of the poet Catullus (who died, young, in the mid-fifties B.C.E.). Ovid’s erotic poetry represents—to my mind, anyway—the ancient world’s tightest combination of delight in the world with delight in writing. He is by far the keenest observer of early Imperial Rome’s details, and the wittiest confabulator to use this material, from the look and sound of public entertainments to the mechanics of recreational sex, and from the distant spectacles of large historical events to the moods in an apartment where a courtesan tries a new hairstyle to better suit the shape of her face or fights for her life after an abortion.
But even though some of the topics are still customarily called “light,” the term “frivolous” is unfair: at this stage of his career (as opposed to his time of exile after 8 C.E., when loneliness, humiliation, and a campaign to be recalled produced what can look like real personal writing), Ovid is not concerned with anything so trivial as his own physical desires or emotional attachments, or even his own wider circumstances or experiences. Even his career as a roué may have been fictional or brief, given what he writes in exile in the collections entitled Tristia (Sad Things) and Letters from Pontus (the Black Sea, beside which he made his involuntary new home) about his loving, loyal, desperately missed third wife, whom he probably married around the age of thirty, when many Roman men contracted their first legal unions).
But in the texts of the Amores and Ars Amatoria themselves lies the main evidence that Ovid’s love poetry was about itself, so that his freedom and achievement there went far beyond the necessary narrow limits of self-depiction or self-expression: it was creation in a broader sense that concerned him, creation feeding on the infinity of literary possibilities rather than the decidedly finite store of individual human experience. The writing luxuriates in rhetorical convolutions and send-ups of the love elegy genre that it technically inhabits, and is obviously determined to use all its contents as mere combustible material for verbal and dramatic fireworks.
But in a stunt such as this, the indispensable thing, the thing that prevents the composition from being a mere pile of dry tiresomeness that over time will grow soggy and rot, is the spark of genius. If genius is above all the ability to create a new world, then Ovid is one of literature’s great geniuses; and if the genius of modernity is above all independent, individual creation, then Ovid is the foundational modern mind. Authors of all kinds had come before him, but in my opinion he was the first writer, and the erotic poetry seems a fitting prelude to the first writerly masterpiece, his epic Metamorphoses, in which the whole range of Greek and Roman mythology is a mere playground for his narrative skill.
Ovid’s Life
This poet’s biography, plausibly presented in one of his exile poems, looks at the beginning a good deal like that of a typical Roman author of the Republican Era, which ended when Ovid was still a child. His family belonged to the wealthy, land-owning Italian aristocracy and sent him to Rome to distinguish himself first as a student of famous rhetoricians and then as an advocate in the law courts and as a politician. Much later in life, he asserted that his undeniable natural impulse was toward poetry, and that this was the reason he shunned a political career, but he very likely perceived early on that politics was no longer the best choice for a really ambitious man.
Though the senate, the popular assembly, and the law courts met as usual, important policy in these new Imperial times was decided within the emperor’s household, leaving orators in the public sphere to speak only on cue and to excite no one. No wonder Ovid evinced a stubborn interest in another branch of literature than political or forensic rhetoric. And given the opportunities a previous generation of poets had found to be celebrated in their own right (though their voices were hardly autonomous), no wonder this branch was poetry.
This was because of the patronage of a remarkable man. Caesar Octavian, ruling under the title Augustus (roughly, “the Man Who Is the Source of Growth,” with sacral overtones), had ended a hundred years of on-and-off civil wars. After his decisive victory in the Battle of Actium (31 B.C.E.) allowed him to take control of Rome’s political system as the first of the Roman emperors, he propagandized—partly though poets—that under Roman governance the world was now beginning a golden age of peace and prosperity. This news, of course, would have made little impression had he not been a supremely able administrator.
The most solid and lasting evidence of Augustus’s skill and judgment survives from his literary program. Employing his highly cultured friends Maecenas and Messalla as talent scouts, he fostered several geniuses, apparently never snubbing obscure origins or an uncongenial political past. Horace (65–8 B.C.E.) was actually the son of a freed slave and had fought in the losing Republic army against the forces of Julius Caesar, the new emperor’s adoptive father and quasi-predecessor. Nonetheless, under Augustus’s auspices and Maecenas’s management Horace was funded, defended, and not overtaxed with demands for court poetry. Another poet was Virgil, and it is arguable that his career could not even have started without the emperor’s help.
Perhaps in part because Augustus was firmly settled in power and less in need of kudos by the time of Ovid’s early maturity, or perhaps because Ovid’s inherited status was higher, or perhaps simply because of his innate independence of mind, the poet’s erotic verses have a very different tone from that of anything by his older colleagues. Though Ovid was ostensibly pro-Augustan, his support was expressed in such flip connections that he must not have felt any great pressure to propagandize, or even to avoid constant irony about the very existence of the public sphere, which he depicts mainly as a stage for flirtation. An anticipated Triumph (a grandiose parade celebrating a major military victory) by a young relative and protégé of Augustus, reports Ovid in Book I of the Ars Amatoria, will be an ideal occasion for picking up a girl; a man on the make can plant himself next to one and identify each part of the pageant representing conquered places, peoples, and leaders:
Tell her everything, and not just if you’re bid;
If you don’t know, respond as if you did. (I.221–222)
The content and tone of the erotic poetry is one basis for debate about the most intriguing juncture in Ovid’s life. In 8 C.E. he found Augustus to be something other than a benevolent dictator and patron of the arts. There is no way to know the precise nature of the poet’s indiscretions—as tantalizingly cited by himself in Tristia 2.207 as carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake”—that brought this change about (though Augustus’s daughter Julia, notoriously promiscuous, is a good candidate for involvement, and a conspiracy within the imperial household was harshly repressed around the time Ovid was banished), but whatever happened was so enraging to the emperor that it saw the poet exiled to the hardscrabble outpost of Tomis (modern Constanta, in Romania), toward the far end of the Black Sea. Ovid pleaded in hundreds of lines of exile poetry to be allowed to return, but Augustus’s anger was implacable—or more than implacable, as it survived his death, to keep Ovid at his immense distance from the Roman metropolis until the poet’s own death three years later.
How could the emperor resist such appeals? Ovid’s poetic reports swell with images of the wild, barren, freezing country he has landed in and the dangers to the fortified outpost from attacking barbarians, whose poisoned arrows land in the street and stick in the roofs. But making the best of it, he learns (or so he claims) the local language well enough to compose a poem about the apotheosis of Augustus (imperial propaganda ascribed to him divine ancestry and a heavenly destiny); the locals, hearing a recitation, are sure (according to Ovid) that this will win a summons home. Interestingly, grave as the offense must have been to have brought a punishment this harsh and inescapable, the scandal never broke—into the historical record, that is. Perhaps the permanent exile of a popular, well-connected poet served mainly as a warning and helped keep the facts hushed up.
In any case, Ovid’s several mentions of his erotic poetry as forming part of Augustus’s motivation are probably little more than an attempt to throw readers off the trail. If Augustus did object to the admittedly irreverent poems, then why hadn’t he done
