I. INTRODUCTION
Much has changed since Fowler ended his discussion of the now widely accepted acrostic MARS at Aen. 7.601–4 with the infamous dictum ‘I await the men in white coats’.Footnote 1 Indeed, one scholar has recently declared an ‘Acrostic Revolution’.Footnote 2 This change in attitude is owed to two important developments. Foundational studies have since securely established the flourishing of acrostics in the Hellenistic period and their continuation among Latin poets.Footnote 3 The current zeal in acrostic studies, however, is owed more to the renewed appreciation that ancient readers themselves hunted for them.Footnote 4 It is worth repeating some evidence: Diogenes Laertius (5.92–3) reports that in the fourth century a certain Heracleides claimed authorship of a tragedy attributed to Sophocles by pointing out an acrostic therein of the name of his erōmenos ΠΑΝΚΑΛΟΣ; Cicero (Diu. 2.111) notes that there was ‘in certain Ennian verses’ (in quibusdam Ennianis)Footnote 5 an acrostic Q ENNIVS FECIT (‘Quintus Ennius made [me]’) and then (2.112) mentions the omnipresence of acrostics in the Sibylline books; Aulus Gellius (NA 14.6) describes a book devoted to identifying apparent acrostics and other plays on words in Homer. This reading practice did not emerge in the Hellenistic period ab ouo, but had roots in earlier sympotic culture. Athenaeus (Deipn. 10.457e–459b), drawing on Clearchus of Soli's work on riddles, reports that symposiasts in the Classical period would compete in such games as reciting Homeric verses which began and ended with the same letter, or those whose first and last syllables formed proper names or the names of dining paraphernalia. Modern readers looking for acrostics are thus playing an ancient game, indeed.
The passage of Athenaeus just cited demonstrates an important point: ancient readers attended not only to verses’ first and last letters but to their syllables as well.Footnote 6 It comes as no surprise, then, that we observe acrostics comprising the first two letters and/or syllables of successive lines. The most famous acrostic of all, Aratus’ ΛΕΠΤΗ (Phaen. 783–6),Footnote 7 is followed by a passage which displays two such acrostics, first identified by Haslam.Footnote 8 Here Aratus describes how weather signs are given at different points of the month (Phaen. 805–10):
But the signs are not all furnished for all the days [sc. of the month]; rather, those which occur on the third and fourth days hold until the half-moon, and then those from the half-moon hold up until mid month, but then from mid month to the waning half-moon; and the fourth day from the departing month follows after that; and the third day of the coming month after that.Footnote 9
Line-initial σήματα (‘signs’, 805) and σημαίνει (‘it signifies’, 808) act as ‘signposts’ for acrostics to come.Footnote 10 A reader intent on single-letter acrostics such as they have already encountered in the Phaenomena will note two incomplete ones immediately: σήματα (805) begins an acrostic ΣΑΜ- (that is, Doric ΣΗΜ-) spanning lines 805–7;Footnote 11 then, with σημαίνει (808) begins another acrostic ΣΕΜ- echoing the first.Footnote 12 Aratus, however, has not yet finished his ‘signs’. As Haslam has demonstrated, Aratus figures the weather signs’ progression from half-moon (διχαιομένης, 807) to mid month (διχόμηνον, 808) with a first syllabic acrostic ΜΕ-ΣΗ (‘middle’) whose second syllable is provided by the signpost σημαίνει. Then, as the month recedes from the fading half-moon (διχάδα φθιμένην, 809) to its end (μηνὸς ἀποιχομένου, 810), the letters of ΜΕ-ΣΗ seem themselves to fade, transposed as they are into ΕΣ-ΜΗ.Footnote 13 Aratus’ fivefold repetition of the prefix διχ- seems to signal the play of these syllabic acrostics with halves. I therefore suggest that the other numbers in this passage play similar roles. The double appearance of the number four (τεταρταίῃ, 806; τετράς, 809) may indicate that the two syllabic acrostics span four lines and play with the four-letter word μέση; the two-fold use of the number three (τριτάτῃ, 806; τριτάτῃ, 810) may likewise point to the two single-letter acrostics ΣΑΜ- and ΣΕΜ- which comprise three letters each over a total of six lines. Single-letter and syllabic acrostics are thus skilfully interwoven into a coherent whole.Footnote 14
Aratus’ syllabic acrostics appear to have caught his Latin emulators’ eyes. Recently, Kronenberg has identified a syllabic acrostic in Lucretius’ description of eclipses, whereby luna (‘moon’) ‘hides’ (cf. latebras, 5.751) in the reversed acrostic NA-LV (5.753–4; cf. luna, 5.753).Footnote 15 Aratus’ syllabic acrostic may also have inspired Virgil's famous reversed skipped-line signature MA-VE-PV (G. 1.429–33).Footnote 16
Syllabic and ‘two-letter’ acrostics were not confined, however, to Aratean contexts. Two have recently been identified in Virgil's fourth Eclogue.Footnote 17 A more striking example is found in a Greek verse inscription from Egypt dated to 7 b.c. (IPhilae 143) boasting an elaborate ‘double acrostic’: the first syllable of each line as well as each line's first and last letters taken together produce the poet's name and alias in the genitive case (Κατιλίου τοῦ καὶ Νικάνορος, ‘of Catilius, also [called] Nicanor’).Footnote 18 Read linearly, the text withholds Catilius’ name, referring to him only as a ‘talented man’ (εὐτέχνου φωτός); the reader who perceives his acrostics discovers both his name and proof of his τέχνη. This same Catilius composed a verse inscription in praise of Augustus (IPhilae 142), and Mairs argues that he may have belonged to the emperor's literary entourage.Footnote 19 Be that as it may, his poem demonstrates that there existed in the late first century b.c. a taste for syllabic and two-letter acrostics strong enough that a poet would stake his claim to talent upon them.
The opening of a poetry book is a conspicuous place for acrostics and related forms of wordplay. The acrostic IANE, for instance, opening Ov. Fast. 2.1–4 (a ‘gamma’ acrostic, the poem's first word being Ianus) invokes the god of thresholds at the boundary between books.Footnote 20 The syllabic acrotelestich terRAM | VERtere (‘to turn the earth’) at Verg. G. 1.1–2 has been identified by Katz as a Virgilian signature (that is, MARo VERgilius) enjambed precisely where Aratus had punned on his own name (ἄρρητον, ‘unspoken’, Phaen. 2).Footnote 21 The beginning of the Aeneid has proved a popular hunting ground, albeit yielding finds less widely persuasive.Footnote 22 In what follows, I bring two new instances of acrostic commencement into the discussion.
II. ACTIAN IAMBS: HOR. EPOD. 1.1–2
In the Ars poetica Horace declares the power of a word's placement to make it ‘new’: dixeris egregie, si notum callida uerbum | reddiderit iunctura nouum (‘You will speak excellently, if a clever collocation renders a familiar word new’, 47–8). While Horace is generally understood here to refer to reinvigorating a word by using it in an unexpected semantic context,Footnote 23 the vertical juxtaposition of notum (‘familiar’) and nouum (‘new’) is iconic of the effect that a word's physical placement on the scroll has on its meaning: notum seems visually to become nouum. Recent intriguing acrostics and telestichs have been identified in the Satires and the Odes.Footnote 24 Yet Horace's callida iunctura, I argue, can be observed at the opening of his earliest book, the Epodes.
Horace later summarized his achievement in the Epodes as bringing the aggressive iambic poetry of Archilochus to Italy. Thus in Epist. 1.19 he writes (1.19.23–5):
I was the first to show Parian iambs to Latium, having followed Archilochus’ metres and spirit, but not his subject, namelyFootnote 25 words attacking Lycambes.
We are probably to understand animos (24) more precisely as ‘anger’, as is idiomatic in the plural (OLD s.v. 11), for in the Ars poetica Horace identifies iambus as the metre of rage: Archilochum proprio rabies armauit iambo (‘Rage armed Archilochus with the iamb proper to it [that is, rabies]’, Ars P. 79).Footnote 26 So it comes as something of a surprise that Horace's Epodes begin not with rage but with a solemn declaration of friendship.
Epode 1 is a propemptikon addressed to Maecenas setting off for Actium.Footnote 27 Horace opens by predicting the danger his friend will find there in Octavian's service (1.1–4):
You will go with the Liburnians, friend, among the ships’ tall towers, prepared, Maecenas, to support Caesar's every risk with your own.
Scholars seeking to locate the iambic quality of these lines have focussed primarily on their subject-matter, as seafaring, battle and friendship are recurrent Archilochean themes.Footnote 29 Heyworth, on the other hand, has noted that the first word ibis echoes the title of a lost curse poem by Callimachus, thereby setting the Epodes in dialogue with Callimachus’ third-century revivification of archaic iambus.Footnote 30
Yet we have just seen that Horace prided himself on being the first to bring not only Archilochean res to Italy but also Archilochean numeros. Little attention has yet been paid to how insistently Horace underscores his metrical innovation in the first lines of Epode 1.Footnote 31 It has, for example, often been notedFootnote 32 that the opening couplet revolves around a contrast between the proverbially light Liburnians (Liburnis, 1)Footnote 33 on Octavian's side and the towering warships on Antony's (alta nauium | … propugnacula, 1–2).Footnote 34 Barchiesi and Harrison have sought an Archilochean pedigree for the image in Archil. fr. 24.1–2 West, which describes a voyager's safe return home (νηῒ σὺν σ[μ]ικρῇ μέγαν | [πόντον περήσ]ας ἦλθεν ἐκ Γορτυνίης, ‘He arrived from Gortyn after crossing the great sea with a small ship’).Footnote 35 The supposed echo, however, is faint, and Woodman has now demonstrated its dubious relevance to Epode 1.Footnote 36 Far more palpably ‘iambic’ is how the contrast of light Liburnians and towering enemy ships mirrors the conflict of short and long syllables that creates the iambus itself. Horace describes the iamb in the Ars poetica as follows: syllaba longa breui subiecta uocatur iambus, | pes citus (‘A long syllable placed next to a short is called the iamb, a swift foot’, 251–2). The participle subiecta denotes not only the long syllable's placement after the short (OLD s.v. subicio 8) but also its metaphorical submission to the short syllable's power (OLD s.v. 5) resulting in a ‘swift foot’ (pes citus). In Horace's hands iambus has become iconic of the disparate naval forces gathering at Actium, and for his audience reading after the battle had been won the metre's speed suggests the Liburnians’ coming victory. The same analogy obtains, too, at Horace's larger unit of iambic composition, the epodic couplet, which was widely considered Archilochus’ invention.Footnote 37 Here again we witness the alternation of short and long lines, and the perpetual yielding of a larger line (here the iambic trimeter) to a smaller, faster one (the iambic dimeter). Horace's first epodic couplet, then, presents an artful mise-en-abyme: iambic metron, epodic couplet and Actian forces all repeat each other in a perfect marriage of form and content.
Nor are these the only ways in which iambus asserts its formal qualities at the beginning of the Epodes. Holzberg has argued that ibis suggests, metaphorically, the reader's commencement on a journey through the poetry book as if it were a ship being launched.Footnote 38 Let us pursue this idea more rigorously. ibis does not stand alone but is construed with inter, and, as Du Quesnay reminds us, ire inter is idiomatic for charging into the midst of the enemy.Footnote 39 This use of ire inter draws tantalizingly close to the semantic range of the Greek verb ἰάπτειν (‘to launch oneself, burst, inveigh’, BDAG s.v. 1a; ‘to strike, beat, damage, ruin’, BDAG s.v. 1b), which was apparently connected in ancient thought to verbal invective and the ἴαμβος.Footnote 40 This possible etymological play lends more force to Holzberg's argument: ibis inter suggests that a specifically iambic journey lies ahead of the Epodes’ reader.
What is more, if we do pursue Holzberg's interpretative tack, taking ire inter as metaphorical for the act of reading, we may be surprised when we find an IAMB ‘between’ (inter) the first two lines (Epod. 1.1–4):
The first two letters of each line taken together yield IB-AM, an anagram of IA-MB; taking the third letter of either line, we get IAMBI.Footnote 41 Readers intent on confirmatory signposts may appreciate that propugnacula (2) could draw attention to the ‘fore’ of the lines, and subire (4) suggests that we attend to vertical motion. That the letters of IBis … AMice require rearrangement need not be an impediment to recognition. We have already seen such an ‘anagrammatic’ acrostic, namely Aratus’ ΕΣ-ΜΗ (Phaen. 809–10) following ΜΕ-ΣΗ (807–8), offering a formal precedent for Horace's IAMB. Moreover, no Latin word begins with the letters mb-, making an acrostic IA-MB impossible. But why, one might wonder, would Horace have preferred this anagrammatic IB(i)-AM(i)/IAMBi to an acrostic of single letters, viz. I-A-M-B-I? By fashioning an acrostic out of the beginnings of two lines, and two lines only, Horace embroiders the generic name IAMBI on his first epodic couplet, underscoring the epode as his Archilochean innovation in Latin verse.
If the reader finds significance in the first two lines’ letters rearranged into IAMBI, it is reasonable to assume that they will also have pondered the acrostic as it actually appears, IB-AM, that is, ibam (‘I was going’). This reader immediately will be struck by the harmony of IB-AM with the poem's first word, ibis (‘you will go’). But what significance could inhere in the contrasting statements ‘You will go (ibis); I was going (IB-AM)’? Here it seems important to keep two things in mind: first, Horace's declaration at Epod. 1.23–4 that he will accompany Maecenas to Actium, whose truth there is no cogent reason to doubt;Footnote 42 second, the passage of time between the epode's dramatic setting before Actium and the publication of the collected Epodes after the battle.Footnote 43 Read from this vantage point, IB(is)-AM admits interpretation as the statement of the author looking back on his journey to Actium (‘I was going’). At the moment of reading, however, the reader's journey to Actium, like Maecenas’ journey in 31 b.c., lies ever ahead in the future, so that the paired statements seem to say: ‘You will go where I was going …’
Having observed such an intricate and meaningful acrostic at the opening of Epodes 1, the reader will with reason continue to seek similar plays ‘between the lines’ in the collection to follow. Cowan has already, for instance, pointed out a bilingual wordplay on Io's name facilitated by the vertical juxtaposition of Inachia and heu at the beginnings of lines 6–7 in Epode 11.Footnote 44 As it happens, the reader does not have long to wait for another effect of callida iunctura to appear. Later on in Epode 1, Horace declares his intent to follow Maecenas not for material enrichment but to earn his friend and patron's pleasure, as follows (1.23–30):
Gladly shall I fight this and every war in hopes of your favour, not so that my ploughs may be yoked to many bulls and struggle onwards, nor so that my flock may move from Lucanian to Calabrian pastures before the burning Dog Star, nor so that a villa of Tusculum shining from on high may touch the Circean walls.
Harrison has observed that all the rewards which Horace denies motivate his service (bulls, flocks, a splendid villa) may be read as symbols of grand poetry, especially epic. The passage thus serves as a recusatio.Footnote 45 How fittingly, then, does the couplet preceding this recusatio begin with the initial words LIBEnter and BELLVM, suggesting a libellus! This callida iunctura adds substantial point to Horace's claim in these lines to ‘gladly fight this and every war’. The fruits of Horace's soldiering with Maecenas and Octavian will not be military successes but poetry, and poetry of a particular kind: not military epic but libelli like the Epodes for ‘this and every war’ in a promise of perpetual gifts of verse.
III. ‘YOU BEGIN’: THE PROEM TO OVID'S METAMORPHOSES
We turn now to an epic whose ending begins, enigmatically, with an acrostic about beginning. It was Barchiesi who first observed that Ovid's sphragis in the Metamorphoses starts with the acrostic INCIP- (that is, ‘BEGIN-’, 15.871–5), whose incompletion he takes as emblematic of the epic's concern with closure.Footnote 46 INCIP- also begs the question whether we might find a similar play at the beginning of the Metamorphoses. While one scholar has recently called off the search,Footnote 47 acrostics and telestichs continue to be identified later in the epic's first book, some more satisfying than others: the acrostics MVS (‘mouse’, 1.14–16)Footnote 48 and DEVS (‘god’, 1.29–32);Footnote 49 and the telestichs NESO (1.10–13, nearly an Ovidian signature),Footnote 50 ERATO (1.14–18, possibly hinting at the theme of amor?)Footnote 51 and NASO[S]SIM (‘might I be Naso’, 1.452–9, interpreted as a signature at the start of the Daphne episode).Footnote 52 INCIP-, however, still beckons to the proem; let us take another look.
It is well known that the proem stages the epic's theme of transformation at the level of language itself. Following Tarrant's edition we read (Met. 1.1–4):Footnote 53
My spirit bears [sc. me] to speak of shapes changed into new bodies: gods, breathe favourably upon my beginnings (for even these you have changed), and spin out a continuous song from the first origin of the universe to my times.
The poem's first metamorphosis is one of syntax. The reader is liable to take in noua fert animus initially as ‘My spirit bears [me] into new things’, but upon reading the enjambed corpora (‘bodies’, 2) they must revise and construe in noua with corpora.Footnote 55 Following on this change's heels is the hint of a metrical and generic transformation from elegy to epic, for the parenthesis nam uos mutastis et illa (‘for even these you have changed’) occurs at the metrical sedes where the metre reveals itself as dactylic hexameter.Footnote 56 Still another transformation of language, this time translation, is suggested in the first line by mutatas … formas. Ahl noted that this collocation echoes the epic's Greek title Metamorphōseis (or Libri metamorphōseōn);Footnote 57 his argument may be strengthened when we recall that muto as early as the elder Seneca (Controu. 10 praef. 11) refers to the act of translation (OLD s.v. 12c; TLL 8.1724.79–84), so that mutatas … formas suggests the translation of Greek material into Latin.
It is fair to say, then, that this proem demands that its readers watch for evolutions of meaning resulting from the careful placement of words. It is worth noting, therefore, that Ovid draws insistent attention to beginnings (cf. coeptis, 2; prima … origine, 3), and that the beginning of each line is emphatically marked. The preposition in, of course, is a striking first word which suggests the affiliation of the Metamorphoses with didactic ‘scientific’ epic, including Aratus’ Phaenomena;Footnote 58 then in the following lines both corpora (2) and aspirate (3) are enjambed.Footnote 59 When we focus on the beginnings of these lines together, an acrostic begins to come into view:
IN-CO-AS: one letter away from incohas, ‘you begin’. The missing letter, however, needs accounting for. Although intervocalic [h] seems not to have been pronounced by speakers from lower social strata, the letter's correct observation was prized by elites, as so famously documented in Catullus’ abuse of (H)Arrius in poem 84.Footnote 60 If, however, we return to the proem, we will find that the absent letter h is hinted at by the very word which provides the syllable where it seems to be lacking, ASpirate (‘breathe upon!’); for as early as Varro and Nigidius Figulus aspiro was a technical term used by grammarians meaning ‘to aspirate’, that is, pronounce the letter h,Footnote 61 which was itself called aspiratio.Footnote 62 Thus Ovid's imperative aspirate, especially when taken with the dative coeptis … meis, may serve as a signpost to ‘pronounce the h’ upon ‘my beginnings’, that is, the beginning of the verse. When we do, we pronounce IN-CO-(H)AS, ‘you begin’.
At this point a possible orthographic objection must be addressed. While I have followed Tarrant in printing aspirate, other recent editorsFootnote 63 have preferred the analogical spelling adspirate, begging the question: would a reader have detected IN-CO-(H)AS if what they saw was IN-CO-ADS? In this case, I argue that phonology trumps orthography. Even if Ovid wrote adspirate, in pronunciation [d] would have been assimilated to the following [s]. A Plautine joke (Poen. 279), for example, exploits the equivalence in pronunciation of adsum (‘I am here’) and assum (‘roasted’); and Lucilius (375 Marx) wonders whether accurrere should be spelt with a d or with a c, ultimately concluding that it does not matter.Footnote 64 Whatever the spelling, it appears that a reader would have heard, either read aloud or silently, IN-CO-AS at the beginnings of the lines, thus permitting the acrostic's recognition.
The significance of IN-CO-(H)AS, ‘you begin’, starts to come into view when we consider the identities of its subject and its speaker. incoho often denotes the commencing of literary composition, as at Cic. Arch. 28 quas res … gessimus, attigit hic uersibus atque incohauit; quibus auditis … hunc ad perficiendum adhortatus sum (‘And he [Archias] undertook and began to treat in verses the deeds which we accomplished; and when I heard them I exhorted him to complete them’).Footnote 65 The subject of the acrostic IN-CO-(H)AS would seem thus to be none other than Ovid himself, setting out to write his Metamorphoses.Footnote 66 But who is the acrostic's speaker addressing the poet? On the most immediate level, of course, it is the reader, whose voice pronounces the acrostic. Yet we have seen that the final syllable of IN-CO-(H)AS is provided by the imperative aspirate, which Ovid addresses to the gods. By a marvellous coincidence, then, in the same breath as Ovid implores the gods to ‘breathe favourably’ upon his work, the reader completes the acrostic utterance IN-CO-(H)AS, ‘you are beginning [your poem]’. I mentioned in the first section Cicero's claim that the oracles of the Sibylline books were famous for their acrostics.Footnote 67 In this light, I suggest that IN-CO-(H)AS might be understood as the favourable breath of the gods’ reply to Ovid as he begins his epic.
This divine message might seem at first anti-climactic: of course Ovid ‘is beginning’. Yet if we examine IN-CO-(H)AS more closely, both in the immediate context of the proem and in dialogue with INCIP- at the end of the Metamorphoses, it will be seen to hold programmatic significance for the epic it introduces. One of Ovid's persistent interests in the Metamorphoses is etymology as a form of aetiology,Footnote 68 and so it is noteworthy that two rival etymologies given for incoho by Ovid's contemporaries are embedded in the beginning of the Metamorphoses. According to the fourth-century grammarian Diomedes (Gramm. Lat. 1.365.16–20), Julius Modestus, the freedman of C. Julius Hyginus (the latter a friend of Ovid's, to believe Suet. Gram. et rhet. 20), endorsed the spelling and pronunciation inchoo, deriving the verb from chaos. On the other hand, M. Verrius Flaccus, a leading grammarian after Varro and author of the De significatu uerborum (‘On the meaning of words’) in forty books, preferred incoho on the basis of a derivation from the archaic gloss cohum (cf., for example, Enn. Ann. 558 Skutsch), which he understood to mean mundum (‘universe’). It is intriguing, then, that just after IN-CO-(H)AS concludes, Ovid's prayer continues primaque ab origine mundi | ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen (Met. 1.3–4). These lines are teeming with etymological terminology: origo refers to a word's ‘derivation’ (OLD s.v. 4b), and deduco can mean ‘to derive’ etymologically (OLD s.v. 13). We seem here to witness a game of etymological ‘suppression’.Footnote 69 Ovid alludes to the derivation of incoho from the suppressed term cohum via mundum; indeed, deducite might be taken as a signpost to ‘make a derivation’.
And yet, as so often in the Metamorphoses, words and their meanings refuse to stand still. For no sooner has the reader perceived an etymological link between IN-CO-(H)AS and mundum/cohum than they are led headlong to Julius Modestus’ derivation of incoho (or, in his spelling, inchoo) from chaos (Met. 1.5–7):
Before the sea and the earth and the sky which covers everything there was a single face of nature on the entire globe, which they called Chaos.
At this point, the acrostic IN-CO-(H)AS seems itself to be a signpost for the direction Ovid's epic is heading: in Chaos. The first etymology of incoho from cohum/mundum now appears to have been a false start. It is worth noting that Varro derived cohum ultimately from chaos (Ling. 5.19), as he did caelum (5.20) which makes an appearance in line 5.Footnote 70 The game that IN-CO-(H)AS kicks off thus offers a taste of the etymological predilections of the epic to come.
If IN-CO-(H)AS bespeaks the interest of the Metamorphoses in etymology, it also suggests the epic's aspirations to monumentality made fully apparent in the poem's sphragis. At the end of fifteen books, Ovid's conclusion, beginning with the words iamque opus exegi … (‘Now I have completed a work …’, 15.871), alludes extensively to Hor. Carm. 3.30 (exegi monumentum, ‘I have completed a monument’).Footnote 71 In that poem Horace harnessed the language of epitaphs to frame his three books of Odes as an indestructible funerary monument securing his immortality.Footnote 72 Ovid's allusion to Horace frames the Metamorphoses also a monument, but with a significant difference in kind implied by his substitution of opus for Horace's monumentum. When referring to physical structures, opus often signifies a public building (OLD s.v. 10); Hardie has argued that Ovid hereby ‘invites comparison’ between his opus and those of Augustus, since Ovid has just completed prayers (Met. 15.861–70) to a series of divinities for whom the emperor had erected significant temples and shrines.Footnote 73 If we now follow the unfinished acrostic INCIP- in the sphragis back to the proem, a new valence of IN-CO-(H)AS comes into view. When incoho refers to the act of commencing physical construction (OLD s.v. 1), its object is often monumental public building, as in Augustus’ celebration of his commencement of reconstruction of a basilica (Res gestae 20.3).Footnote 74 From the very beginning of the Metamorphoses, then, IN-CO-(H)AS lays the foundation of a monumental epic that will take Ovid from Chaos at its beginning to ‘above the lofty stars’ (super alta … | astra, 15.875–6) by its INCIP-ient conclusion.
It makes intuitive sense for a poet to begin with an acrostic about beginning; why, then, does Ovid end his poem with a second acrostic beginning, namely INCIP-? As was mentioned above, Barchiesi suggests that INCIP- is non-closural and along with the poem's final word uiuam (‘I shall live’, 15.879) returns us to the first words of the Metamorphoses, in noua fert animus, effectively ‘closing the poem in a circularity of glorious rebirth’.Footnote 75 At the same time, however, Barchiesi has shown that Ovid's proem looks beyond the end of the Metamorphoses to the Fasti. His prayer that the gods spin out his song ad mea tempora (‘to my times’, 1.4) glances to the first word of the Fasti, tempora; moreover, Ovid fashions a clever segue to his calendar poem by winding down Metamorphoses Book 15 with the aetion of Asclepius’ arrival in Rome and the dedication of his temple, which was celebrated on 1 January.Footnote 76 It is fair to ask, then, whether INCIP- points towards the new commencement of the Fasti as much as it returns us to the start of the Metamorphoses. A closer look at the start of INCIP- might reveal a clue (Met. 15.871–2):
I have now completed a work which neither Jove's anger nor fire, nor the sword, nor rapacious old age will be able to destroy.
It was noted in Section I that Ovid opens Fasti Book 2 with the acrostic IANE. Is it a coincidence that the two-faced god of January seems likewise to appear at the end of the Metamorphoses? This acrostic nexus of INCIP-/IA-NE seems to close the Metamorphoses by invoking Janus and commencing the Fasti. Quite fittingly, it is precisely at the junction of these two works that Ovid stakes his claim to poetic immortality.
IV. CONCLUSION: ACROSTIC DIALOGUES BETWEEN AUTHOR AND READER
In her study of acrostics on stone, Garulli notes several cases in which ‘the acrostic is used as a communication channel distinct from—and parallel to—the poem: it can give voice to a viewpoint different from the dead person's or the dedicator's, and to some extent “external”’.Footnote 77 The notion of the acrostic as a ‘communication channel’ is a fruitful one that can be usefully applied to the acrostics considered here. This brief conclusion will consider how both acrostics open dialogues between the author and the reader in the present moment of reading, including the manipulation of the reader's voice in Ovid's IN-CO-(H)AS.
The second section of this article argued that Horace's acrostic IB-AM, conjoined as it is with the first word of Epode 1 IBis, indicates the temporal rift between the poem's dramatic present, in which Actium looms in the future (ibis), and the time of its reception after Actium, when Horace has already gone to Actium (IB-AM). With this acrostic nexus of second-person future and first-person imperfect verbs, Horace sends his reader off on a journey he himself has already made, thereby bringing his own past (IB-AM) emphatically into the reader's present. And what could be more present, more in the ‘now’ (iam), than Horace's IAMBI? It seems that a final trick of this Horatian acrostic is precisely this triangulation of the present moment of reading (IAM) between the author's past (IB-AM) and the reader's future (IBis).
If Horace's acrostic beginning the Epodes makes the past present, Ovid's acrostic makes the beginning of the Metamorphoses always a new beginning. Every time we lend our voice to IN-CO-(H)AS, we proclaim the commencement of Ovid's epic undertaking. I use the terms ‘voice’ and ‘proclaim’ deliberately, for the acrostic's signpost is the emphatically vocal aspirate. This leads me to a final point. Communis opinio holds that acrostics are a ‘purely visual phenomenon’,Footnote 78 a view that is, to be sure, bolstered by several ancient practitioners of the device: Aratus signals his ΛΕΠΤΗ with the repeated imperative σκέπτεο (‘look’, Phaen. 778, 799),Footnote 79 and Virgil in apparent imitation signals MA-VE-PV with respicies (‘you will look again’, G. 1.425). But must acrostics only be visual? In his commentary on the Greek figure poems Kwapisz notes the insistent aurality of works including Simas’ Egg and the ps.-Theocritean Syrinx, and he remarks in his introduction: ‘I find it thought-provoking to consider what it would mean to hear a figure poem’.Footnote 80 Ovid's IN-CO-(H)AS relies not only on the reader's eyes for its recognition but also on the reader's voice and ears, as we ‘breathe upon’ (aspirate) its syllables. One might say we hear this acrostic before we see it.
Such a synaesthetic acrostic is fully in keeping with Ovid's exploration of the materiality of the voice in the Metamorphoses, most famously in the episode of Echo and Narcissus.Footnote 81 It also anticipates in yet another way the close of Ovid's epic: ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, | siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam (‘I shall be read by the mouth of the people, and if the forewarnings of prophets contain any truth, throughout all the ages I shall live by means of my reputation’, Met. 15.878–9). It is not the text of the Metamorphoses but the os populi that Ovid claims will grant him immortality by means of his spoken reputation (fama).Footnote 82 This privileging of the reader's voice squares with Ovid's poetic autobiography written from exile (Tr. 4.10.41–60), where, as Wiseman reminds us, Ovid emphasizes oral delivery as the primary mode of receiving his contemporaries’ poetry and recalls his own first public recitation.Footnote 83 What better way, then, to start his monumental Metamorphoses than by putting in the reader's mouth the proclamation of his commencement: incohas!
