and the poet’s infatuation is credible. Cynthia and Delia, it might be said, are more convincing than if we saw them only through a man’s lovesick mind. They don’t retreat quickly and irrevocably from idealization into the obscurity of resentment and estrangement; they come and go, and their moods and circumstances change realistically. They don’t disappear when their admirer isn’t there but have independent occupations such as religious observances and visits among women friends, and they display their own learning and tastes. Here, where the female protagonists are probably for the most part fictional, their roles cohere and convince. In Augustan Rome, with its army of courtesans who were both consumers and consumed, cultured and part of the culture in the first really well-established imperial society, a form of literature became popular that still rings true.
Elegiac meter is an excellent vehicle for this achievement. The meter consists of an indefinite series of couplets, the first line of each being the same as an epic hexameter, or six-foot unit. The basic schema of the hexameter is the following, with one long (—) and two short syllables
But most pairs of short syllables can be replaced by a single long one. This is because Latin meter is quantitative, not qualitative, as in English verse. In quantitative meter it takes longer to pronounce some syllables than others, whereas in qualitative meter the rhythm on which the line is built is based on stress, on whether the natural beat in a word falls on a particular syllable or not. The final long syllable of the hexameter can be replaced by a single short one.
It is an organic, flowing meter in Greek and Latin, pausing where the words for a single image or action are likely to pause, and so apt for narrative, as in English, where the often-cited example is Longfellow’s “American epic,” Evangeline:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic.
But in elegiac couplets the hexameter alternates with a line that has a mandatory, very distinct pause separating the first two-and-one-half feet from the second; these two halves together amount to five feet and give the line its name, “pentameter.” This one, with conventional replacement syllables, would be:
The translations in this volume show a rare commitment to reproducing in English the authentic sound of Roman elegiac couplets, and along with it their essential effect, commonly called the “pointed style” of later Roman rhetoric:
My one-time love, who started up with only me,
I see is now Rome’s common property.
Now, stop me, but I’d swear my books produced her fame.
And so it is: my Muse spread wide her name.
I earned this! Why did I proclaim her form and face
Until my verse became her marketplace?
(Amores III.12.5–10)
As in English heroic couplets, where rhyme packages blank verse into compact but malleable pairs of lines (like Pope’s “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man”), elegiac verse lends itself to pithiness as well as rhetorical or narrative flow. Typical lyric meters dictate a stanza of a special form, and if the number of stanzas is not limited by the character of the genre (as in a Greek choral ode or a sonnet), the sheer difficulty of a stanza’s components is likely to intervene. Eugene Onegin aside, it’s just about impossible to rattle on and on in sonnets.
But in elegiac couplets, that hybrid form between lyric and epic, you could rattle on and on—and at the same time easily draw attention away from the subject matter and to yourself, particularly to your processes of thinking and writing. The pairs of lines, moving forward in measured but unlimited sequence, invite all kinds of play with words and ideas both within and across the pairs. The meter is an ideal form for narrative that comments on itself, like the vignettes in Ovid’s Amores. It is also good for lively didactic poetry like Ars Amatoria. More traditional didactic poems in hexameter date back to Hesiod, mythology and legend and fable being natural concomitants of advice for success in life or in a particular calling, but the didacticism of worldly sophistication needed a framework on which it was easier to hang qualifications, quips, irony, sneers, self-deprecation, and many other kinds of writerly performance.
It was through the elegiac form that Ovid took ancient erotic poetry to its logical conclusion. In our culture, that conclusion would have been of the opposite type, familiar in certain pop phenomena: the flourishes of music and literature have been cut down further and further, from thoughts to emotions to physical sensations and even mere physiological responses: fight, flight, or pursuit. But in Imperial Rome, as a triumph of a poet’s pride and will, the personal is pared away more and more severely—under the guise of play—until there is nothing left but his knowledge, skill, and adaptability.
He begins by parodying the investment scene of the great Alexandrian poet Callimachus, who reports that, when as a child he had started to compose epic poetry, Apollo swooped down and forced him to rethink his vocation. Ovid at the start of his poetic career writes one hexameter line of epic—and Cupid steals the final foot of the second line! The poet is annoyed—he doesn’t even have a girlfriend. Cupid obligingly shoots him, but doesn’t provide an object for his passion. (Corinna, named after a poetaster from Boetia, a Greek land notorious for stupidity, appears only in Poem 3.) Throughout the collection, the lover’s stances continue to appear contrarian or trivializing in comparison even to those of his mannered predecessors in love elegy, and he ventures into distinctly unromantic territory in quest of novelty and fun.
Propertius’s and Tibullus’s beloveds are loveliest when dressed simply and naturally; Ovid writes that he used to rail against Corinna dying her hair, but that’s no longer necessary, because one potion caused it all to fall out (I.14). His persona lectures Corinna in lofty philosophical terms as she recovers from a traumatic abortion (II.14). On and on he goes, treating the mere idea of a love affair as a purely intellectual exercise, and lampooning his poetic colleagues who have seemed to take the matter more seriously. Quip by quip, antithesis by mutually annihilating antithesis, he mows his way through sensation, sentiment, and sentimentality, leaving nothing behind but the magic show itself.
Ars Amatoria and its later companion Remedia Amoris (Remedy for Love, or how to fall out of it) take ancient love elegy to the brink of destruction and push it over—and Ovid did kill off the genre by making it impossible for any would-be literary swain to take himself at all seriously. There were in fact no more love poets of any significance, working in any meter, during antiquity, and though the entire Ovidian corpus was exuberantly popular during the Middle Ages, courtly love was built up as a separate edifice on a Christian model: worshipful, self-sacrificing, and tragic.
I think Ovid’s final blow to eroticism was his use of the didactic form. Didactic poetry was a lofty undertaking; the greatest Roman example was Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, a scientific and philosophical account of the world’s workings and life’s purposes. For didacticism to address love affairs, which for Roman men were supposed to be no more than physical and cultural pleasures, and which for freedwomen were largely a commercial business they understood well enough already, was absurd—and offensive? Not the latter, I think.
Ovid
