P. Knox – A Companion To Ovid

Автор: P. Knox
Название книги: A Companion To Ovid
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Древний мир и Античность
Страницы: 545
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A Companion to Ovid is a comprehensive overview of one of the most influential poets of classical antiquity.
Features more than 30 newly commissioned chapters by noted scholars writing in their areas of specialization
Illuminates various aspects of Ovid's work, such as production, genre, and style
Presents interpretive essays on key poems and collections of poems
Includes detailed discussions of Ovid's primary literary influences and his reception in English literature
Provides a chronology of key literary and historical events during Ovid's lifetime

Ovid is himself the source for most of what we think we know about his life; indeed,
he provides more information about himself than most ancient poets. It is always
hazardous to infer too much or too confi dently from such references in a poet’s own
work: as Ovid himself avers (Am. 3.12.19), nec tamen ut testes mos est audire poetas
(‘nor is it the custom to listen to poets as if they were courtroom witnesses’). It is
nonetheless possible to glean some data about his background and career, not only
from the long autobiographical poem composed toward the end of his life during
his exile on the Black Sea (Tr. 4.10), but also from numerous revealing remarks scattered
throughout his works. His hometown was Sulmo (Tr. 4.10.3 Sulmo mihi patria
est), now called Sulmona, situated in a well-watered valley in the Abruzzi of central
Italy, and in Ovid’s time one of the chief towns of the tribe known as the Paeligni.
He was born Publius Ovidius Naso on 20 March 43 BCE. The signifi cance of this
date was not lost on Ovid later in life, for as he notes (Tr. 4.10.6) it was in this year
that the two consuls Hirtius and Pansa both fell in the campaign against Mark Antony
at the head of the last army of the Roman Republic. Most of the poets Ovid names
in his autobiography began their careers in the confused circumstances of the civil
wars that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination. Virgil, who released his Georgics in
29 BCE in the immediate aftermath of Octavian’s victory at Actium, had earlier composed
his book of Eclogues, in which the tenor of the times is refracted through the
lens of Theocritean bucolic. Horace’s book of Epodes, probably published near the
end of the Triumviral period, also meditates on the fears and apprehensions of that
era. At about the same time, Ovid’s two surviving predecessors in elegy, Tibullus and
Propertius, were producing books in which the harsh realities of the time impinge
on their idealized visions of the life of love. Ovid, so far as we can tell, was touched
by none of this. His career belongs entirely to the early Empire, a time of peace at
least on the domestic front, and the great matters treated in his works are affairs of
the heart and of character, rather than of state.
His fi rst literary performances probably took place several years after the battle
of Actium and the fall of Alexandria, perhaps around 25 BCE. The date can only
be approximate, deriving as it does from information given by Ovid himself
(Tr. 4.10.57–8):
carmina cum primum populo iuuenalia legi,
barba resecta mihi bisue semelue fuit.
When I fi rst read my youthful songs to the public, my beard had been cut but once or
twice.
We may suppose that Ovid was no more than about eighteen years old when this
took place (Wheeler 1925: 11–17), but precision on this score is unimportant: the
point that Ovid makes is about the precociousness of his venture into a life of
poetry.
His family presumably preferred a different career path. As the second son of an
old, equestrian family of considerable standing in the community, Ovid might have
been expected to pursue a career in public life, where opportunities beckoned under
the new regime in Rome. As recently as during the Social War of 91–89 BCE, Sulmo
had aligned itself with the rest of the Paeligni against Rome, but there was a long
tradition of alliance. In his move to consolidate power Augustus sought to draw on
such communities throughout Italy to recruit new magistrates and senators. From
Ovid we learn that he embarked on just such a course: he studied rhetoric in Rome
and Athens, the traditional route to a political career (Wheeler 1925: 4–11). He held
two positions on boards of magistrates, as one of the tresuiri capitales (Tr. 4.10.33–4;
Kenney 1969b: 244), who exercised police functions in the city. And later he informs
us (Fast. 4.383–4) that he held a seat among the decemuiri stlitibus iudicandis
(‘Board of Ten for Judging Lawsuits’), an important judicial post that was commonly
a precursor to seeking the quaestorship and a senatorial career. On Ovid’s testimony
his earliest recitations of poetry took place at the very time when he was ostensibly
embarking on a life in law and politics. He ironically remarks that his father had
hoped for a more lucrative livelihood:
saepe pater dixit ‘studium quid inutile temptas?
Maeonides nullas ipse relinquit opes.’
Often my father said, ‘Why do you attempt a useless pursuit? Homer himself left no
wealth.’
Perhaps his father might have gotten the joke, but if Augustus ever noticed this poem,
he would not have been amused. Ovid abandoned public offi ce for the life of letters,
but his choices in that fi eld were not bound to win him favor.