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Ovid appears late in the history of the elegy, following the work of the major Roman erotic and neoteric poets as well as the earlier erotic epigrammatists from the Hellenistic period. Thus, confronting a poetic genre that had reached its maturity, a genre that had experimented, within a formalistically defined space, with nearly every tonality of erotic expression, Ovid well knew that most of his readers were already acquainted with the “elegiac code,” its common topoi, its typical erotic scenarios, and the conventional erotic rhetoric it employed. This suggests a crucial peculiarity of the Amores: namely, that while Ovid himself is just setting out, on the cusp of his entire poetic career, his poetic genre is already quite mature. When Ovid had begun his revisions for the second publication of the Amores, Roman literature had already assembled its own “classical” poets – epic (Ennius, Virgil), erotic (Catullus, Cornelius Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, satiric (Ennius, Lucilius), didac ...
Ovid appears late in the history of the elegy, following the work of the major Roman erotic and neoteric poets as well as the earlier erotic epigrammatists from the Hellenistic period. Thus, confronting a poetic genre that had reached its maturity, a genre that had experimented, within a formalistically defined space, with nearly every tonality of erotic expression, Ovid well knew that most of his readers were already acquainted with the “elegiac code,” its common topoi, its typical erotic scenarios, and the conventional erotic rhetoric it employed. This suggests a crucial peculiarity of the Amores: namely, that while Ovid himself is just setting out, on the cusp of his entire poetic career, his poetic genre is already quite mature. When Ovid had begun his revisions for the second publication of the Amores, Roman literature had already assembled its own “classical” poets – epic (Ennius, Virgil), erotic (Catullus, Cornelius Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, satiric (Ennius, Lucilius), didactic (Lucretius). The symptoms of this poetic “belatedness” of Ovid, as traced in the corpus of the second publication of Amores, its dimensions and expressions on a metapoetic as well as dramatic level, form the thematic core of the present study. Contrary to previous elegiac poets, who presented themselves as victims of their erotic passions, Ovid’s elegiac persona from the outset gives the impression of a self-reflective and self-conscious disengagement. This allows the poet-lover an “emotional distance” by which he may narrate his erotic scenario, casting it as a “work” of systematic and voluntary illusion, as a “work of fiction” in the greater context of elegiac poetry. For this reason, the running commentary on the nearly fifty elegies of the Amores in the present work seeks to discover the ways in which the poet turned his poetic belatedness into an advantage. By transforming the erotic discourse of the Amores into a metapoetic voice that comments on itself, Ovid exposes the ideological, philological and aesthetic mechanisms that constitute the “classic” erotic discourse of Roman elegy. It is precisely this “regularization” of the metapoetic voice (indicative of Ovid’s ironic distance from the “dramatic theatre” of Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus) that raises the issue of the socalled “insincerity” of the Amores. Ovid’s programmatic choice was not to depict a “sincere” poet-lover but to demonstrate the ease with which the doctus amator assumes the various roles of the erotic personae of his predecessors, especially of Propertius. In other words, the ovidian lover embarks upon a "secondary" career, his only map and guide being the elegiac code, not the “passion” of his predecessors. Thus, if Propertius could still “convince” his readers that he is a victim of pathetic love, Ovid does not hesitate to confess that in love he is only playing, evermore at play. Moreover, he “exhausts” the rhetoric of passion not in order to charm his beloved but rather to reveal the methodology of the genre, and makes the scenarios, the conventions, and topoi of Roman elegy far too recognizable. In this process (which one may call the “poetics of saturation”), passion (which is usually fundamental to the elegies of Tibullus and Propertius) turns out to be either just a pretext or a romantic joke. The ovidian amator is no longer the pitiful and woeful lover who perceives and understands only what falls within the small ken of his own erotic situation. On the contrary, being the absolute sovereign of the elegiac code, he controls and employs to an exhaustive degree the whole array of conventions and norms of the elegiac genre, either by expanding or parodying them. In this way, Ovid is not simply repeating the earlier “poetic voices” of Propertius and his predecessors, but rather he elevates them, in his unique, self-conscious way, to a higher plane. Certainly, many important studies on ovidian poetics have already moved in a similar direction, and without their vital conclusions our work here would clearly be more difficult. But in more general terms, the modern reader, one familiar with the ovidian bibliography, will know that pride of place has been granted to the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, while the Amores (as well as the Heroides, Ovid’s next “experiment in Elegy”) have a more uneven critical history, remaining under-interpreted and in want of commentary, in comparison at least with the abundance of commentaries published on the elegies of Propertius and Tibullus. Thus, this thesis, “The Rhetoric of Belatedness: A Running Commentary on Ovid’s Amores”, has really something new to add to modern scholarship.
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