on the subject of love) and a play on the subject of Medea (now, tragically, lost) but what survived, and survived because it was so popular, were his witty, clever poems depicting the author as a stylish man-about-town and sexual athlete. He may describe himself as a 'slave to love' (a trope so common it had its own name, the servitium amoris), stricken by Cupid's arrows and plunged into despair – but it's impossible to ever take Ovid seriously. Irony, parody and irreverent laughter are his thing, what Green describes as 'his wit, his irony, his bubbling sense of fun' (p.80). As Green puts it, 'Ovid is Homo ludens in person'.
The translation
On page 79 of his long introduction Green explains that he is going to translate the strict elegiac metre (a hexameter followed by a pentameter) very freely, using 'a variable short-stopped line with anything from five to two stresses'. This approach hints at the metrical regularity of the original, yet gives scope for changes of pace and emphasis, 'often through a casual enjambment that works more easily in English than it might in Latin.' None of this prepares you for the tone and style of Green's translations, which is wild, flippant and jazzy.
Arms, warfare, violence – I was winding up to produce a
Regular epic, with verse form to match –
Hexameters, naturally. But Cupid (they say) with a snicker
Lopped off one foot from each alternate line.
'Nasty young brat,' I told him, 'Who made you Inspector of Metres?
We poets comes under the Muses, we're not in your mob.'
Right from the start Green announces the flippancy and slanginess of this translation. The result is that the number of beats in each line is difficult to ascertain and, as Green indicated, not at all regular. Instead we are carried away by the energy of the diction, although this, also, is a little difficult to nail down. That 'Hexameters, naturally' sounds like a confident posh boy, but 'snicker' is an American word, whereas 'mob', I suppose, is an America word associated with the 1930s but makes me think of the Lavender Hill Mob. So I found his tone wildly all over the place.
'Look boy, you've got your own empire and a sight too much influence…'
'Boy' is either the demeaning word used by southern Americans to blacks (unlikely) or the tone of a posh, public school banker to a waiter at his club (maybe); 'a sight too much' strikes me as a very English locution, again of a posh variety, something I don't think anybody says any more. I give plenty of quotes below, and you can see for yourself how Green uses a variety of locutions to create a witty, slangy, vibrant register.
The Amores
1.1 The poet announces that love will be his theme.
In a trope familiar from all the elegists, the poet declares he wanted to write a grand epic as society (and Augustus) require, but was foiled by Cupid. When he wails that he hasn't got a subject to write about Cupid promptly shoots him with his arrows, making him fall furiously in love.
'Hey, poet!' he called, 'you want a theme? Take that!'
His shafts – worse luck for me – never miss their target:
I'm on fire now, Love owns the freehold of my heart.
So that's going to be the subject, love, and Ovid himself, right here in the first poem, describes the process of abandoning ambitious plans to write a highfalutin' epic poem in regular hexameters and settling for the alternating metre of elegiacs:
So let my verse rise with six stresses, drop to five on the downbeat –
Goodbye to martial epic and epic metre too!
1.2 He admits defeat to Cupid
He tosses and turns at night and then pleads with Cupid that he'll come quietly. The ox that resists the yoke suffers most or, as Green puts it in his deliberately uncouth, slangy style:
It's the same with Love. Play stubborn, you get a far more thorough
Going-over than those who admit they're hooked.
So I'm coming clean, Cupid: here I am, your latest victim.
Sounds like a character from 'The Sweeney' – I'm surprised he doesn't address Cupid as 'guv'nor'. Anyway, the poet says he'll submit to Love's demands, he'll be a captive in Love's great triumphal procession, and then gives a mock description of a Roman triumph as burlesqued by Love and Love's army:
And what an escort – the Blandishment Corps, the Illusion
And Passion Brigade, your regular bodyguard:
These are the troops you employ to conquer men and immortals…
1.3 He addresses his lover for the first time and lists her good qualities
Green's Cockney register continues in this poem, where the poet addresses Venus and vows to be true to her if she can make his mistress love him.
Fair's fair now, Venus. This girl's got me hooked. All I'm asking for
Is love – or at least some future hope for my own
Eternal devotion. No, even that's too much – hell, just let me love her!
(Listen, Venus: I've asked you so often now.)
Say yes, pet. I'd be your slave for years, for a lifetime.
'Pet'? Very casual locution, originally from the North East of England. Anyway, Ovid goes on to say that he doesn't come from some posh, blue-blood family with 'top-drawer connections'.
What have I got on my side, then? Poetic genius, sweetheart.
'Sweetheart'? This is fun.
1.4 He attends a dinner part where his beloved and her husband are also present
The poet is driven so mad with jealousy that his beloved is going to be embraced and kissed and pawed by her husband, in full view of himself and everyone else at this dinner party, that he gives her a list of secret signs to reassure him that she secretly loves him.
As with everything else in the Amores, you strongly feel these are stock clichés of the form, but jived up by Ovid's breezy attitude. So: when she's thinking about the last time they made love, she should touch her cheek with her thumb; if she's cross with him but can't say so, pinch her earlobe; if he says or does something which pleases her, she should turn the ring on her finger.
If her husband kisses her, he swears he'll leap up, declare his love, and claim all her kisses as his own! He'll follow them home and, though he'll be locked outside at her door, he begs her to be frigid with her husband, 'make sex a dead loss'.
1.5 Corinna visits him for afternoon sex
This is the poem brilliantly translated by Christopher Marlowe one and a half thousand years after it was written. It's the first time in the sequence that Corrina is called by her name.
1.6 He begs Corrina's doorkeeper to let him into her house to see his love
This is an example of the paraclausithyron or 'poem at the beloved's door' and Ovid adopts the traditional figure of the exclusus amator (the 'shut-out lover'). Similar poems were written by Horace (Odes 3.10), Tibullus (Elegies 1.2) and Propertius (Elegies 1.16). Propertius's variation on this familiar theme is notable, for he gets the door itself to give its opinion about all these weeping lovers hanging round outside it.
In Ovid's version, the poet tracks through a range of topoi associated with this genre – how the poet's tears water the doorpost, how the porter need only open the door a fraction because the poor poet has lost so much weight pining away that he'll be able to slip through a mere crack, etc.
What struck me was the opening line where he describes how the door slave is chained to the doorpost. At line 20 he reminds the door slave of the time he was stripped ready for a whipping but he, the poet, talked Corrina out of punishing him. This is all meant to be part of the playful banter, but…chains and whips. Slavery.
1.7 He hits his lover and is remorseful
Obviously he's consumed with regret, says he was momentarily out of his mind with rage – but the alleged hitting is really only a pretext to invoke a whole host of precedents from myth and legend of psychotically angry heroes like Ajax and Orestes. And after all (he whines), all he did was mess up her hair a little, which made her look even more beautiful, like Atalanta or Ariadne or Cassandra about to be raped at the fall of Troy (!).
To be precise, he grabbed her hair and scratched her face (line 50) – an oddly girlish form of assault. He asks himself why he didn't do something more manly, such as ripping her dress from neck to waistline (an interesting notion). What's most effective in the poem is his description of how Corrina didn't say anything but stood shivering and crying mute tears. That sounds horribly believable.
As a side point, he remarks that, instead of tears, the proper marks of love should be bruised lips and bites around the neck and shoulders. Now, love bites are mentioned in Propertius and in Plutarch's life of Pompey: it was obviously an accepted part of love play in ancient Rome.
1.8 Dipsas's monologue
Dipsas is a bawd or procuress. The poet violently describes her as a cursed witch. This is because, one day, he claims to have overheard her giving cynical advice to Corrina on how to bewitch young men and wangle rich gifts out of them, gifts she can then share with her mentor, Dipsas.
He particularly hears Dipsas disrespecting Ovid because he's poor, telling Corrina to angle for richer lovers, and not even to be fussy about freed slaves, so long as they're rich. Dipsas tells Corrina to play hard to get, to agree to sex now and then but often say she's got a headache or abstain because of Isis (attendants at ceremonies for Isis had to be celibate 10 days beforehand). He overhears Dipsas telling Corrina to stage strategic arguments to drive him away, though not permanently. She should learn how to cry at will. She should get a houseboy and a maid, who can both extract even more presents from her desperate lover.
Like the beating poem or the door poem, above, this feels like Ovid adopting a standard topic (the wicked old adviser) and determined to write the best, most comprehensive poem on the theme.
As a footnote to Roman love, Dipsas tells Corrina to cultivate a few bruises on her neck i.e. indicating that she's having sex with someone else to make her lover jealous. Love bites and bruises.
1.9 The poet compares lovers with soldiers
Both belong to the same age group, lusty young men.
A soldier lays siege to cities, a lover to girls' houses,
The one assaults city gates, the other front doors.
Obviously this is mocking the martial traditions of Rome, in a style previously done by Propertius, but somehow in Ovid's hands it feels that much more mocking and derisive. And the poem ends with the mocking thought that he was a lazy good-for-nothing scribbling poems until – he fell in love! Now look at him – 'fighting fit, dead keen on night exercises'!
1.10 He complains that his mistress is demanding material gifts instead of the gift of poetry
So he mounts a list of arguments why this is corrupt, why love should be naked, why sex should be equal, only prostitutes ask for money or gifts etc. All gifts are trash and will rot, but his poetry, if he gives it to her, will last forever and make her immortal. Another very familiar trope.
1.11 Praise of Corinna's maid
Let me tell you about Napë. Though she's expert at setting
Unruly hair, she's no common lady's maid.
The poem is set in the present as the poet calls Napë over and instructs her to take this note to his beloved, right now, and wait while she reads it, and mark her expression, and insist on a reply, and not just a brief note but 'a full tablet': get her (Corrina) to squeeze up the lines and scribble in the margins.
1.12 The poet curses his tablet
Corrina says NO to a visit and so the poet vents his fury on the wood and wax tablet which failed in its duty, cursing the tree which made the wood, the beeswax etc. It turns into a full blown execration of the wretched tablet, which is inventive and funny.
1.13 He addresses the dawn and asks it to wait, so he can stay longer with his mistress
The poet addresses Aurora asking her to rise slowly, to wait, so he can extend his time with his beloved. He invokes the mythology surrounding Aurora, cruelly claiming she's only in such a rush each morning to get away from her ancient withered lover, Tithonus.
1.14 He mocks Corinna for ruining her hair by dyeing it
A very uxorious, familiar poem in which the poet scolds his beloved for ignoring his advice to lay off hair dyes and rinses; she used them and now her hair's all falling out. It used to be so long, could be arranged in a hundred different styles, was so fine, like spider's web, a 'brindled auburn' colour. It was also damaged by her insistence on applying heated tongs to corkscrew it.
Oh well, he says, look on the bright side – after 'our' recent German conquests she can get a wig made from some captive German woman's hair.
1.15 The book ends with Ovid writing of the famous poets of the past, and claiming his name will be among them
He gets the allegorical figure of Envy to articulate all the criticisms which could be made of his position: drone, parasite, layabout who should be using his youth as a soldier or his intellect as a lawyer – then refutes these accusations. He wants to be numbered among the immortal poets:
What I seek is perennial fame,
Undying world-wide remembrance.
Though Time, in time, can consume the enduring ploughshare,
Though flint itself will perish, poetry lives –
Deathless, unfading, triumphant over kings and their triumphs,
Richer than Spanish river-gold.
And here I am, 2,000 years later, reading his poetry, proving him correct.
Preliminary thoughts
1. In his mockery of a soldier's life, his description of a mock triumph, his jokey comparison of a soldier and a lover (1. 9) Ovid mocks Rome's military tradition ('the dusty rewards of a soldier's career', 1.15). And in his whole approach promotes the lifestyle of an upper-class layabout lover with no sense of public duty, frittering his life away on girlish emotions. This, as his later career was to make clear, was a risky strategy. As with Oscar Wilde, traditional society eventually took its revenge on a taunting provocateur.
2. In his introduction, Peter Green spends a lot of effort suggesting that 'Corrina' is based on a real figure and that it was Ovid's first wife, who he married when he was just 18. Although the convention for these poems was that the beloved was the wife of another man, high-born and unattainable, or a moody and capricious courtesan – and this certainly fits some of the poems, such as the door poem and the pair about sending a note to his mistress – on the other hand the 'Corrina was Ovid's wife' theory is a better fit for the poems about sex on a summer's afternoon (1.5), the poem to the dawn and especially the one about her hair (1.14). These have none of the stress of stolen visits while husband is away, but have the relaxed candour of married love.
3. Above all else, the poems feel very programmatic, systematic, as if he's listed all the topics which poems in this genre ought to address, and then set out to write the best possible example of each type.
4. Ovid's persona is of supreme self-confidence, a very attractive, brash, bullet-proof, man-about-town cockiness. Even when he pretends to be downhearted we know he's only playing
5. Lastly, re. Green's style of verse, I like the way his lines are of unpredictably varying length, they rock along in perfect match with his laddish, demotic diction. BUT. One small point of criticism – I don't like the way he starts each line with a capital letter. It has the effect of cluttering lines which are already cluttered with italics, brackets, exclamation marks and so on. I wish that, like most modern poets, he'd started new lines with small letters, unless it is actually starting a new sentence.
My mistress deceived me – so what? I'd rather be lied to
than ignored.
is better than:
Clearer, easier to read and parse (understand the grammar of), and looks more modern, has more swing.
2.1 The poet describes the sort of audience he wants (girls)
A formal opening to the second book by 'that naughty provincial poet', 'the chronicler of his own wanton frivolities'. Ovid describes how he was actually writing a worthy epic about war in heaven when his mistress locked her door against him and straightaway he forgot his epic and fell back on soft love poems, for
Soft words
Remove harsh door-chains. There's magic in poetry, its power
Can pull down the bloody moon,
Turn back the sun, make serpents burst asunder
Or rivers flow upstream.
Yes, 'epics's a dead loss for me':
I'll get nowhere with swift-footed
Achilles, or either of Atreus's sons.
Old what's-his-name wasting twenty years on war and travel,
Poor Hector dragged in the dust –
No good. But lavish fine words on some young girl's profile
And sooner or later she'll tender herself as the fee.
An ample reward for your labours. So farewell, heroic
Figures of legend – the quid
Pro quo you offer won't tempt me. A bevy of beauties
All swooning over my love songs – that's what I want.
2.2 The poet asks Bagoas, a woman's servant, to help him gain access to his mistress
The poet addresses Bagoas, a beautiful woman's maid or servant and delivers a long list of reasons why she should engage in all kinds of subterfuges to help her mistress's lover gain his ends, the main motive being she'll be paid and can save up enough to buy her freedom (line 40).
What struck me is the poem opens with him describing taking a walk in some cloisters and spying this young woman and being struck by her beauty i.e. it doesn't seem particularly about Corrina.
2.3: The poet addresses a eunuch (probably Bagoas from 2.2) who is preventing him from seeing a woman
A short poem in which the poet laments the condition of men who've been castrated and says they (the poet and his mistress) could have got round the neuter minder anyway, but it seemed more polite to make a direct approach and offer him cash for access.
2.4 The poet describes his love for women of all sorts
Other people are going to criticise his character so why doesn't he go ahead and do it himself. He despises who he is, his weakness for every pretty face he sees, his lack of self discipline. Thick, clever, shy, forward, sophisticated, naive, fans of his, critics of his, dancers, musicians, tall, short, fashionable, dowdy, fair, dark or brunettes – he's 'omnisusceptible', he wants to shag them all.
Young girls have the looks – but when it comes to technique
Give me an older woman. In short, there's a vast cross-section
Of desirable beauties in Rome – and I want them all!
2.5 The poet addresses his lover, whom he has seen being unfaithful at a dinner party
Describes the rage of jealousy he's thrown into when he sees her fondling and snogging another man at a dinner party. When he confronts her, later, about it, she denies it means anything and, like a fool, he believes her. Still. Her kisses show a new style, technique and passion. She's been learning from a master!
2.6 The poet mourns the death of Corinna's parrot
A comic exequy for Corrina's parrot, a gift from the East, who was so sociable and clever and ate so little and now is dead. He gives an extended comparison with all other types of birds ending with a vision of pretty Polly in paradise.
2.7 The poet defends himself to his mistress, who is accusing him of sleeping with her handmaiden Cypassis (28 lines)
Short one in which he accuses his mistress of being too touchy and jealous. Of course he isn't having an affair with her maid! God, the thought! Why would he bother with 'a lower-class drudge'? More to the point:
What gentleman would fancy making love to a servant,
Embracing that lash-scarred back?
'Lash-scarred back.' I know I'm developing an obsession with this subject, but the ubiquity in Roman social life of slaves, performing every possible function, present at almost all events, present throughout everybody's house, who can be chained to the doorpost, who can be shackled and manacled and who can be stripped and whipped at a moment's notice, seriously impairs my enjoyment of these 'light-hearted' poems.
2.8 The poet addresses Cypassis, asking her to keep their affair a secret from her mistress
The joke is that, having just denied it in 2.7, he now lets us in on the secret that he is shagging his mistress's slave. The poem bespeaks the furtiveness of a secret affair. Did they get away with it when Corrina accused him point blank? When Cypassis blushed, did the poet's fierce oath that it wasn't true convince her? Now – he wants sex.
I did you a good turn. Now it's time for repayment.
Dusky Cypassis, I want to sleep with you. Today.
'Dusky'? Is she black?
2.9a The poet rebukes Cupid (24 lines)
He blames Cupid for trapping him in this life of love for good. The old soldier can retire, an old racehorse is put out to grass, warships are dry docked, an old gladiator can hang up his sword. Why won't Cupid let him go?
2.9b The poet professes his addiction to love (30 lines)
He admits to sometimes feeling sick of the whole business of love but some kink in his nature addicts him to it. He just can't kick the habit of loving and shagging. He's Cupid's best customer, his arrows know the way to his heart without needing to be fire. They're more at home in his heart than Cupid's quiver. He sounds quite a bit more tired and cynical than previously:
2.10 The poet bemoans being in love with two girls at once
The poet addresses a man, Graecinus, and makes you realise it's the first time he's done so on 25 poems. A lot of Tibullus and Propertius's poems are addressed to other blokes; surprisingly, this is rare in Ovid. Maybe showing how much of a lady's man he is.
Anyway, this Graecinus told him no man could possibly fall in love with two women and yet – here he is, in love with two women! It seems like an unnecessary surfeit but he'd rather have two than none at all. And he proceeds to show off a bit:
I can stand the strain. My limbs may be thin, but they're wiry;
Though I'm a lightweight, I'm hard –
And virility feeds on sex, is boosted by practice;
No girl's ever complained about my technique.
Often enough I've spent the whole night in pleasure, yet still been
Fit as a fighting cock next day.
He wants to die in mid-act, 'on the job'.
2.11 Corinna's voyage (56 lines)
He deploys the full range of arguments against taking a sea voyage (the danger, the monsters, the boredom) but Corrina is determined to go, so he switches to wishing her good luck.
2.12 His triumph (28 lines)
Meaning Roman triumph because the poet has, finally, despite all obstacles, won his Corrina. Again he compares himself to a soldier, conscripted and fighting in great battles , except:
The credit is mine alone, I'm a one-man band,
Commander, cavalry, infantry, standard-bearer, announcing
With one voice: Objective achieved!
What's odd is we saw him having lazy summer afternoon sex with Corrina back in 1.5, so why is 'winning' her, here, depicted as such a huge triumph? Is it a reminder that we should never take these poems as telling any kind of coherent narrative, but more a selection, arranged in a vague but not narrative-based order?
2.13 The poet prays to the gods about Corinna's abortion (28 lines)
Corrina has carried out an abortion on herself and now lies badly ill. The poet addresses the goddesses Isis and Ilythia, saying he'll do anything for them offer them anything, if only his beloved recovers. If we're talking about possible narratives and orders, it is odd to have a poem this serious immediately after the one in which he claims to only just have 'triumphed' and won her (2.12).
2.14 The poet condemns abortion (44 lines)
A fairly playful development of the anti-abortion position, to wit: if every woman acted like Corrina the human race would die out. This is followed by a list of amusing counterfactuals: what if Thetis had carried out an abortion? No Achilles, no defeat of Troy. Or what if the priestess of Mars had done the same? No Romulus and Remus, no Rome. What if Corrina's mum had done the same? No Corrina! Or Ovid's mum, if he'd been 'mother-scuppered before birth'? No Amores!
From a social history point of view the poem makes clear that self-attempted abortion was quite a common occurrence in ancient Rome and equally common girls dying from it (line 40).
2.15 The ring (28 lines)
He sends her a ring and then, in flights of fantasy, imagines being the ring, fitting snugly on her finger, accompanying the finger when it strokes her skin, her cleavage or…elsewhere.
2.16 At Sulmona, a town in his native region (52 lines)
His home town, Sulmona, is lovely and fertile and all…but his girl isn't with him so it feels barren and strange. Suddenly, urgently, he wills her to call out her cart, harness the quick-stepping ponies and make haste to be with him.
2.17 His devotion to Corrina (34 lines)
Corrina's loveliness makes her treat him like dirt. He describes beautiful legendary women who paired with less attractive men e.g. Venus and Vulcan, and then compares them to the way the hexameter and pentameter are combined in the elegiac couplet.
Well, look at the metre I'm using – that limps. But together
Long and short lines combine
In a heroic couplet.
Apparently some other woman is going round claiming to be the 'Corrina' of his poems, but gently and sweetly he assures her she is his only beloved.
…none but you shall be sung
In my verses, you and you only shall give my creative
Impulse its shape and theme.
2.18 The death of tragedy (40 lines)
He writes to his friend Macer, a poet who appears to have been writing a epic poem describing the events leading up to the Iliad describing having another go at writing a tragedy but how not only his Muse mocked him but then Corrina came and sat on his lap and covered him and kisses and asked why he wasn't writing about her. Oh, what the hell, he might as well stick to what he's good at, 'verse lectures on seduction' or 'love-lorn heroines' letters' (referring to the Heroides).
Interestingly, he appears to imply that another friend of his, Sabinus, also a poet, had written letters in which the absent menfolk reply to the letters listed in the Heroides. If he did, they're now lost.
2.19 To a husband to be more protective of his wife (60 lines)
Ironic satirical poem written to the husband of another woman who he's seeking to woo (not Corrina) telling him (the husband) to take more care of her because at the moment, seducing her is just too easy! He prefers a battle, a struggle, the thrill of the chase.
Then the addressee seems to change to the woman in question, 'my latest eye-ravisher'. He tells her to copy Corrina who was a master of teasing him, throwing temper tantrums, then relenting, leading him on, rebuffing him, exciting his ardour.
That's the way I like it, that feeds the flame.
Then back to the husband and a very funny sequence of mounting frustration at his relaxed complaisance. Be more jealous, put your foot down, be a man for God's sake. There's no fun in an easy conquest.
3.1 Elegy and Tragedy
Walking in a wood, the poet encounters the allegorical figure of Tragedy who tells him it's time to grow up, drop ballads for schoolgirls and produce a really serious work. But then appears Elegy (with one foot shorter than the other, harping on that at fact of the elegiac metre, hexameter followed by pentameter) who tells Tragedy not to be so condescending, and then tells both of them what she's been through, pinned to closed doors, torn up and flushed down the loo. If Tragedy's interested in Ovid, it's because of what Elegy's done for him.
The poet asks the two ladies to stop quarrelling and admits that he chooses Elegy (again) and Tragedy will just have to be patient. (It is a big irony of history that Ovid did apparently write a tragedy, on the subject of Medea, and it was praised by Tacitus and Quintilian, but, very unhappily, it has been lost. Or ironically, in the context of this poem.)
3.2 At the races (84 lines)
A vivid description of our man chatting up a girl in the audience of the chariot races. In Green's translation it's a stream-of-consciousness account as the poet compares himself to a chariot racer, asks other members of the audience to stop poking and cramping them, begs Venus to give him luck with his new amour.
He describes a fixed feature of the races, which was the entrance of a procession (pompa) of ivory statues of the gods, borne on wagons or floats, which made its way through the Forum and into the Circus and proceeded the entire length of the racetrack to the cheers of the vast audience. The poet gives a running commentary on the images of the gods and how they're useful to him, and then commentates on an actual race, yelling for the chariot his amour has bet on to win.
3.3 The lie (84 lines)
Ovid laments that his lover has not been punished for lying. He blames the gods for letting beautiful women get away with murder but coming down like a ton of bricks on men.
3.4 Give her freedom (48 lines)
Ovid warns a man about overprotectively trying to guard his wife from adultery. Do the opposite, give her complete freedom and watch her lose interest. We only chafe for what we can't get. If it's suddenly all available, we lose interest. 'Illicit passion is sweeter.' Doesn't seem to be about Corrina.
3.5 The dream (46 lines)
The poet describes having a dream about a white heifer who is joined in a field by a black bull, but a black crow comes and starts pecking at the heifer's breast till she stands up and waddles off to another herd of cows in the distance.
The poet asks the dream interpreter (an oneirocrit) who's listened to his recounting, what it means, and the interpreter says that he, Ovid, is the black bull, the white heifer is his beloved, and the crow is a bawd who comes and pesters her to leave him (the poet) and go off to seek riches elsewhere.
At these words the blood ran freezing
From my face and the world went black before my eyes.
This, for me, is one of the most effective poems in the set, maybe because it's so unusual, so unlike the familiar tropes of the genre.
3.6 The flooded river (106 lines)
The poet had got up early to make a journey to see his lover and finds his way blocked by a swollen stream. First he complains to the river about being so damn inconvenient. Then he claims the river ought to be helping him not hindering and rattles off a page-long list of rivers and how they helped lovers, or were themselves lovers, back in mythological times – although, knowing as ever, he emphasises that these old stories are:
All lies, old poetic nonsense
That never really happened – and never will.
Despite this brash dismissal, the poem is unusually long precisely because it contains a dramatised version of one these old 'lies', the legend of Ilia the Vestal Virgin ravished by the river Anio.
And the poem ends with an amusing execration of the river that's blocking his path, barely a proper river at all, a desert of stones and dust in the summer, then an unpredictable torrent in winter, not marked on any maps, just a 'no-name dribble'!
3.7 Erectile dysfunction (84 lines)
Also unusually long. The poem is about a time he lay in his beloved's arms and she tried every trick in the book (French kisses, dirty words, called him 'Master') to no avail:
My member hung slack as though frozen by hemlock,
A dead loss for the sort of game I'd planned.
There I lay, a sham, a deadweight, a trunk of inert matter…
I wonder if Ovid is really as much of a Jack the Lad in the original Latin as Green's zingy English makes him sound:
It's not all that long since I made it
Twice with that smart Greek blonde, three times
With a couple of other beauties – and as for Corrina,
In one short night, I remember, she made me perform
Nine times, no less!
The poem is interesting because it puts his 'love' for Corrina in the context of sleeping with umpteen other girls as well i.e. it is nowhere near as devoted and obsessive as Propertius's love for Cynthia, let alone the high devotion of Courtly Love which was to invoke his memory over a thousand years later.
He wonders whether some jealous rival has commissioned a magician to put a hex on him, laments that she was such a beautiful girl and yet no dice; compared to the moment when he's actually writing, when his member is standing stiff and proud to attention, 'you bastard' (line 69). After trying everything, eventually his girl got cross, accused him of recently sleeping with someone else, flounced out of bed and – to fool her maids that something had happened – splashed around with some water for a bit.
Is this the reason why his beloved appears to have abandoned him in 3.5 and appears to be going out with a soldier, described in the next poem as having more money than Ovid, but maybe just being able to…get it up.
3.8 The cure of money (66 lines)
He can't believe his beloved is now dating a soldier, just because he has money from his campaigns. This develops into a traditional curse on gold and greed, and a lament on the decline since the idyllic days of Saturn (the so-called Saturnia regna) the lost Golden Age when gold and precious metals lay in the ground. Instead gold rules Rome now and leaves a poor lover like him unable to compete with a rich soldier, flashing his rings and stolen treasure (boo hoo).
In his notes Green adds resonance by pointing out that Ovid was not well off but prided himself from coming from an old established family and not being a parvenu like so many of the nouveaux riches who had made a fortune and acquired status through the disruptions of the civil wars. Soldiers who'd done well in the wars or merchants who'd bought up proscribed land, speculators and bankers. Ovid, like hard-up poets throughout history, despised them all.
Me, genius, out in the cold,
Traipsing round like a fool, replaced by some new-rich soldier,
A bloody oaf who slashed his way to the cash
And a knighthood!
An interesting footnote points out that that the beloved who's been taken by another man is married i.e. has swapped adultery with Ovid for adultery with the soldier. No mention of Corrina's name.
3.9 An elegy for Tibullus (68 lines)
He says Cupid has doused his torch and broken his bow in sorrow at the death of Tibullus, the great elegiac poet (thought by scholars to have died in autumn 19 BC). There can be no gods if such good men are allowed to die. While his body is rendered down to an urnful of ashes, only the poet's work, his songs, survive, and for all time.
Green, in his notes, points out the structural similarity with the epicedion or funeral lament for Corrina's parrot (2.6) and that both follow the same five-part structure:
introductory address to the mourners
the laudatio including the 'what avails it…' theme, and a ritual outburst (schetliasmós) against unjust fate
the deathbed scene
a consolatio
the burial itself followed by a prayer for the repose of the dead
Interestingly, Ovid confirms the names of the two beloved women mentioned in Tibullus's elegies, claiming that at his pyre Delia and Nemesis squabbled over who loved him most. Then says his soul will be greeted in Elysium by Catullus (84 to 54 BC) and Gaius Cornelius Gallus (69 to 26 BC), his predecessors in elegiac poetry.
3.10 The Festival of Ceres (48 lines)
The annual festival of Ceres prevents Ovid from making love to his mistress, which leads into an extended description of the rise of Ceres and her own godly love affairs.
3.11a Enough (32 lines)
He's finally had enough of his lover, enough of being shown the door, grovelling in the street, while she was shagging someone else inside, then watch his rival, exhausted by sex, stumble out into the street. He is ashamed of watching her send secret signals at dinner parties to other men; of her broken promises. Enough! 'I'm not the fool I was.'
3.11b Conflicted (20 lines)
He is conflicted. He loves and hates:
Your morals turn me off, your beauty on
So I can live neither with you or without you.
He loves and lusts after his lover but describes her infidelity and betrayals. He wishes she were less attractive so he can more easily escape her grasp.
Ovid laments that his poetry has attracted others to his lover, led them to her front door.
What good have my poems done me? They've brought me nothing but trouble.
So he's sick not just of Corrina but of poetry, or these kinds of poems – fat lot of good they've done him. He claims that poets' statements shouldn't be taken for fact, they're much more suited to making up wild fantasies – and then goes off on a page-long digression listing some of the most florid Greek myths.
Oh, creative poetic licence
Is boundless, and unconstrained
By historical fact
A thought worth keeping in mind when we come to the Metamorphoses.
3.13 The Festival of Juno (36 lines)
A relatively chaste poem in which he describes the festival of Juno ('sacrifice of a heifer; crowded games') taking place in the town of his wife's birth, Falsica (Falerii), and its origins, describing at some length, the shrine, the procession of youths and shy maidens and so on. He ends by hoping Juno will favour both him and the townspeople.
Green makes the point that the poem breaks the cardinal rule of love elegies by mentioning his wife! At a stroke this dose of spousal affection and family piety undermines the elaborate poses of the entire series. Unless, like Green, you take the rather mind-boggling view that Corrina may be based on Ovid's wife. Personally, my experience of reading the other elegists (Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius) suggests to me that these sequences are more random, and contain more random elements, than modern tidy-minded critics would like. To us a poem about his wife breaks the fourth wall, undermines the illusion of the hard-shagging, lover-about-town image promulgated in the other poems.
3.14 Keep it to yourself (50 lines)
Ovid sounds tired, resigned. He doesn't mind if his beloved has other affairs, but can she just keep it to herself. He describes the passion of the bedroom (stripping off, twining thigh over thigh, French kissing, ecstatic moans, the bed rattling like mad) but when you reappear in public, affect respectability and virtue. Instead of which his beloved enjoys feeding tittle-tattle about her sex life to gossips. Must she flaunt her dishevelled hair, the unmade bed, those live bites? So disappointing, so vulgar. Every time she confesses another liaison it kills him by inches. Can't she please just deny her countless other trysts and so let him live in ignorant bliss.
3.15 Farewell to love elegy (20 lines)
Mother of tender loves, you must find another poet;
My elegies are homing on their final lap.
This final very short poem gives a brief potted biography of him, not from a rich family, but an ancient and distinguished one; from the little town of Sulmona in the region of Paelignia, which fought so bravely against Rome in the Social Wars. Farewell to elegiac verse;
Horned Bacchus is goading me on to weightier efforts, bigger
Horses, a really ambitious trip.
What's he referring to? The Metamorphoses?
Brief summary
Reviewing the Amores I can well see how Ovid took the stock subjects or topics of the genre, one by one, and took them to the limit, developing each premise to sometimes absurd extents, stuffing each poem with the maximum number of relevant mythological references, including all possible relevant emotions – but at the same time he quite visibly did it as a joke, as a game, playfully, ironically, knowingly. Homo ludens. Thus I can see the force of A.M. Juster's point that Ovid both a) exhausted the possibilities of the content of the genre but, more profoundly b) undermined all future attempts to take it seriously. He killed it.
Latin terminology
consolatio – type of ceremonial oratory, typically used rhetorically to comfort mourners at funeral
epicedion – funeral lament
exclusus amator – the shut-out lover
Homo ludens – playful man, game-playing man
laudatio – epitaph in praise of someone who's died, often a loved one
paraclausithyron – poem at the beloved's door
rusticitas – rusticity, the quality of country life and people, by extension, lack of education, idiocy
schetliasmós – ritual outburst against unjust fate
servitium amoris – servant of love
urbanitas – city fashions or manners; refinement, politeness, courtesy, urbanity, sophistication; of speech – delicacy, elegance or refinement of speech; wit, humor
Modern translation of Ovid's Amores by A.S. Kline
Ovid's Amores translated by Christopher Marlowe
by Simon on November 9, 2022 • Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Sex, Translation
Tagged A.M. Juster, Abortion, Achilles, adultery, Ajax, amor, Amores, ancient Rome, Anthony, Ariadne, Atalanta, Atreus, Aurora, Bacchus, Bagoas, Battle of Actium, Cassandra, Catullus, Christopher Marlowe, classical literature, consolation, Corrina, Cupid, Cures for Love, Cynthia, Cypassis, Delia, Dipsas, doorpost poem, elegiac metre, elegy, Elysium, Envy, epicedion, erectile dysfunction, eulogy, Eunuch, exclusus amator, Falerii, Falsica, Festival of Ceres, Festival of Juno, funeral lament, Gaius Cornelius Gallus, Gallus, Golden Age, Graecinus, Hector, Heroides, hexameter, Homo ludens, Horace, humour, Ilia, Ilythia, invective, irony, ISIS, Julius Caesar, Juno, late-Republican Rome, Latin, laudation, Lavender Hill Mob, Lesbia, Literature, love, love poems, love poetry, Macer, Mars, Medea, Metamorphoses, metre, Napë, Nemesis, Octavius, oneirocrit, Orestes, Oscar Wilde, Ovid, Ovid's Amores, Paelignia, paraclausithyron, parody, parrot, pastiche, Penguin, pentameter, Peter Green, Plutarch, poems, poetry, pompa, Pompey, Propertius, Publius Ovidius Naso, Quintilian, Roman Circus, Rome, Romulus and Remus, rusticitas, Sabinus, Saturn, Saturnia regna, schetliasmós, servitium amoris, sex, Slavery, Social Wars, Sulmona, Tacitus, The Art of Love, The Erotic Poems of Ovid, The Sweeney, Tibullus, Tithonus, Tragedy, Translation, Troy, urbanitas, Venus, Vulcan, witch
Posted by Simon on November 9, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/amores-ovid/
The poems of Propertius translated by Ronald Musker
He errs who expects the madness of love to end;
Love that is true can know no measure…
In life I shall always be hers; in death
I shall be hers still.
(Book 2, elegy 15)
Robert Maltby's introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of the elegies of Tibullus is outstanding in its clarity and authority and includes elements which make a good introduction to Propertius, too.
Maltby explains that in the last decades of the first century BC, Rome was home to a small cohort of leading Roman poets who took the Greek metre associated with elegies and which had come to be called 'elegiacs', and repurposed them as vehicles to describe very personal (or personal sounding) love affairs. Or, in Propertius's words:
Priestlike I lead the way from the crystal spring
To adapt Italian rites to Grecian measures.
To repeat what I wrote in the Tibullus review:
What is an elegy?
The modern sense of 'elegy' as a lament for the dead only crystallised during the 16th century. Two thousand years ago, for the ancient Greeks and Romans the word had a much wider definition – elegies could cover a wide range of subject matter (death, love, war).
The defining feature of them was that they were written in elegiac couplets or 'elegiacs', which consist of a dactylic hexameter line followed by a dactylic pentameter line i.e. six 'feet' in the first line, five in the second. In English it looks like this, 6 beats, followed by 5:
My girl is now held hostage by a surly guard (6)
and her stout door is shut and bolted tight. (5)
I've often tried to banish pains of love with wine,
but sorrow turned the uncut wine to tears.
Obviously you're not meant to say it out loud emphasising these beats, that would be silly. It's just a structuring device, a convention, a code buried under the words, a rhythm you're meant to be only dimly aware of, if at all, which gives a subliminal sense of regularity and rhythm.
Elegiac couplet Wikipedia article
The effect of a long line followed by a slightly shorter one was to create a kind of dying fall, repeated every two lines – hence its attraction for poets who wanted to write an elegy in our sense, a lament for someone who'd died, and the elegiac couplet was in fact the metre used for writing funeral inscriptions and sometimes examples of these were included in elegiac poems. However, the most famous of the Roman elegists copied the way that late Greek or Hellenistic poets had taken to using it to express personal and often 'amatory' subject matter.
The variation between the two lines helped to build the impression that elegiac couplets were more appropriate for the expression of 'direct and immediate concerns' i.e. the poet's personal life, than a poem written entirely in hexameters, which was felt to be the metre for continuous narrative, as in Homer's epics.
Catullus (84 to 54 BC) was the first Roman poet to co-opt the form from the Greek Hellenistic poets and adapt it to Latin for his scandalous love poems and execrations. Catullus was followed by Tibullus (55 to 18 BC, in his elegies), Propertius (50 to 16 BC in his elegies) and Ovid (43 BC to 18 AD, in a series of works, namely the Amores, Heroides, Tristia and Letters from Pontus).
Elegiacs as love poems
The classic Roman elegists used the form to write love poems, often surprisingly candid about their own love affairs. The convention quickly arose of devoting some or all of the poems to a Beloved Mistress, who receives the poet's devotion despite being often capricious or antagonistic.
'Your theme shall be flower-wreathed lovers at someone's door,
And the signs they leave of their drunken flight through the night…'
(The Muse Calliope telling Propertius what his subject should be, book 3, elegy 3)
Catullus (b.84 BC) can be said to have invented many aspects of this convention in his poems to 'Lesbia', universally taken as a pseudonym for the Roman aristocrat Clodia Metelli with whom he (if the poems are to be believed) had a passionate affair and then an equally emotional falling-out. (Catullus and Lesbia are mentioned a couple of times by Propertius; he consciously compares his love for Cynthia with Catullus's for Lesbia, 2.32, 2.34C).
In the next generation Tibullus (b.55 BC) is a little unusual in addressing elegiacs to three figures, two women and a boy. The dates of publication of Tibullus's two books interlink with the first books by Propertius. Propertius (b.50 BC) is more typical in addressing most of his elegies to just the one figure, who he names 'Cynthia'. A little later, Ovid (b.43 BC), wrote love elegiacs addressing a figure named 'Corinna', though there is widespread agreement that she probably didn't exist but was a poetic convention.
In Maltby's opinion Ovid rang pretty much every possible permutation on the use of elegiac as love poem and made it obvious that he was experimenting with the form for its own sake. Maltby thinks he used it up and hollowed it out and as a result the metre fell out of fashion.
Publishing in ancient Rome
Using the word 'publishing' gives a misleading impression. There were no printing presses in the West for another 1,500 years. 'Publishing' meant that a hand-written manuscript of the text was given to secretaries or amanuenses to copy out in full, by hand, on rolls of papyrus. These rolls were then rolled up and slipped into tubular containers. A library' consisted of numerous tubes containing manuscripts.
As this implies, not many copies were made, generally scores, rarely into the hundreds. There was no question of making money from this process. The aim was a) if you were rich, to gain a reputation among the people who counted, the educated class or b) if you were less well-off (as Virgil, Horace and Propertius were) to win the patronage of a rich sponsor, as all three were lucky enough to do with Maecenas, who gave land, property and money to both Horace and Virgil.
Ronald Musker's introduction
I read Propertius's poems in the 1972 Everyman edition translated by Ronald Musker. In his introduction Musker points out that Propertius came from the equestrian class i.e. the second rank of the aristocracy below the senatorial class. His family had extensive lands in north-central Italy but, like many of his class and generation, lost a substantial amount during the enforced confiscations of Octavian after the Battle of Phillippi.
Too early you gathered up your father's ashes;
And you had to accept a straitened hearth and home,
For many an ox had turned your rich lands over,
But the ruthless surveying rod took your wealth away. (4.1)
It also appears from one of the elegies, that a close relative or perhaps guardian was killed in the bitter localised civil war known as the Perugine War because it ended up with the rebels (led by Mark Anthony's wife and brother) holed up and besieged by Octavian's forces in the city of Perugia, near Propertius's birthplace. Musker considers the trauma of these events may explain the tone of melancholy which recurs throughout his poems.
In Rome young Sextus Propertius was a friend of fellow poets Gallus and Virgil and, through them, was adopted by the renowned patron of the arts, Gaius Maecenas. His poems survive in 4 books containing around 92 poems. Actually the number varies because editors of book 2 in particular think some poems are jumbled together which must once have been separate poems and so snip and separate them; other scholars disagree; hence the difficulty of giving an exact number.
The translator, Musker, appears to have given each poem a tabloid-style title, which aren't in the original. These are actually quite helpful in distinguishing between them and indicating the topic of each poem at a glance.
Book 1, 25 BC (23 poems)
Cynthia is the main subject, the first word of the first poem and mentioned in over half the other poems. The poems proceed through the set subjects and attitudes of the afflicted male love for his mistress, including mad declarations of love, promises to be true, lists of her achievements and perfections, jealousy of other men, despair at being abandoned, rage at being abandoned, laments on why women are so fickle and/or easily bought by rich men with shiny trinkets – and so on.
It includes a paraclausithyron i.e a poem describing the lover at the locked door of his beloved. Apparently, Propertius's version of this is a novelty because he has the door itself speak – we get the door's point of view, a rather cutting description of the wretched poet pining outside.
I noticed, reading Propertius, that the way these poets created the bulk of a poem, most of its content, is to address a friend, sometimes a rival or enemy – either calling them to witness aspects of your sorrow and affliction, or giving wise advice to them if they fall in love, or any other kind of address.
This conceit of addressing the poem to a pal a) makes it more dynamic b) makes it more like a speech than a solitary meditation. At many points a poem reminded me of Cicero's legal speeches. All of them, without exception, make a case.
Also, addressing a friend in a poem makes it very public because you have to respect politeness and decorum. The two friends whose names crop up most frequently are Gallus and Tullus, apparently, historically verified real people.
Why, Bassus, by praising all these other girls
Must you try to change me… (1.4)
Put an end, my envious friend, to your tiresome talk… (1.5)
I am not afraid, my Tullus, to learn with you
The Adriatic's moods… (1.6)
While you, my Ponticus, tell of the city of Cadmus… (1.7)
I told you, my scornful friend, that love would visit you… (1.9)
You, as your way is, Gallus, will be delighted
At my plight… (1.13)
I suppose it's worth pointing out that the poet addresses a cohort or circle of friends and they are all men. A group of men talking about a woman, one woman's behaviour. Hmmm. Very much a one-sided perspective, not just a guy talking about a girl but a buy recruiting all his mates to pile in behind him and back up his interpretation.
Although the Cynthia poems felt competent, the single poem which stood out for me was the ante-penultimate one, number 20, which Musker titles 'Beware of the nymphs!'. This advises his friend, Gallus, on his love affair with a boy, warning him that the (unnamed) boy is so beautiful that he, Gallus, should keep him away from predatory girls, otherwise he'll lose him, just as the legendary Hylas was lost to Naiads (spirits of the water) on the voyage of the Argonauts. Apart from 4 or 5 lines at the beginning and end, this is a verse description of Hylas's story i.e. an extended fantasia into Greek legend, describing the way Hylas was sent off by Hercules to gather firewood but wandered too far and was seduced by the water nymphs while Hercules' voice echoed wanly from afar. This was genuinely haunting.
This raises the issue of the extent to which Propertius not just incorporates Greek myth and legend into his poems, but packs them with mythological references (see below).
Book 2, 24 BC? (55 poems, including 10 or more 'fragments')
Book 2 for the first time features poems addressing Augustus's great 'minister for the arts', Maecenas. He is described, rather unctuously, in the first poem as:
True heart alike in peace or war
hope of the youth of Rome
And their envy, and my true glory in life and death…
Scholars deduce that the first book brought Propertius to Maecenas's attention and in this second one he has become one of the great man's circle. So not only does it address Maecenas himself but also, as was required, directly addresses Augustus.
Book 2 contains as many poems as 1 and 3 put together so some scholars think it actually combines 2 separate books. This is also suggested by the poor state of many of the poems in it. This has led some scholars to drastically rewrite the poems, taking bits which from poems where they seem out of place and stitching them into other poems where they seem to fit better. I can imagine this leads ultimately to a nightmare jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of fragments on the table in front of you as you rack your brains to recombine them in more 'sensible' ways.
Musker explains all this and concludes that, although many of these scholarly editions are intriguing for experts in the field, in this edition he rejects almost all of them. Because there is an alternative explanation – which is that Propertius deliberately made sudden swerves and juxtapositions in his verse, as policy. One of the elements that contributes to what Musker calls Propertius's 'elusiveness' and has made him less popular in modern times that the far more sensible, down-to-earth Horace, or the scandalously sexy Catullus.
The subject matter of the poems is more varied though still circling round the figure of Cynthia. Several describe a rich rival who appears to have won her affections with jewels, and throw deep hatred his way. But then the next one might be another hymn of fulsome love and devotion. So the poems follow no order i.e you can't make out a narrative, in fact they seem almost deliberately randomised.
Book 3, sometime after 23 BC (27, including 2 'fragments')
The poems start to range in subject matter beyond simple love songs to tackle more public themes. For example, several invoke Augustus's previous victories against Antony and Cleopatra and his current campaign in Parthia (3.4) (cf the long poem in book 4 celebrating the battle of Actium and repeatedly criticising Cleopatra).
There's one very close to the royal family, lamenting the death of young Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus's nephew, who he legally adopted then married to his daughter Julia, only for him to die in 23 BC, his twentieth year (3.18).There's one on the standard topic of how Rome has become corrupted by foreign riches and let its shrines and temples fall into shameful disuse:
Proud Rome is falling, crushed by her own prosperity. (3.13)
Several of the early ones are recusatios, a stock type of poem in which the poet bashfully excuses himself from writing the grand epic poem about Rome's heroic military victories which society expected, and instead gets a Muse or god to explain that the poet's real vocation is love poetry.
Wars I would tell of in patriotic verses,
But, alas, how weak the notes that sound on my lips! (4.1)
He writes a long poem to Maecenas saying everyone has his own nature and his (Propertius's) is emphatically not either going to war or writing about war. The only war he enjoys is the battle of love ('love's sweet strife', 3.20B). In fact this is continuing a trend which began in book 2, with 2.34 actually mentioning Virgil as the great epic poem of Propertius's time.
Cynthia still pops up. In some he celebrates Cynthia's birthday (3.10), but overall he seems to be tiring of her, and the final poems declare himself well shot of her:
False is that trust of yours in your beauty, woman,
Whom my favouring eyes have long made overproud.
Yes, Cynthia, greatly indeed my love has praised you;
It shames me now that through my verses
You gained such fame. (3.24)
And the last poem in the book is an execration, calling down curses on her, and looking forward to her aging and withering and losing her beauty (3.25).
Book 4, published sometime after 16 BC (12 poems)
Book 4 contains only half the number of poems as book 1, leading some scholars to speculate that it may have been published posthumously, a tidying-up operation. Several of the poems imply that Cynthia is dead – in 4.7 her ghost complains to Propertius that her funeral wasn't lavish enough.
The other poems move well beyond love poetry, addressing a variety of subjects. They include several 'aetiological poems', a genre which explains the origin of various Roman rites and landmarks. They're longer than before, too. Many poems in book 1 were one page long. All those in book 4 are at least 2 pages long, some 3 or even 4.
The poet describes the early history of Rome for 2 pages and the original rural appearance of Rome in terms very reminiscent of the Aeneid before the second half is spoken by a Babylonion priest predicting Propertius's horoscope.
The Etruscan god Vertumnus speaks, speculating about his own origins and purpose; he is a chameleon and can be male or female or take any role or profession.
Two-page poem in which a young wife, Arethusa, writes to her husband, Lycótas, away at the wars, describing her sadness and devotion.
Three pages describe the iniquity of Tarpeia, a vestal virgin back in the earliest days of Rome, when it was little more than a village, who falls in love with Tatius king of the neighbouring tribe of the Sabines; she betrays a secret path up the Palatine Hill into Rome but when Tatius marries her, as he promised, he gets his men to crush her with their shields for her treachery. This, supposedly, is the origin of the name of the Tarpeian Rock on the Palatine.
Execration of a procuress named Acanthis, who incited his (unnamed) love to spurn the gods, whore after gold, reject his love, and so on.
Three pages celebrating Augustus's victory at the Battle of Actium. Always good policy to suck up to the emperor.
Cynthia's ghost comes back from the tomb to upbraid him on the evening of her funeral. At the end he tries to embrace her but her ghost vanishes into air which reminds me of the umpteen time the same thing happens in the Aeneid.
To get his own back on Cynthia (see how the poems are not in any narrative order) the poet organises a little orgy with two hand-picked courtesans at the height of which Cynthia storms in, drives the girls out scratching and screaming, then demands complete submission from the poet, before fumigating the place. Then they have championship sex.
Another poem describing what Rome looked like before it was founded i.e. was idyllic countryside – very reminiscent of book 8 of the Aeneid – here the backdrop for the legendary moment when Hercules stopped on the site only to have his cattle stolen by Cacus. The poem describes the Forum when it was just a grazing ground and explains the origin of the Great Altar which still stood in Propertius's time. I wonder if it was Augustus and Maecenas's pressure which led him to drop love poetry and turn to accounts of Rome's founding legends.
If a Roman military leader defeated the leader of the enemy in single combat and kept the latter's arms and armour, these were called the spolia opima and brought back to be dedicated in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. It had only happened three times in Roman history and this poem describes those three great personal achievements, by Romulus, Aulus Cornelius Cossus (consul in 428 BC) and Marcus Claudius Marcellus (consul in 222 BC).
The final poem is a touching address by the recently deceased Cornelia consoling her husband, Paullus Aemilius Lepidus (77 to 11 BC). This man's father had been brother to the Lepidus who was in the Second Triumvirate alongside Anthony and Octavius. Not long after Cornelia's death, he married Claudia Marcella Minor, a daughter of Octavia the Younger, sister of Augustus. So like the lament for Marcus Claudius Marcellus (3.18) this is by way of being an imperial commission. However, its stately beauty has led to it being described as the 'queen of the elegies' and it is commonly considered the best poem in the entire collection.
Musker's translation
Having carefully explained what the Latin elegiac metre was, Musker then goes ahead and cheerfully ignores the strictness of it in his own translation. His versions are very free and all the better for it. Try and spot traces of the hexameter-pentameter combination in the following:
Whence, you ask me, come all my poems of love,
And my book that sounds on men's lips its note of langour.
Calliope does not sing me these songs nor Apollo;
A girl provides me with all I have
Of poetic talent.
Instead of couplets defined by the elegiac metre, Musker uses the verse paragraph. Each poem, instead of presenting a solid column of verse –as they do in the original Latin – is divided into 3 or 4 or 5 verse paragraphs of 5 or 6 lines, the last one or two lines always notably shorter, maybe a kind of recreation of the 'dying fall' of the original. Thus:
Penelope, who was worthy of many suitors,
For twice ten years was able to live untouched;
To defer remarriage by feigning a womanly industry,
Then unwinding by nightly stealth the weft of the day.
And though, grown old with waiting, she had no hope
Of ever seeing Ulysses again,
She yet stayed true.
This not being faced by a wall of verse, instead being able to read a paragraph at a time, makes the poems immensely more readable, as does Musker's relaxed approach to metre
Conventions of the love poem
Scholars have suggested various real-life models for Cynthia but there is no consensus. As usual all we have to go on is hints within the poems and one remote historical reference.
Propertius mentions that Cynthia is a descendant of the Roman poet Hostius. He frequently compliments her as docta puella meaning 'learned girl'. He tells us that she herself was a writer of verse. This kind of autobiographical clue-hunting strikes me as pointless. Even when you have confirmed that Lesbia was a codename for Clodia…does it change anything? If anything, it reduces the impact of the poems, which they gain from being about a shadowy unnamed woman.
Instead, the poems are artifices; they rehearse a number of postures or attitudes or emotions related to love affairs. These may or may not ever have been 'genuine' or related to 'a real person' but it's a question of taste whether you need to believe that to enjoy them. I don't.
Poems are verbal machines designed to evoke psychological states in the reader; some of these might be mimetic, directly replicating the emotion described in the poem. But once you've read a certain number of poems and start to recognise the same topics recurring in the same treatment, at least part of your mind becomes capable of detachment, regarding even the most moving poem as a verbal artifact, a device.
Apparently, Propertius is often criticised because of his excessive use of references from myth and legend. For example, elegy 2.6 kicks off with a flurry of mythological comparisons: he cites three of the most famous courtesans from ancient times and the crowds of men who flocked around them and then claims they were all nothing compared to the hordes of men who swarm at Cynthia's door. In other words, it is a poem about male jealousy.
The house of Laïs at Corinth, though at her door
All Greece paid court, was never thronged like yours;
Thaïs, famed by Menander and once the darling
Of Athens, attracted no such swarm;
Nor yet did Phrynë, enriched by all those lovers
So that she could have re-erected
Demolished Thebes. (2.6)
In his introduction Musker defends Propertius against the charge of introducing too much mythological matter into his poems. His defence is:
The ancients thought through mythology. Lacking anything remotely like a modern scientific understanding of the laws of nature, their extremely dense and multi-layered mythology provided not exactly rules or laws but stories from history which suggested underlying tendencies, among humans and among the fate which seems to hover over them. Mythology helps to make sense (albeit a chaotic and violent sense) of the world.
Sheer swank. Propertius's jealousy risks coming over as petty, small-minded, unaristocratic. But if he devotes a paragraph to comparing himself and Cynthia to figures from myth and legend then he obviously flatters her, bigs himself up, and turns a personal peeve into what sounds like the grand statement of some general law rather than a trivial tiff between pampered layabouts.
Personally, I enjoyed Propertius's use of mythology. In Horace the mythological references often felt dragged in – I think it's because Horace is such a regular guy, his entire schtick is about living for the moment and enjoying life in a very realistically described Rome, his is such a down-to-earth, sensible philosophy, that Achilles and Apollo seem wildly out of place in it.
Whereas Propertius from the start is more intense and shrill, a little more hysterical and extreme, and so his use of myth and legend genuinely helps to expand and enhance the poems, gives them size, like adding echo to a voice track.
The Romans expected their lovers to give them prominent love bites (note to 4.3, p.220, and 4.5).
Poems of Propertius, translated by Robert Musker, was published by Everyman books in 1972. All references are to the 1972 paperback edition.
Tagged Acanthis, Achilles, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Antony and Cleopatra, Apollo, Arethusa, Argonauts, Athens, Augustus, Aulus Cornelius Cossus, Æneid, Battle of Actium, Battle of Phillippi, Cacus, Calliope, Catullus, Cicero, classical literature, Claudia Marcella Minor, Cleopatra, Corinth, Cynthia, dactylic hexameter, dactylic pentameter, elegiac couplets, elegiacs, elegy, first century BC, Friendship, Gaius Maecenas, Gallus, Great Altar, Greek legend, Greek mythology, Hellenistic poetry, Hercules, Homer, Horace, Hostius, Hylas, Julia, Jupiter Feretrius, Lais, Latin poetry, Lepidus, love, love bites, love poem, love poetry, Lycótas, Maecenas, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Mark Anthony, Menander, mythology, Naiads, Octavian, Ovid, Palatine Hill, paraclausithyron, Parthia, Paullus Aemilius Lepidus, Penelope, Perugia, Perugine War, Phryne, poem, poems, Poems of Propertius, poetry, Propertius, recusatio, Robert Maltby, Robert Musker, Roman civil war, Roman poetry, Rome, Romulus, Ronald Musker, Sabines, Second Triumvirate, Spolia opima, Tarpeia, Tarpeian rock, Tatius, Thais, Thebes, Tibullus, Tullus, Ulysses, Vertumnus, Virgil
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/04/propertius-ronald-musker/
The elegies of Tibullus translated by A.M. Juster (2012)
But if you're slow you shall be lost! How fast the time
escapes – the days don't linger or return!
How fast the earth relinquishes its purple hues!
How fast tall poplars lose their gorgeous leaves!
(Book 1, elegy 4)
The Oxford University Press edition of the elegies of Tibullus is a lovely artefact to hold and own. It's beautifully produced, with a stylish line drawing of a woman in Victorian dress adorning the white cover, and the print quality and page layout on the inside feels just as light and clear and stylish.
Three authors
The text is the product of three authors.
1. Albius Tibullus himself was one of the leading writers of 'elegiacs' as the Roman republic turned into the Roman empire under the rule of Augustus. We have no certain evidence for either of his dates, but scholars guesstimate he was born between 55 and 49 BC and died soon after 19 BC, so at an early age of between 30 and 35.
Tibullus was a member of the equestrian class and so well-off, despite the conventional claims of 'poverty' made in his poems. All these poets claimed 'poverty' because it was one of the conventions of the genre; it didn't mean what we think of as poverty so much as indicate their moral probity, putting them on the side of simple, traditional, rural values against the luxury and decadence of the city rich.
Tibullus is mentioned in some of the poems of his contemporaries Horace (65 to 8 BC) and Ovid (43 BC to 18 AD). Tibullus published just 2 books of elegies amounting to just 16 poems in all (book 1, 10 elegies, book 2, 6 elegies). This edition contains the full Latin texts of all 16.
(In fact, the state of Tibullus's poems is messier than this simple layout suggests; a third and fourth book of elegies survives from antiquity but most scholars think they are not his work, while some of the canonical 16 have issues of order and logic which suggest they may have been tampered with. All this is discussed in the introduction but, as it were, buried in the crisp, clear formal layout of the text itself.)
2. This edition also contains an admirably to-the-point introduction and thorough and useful notes by Tibullus scholar Robert Maltby. We learn that these are taken from Maltby's own larger, more scholarly edition of Tibullus, cut down and focused for this OUP paperback. Many notes for classic texts are obvious and trite, for example telling you who Julius Caesar or Mars were. Maltby's notes are outstanding, clarifying all the unusual references in each poem, and consistently going deeper than the obvious, telling us fascinating things about Roman social practices and delving deep into the origins of the gods or the stories of the many figures from myth and legend who Tibullus mentions.
3. And the third author is the translator of the poems themselves, award-winning American poet, translator and essayist A.M. Juster.
The modern sense of 'elegy' as a lament for the dead only crystallised during the 16th century. 2,000 years ago, in the ancient Greeks and Romans the word had a much wider definition – elegies could cover a wide range of subject matter (death, love, war).
The defining feature of them is that they were written in elegiac couplets or 'elegiacs', which consist of a dactylic hexameter verse followed by a dactylic pentameter verse i.e. six 'feet' in the first line, five in the second. Juster repeats this format fairly precisely, producing couplets whose first line has six beats, the second line, five beats. 6 then 5.
My girl is now held hostage by a surly guard
and her stout door is shut and bolted tight.
The effect was to create a kind of dying fall, hence its attraction for poets who wanted to write an elegy in our sense and the elegiac couplet was in fact the metre used for writing funeral inscriptions and sometimes these found their way into elegiac poems (Tibullus includes a few in his poems). However, the most famous of the Roman elegists copied the way that late Greek or Hellenistic poets had used it to express personal and often amatory subject matter.
Elegiac couplets were felt to be appropriate for the expression of 'direct and immediate concerns', by contrast with the hexameter which was felt to be the metre for continuous narrative, as in Homer's epics.
Catullus was the first Roman poet to co-opt the form from the Greek Hellenistic poets and adapt it to Latin. He was followed by Tibullus (in his elegies), Propertius (in his elegies) and Ovid (in the Amores, Heroides, Tristia and Letters from Pontus).
Elegiac couplets were also used for actual funeral inscriptions on gravestones,
The classic Roman elegists used the form to write love poems, often (apparently) surprisingly candid about their own love affairs. The convention quickly arose of devoting some or all of the poems to a beloved mistress, who receives the poet's devotion despite being often capricious or antagonistic.
Catullus can be said to have invented many aspects of this convention in his poems to Lesbia, universally taken as a pseudonym for the Roman aristocrat Clodia Metelli with whom he (if the poems are to be believed) had a passionate affair and then an equally emotional falling out. Tibullus's contemporary, Propertius, addresses his elegies to the figure of 'Cynthia'. A little later, Ovid addresses a figure named 'Corinna', though there is widespread agreement that she probably didn't exist but was a poetic convention.
Tibullus's lovers
Tibullus for his part, addresses three figures in his short collection: Book 1 addresses a figure called called Delia (the later Roman writer claimed, Apuleius, claimed that her real name was Plania). The poems are in no logical order so don't portray a clear narrative. Sometimes she is referred to as single, sometimes as married. Some of the poems imply their relationship began when her husband was away serving with the army in Cilicia. At some point the poet discovers that Delia has another lover. When her husband returns, the poet now has two rivals!
Meanwhile, some of the poems in book 1 also address a boy, Marathus. The three poems centred on Marathus constitute the longest poetic project in Roman literature having homosexual love as theme, being 1.4, 1.8 and 1.9.
In the second book the place of Delia is taken by 'Nemesis', who appears in 2.3, 2.4 and 2.6. Nemesis is clearly a pseudonym, given that it is the name of a famous goddess. This person was probably a high-class courtesan and appears to have had other admirers besides Tibullus. In the Nemesis poems Tibullus complains bitterly of his bondage, and of her rapacity and hard-heartedness. In spite of all, however, she seems to have retained her hold on him until his death.
Tibullus's patron
Tibullus's patron was the statesman and general, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. The introduction tells us that Corvinus was patron of a circle of poets which included Propertius and the young Ovid, and was himself an author of poetry. He was 'a stickler for purity of style in Latin', which may go some way to explaining the elegance of Latin diction which Tibullus is noted for.
Although an old school republican, Corvinus allied himself with the new regime and served as co-consul with Augustus in 31 BC. Seen from this perspective, Tibullus's praise of rural values, respect for the traditional gods, support of his patron and his son, all fall into line with the tendency of Augustan propaganda. Doesn't exactly explain, but makes sense of, the extended passage in 2.5 where Tibullus gives a compressed account of the ancient origins of Rome – the odyssey of Aeneas, the war with Turnus, the prophecies of the Sibyl and so on – which echo or parallel the themes of the Aeneid by Virgil, who Tibullus certainly knew.
That said, Tibullus nowhere actually mentions Octavius/Augustus (unlike the numerous praising references found in Virgil and Horace) and his positive references to Egypt and its religion (Isis, Osiris) in elegy 1.7 also run counter to Augustan propaganda, which was vehemently anti-Egyptian.
I propose to summarise the content of each poem, then, because they are stuffed with references to myth and legend alongside details of Roman social life, to note any bits of social history which interest me. At the end I'll discuss Juster's translation.
Book 1 contains 10 poems just as Horace's first book of satires does and Virgil's 10 eclogues. Publication allowed a poet to arrange poems very much not in chronological order, but thematically.
May someone else assemble wealth of gleaming gold
and hold vast plots of cultivated land,
one who would fear the constant toil of lurking foes,
one whose sleep flees when Mars' trumpets blare.
May poverty provide me with an idle life
while steady fire burns within my hearth…
First poems in collections set out the themes and announce the tone. Tibullus's describes his longing for the simple life on a rural farm, planting fruit trees and vines himself and piously worshipping the country gods. This is contrasted with the ambition for glory of his patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, himself an orator and poet as well as a statesman and military commander. Only at line 57 is Delia introduced, at whose door the poet waits. He imagines his own funeral where she weeps for him.
Pour more unwatered wine, and let it overcome
fresh grief so sleep controls my weary eyes
and, when my brow is Bacchus-bludgeoned, may no man
awaken me as barren passion rests.
and her stout door is shut and bolted tight…
The ancient Greeks were great for categorising everything, particularly in the arts. So they had a name for the type of poem describing a lovelorn lover struck outside the locked door of his beloved. It was called a paraklausithyron (melos) meaning '(a song) at the locked door'. Propertius wrote one (where the door itself speaks) and Ovid, too (where he addresses the doorkeeper).
Delia has been put under lock and key by her husband. The poet says he'll get drunk to drown his sorrows, appeals to the door to let him in, then Delia to come and open it. He describes the many ways Venus helps illicit lovers. Then tells us he's paid a witch to help his affair and describes here (awesome) powers. Unlike his rival who went off to win glory in war, all the poet wants is a quiet rural idyll with his Delia.
Historical notes: everyone else seems to ignore it but I am brought up short by the ubiquity of slavery in ancient Rome. Some Roman householders kept a door slave chained to their front door, to greet visitors and manage its opening and closing.
Messalla, you will sail Aegean seas without me.
O that your staff and you remember me!
Phaeacia confines me, sick, in foreign lands;
grim Death, please keep your greedy hands away!
The poet has fallen ill at the island of Corfu, while accompanying his patron, Messalla, on official business to the East. The poem links together a number of reflections on this situation. He bids farewell to Messalla, who's sailing on without him. He remembers parting from Delia in Rome, which leads him to ask Delia's favourite deity, Isis, for a cure. He expresses his own preference for the good old traditional Roman gods, and then to contrast the Golden Age of Saturn with the present Age of Iron, with its endless wars. He imagines dying and being led by Venus to the Elysium reserved for devoted lovers, as opposed to the Tartarus or hell reserved for those who scorn love. Finally he imagines arriving back in Rome and his loving reception by Delia.
Note: the cult of Isis spread from the East to Rome during the first century BC and became popular among women of Delia's class: the mistresses of both Propertius and Ovid were said to be devotees. Isis was worshipped twice a day, once before sunrise, once in the afternoon. At religious ceremonies women untied their hair, which was usually bound and braided. Isis's male priests had completely shaven heads. Isis demanded of her female devotees periods of sexual abstinence, often ten days in duration which rankled with the sex-obsessed male elegists.
'Priapus, so a shady cover may be yours
and neither sun nor snowfall hard your head,
how does your guile enthrall the gorgeous boys?'
We've only had three poems mentioning Tibullus's passionate love for Delia before the sequence is interrupted by a completely unexpected hymn to pederasty i.e. adult male love for adolescent boys. This is one of the three poems on the subject of Tibullus's love for the boy Marathus. Homosexual love was fairly frequent in the Greek tradition but was avoided by the Romans (although it appears in some of Virgil's Eclogues and Virgil is reported as having been gay).
The poem takes the form of an address to Priapus, the god of fertility. Tibullus invokes the god who then takes over the poem and delivers a mock lecture on the art of loving boys, which comes in 6 sections:
beware the attractions of boys 'who will always offer grounds for love'
be patient, 'his neck will bit by bit accept a yoke'
do not hesitate to use false oaths, for the Father forgives oaths sworn 'in lust'
do not delay too long
do whatever your boy wishes, 'love wins most by subservience'
Priapus laments the current fallen times when youths value money more than love and poetry!
Only at this point do we learn the lecture is meant to be passed on by Tibullus to his friend Titius, but Titius's wife won't allow him to make use of it and so Tibullus himself will, reluctantly, have to become 'a teacher of love.'
May those deceived by tricks
of cunning lads proclaim me as the expert!
To each his source of pride! For me it's counselling
spurned lovers.
The notion of a 'love teacher' was common in Greek New Comedy and so crops up in the plays of Plautus, who pinched the plots of all his plays from the Greeks. Soon after Tibullus, it was to form the basis of Ovid's humorous poems, The Art of Love and The Remedy For Love.
Note: at their initiation the priests of the Mother goddess, Cybele, castrated themselves in a frenzy to the sound of Phrygian flutes (and, you would imagine, screams of pain).
I claimed I took the break-up well, and I was tough,
but my persistent pride is now long gone,
since, like a top with string, I move on level ground
while whirled by talents of a skilful lad…
The second paraklausithyron or 'locked outside the lover's door' poem. The narrator thought he could bear a separation from his beloved, but he can't. His devotion helped restore her to health when she was ill by performing various magic rites; but now she has taken another lover. He had dreamed of an idyllic life in the country with her but now these dreams are scattered like winds across perfumed Armenia. He's tried to forget her through wine and other women, who blame his impotence on her witchcraft, but really it's her beauty which has bewitched him. A bawd or madam has introduced her to a rich lover. The poet delivers an extravagant curse of this 'witch'. The poet pleads the true love of the poor lover (i.e. himself) but alas, doors only open for cash now.
The poem is structurally interesting because it mentions many of the points described in 1.2 and shows how each one has deteriorated.
Notes: burning and branding were typical punishments for slaves. The Romans had a word for slaves born into a household, a verna. Such slaves appear to have been treated more indulgently and so were more likely to chat and confide than slaves bought from outside.
The 'curse poem' was a full-blown literary genre in Hellenistic Greek poetry.
You always flatter me, Love, so I'm snared, though later,
to my sorrow, you are harsh and sad.
Why are you so cruel to me? Or is there special glory
when a god has set a human trap?
The final Delia poem. Even more disillusioned than in 1.5, the poet realises Delia didn't have a new lover forced on her by the bawd who he so extravagantly cursed in 1.5 but has, of her own free will, taken a new lover. He starts off attacking the god of love, Amor. He addresses Delia's husband, itemising all the tricks whereby they deceived him then makes the outrageous suggestion that the husband give Delia to him (the poet) to protect. A spooky description of a priestess of the war goddess, Bellona, prophesying that anyone who touches a girl under love's protection will lose his wealth should be a warning to her rich lover. He admits Delia is not to blame and should not be harmed, not least on account of her mother, who helped the couple in their affair. The poem ends with an appeal to Delia to be faithful and a description of the miserable old age of the faithless woman.
The irony throughout the poem is that Tibullus has been undone by his own tricks being performed, now, by another lover. Only in the notes to this poem does it become clear that Delia doesn't have a 'husband' in the legal sense. So is she the kept courtesan of a rich man who, when he was away, took Tibullus as a lover and now has taken another? This version add pity to the vision of her as a widow without any legal rights and having to make a pitiful living by weaving which the poem ends on.
It's impressive how there have only been five poems about Delia and yet it feels like I've read an entire novel about their affair, packed with emotions and vivid details.
Notes: In his description of his 'enslavement' to Delia, the poet says he is ready to accept 'the cruel stripes and the shackles' which are reserved for slaves.
While spinning threads of fate a god cannot unwind,
the Parcae prophesied about this day,
this one that would disperse the tribes of Aquitaine,
that made the bravely conquered Atur tremble…
A song of pretty sycophantic praise to his patron, Messalla, on the latter's birthday, celebrating his achievements, namely his victory over the Aquitanians in Gaul, the triumph he was awarded on 25 September 27 BC, his successful mission to the East, and his repair of the Via Latina (the kind of restoration work Augustus required of the well-off). The central section, describing his mission to the East, includes a hymn to the Egyptian god Osiris, who is identified with the Greek god, Bacchus, and a digression into how Bacchus invented cultivation of the vine.
In a typically useful note Maltby points out that this poem was written relatively soon after Augustus's defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium (31 BC) and the couple's suicide in 30 BC, BUT it departs from the usual fiercely negative tone of Augustan propaganda (compare it with the negative references to the ill-fated couple in the Aeneid). Maltby interprets this as calling for the peaceful integration of Egypt into the Roman imperium.
Notes: Slaves worked the fields of the Roman aristocracy chained together in chain gangs. Tibullus has the heart to call them 'mortals in distress' (41).
Each Roman had a guardian spirit watching over him called his Genius, who was born with him and protected him during his lifetime.
There is no hiding from me what dome tender words
in whispers and a lover's nod convey.
For me there are no lots, no livers linked to gods,
no songbirds that predict events for me…
Opens with Tibullus assuming the role of teacher of love, telling the poem's addressee to admit to being in love, warning that cosmetics don't work, comparing the addressee with a girl who never uses make-up but looks great. Old age is the time for make-up. What enchants is physical presence, thigh pressed against thigh. Only at line 23 do we learn that he is addressing a boy. It emerges that Tibullus is in love with a boy who is in love with the pretty girl mentioned earlier. Tibullus now tells the girl not to beg presents from the boy, but only from old admirers who can afford them. Quick now, while you are young, there's time enough for make-up when you're old.
No gems and pearls delight a girl who sleeps alone
and cold, and is desired by no man.
He tells her not to be tough on the boy and only now do we learn his identity, Marathus, the same boy as in 1.4, and we realise Tibullus is addressing them both as if they're there, together, in front of him. We learn the girl is called Pholoe. He tells her to relent, pointing out that Marathus once enjoyed playing hard to get to older lovers; now the boot's on the other foot and he himself is suffering agonises form being rejected by Pholoe.
It is a very dramatised poem, with Tibullus first addressing the boy and girl as if they're in front of him, then handing over the narrative to Marathus. But then we've seen the high degree of dramatisation and multiple voices in Horace's epistles and odes.
If you were going to abuse my wretched love,
why make vows by the gods profaned in private?
O wretch, though broken oaths can be concealed at first,
the punishment still comes on muffled feet…
Closely related to 1.8, this also features Tibullus addressing lovers, in this case a boy who Tibullus is in love with (presumably the same Marathus) and an old married man who has bought the boy's love with gifts (a recurring trope in all these love poems, the buying of love). Tibullus starts by cursing the boy for selling out to a rich lover, then kicks himself for having helped the boy so actively in his pursuit of the girl, holding a torch for him on midnight assignations, persuading the girl to come to her door to speak to the boy, and so on. He marvels that he was so naive ('I should have been more wary of your traps'), and wrote love poems. Now he wishes Vulcan to come and burn those poems to ash.
At line 53 the narrator turns to the old married man who's pinched him, and hopes his wife has umpteen affairs, surpassing even the licentiousness of his sister. He doesn't realise his debauched sister taught his wife all his sexy tricks. The poet wishes the aroma of all his wife's lovers will linger in their marital bed.
Then returns to the boy, asking him how he could sleep with such a monster, with his 'vile, gouty flesh and elderly embraces'. The poem closes by ending the Marathus affair ('Just get lost, you who only want to sell your looks'), saying he will take a new lover, and rejoice in the boy's 'torment', and dedicate a palm to Venus in thanks for his escape. The final couplet is an actual dedication to the goddess, elegiac metre being used for real-life inscriptions.
It belongs to a recognised type in the ancient world, the 'end of the affair' poem (surprising that the Greeks don't have a handy term for it).
Notes: slaves could be punished by being whipped 'with a twisted whip', lashing their shoulders, or branded. I am by now realising that the theme of slavery, as transposed to the trope of 'love's slave' and 'the slavery of love', features in every poem. It is a stock trope to go alongside the conceit of love's 'wars'. The poet may be a warrior for love, a soldier of love, a casualty of love's wars, or a slave for love etc.
1.10 (lines)
Who was the first to make horrific two-edged swords?
How ired and truly iron that man was!
First murder of the human race, then war was born,
then quicker ways to grisly death were opened…
Having rejected gay and straight love, the poet returns to the Roman ideal of a stable marriage. This is the last poem in the and it book picks up themes adumbrated in the first, such as rejecting war and greed in favour of the simple rural life. But now the poet finds himself being dragged off to war (we don't know which war or when) and wishes for the lost Golden Age before war or greed were heard of. Oh how he loved scampering about under the gaze of the simple wooden household gods of his childhood! Oh let him live a simple life and dedicate simple sacrifices to the gods and let someone else 'lay hostile leaders low'!
Half way through the poem switches to a vision of the dead in Hades, scratching their faces by the river Styx, waiting for Charon the filthy ferryman. Instead let us praise a simple farmer, such as he wants to be. There is a confusing passage when war and (apparently) sex or rape (?) intrude, before the last couplet invokes Peace, again.
So come to us while holding cornstalks, fertile Peace,
and may fruit spring from your resplendent breast.
Be quiet, everyone! We're cleansing crop and fields,
a rite still done as forebears passed it on.
Come Bacchus, and from your horns let sweet grapes hang
and, Ceres, wreath your brow with stalks of corn…
Book 2 opens with a dramatisation of a country festival. Procession to the altar of the sacred lambs, prayer to the ancestral gods, confirmation that the omens are good, toast to his patron, Messalla ('pride of bearded ancestors') in his absence, who he then asks to help him with the rest of the poem (as Virgil repeatedly asks Maecenas for help with his Georgics).
Then Tibullus sings a 30-line hymn in praise of the rustic gods and then the early farmers who developed the arts of agriculture. This segues into the final passage about Cupid, who was born among the beasts of the fields but quickly learned to ply his trade among humans, ah he causes much pain and sorrow. Which is why Tibullus enjoins him to lay down his bow & arrow and join the feast.
Notes: statues of the gods were often painted red, specially during festivals.
Tragic actors were awarded a goat, tragos in Greek, as a prize for their songs, which were performed in honour of Bacchus.
'The gods are pleased by abstinence.' Sexual abstinence was required before religious festivals.
Let's speak with joyous words; Birth-Spirit nears the altar.
Those present, male or female, hold your tongue!
Let hearths burn holy incense; let them burn perfumes
some gentle Arab sends from fruitful lands…
The shortest of the 16 elegies, this is addressed to Tibullus's friend, Cornutus, on his birthday. Tibullus addresses Cornutus's 'Genius', which probably means a statue or bust of him, brought from his house for the purpose. He (rhetorically) asks the absent Cornutus what gift he would like, then imagines Cornutus's image nodding assent. Tibullus bets he will be praying for a wife's true love, at which Tibullus asks Amor to come flying down and bring with him the bonds of a stable marriage. He asks the Birthday Spirit to provide Cornutus with healthy offspring.
It's very brief and much more like a kind of fantasia or dream than the rather laboured discourses of the other elegies.
Cornutus, farms and villas occupy my girl.
Alas, he who can stay in town is iron!
Venus herself has moved on now to open fields
and Love is learning rustic slang of farmers…
First of the short 'sequence' devoted to the new, 'dark' mistress, codenamed 'Nemesis'. Whereas an idealised vision of the country is where Tibullus imagined his love for Delia, Nemesis is very much a woman of the city. The very wealth he had rejected in book 1, he now accepts if it helps him win his new, mercenary mistress.
The poem opens by addressing Cornutus. It is, in effect, a long moan to his friend. Tibullus laments that his mistress is being delayed in the country; Tibullus would do hard labour to release her; even Apollo underwent labours for his love, Admetus (11 to 36). Inevitably, he has a rival for her affections and attack on him leads into an attack on the greed of the present age ('Our iron age applauds not love but loot of war') and a series of lines condemning the lust for loot and the violence it motivates. And women are all too often lured by money – 'Alas, I see that girls are thrilled by riches now.'
Only now, at line 57, do we discover the name of his mistress, 'Nemesis', the Greek word for retribution. Tibullus uses this technique of delaying the identity of the beloved in his poems about Delia and Marathus, obviously a stock technique to raise tension/introduce drama.
He is disgusted that his rival, her other lover, appears to be an ex-slave, one who 'was often forced/to drag chalked feet upon a foreign scaffold' – because (as Maltby's excellent notes inform us) slaves on sale from abroad had their feet coated with chalk and were displayed in front of potential buyers on a temporary wooden scaffold.
Then the poem reverts to the rural setting, as he delivers 2-line curses of Ceres and Bacchus, the 2 deities most associated with the countryside, for keeping his beloved there. And he pines, not for the first time, for the Golden Age when men led simple lives, ate simple food, made love freely out of doors. The last line is a defiant claim that he will 'never shrink from chains and lashes' i.e. is prepared to become a slave for her sake.
I see that I have gained both bondage and a mistress!
Farewell to native freedoms now for me!
Still, sadly, service is imposed and I'm in chains,
and for a wretch Love never loosens bonds,
and whether I have earned it or not sinned, it burns…
Picks up the slavery theme where 1.3 left off. The poet realises that, in acquiring a new mistress, he has put himself in bondage. He burns! He wishes he was unfeeling stone, was a cliff beaten by the sea. Poetry is useless; his mistress wants expensive gifts! If he's not to be left whining outside her locked door he must forget poetry. Through verse he asks for access to his girl, a frequently repeated trope of the elegists – but it doesn't work. It's Venus's fault, so he'll profane her shrine. He curses the manufacturers of luxury goods for spoiling girls. He's locked out of her house while any fool with money can bribe their way in. Then a passage bitterly cursing his beloved: may her house burn down, may she die unmourned. But then he relapses back into hopelessness: if she insists he sell his ancestral home, he'll do it, yes and drink potions prepared by Circe or Medea, even drink the piss from a mare in heat, he'll do it for his love!
Phoebus, protect the novice entering your shrine;
come quickly to perform with song and lyre…
Tibullus's longest poem. It is an invocation of the god Apollo in celebration of the induction of the son of his patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Messallinus, into Apollo's priesthood. (This took place about 19 BC i.e. not very long before scholars think Tibullus himself died.) The opening couplets describing Apollo's powers are very evocative, as is his vision of Rome before it was settled, when it was merely a few idyllic villages.
What makes the poem so long is it swiftly moves on to mention the Sibylline books (which the priests of Apollo guarded) and then retells many of the prophecies of the ancient Sibyl about:
a) the founding of Rome by Aeneas (the subject of Virgil's epic poem, the Aeneid), quick vignettes of Ilia and Romulus, mentions of Lavinia and Turnus, focus of the second half of the Aeneid
b) events surrounding the assassination of Caesar and the subsequent civil wars – quite extensive subjects
The poem ends with an extended description of a rural festival, in its final lines introducing the figure of Cupid who has wounded the poet who now suffers from the pangs of love. Tibullus asks mercy of Nemesis (for it is she) so that he has the strength to celebrate the great achievements of young Messalinus, envisioned as driving through conquered towns.
The notes point out that by expanding the range of subject matter of the elegy, Tibullus paved the way for Propertius to do likewise, in his book 4, and Ovid in his Fasti.
Notes: there were three types of divination in ancient Rome: augury (observation of the flight and call of birds), sortilege (casting lots) and haruspicy (examining the liver and entrails of sacrificed animals).
Macer is called up. What will come of tender Love?
Be friends and bravely lug gear on his neck?
Another 'locked out' poem. It starts by describing the fact that this 'Macer' is being called up (much scholarly debate about who this is 'Macer' is) and is off to the wars. The poet extends a brief description of a young man off to the wars into his own situation, an embattled man in love, who cannot keep away from his beloved's locked door.
If only love's weapons could be destroyed. He'd have killed himself now if only cruel Hope did not assure him Nemesis will relent. He prays at the grave of Nemesis's dead sister, that she will pity him. He blames Nemesis's bawd or madam, named as Phryne, for locking him out, and curses her. (Shifting the blame from the beloved to her 'bawd' and bad advisor was a traditional trope in 'locked out' poems).
Greek poetry had traditionally opposed Hope and Nemesis, which adds resonance to their binary opposition here.
The last couplet of Tibullus's last poem curses this bawd or madam, calling down the retribution of the gods on an old woman.
Juster's translation
Juster's translation is efficient but it doesn't zing, not like Rolfe Humphrey's dazzling translation of Lucretius or Peter Fallon's brilliant translation of Virgil's Georgics. Again and again I read couplets which I thought even I could have phrased a bit more smoothly. It's not as baggy as Cecil Day Lewis's translation of the Eclogues, but there's… no… pzazz. No magic.
I swore so often not to go back to her door
yet when I swore, my wilful feet returned. (2.6)
I imagine Juster is conveying the sense accurately, and he keeps very closely to the elegiac format i.e. 6 beats in the first line of each couplet, 5 in the second, throughout. But without the roll and rise:
Whichever god gave beauty to a greedy girl,
alas, he brought much evil with the good,
and so the sobs and brawls resound; in short, it's why
Love is a god who's disrespected now. (2.4)
Close, but no cigar.
I praise the farm and gods of farms; with them as guides
life meant not fending hunger off with acorns. (2.1)
Accurate, efficient but…none of the surprise and joy of really wonderful poetry.
I know I'm meant to be paying attention to Tibullus's achievement as an elegiac poet, noting his expansion of the genre, his three (tiny) sequences of poems to Delia, Nemesis and Marathus, noting the sexual fluidity of ancient Rome, noting his expansion of the genre to include the paean to his patron's son and so on.
But it's hard to take his descriptions of rural idyll seriously, when you know that a) he was actually a well-off aristocrat and city boy and b) from history books, that the friendly family farm described by him and Virgil and Horace had largely disappeared to be replaced by vast latifundia worked by shackled slaves.
Hard to take his complaints about this or that high-class courtesan or pretty boy playing hard to get or demanding expensive gifts, when that was the convention of the time. Hard to take his complaints against luxury very seriously, when historians tell us the 1st century BC saw unprecedented wealth pour into Rome and the lifestyles of the rich meet dizzy heights, and we know he himself was a member of the wealthy equites class.
In other words, almost all the substance of the poems is sophisticated pose and artifice. And, as so often, what I most noted was the references in every poem to slavery, to chains and shackle, to the punishments of whipping and branding (!), to the description of newly imported slaves being lined up on a wooden scaffold and auctioned off. That image, that idea, that suffering, vastly outweighs Tibullus's fake descriptions of his own stereotyped emotions.
I take the point that there was an entire genre of poems called 'at the door' poems or paraklausithyrai. But whenever I think of The Door I can't help remembering the note which says many doors of the rich had a slave shackled to them, to guard them, to prevent admission to undesirables, to call a senior servant to vet visitors, and that if this slave slipped in his duty or spoke out of turn he could be whipped, branded, beaten and, in extreme cases, have his legs broken or be crucified.
Tibullus elegies, translated by A.M Juster with notes and introduction by Robert Maltby, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. All references are to the 2013 paperback edition.
Tibullus Wikipedia article
Tagged A.M. Juster, Aeneas, Albius Tibullus, amor, ancient Egypt, ancient literature, ancient Rome, and haruspicy, Antony and Cleopatra, Apollo, Apuleius, augury, Augustus, Bacchus, Battle of Actium, Bellona, Catullus, Cecil Day-Lewis, Ceres, Charon, Circe, classics, Clodia Metelli, Corfu, Corinna, Cornutus, Cupid, curse poem, Cybele, Cynthia, dactylic hexameter, dactylic pentameter, Delia, Divination, Eclogues, elegiac couplets, elegiacs, elegy, Elysium, equestrian class, Gaul, Georgics, Greek new comedy, Hades, Homer, homosexual love, Horace, Ilia, ISIS, jealousy, latifundia, Lavinia, Lesbia, love poem, Lust, Maecenas, Marathus, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, Medea, Messalinus, Messalla, Mother goddess, Nemesis, Osiris, Ovid, Oxford University Press, paraklausithyron, pederasty, Peter Fallon, Pholoe, Phryne, Plania, Plautus, poetry, Priapus, River Styx, Robert Maltby, Rolfe Humphrey, Roman Empire, Roman gods, Roman Republic, Romulus, same-sex love, Sibyl, Sibylline Books, slave, Slavery, sortilege, Tartarus, the Age of Iron, the Aquitanians, The Art of Love, the Golden Age of Saturn, The Remedy For Love, Tibullus, Tibullus elegies, Titius, tragos, Turnus, Venus, verna, Via Latina, Virgil, witch
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/31/elegies-tibullus-a-m-juster/

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl