Friends, for those of you who read Ovid, preferrably in the original (but feel to give your opinion even if you read in translation), what in your opinion are his strengths as a poet and what are his limitations, especially compared to other Latin poets of canonical status like Vergil?
Ovid as a poet
- Thread starter Severus2023
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Is this for an assignment?
Nope, just interested in Latin literature from a canonical perspective. Specifically, I mean in the case of Ovid, I have noticed that his influence in the Western canon has far exceeded what seems to be his estimation among Latinists who do not consider him the equal of Vergil, for example.
But there are a lot of perspectives out there and I wonder what Latinists, i.e. people who can approach these poets at the level of the language itself, think about Ovid's literary merit. What makes him memorable, enjoyable to read, original, stylistically attractive, etc.
I haven’t read much Ovid (at least not recently), but jstor is a great resource for articles (you can make an account for free). Here’s a short one:
I haven't read the Tristia, but if you compare the Metamorphoses to the Aeneid I find Ovid is usually a little bit tongue in cheek, particularly in tragic events, whereas Virgil is heroic and more moving. If you read something like Daphne and Apollo, Ovid makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable, whilst ostensibly heaping praise on Apollo & Rome.
Personally I liked the Ars Amatoria, but I didn't think to compare Ovid's pentameter to Virgil because they are so different.
As far as weaknesses go, Ovid didn't know when to stop...
As far as weaknesses go, Ovid didn't know when to stop...
I'm a huge fan of Ovid, so forgive me for rambling a bit or going more into specifics than you probably need. Ovid rarely reaches the poetic/emotional heights of Vergil, but faulting him for that would be criticizing him for something he's not trying to do (as he shows pretty clearly when he summarizes the Aeneid in books 13-14 of the Metamorphoses and spends as more lines on a digression about an island where people were turned into monkeys than he does on the whole Dido story). Firstly, nobody even comes close to him in how naturally he fits his words to the meter. Dactylic hexameter and pentameter are not natural meters for Latin; they are imported from Greek, and even in Greek they only work because of a bunch of alternate forms unique to poetry. But you'd never be able to guess that from Ovid's use of the meter; more than any other poet, he makes writing in hexameter look trivial. It's hard to describe exactly what I mean by the smoothness of his verse, but later poets (e.g. Statius, Valerius Flaccus) clearly have to try very hard to express what they want to express, and rely on contorted word orders and heavily allusive language, whereas in Ovid it consistently seems effortless, which is super impressive to me. Additionally, he is very unwilling to take himself seriously and everything has at least a tinge of irony behind it. Even his most serious work, the Metamorphoses, has a lot of self-aware humor, some rather subtle in ways that play with the audience's knowledge of myth and epic conventions.
One of my favorite examples is in the Byblis story (9.450-665, where Byblis falls in love with her brother Caunus and is rejected). There are a lot of amusing and charming details (e.g. her love letter is so long that she runs out of space on the paper; when she is rejected for the first time, she manages to convince herself that the messenger just did a bad job reading the letter). But Ovid also makes fun of the way characters in epic poetry are always able to cite other mythological examples to support their cause: in a soliloquy, Byblis remarks "At non Aeolidae thalamos timuere sororum! / unde sed hos novi? cur haec exempla paravi?" ("But the sons of Aeolus did not fear the bridal-chambers of their sisters! But where did I learn about these people? How did I prepare these examples?"). What makes this most remarkable is that she's alluding to a description of Aeolus's sons in the Odyssey (where his 6 sons are married to his 6 daughters) that actually contradicts most of the Metamorphoses; in other stories within the poem, sons of Aeolus have completely non-incestual relationships. So Byblis literally reaches out of the world of the poem she's in to pull a reference from another poem, then comments on the weirdness of having done that.
A similarly subtle example of that sort of learned humor comes in the argument between Ajax and Odysseus over who deserves Odysseus's armor. Odysseus lists some of the people he killed in the Iliad, saying "cum multo sanguine fudi / Coeranon Iphitiden et Alastoraque Chromiumque / Alcandrumque Haliumque Noemonaque Prytaninque" ("with much blood I cast down Coeranus son of Iphtitus and both Alastor and Chromius, and Alcandrus and Halius and Noemon and Prytanis"). This seems like just a boring list of names, but Alcandrumque Haliumque Noemonaque Prytaninque is a line that's been used in two previous epic poems. It is a direct transliteration of a line from Homer's Iliad as Odysseus is slaughtering those people (Alkandron th' Halion te Noēmona te Prytanin te), but the same line also appears in Vergil's Aeneid in a completely different context. Vergil seems to have just included the line as a little "easter egg" (like "haha, I can fit this Greek line perfectly into Latin, isn't that funny"), and Ovid is one-upping him by essentially saying "Hey Vergil, I caught your little 'easter egg', and I know my Homer well enough to remember the exact context of the line and put it back in that context."
He also makes fun of the epic convention of adding useless phrases to fill out the meter of a line, and takes that to an extreme by interrupting bits of dialogue with completely useless parentheticals: "'hi te ad bella pares annis animisque sequentur, / cum primum qui te feliciter attulit eurus' / (eurus enim attulerat) 'fuerit mutatus in austrum.'" ("[Aeacus said to Cephalus:] 'These people will follow you to war, equal in years and courage, as soon as the East wind that brought you here with good fortune' (for it was the East wind that had brought them there) 'turns into a South wind.'")
In general, the work is super charming and fun to read, and there are a ton of memorable scenes for various reasons (Cyclops Polyphemus's love song for Galatea in Book 13 is deliberately written as a parody of terrible love poetry by a hapless brute who's trying to turn himself into a poet, beginning with more than 25 similes in a row that are all based on the pastoral imagery Polyphemus would be familiar with, e.g. "softer than cheese"; Medea's monologue as she struggles to process her love for Jason at the start of Book 7 brilliantly represents her mental turmoil).
I think Quintilian accurately describes Ovid as nimium amator ingenii sui (over-fond of his own genius), but unlike some later poets that doesn't mar his style. He certainly knows that he's clever and learned and doesn't hesitate to flaunt that, but almost never at the cost of readability or entertainment value. I will say that there's a ton of stuff in the Metamorphoses, and my perspective is only one approach to the work; the details I've focused on here are not the most famous things about Ovid or the things that have been most influential in the Renaissance/modern canon, and plenty of readers would find themselves struck by completely different things. My guess as to why his influence on the Western canon has been so great is just that he preserves such a large variety of stories rather than going into detail on one story, which naturally affords more material for other artists or writers, and due to the poor preservation of Hellenistic poetry, his account is the best-preserved for most of the stories he narrates.
Thanks for this analysis, very valuable on a literary level. I'm going to look into the passages that you mention.
Ovid writes a lot more in dactyles rather than spondees compared to other authors; he avoids elisions a lot more (and if he puts one in, he usually avoids replacing a long vowel with a short one); and he hardly ever puts an elision in the caesura (as Vergil frequently does). Over all, you could rightfully say that he had the cleanest writing style of all Roman poets ... and unlike Vergil, he actually had a sense of humour. Vergil just earned his reputation for the epic he agreed to write (while many others declined). Had it not been for that, he would just have been one of many other poets. And he even considered his own epic to be crap himself.
There can't be any question that Ovid was the best Roman poet, even though I don't think he gained enough recognition until 1800ish. His tristia were only appreciated even later, even though they were pretty well-written as well. I agree with Iason that the amores were a bit awkward ... or at the very least they had more downsides than his later poetry.
He's also the first author I know who really expanded the idea of a poetical ego, inasmuch as he wrote letters from a woman's perspective to their male lovers. Dantius describes many other great examples of his ingenuity, and it's hard to deny that he was the bestest poet the world has ever faced.
I may have been the only one to read all of your post, but you're probably talking about the armour of Achilles
Oops! Looks like I can no longer edit it, but you are of course right.I may have been the only one to read all of your post, but you're probably talking about the armour of Achilles
There's a passage where Iris visits the personification Somnus, but quickly departs his palace after delivering her message because she feels herself getting sleepy:
postquam mandata peregit,
Iris abit: neque enim ulterius tolerare soporis
vim poterat, labique ut somnum sensit in artus,
effugit et remeat per quos modo venerat arcus.
I do have to wonder if the two elisions with -que in two successive lines (neque enim and labique ut), and the series of spondees in labique ut somnum sensit, are meant to imitate the sound of someone beginning to slur their words and speak more slowly as they start to fall asleep. But there's no real way of knowing with those things what is or isn't intentional.
It's hard to tell, but such (slight) irregularities in the lines of a poet who usually tries to avoid such thing can mean something. You can also see a very swift change from a completely dactylic style up to poterat to a completely spondeic finish of of the line.