Ovid As An Epic Poet PDF
Preview Ovid As An Epic Poet
OVID AS AN EPIC POET OVID AS AN EPIC POET BY BROOKS OTIS Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities Stanford University CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1966 PUBLISHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W. l American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022 West African Office: P.M.B. 5181, Ibadan, Nigeria Printed in Great Britain at the University Printing Ho11se,C ambridge (Brooke Crutchley, University Printer) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUE CARD NUMBER: 65-19145 CONTENTS Preface page vu List of Abbreviations I The Problem l II The Limitations of the Elegist 4 III The Plan of Ovid's Epic 45 IV The Divine Comedy 91 V The Avenging Gods 128 VI The Pathos of Love: I 166 VII The Pathos of Love: II VIII Troy and Rome IX Conclusion Appendix: On the Sources used by Ovid 346 Index of PassagesQ J!.otedo r Referredt o 395 General Index 400 PREFACE This book has a rather complicated history. I became interested in Ovid when I was working with E. K. Rand at Harvard some thirty years ago. My primary concern at the time was with the MSS of the Metamorphosesb ut I subsequently published my ideas on Ovid's poetry in an article (' Ovid and the Augustans') which appeared in the 193 8 Transactions of the American Philological Association.T hen many other duties and interests intervened and it was under very different circumstances that I finally returned to Ovid. Yet without the article just mentioned, this book would probably never have been written. It is some sense a palinode, a solemn act of penance for that article. The other and more direct origin of this book has been already explained in the preface to Virgil (Clarendon Press, 1964) and need not be repeated here. But wholly apart from any personal reasons, there is a much more important excuse for these pages that requires at least a brief explanation. Despite the long-standing popularity of Ovid and his obvious inBuence, he has not received much attention from the literary critics and has been (as I think) often misunderstood by classical scholars. Patrick Wilkinson's excellent Ovid Recalled( Cambridge, 1955) has, however, done much to compensate for previous neg lect. Though designed as a work of popularization, it is in fact as scholarly as it is delightful. No one in my opinion has written a more perceptive or more balanced account of Ovid's total work. But the book was not intended to be a critical discussion of the text and sources of the poems. In particular, the problem of the Metamorphoses-its plan, origins, style and 'epic' character-was only cursorily treated. Nor can it be said that any ofWilkinson's predecessors-such as Georges Lafaye, Richard Heinze, Edgar Martini, E. K. Rand, or Hermann Frankel-have fully discussed, let alone 'solved', the problem. In fact the 'problem' has usually Vil PREFACE been ignored: the Metamorphosesh as all too often been thought to be a wholly un-enigmatic work that he who runs may read. In any event, no one, to my best knowledge, has tried to describe the 'plan' or 'structure' of the Metamorphosesa s I have done in this book. I cannot, of course, presume to judge what other scholars will say of it. It is nothing I set out to find (its discovery was largely an accident) and I myself have regarded it with considerable suspicion. On the whole it seems to me to be a reality (it corresponds in some sense to Ovid's intentions) though of course there is much room for dispute as to details. But I am not so much concerned that it should be ignored as that it should be overrated or, more exactly, that Ovid's 'plan' should be con fused with his poetical achievement. The true value of knowing his plan, as I see it, is that it enables us to discriminate between what he felt he had to do and what he truly wanted to do. For the 'problem' of Ovid is really why a good poet could write such an unconscionable amount of bad poetry. It has been heretofore thought, so far as I can make out, that this was simply a conse quence ofhis own careless and prodigal genius. The careful scheme or plan of his Metamorphosesd emonstrates, I think, that this is quite a false assumption. There was, in short, a reason for Ovid's lapses (at least those of this poem) that we can to some extent understand. Such understanding, moreover (and this is the main point I want to make), enables us to grasp his virtues, his poetical achievement, more precisely and completely than has been the case. What I have tried to demonstrate, to put the matter briefly, is that the superficial 'continuity' of the Metamorphoses( its chrono logy, its obtrusively evident linkage of the diverse episodes, books and sections) is really only technical or artificial: it is not the linkageb ut the ordero r successiono f episodes, motifs and ideas that constitutes the real unity of the poem. But unfortunately this unity was marred by the inherent disharmony of its two major elements-the essentially amatory element on the one hand and the Roman-Augustan element on the other. In the article men- vm PREFACE tioned above I committed the great error (as I now see it) of over stressing the second element and calling the Metamorphosesa n 'Augustan epic', even though I was therefore quite unable to account for its non-Augustan features. But I did not at the time see the plan or scheme of the poem as I now do. Ovid (as I now think) most definitely had an Augustan plan, a plan that included both the Roman-Augustan finale in Books xrr-xv and the great epic 'panels' of the two preceding 'sections' of the poem. But this is quite different from the 'plan' of the rest of the poem that deals with the comedy of divine love and, above all, the pathos of human love. In the first (the Augustan Metamorphoses)O, vid was engaged on a subject most uncongenial to him and in consequence wrote what often amounts to fustian or bathos. In the second (the amatory Metamorphoses)h, e revealed fully his two great qualities: his humour or capacity for rich comedy and his pathos or sympa thetic comprehension of human passion. In both he was not only Roman but unique: there is nothing in Greek or Hellenistic poetry that duplicates them. Unfortunately, both also revealed a latent anti-Augustanism or, more exactly, an utter lack of sympathy with the 'serious' or 'earnest' Augustanism that was so classically expressed in the Aeneid and .in the great odes of Horace. There is really nothing here that has not been known or sus pected before. Yet I think that a clearer sense of Ovid's plan and a somewhat clearer understanding of his relation to his sources (e .g. his simultaneous use of Virgil and of Hellenistic-neoteric poetry) can bring out (as has not been brought out) both the reason for his lapses and the nature of his successes as a poet. Realizing that he could not write true narrative poetry in the elegiac metre and style, he turned to epic. It was both his fortune and his misfortune then to confront the example of Virgil and the reality of Augustus. This was what made possible his peculiar brand of' epic' but at the same time kept him from writing the 'epic' of which he was capable. It in fact condemned him to the com position of much factitious and indeed very bad poetry. But a clearer perception of his dilemma enables us to separate the. good lX PREFACE from the bad more sharply and explicitly and thus to 'understand' a poet who was so Augustan, yet so disastrously opposed to his age. The above paragraphs were written when my manuscript was first submitted to the Cambridge University Press on 1 February, 1964. Since then, I have not been able to make more than very slight verbal revisions of the text. Such as it was and is, it must now stand. I cannot, therefore, take account of Walter Ludwig's very recent monograph, Struktur und Einheit der Metamorphosen Ovids (Berlin, de Gruyter, 1965), a copy of which he most kindly sent me. It is obviously an important contribution to the subject and, in particular, to that phase of the subject with which this book is especially concerned. It agrees with my own view that the Metamorphosesis a carefully constructed work of art with a definite structure and plan. Yet Ludwig' s 'plan' is very different from my own. He sees no less than twelve separate sections (e.g. he splits my third section, the Pathos of Love, into four separate sections). Nevertheless when some of his sections are taken to gether (e.g. the first two or the last three) their plans reveal a close resemblance to my own 'plan' for those particular portions of the poem. In general it seems to me that he over-emphasizes the genealogical and chronological connections and that his sections accordingly do not take acount of the dominant motifs and ideas of the poem. I thus see no reason to change any of my major con clusions, though I should probably want to reconsider several details were I now to rewrite my whole book. As it is, I can only recommend that my fellow Ovidians read and compare the two ofus. This book is intended for the general reader as well as for the scholar. This is why I am so glad to have secured permission to use the admirable verse translation of the Metamorphosesb y Mr A. E. Watts (University of California Press, 1954). I have not changed it (except for two trivial errors of orthography) even when I did not wholly agree with some particular rendering. Such piety it certainly deserves. The Latin te:>..o.'tf the Metamor- x
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