OVID'S DISCLAIMERS: ARS AMATORIA

Ovid's disclaimers in the Ars Amatoria need to be read in this context. My main argument is that, in his disclaimers, Ovid is rendering his female readership socially unrecognizable, rather than excluding respectable virgins and matronae from his audience. Ars 1.31–4, Ovid's programmatic statement about his work's target audience, is a case in point. A closer look at the passage shows that he does not necessarily warn off Roman wives and marriageable girls:

Adrian Hollis comments ad loc.: ‘The message is that respectable married women (matronae) should not read the Ars.’Footnote ⁴ Similarly, Alison Sharrock, in an influential article, quotes the passage above and notes: ‘Ovid makes his poem safe by sending respectable women away.’Footnote ⁵ She goes on to give a particularly perceptive analysis of the subversive nature and diction of Ovid's disclaimer, but what seems to have escaped criticsFootnote ⁶ is that Ovid does not send respectable women away, but rather the symbols of respectable women, namely their clothing. Whether scholars read his lines as sincere or subversive, they all seem to agree that he ‘identifies married women by reference to their clothing’.Footnote ⁷ This interpretation is so prevalent that it often appears in translations. Peter Green, for instance, to quote a particularly influential translator of Ovid, translates Ars 1.31–4 as follows:Footnote ⁸

Ovid's daring apostrophe to skirts and fillets has been replaced with the ladies who are identified by these very tokens. This is certainly one way of reading the passage, but not the only way, since no respectable women are sent off in the lines under discussion. It is the clothes that are discarded, not the women.

Note that Ovid dismisses a certain style of clothes by addressing them directly at Ars 3.169–70: quid de ueste loquar? nec uos, segmenta, requiro | nec quae de Tyrio murice, lana, rubes (‘What shall I say about clothing? I seek neither you, flounces, nor you, wool, who are purple with Tyrian shellfish’). Obviously, he is getting rid of luxurious fabrics here, not of wealthy or greedy women. Thus, the conceited apostrophe to clothes in Ars 3.169–70 has been read as Ovid instructing his female readers to avoid wearing certain clothes, while the similar address in Ars 1.31–4 has been read as excluding women rather than garments. But if we take into account Ovid's fashion advice in Ars 3.169–70, then we can read his initial disclaimer as the praeceptor's attempt to discourage his readership from adopting the evident symbols of the matronae.

Of course, the interpretation that Ovid metonymically mentions the symbols of chaste Roman women instead of the women themselves is legitimate. This is certainly how the relegated poet wanted Augustus to read this passage (see Tristia 2.303–4). Yet it is well known that, more often than not, legitimate readings of Ovid's poetry readily present themselves in order to cover up more subversive subtexts.Footnote ⁹ If married women are identified by what they wear, something that Augustus' lex Iulia actually enforced, then female social identity becomes rather fluid once the signs of chastity are taken off. Admittedly, this reading says more about Ovid's cunningly subversive take on Augustan legislation than his views on Augustan society itself. He takes what the Augustan authorities wish to make an outward marker of persisting social and moral status and implies that it is the only marker. In other words, if clothing and symbols are cast as unmistakable badges of honour and shame, women's status is easily problematized in the absence of the imposed insignia. No shame would remain once the symbols of shame that cover the female body are removed. To paraphrase the quotation from Herodotus at the beginning of this article, a woman takes off her modesty along with her dress.

Ovid's programmatic disclaimer belongs to a broader redefinition of the terms of discourse used by Augustus' moral legislation and thus needs to be placed against other similar passages. Several disclaimers take on added meaning once we realize that they seemingly divide women into social categories but in fact blur the very distinctions they delineate. Ars 2.599–600: en iterum testor: nihil hic nisi lege remissum | luditur; in nostris instita nulla iocis (‘Look, I testify again: nothing unless it is granted by law is in play here; there is no long hem in our games’), clearly reiterates Ars 1.31–4. Coming after Ovid's approval of compliant husbands (Ars 2.545–6) and his digression on Venus' notorious adultery with Mars (Ars 2.561–98), the statement sounds disingenuous. In sharp contrast to Augustan legislation, Ovid favourably mentions husbands who act as lenones (‘pimps’) and criticizes Vulcan's exposure of his wife's adultery.Footnote ¹⁰ In this context, his claim that he is following the law can hardly be taken at face value. The irony of Ovid's declaration is all the more emphatic if we pay closer attention to the fact that he excludes the skirts of married women rather than married women themselves. Ovid's games of erotic deception (cf. luditur, iocis, Ars 2.600) can barely square with the strict legal categorizations that he is pretending to adhere to. After zooming in on the nudity of an adulterous couple (Ars 2.579–84), he states that the long skirts of the matrons have no place in his cunning games of love. The poet's mannered testimony that there is no instita in his love affairs has deceived readers into thinking that wives rather than their clothes are absent from extra-marital sex.Footnote ¹¹

It is true that Ovid's disclaimers do not always refer to clothes.Footnote ¹² Yet what all these passages have in common is that they leave open the social and moral status of Ovid's female readers. In Ars 3.27–8, for instance, the poet declares that he teaches his playful games of love to every woman (nil nisi lasciui per me discuntur amores: | femina praecipiam quo sit amanda modo, ‘I teach nothing but playful loves: I shall teach how a woman must be loved’). Various attempts to emend femina say more about scholars' discomfort with the fact that Ovid invites every woman to his playful loves and less about the text itself.Footnote ¹³ The generic puellae in Ars 3.57–8 is equally vague: dum facit ingenium, petite hinc praecepta, puellae, | quas pudor et leges et sua iura sinunt (‘While my poetic talent is creative, take lessons from here, girls, those of whom shame, the law, and your own rights allow’). Ovid presumably refers to the lex Iulia in this passage, but his reference barely clarifies the social status of the puellae. Roy Gibson is right to note that, in this passage, ‘Ovid slyly shifts the responsibility for constructing the legal boundaries for the puellae onto the reader in the context of juristic uncertainty about those boundaries.’Footnote ¹⁴ In defining his audience here, Gibson adds, Ovid takes advantage of the legal difficulties created by the phrasing of the law.Footnote ¹⁵ He may say that certain women should not follow his lessons, but in fact it is up to any female readers to decide whether they are interested in playing Ovid's game or not.

Ovid's initial reference to female readers (Ars 1.31–4) should be interpreted vis-à-vis Ars 3, and in particular his fashion tips. The first disclaimer can be read both as an attempt to rid Roman women of the outward trappings of social status and as an implicit call to nudity. Such an approach is suggested again in Ars 2.576–600, in which a reference to Venus' adultery and nudity is followed by a passage declaring that the distinctive clothes of married women have no place in Ovid's games of love. Interestingly, at the beginning of Ars 3 Ovid's women appear naked. In a distinctly elegiac twist, he combines epic imagery with sexual innuendo, proclaiming that ‘it was not fair for naked women to run into armed men’ (non erat armatis aequum concurrere nudas, Ars 3.5). In my view, nudas can be interpreted not just as a pun on the double meaning of ‘unarmed’ and ‘naked’ but also as alluding back to the banished clothes in Ars 1.31–4. At the beginning of Ars 1, the praeceptor dismissed certain clothes for women and now his female students appear naked at the beginning of Ars 3. Subsequently, one of Ovid's first tasks is to dress his female students (Ars 3.169–92). The section of his fashion tips opens with an apostrophe to luxurious garments (Ars 3.169–70), a clear nod towards re-reading and re-interpreting Ars 1.31–4. Thus, undressing and dressing women becomes part of the narrative progression of the Ars. The work opens with an advice to women to take off apparel that would exclude them from playful love affairs. As a result, female readers first appear nude in Ars 3 and then Ovid takes up the task of dressing them. If they follow his instructions, the women will resemble neither matronae nor meretrices. In any case, his fashion suggestions aim at making his students attractive and thus Ars 3 comes to an end with Ovid's students enjoying sex naked (Ars 3.769–808).

The induction of Ovid's female readers is first cast as a religious initiation (Ars 1.31–4). A recommendation to exclude the symbols of female modesty and an implicit call to nudity, the initial disclaimer appears in the context of a religious ritual.Footnote ¹⁶ While examining the ironies of Tristia 2.247–50, which basically repeats Ars 1.31–4,Footnote ¹⁷ Gareth Williams draws attention to the ceremonial diction of Ovid's disclaimer.Footnote ¹⁸ The ritual formula este procul dismisses the uninitiated and ceremonially unclean,Footnote ¹⁹ only Ovid, by excluding the matronae, wittily suggests that the profani are his initiates.Footnote ²⁰ Again, this reading takes for granted that Ovid's address to the matrons' insignia is the same as an address to the matrons themselves. But if we accept the address to clothing rather than women as meaningful, the effect of Ovid's reworking of the initiation formula changes radically. Instead of excluding married women from his readership, Ovid inducts them into the art of adulterous love by taking off the symbols of their marital status. The disclaimer is an excellent example of his using traditional motifs in order to take his readers by surprise. His ritual cry of este procul is paradoxically inclusive rather than exclusive. The initiation ceremony is turned on its head, since the new initiates do not don a garment symbolic of their ritual passage but discard clothing. In an introduction to a course on extra-marital affairs, the initiates, quite appropriately, have to take off the clothes that signify chastity and marriage.Footnote ²¹

OVID'S VENERALIA: FASTI 4

While initiation ceremonies ultimately define and enforce social roles and hierarchies, Ovid's subversive initiation blurs the boundaries between matrona and meretrix. Interestingly, themes of ritual nudity and social inclusiveness are brought up in Fasti 4.133–62, the passage on the Veneralia, which opens with an invitation reminiscent of the Ars Amatoria:

It seems that Ovid invites women of all classes to participate in the Veneralia. Matrons, brides, and prostitutes together worship both Venus Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis on 1 April. This is a striking exception to most female cults.Footnote ²² What is more, if we read the couplet as Ovid inviting two different types of women (respectable ladies in the hexameter and prostitutes in the pentameter) to take part in the same rituals, two interesting problems arise. First, while Ovid includes all women in all the cults of the Veneralia, other sources differentiate the ritual activities of women according to their social status. Second, none of our sources includes prostitutes in the cults of 1 April.

The Augustan Fasti Praenestini of Verrius Flaccus, one of Ovid's principal sources for the Fasti, attests that only lower-class women honoured Fortuna Virilis in the baths (CIL I.2.235): frequenter mulieres supplicant Fortunae uirili; humiliores etiam in balineis quod in iis ea parte corpor[is] utique uiri nudant qua feminarum gratia desideratur (‘in great crowds, the women worship Fortuna Virilis; lower-class women even in the baths because indeed there men bare the part of the body by which the favour of women is desired’).Footnote ²³ The prudish tone of the Fasti Praenestini, evident in the tortuous syntax of the passage cited above and in the suppression of female nudity (surprisingly, the passage describes naked men, not women), contrasts sharply with Ovid's clear reference to the participants' nakedness (cf. Fasti 4.147–8: accipit ille locus posito uelamine cunctas | et uitium nudi corporis omne uidet, ‘that place receives all women, after they take off their clothes, and sees every flaw of the naked body’). Ovid's inclusion of all (cunctas) women stands in opposition to the exclusion of upper-class women from the baths in the Fasti Praenestini.

The social differentiation of women was probably even sharper in the Fasti Praenestini. Mommsen reads frequenter mulieres supplicant, <honestiores Veneri Verticordiae>, Fortunae uirili humiliores (‘In great crowds upper-class women worship Venus Verticordia, lower-class women worship Fortuna Virilis’).Footnote ²⁴ His supplement and punctuation rely on the evidence of John Lydus, De mensibus 4.65: ταῖς τοίνυν Καλένδαις Ἀπριλίαις αἱ σεμναὶ γυναικῶν ὑπὲρ ὁμονοίας καὶ βίου σώϕρονος ἐτίμων τὴν Ἀϕροδίτην· αἱ δὲ τοῦ πλήθους γυναῖκες ἐν τοῖς τῶν ἀνδρῶν βαλανείοις ἐλούοντο πρὸς θεραπείαν αὐτῆς μυρσίνῃ ἐστεμμέναι (‘On 1 April noblewomen honoured Aphrodite for concord and prudent life, while women of the masses were bathing in men's baths crowned with myrtle for the worship of the same goddess’). Macrobius also mentions that, according to Verrius Flaccus, only matrons offered a sacrifice to Venus (see Saturnalia 1.12.15; Macrobius presumably refers to the Veneralia). Whether Mommsen's emendation of the Fasti Praenestini is correct or not,Footnote ²⁵ our sources suggest that in the Veneralia different rites were performed by different women in accordance with their social status, a distinction which is systematically undermined in Ovid's Fasti. Ovid's socially inclusive ceremonies not only go against the grain of ritual traditions,Footnote ²⁶ but also challenge Augustus' policy of putting women into neat social and moral categories.

If we read Fasti 4.133–4 against the evidence of our sources, we realize that Ovid's supposed inclusion of prostitutes in the rites of 1 April is peculiar. The Fasti Praenestini refers to lower-class women (humiliores), and John Lydus distinguishes between noblewomen (αἱ σεμναί) and women of the masses (αἱ τοῦ πλήθους γυναῖκες). Molly Pasco-Pranger is right to point out that neither phrase (humiliores; αἱ τοῦ πλήθους γυναῖκες) is likely to refer to prostitutes, but rather they make a distinction between women of the upper census classes and those of the lower.Footnote ²⁷ From this perspective, the default characterization of women who lack fillets and a long dress as prostitutes becomes problematic. Note that no clear mention of meretrices taking part in the Veneralia is made in Fasti 4.135–62; the assumption that Ovid includes prostitutes in the cults of 1 April is based entirely on Fasti 4.133–4. But does Ovid's et uos, quis uittae longaque uestis abest necessarily refer to prostitutes who were not allowed to assume the uittae and the stola? This is certainly a possible interpretation, according to which Ovid innovates by allowing prostitutes to attend the Veneralia. Yet it is not the only way of reading Fasti 4.133–4. He may simply be inviting Latin mothers and brides, even those (cf. et uos) who do not wear the distinguishing marks of their status.

What I would like to stress, though, is not that there is a better way of reading Fasti 4.133–4, but that the lack of specific clothes does not mark women as belonging to certain classes. Quite the opposite: the absence of uittae and longa uestis makes it impossible to distinguish female social status. Thus, instead of using clothing as a mark of distinction, Ovid removes the visual markers of female class. Soon after the poet mentions the absence of fillets and long robes, we see the women participating naked in the cults of the Veneralia. In my view, ritual nudity serves Ovid's strategy to include all women in the cults by rendering them socially unrecognizable.

Along similar lines, Molly Pasco-Pranger has given a particularly perceptive reading of the Veneralia.Footnote ²⁸ In her view, Ovid locates the central meaning of the cults of 1 April in a tension between matrons and prostitutes, marital chastity and erotic success. These categories are both delineated and complicated by the Fasti's ritual directions and aetia.Footnote ²⁹ The poem lays out differentiated status groups, only to blur them as the rite progresses.Footnote ³⁰ Essentially contradictory notions merge together as Ovid conflates the rites of Fortuna Virilis and Venus Verticordia. The aetion for the ceremonial bath of Venus' statue is related to the goddess's resistance to lustful satyrs when they saw her taking her bath (Fasti 4.135–44). Women are encouraged to repeat Venus' reaction in a ceremony that turns the naked goddess of sex into a symbol of ritual cleansing and chastity. After associating nudity with purity, Ovid links nakedness with sexual desirability (Fasti 4.145–56). All women are asked to strip off their clothing in the baths and pray to Fortuna Virilis to cover up their flaws from men.

In another re-enactment of Venus' behaviour, the worshippers are instructed to consume poppy pounded with milk and honey before the consummation of their marriages:

The diction of the couplet clearly refers to marriage.Footnote ³¹ Yet the irony of Venus appearing as an example of a timid virgin on her wedding night is hard to miss. Aphrodite/Venus had little, if anything, to do with wedding rites of passage.Footnote ³² What is more, if we take into account the religious tradition that Ovid is appropriating here, we realize that what is evoked is Venus' affair with Mars, not her marriage with Vulcan. Bömer points out that Venus Verticordia is related to Aphrodite Apostrophia, whose cult revolved around the union of Aphrodite and Ares,Footnote ³³ and therefore maintains that the cupidus maritus at Fasti 4.153 is Mars, not Vulcan.Footnote ³⁴ Even without taking into account the religious background of Venus Verticordia, Venus' close connection with Mars is clearly suggested right before the Veneralia (Fasti 4.129–30). The notorious adultery of the gods casts a heavy shadow on Venus' shy conjugal pose in Fasti 4.153–4.

Ovid's Veneralia consists of a striking conflation of marital and extra-marital sex, and a double take on nudity as the symbol of both female purity and sex appeal. The poet achieves his bold syncretism by inviting women from all social and moral backgrounds to take off their clothes and share related, albeit antithetical, rites. At the same time as nudity can cloud female social identity, moral judgements based on dress choices are problematized in the Fasti. The story of Claudia Quinta shows that a woman's fashion style does not necessarily correspond to her lifestyle (Fasti 4.305–48). Although a chaste and noble lady, Claudia is slandered. Her manners and appearance provoke malicious gossip:

Claudia chooses to dress and behave in a manner that clashes with the socially acceptable appearance and demeanour of a Roman noblewoman. Yet her refined dress, her elaborate hairstyles, and her witty tongue are no proof of an immoral life, only the source of unfair rumours. Ovid cautions his readers against judging a woman by the way she dresses and speaks. After reading this passage, one wonders if we can simply say that women without matronly symbols are all whores. Do readers who take Fasti 4.134 and other similar passages as referring to prostitutes make the same mistake as those who judge Claudia Quinta's morals by her cultus? The close affinities between the rites of the Veneralia and the introduction of the Magna Mater to Rome, which was fulfilled thanks to Claudia Quinta, suggest that Ovid links the cults of 1 and 4 April by laying emphasis on the instability of visual markers in defining women's moral and social status.Footnote ³⁵

OVID'S ‘MIDDLE WAY’

To some extent, Ovid's attitude towards female cultus in Fasti 4 is a foil to his playful disclaimers and fashion advice in the Ars. While I read Ovid's disclaimers as inviting matrons to get rid of their clothes and enjoy playful love affairs, Claudia's lack of matronly symbols does not correspond to loose morals in the Fasti. Yet both the Ars Amatoria and the Fasti suggest that clothes are no solid basis for defining female social status and forming moral judgements. Ovid's ritual cry in Ars 1.31–4 and his treatment of the Veneralia have a similar effect. Both passages blur female social categories by discarding clothes and conflate marital with extra-marital sex. This daring approach goes against Roman religious traditions and the Augustan legislation. Far from adopting the Julian law's employment of specific dress codes as a means of polarizing women into two social extremes, Ovid rids women of clothing that stamps them as either matronae or meretrices, and criticizes those who judge women by their fashion choices.

Ovid's new ‘middle way’Footnote ³⁶ challenges not only Roman mores and legislations but also long-established readings of Roman elegy. Maria Wyke, for instance, in an influential reading of Amores 3.1, argues that Ovid subscribes to the archetypal dichotomy of women into matrons and whores.Footnote ³⁷ In that poem, the poet has to choose between Elegy and Tragedy, the former dressed as a meretrix, the latter as a matrona. For Wyke, Ovid's choice is one between matron and prostitute, and thus he follows the patriarchal polarization of women into sexually unrestrained and childless whores on the one hand and faithfully married and childbearing ladies on the other. Yet Ovid's final engagement with both Elegy and Tragedy already undermines the dilemma he poses in Amores 3.1. Wyke cites Ars 1.31–2 as proof that the Roman matrona who wears the long gown of respectability is said to have no place in elegiac discourse.Footnote ³⁸ But what about the Roman matrona who does not wear the long gown of respectability? Does she have a place in elegiac discourse? Does she fit into the rigid division of women into matrons and whores? Ovid's ‘middle way’ turns out to be the most radical challenge to patriarchal stereotypes. The poet subverts patriarchy's familial ideology not by opting for the socially and politically disruptive meretrix instead of the restrained and loyal matrona but by actually throwing these very categories into utter confusion.