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Ovid: A Very Short Introduction

2022; Columbia University Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00358118-9812594

2688-5220

Gareth Williams,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Pithy and sinuous, erudite but wearing its learning lightly, fast-moving but lingering long enough to shed fresh light on many parts of Ovid’s poetic corpus, this Very Short Introduction (VSI) packs an admirable amount of information, insight, sociocultural contextualization, and interpretational brio into its 111 pages of main text. For those familiar with Llewelyn Morgan’s long record of published scholarship on Roman poetics, the critical poise and panache on display in this volume will hardly surprise; but he combines that scholarly sophistication with a nimbleness of approach and an accessible mode of presentation that are well made for the VSI readership. It is hard to imagine a VSI volume on Ovid that could be better executed in terms of the balance it achieves between its breadth of vision, on the one hand, and its eye for particularity, on the other: a major strength of this book is that at no point in his coverage of Ovid’s individual works does Morgan lose sight of the larger storyline that gives this VSI so robust a coordinating frame.At first sight Morgan’s study is conventional enough in format: an introductory chapter on Ovid’s life and times gives way to a sequence of chapters that survey the three main phases of his creative life. First, Ovid as elegiac love poet: chapter 2 charts his progress from his early Loves (Amores, ca. 25–15 BCE) to his ever more ambitious strivings in elegiac eroticism in his didactic Art of Love and Cures for Love (Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, written between 1 BCE and 2 CE); Morgan then proceeds in chapter 3 to the so called Heroides, or the elegiac letters purportedly written by some of most storied women of myth to their absent, errant, and/or abhorrent male lovers (the “double letters” that constitute the last six poems of the collection give the males a right of reply). Second, the works that dominated Ovid’s “middle phase” between 2 and 8 CE: chapter 4 is devoted to his epic-scale compendium of stories of change in his Metamorphoses (in so many ways a poem on the nature of change itself), and chapter 5 to Ovid’s elegiac enunciation of the Roman festival calendar in his six-book Fasti, running from January to June. Third, in chapter 6, Ovid’s last phase after he was exiled by the emperor Augustus in 8 CE, a turning point that partly explains why his extant Fasti expires so abruptly at the end of June: time stops as the poet enters the temporal, geographical, and social wasteland of Tomis, his place of exile on the western coast of the Black Sea, where he penned five books of Sad Songs (Tristia) and four books of Letters from the Black Sea (Epistulae ex Ponto) as well as a vitriolic curse of extraordinary length and density (his so called Ibis) against an unnamed enemy back at Rome. M.’s book closes suddenly at the end of chapter 6, his last words addressing Ovid’s presumed death in Tomis between 17 and 18 CE.Morgan’s tour of the Ovidian corpus is as much a visitation of the major themes and approaches that have dominated Ovidian scholarship in the last decades, and in this respect the book is a bona fide VSI in Ovid studies. Matters of gender, Ovid’s bold experimentation with genre, his debt to Alexandrian poetic precedents and ideals (especially as mediated through Callimachus), the complex and often ambiguous political valence of his writings in relation to Augustus (pro- or anti-Augustan, or somewhere in between?), sexual violence in the Metamorphoses in particular, his techniques of allusive appeal to a dizzying array of precedents in the Greco-Roman literary canon from Homer onward, his cultivation of arresting metrical effects: in these and other well-trodden areas, this VSI is a state-of-the-art production on a theoretical front, but at no point does Morgan lapse into a form of abstract theorization at a distance from the Ovidian texts. His recourse to the scholarly apparatus is discreet and understated, and he tends to follow a critical “middle way” on issues of long-standing controversy (e.g., the authenticity of various of the Heroides, the full cause(s) of Ovid’s banishment in 8 CE, or the extent to which the Fasti and the Metamorphoses were revised in Tomis).In different hands the sequential course of Morgan’s study might have made for a somewhat predictable storyline of Ovid’s increasingly restless generic experimentation from the early Amores onward, down to his late reversion to elegy in exile. But at least three features of the book show a special flair and enterprise despite Morgan’s relative orthodoxy of format. First, while the coordinates of his overall treatment of a given work may be familiar enough to specialists in the field, Morgan’s easy style nicely communicates complex ideas and scholarly controversies to a lay audience; but the specific textual examples by which he illustrates broader phenomena within the given work sparkle with insight and surprise, as if Morgan relies on these arresting cases in point for much of the most eye-catching thrust of his proceedings. So, for example, in Amores 2.19 Ovid urges a husband to do more to protect his wife from erotic predators like our rakish poet; for what interest could there be in the erotic pursuit if it were made too easy? Ovid’s position here, in the last poem of Amores 2, is tactical at the poetic as well as the erotic level; for unless the husband better protects against interlopers like Ovid, and “if the poet-lover is not going to be locked out any more, where is a third book of love-elegy going to come from?” (27–28). In effect, lockdown in 2.19 opens the door to Amores 3—an ingenious metapoetic maneuver that well illustrates the weight that Morgan attaches to particular (and particularly telling) textual examples as opposed to larger, less acute generalities.Second, Morgan’s turns of phrase are often eye-catching in their flashes of color and wit, and suggestively Ovidian in their playful spirit: so, for example, “When Ovid does smut, you can at least be sure it’s smut with a long and prestigious poetic pedigree” (31); “The lover is advised to Romansplain” (32); “Ovid maintains a fuzzy . . . picture of sex in the City of Rome” (33); “(to Ancaeus is attributed temeraria uirtus, which would be good Latin for ‘toxic masculinity’). . . . This is Ovid as literary hooligan” (68). Such touches lend a distinctive personality to Morgan’s writing, a feature that attractively suggests a truly engaged ownership of (and even a certain identification with) his subject; and these appealing turns of phrase are compounded by the nuggets of side-fact and fancy that he works in along the way (e.g., “the ‘molly houses’ of 18th- and 19th-century England,” so named from Latin mollis (soft) [26]; the fact that “copies of the Ars Amatoria were still being barred entry by United States Customs as recently as 1928” [35]; the fact that there is in the Ukraine “still a small town called Ovidiopol” [110]). Third, and to develop this last point: Morgan does not include a single section devoted to the complex reception of Ovid’s works through the ages, but at the end of each of chapters 2 to 6 he offers brief and engaging examples of that reception, often in the eye-opening spirit of his factual aperçus, as sampled above. These glances do enough to give the Ovidian reception adequate representation in this volume without unduly diverting Morgan from his main agenda.All in all, this VSI surely deserves to be recognized as a model of its kind by an author who is an acclaimed expert in the study of Ovid but also adept at conveying the wonders of his subject matter to a wider, nonspecialist audience. Insights abound in Morgan’s graceful, sensitive, and well-written book, but perhaps its greatest strength lies in its accessibility as a first-rate resource for new initiates to what Ovid himself unblushingly heralded as his immortal poetics.