Classical literature abounds in acrostics, anagrams and other types of alphabetic play—Ovid's poems perhaps more so than most.Footnote 1 These are miniaturizations at the level of individual letters of other lexical games involving greater (sense-)units, such as puns or centos which recontextualize and resemanticize words or sentences, and figure-poems whose mise-en-page encodes their theme. On the spectrum of interpretative certainty, such verbal acrobatics fall somewhere between the text's surface-level meaning and the implicit significance of allusion; acrostics or puns that become objects of allusion muddy the waters.Footnote 2 Acrostics hold an intermediate position because they make a relatively great demand on readers to see authorial intentionality.Footnote 3 As with allusion/intertextuality, readers must ‘work harder’ to make acrostics meaningful.Footnote 4 Scholarship on these phenomena shows increased readiness to accept them: quantification sensitizes us to their presence and demonstrates the reader's collusion with the text (and author) to bring such aspects of textuality into hermeneutic focus.
The imperfect acrostic INCIP- discovered by Alessandro Barchiesi in the epilogue of the Metamorphoses (15.871–5), apropos of Ovid's ‘endgames’—the poet's fascination with the (un)finished nature of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti—presents a limit-case.Footnote 5 I contend that Ovid, forever bilocating on finishing but never ending his work and playing with varying notions of perpetuity and change, enables us to complete it. If viewed as a ‘gamma-acrostic’, like Aratus’ famous ΛΕΠΤΗ-acrostic (Phaen. 783–7), the two axes of Ovid's acrostic are complementary.
I. THE ACROSTIC: MET. 15.871–5
The underlined and bolded letters in the coda of the Metamorphoses form the acrostic discovered by Barchiesi.Footnote 6 Following intra- (§II) and intertextual (§III) cues, I try to complete it.
Now I have completed my work, which neither Jupiter's anger, fire nor sword can efface, nor voracious old age. Let that day, that has power over nothing but my body, end, when it wishes, my uncertain span of years: yet my better part will be borne, immortal, beyond the distant stars. Wherever Rome's power extends, in the lands it has brought under its dominion, I will be spoken of, on people's lips: through all ages, if there is truth in poets’ prophecies, in fame I will live on.
In the open-ended world of the Metamorphoses, where everything is ever-changing and nothing fixed, Ovid foretells his enduring legacy: an apparent constant in a cosmos where everything is in flux. At this significant moment, when he fulfils the proem's promise to conclude the Metamorphoses in his own day (Met. 1.1–4, below), Ovid unravels his text's fabric. As he proclaims—after Horace (Carm. 3.30.1)—his work finished (iamque opus exegi), a near-indestructible monument cementing his everlasting mutable fama, he negates closure with an incomplete acrostic: INCIP-.
Does an imperfect acrostic fit within established knowledge of acrostics and related phenomena or is it an accidental acrostic meeting an overzealous reader?Footnote 7 Parallels are instructive, though seldom definitive in debates of intentionality, but Ovid provides clues.Footnote 8
II. MAKING MEANING: INTRATEXTUAL ARGUMENTS
Ovid's coda should be an explicit, signifying the book roll's end and providing closure. Instead, we get an incip(it) and an incomplete one at that: an incertum spatium concluding neither Ovid's opus nor aeuum and challenging the reader to supplement.
Incipio, ongoing present tense, would contrast neatly with the definitive perfect tense exegi, although the ending has no textual support. The temporal disjunction is mediated retroactively as one continues through the future tenses (poterit, ferar, erit, legar, uiuam) and the present subjunctives’ future-oriented uncertainty (uolet, finiat),Footnote 9 since Ovid realizes that ‘survival’ beyond death is contingent on ‘being read’ (legar). But if we take Iam, our acrostic's starting-point, as an interpretative marker, we can construe incipiam. We may not have to choose (if we choose): incipiam can be future tense (‘I shall begin’) and present subjunctive with optative and/or adhortative force (‘may I/let me begin’).
Signposting through ‘verbal referents’ is familiar from explicit wordplay and implicit allusion,Footnote 10 and at home in the phenomenon examined here, although this gamma-acrostic seems the first of its kind.Footnote 11 Although unique in Graeco-Roman poetry, our acrostic is no more outlandish than reversed or boustrophedon acrostics.Footnote 12
The epilogue, like the narrative of the Metamorphoses, moves from the past (exegi) through the present into the future, bookended by Ovid's uiuam and INCIP-/iam. Like the proem (Met. 1.1–4), the coda is a programmatic pars pro toto. The poem's metamorphoses show the world's coming-into-being and impermanence. The same, mutatis mutandis, holds for Ovid's fame: his fama lives on, but like everything else in the universe it is not static.Footnote 13 In history and interpretation (and in the history of interpretation) recontextualization occurs in the longue durée, changing the meaning readers attribute to a text.Footnote 14 Feeney puts the paradox well: ‘The word that begins the poem's final paragraph, on Ovid's future fate, is iam, “now”—the “now” of the poet's act of completion, but always into the future the ongoing and ever-changing “now” of each new reader's act of coming to the end.’Footnote 15 Ovid's finale heralds a new start.
Ovid's fama continues through his poetic œuvre and future audiences, who are beyond ‘perfect’ authorial control, despite Ovid's best efforts, no matter how beguiling the text of the Metamorphoses or the hermeneutic strategies it encodes—semiosis never stops, as the acrostic underscores.Footnote 16 Our acrostic makes sense in context; authorial control brings us to a testimonium about the coming-into-being of the Metamorphoses.
III. MAKING IT MEAN: INTERTEXTUAL ARGUMENTS
In Tristia Book 2, Ovid laments that exile prevented him from finishing the Fasti and the Metamorphoses:Footnote 17
Six books of Fasti I wrote, and the same number again; each volume ends with its own month. This work, recently written with your name at its head, Caesar, and dedicated to you, my bad lot interrupted … Written by me, too, although the undertaking lacked the finishing touch, were bodies changed into new appearances.
We should not take Ovid at his word.Footnote 18 As Stephen Hinds summarizes, ‘one suspects … the Metamorphoses was rather more, and the Fasti rather less, finished than Ovid seems to claim.’Footnote 19 Like our intext, these lines could double as paratexts (in-/excipits) to the Fasti and the Metamorphoses, showing again that Ovid blurs beginnings and endings.
It is relevant that lines 555–6 echo the incipit of the Metamorphoses (1.1–4):
My mind conceived to speak of forms changed into new bodies; gods, inspire my undertakings (for you changed those also) and lead my continuous poem down from the earliest beginning of the world to my own times!
It is uncertain where Ovid's manus ultima (Tr. 2.555) is lacking, because the epilogue of the Metamorphoses accomplishes what Ovid announced in the prologue, culminating in his metamorphosis into undying fama among readers. It cannot refer to nam uos mutastis et illa (Met. 1.2), as Ovid in Tristia 1.1 addresses his poems to join their ‘big brothers’ (cf. 1.1.107 fratres), the ‘thrice five volumes of/on changed form’ of the Metamorphoses (1.1.117 sunt quoque mutatae, ter quinque uolumina, formae) in Rome: ‘I trust you tell them that the appearance of my fate may be numbered among the changed bodies’ (1.1.119–20 his mando dicas, inter mutata referri | fortunae uultum corpora posse meae), proving that the Metamorphoses were in circulation.
Rather, it must refer to the ‘sequel’ of the Metamorphoses, highlighting Ovid's fama. Not only are transformations the poem's subject, the Metamorphoses itself has undergone a change in appearance (cf. Tr. 1.1.120 uultum ~ 2.556 facies) after Ovid's reversal of fate, as his readers know and will read into the text. Consequently, Tristia Book 1 serves as ‘a potential sixteenth book of the Metamorphoses’.Footnote 20 Ovid's iam at Met. 15.871 begins to look like an incipit, demonstrating again the poet's propensity for confusing beginnings and endings.Footnote 21
If the narrative of the Metamorphoses seems linear, from primordial times to Ovid's day (mea tempora), its conception of time is cyclical, toying with the idea of recurring ages.Footnote 22 Moreover, Alessandro Barchiesi remarks that the prologue's thematic tempora is also the opening word, and the alternative title, of the Fasti, Ovid's cyclical/calendrical poem, signalling the poems’ complementary programmes.Footnote 23 Feeney notes that ‘the arrow of Ovid's hexametric time in the Metamorphoses carries on down until it hits the circle of his elegiac time in the calendrical Fasti. These two categories are not watertight in separation, since time's arrow and time's cycle are never completely independent in the apprehension of time.’Footnote 24 The same applies to Ovid's return to cyclical elegy in the Tristia and to his wish to alter the form of the linear epic Metamorphoses and its temporal scope. The problem with an ending in the present (Met. 1.4 ad mea … tempora) is that the present keeps slipping away into an unknown changeable future (cf. Met. 15.874 incerti … aeui; Tr. 1.1.120 fortunae … meae).Footnote 25
This temporal slippage is borne out by the inversion of the prologue of the Metamorphoses in Tristia Book 2, where the former's in noua … corpora and mutatas … formas switch places syntactically with the latter's corpora uersa and in facies … nouas: Ovid goes from ‘speaking of forms changed into new bodies’ to having written about ‘bodies changed into new appearances’, turning back the hands of cyclical-elegiac time in his banishment's living death to the linear-hexametric scheme of the Metamorphoses,Footnote 26 which in the hindsight of the Fasti and the Tristia is not simply a linear deductum carmen (cf. Met. 1.4 deducite … carmen) but a true perpetuum … carmen as the cycles of time repeat forever and change in the process. In what now is an ‘unending’, or at least ‘unendable’ or open-ended, poem, Ovid's coepta (‘things begun’) in retrospect become incipientia (‘things beginning’), whose direction the gods changed at least once (Met. 1.2 nam uos mutastis et illa) and whose temporal (re-)orientation cannot permit a manus ultima (Tr. 2.555).Footnote 27 The gamma-acrostic INCIP-/iam underscores the poem's interminable nature.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
The epilogue's unique gamma-acrostic INCIP-/iam, with its future anchoring point, markedly contrasts with the coepta of the prologue (Met. 1.2) and the Tristia (2.155). We come full circle: nothing is fixed in the time-space of Ovid's universe, not even his fama. Ovid's paradoxically (in)complete acrostic suits the literary programme of the Metamorphoses and the Ovidian œuvre. Ovid ‘in his better part’ is perennis (Met. 15.875), but in a world of unfettered semiosis this cannot be the part that ‘has just now (iam) finished this work’ (15.871), the letters or ‘part’ missing from our acrostic: readers must make Ovid whole again, recreate him in new forms (in noua … corpora) in the act of reading, reflecting on previous appearances (mutatas … formas) across his corpus and its reception.Footnote 28 It is a fine irony that Ovid's disembodied undying fama, his ‘better part’ encoded within coda and intext, relies on the poem's physical layout on a book roll, a ‘monument’ subject to decay. In Ovid's end is his beginning and vice versa, but only ‘at the point of reception’ which is always-already new and full of différance.Footnote 29
