Today is the Vernal Equinox, one day ahead of its usual date. That's because our calendar doesn't quite keep exact track of the solar year. Happy spring, everybody! Be sure to tell the Sun welcome back.
It is also the birthday of both Ovid and Henrik Ibsen. I think I've mentioned Henry Gibson recently, so let's talk about Ovid. I'm currently listening to his history on a remarkable podcast called Literature and History.
He was born Publius Ovidius Naso in what is now Sulmo, Italy in 43 BCE. He became a famous, beloved poet in Rome, privy to the inner circles of the Augustan court.
There is a genre of poetry that has entirely vanished, the didactic poem, but that were quite popular in the ancient world. Virgil's Georgics, for instance, is an extended poem on how to run a farm.
There is an extant 100 line fragment teaching women how to put on makeup, Medicamina Faciei Femineae ("Women's Facial Cosmetics"). The recipes are so outlandish that it probably was a comic didactic poem. One of his most famous poems in this genre is Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love"). It is essentially advice on seduction and its inevitable consequence, two books for men and one for women. But it is written, perhaps with comic intent, in the elegiac meter previously used by poets like Propertius and Horace for short love poems. Ovid tells people where to go in Rome to find available women, what to do once you're there and when you get them home, and how women can better attract cruising guys. Some of it reads like that "Wild and Crazy Guys" skit from early SNL. This was followed by Remedia Amoris ("The Cure for Love"), which gives you advice on how to get over it once she dumps you. Pro tip: pretend to yourself that you are happy so that you will become so eventually. Although the Ars is ironic, it is never obscene. The last book for women, for instance, gives them advice on how to choose sexual positions (the better to hide your blemishes), but doesn't actually describe the act.
The Ars Amatoria was included in the syllabi of medieval schools from the 11th century, who were nowhere near as prudish as their reputation, and was massively influential on European literature in the following two centuries. But by the 15th century, as prudery became a Thing in Europe, it was apt to be burned by people like Savonarola, and in 1930 it was confiscated on obscenity grounds by US Customs.
Ovid's most famous work today is the Metamorphoses, following a theme of transformation through a really rather large number of ancient myths. Quite a lot of what we know about Greco-Roman mythology comes from this poem. The ways that stories are linked by geography, themes, or contrasts creates interesting effects and constantly forces the reader to evaluate the connections. Ovid also varies his tone, meter and material from different literary genres, creating a sort of gallery of genres. For instance, Ovid's use of Alexandrian epic, or elegiac couplets, shows his fusion of erotic and psychological style with traditional forms of epic.
Metamorphosis or transformation is a unifying theme amongst the episodes of the Metamorphoses. Ovid raises its significance explicitly in the opening lines of the poem: In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora; ("I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities;"). Accompanying this theme is often violence, inflicted upon a victim whose transformation becomes part of the natural landscape.
There is a huge variety among the types of these transformations that take place: from human to inanimate object (Nileus), constellation (Ariadne's Crown), animal (Perdix); from animal (Ants) and fungus (Mushrooms) to human; of sex (Hyenas); and of colour (Pebbles). The metamorphoses themselves are often located metatextually within the poem, through grammatical or narratorial transformations. At other times, transformations are developed into humour or absurdity, such that, slowly, the reader realizes he is being had, or the very nature of transformation is questioned or subverted.
Because of its fusion of styles, the Metamorphoses is sort of a thing unto itself, difficult to classify into any previously existing genre. It meets the criteria for an epic and is often considered an anti epic or mock epic.
It's influence on Geoffrey Chaucer is extensive. Chaucer went so far as to adapt two of the stories for The Canterbury Tales, in The Manciple's Tale (Coronis and Phoebus Apollo) and The Wife of Bath's Tale (Midas).
Ovid was also a profound influence on William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet is influenced by the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (Metamorphoses Book IV); and, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a band of amateur actors performs a play about Pyramus and Thisbe. Shakespeare's early erotic poem Venus and Adonis expands on the myth in Book X of the Metamorphoses (Achelous and Hercules). In Titus Andronicus, the story of Lavinia's rape is drawn from Tereus' rape of Philomela, and the text of the Metamorphoses is used within the play to enable Titus to interpret his daughter's story. Most of Prospero's renunciative speech in Act V of The Tempest is taken word-for-word from a speech by Medea in Book VII of the Metamorphoses.
Among other English writers for whom the Metamorphoses was an inspiration are John Milton, who made use of it in Paradise Lost, considered his magnum opus, and evidently knew it well, and Edmund Spenser. John Dryden produced a famous translation into stopped rhyming couplets.In Europe, the poem was an influence on Giovanni Boccaccio (the story of Pyramus and Thisbe appears in his poem L'Amorosa Fiammetta) and Dante. This just touches the surface of the late medieval and early modern European writers influenced by Ovid.
But opinion on him declined during the Romantic period, when he was considered stuffy, over formalized and lacking in passion. More recently, the wheel has turned back again, and Ovid's wit, versatility, and subversive humor have achieved some degree of respect and critical attention. A significant minority opinion, for instance, considers the Ars Amatoria to be a slyly disguised manual for prostitutes and their clients, traveling in disguise. He is widely considered one of the three greatest Roman poets, along with Virgil and Horace.
Something happened in 8 CE and as a result Augustus exiled Ovid to the Black Sea where he remained until his death. Ovid elliptically attributed it to "carmen et error" ("a poem and a mistake") and his various references while in exile are cryptic and contradictory. This has provided extensive opportunity for generations of excited speculation among scholars. Some believe the poem being referred to is the Ars Amatoria. One mostly discredited idea claims the exile never happened at all and was a product of Ovid's fertile imagination.
The Emperor Augustus was a bit of a prude and given to invading the private lives of Romans, out of concern to keep the birth rate (and therefore army) up. He passed the two Julian Laws, one of which required every Roman man between the ages of 24 and 65 to be continuously married to someone, and the other would take one year off the cursus honorum ("course of honor"; the path to political power in the Roman state) for every child you had. Ovid's recommendations for adultery in the Ars could be viewed as a serious faux pas. However, 9 years had passed between the poem and the exile so if it was a factor at all, it was likely a pretext.
More likely, Ovid may have known something about a conspiracy against Augustus since the emperor's grandchildren, Julia the Younger and Agrippa Postumus, were also banished around the same time, and Julia's husband, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was put to death. In his later poems from exile, Ovid refers to having seen something he shouldn't have seen, but again there is nothing specific. He never stopped trying to return to Rome and his poetry from exile is particularly emotive and persona.. Even after Augustus died, the next emperor, Tiberius, would not allow Ovid to return and he died in exile in 17 or 18 CE.
In December, 2017, his banishment was formally revoked by the city council of Rome.
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