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Main article: Epistulae ex Ponto The Epistulae ex Ponto is a collection in four books of further poetry from exile. The Epistulae are each addressed to a different friend and focus more desperately than the Tristia on securing his recall from exile. The poems mainly deal with requests for friends to speak on his behalf to members of the imperial family, discussions of writing with friends, and descriptions of life in exile. The first book has ten pieces in which Ovid describes the state of his health (10), his hopes, memories, and yearning for Rome (3, 6, 8), and his needs in exile (3). Book 2 contains impassioned requests to Germanicus (1 and 5) and various friends to speak on his behalf at Rome while he describes his despair and life in exile. Book 3 has nine poems in which Ovid addresses his wife (1) and various friends. It includes a telling of the story of Iphigenia in Tauris (2), a poem against criticism (9), and a dream of Cupid (3). Book 4, the final work of Ovid, in 16 poems talks to friends and describes his life as an exile further. Poems 10 and 13 describe Winter and Spring at Tomis, poem 14 is halfhearted praise for Tomis, 7 describes its geography and climate, and 4 and 9 are congratulations on friends for their consulships and requests for help. Poem 12 is addressed to a Tuticanus, whose name, Ovid complains, does not fit into meter. The final poem is addressed to an enemy whom Ovid implores to leave him alone. The last elegiac couplet is translated: "Where’s the joy in stabbing your steel into my dead flesh?/ There’s no place left where I can be dealt fresh wounds."[42] Lost works One loss which Ovid himself described is the first five-book edition of the Amores from which nothing has come down to us. The greatest loss is Ovid's only tragedy, Medea, from which only a few lines are preserved. Quintilian admired the work a great deal and considered it a prime example of Ovid's poetic talent.[43] Lactantius quotes from a lost translation by Ovid of Aratus' Phaenomena, although the poem's ascription to Ovid is insecure because it is never mentioned in Ovid's other works.[44] A line from a work entitled Epigrammata is cited by Priscian.[45] Even though it is unlikely, if the last six books of the Fasti ever existed, they constitute a great loss. Ovid also mentions some occasional poetry (Epithalamium,[46] dirge,[47] even a rendering in Getic[48]) which does not survive. Also lost is the final portion of the Medicamina. Spurious works Consolatio ad Liviam ("Consolation to Livia") The Consolatio is a long elegiac poem of consolation to Augustus' wife Livia on the death of her son Drusus. The poem opens by advising Livia not to try and hide her sad emotions and contrasts Drusus' military virtue with his death. Drusus' funeral and the tributes of the imperial family are described as are his final moments and Livia's lament over the body, which is compared to birds. The laments of the city of Rome as it greets his funeral procession and the gods are mentioned, and Mars from his temple dissuades the Tiber river from quenching the pyre out of grief.[49] Grief is expressed for his lost military honors, his wife, and his mother. The poet asks Livia to look for consolation in Tiberius. The poem ends with an address by Drusus to Livia assuring him of his fate in Elysium. Although this poem was connected to the Elegiae in Maecenatem, it is now thought that they are unconnected. The date of the piece is unknown, but a date in the reign of Tiberius has been suggested because of that emperor's prominence in the poem.[49] Halieutica ("On Fishing") The Halieutica is a fragmentary didactic poem in 134 poorly preserved hexameter lines and is considered spurious. The poem begins by describing how every animal possesses the ability to protect itself and how fish use ars to help themselves. The ability of dogs and land creatures to protect themselves is described. The poem goes on to list the places which are best for fishing and which types of fish should be caught. Although Pliny the Elder mentions a Halieutica by Ovid, which was composed at Tomis near the end of Ovid's life, modern scholars believe Pliny was mistaken in his attribution and that the poem is not genuine.[50] Nux ("The Walnut Tree") This short poem in 91 elegiac couplets is a monologue spoken by a walnut tree asking that boys not pelt her with stones to get her fruit. The tree contrasts the formerly fruitful golden age with the present barren time, in which its fruit is violently ripped off and its branches broken. The tree compares itself to several mythological characters, praises the peace the emperor provides, and prays to be destroyed rather than suffer. The poem is considered spurious because it incorporates allusions to Ovid's works in an uncharacteristic way, although the piece is thought to be contemporary or by a poet of the same period.[51] Somnium ("The Dream") This poem, traditionally placed at Amores 3.5 is considered spurious. The poet describes a dream to an interpreter, saying that he sees while escaping from the heat of noon a white heifer near a bull; when the heifer is pecked by a crow, it leaves the bull for a meadow with other bulls. The interpreter interprets the dream as a love allegory; the bull represents the poet, the heifer a girl, and the crow an old woman. The old woman spurs the girl to leave her lover and find someone else. The poem is known to have circulated independently and its lack of engagement with Tibullan or Propertian elegy argue in favor of its spuriousness, however, the poem does seem to be datable to the early empire.[52] Style Ovid is traditionally considered the final significant love elegist in the evolution of the genre and one of the most versatile in his handling of the genre's conventions. Like the other canonical elegiac poets Ovid takes on a persona in his works that emphasizes subjectivity and personal emotion over traditional militaristic and public goals, a convention which has been linked by some scholars with the relative stability provided by the Augustan settlement.[53][54] However, although Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius may have been inspired in part by personal experience, the validity of "biographical" readings of these poets' works is a serious point of scholarly contention.[55] Ovid has been seen as taking on a persona in his poetry which is far more emotionally detached from his mistress and less involved in crafting a unique emotional realism within the text than the other elegists.[56] This attitude, coupled with the lack of testimony which identifies Ovid's Corinna with a real person[57] has led scholars to conclude that Corinna was never a real person and that Ovid's relationship with her is an invention for his elegiac project.[58] Some scholars have even interpreted Corinna as a metapoetic symbol for the elegiac genre itself.[59] Ovid has been considered a highly inventive love elegist who plays with traditional elegiac conventions and elaborates the themes of the genre;[60] Quintilian even calls him a "sportive" elegist.[61] In some poems, he uses traditional conventions in new ways, such as the paraklausithyron of Am. 1.6, while other poems seem to have no elegiac precedents and appear to be Ovid's own generic innovations, such as the poem on Corinna's ruined hair (Am. 1.14). Ovid has been traditionally seen as far more sexually explicit in his poetry than the other elegists.[62] His erotic elegy covers a wide spectrum of themes and viewpoints; the Amores focus on Ovid's relationship with Corinna, the love of mythical characters is the subject of the Heroides, and the Ars Amatoria and the other didactic love poems provide a handbook for relationships and seduction from a (mock-)"scientific" viewpoint. In his treatment of elegy, scholars have traced the influence of rhetorical education in his enumeration, in his effects of surprise, and in his transitional devices.[63] Some commentators have also noted the influence of Ovid's interest in love elegy in his other works, such as the Fasti, and have distinguished his "elegiac" style from his "epic" style. Richard Heinze in his famous Ovids elegische Erzählung (1919) delineated the distinction between Ovid's styles by comparing the Fasti and Metamorphoses versions of the same legends, such as the treatment of the Ceres–Proserpina story in both poems. Heinze demonstrated that, "whereas in the elegiac poems a sentimental and tender tone prevails, the hexameter narrative is characterized by an emphasis on solemnity and awe..."[64] His general line of argument has been accepted by Brooks Otis, who wrote: The gods are "serious" in epic as they are not in elegy; the speeches in epic are long and infrequent compared to the short, truncated and frequent speeches of elegy; the epic writer conceals himself while the elegiac fills his narrative with familiar remarks to the reader or his characters; above all perhaps, epic narrative is continuous and symmetrical... whereas elegiac narrative displays a marked asymmetry ...[65] Otis wrote that in the Ovidian poems of love, he "was burlesquing an old theme rather than inventing a new one."[66] Otis states that the Heroides are more serious and, though some of them are "quite different from anything Ovid had done before [...] he is here also treading a very well-worn path" to relate that the motif of females abandoned by or separated from their men was a "stock motif of Hellenistic and neoteric poetry (the classic example for us is, of course, Catullus 66)."[66] Otis also states that Phaedra and Medea, Dido and Hermione (also present in the poem) "are clever re-touchings of Euripides and Vergil."[66] Some scholars, such as Kenney and Clausen, have compared Ovid with Virgil. According to them, Virgil was ambiguous and ambivalent while Ovid was defined and, while Ovid wrote only what he could express, Virgil wrote for the use of language.[67] Legacy Criticism A 1484 figure from Ovide Moralisé, edition by Colard Mansion. Ovid's works have been interpreted in various ways over the centuries with attitudes that depended on the social, religious and literary contexts of different times. It is known that since his own lifetime, he was already famous and criticized. In the Remedia Amoris, Ovid reports criticism from people who considered his books insolent.[68] Ovid responded to this criticism by writing the following: "Gluttonous Envy, burst: my name’s well known already:/it will be more so, if only my feet travel the road they’ve started./But you’re in too much of a hurry: if I live you’ll be more than sorry:/many poems, in fact, are forming in my mind."[69] After such criticism subsided, Ovid became one of the best known and most loved Roman poets during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.[70] Writers in the Middle Ages used his work as a way to read and write about sex and violence without orthodox "scrutiny routinely given to commentaries on the Bible".[71] In the Middle Ages the voluminous Ovide moralisé, a French work that moralizes 15 books of the Metamorphoses was composed. This work then influenced Chaucer. Ovid's poetry provided inspiration for the Renaissance idea of humanism, and more specifically, for many Renaissance painters and writers. Likewise, Arthur Golding moralized his own translation of the full 15 books, and published it in 1567. This version was the same version used as a supplement to the original Latin in the Tudor-era grammar schools that influenced such major Renaissance authors as Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Many non-English authors were heavily influence from Ovid's works as well. Montaigne, for example, alluded to Ovid several times in his Essais, specifically in his comments on Education of Children when he says: The first taste I had for books came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.[72] Cervantes also used the Metamorphoses as a platform of inspiration for his prodigious novel Don Quixote. Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1859. National Gallery (London). In the 16th century, some Jesuit schools of Portugal cut several passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. While the Jesuits saw his poems as elegant compositions worthy of being presented to students for educational purposes, they also felt his works as a whole might corrupt students.[73] The Jesuits took much of their knowledge of Ovid to the Portuguese colonies. According to Serafim Leite (1949), the ratio studiorum was in effect in Colonial Brazil during the early 17th century, and in this period Brazilian students read works like the Epistulae ex Ponto to learn Latin grammar.[74] In Spain, Ovid is both praised and criticized by Cervantes in his Don Quixote where he warns against satires that can exile poets, as happened to Ovid.[75] In the 16th century, Ovid's works were criticized in England. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered that a contemporary translation of Ovid's love poems be publicly burned in 1599. The Puritans of the following century viewed Ovid as pagan, thus as an immoral influence.[76] John Dryden composed a famous translation of the Metamorphoses into stopped rhyming couplets during the 18th century, when Ovid was "refashioned [...] in its own image, one kind of Augustanism making over another."[70] The Romantic movement of the 19th century, in contrast, considered Ovid and his poems "stuffy, dull, over-formalized and lacking in genuine passion."[70] Romantics might have preferred his poetry of exile.[77] The picture Ovid among the Scythians, painted by Delacroix, portrays the last years of the poet in exile in Scythia, and was seen by Baudelaire, Gautier and Edgar Degas.[78] Baudelaire took the opportunity to write a long essay about the life of an exiled poet like Ovid.[79] This shows that the exile of Ovid had some influence in 19th century Romanticism since it makes connections with its key concepts such as wildness and the misunderstood genius.[80] Ovid's Influence Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. Literary and artistic (c. 800–810) Moduin, a poet in the court circle of Charlemagne, adopts the pen name Naso. (12th century) The troubadours and the medieval courtoise literature (13th century) The Roman de la Rose, Dante Alighieri (14th century) Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, Juan Ruiz (15th century) Sandro Botticelli (16th century–17th century) Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Marston, Cephalus and Procris; Narcissus (17th century) John Milton, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, 1605 and 1615, Luis de Góngora's La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 1613, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe by Nicolas Poussin, 1651, Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1620 (1820s) During his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin compared himself to Ovid; memorably versified in the epistle To Ovid (1821). The exiled Ovid also features in his long poem Gypsies, set in Moldavia (1824), and in Canto VIII of Eugene Onegin (1825–1832). (1916) James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a quotation from Book 8 of Metamorphoses and introduces Stephen Dedalus. The Ovidian reference to "Daedalus" was in Stephen Hero, but then metamorphosed to "Dedalus" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses. (1920s) The title of the second poetry collection by Osip Mandelstam, Tristia (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. Mandelstam's collection is about his hungry, violent years immediately after the October Revolution. (1951) Six Metamorphoses after Ovid by Benjamin Britten, for solo oboe, evokes images of Ovid's characters from Metamorphoses. (1960) God Was Born in Exile, the novel by the Romanian writer Vintila Horia about Ovid's stay in exile (the novel received the Prix Goncourt in 1960). (1960s–2010s) Bob Dylan has made repeated use of Ovid's wording, imagery, and themes. (1978) Australian author David Malouf's novel An Imaginary Life is about Ovid's exile in Tomis. (1998) In Pandora, by Anne Rice, Pandora cites Ovid as a favorite poet and author of the time, quoting him to her lover Marius de Romanus. (2000) The Art of Love by Robin Brooks, a comedy, emphasizing Ovid's role as lover. Broadcast May 23 on BBC Radio 4, with Bill Nighy and Anne-Marie Duff (not to be confused with the 2004 radio play by the same title on Radio 3). (2004) The Art of Love by Andrew Rissik, a drama, part of a trilogy, which speculates on the crime which sent Ovid into exile. Broadcast April 11 on BBC Radio 4, with Stephen Dillane and Juliet Aubrey (not to be confused with the 2000 radio play by the same title on Radio 4).[81] (2006) American musician Bob Dylan's album Modern Times contains songs with borrowed lines from Ovid's Poems of Exile, from Peter Green's translation. The songs are "Workingman's Blues #2", "Ain't Talkin'", "The Levee's Gonna Break", and "Spirit on the Water". (2007) Russian author Alexander Zorich's novel Roman Star is about the last years of Ovid's life. (2008) "The Love Song of Ovid", a two-hour radio documentary by Damiano Pietropaolo, recorded on location in Rome (the recently restored house of Augustus on the Roman forum), Sulmona (Ovid’s birthplace) and Constanta (modern day Tomis, in Romania). Broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC Radio One, Dec. 18 and 19, 2008. (2012) The House Of Rumour, a novel by British author Jake Arnott, opens with a passage from Metamorphoses 12.39–63, and the author muses on Ovid's prediction of the internet in that passage. Dante twice mentions him in: De vulgari eloquentia, along with Lucan, Virgil, and Statius as one of the four regulati poetae (ii, vi, 7) Inferno ranks him with Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Virgil (Inferno, IV,88). Retellings, adaptations, and translations of Ovidian works (1767) Apollo et Hyacinthus, an early opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1938) Daphne, an opera by Richard Strauss (1949) Orphée, a film by Jean Cocteau, retelling of the Orpheus myth from the Metamorphoses (1978) Ovid's Metamorphoses (Translation in Blank Verse), by Brookes More (1978) Ovid's Metamorphoses in European Culture (Commentary), by Wilmon Brewer (1991) The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr (1997) Polaroid Stories by Naomi Iizuka, a retelling of Metamorphoses, with urchins and drug addicts as the gods. (1994) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun is an anthology of contemporary poetry envisioning Ovid's Metamorphoses (1997) Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes is a modern poetic translation of twenty four passages from Metamorphoses (2000) Ovid Metamorphosed edited by Phil Terry, a short story collection retelling several of Ovid's fables. (2002) An adaptation of Metamorphoses of the same name by Mary Zimmerman was performed at the Circle in the Square Theatre [82] (2006) Patricia Barber's song cycle, Mythologies (2011) A stage adaptation of Metamorphoses by Peter Bramley, entitled Ovid's Metamorphoses was performed by Pants on Fire, presented by the Carol Tambor Theatrical Foundation at the Flea Theater in New York City and toured the United Kingdom (2012) "The Song of Phaethon", a post-rock/musique concrete song written and performed by Ian Crause (former leader of Disco Inferno) in Greek epic style, based on a Metamorphoses tale (as recounted in Hughes' Tales from Ovid) and drawing parallels between mythology and current affairs. |
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