Table Of ContentOVID
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
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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-
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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
