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Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.653–61

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

T. J. Leary
T. J. Leary
Affiliation:
Hampton School, Middlesex
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Extract

The aim of these lines seems to be to demonstrate that everyone has his price. Even Jupiter can be bribed. According to the text as printed above (= O.C.T.), the sequence would then continue: ‘What can a wise man do (sc. but submit to bribery) when even foolish ones willingly contract to keep quiet?’

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , May 1991 , pp. 265 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1991

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References

2 The East Berlin Hamilton MS. Y is of no help in this matter: 655 = Kenney (munerae); 656 ‘quoque…mutis (sic)’ Y, mitis y. See Franco, Munari, Il Codice Hamilton 471 di Ovidio (Rome, 1965), p. 30Google Scholar.

3 Compare perhaps Am. 3.4.48 where the vir is urged not to insist on his rights, but to profit from the presents given to his wife at no expense to himself.

4 Note Paulus (third century), Opinions 2.26.1–17 ‘It has been decided that a husband who does not at once dismiss his wife whom he has taken in adultery can be prosecuted as a pander’; cf. Justinian, Digest 48.5.1 pr. ‘This law was introduced by the divine Augustus… The crime of pandering is included in the Julian law of adultery, as a penalty has been prescribed against a husband who profits pecuniarily by the adultery of his wife; as well as one who retains his wife after she has been taken in adultery’ – taken from Lefkowitz, and Fant, , Women's Life in Greece and Rome (Baltimore, 1985), p. 182Google Scholar.

5 Deletion is, for instance, suggested at Ars 3.433–8 by Tarrant, R. J., PCPhS 206 (1980), 85–8. I would, as it happens, oppose this deletion, although tentatively accepting Kenney's transposition of 435–6 to follow 454 (Tarrant, op. cit., p. 88 n. 8). My arguments, too lengthyto reproduce here, can be found ad loc. in ‘Ovid Ars Amatoria 3.101–498: an Introduction and Commentary’ (unpublished Oxford M.Litt. dissertation, Trinity 1989). Tarrant cites as other instances of interpolation in the Ars 1.585–8 and 2.669–74.Google Scholar

The omission of 656 in two MSS. should probably not be allowed to influence arguments for deletion here.