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’.Footnote 1 The present note will subject a famous and somewhat puzzling Ovidian passage to the kind of treatment that Martial might have given it.Footnote 2 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.
First, the argument. As every artist in Ovid's Ars Amatoria reflects in some sense on the poet and his poetry, so every teacher reflects on his teaching. Though the praeceptor specifically disavows the aid of Apollo at the start of his project (1.25), that god nevertheless appears in person to deliver a lame little Ars Amatoria in Book 2 (493–510).Footnote 3 John Miller examines how Ovid's ‘vision of Apollo unfolds by spasmodic turns, constantly revising itself, teasing or even frustrating us, deferring first one punch line, then another’, conflating and confusing the various manifestations of the god in both cult and literature.Footnote 4 The Martialian reader, however, detects something even more devious. The praeceptor has just instructed his pupils that the only way to tame a jealous woman's wrath is to bed her, then discoursed a bit on the origins of the world and the role of sex in forming the bonds of human society (2.455-92). The god yanks him off course (2.493-502):
Laurel was of course Apollo's sacred tree, employed by Horace, for instance, with associations ‘simultaneously Delphic and triumphal, Pindaric and Augustan’;Footnote 5 but it might also remind the reader of Apollo's failed attempt to woo/catch/rape the unreceptive Daphne (Greek ‘Laurel’), who rejected the god's impassioned song and metamorphosed into a tree in the nick of time—an epic fail (so to speak) of the art of love.Footnote 6 So when Apollo says that only he who is ‘known to himself’ will ‘finish every job (opus) according to his strength’, given the ubiquitous use of opus to refer to the sexual act,Footnote 7 the potential meaning of cognosco as ‘to get to know carnally’,Footnote 8 the primary and etymologically sound meaning of manifestus as ‘caught red-handed’,Footnote 9 the suitability of the lyre string to erotic metaphorFootnote 10 and of the thumb to erotic stimulation,Footnote 11 the conundrum concerning the employment of Apollo's hands,Footnote 12 and Ovid's riffs throughout his poetry on the god's disastrous sex life,Footnote 13 is it not possible to see here a wink at Apollo's carnal self-consolation after the Daphne debacle (and others)?Footnote 14
Now, the interpretative consequences. Ovid is often most serious when he is funniest, and there may be more at stake here than a dirty joke. If Apollo's speech is a mise en abyme for the Ars Amatoria as a whole, then the scene says much about the gap between the praeceptor-prophet and the actual author of the poem: Apollo surely does not intend the humiliating double entendre, but Ovid means us to laugh at the ironic distance between the god's pompous pronouncement and his failure at both love and (non-carnal) self-knowledge. The joke also points up rather baldly what the praeceptor is actually peddling. The ‘love’ endorsed by the Ars Amatoria, which seeks self-gratification at another's expense (as opposed to actual love, which seeks another's good even at one's own expense), is essentially narcissism, a chronic state of unfulfilment leading ultimately to despair and annihilation.Footnote 15 It is no coincidence that, in the Metamorphoses, the ‘fate-speaking prophet’ Tiresias tells Narcissus’ mother that the child will lead a long life, on one condition: ‘if he doesn't know himself’ (si se non nouerit, Met. 3.348).Footnote 16
I have argued that a Martialian reading of Apollo's epiphany offers a rather unflattering insight into the god's activities and, perhaps, the goals and processes of elegiac love. I shall end with the promised pay-off for invoking Martial, an Ovidian reading of … reading. Epigram 3.68, which ostensibly shoos away a respectable married woman (matrona), because the poet is about to get down and dirty—‘we're stripping: refrain from looking at naked men’ (exuimur: nudos parce uidere uiros, 4)—is an obvious allusion to Ars am. 1.31-4, in which the praeceptor-prophet famously shoos away matronae from his ‘rites’.Footnote 17 Martial then spells out, in his characteristically forthright way, the effect that such an apotropaic statement is likely to have: namely, to ensure that matronae and everyone else will read every word, as Ovid, for all his subsequent protestations of innocence (for example, Tr. 2.245-52), also knew perfectly well. Martial's punchline, I suggest, is even funnier if we recognize the subtler ‘Ovidian’ double entendre in nosco, the common use of lassus to indicate sexual exhaustion (for example, Am. 1.5.25, 3.7.80), and the Priapic potential of the poet's libellus (3.68.11-12):
As Sergio Casali points out, si bene te noui is an Ovidian tag with metapoetic implications: Martial is both citing Ovid (Am. 2.18.39; Ars am. 3.51; Pont. 1.6.4, 2.3.49) and allusively affirming that he ‘knows well’ the author he is citing.Footnote 18 But by temporarily activating the carnal sense of te noui, Martial also implies that he has successfully accomplished the ‘seduction’ at which both the Ars Amatoria and his own epigrams aim—that his libellus, in short, has become a victorious mentula.
Supporting materials for such a reading are not far to seek. For one thing, the next epigram contrasts with Martial's own the poetry of one Cosconius, in which there is no mentula (3.69.2): Martial's poem, presumably, does contain this item. For another, the punchline of the book's first poem, ‘for a home-grown book ought to beat a Gallus’ (debet enim Gallum uincere uerna liber, 3.1.6), is greatly improved by recognizing the play on Gallus as ‘Gaul’ and ‘eunuch’ (cf. 3.24, 11.74): the uerna liber, presumably, possesses intact that which the Gallus lacks. Less subtly, in Book 1, the poet implores the reader's indulgence in rather graphic terms (1.35.12-15):
Those who wish to investigate further will also find some suspicious scroll-folding and opus-shortening (after the moderate quantity of wine Ovid recommends in Ars am. 1.589-90 and 3.763-4, and warns against in Rem. am. 805-10) in Book 4 (82.5-8). But since this note is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, I will end here as Martial does his fourth book: ohe, iam satis est, ohe, libelle! (‘Whoa, that's enough now, whoa, little roll!’, 4.89.1, 4.89.9).Footnote 19
