Empedoclean Elegy: Love, Strife and the Four Elements in Ovid's Amores, Ars Amatoria and Fasti

480 Pages·2014·2.44 MB·English

by  Charles Tyler Ham

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Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations
2013
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Charles Tyler Ham
University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations
Part of the Classics Commons
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Ham, Charles Tyler, "Empedoclean Elegy: Love, Strife and the Four Elements in Ovid's Amores, Ars
Amatoria and Fasti" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 759.
https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/759
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/759
For more information, please contact [email protected].
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In this dissertation, I examine Ovid's use in the Amores, Ars Amatoria and Fasti of the concepts of love,
strife and the four elements, which were closely identified with the philosopher-poet Empedocles in
antiquity. My dissertation has two parts: in the first I demonstrate that in the Amores and Ars Amatoria
Ovid connects themes fundamental to his elegiac poetics, such as the interaction of love and war, to the
Empedoclean principles of love and strife. This is a means for Ovid of relating his elegy to the epic
tradition, in which Empedocles was an important figure. At the same time I argue that Ovid suggests that
there are certain features of the form and content of elegy that render it uniquely "Empedoclean," such as
the "cyclical" alternation of the hexameter and pentameter verses of the elegiac couplet, which are
identified with war and love respectively in Ovidian poetics. This conception of elegy's form serves as the
foundation of Ovid's use of the interaction between elegy and epic, amor and arma as the building-blocks
of much of his poetry. Ovid's creative use of Empedoclean themes is most extensive in the Fasti, which is
the elegiac poem of Ovid's whose relation to epic is the most intense. In the programmatic Janus episode
in book 1 of the Fasti Ovid has the god Janus describe an Empedoclean cosmogony that encourages us
to interpret subsequent features of the poem against the background of an Empedoclean cosmos: in this
light, the centrality in the poem of Mars and Venus (i.e. the months of March and April) and its interest in
the concepts of concordia and discordia acquire a new significance. I demonstrate, furthermore, that
Ovid's use of Empedocles illuminates not only our understanding of the poetics of the Fasti, but also its
politics. Ovid uses Empedoclean physics as part of his representation in the Fasti of cyclical or non-
teleological time and the pattern of ceaseless change. These representations of time and history
complicate the poem's treatment of key Augustan tropes such as the pax Augusta, the Golden Age and
the urbs aeterna.
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Dissertation
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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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Classical Studies
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Joseph Farrell
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Classics
This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/759
EMPEDOCLEAN ELEGY: LOVE, STRIFE AND THE FOUR ELEMENTS IN OVID’S AMORES, ARS
AMATORIA AND FASTI
Charles T. Ham
A DISSERTATION
in
Classical Studies
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2013

Supervisor of Dissertation
__________________________
Joseph Farrell
Professor of Classical Studies

Graduate Group Chairperson
__________________________
Emily Wilson, Associate Professor of Classical Studies

Dissertation Committee
James Ker, Associate Professor of Classical Studies
Cynthia Damon, Professor of Classical Studies
EMPEDOCLEAN ELEGY: LOVE, STRIFE AND THE FOUR ELEMENTS IN OVID’S
AMORES, ARS AMATORIA AND FASTI
COPYRIGHT
2013
Charles Tyler Ham
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
License

To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2.0/
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have benefited from the support of many people while working on this project and it is a
genuine pleasure to acknowledge them. First, I am indebted to the members of my
dissertation committee, Cynthia Damon, James Ker and my advisor Joseph Farrell. I
thank all three of them for their patience and generosity in reading over many, many
drafts. As they know, the project has been not unlike Empedocles’ account of the origin
of species, where first arose many disarticulated parts and strange hybrids. Any
resemblance it now has to a fully developed and integrated argument I owe to them.
Special thanks go to Joe, who has expertly guided this project from its beginning and who
has contributed so much else to my professional development. The Classical Studies
department at Penn has offered a wonderful place in which to work. Many faculty, staff
and graduate students have helped me in some form or another over the years, but I need
to thank in particular the other three members of my cohort, Jen Gerrish, Cat Gillespie
and Jason Nethercut, who offered the sympathy and support that only other graduate
students can. I am very grateful to Myrto Garani for so kindly sharing and discussing
with me her own important work on Empedocles in the Fasti at a critical stage in my
project. A generous fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Pennsylvania for the academic year 2012-13 afforded me the time I needed
to bring the project to completion. The greatest thanks, however, goes to my family. I
have been blessed throughout my life by the love and support of two extraordinary
parents; and my brothers have helped me in ways of which they probably are not even
aware. Finally, I could have never made it through graduate school, let alone completed a
dissertation, if it were not for the unfailing support of my remarkable wife — I still
cannot believe my luck.
iv
ABSTRACT

EMPEDOCLEAN ELEGY: LOVE, STRIFE AND THE FOUR ELEMENTS IN OVID’S
AMORES, ARS AMATORIA AND FASTI
Charles T. Ham
Joseph Farrell
In this dissertation, I examine Ovid’s use in the Amores, Ars Amatoria and Fasti of the
concepts of love, strife and the four elements, which were closely identified with the
philosopher-poet Empedocles in antiquity. My dissertation has two parts: in the first I
demonstrate that in the Amores and Ars Amatoria Ovid connects themes fundamental to
his elegiac poetics, such as the interaction of love and war, to the Empedoclean principles
of love and strife. This is a means for Ovid of relating his elegy to the epic tradition, in
which Empedocles was an important figure. At the same time I argue that Ovid suggests
that there are certain features of the form and content of elegy that render it uniquely
“Empedoclean,” such as the “cyclical” alternation of the hexameter and pentameter
verses of the elegiac couplet, which are identified with war and love respectively in
Ovidian poetics. This conception of elegy’s form serves as the foundation of Ovid’s use
of the interaction between elegy and epic, amor and arma as the building-blocks of much
of his poetry. Ovid’s creative use of Empedoclean themes is most extensive in the Fasti,
which is the elegiac poem of Ovid’s whose relation to epic is the most intense. In the
programmatic Janus episode in book 1 of the Fasti Ovid has the god Janus describe an
Empedoclean cosmogony that encourages us to interpret subsequent features of the poem
against the background of an Empedoclean cosmos: in this light, the centrality in the
v
poem of Mars and Venus (i.e. the months of March and April) and its interest in the
concepts of concordia and discordia acquire a new significance. I demonstrate,
furthermore, that Ovid’s use of Empedocles illuminates not only our understanding of the
poetics of the Fasti, but also its politics. Ovid uses Empedoclean physics as part of his
representation in the Fasti of cyclical or non-teleological time and the pattern of ceaseless
change. These representations of time and history complicate the poem’s treatment of key
Augustan tropes such as the pax Augusta, the Golden Age and the urbs aeterna.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iv

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1

CHAPTER 1 The Elements in Poetic and Political Discourse ......................................... 29

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 29

1.1 Terminology ........................................................................................................................ 30

1.2 Looking for the Elements .................................................................................................... 36

1.3 Elements of Poetry ............................................................................................................... 44

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 78

CHAPTER 2 Love and Strife in the Amores and their Sources ....................................... 81

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 81

2.1 Literary Background: Empedocles in the Epic Tradition .................................................... 81

2.2 Love and Strife in Elegy .................................................................................................... 107

2.2.1 Love, Strife and militia amoris in the Amores ...........................................................................107

2.2.2 Love and Strife in Tibullus and Propertius as predecessors to the Amores ...............................113

2.2.3 Mars, Venus and the Center of Amores 1 ..................................................................................121

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 148

CHAPTER 3 The Ars Amatoria and the Tradition of Didactic Natural Philosophy ...... 150

Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 150

3.1 Cosmic Amor ..................................................................................................................... 152

3.2 Semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem .................................................................... 154

3.3 Daedalus, Lucretius and Empedocles ................................................................................ 160

3.4 Ovid’s Elegiac Cosmology (Ars 2.425-92) ....................................................................... 177

3.4.1 Fabula narratur toto notissima caelo ..........................................................................................198

3.4.2 Mars, Venus and Metapoetics ....................................................................................................207

3.5 Lucretius, Empedocles and the end of the Ars Amatoria .................................................. 213

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 218

CHAPTER 4 Empedoclean Physics and Ethics in Fasti 1 ............................................. 221

Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 221

4.1 Janus, Chaos and the Empedoclean Cosmos ..................................................................... 223

4.2 Felices Animae and the Didactic Tradition ....................................................................... 236

4.3 Aristaeus, Sacrifice and Empedoclean Ethics ................................................................... 251

4.3.1 Animal Sacrifice and the Golden Age .......................................................................................253

4.3.2 The Myth of the Ages, the Flood and Empedoclean Physics ....................................................260

4.3.3 The “Aristaeus” in Ovid and Vergil ...........................................................................................271

4.3.4 Metamorphoses 1 and Fasti 1, Love and Strife .........................................................................290

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 296

CHAPTER 5 Mars, Venus and the Structure of the Fasti .............................................. 298

Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 298

5.1 Mars, Venus and the Didactic Tradition ............................................................................ 301

5.2 Mars and Empedoclean Neikos ......................................................................................... 307

5.3 The Disarming of Mars (and the Arming of Vesta?) ......................................................... 311

5.4 Further reflections of Mars and Venus in Fasti 3: Romulus, Numa and the ancile .......... 322
vii
5.5 The Union of Mars and Venus and the Birth of Harmonia/Concordia ............................. 326

5.6 Venus and Empedoclean Philia ......................................................................................... 329

5.7 Numa and Strife ................................................................................................................. 333

5.8 Concordia (and Discordia) in the Structure of the Fasti ................................................... 342

5.9 Elegiac and Cosmogonic Rhythms .................................................................................... 358

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 362

CHAPTER 6
The Vestalia and the Philosophical Frames of the Fasti and Metamorphoses ............... 364

Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 364

6.1 Poet as Vates ...................................................................................................................... 366

6.2 Fasti 1 and 6, Janus and Juno ............................................................................................ 372

6.3 Janus, Vesta and the Natural-Philosophical Frame of the Fasti ........................................ 379

6.4 The Vestalia and the Speech of Pythagoras ....................................................................... 382

6.5 The Vestalia and Metamorphoses 1 and 2 ......................................................................... 409

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 427

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 430

APPENDIX A: Some Collocations of the Four Elements in Latin Prose ...................... 447

APPENDIX B: Norden, Discordia and the Paluda Virago ............................................. 453

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 457
1
INTRODUCTION
It used to be de rigueur for scholars writing on the Fasti to begin by noting its relative
neglect — or, if not neglect, dismissal — among poems in the Ovidian corpus,1 but this is
no longer the case. For quite some time now, the poem has been the subject of robust
interest from scholars of Latin poetry, as well as those interested chiefly in Roman
religion and Augustan politics.2 Critics now recognize that the poem requires and repays
close attention, and it has in fact attracted the attention of some of the best scholars
working in the field of Latin poetry in the last quarter-century;3 study of the poem has
been encouraged in particular by the publication of several excellent commentaries on
individual books.4 At the same time, the fact that the poem had been neglected for so long
means that this critical re-evaluation of the poem is still very much an ongoing project.

1 See, for example, Newlands (1995) 1: “...Ovid’s poem on the Roman calendar has been one of the least
popular of his works.”
2 On Roman religion and the Fasti see, for example, the important article of Beard (1987); see also Phillips
(1992); Scheid (1992). Feeney (1998) discusses the Fasti, as well. Herbert-Brown (1994) is an important
historical study of the poem.
3 R.J. Littlewood in many ways inaugurated the critical re-evaluation of the poem (see, for example,
Littlewood (1975), (1980), (1981) and (2002)) and has recently published an excellent commentary on
book 6 (Littlewood (2006)). Elaine Fantham has also been at the forefront, publishing numerous articles, in
addition to her own exemplary commentary on book 4: see Fantham (1983), (1985), (1992a), (1992b),
(1995), and (1998). John Miller has done more than any other scholar to illuminate the relationship of the
Fasti to Hellenistic poetry, especially to the works of Callimachus: see, for example, Miller (1980), (1982),
(1983), (1991) and (1992). The Fasti, along with the Metamorphoses, is the focus of Hinds’ seminal study
on Ovidian genre (Hinds (1987)), to which he added a very influential two-part article on genre and its
political ramifications in the Fasti (Hinds (1992a) and (1992b). Philip Hardie (1991) has examined the
Janus episode in an article that has been especially influential on this dissertation; Denis Feeney (1992) has
considered the Fasti and speech under the principate. Alessandro Barchiesi has published a typically
impressive monograph on the poem (Barchiesi (1994), translated into English and published as Barchiesi
(1997a)), as well as several important shorter contributions (e.g. Barchiesi (1991) and (1997b)). Niklas
Holzberg (1995) has published a text and German translation of the poem, along with introduction and
notes. Carole Newlands has written an important book (Newlands (1995), cited above) on the poem as a
whole, in addition to several articles and chapters: see Newlands (1991), (1992), (1996), (2000) and (2002).
This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it acknowledges many of the scholars who have laid the
foundation for current criticism of the poem.
4 Green (2004) on book 1, Robinson (2011) on 2, Fantham (1998) on 4 and Littlewood (2006) on 6.
Bömer’s (1957-8) commentary on the entire poem is still essential. See also the commentary of Ursini
(2008) on part of book 3 (lines 1-516).