‘Textual difficulties as well as problems of content are sometimes prone to being overlooked in famous passages, because their very familiarity tends to stifle reflection on their actual meaning.’ Setting out from these words, Martin Korenjak has proposed that the famous phrase ars adeo latet arte sua (Ov. Met. 10.252) presents difficulties, and that emendation may be called for.Footnote ¹ Korenjak offers a few suggestions for correction, but concludes that ‘the true solution presumably still remains to be found’.Footnote ²

The object of this contribution is to put forward what seems a likely textual elucidation of the problem. It was not considered by Korenjak, but it does have support from the Byzantine indirect tradition.

Here is the relevant passage in full (Ov. Met. 10.247–53), where Pygmalion begins to fall in love with the statue of a woman he has sculpted:

Although the known Latin manuscripts are, according to modern editions, unanimous in reading ars adeo latet arte sua, it is certain that not all readers of editions of the text circulating in the Byzantine period had this version of Met. 10.252 before their eyes.

Maximus Planudes (1255–1305) made a Greek prose translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the autograph copy of which still survives (Vatican City, Reg. gr. 132, dated to around 1294). His translation is generally thought to be fairly faithful to Ovid's text, and was based on the collation of various Latin manuscripts, some of which are probably now lost.Footnote ³ In Planudes's work, the final four lines of the above passage are translated in this way: παρθένου γὰρ ἦν ὄντως τὸ εἶδος, ἣν ἐμπνεῖν ἂν πιστεύσαις, κἄν, εἰ μὴ ἀνθίστατο ἡ αἰδώς, καὶ κινεῖσθαι δὴ βούλεσθαι. διὰ δὴ ταῦτα καὶ ἡ τέχνη λανθάνει. ὁ δὲ Πυγμαλίων τήν τε ἑαυτοῦ τέχνην θαυμάζει, κἀν τῇ ψυχῇ τὸν τοῦ πεπλασμένου σώματος εἰσδέχεται ἔρωτα.Footnote ⁴ This naturally suggests either that Planudes did not understand and so reworked line 10.252, or that he had before him a different Latin text. Neither possibility can be ruled out. Whatever the reason, Planudes's version is different in that it has no reference at all to art hiding in its own art: ars adeo latet arte sua. miratur et haurit | pectore Pygmalion simulati corporis ignes has been turned into διὰ δὴ ταῦτα καὶ ἡ τέχνη λανθάνει. ὁ δὲ Πυγμαλίων τήν τε ἑαυτοῦ τέχνην θαυμάζει (‘on account, indeed, of these even the art escapes notice; and Pygmalion admires his own art’).

This gives rise to a new interpretation of the line. There is no available evidence for the original ancient punctuation of the Metamorphoses, if any ever existed, and in this particular instance one can see that Planudes has interpreted the punctuation of the line in a way that differs from modern scholars. He must have read ars adeo latet. arte sua miratur, from which one could translate ‘the ars is truly hidden; Pygmalion is amazed at his own ars’.Footnote ⁵ In other words, the sculpture has been so well crafted that one can hardly tell that it is not real but rather the product of ars; indeed, it is more perfect even than any living woman (cf. 10.248–9). Even Pygmalion is surprised by the product of his own skill in crafting the sculpture.

At a grammatical level, this needs some explanation. It is extremely rare for miror to take an object in the ablative case, and alleged examples of this usage listed in dictionaries are not encouraging.Footnote ⁶ There is one important exception. At Verg. Aen. 11.126 iustitiaene prius mirer belline laborum, Priscian offers ablative iustitiane as an alternative to the genitive iustitiaene (Inst. 17 = GL 3.163.1–4 Hertz). The testimony of Priscian suggests that an ablative object for miror can be taken as poetic usage.Footnote ⁷ A less attractive alternative might be to interpret arte sua instead as an ablative of cause (‘he is amazed because of his own ars’), with miror intransitive; this would be subtly different from Pygmalion being amazed at his own ars, for which one might expect the normal accusative construction artem suam. As far as the metre is concerned, diaeresis at the end of the second foot is sometimes used in hexameter poetry, though rarely (in Ovid compare, for example, Met. 10.590 miratur magis: et cursus facit ipse decorem).Footnote ⁸

Since this reading works both grammatically and metrically, it deserves attention. Planudes's version has value in so far as it represents the interpretation of a learned scholar from the distant past, who may have had access to knowledge that has not survived to our day. Even so, Planudes's interpretation has no ancient authority and must be judged on its own merits. In the notes to his editio princeps of Planudes's Greek translation, J.F. Boissonade seems to have been the first to have recognized that Planudes had a different reading for line 10.252, but he thought that it was a bad reading on the part of the Byzantine scholar: ‘Ovidius: Ars adeo latet arte sua; miratur—male lecta uerba male uertit. Legisse enim uidetur, Ars ab eo latet; artem suam miratur’.Footnote ⁹ Boissonade did not take into account the possibility that the ablatives arte sua might be kept as a feature of poetic language with miror, and his back-translation is unmetrical.

To finish, it is interesting to note that the same punctuation is also found in the learned, old edition of Regius.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Regius, the words ars adeo latet can be explained as referring to the living quality of the statue (‘ars adeo latet: ut uiua uideretur, non ex ebore confecta’), and the words arte sua can signify the statue itself (‘arte sua miratur: statuam subaudiamus’).

This repunctuation—it is not an emendation—gets rid of an Ovidian phrase famous in modern scholarship; but it is worth remembering that ars adeo latet arte sua is not cited by any indirect Latin or Greek witnesses, and its obscurantist character may well be out of place in anything other than modern scholarly imagination. If this solution is right, then what Ovid wrote was rather plain.