21 - Ovid

Summary

‘FAME IS THE SPUR’

There had been nothing diffident or tentative about Ovid's literary début. In the very first of his surviving works, the Amores (Loves), he manifests astonishing confidence in himself and in his professional future. The three opening poems of Book 1, read as they are clearly intended to be read, that is as a connected sequence, sketch a poetic programme which is then carried through with masterful assurance until it achieves its ordained end in the double renunciation, of ‘elegiac’ love and of love-elegy, in the last poem of Book 3. The design and execution of the Amores can be properly understood only in relation to Ovid's predecessors. He had taken a genre already exploited, after Gallus, its inventor, by Tibullus and Propertius, and exploited it in his turn, originally but with a deadly efficiency that left no room for a successor. (The work of ‘Lygdamus’ shows how barren a mere recombination of the conventional motifs of love-elegy was bound to be.) As a demonstration of technical virtuosity the Amores verges on insolence; it was a remarkable, and tactically profitable, feat of literary originality, as originality was understood by the ancients, to impart to a well-established form with the inherent limitations of love elegy this new semblance of vitality. More than a semblance it cannot be accounted, but for Ovid's purpose that was enough. In the Amores he had put himself on the map; he had measured himself against his elegiac precursors, implicitly criticized them and some of the literary values accepted by them, and shown himself at the very least their technical equal.