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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2015
Gutter-minded readings of Ovid have a venerable ancient precedent in Martial. As Stephen Hinds points out, the epigrammatist has a particular knack for ‘editorializing on the euphemistic language of elegy by “staining” it, in more or less complicated ways; it can be argued that the intertext between Ovidian and Martialian erotics, as well as differentiating them, tends to give the reader both a more Ovidian Martial and a more Martialian Ovid than before’. The present note will subject a famous and somewhat puzzling Ovidian passage to the kind of treatment that Martial might have given it. The alert reader will notice that this is, on one level, a dodge—an excuse for skirting the issue of Ovid's intentions and abjuring responsibility for whatever ‘staining’ may occur. But perhaps I shall be forgiven if I can show how listening in on an imagined intertextual conversation between two of antiquity's wittiest authors pays dividends in bringing out Martial's Ovidian side, a genius for innuendo combined with literary insight that can be too easily drowned out by his barrage of primary obscenities.
Anthony Corbeill, Peter Knox, John Miller, editor Bruce Gibson and the anonymous reader offered helpful comments and encouragement on various drafts of this note. Blame them.
1 Hinds, S., ‘Martial's Ovid / Ovid's Martial’, JRS 97 (2007), 113–54Google Scholar, at 129. For additional recent discussion and bibliography on Martial's brilliant intertextual dialogue (whose subtlety is only beginning to be appreciated) with the Ars Amatoria, see also S. Casali, ‘Il popolo dotto, il popolo corotto. Ricezioni dell'Ars (Marziale, Giovenale, la second Sulpicia)’, in L. Landolfi and P. Monella (edd.), Arte perennat amor, Riflessioni sull'intertestualità ovidiana, L'Ars amatoria (Bologna, 2005), 13–55; M. Janka, ‘Paelignus, puto, dixerat poeta (Mart. 2. 41. 2): Martial's intertextual dialogue with Ovid's erotodidactic poems’, in R. Gibson, S. Green and A. Sharrock (edd.), The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (Oxford, 2006), 279–97; C. McNelis, ‘Ovidian strategies in Early Imperial literature’, in P.E. Knox (ed.), A Companion to Ovid (Malden, MA, 2009), 397–410, at 398–404; Lämmle, C. Scheidegger, ‘Martial on Ovid on Ovid: Mart. 11.104, the Remedia Amoris, and Saturnalian poetics’, CW 107 (2014), 319–45Google Scholar.
2 As Janka (n. 1), 280 observes of the two authors, ‘[a]bove all, they are both in a sense “amatorians”, since their use of motifs, phrases, and imagery shows overt as well as hidden features of a rather obsessive “erotography”, that is to say, a mode of literature in which sexuality dominates as a recurrent poetic theme and structural pattern’.
3 On ‘Apollo as magister amoris’, both like and unlike the praeceptor, see A. Sharrock, Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria 2 (Oxford, 1994), 245–56.
4 J.F. Miller, Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets (Cambridge, 2009), 324–6, at 324.
5 Miller (n. 4), 324.
6 On Apollo as failed lover, see Hejduk, J.D., ‘Death by elegy: Ovid's Cephalus and Procris’, TAPhA 141 (2011), 285–314 Google Scholar, at 296–9. Though the famous Metamorphoses version of Apollo and Daphne (1.452-567) presumably postdates the Ars Amatoria, the association of Daphne/laurel with the god's unsuccessful wooing is traditional: see e.g. Knox, P.E., ‘In pursuit of Daphne’, TAPhA 120 (1990), 183–202 Google Scholar and 385–6, especially at 193, on ‘Apollo's frustrated song to an unimpressed Daphne’ as an ‘ideal balance to Virgil's representation of elegiac love-poet’ Gallus with his fleeing mistress Lycoris in Virgil's tenth Eclogue. I should note that seeing Daphne in the ‘laurel’ emphasized in the Ars Amatoria passage is not essential to my argument, but Apollo's frustrated suit would nicely motivate his recommendation of an alternative strategy for dealing with recalcitrant mistresses.
7 TLL 9.2.851.8-36 (s.v. opus, ‘de coitu’). See D.F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge, 1993), 58–63.
8 OLD s.v. cognosco 5b. The first example listed of this usage happens to be from Ovid's Heroides (6.43), non ego sum furto tibi cognita—a passive construction with the dative of the person doing the ‘knowing’ exactly parallel to the cognosci sibi (‘to be known to [by?] himself’) of Ars am. 2.500. As J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore, 1982), 190 points out, ‘[t]he familiar Biblical euphemism “know” (of carnal knowledge) was well domiciled in Latin before it made an appearance in Bible translations’.
9 OLD s.v. manifestus 1: ‘(of criminals) Caught in the act, plainly guilty.’ The first half of manifestus appears in fact to derive from manus, ‘hand’, and it was so understood by the Romans; see A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Latine (Paris, 1932), 559: ‘expliqué par les Latins comme signifiant “pris à la main”, d'où “pris sur le fait”’. (The ‘hand’ in manifestus appears to belong to the catcher rather than the one caught, but I have taken the liberty of applying the English ‘caught red-handed’, like the French pris la main dans le sac, as a synonym for ‘caught in the act’.) Naturally, the secondary meaning ‘evident’ or ‘conspicuous’ (OLD s.v. manifestus 3 and 4) would come to mind at first reading of the passage; after a critical mass of doubles entendres, however, suspicions begin to be raised.
10 Adams (n. 8), 21, 25. In Priapea 68, Achilles, defrauded of his girlfriend by his commander, sings a sad song at his cithara, cithara tensior ipse sua (16). (That poem, incidentally, in its single-mindedly erotic reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey, has a striking affinity to the Ars Amatoria and to Tristia 2.) Conversely, in Varro's Menippean Satires, it is Briseis who plays Achilles’ ‘strings’ (nervia, 368); OLD s.v. neruia expresses ambivalence about whether the reference is to Achilles’ lyre or to his person.
11 In his essay on ‘The power of thumbs’, A. Corbeill, Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 2004), 43 cites Martial 11.29.2 and 12.97.9 for this use (albeit in both cases unsuccessful) of the pollex. For an extensive list of the thumb's many services, see T. Echtermeyer, Proben aus einer Abhandlung über Namen und symbolische Bedeutung der Finger bei den Griechen und Römern (Halle, 1835), 1–6.
12 As Sharrock (n. 3), 223–4 remarks, it is ‘slightly odd that the god is holding laurel and playing the lyre at the same time! How many hands does he have?’. We must be meant to envision Apollo holding his instrument between his legs, a typical posture for ancient lyre playing. If we take adit to mean that the god ‘approaches’, while holding laurel in both hands and playing the lyre, the hand problem is compounded. But adeo can also be a sexual euphemism, as R. Pichon, Index Verborum Amatoriorum (Paris, 1902), 79 notes in a charming tricolon: Adire est modo puellam adloqui et rogare … modo in puellae domum ire … Denique turpem sensum habet hoc uerbum (citing Tib. 1.5.39, iam cum gaudia adirem). See Adams (n. 8), 176. My translation approximates the idea.
13 See Armstrong, R., ‘Retiring Apollo: Ovid on the politics and poetics of self-sufficiency’, CQ 54 (2004), 528–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar on Ovid's ‘conspiracy of one against Apollo, and a conspiracy with both poetic and political ramifications’ (528)—including hints of Apollo in Am. 1.15.35-6 as Ovid's Ganymede (537). In so far as Apollo was Augustus’ patron god, one wonders sometimes why Ovid was not exiled sooner.
14 Since I have just spoiled the Delphic admonition ‘Know Thyself’ in perpetuity for my readers, I will refrain from commenting on the line with which the episode closes, ‘Faith in this god's sacred mouth is solid’ (certa dei sacro est huius in ore fides, 510). (It would surely be excessive to mention, for instance, that fides, ‘faith’, is a homograph for fides, ‘lyre string’.) Lest you think it is just me, see how Houghton, L.B.T., ‘Sexual puns in Ovid's Ars and Remedia ’, CQ 59 (2009), 280–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar interprets the praeceptor's injunction ‘to have thoroughly learned two tongues’ (linguas edidicisse duas, 2.122).
15 Ovid's story of the beautiful boy who feasts on selfies until he wastes away to nothing (Met. 3.339-510) offers some profound lessons about elegiac love and art, among other things: see especially B. Pavlock, The Image of the Poet in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Madison, 2009), 14–37 (‘Narcissus and elegy’).
16 On Ovid's activation of the ‘amatory associations of nosco and cognosco’ in the Narcissus episode, see P.E. Knox, Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry (Cambridge, 1986), 20.
17 See Casali (n. 1), 26–30; Hinds (n. 1), 124–5.
18 Casali (n. 1), 29.
19 And I will not say a word about peruenimus usque ad umbilicos (4.89.2) or tibi res peracta est (5-6) or lector deficit (7). Or about sed, puto, quod scripsi legerat: ergo dabit (‘But what I wrote, I think, she had taken in: therefore she'll put out’, 2.9.2).