It is well known that Ovid's Amores begin with a reference to Virgil's Aeneid in the very first word, arma (‘weapons’, Am. 1.1.1 = Verg. Aen. 1.1), which implies that the elegist had been composing epic before Cupid, by stealing a foot, apparently forced him to write elegy.Footnote 1 In spite of this incapacitation at the hands of the love god, Ovid continues to toy with Virgil's epic by making the first two poems of his collection of elegiacs into a mini-Aeneid,Footnote 2 or – to be precise – by making the second poem of the collection into the second half of the Aeneid.Footnote 3 One result is that the three-book edition of Amores threatens to be over even before it has begun. Another is that Ovid can be identified with the Latin enemies, on the wrong side of history, from the Aeneid. I restrict the argument largely to what can be observed in Amores 1.2, leaving aside, for instance, the possibility that Ovid shot by Cupid's arrow in 1.1 might be thought comparable to Dido, similarly shot and causing Aeneas to dally in Carthage with her in Aeneid 4.
The key to the interpretation offered here is the identification of a ‘false closure’ at the end of Amores 1.2,Footnote 4 with its encouragement to Cupid to be as merciful as his kinsman Augustus:
Look at the happy weapons of your kinsman Caesar – with the hand that conquered, he protects those he has conquered.
The sly wit of this piece of advice is discussed by many commentators,Footnote 5 but there is an extra dimension which has so far been hiding in plain sight. Ovid urges Cupid to pursue a merciful course of behaviour, an entreaty similar to the appeal of Turnus for clemency at the end of the Aeneid. The option of compassion suggested to Cupid in Amores 1.2 is one-half of the choice offered to Aeneas at the end of the Aeneid: should he kill Turnus or show mercy to him? The epic hero's inclination is to the latter until he sees the infelix (‘unhappy’, 12.941) baldric of Pallas. Virgil's ending effectively mythologizes the choice faced by Augustus when he was merely Octavian: should he pursue and seek revenge against the murderers of his father, or should he pardon them, as their victim, Julius Caesar, who was renowned for his clemency, might have done to his own enemies?Footnote 6 The end of the Aeneid and the end of Amores 1.2 also share the issue of kinship: the pointed reference to the family tie between Caesar and Cupid, a lineage to which Aeneas of course also belongs, is a debased version of Turnus’ pathetic invocation of his father, Daunus, in his unsuccessful appeal to Aeneas: fuit et tibi talis/Anchises genitor (‘and such a father to you was Anchises’, Aen. 12.933–4).
There are verbal parallels between the final scene of the Aeneid and the couplet that closes Amores 1.2 to buttress this reading. The ‘happy weapons’ of Amores 1.2.51 contrast with the ‘unhappy baldric’ (infelix…balteus) of Aeneid 12.941–2, and the deliberate placement of uicit adjacent to uictos in Amores 1.2.51 picks up uicisti et uictum (‘you have won and I am beaten’, Aen. 12.936) in Turnus’ plea to Aeneas.Footnote 7 Notice, too, that 1.2.51 ends with the same word, arma, which began both the Amores and the Aeneid, a repetition that may mirror the well-recognized doublings between the epic's beginning and end. For instance, the word condere appears in two different meanings (‘to hide’ and ‘to found’) very early on in the epic, and three lines from the Aeneid's end (Aen. 1.5, 1.33 ~ 12.950).Footnote 8 Now condere and protegere have similar meanings (with possible suggestions of covering and hiding).Footnote 9 Moreover, another possible model for the final couplet of Amores 1.2 is Propertius 2.16.41–2,Footnote 10 which features condere: Caesaris haec uirtus et gloria Caesaris haec est:/illa, qua uicit, condidit arma manu (‘This is the quality of Caesar and this is Caesar's glory; he sheathed his weapon with the hand by which he won’). And I wonder whether the reappearance of protegit at 1.14.52 could be considered a stichometric repetition (that is, from the same line, 52) of the word at the same place (though not the same sedes) in the second and second-last poems of Amores 1.Footnote 11 While this may strain credulity, that single other appearance of the word in the Amores does refer to the beloved covering her face while she blushes – a celebrated scene from the last book of the Aeneid.Footnote 12 Thus Ovid in Amores 1.14 could be referring back to a subtle game with closural elements when he had employed the same word earlier in his book.
But if the culmination of Amores 1.2 mirrors the ending of an epic, this closure comes too early for an elegiac collection of which this is famously a programmatic poem.Footnote 13 It is only in the third poem that Ovid starts to talk about a girl: the order of elegiac business is reversed and we move from metrics to the poet's opus, first via the love god's arrow-shot and then by Cupid's triumph, before we get to a love object.Footnote 14 Even when tossing and turning in bed at the beginning of 1.2, the Ovidian lover is alone,Footnote 15 and at the mercy not of the elegiac mistress, as might be expected, but of Amor.Footnote 16 In spite of the Ovidian lover's solitude,Footnote 17 I would suggest that the opening scene of 1.2 is reminiscent of another episode of the Aeneid Footnote 18 – the infection and incitement to war of Turnus by the fury Allecto, in the guise of the priestess of Juno, Calybe.Footnote 19 The result is to inaugurate a ‘second half of the Aeneid’ at the start of Amores 1.2.
That said, in Book 7 Turnus is asleep when the fury in disguise first wakes him: iam mediam nigra carpebat nocte quietem (‘now he was enjoying the middle of his sleep in the dark night’, Aen. 7.414). It can be argued that the specification placida cum nocte iaceres (‘since you were lying in the calm night’, 7.427), taken as a causal rather than temporal cum-clause, likewise reflects the peacefulness of Turnus’ sleep;Footnote 20 I agree that carpere implies step-by-step movement into ever-deeper sleep.Footnote 21 Rather, it is Amata who was already convulsed with worry before the advent of Allecto: femineae ardentem curaeque iraeque coquebant (‘female cares and angers were cooking her, blazing’, 7.345). Indeed, in that case the snake which Allecto inflicts on the queen is unfelt: uoluitur attactu nullo, fallit furentem (‘it rolls with no touch, it deceives the raging woman’, 7.350). Given the similarity with Ovid's understanding of his own situation (although the two options are presented in reverse order), it seems reasonable to ask whether Ovid's persona is similarly experiencing femineae curae: a woman's cares, or cares regarding a woman?
However, when rebuffed, Allecto causes Turnus to tremble and then his eyes to become fixed (7.446–7); she ‘turns her fiery gaze’ (flammea torquens/lumina, 7.448–9) on him, and she also throws a missile at him:
When she had spoken like that she threw a torch at the young man and fixed smoking brands in his heart with black light.
The result, in the next line, is that ‘a huge fear breaks his sleep’, and Turnus sweats down his bones (7.458–9), just as the speaker of Amores 1.2 is uacuus somno and feels pain through his bones (Am. 1.2.3–4). Yet if Turnus was already awake, and he did manage to speak mockingly to Allecto (Aen. 7.435–44), then a problem arises for an understanding of the passage as realistic: did he see all this happen?Footnote 22 The question is pertinent to Amores 1.2 because the speaker wonders how the missiles of Cupid had entered his heart without him knowing (1.2.6, followed by sic erit, ‘that must be it’, 1.2.7). In any case the Ovidian speaker talks shortly after about ‘having seen’ (uidi, 11–12) torches blazing and dying for himself.Footnote 23 Likewise, although Allecto (in the persona of Calybe) barely mentions the issue of marriage to Lavinia (coniugium, Aen. 7.433), Turnus, when infected by Allecto, experiences a love (amor, 7.461) – but, paradoxically enough, for iron (ferri), meaning war. To be sure, he is going to war for a woman, but again the situation arguably matches Ovid's persona's lack of a mistress. If in the Aeneid 7 passage Virgil ‘grafts elegiac language into epic diction’,Footnote 24 I submit that Ovid's speaker owes something in turn to Virgil's anti-hero Turnus, together with his vocal champion Amata.Footnote 25
At the beginning of Amores 1.2, ‘the subject matter is mundane, domestic almost, and the language is correspondingly simple’.Footnote 26 However, the tone is soon heightened with the set-piece description of Cupid's triumph,Footnote 27 with a specific nod to the elegiac predecessor Tibullus (as 1.2.34 modifies Tib. 2.5.118). Importantly, we have moved from Aeneid 7 to Aeneid 8: in Amores 1.2 the focus on the triumphal chariot as the gift of a uitricus (‘stepfather’, 1.2.24), which has led to debate over whether Mars or Vulcan is meant, reproduces the appearance of Mars's chariot when Venus goes to ask for Aeneas’ arms from Vulcan in Aeneid 8:Footnote 28
In another part they were pressing on with a chariot with winged wheels for Mars, with which he rouses men, with which he rouses cities.
Likewise, we must bear in mind the observation that Virgil's ecphrastic description of the shield of Aeneas takes a structure which reflects the progression of the triumph which winds up as its centrepiece.Footnote 29 It is noteworthy that Ovid alludes, in his description of Mens Bona (‘Good Sense’) and Pudor (‘Modesty’) in chains, to a painting by Apelles set up in the Forum of Augustus that featured a bound Furor (‘Frenzy’),Footnote 30 making the scene a parodic ecphrasis, and therefore a debased form of the description of Aeneas’ shield. Indeed, we might consider that the Triple Triumph on the Shield enacts in ecphrasis the closure prophesied by Jupiter in Aeneid 1.286–96 with the coming of Caesar. Thus it is possible to see a negative reminiscence of that pro-Augustan passage from the Aeneid, Jupiter's prophecy to Venus of future glory for Rome (Aen. 1.291–6), in Ovid's reference to the chained personifications.Footnote 31 Cupid's triumph in Amores 1.2 unbinds the Furor who had been bound up in Jupiter's telling (Aen. 1.294–6), undoing the triumphal, pacifying conclusion of the Shield passage. Moreover, that endpoint, chronologically the latest historical event described in the epic, can be assimilated with the narrative closure of Aeneid 12, where ‘Frenzy’ is also unbound when Aeneas is ‘blazing with fury and rage’ (furiis accensus et ira, 12.946).Footnote 32 As we progress through Amores 1.2, we are also progressing through the second half of the Aeneid, until we reach its violent end with its hard choice in the poem's final couplet.
But it is certainly the case that a girl is still missing from Ovidian elegy until Amores 1.3 at least – so one valid way of reading the second half of the Aeneid, as a conflict of suitors over the blushing would-be bride Lavinia (let alone the first half with Dido), is lacking from the Ovidian response to the epic that I have mooted in Amores 1.2.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, further Virgilian aspects are at play in Amores 1.2.Footnote 34 It is tempting to claim that the closing couplet, which I have linked with the end of the epic, has affinities with the advice of Anchises in Aeneid 6: parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (‘to spare the conquered and war down the proud’, 6.853);Footnote 35 the imperative parce in Amores 1.2.50 is no accident.Footnote 36 That advice could also be said to follow a triumph-like set piece, in the form of the Parade of Heroes from Roman History shown to Aeneas (Aen. 6.760–846).Footnote 37 As the parade is midway through the epic, we do not have to decide that the end of Amores 1.2 is a total closure, only that it is possible to read it as one.
However, there is a further Virgil-inspired detail in the closing couplet of Amores 1.2 which makes us think hard about the political ramifications of the elegist's literary decisions. The phrase felicia arma (‘happy weapons’) is used earlier than our poem only in the Aeneid, to describe the arms of Ufens (felicibus armis, ‘with his happy weapons’, 7.745).Footnote 38 This forms part of his vignette in yet another triumph-like locus, the Catalogue of Heroes – except that Ufens fights on the wrong side, that of the Latins. If we notice this identification, we start to wonder about what it means for Augustus to be associated with a historic enemy.Footnote 39 The true meaning of clemency, it would seem, is that conqueror and conquered can switch roles: each side can exchange its ‘happy weapons’.Footnote 40
But there is more for the suspicious and discerning reader of Ovid, because the enemies of Aeneas (and by extension of Cupid's family) in the epic can be linked not to Augustus but to the love elegist himself, downtrodden in the love god's triumph. When we meet Ufens again in the Aeneid, it will be in a charged situation that has implications for Ovid himself: the immediate aftermath of the death of Pallas (10.517–20):
He grabs four youths alive, sons of Sulmo, then four raised by Ufens, to sacrifice as victims to the shades below [of Pallas], to pour out as captive blood on the flames of the pyre.
This infamous scene shows an unmerciful Aeneas preparing to sacrifice children of Ufens and of Sulmo.Footnote 41 While Sulmo here seems to have been another Latin warrior (the name only appears elsewhere in the Aeneid as the first victim of Nisus when Euryalus has been killed, 9.412), Sulmone can be interpreted as an ablative of location: thus some of the sacrificial victims could be said to have been ‘born at Sulmo’.Footnote 42 Of course, another famous person ‘born at Sulmo’ was Ovid (in the Amores at 2.16.1, 3.15.11). In my view, Ovid has actively encouraged a creative misreading of Virgil's Aeneid in Amores 1.2, which makes me less inclined to trust that Cupid, kinsman not only of Augustus but also of Aeneas, will be merciful to the elegiac poet-lover.Footnote 43 In that case, we might want to ask what not being merciful entails: does it imply, on analogy with the end of the Aeneid, that Cupid will kill and therefore silence the poet, who is already wounded (Am. 1.2.29)? That would put a premature stop to the Amores.Footnote 44
Yet we must remember that Ovid's condensation of the Aeneid near the beginning of the Amores in the service of a narratological game has Virgilian precedent itself in the epic's early stages. In the shipwreck scene in Book 1 the fate of the poem hangs in the balance: if Aeneas perishes with his ships, then his founding of Rome cannot so much as get started. In this fraught atmosphere, the opening two words of the epic resurface amid the floating debris: arma uirum tabulaeque et Troia gaza per undas (‘arms of men, planks, and the treasure from Troy through the waves’, Aen. 1.119).Footnote 45 So, too, the very ending of the poem is foreshadowed in that same scene. Aeneas’ very first appearance shows him un-heroically fearful: soluuntur frigore membra (‘his limbs are slack with chill’, 1.92), which is the same phrase applied to Turnus in the epic's penultimate line (12.951), when the tables are turned and Aeneas has dealt him the death blow. And in this context the mention of Caesar by name at Amores 1.2.51 in relation to clemency replays the old dispute over which Caesar (Aen. 1.286), Julius or Augustus, is meant in Jupiter's Aeneid 1 prophecy.Footnote 46
As for another celebrated feature of the Aeneid's narrative complexity, the ‘proem in the middle’,Footnote 47 that too has an unexpected aspect relevant to Ovid's purposes in the Amores: its dedication is to Erato, the Muse of love poetry.Footnote 48 But this could be a further similarity not only with Amores 1.1Footnote 49 but with Amores 1.2 as well. The latter's opening styles itself as a new surprise beginning after the focus on the nuts and bolts of metrics in Amores 1.1: a ‘proem in the middle’ of the opening, so to speak,Footnote 50 even if – to be more precise – the address to Erato might take place at the end of Amores 1.1 (Musa, 1.1.30). A broad result of these points is that Ovid ends up writing epic after all, joining up two poems, which purported to be discrete ‘snapshots’ rather than coherent narrative,Footnote 51 but also flagrantly disobeying Cupid's Amores 1.1 order – not to write epic – with the creation of a surreptitious ‘mini-Aeneid’. Such disobedience goes against the stated theme of Amores 1.2: the necessity of surrender to Cupid. Ovid's subversiveness makes the trail that I have identified, which leads to Aeneas’ ‘human sacrifice’, all the more uncomfortable and worrying, the more so because it comes so close to the outset of the poet's literary and erotic collection of Amores.
