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Amores 2.1.7–8: a programmatic allusion by anagram

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

D. J. Califf
D. J. Califf
Affiliation:
Kean College, Union, New Jersey
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Extract

Ovid begins his overtly programmatic Amores 2.1 with the claim that Cupid, who had previously interfered with the poet's attempt to write an epic (1.1), has once again ordered him to reject epic subjects (this time, a Gigantomachia) and to compose a book of decadent love-elegies instead. Faced with this new task, the poet dutifully proceeds to warn that his elegiac verses are not suitable for the prudish but hopes that they will be read by lovers. Among the prospective readers are young men who, like Ovid himself, have been shot by Cupid's arrow:

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , December 1997 , pp. 604 - 605
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1997

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References

1 See Pease on Aeneid4.1.

2 Consider also ‘nee mora, uenit amor’ (1.6.13), ‘ater erat’ (1.14.9), and perhaps Romaas an anagram for Amorat 2.9.17. Frederick Ahl's Metaformations(Ithaca, 1985) provides a useful introduction to anagrammatism in antiquity (pp. 44-54) and offers numerous examples of anagrams in Latin poetry, e.g. Vergil's Latiumlmaluit (Aen.8.322-23) and Seneca's omnialanimo (Med.557). In addition, an especially clever Horatian etymologising anagram has been identified by Francis Caims, who in his ‘Horace Odes3, 22: Genre and its Sources’, Philologus126 (1982), 235, spotted triuiain ‘diua triformis’ (Carm.3.22.4).

3 See also the Prolegomena to McKeown's, J. C.Amores commentary (Liverpool, 1987) on this aspect of the doctrinaof the poem (I, 32 ff.).Google Scholar

4 In Tristia 2,Ovid defends his earlier elegies against charges of immorality and claims not to have written anything that cannot be found in ‘respectable’ Homeric epic (371-80) or in tragedy (381-408), the genre that the poet juxtaposes with elegy in Amores3.1. In addition, the militia amorisconceit developed in 1.9 recurs throughout the Amoresand is arguably of a piece with the phenomenon described here.

1 For Penelope, see Ov. Her.1.59-62 and Kennedy, D. C., ‘The Epistolary Mode and the First of the Heroides’, CQ 34 (1984), 413–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 417-18. For Ariadne and the tigers, see Ov. Her.10.85-6 and cf. Ars Am.1.549-52. A number of examples of this phenomenon are discussed in Barchiesi, A., ‘Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovid's Heroides’, HSCP 95 (1993), 333–365.Google Scholar