The NAB Blog

Latin Love Lessons
Ovid’s Elegiac Poetry

By Anthony Anderson

2 October 2024

Ovid’s love poems form a trilogy within his creative output. The first collection, Amores (‘Loves’), dates from his youth. Its five books (later edited by the poet himself into three) were published around 16 BCE, when the poet was not yet 30 years of age.

Despite bidding farewell to the love elegy at the end of Amores (‘Mother of tender Loves find a new poet! / This is the last lap now for elegy…’), he did produce further elegies about love – Ars Amatoria (‘The Art of Loving’) following around 15 years later, and the Remedia Amoris (‘The Cures for Love’) a few years after that, probably around 1 CE. In any event, all three works had been published some years before Ovid’s exile to Tomis (in modern day Romania) in 8 CE, on the orders of the Emperor Augustus, apparently because of a poem (possibly Ars Amatoria) and an indiscretion (the nature of which remains unknown to this day.)

At the time of his banishment, Ovid was the leading poet in Rome, after the deaths of Horace and Virgil, but his poetry often seems to be contrary, albeit with frequent subtlety, to the Augustan attempts to reinstate traditional Roman values such as marital fidelity (for example, adultery became a criminal offence) and observations of religious rites. The main object of desire in the Amores, Corinna, is a married woman, and it is the poet’s affair with her that forms the narrative thread of the 49 poems which make up the work. In this poem he advises Corinna on how to put her husband out of action at a dinner party:

‘When he’s not looking try to lace the brew.
If wine and sleep have got him nicely settled,
The time and place will tell us what to do.’

Despite being over 2000 years old, many of the thoughts and sentiments seem pertinent to our own time

Throughout all his love poetry, Ovid’s trademark wit is never far away. Evidence of this can be seen in the opening lines of Amores, in which the poet, tongue firmly in cheek, claims that he was about to write a heroic epic when

‘…Cupid laughed (they say)
And filched one foot away.’

In this section, the second line of each couplet is reduced from the hexameter of epic poetry to the pentameter of elegy.

Not only in his observation of metrical convention does Ovid follow the tradition of Roman elegy, but there are clear influences from Tibullus, Propertius, as well as Catullus. Where Catullus sympathises with his Lesbia over the death of her sparrow (probably a metaphor for the writer’s impotence), Ovid mourns with his Corinna the death of her pet parrot (a motif repeated by the later poet, Statius). Ars Amatoria, which offers advice on how to win and keep a lover, echoes both Tibullus and Propertius because the poet takes on the role of teacher, schooling the listener in affairs of the heart, with his qualifications for this role recalling the words from Amores: ‘Experience prompts my labours.’

The same didactic approach is common to the Remedia Amoris, which advises the (male) listener on how to disentangle oneself from an unwanted relationship. In common with the Ars Amatoria (written for both sexes) it includes vivid allusions to contemporary Roman domestic life.

Remedia differs from Amores and Ars Amatoria in that it is a single poem, albeit of a lengthy 814 lines. Ovid, again the tutor in matters of love, sets out his stall:

‘You fellows who’ve been cheated, take my precepts,
You whom your love has totally betrayed;
Learn to be cured of love from him who taught it…’

As with most ancient poets, Ovid’s work was devised to be read out loud and heard, so to listen to David Timson’s masterful new recording picks up that tradition of public performance of verse, perfectly capturing the wit and parody prevalent in these poems. Despite being over 2000 years old, many of the thoughts and sentiments seem pertinent to our own time. Perhaps his best advice of all is in the following couplet from Remedia:

‘Let love die by degrees and gently vanish,
Dissolving without trace into thin air…’