ELLEN OLIENSIS
The Power of Image-Makers:
Representation and Revenge in
Ovid Metamorphoses 6 and Tristia 4
This essay focuses on the competing representational projects of poet and emperor as represented (or polemically misrepresented) in Ovid’s poetry. I begin by developing two readings
of the famous weaving contest of Metamorphoses 6, the first emphasizing Arachne’s will to
truth (her exposé of Olympian injustice), the second her will to power (her appropriation of
Olympian potency). With these models in mind, I explore the vicissitudes of Ovid’s rivalrous
identification with Augustus in the Tristia, ending with some unhappier implications of this
identification, and with some reflections on the question of the reality of Ovid’s exile.
All the drives and powers that morality praises seem to me to be essentially the same
as those it defames and rejects; e.g., justice as will to power, will to truth as a tool of
the will to power.
— F. Nietzsche, from The Will to Power (1883–1888)
Pup up.
Brown down.
Pup is down.
Where is Brown?
— Dr. Seuss, from Hop on Pop (1963)
This paper is about a pair of rival image-makers, or more precisely about
the polemically contoured image of rivalry put forward by one member of the
This article evolved from papers delivered at the University of Michigan (1997), Yale University
(1999), the University of Chicago (2001), and Trinity College Dublin (2002). I would like to thank
my hosts for inviting me to speak and my audiences for their responses. Behind the scenes, John
Shoptaw launched my reading of Tristia 4.3, Philip Hardie helped with Arachne, and the anonymous
referees for Classical Antiquity improved the whole. For the text of the Metamorphoses, I use
Anderson 1993; for the exile poetry, Owen 1915.
Classical Antiquity. Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 285–321. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e).
Copyright © 2004 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct
all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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pair. It follows up on recent work by Alessandro Barchiesi, Philip Hardie, and
Ellen O’Gorman, among others, which productively sidesteps the fruitless debates
over Ovid’s (anti)Augustanism by focusing attention instead on the competing
representational projects of poet and emperor.1 Not opposition, then, but rivalry is
my theme—a form of opposition, it is true, but one that does not automatically
concede the high ground to Augustus. In place of dissent and resistance (and
the “Augustan” hierarchies those terms presuppose), I will be looking for envy,
aggression, exaltation, and abasement: the see-saw rhetoric of an Ovidian game
designed for two symmetrically confronted players. I will begin by analyzing the
rules of this game as they are set out for us in the famous contest that launches
Metamorphoses 6. I will turn next to the Tristia, in particular Tristia 4, to explore
Ovid’s aggressive deployments of his imperial mirror-image. I will end by drawing
attention to some of the unhappier implications of Ovid’s rivalrous identification
with Augustus.
I. MINERVA v. ARACHNE
The most richly suggestive contest of image-makers in the Ovidian corpus
comes at the start of Metamorphoses 6, in Ovid’s account of the weaving competition entered into by the goddess Minerva and the mortal Arachne. Though this
episode has been much discussed,2 I don’t believe that its intricately self-reflexive
implications have ever been adequately elucidated, and since these implications
bear directly on my theme, I would like to take the time here to unfold them as
best I can.
The confrontation gets under way as Minerva descends, disguised as an old
woman, to advise Arachne to pay due respect to divinity. When Arachne flares up
in a rage, all but strikes her disguised visitor, and insultingly suggests that the
goddess is afraid to compete with her, Minerva abandons her disguise and the two
set to work on their rival creations. As is well recognized, the contrasting content
of the tapestries they produce is highly overdetermined. Minerva produces a
hierarchical, self-congratulatory design, centrally featuring her own victory over
Neptune in a contest of benefactions lavished upon the grateful city of (as it
will now be known) Athens; at the four corners, answering this scene of divine
condescension, she depicts, explicitly as a warning to her mortal challenger (ut
tamen exemplis intellegat aemula laudis / quod pretium speret pro tam furialibus
ausis, 6.83–84), hubristic mortals justly punished with transformation. A good
analogue to this elaborate and readily legible design of auctoritas is provided
1. Barchiesi 1997 (see esp. 7–11, 43–44, densely suggestive pages which serve as essential
background to this paper); Hardie 1997; O’Gorman 1997. On Augustan image-making, Zanker 1988
remains fundamental. For a whirlwind tour of Augustan representational media, see Barchiesi 1997:
11.
2. Recent discussions include Feeney 1991: 190–94; Harries 1990; Rosati 2002: 292–97;
Feldherr 2002: 174–75.
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: The Power of Image-Makers
287
by the golden shield awarded to Augustus (along with the name “Augustus,”
which makes its way into Minerva’s tapestry in the “august” gravitas of the
Olympians, 6.73) by a grateful SPQR in 27 . Originally associated with
Augustus’ foundational victory at Actium (and accordingly often represented in
the hands of a personified Victory), this shield featured the emperor’s key virtues
of virtus, clementia, iustitia, and pietas, virtues Karl Galinsky has suggested
themselves form, “in a way, the famous ‘Augustan constitution.”’3 Minerva’s
tapestry likewise encodes a Minervan constitution, a self-authorizing display
of beneficently exercised power, in which divine condescension is answered
by mortal gratitude, mortal rebellion by divine punishment. The description of
Arachne’s tapestry comes second and so is rhetorically positioned as a polemical
response to Minerva’s. Where Minerva represented a world of moral order and
aesthetic balance, Arachne weaves an accelerating episodic sequence of male gods
descending into the forms of animals and even plants in order to have their way
with women4 both immortal and mortal; the axis of gender now replaces Minerva’s
vertical hierarchy of gods and mortals, and metamorphosis now figures as a tool
of divine lust, not a punishment inflicted on badly behaved earthlings. Arachne’s
tapestry thus exposes the gods as neither just nor benevolent nor “superior”
except insofar as they wield superior force (virile or metamorphic). Astonishingly
enough, the mortal weaver is not judged inferior to her divine rival; she may even
be taken to have won the contest. Enraged by Arachne’s success, and outraged
at her exposé of Olympian misconduct, Minerva strikes her brow with a shuttle
and then, when Arachne hangs herself, takes pity on her and transforms her into
an ever-weaving spider.
As readers have often remarked, the contest is a potent mise en abyme of
the fluctuating representations of world (and aesthetic) order (or disorder) in the
Metamorphoses as a whole. Is the poem a well-constructed edifice or a fluid
hodgepodge of loosely linked stories? Does it justify the ways of gods to men
and women, or does it represent a world of force, in which might alone makes
right? Eleanor Winsor Leach has rightly insisted that neither tapestry suffices as a
representation of Ovid’s poem, which in the event provides ample support for
both a Minervan and an Arachnean account.5 What I would like to explore here
is the peculiarly local value of this mise en abyme— its value, I mean, for the
episode from which it arises. To which tapestry, we are entitled to ask, does this
particular collision of god with mortal belong? Is Arachne (following Minerva’s
script) a hubristic mortal justly laid low? Or is she (following her own collage) an
innocent victim of deception and force?
No doubt there is much here to validate a Minervan verdict. Certainly Arachne
is not presented to us as a particularly admirable character. Most damning perhaps
3. Galinsky 1996: 88, in the course of an illuminating discussion of the clupeus virtutis.
4. With one exception, Admetus (6.122), loved by Apollo in shepherd guise.
5. Leach 1974: 103–104, seconded by, e.g., Feldherr 2002: 177.
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is her resemblance to the scandalously hubristic Niobe whose story follows hers.
Both women are characterized by anger, a prideful flaring-up of resentment
directed at the gods (iram, 35; ira, 167; irascentem, 269). Further, in a sequence
marked by its interest in the didactic force of exemplary tales, both women prove to
be intractable students, aggressively impervious to the improving moral lessons
with which the poem surrounds them. When the disguised Minerva offers her
some sage advice (cede deae veniamque tuis, temeraria, dictis / supplice voce
roga, 32–33), Arachne responds with a torrent of abuse. And when she unveils
her sublimely powerful self, the stubborn girl “persists in her undertaking,” as the
narrator notes with a positively Minervan disapproval, “and in her longing for
stupid victory rushes toward her own destruction” (perstat in incepto stolidaeque
cupidine palmae / in sua fata ruit, 50–51)—effectively forcing Minerva to abandon
admonition in favor of punitive action (nec monet ulterius, 52).6 Just as Arachne
fails to absorb Minerva’s didactic message, so Niobe misses the moral point
of Arachne’s exemplary punishment (nec tamen admonita est poena popularis
Arachnes / cedere caelitibus verbisque minoribus uti, 150–51); not even the
destruction of her seven sons suffices to bring her to her senses. By contrast, the
locals who witness Niobe’s demise are not blind to the obvious: “then everyone,
woman and man alike, feared the divine anger thus unmistakably revealed” (tunc
vero cuncti manifestam numinis iram / femina virque timent, 313–14). Exemplary
students that they are, these onlookers not only read the moral of Niobe’s story
but themselves assume the admonitory role, proceeding to swap anecdotes that
confirm the wisdom of treating Latona and her children with zealous reverence:
the story of the Lycian peasants,7 transformed into frogs for their outrageous
rudeness in refusing to allow Latona a drink from their pond, and the story of the
satyr Marsyas, flayed alive for his presumption in challenging Apollo to a music
contest. It is with this pair of exemplary tales that the “theodicy” sequence initiated
by Arachne8 draws to a close. On this view, then, what the Arachne episode yields
is in effect an Arachne-medallion for one of the corners of Minerva’s next tapestry,
the other three corners being reserved perhaps for the three stories of hubris that
follow hers in Book 6.
And yet though it can be taken to back up Minerva’s argument, the poem
also provides plenty of material for an alternative Arachnean account. In the end,
Minerva’s unjust actions speak louder than the narrator’s pious words. As readers
6. Of course Minerva will try admonition again via her tapestry, but by this time Arachne is
presumably too busy weaving her own to notice.
7. With whom Arachne shares not only the trait of low birth and a habit of malediction but also
the fate of being transformed into a low form of life; the resemblance of the punch-line nouns sealing
their respective episodes (antiquas exercet aranea telas, 146; limosoque novae saliunt in gurgite
ranae, 381) may not be fortuitous.
8. Or by the daughters of Pierus in Met. 5; or by the Theban stories of Met. 3. Otis 1970: 83
entitles Met. 3–6.400 (= Section II in his four-part analysis of the poem) “The Avenging Gods”;
on Arachne’s hubristic affiliations, see Otis 1970: 146.
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: The Power of Image-Makers
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have been quick to note, Minerva’s anger is motivated not only by righteous
indignation at the mortal weaver’s depiction of caelestia crimina (6.131) but also,
and it seems chiefly, by a rival artist’s envy of Arachne’s superlative success:
“Pallas could not, Envy could not find fault with that work” (non illud Pallas,
non illud carpere Livor / possit opus, 6.129–30).9 Her Olympian gravity is further
compromised when she strikes out at Arachne in a fit of petulant rage before
she transforms her—succumbing to the violent impulse that Arachne earlier just
managed to curb.10 The transformation is itself only accomplished via the magic
juice which the goddess sprinkles over her victim (sucis Hecateidos herbae,
139), rehearsing in miniature the quite unOlympian practices of the witch Medea
described at the start of Metamorphoses 7.11
Further evidence for the case against Minerva is provided by the simile
describing Arachne’s reaction to Minerva’s self-disclosure. This simile aggravates
Minerva’s likeness to the divine rapists on Arachne’s tapestry by compounding
the element of deception with a hint of sexual violation:
. . . formamque removit anilem
Palladaque exhibuit. venerantur numina nymphae
Mygdonidesque nurus, sola est non territa virgo;12
sed tamen erubuit, subitusque invita notavit
ora rubor rursusque evanuit, ut solet aër
purpureus fieri, cum primum aurora movetur,
et breve post tempus candescere solis ab ortu.
6.43–49
She put off her old-woman shape and showed herself as Pallas. The
nymphs adored her power, along with the young married Phrygians; the
virgin was the only one not to be terrified; but all the same, she blushed,
and a sudden blush marked her unwilling cheeks and then vanished, as
the air turns red, when the dawn first stirs, and soon after brightens from
the sunrise.
Later in the poem Vertumnus will likewise doff his old-woman disguise as
he prepares for virile action against Flora, a masculine revelation that will be
compared to the sun breaking free of clouds.13 The fugitive flush that “marks”
9. See, e.g., Galinsky 1975: 67; Barchiesi 1997: 42.
10. See, e.g., Lateiner 1984: 16–17.
11. On Minerva’s surprising use of magic here see further Tupet 1985. Contrast, e.g., Latona,
who needs no such material assistance when she transforms the Lycian peasants; her potent word
suffices.
12. I suspect a subdued ironic reverberation of Hom. Od. 6.137–41, where Nausicaa (emboldened by Athena!) is the only Phaeacian girl to remain unterrified at the approach of the naked
brine-encrusted Odysseus, who looks for all the world like a rapist.
13. I owe this observation to Philip Hardie. The likeness is striking: compare Minerva’s disguise
(Pallas anum simulat falsosque in tempora canos / addit et infirmos baculo quoque sustinet artus,
6.26–27) with Vertumnus’ (innitens baculo positis ad tempora canis / adsimulavit anum, 14.655–56).
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Arachne’s “unwilling cheeks” (subitusque invita notavit / ora rubor, 46–47) is
elsewhere a sign of specifically sexual resistance: Daphne blushes when her father
asks for grandchildren (pulchra verecundo subfuderat ora rubore, 1.484), and
Hermaphroditus blushes at the advances of Salmacis (pueri rubor ora notavit,
4.329). It can also suggest sexual bloodshed, as it does for that other weaver
from Metamorphoses 6, Philomela, who translates her bloodstains (she is like
a dove “with blood-soaked wings,” madefactis sanguine plumis, 6.529) into her
tapestry’s “red marks” (purpureasque notas, 6.577), marks which reappear (now
also memorializing the blood of Itys shed by the vengeful sisters) as the “marks
of slaughter” (caedis / . . . notae, 6.669–70) on the breasts of the sisters-turnedbirds.14 Indeed, next to Niobe, Philomela is Arachne’s closest relative within Book
6; the tapestry she weaves, representing (whether in Arachnean images or Ovidian
words) her own rape by the tyrant Tereus, looks very much like an episode from
Arachne’s tapestry writ large, and writ tragic. With Philomela in mind, one might
go so far as to read Arachne’s fate as a parallel instance of the triumph of sheer
force, with Minerva in the role of the rapist. The Minerva-Arachne confrontation
finds its image, then, not only on Minerva’s tapestry but also on Arachne’s.
Yet there is another way of reading the opposition between these rival weavers,
and between their tapestries. Minerva claims to be angry at Arachne for her
depiction of “heavenly crimes” (caelestia crimina, 131). But as Leach astutely
remarks, this is only one interpretation, and quite possibly a misinterpretation,
of the meaning of Arachne’s tapestry. It is a reading of Arachne’s tapestry that
absorbs it into the themes and concerns of Minerva’s tapestry; it is a reading that,
insofar as it defines and reads Arachne’s tapestry precisely and exclusively as
“anti-Olympian,” remains entirely within the confines of an Olympian discourse.
But it is also possible, Leach suggests, to read Arachne’s tapestry not as an
indictment of the gods but as a celebration of their abundant vitality, a captivating
“spectacle of motion and energy.” “The fact is that Arachne does not, by her
representation, make a moral judgment upon the loves of the gods. It is Minerva’s
interpretation that makes the subject immoral and trivializes this vast panorama of
desire and generation as caelestia crimina.”15
Minerva’s intention, what she means by her tapestry—or part of what she
means by it; or at least what she would like to claim she means by it—is clear;
she aims to teach her rival a lesson about the folly of challenging the gods (ut
tamen exemplis intellegat aemula laudis, etc., 83ff.). There is no comparable
announcement regarding Arachne’s intention, which thus remains as it were
officially open to variant interpretations. If Leach’s suggestion has found no
takers, one reason is that most of us are preprogrammed to read for the moral,
The old-woman disguise is also used by jealous Juno against her rival Semele (3.275–77) and by
Apollo raping Chione (11.310).
14. On Philomela’s notae see Segal 1994: 266.
15. Leach 1974: 117.
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: The Power of Image-Makers
291
and preprogrammed by just such texts as the one Minerva produces here. And
it is certainly true that throwing away the moral compass makes for readerly
disorientation or (to put the case more positively) for a radical reorientation of
reading. For what the celebratory interpretation suggests (though this is not a line
of interpretation that Leach herself pursues) is that Arachne is to be aligned, is
in fact aligning herself, not with the feminine victims of divine aggression but
with the divine aggressors.
Such an alignment is readily apparent, once we open our eyes to it.16 The
unquenchable fertility of the gods is matched by the copia of Arachne’s episodic
representation, which seems, as a consequence of Ovid’s hasty summaries, to be
produced at top speed—as if Arachne had an inexhaustible supply of material at
her disposal and were trying to cram in as much as she could before her time was
up. And their metamorphic talents of deception are answered by her verisimilar
artistry, a congruence of feignings signaled most explicitly at the start of Ovid’s
description:
Maeonis elusam designat imagine tauri
Europam: verum taurum, freta vera putares.
6.103–104
The Maeonian girl traces Europa tricked by the image of a bull; you’d
think the bull real, the waves real.
As has often been noted, the deception here is simultaneously Jove’s and Arachne’s
(and Ovid’s: see the end of Metamorphoses 2): the bull is not “real” both because it
is not a bull (it is Jove) and also because it is an image of a bull (woven by Arachne,
after Ovid).17 What readers have had trouble acknowledging is the identification of
Arachne with Jove that follows from this congruence. Arachne stands with Jove,
while the viewers of this tapestry—we readers, and also Minerva—are situated
alongside Europa as the victims of a ravishingly potent image.18
To read with Minerva is to produce moral judgments. To read with Arachne, I
am suggesting, is to acknowledge the fundamental priority of the will to power. If
it is easy to read Arachne’s tapestry as a piece of moral discourse (an exposé of
divine criminality), it is also possible, looking through Arachne’s eyes, to discern
the will to power operating in Minerva’s tapestry.19 At its center, Minerva depicts
16. This alignment comes through even to a reader as consistently moralizing as Lateiner; see
Lateiner 1984: 16, unselfconsciously juxtaposing condemnation of gods who “disguise themselves
solely in order to victimize humans” with an appreciation of “the power and fecundity of [Arachne’s]
imagination and the verisimilitude of her tapestry.”
17. Hardie 2002: 176.
18. On the powerful effects of artwork on viewer in Ovidian poetry and beyond, see Hardie
2002, esp. 173–93.
19. Cf. Rosati 2002: 295–96, an implicitly Arachnean reading (by which I now mean: not moral
but wilful) of the contest, which takes Minerva’s tapestry as a “celebration of divine power” (note:
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herself fully armed and defensively encased, an impenetrable warrior wielding
a prolific spear, which penetrates the earth to engender a new “child”:
at sibi dat clipeum, dat acutae cuspidis hastam,
dat galeam capiti; defenditur aegide pectus,
percussamque sua simulat de cuspide terram
edere cum bacis fetum canentis olivae.
6.78–81
But to herself she gives a shield, she gives a sharp-tipped spear, a helmet
for her head; her breast is protected by the aegis, and she represents the
earth, struck by her spear-point, as giving forth the new growth of a pale
olive-tree complete with berries.
It is this markedly virile self-image to which Arachne’s celebration of power
draws our attention in the very act of upstaging it. Note that Minerva’s weaving
proudly features a (single, unique) act of (pro)creativity, symbolically reiterated
in the olive border that delimits her tapestry. But Arachne’s stunning art itself
participates in the reiterated phallic accomplishments it describes; Arachne is
not imaging but enacting her creative potency as she weaves. It is not by
chance, moreover, that Neptune, who loses to Minerva on Minerva’s tapestry,
is recuperated by Arachne—with the collaboration of the poet, who reserves for
Neptune the spotlight of the quasi-hymnic second person (te, Neptune, tu, te,
6.115–18)20 —as a six-time virile “winner” over a sequence of helpless females.
To put it as coarsely as I believe the case requires, Arachne through her tapestry
effectively sticks it to Minerva over and over again, putting the virginal goddess
back in her place as a figure of highly restricted creativity, while claiming for
herself an unwearying artistic potency.
Though she doesn’t acknowledge it explicitly, Minerva’s reaction shows that
she has gotten Arachne’s aggressive message. When she strikes out at Arachne, the
warrior-goddess (virago, 130)21 reclaims for herself the role of phallic aggressor,
forcing Arachne out of the role of potent creator and into that of rape victim. In the
same instant, she effectively endorses Arachne’s representation by abandoning her
own professedly pacific tapestry for the violent virile world depicted on Arachne’s.
This may represent a kind of victory for Arachne. But what I want to underscore
is that it is not the victory Arachne had in mind. She had aimed to ravish Minerva,
not to be ravished by her. Her rape attempt comes to nothing; this violation
not justice!) featuring a “threatening” self-portrait, and Arachne’s as the expression of a “malignant
intention” to shock and offend.
20. The only other apostrophe in this passage is directed to Alcmene, one of Jupiter’s conquests
(te, 112).
21. As noted by Hofmann 1985: 233, Ovid’s only other use of virago comes at Met. 2.765, again
in proximity to envy (Minerva chez Invidia).
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: The Power of Image-Makers
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yields no fruit.22 But Minerva’s phallic counter-assault is equally unproductive.
Struck across the forehead by Minerva’s shuttle, as the fertile earth of Athens
by Minerva’s spear,23 Arachne non tulit infelix: “the unhappy girl didn’t endure
it” (her humiliating treatment at Minerva’s hands), but also “the unproductive girl
didn’t bear [fruit]” (the agricultural sense of ferre and infelix). Perhaps one should
consider translating simulat, the verb introducing Minerva’s creation of the olive,
as not “she represents” but “she feigns” (in keeping with its other appearance,
heralding her old-woman disguise: Pallas anum simulat, 26). Here as elsewhere,
Minerva’s alignment with Envy bespeaks an essential barrenness.
The moral reading of this episode, a reading which rests on asymmetry
(the gods make either good or bad use of their superior might), is ultimately
trumped, I believe, by the Arachnean theme of power, power as deployed, in
symmetrical gestures of aggression, both on and off the tapestry. This is why
it matters so much that Minerva and Arachne are practically look-alikes: both
virgins, both fantastically skillful weavers, both violently proud, both prone to
violent anger. At the end of the episode the invidious Minerva raises an angry
hand to strike Arachne; at the start of the episode Arachne herself flies into a rage
at the disguised goddess, glares at her (adspicit hanc torvis, 6.34),24 and scarcely
refrains from striking her (vixque manum retinens, 35). This likeness also marks
their identities as weavers. Though their finished products are radically different,
the producers are practically indistinguishable. As they set up their “twin looms”
(geminas . . . telas, 54), they are themselves twinned, designated impartially as
ambae (53) and utraque (59), in a passage capped by a simile whose subject
is indistinguishability: the colors they use are like a rainbow’s colors, which
melt into each other undetected (transitus ipse tamen spectantia lumina fallit,
66; though the colors at either border remain ominously—for Arachne—distinct,
tamen ultima distant, 67). Minerva and Arachne may produce antithetical images
of power, but they look the same when they are producing them, and produce
them using the same deceptive, artful means.
It is here, I think, that Ovid most obviously betrays his partisanship. As
filtered through Ovid’s description of it, Minerva’s art pretends to transparent
representationality, downplaying the medium in favor of the thing itself, mut22. I wonder, however, about carpere (129), coming right after the interwoven flowers and
ivy of Arachne’s border, and not far from the grapes with which Bacchus deceived Erigone (Liber
ut Erigonen falsa deceperit uva, 125)—a line that may allude, as suggested by Hardie 2002: 176,
to the famous story about Zeuxis’ hyperrealistic grapes. As Philip Hardie has pointed out to me,
Envy “carps” both literally and figuratively in her major appearance in Metamorphoses 2 (781,
792). Did Arachne’s illusion trick Minerva and Envy into attempting to “pluck” those pictured fruits
and flowers? Is there something quasi-reciprocal about Arachne’s “ravishment” of the viewer and
Minerva’s responsive (invidious) desire to cull her representations—as if it were the task of the
carping critic to undo the ravishment of the work by blasting it?
23. percussit (133) recalling percussam (80), as remarked by Harries 1990: 74.
24. As Minerva’s name is linked with Envy, so the torvus glare of Arachne can bespeak the
invidious force of the evil eye; cf. Met. 2.752 (of Minerva), 5.241 (Medusa’s head).
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ing (though not eradicating) the language of illusion in favor of the language of
transcription.25 On her tapestry the gods simply “sit” (sedent, 73), as if really
already there, while the appropriate countenance, as if without Minerva’s intervention, magically inscribes each one (sua quemque deorum / inscribit facies,
73–74). By contrast, the marvelous verisimilitude of Arachne’s tapestry insists
that we admire the very skill with which it counterfeits the real:
verum taurum, freta vera putares;
ipsa videbatur terras spectare relictas
et comites clamare suas. . . .
6.204–206
you’d think the bull real, the waves real; as for the girl, she seemed [or:
she herself, in very person, was seen] to look at the land she has left
behind, to call out to her companions. . . .26
“Ours is a knowing credulity, as we watch ourselves being duped by the
art.”27 We won’t be dumbfounded unless or until we know that the bull and the
waves really aren’t real; the artist’s trick is to dupe the viewer without letting
her miss the fact that she is being duped—that she is falling victim, like all the
duped women on the tapestry, to an irresistibly potent illusion. So one crucial
lesson of this episode, and one that works against Minerva’s interests, is that
Minerva’s art lies (because it claims to be the truth) while Arachne’s tells the
truth (because it flaunts its power to deceive).28 It matters that the verb simulat
crops up in connection with Minerva’s benefaction—the invention of the olive,
the synecdochic justification of her demands for honor and worship. What if this
is only a self-aggrandizing fiction, a crass piece of propaganda? This question
won’t arise in the case of Arachne, of course, since her artistry itself forms the
basis of her claim to renown.29
Minerva has a stake in maintaining the difference between herself and
Arachne, proving herself a goddess, whose divine might can crush, her divine
condescension spare, her enemies. Arachne has a stake in crossing that differ25. Is the reiterated pingere (pingit, 71, pinxit, 93) a nod to Minerva’s pinguis pretensions?
Contrast Arachne’s identification, right at the start of her tapestry, as Maeonis (103)—an Ovidian
nod to the Maeonian Homer?
26. As my translation aims to convey, this ipsa is a good example of the Ovidian habit, identified
by Hardie 2002: 9 (see further index s.v. ipse), of invoking the pronoun of intensified presence
precisely where presence is compromised or imperiled.
27. Hardie 2002: 180 (re the statues produced by Medusa in Met. 5).
28. Cf. most famously Sir Philip Sidney in the Defense of Poetry: “ Now for the poet, he nothing
affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.” Along parallel lines, Harries 1990: 71: “Arachne’s portrayal
of the imago of the disguised gods is an exposé of their real nature . . . while Minerva’s picture of the
regalis imago of Jupiter . . . is revealed as an evident piece of image-making.”
29. Readers of Hardie 1997 will recognize the implicit argument re Ovid’s poetic success, on
which more below.
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ence, representing Minerva as merely another artist, and perhaps not such a good
one after all (the only viewers who marvel at Minerva’s creative work are the gods
who form the audience depicted on her tapestry). Though he disseminated endless
representations of himself across the empire, Augustus could gain nothing, so far
as I can imagine, from representing himself in the act of representing. Indeed, the
design and execution of Augustan representations devolved (or was represented
as devolving) for the most part onto others (the main exception being Augustus’ autobiographical writings): the senate, which voted Augustus his new name;
senate and people, who honored him with the golden shield listing his imperial
virtues; the anonymous artists who designed his coinage, his portraits, the Prima
Porta Augustus, etc. The obfuscation of Augustus’ authorial and authorizing role
in the production of these images enhanced his auctoritas, lending it the stature
of preexisting truth, of which such images were the faithful emanation and reflection. By having Minerva herself produce her self-aggrandizing representation,
what Ovid discloses is the interestedness of Augustan (self)representations: their
composite function as an expression, mystification, justification, and medium of
power. When Minerva tears apart the “decorated cloths, heavenly misdeeds” (pictas, caelestia crimina, vestes, 131), the plural “cloths” makes me wonder if she
is destroying her own tapestry along with Arachne’s—as if Arachne’s success had
irreparably spoiled its looks, permanently tarnished its virile gleam. It is certainly
true that Minerva can’t destroy Arachne’s work without compromising her own
self-righteous self-portrait—a clupeus virtutis fabricated, as it were, out of whole
cloth. Indeed, in the very act of punishing Arachne violently and unjustly for her
tapestried images of divine violence and injustice, Minerva effectively unravels
her own hierarchical tapestry and validates the truth of the world of force depicted
on Arachne’s.
Yet Arachne is not, as she could so easily have been, an idealized portrait
of the artist as the forlorn defender of truth, the doomed rebel with a cause. In
a notebook entry on martyrs, Nietzsche writes:
These immoralists should be forgiven for always having posed as “martyrs
to truth”: the truth is that it was not the drive to truth which made
them negate, but disintegration, sacrilegious skepticism, pleasure in
adventure—. In other cases, it is personal rancor that drives them into
the domain of problems—they combat problems in order to be in the
right against particular people. But it is revenge above all that science
has been able to employ—the revenge of the oppressed, those who had
been pushed aside and, in fact, oppressed by the prevailing truth.30
What strikes us about Ovid’s Arachne is that she is not posing as a “martyr to
truth.” Her will to truth is quite evidently a tool opportunistically picked up by
30. Nietzsche 1968: 250 (in the course of an argument about Christianity, science, nihilism,
etc.).
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her will to power—and no less effective, moreover, for being thus transparent.
In the marvelously self-confirming argument of this episode, Arachne’s will to
truth does the work of her will to power precisely by disclosing the will to power
that is veiled (but practiced) by Minerva, practiced (and flaunted) by Arachne,
alongside the gods she depicts. Arachne would accordingly be the last to deny
that she is just as angry as Minerva, and that she wants power quite as badly
as Minerva needs to show that she is the one who has it. It is true that the way
Arachne “wins,” in the end, is by playing, all unwittingly it seems, and certainly
reluctantly, Minerva’s moral game: exposing, by means of her own doom, the
injustice of the gods, joining the victims of divine passion depicted on her own
tapestry. Yes, the strategy is effective; but this was not Arachne’s driving motive.
She wanted to win on her own terms, by the sheer overwhelming power of her art.
She forgot that Minerva had access, off-tapestry, to her father’s thunderbolt.
II. OVID AND / OR AUGUSTUS: TRISTIA 4
It is under the sign of the symmetrically raised angry hands of the competing
image-makers of Metamorphoses 6 that I would like to place the readings of
Ovid’s exile poetry that follow. This is not narrative poetry, but the first-person
poetry of one hand, and so the contests it stages have of necessity a very different
look (this is what my “and/or” is trying to capture). Ovid will not (cannot) confront
Augustus as Arachne does Minerva. Antagonism, envy, rivalry, usurpation: these
are emotions that I read out of (or into) this poetry. I grant, then, that my readings
are optional, the poems being sufficiently legible without them, and that they
derive from my inability not to think about Augustus when Ovid is writing about
Ovid. On the other hand, as I hope to demonstrate, this inability is itself something
that is fostered by Ovid’s exile poetry, a poetry that seems designed, as Alessandro
Barchiesi has pointed out, to provoke paranoiac overrreadings.31
In the exile poetry, Minerva and Arachne are roles variously cast, still awaiting
their definitive performances. Ovid oscillates between representing himself as the
squashed victim of Augustan ira (sometimes also known as clementia) and as
Augustus’ superpotent double and rival, a figure readily capable of squashing the
emperor in turn.32 These polar possibilities, with their vengeful implications of
symmetry and reversibility, are written into the very title of Ovid’s first collections
of poetry written from exile: Tristia, or Tristium libri. This title is usually rendered
into English as “Sorrows” or “Laments,” a translation clearly sanctioned by
the programmatic opening poem of Tristia 1, which lays great emphasis on the
mournfulness of this prototypically elegiac poetry (blotted letters as tearstains,
31. Barchiesi 2001: 85–103 (on paranoia, see esp. 85–86); a related strategy of “reading more”
is put into practice by Casali 1997.
32. The interplay of Ovidian power and powerlessness also informs the discussion of Bretzigheimer 1991 (the polarity is spelled out at 43).
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untidily fraying bookroll edge as a mourner’s loosened hair, etc.). The translation
“Sorrows” is further sanctioned by the first appearance of the titular (positive)
tristia within the Tristia—in company, I note, with the noun verba. This is from
Tristia 1.3, Ovid’s account of his last night in Rome:
tum vero coniunx umeris abeuntis inhaerens
miscuit haec lacrimis tristia verba meis. . . .
1.3.79–80
Then my wife, clinging to my shoulders as I set off, mingled these sad
words with my tears.
Here the meaning of tristia is overdetermined by the juxtaposition with lacrimis:
husband and wife are alike overwhelmed by sorrow on this superlatively sorrowful
occasion, as Ovid terms it in the poem’s first line (tristissima noctis imago, 1.3.1).
At this self-reflexive moment, Ovid proposes as a model for his own tristia verba
the despairing laments of his loving but helpless wife. But there is another meaning
of tristia that is relevant to Ovid’s poetic project in the Tristia, a meaning that
surfaces in the second appearance of tristia within the Tristia, again, and hardly
by chance, paired with verba. This is from Tristia 2, Ovid’s book-long letter
to Augustus, and it describes the fateful private interview at which the emperor
decreed the poet’s banishment:
tristibus invectus verbis (ita principe dignum)
ultus es offensas, ut decet, ipse tuas.
2.133–34
Having attacked me with harsh words, as befits a ruler, you yourself took
revenge, as is appropriate, for the offense committed against you.
Here again the meaning of tristia is disambiguated by the juxtaposition with
invectus: these are not sad words but words of attack, of invective, therefore
“austere” or “grim” words, punishing words that sadden their target.33 What I
would suggest is that the vengeful words of the princeps shadow forth a second,
alternate model for Ovid’s Tristia, which might then be translated as not “Sorrows”
but “Soberings” or “Rebukes.” In the event, Ovid’s Tristia poems do oscillate
between the disempowered lamentation exemplified by the tristia verba of Ovid’s
wife and the vengeful display of power exemplified by the tristia verba of the
emperor. If the exilic poems incline heavily toward the former, it is not simply
because Ovid really is crushed; as we will see, the pose of impotence may be
more efficacious, and more damaging to Augustus—more potent, in effect—than
the pose of omnipotence. But what I want to underscore here is that the title
of the Tristia harbors the same double and reciprocal effect that Sergio Casali
has discerned in the Ibis, where Ovid’s bird aggressively echoes back Augustus’
33. On this embedded titular tristia, see also Habinek 1998: 155–56.
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own grim banishing verb (ibis: “you will go,” says Augustus; “ you will go,”
replies Ovid).34 The Arachnean fantasy of vengeful symmetry is that Ovid’s harsh
representations may yet reduce the emperor to tears.
The two faces of Ovidian tristitia, the weepy prostration of the emperor’s
victim (Arachne the spider, an image of Minervan ira and/or Minervan clementia)
and the harsh superbia of the emperor’s rival (Arachne the artist, an image-maker
bent on defacing Minerva), are illustrated with an almost programmatic clarity by
the fourth book of Ovid’s Tristia, a well-formed collection of ten poems completed
roughly two years after Ovid’s arrival in Tomi. Both are on display in Tristia 4.6,
the poem that opens the second half of the collection and that reiterates its keynote,
which is time (this poem offers seven forms of tempus in its first 12 lines, five
of them leading off a couplet). The lesson of the poem, at least initially, is that
time tempers all things—bulls, horses, lions, unripe fruit, rocks, and even, Ovid
tells us, human emotions:
hoc etiam saevas paulatim mitigat iras,
hoc minuit luctus maestaque corda levat.
4.6.15–16
This [i.e., time] softens even savage anger bit by bit, it reduces grief and
lightens sad hearts.
In the following couplet, Ovid supplies his own case as the exception that proves
time’s universal rule:
cuncta potest igitur tacito pede lapsa vetustas
praeterquam curas attenuare meas.
4.6.17–18
And so time, as it slips by with silent foot, can weaken the force of
everything— except my cares.
But the two emotions named in the preceding couplet, anger and grief, could
suggest another, complementary exception: not only “Time cures every grief
except mine” but also “Time soothes every angry heart except Augustus’.” These
exceptions are both symmetrical and reciprocal: it is because Augustus’ anger
is unrelenting that Ovid’s grief is unending. For “time,” moreover, one could
substitute the tempora or measures of a poem such as this one, with its monotonous
reiterations of tempus. The endless dripdripdrip of the Tristia has not succeeded
in wearing Augustus down, any more than it has succeeded in wearing Ovid out; it
is this stalemate that keeps the Tristia going. On the other hand, the summative
couplet introduced by cuncta potest igitur does not demarcate the roles this way,
and one might also attribute both emotions, anger as well as grief, or better anger
surging up under cover of grief, to Ovid himself. I am inclined to this reading
34. Casali 1997: 106–108.
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by an echo of the phrase curas attenuare from the opening poem of the collection,
where Achilles is called upon to exemplify the consolatory power of poetry:
fertur et abducta Lyrneside tristis Achilles
Haemonia curas attenuasse lyra.
4.1.15–16
We’re told that Achilles, grieving over the abduction of the girl from
Lyrnesos, lessened his cares with a Haemonian lyre.
Though tristis Achilles appears here (instructively juxtaposed with the bereaved
Orpheus) in the guise of a mournful lover, the emotion chiefly associated with
this hero, bereft of his prize by an insecure and only marginally competent king, is
not sorrow but rage.
In fact Tristia 4 brings on stage both Ovids: an enraged Ovid who claims for
himself (however unconvincingly) practically boundless powers of representation, and a devastated Ovid who figures his poetry as little more than the helpless
and quasi-automatic twitching of his grief. Within Tristia 4.1 tristis Achilles encapsulates the latent threat of force; he is a time bomb set to go off, as we will
see, in the collection’s penultimate poem. What this opening poem foregrounds,
however, is not vengeful anger but the inefficacy both of Ovid’s poetry and of
his aging self. Ovid begins with a plea for readerly forbearance—what Ovid seeks
from this poetry, flawed as he concedes it to be, is not glory but an intermission of
care (requiesque mihi, non fama petita est, / mens intenta suis ne foret usque malis,
3–4). This plea is backed up by an exemplary series that opens with a ditchdigger
singing in his chains (hoc est cur cantet vinctus quoque compede fossor, 5) and
that closes with Orpheus singing out of grief for his twice-lost Eurydice (cum
traheret silvas Orpheus et dura canendo / saxa, bis amissa coniuge maestus erat,
17–18; the cameo of Achilles comes just before). Note that the ditchdigger harbors
no hopes of singing his chains off, and that Orpheus is no longer singing to rescue
his wife from death. Ovid may find poetry a welcome distraction, but he seems to
have given up hope that it might someday win him a remission of his punishment
and a reunion with his own long lost wife.
It is not only Ovid’s poetry that is impotent. The ditchdigger’s fetters, a figure
for Ovid’s encompassing sorrows, resurface as a literal threat later in the poem, as
Ovid describes how the ferocious barbarians who surround Tomi lead off stray
locals, chaining their necks (coniectaque vincula collo, 83). In this setting, the
hitherto peaceable poet is compelled to take up arms:
aspera militiae iuvenis certamina fugi,
nec nisi lusura movimus arma manu;
nunc senior gladioque latus scutoque sinistram,
canitiem galeae subicioque meam.
4.1.71–74
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As a young man I shunned the rough contests of warfare, nor did I brandish
weapons except with a hand at play. Now as an elder I submit my side to a
sword, my left hand to a shield, my white hair to a helmet.
This elderly, incompetent warrior35 naturally produces tearful poems and even
tear-soaked pages (saepe etiam lacrimae me sunt scribente profusae, / umidaque
est fletu littera facta meo, 95–96)—an image of commingled lamentations and
tears that may remind us of the sad embrace of weeping husband and lamenting
wife in Tristia 1.3. As many readers of Ovid’s exile poetry have appreciated, the
pathetic figure Ovid cuts in this poem and elsewhere, his posture of helplessness,
itself voices a reproach, itself fashions an argument.36 How can such a man,
by nature and habit averse to strife, and one who knows and acknowledges his
abjection far, far below that Caesar who has, as Ovid complains, all his fellow
gods (saving only the Muses) on his side (namque deorum / cetera cum magno
Caesare turba facit, 4.1.53–54)—how can such a lowly creature embody, or for
that matter ever have presented, any kind of serious threat or challenge to the
mighty emperor?
As the presence of Achilles suggests, this poem harbors crosscurrents of rage,
to which I will have occasion to return. For a full-fledged performance of truly
august wrath we have however to wait until Tristia 4.9 (the postponement suggests
that the contrast with 4.1 might otherwise be too shocking, or too revealing). In
place of the doddering, weeping, introverted warrior of Tristia 4.1, the collection’s
penultimate poem brings on stage a speaker of remarkable self-assurance and
energy:
Si licet et pateris, nomen facinusque tacebo,
et tua Lethaeis acta dabuntur aquis,
nostraque vincetur lacrimis clementia seris,
fac modo te pateat paenituisse tui.
fac modo te damnes cupiasque eradere vitae
tempora, si possis, Tisiphonea tuae.
4.9.1–6
If it’s permitted, and you’ll suffer it, I will shroud your name and your
crime in silence, and plunge your deeds in the waters of Lethe; my
clemency will be overcome by your belated tears, if only you will publicly
repent; if only you condemn yourself and show yourself eager, if you can,
to wipe out the fury-driven season of your life.
If the malefactor fails to repent, he will have to face up to the consequences:
“but if your breast is [still] ablaze with hatred of me, my unhappy anger will take
up arms perforce” (induet infelix arma coacta dolor, 8). And his weapons, Ovid
35. Virgil’s Priam, a more apt model than Achilles. On the Virgilian echo, see, e.g., Williams
1994: 68, in the course of an illuminating account of the shifting generic affiliations of 4.1.
36. See, e.g., Claassen 1999: 226–27.
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warns, will hit their mark even from Tomi: “from the edge of the world, my anger
will stretch out its hands” (nostra suas istinc porriget ira manus, 10). Whereas the
arma of 4.1 bespeak the real-time martial epic in which the exiled love poet finds
himself so inappropriately enmeshed, a theme on which Alessandro Barchiesi has
written some eloquent pages,37 the arma of 4.9 are the tela of the Muses, the
speech acts of blame. And the poet takes up these arms reluctantly perhaps, but
with unbounded confidence. Their efficacy will extend, he assures his prospective
victim, across vast reaches not only of space but of time:
trans ego tellurem, trans altas audiar undas,
et gemitus vox est magna futura mei.
nec tua te sontem tantummodo saecula norint:
perpetuae crimen posteritatis eris.
4.9.23–26
I will be heard across the land, across the deep sea, and great will be
the sound of my complaint; not only your contemporaries will know your
guilt—you will be an object of reproach for all time.
The inward-turning lamentation of Tristia 4.1 here makes way for a severe, quasiimperial or even more than imperial potency, as Ovid puts down the literal arms
he is forced to bear against invading barbarians and takes up the figurative weapon
of the pen.
Let me acknowledge immediately that Ovid’s bold words here, as in his other
explosions of invective (most notably the Ibis, on which more below), have an
unmistakably hollow ring. Ovid’s confidence—like his show of reluctance—is
a bluff, one that can be called all too easily by his scatheless enemy back in Rome.
The eloquent conclusion to Gareth Williams’ study of the Ibis speaks to 4.9 as well:
[Ovid’s] illusion of omnipotence must . . . face up to the harsh fact that
the “omnipotent” poet is powerless to control his own fate, that Ibis has
nothing to fear from Ovid’s distant fury, and that if the Pontic shore will
resound with praises of Augustus . . . the poet will scream his curse into
the same empty breezes.38
Williams’ insight does justice to the desperate melancholy at the heart of Ovid’s
exilic poetry—something Ovid’s readers are often tempted (for quite various
reasons) to overlook. Yet the emptiness that infects Ovid’s invectives, the impotence that makes his poisoned darts fall short of their target, inheres in the
exile’s present, not the author’s or ours. Ovid “himself” may not be there to
back up his threatening future tenses and may even harbor no faith at all in the
powers of which he boasts. But his words can in fact carry on without him,
37. See Barchiesi 1997: 15–35, arguing, among other things, that Tomi confronts Ovid “with
a scene of continual warfare that recreates the literary genre he had rejected” (34).
38. Williams 1996: 128–29.
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much as Arachne’s tapestry continues to signify in Ovid’s poem even after the
weaver has been reduced to a spider. Ovid’s invectives are virtual performances
that gesture, whether hopefully or hopelessly, toward a future that someone
else may perfect by filling their emptiness with the name that Ovid is barred
from using.
Thus the potential efficacy of 4.9 is located not in the immediate performance
of rage but in the assault against the Augustan image that this performance both
figures and enables. Though Augustus is not Ovid’s addressee here, and is indeed
explicitly excluded from that position by a coy third-person reference (omnia, si
nescis, Caesar mihi iura reliquit, 4.9.11ff.), the tristia verba of Tristia 4.9 are
nevertheless directed to the emperor’s ears in particular, and in several senses.
As Casali has stressed, Augustus is surely, whatever Ovid may say to the contrary,
the prime target of Ovidian rage, the ultimate if unnamable object of every one
of the frantic invectives Ovid composed from exile.39 What this poem advertises
is what Ovidian representation, if it succeeds in surviving and thriving across
the centuries (a big “if” for the exiled poet, notwithstanding his protestations
of authorial confidence), can do to Augustus. Nor do we need to wait for the
disclosure of the imperial name for Ovidian representation to set in train its
potentially devastating effects (I say “potentially” by way of acknowledging,
once again, that it is left to the reader to activate these possibilities). The peculiar
temporality of the Ovidian strategy is worth attending to: Ovid’s threatening future
tenses cover up what Ovid has already done to Augustus by means of his pathetic
poetry of impotence (e.g., 4.1), and also what he is currently doing to him in and
through this self-avowedly potent poem. For, as Betty Rose Nagle has pointed
out, Ovid is not only taking a high tone in this poem, he is presenting himself
to Augustus as a model of how power ought properly to be exercised, or rather
as a mirror reflecting how far short Augustus has fallen of the ideal Ovid here
takes it upon himself to embody. Like the emperor, Ovid has been injured, Ovid is
enraged; where Ovid differs from the emperor is in his readiness to exercise his
clementia and forego his ira if the guilty party publicly and tearfully repents (as
Ovid has done and will do, over and over again).40 These two facets of the poem,
explicit (the poet’s power) and implicit (the emperor’s deficiency), work together:
Ovid’s moderation in ira and readiness to exercise his clementia constitute a
reproach to Augustus, who will become a perpetuae crimen posteritatis, if Ovid
has his way, precisely on account of his unforgiving dourness toward Ovid.41 The
poem thus carries both Ovid’s threat against the emperor (“look what I can do
to you, consider in fact what I already have done to you”) and Ovid’s rhetorical
and not entirely fantastical bid to displace him: what is the power of an emperor,
next to that of a poet?
39. Casali 1997: 107.
40. Nagle 1980: 152–54 (reading 4.9 in conjunction with 4.8).
41. Cf. Bretzigheimer 1991 on Ovid’s production of Augustus’ despotic image.
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What needs to be underscored here is that the attack launched by 4.9 is not
only an expression of the will to truth but also and chiefly a ploy of revenge—
an attempt to bury Augustus, as it were, under the weight of his own golden
clupeus. Ovid’s ultimate aim is not to expose the shaky moral foundations of
the principate but to appropriate to himself the enviable power Augustus does
in fact wield. There is thus nothing disinterested about Ovid’s revelation of
the gap between Augustus and “Augustus.” The flamboyantly fictional charade
of 4.9 is manufactured to enable Ovid to parade his own high-level clemency
and forbearance (virtues I for one would hesitate to concede to Ovid) alongside
his high-level powers of aggressive (mis)representation (powers I experience as
undeniable). The essential amoralism of 4.9 comes into sharp focus in another
poem that adopts a very similar strategy, Tristia 3.7, Ovid’s letter to his quasidaughter Perilla (a step-daughter or protégée). Perilla is, we learn, a gifted and
studious poet, and the letter Ovid dispatches can accordingly expect to find her
“either sitting with her beloved mother, or among her books and Muses” (aut
illam invenies dulci cum matre sedentem, / aut inter libros Pieridasque suas,
3.7.3–4). Devotion to the virginal Muses goes hand in hand with virtue and
chastity, what Ovid terms Perilla’s “modest character” (mores. . . pudicos, 13).
Ovid prides himself on having fostered Perilla’s poetic gift but worries that his
sad fate may deter her from continuing her artistic pursuits:
pone, Perilla, metum. tantummodo femina nulla
neve vir a scriptis discat amare tuis.
ergo desidiae remove, doctissima, causas,
inque bonas artes et tua sacra redi.
3.7.29–32
Set aside your fear, Perilla; only let no woman, no man either, learn to
love from your texts. And so, my most well-instructed girl, away with
reasons for laziness! Return to your virtuous arts and your sacred rites.
As the reference to verse that teaches love suggests, there is a strong contrastive
stress here on Perilla’s restraint, her chastity, her devotion to bonae artes—her
opposite number, never named but exerting a certain pressure throughout, being
the elegiac puella addressed in the Ars Amatoria, a creature of pleasingly loose
morals characterized by her devotion to artes now retrospectively characterized
as malae. The mediating figure is Ovid, teacher and guide, who here polemically
refashions himself as a guardian of morals (think of the bard Agamemnon installed
to watch over Clytemnestra. . .). Perilla, who is to refrain from teaching love (cf.
discat, 30), has herself received Ovidian instruction (doctissima, 31), not in the
art of love but in the chaste arts of poetry.42 It is as if we were being invited to
understand that this is what Ovid had been teaching all along. The Ars was only a
42. Hence the topos of fading beauty (3.7.33ff.) is invoked so that it can be followed not by
the seducer’s carpe diem but by the poet’s summons to glory.
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poem—this poem purports to give us a glimpse of Ovid’s “real life.” But the poem
is not only part of Ovid’s ongoing case for the defense of Ovid. It also participates
in an Ovidian offensive against the emperor, who after all—despite his published
moral legislation—did not really have much success with the education of his
own daughter and granddaughter.43 Which is preferable, moral texts or a moral
household? If only the Julias had spent more time with Ovid, studying the arts of
poetry; if only the pater patriae had taken to heart the example set by the paternal
Ovid. . . .
As in 4.9, Ovid is showing Augustus the proper way to behave, and in this
instance the irreproachably moral tone extends even to the defiance of Caesar that
marks the closing movement. Rome may have conquered the whole world, but
Augustus has not conquered Ovid:
en ego, cum caream patria vobisque domoque,
raptaque sint, adimi quae potuere mihi,
ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque:
Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil.
quilibet hanc saevo vitam mihi finiat ense,
me tamen extincto fama superstes erit,
dumque suis victrix omnem de montibus orbem
prospiciet domitum Martia Roma, legar.
3.7.45–52
Look at me—though I am deprived of my native land, and of you all, and
of my home, though everything that could be taken from me has been,
all the same my talent keeps me company and gives me the good of itself:
Caesar had no jurisdiction there. Let he who will end my life with savage
sword—when I’m dead my glory will yet survive. So long as Rome, city
of Mars, gazes forth from her mountains at the world she has entirely
mastered, I will be read.
This moment of valiant, philosophically inflected self-assertion, a discourse that
positively extorts the emperor’s applause and approbation—what is there to fault
in this faultless performance?—fittingly caps a poem that is as aggressively moral
and upstanding as anything Ovid ever wrote.
The imperious displacement performed by poems such as 3.7 and 4.9 reaches
a climax of sorts in 4.10, which follows 4.9 to close the collection. In 4.9, Ovid
claims the power to make his enemy a perpetuae crimen posteritatis. In 4.10, he
makes a bid for, but also represents himself as having secured in advance, the good
opinion of posterity, to which the poem is directly addressed (accipe, posteritas,
4.10.2) as if over the head of such paltry, present-bound miscreants as the one
targeted in 4.9. Framed as a case for the defense, this famous autobiography
puts Ovid’s late-in-life error, the mistake that aroused the emperor’s ira, in
43. On the failure of Augustus’ rigid household disciplina, see Suet. Aug. 53–54.
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the context of a blameless and mostly literary life. As Janet Fairweather has
demonstrated, moreover, this version of Ovid’s life story—one that features his
equestrian descent, his service as triumvir, his three marriages, his one daughter,
and so on—nicely matches Augustus’ own life story, perhaps as related in the
imperial autobiography of his De vita sua. Fairweather thinks Ovid is making
a bid for Augustus’ sympathy by pointing out all they have in common. But as in
3.7 and 4.9, the cloning act has a hostile edge. Ovid looks like Augustus here—to
Fairweather, to me, and possibly even to Augustus, if he deigned to read the poem.
What then does Augustus look like? It is difficult to say. It is as if Ovid’s imperial
posture entailed the relegation of the emperor, who hovers out of focus at the
horizon of the poem: as the cause of Ovid’s poena (4.10.82) and judge of an error
that was no scelus (90), a “wounded princeps” (unnamed—like the enemy of 4.9?)
whose “anger” (laesi principis ira, 98) brought about Ovid’s relegation. The sky
of this poem is studded rather with the starry names of the famous poets whose
company Ovid once kept and has indeed, so he claims, already joined.
The irrelevance of Augustus becomes quite spectacular as the poem (and the
collection) draws to a close. As he reaches the painful present of his life in Tomi,
Ovid returns to the theme of 4.1 and thanks his Muse for the solace and relief
she has provided by way of the distraction of art (tu solacia praebes, / tu curae
requies, tu medicina venis, 4.10.117–18). But the Muse has done more than that
for her poet:
tu dux et comes es, tu nos abducis ab Histro,
in medioque mihi das Helicone locum;
tu mihi, quod rarum est, vivo sublime dedisti
nomen, ab exequiis quod dare fama solet.
nec, qui detractat praesentia, Livor iniquo
ullum de nostris dente momordit opus.
4.10.121–24
You are my guide and companion, you lead me away from the Danube
and give me a spot in the middle of Helicon. You have given me—a rare
gift—in my lifetime the high renown that fama is wont to give [only]
after death. Nor has Envy, that belittler of the present, gnawed any one of
my works.
The Muse here countermands the tristia verba of the princeps who banished Ovid
to Tomi and does for Ovid what Ovid repeatedly begged for in Tristia 3: she gives
him a new locus of exile, far from Tomi, at the very center of Mount Helicon.44 In
his epistle to Augustus, Horace had remarked somewhat grumpily that it is the fate
of heroes such as Romulus and Hercules, along with contemporary poets such as
Horace himself, to continue unappreciated until they have left the earth behind—
44. mutati . . . loci, 3.5.54; mutato . . . loco, 3.6.24, 3.8.42, etc. Locus is the keynote of Tristia
3 as tempus is of Tristia 4.
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the privilege of conquering envy during his lifetime being reserved uniquely for
Augustus: “upon you, while you are still with us, we lavish fully ripened honors”
(praesenti tibi maturos largimur honores, Epist. 2.1.15). But while the names
of the famous poets Ovid commemorates in 4.10 shine on after their death, Ovid’s
Muse has seen to it that Ovid’s name is stellified even during his lifetime. Ovid’s
audacity in claiming the honor Horace reserved for Augustus is augmented by
his insistence that Envy has left every one of his works intact (nec ullum opus,
4.10.124). Envy may have, but Augustus certainly did not. In fact we would never
guess from this passage that the emperor was a stern critic of Ovid’s work. In
his epistle Horace had come close to identifying the favor of the emperor as a
prerequisite for entrance to Helicon.45 Here Ovid not only gives the keys back
to the Muse but denies the emperor any role in determining the fate of a poet (as
a poet, if not as a man). The power to condemn or canonize is taken from the
emperor and shared out between the Muse and the reading public, the generalized
candidus lector (implicitly set against an ineffectually lividus princeps) to whom
Ovid offers thanks in the poem’s closing lines:
sive favore tuli, sive hanc ego carmine famam,
iure tibi grates, candide lector, ago.
4.10.131–32
Whether I have achieved this renown by your favor, or by means of my
poetry, I do right, kind reader, to thank you.
Ovid is (or wishfully represents himself as being—and has become) something
Augustus will have to reckon with: an undislodgeable presence, despite his
banishment to Tomi, in the conceptual world of Rome.
The strategy of 3.7 and 4.9—showing Augustus how to behave, and thereby
showing up his failure to live up to his image—might be described, from one
perspective, as aggression from below. In these poems, Augustus is not figured as
vanquished or cast down; instead, he is more or less politely, and with perfect
obliquity, prompted to ascend and take his assigned seat, augusta gravitate, among
the Olympians. In 3.7, Ovid uses the Julias to show that Augustus has failed
adequately to occupy that seat. In 4.9, he uses himself: the abjectly penitent,
eternally remorseful Ovid (not on display in 4.9, but very familiar to readers of the
Tristia) to whom Augustus has unaccountably declined to extend his characteristic
virtue of clementia. Another area of Augustan inadequacy showcased in Tristia 4
concerns his deficiencies as a patron of poets, or at least as a patron of one poet in
particular. As Ovid likes to remind his readers, it is the obstinacy of Augustus that
is to blame for the various failings of his exilic verse. Worse still: it is Augustus
who is ultimately responsible for transforming the poet of peace into a poet of
war, one compelled, as Ovid puts it in 4.10, to “forget a life spent in peace and
45. Hor. Epist. 2.1.214–18, with my comments at Oliensis 1998: 193.
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: The Power of Image-Makers
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quiet” and to “take up, in unaccustomed hand, arms fitting the times” (oblitusque
mei ductaeque per otia vitae / insolita cepi temporis arma manu, 105–106). The
complaint is spelled out at the beginning of Ovid’s long invective poem Ibis
(written in the same period), where the first accusation Ovid has to level against
his pseudonymous enemy is that he has compelled a poet whose work was ever
pacific (inerme, Ibis 2) thus belatedly to take up weapons (tela sumere, 10). Hence
the sad paradox of Ovid’s career: the poet whose first extant collection opened
with an image of the poet setting aside arma (Arma gravi numero violentaque
bella parabam, Amores 1.1.1) finds himself at the end of his life forced to bear
arms, not only the literal arma of Tristia 4.1 but the poetic weaponry wielded
in 4.9 and elsewhere.
At issue here is Ovid’s relation not only to Augustus but also to Horace, a
paradigmatically successful and imperially favored poet whom Ovid has in mind
throughout the Tristia, and especially in Tristia 4. One of the more oblique charges
leveled against Augustus by Tristia 4.9 is that the emperor’s perverse treatment
of Ovid has perverted the course of the poet’s career, turning it away from the
Horatian model that it might otherwise have replicated. It is not surprising that the
invective of 4.9 has a Horatian pedigree; Horace is an almost inevitable model
in this area.46 But what interests me is less the particulars of Ovid’s debt to
Horace than the fact that Ovid represents himself as returning, late in life, to an
aggressive mode that bears ineradicable associations with Horace’s early poetry.
That Ovid has Horace’s career trajectory in mind is evident from the preceding
poem, which is devoted to lamenting Ovid’s reluctant deviation from the Horatian
norm. Ovid begins by invoking the image of his white-haired old age (Iam mea
cycneas imitantur tempora plumas, “Now my brow [or: time of life] mimics the
plumage of swans,” 4.8.1) and goes on to detail how that old age should properly
have been spent. To avoid a shameful tumble, the worn-out racehorse is sent out
to pasture, and the soldier is discharged when he’s too old to be of service:
sic igitur, tarda vires minuente senecta,
me quoque donari iam rude tempus erat.
4.8.23–24
. . . and so, when slow old age lessened my vigor, it was high time for
me to be granted my discharge from the arena.
At the beginning of Epistles 1, the book that announces his retirement from Rome
to the country and from lyric poetry into philosophy, Horace likewise compared
himself to a worn-out racehorse and claimed to have earned his discharge from the
46. E.g., Ovid’s emphasis on his reluctance to engage his unnamed enemy in battle, his
description of his poetic arma as coacta, recurs to Sat. 2.1, where Horace similarly describes himself
as a peace-loving citizen who takes up poetic arms only under compulsion; and the threatening image
of horns near the close of 4.9 (iam feror in pugnas et nondum cornua sumpsi, 27) recalls a line from
Epod. 6, where Horace too sports “horns ready to attack,” parata tollo cornua, 12.
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arena (donatum iam rude, Epist. 1.1.2). Ovid follows his Horatian self-portrait of
the aging artist with something that sounds very much like a précis of Horace
Epistles 1:
tempus erat nec me peregrinum ducere caelum,
nec siccam Getico fonte levare sitim,
sed modo, quos habui, vacuos secedere in hortos,
nunc hominum visu rursus et urbe frui.
4.8.25–28
Now was it time for me, not to breathe a foreign air, not to quench my dry
thirst at a Getic spring, but to withdraw into the empty gardens I once
owned, and then again to enjoy the city and the sight of men.
Just so the epistolary Horace represented himself mostly enjoying the rustic solitude of his Sabine villa (site of the famous Bandusian spring) while occasionally
venturing back into the gregarious life of the city.47 My point here is that Ovid’s
tempora seem to be running backwards. Instead of enjoying the kind of serene
rustic retirement in which Horace’s career culminated, Ovid is forced in his old
age to adopt the belligerent mode of Horace’s earliest poetic ventures.
The implication seems to be, however, that Ovid might still be capable, with
help from Augustus, of becoming a second Horace. For Epistles 1 did not after all
mark the end of Horace’s lyric career. Horace came out of retirement to compose
the Carmen Saeculare and, after that, his fourth book of odes—the book that
contains his most straightforwardly Augustan and encomiastic poetry. Ovid’s
abilities in this vein are demonstrated within Tristia 4 by Tristia 4.2, a poem in
celebration of Tiberius’ triumph over the Germans—a triumph which had not in
fact taken place, but whose mere possibility furnishes sufficient inspiration for
Ovid’s poetry. It is probably not an accident that the number of this poem is
4.2. Horace also wrote a poem that bears this number, a poem likewise devoted
to imagining a Caesar’s future triumph over Germany, in this case Augustus’
triumph over the Sygambri. A key difference between the two poems is that
whereas Horace declined the job of celebrating this triumph, entrusting it instead
to Iullus Antonius, Ovid appears eager to take on the task himself. The only
thing that stands in his way is his distance from Rome, and that is a problem
that Augustus is quite capable of solving. I don’t mean that the poem really
serves merely as an advertisement to Augustus of Ovid’s availability, but that it
forms part of Ovid’s fashioning of the pattern of his own deviant, unHoratian but
potentially Horatian career.
As a piece of Ovidian representation, 4.2 seems (but appearances are deceptive) to disavow revenge altogether in favor of the more immediately pragmatic
strategy of ingratiation. Moreover, the elevation of Caesar seems for once not
47. For other connections between the Tristia and Horace’s Epistles, read as lessons in the
proper management of amicitia, see Labate 1987: 114–28.
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to entail the tragic abasement of Ovid, who is here discovered not weeping but
rejoicing, relishing in imagination a moment of communal celebration. The value
of this interlude is confirmed by the contrast it forms to the preceding poem,
Tristia 4.1, with its sad portrait of the solitary, doddering poet taking up arms
against a barbarian foe. It is as if the depiction of a decisive Roman victory
were a fantasy designed to compensate for the poet’s own military impotence.
If Ovid is enmeshed in endless warfare in Tomi, Augustus through Tiberius can
impose closure on Rome’s war with Germany. In 4.1 Ovid stresses his isolation, the extreme solipsism to which his writing is reduced (ipse mihi—quid
enim faciam?— scriboque legoque, 91; “I write and read myself to myself, what
else can I do?”); in 4.2 he imagines streets thronged by plebeians, knights, and
senators, who together enjoy the spectacle of the imperial family and the grand
parade of the triumph (4.2.15–16), an event that involves both communal reading and communal singing (the assembled populus “will read captured towns
along with the tituli of the generals,” 20, while the army chants the victory
formula io triumphe, 51–52). “When that day comes,” Ovid concludes, “I will
set aside my sorrows, and the public motive will prevail over the private” (illa
dies veniet, mea qua lugubria ponam, / causaque privata publica maior erit,
73–74). But the poem itself has already gone some way toward fulfilling this
prophecy. So long as he is immersed in his versified image of the triumph,
Ovid may succeed in making himself, as he puts it in the previous poem, praesentis casus immemorem, “unmindful of present misfortune” (4.1.40). In this
sense 4.2 could be said to realize the program of imaginative distraction laid
down in 4.1.
But the self-administered therapy of Tristia 4.2 is not without its troubling
side-effects. At the end of 4.1, Ovid reveals that writing poetry can be a source
of pain as well as pleasure, inducing not oblivion but memory. Indeed, this
is the essence of Ovid’s project in the Tristia, poems which rarely escape (or
let us escape) into fantasies of other worlds and times (e.g., myth), and which
programmatically harp on the sorrows of a poet living in Tomi. Ovid’s art may
distract, but his chosen content brings him ever back to the wounding point. The
poet who weeps over and onto his page at the end of 4.1 is also a poet who
remembers and grows angry:
saepe etiam lacrimae me sunt scribente profusae,
umidaque est fletu littera facta meo,
corque vetusta meum, tamquam nova, vulnera novit,
inque sinum maestae labitur imber aquae.
cum vice mutata, qui sim fuerimque, recordor,
et, tulerit quo me casus et unde, subit,
saepe manus demens, studiis irata sibique
misit in arsuros carmina nostra focos.
4.1.95–102
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I’ve often poured forth tears as I wrote, and made the letters run with
my weeping; my heart recognizes its old wounds, as if they were freshly
made, and a rain of sad drops slides down my cloak’s folds. When I recall
my change, who I am and who I used to be, and there comes to mind
where and whence misfortune has carried me, my mad hand, enraged at
its pursuits and itself, has often thrown my poetry upon the consuming
hearth.
Internalizing imperial ira, albeit too late, the introverted poet of 4.1 turns that rage
against himself and his writings, thereby effectively identifying the triumph poem
that follows as a specimen of the kind of writing that does not get consigned to
the flames. And yet while the writing of the triumph may enable a pleasurable
fantasy of Roman omnipotence and community, it too cannot but reopen old
wounds. The triumph may indeed be precisely the kind of poem that arouses the
most intense Ovidian rage by revealing that the difference between Ovid’s then
and now (qui sim fuerimque, 4.1.99) can also be expressed as the difference
between Ovid and Caesar. In 4.1, Ovid laments “how wretched it is for a
man who was ever on the lips of the people, qui populi semper in ore fuit, to
live among the barbarian Bessi and Getae!” (67–68); in 4.2, he imagines the
triumphant Tiberius borne in his chariot purpureus populi rite per ora tui, “robed
in purple as is due before the countenances [or: from mouth to mouth] of your
people” (48). As Philip Hardie has pointed out, this description of Tiberius,
which echoes a series of specifically poetic boasts, including Ovid’s from the
end of the Metamorphoses, “comes close to making the imperial triumphator
an allegory of the poet.”48 Or even an allegory of the poetry book: as Ovid
notes in Tristia 1.1 (5–6), such books might sport purple covers; the parade
of conquered Germans in 4.2 fittingly includes one man who, with his “hair
streaming down to hide his rough cheeks” (squalida promissis qui tegit ora
comis, 4.2.34), somewhat resembles Ovid’s own downcast and unkempt book
in Tristia 1.1 (hirsutus sparsis . . . comis, 1.1.12). A Caesar triumphant in the
future stands for (and in the place of) an Ovid triumphant in the past. It is the
defeated Germans, not the conquering Romans, who hold up a mirror to his present
abasement. How could the poet who earlier compared himself to a slave singing
in his chains (vinctus, 4.1.5) fail to see himself in the image of Germany with
“chains on those hands that once bore arms” (vincula fert illa qua tulit arma
manu, 4.2.46)? Even within 4.2 Ovid acknowledges his bondage by entering the
counterclaim that his mind at least is free (libera, 59) to travel to Rome—just
as the mind of a conquered German is free to absent itself from the present scene
of the triumph. Ovid’s happy fantasy of belonging to the triumphant community
is thus fractured by an angry consciousness of sharing the condition of bondage of
the defeated.
48. Hardie 2002: 311.
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Tristia 4.2 can still function, of course, as a demonstration of what Ovid can do
for Augustus when he puts his talents as an image-maker at the emperor’s service.
As Fergus Millar has pointed out, Ovid is engaged, here as elsewhere in the Tristia,
in helping the emperor construct a reassuring image of an imperial domus built to
last.49 The poem opens with plural “Caesars” (Caesaribus, 4.2.1, sc. Augustus and
Tiberius) and a reference to “each Caesar, alike victors” (victores Caesar uterque,
8), upholding the ideal image of the succession, succinctly defined by Hardie as
“Caesar = Caesar, the imperial fiction.”50 As if two were not enough, Ovid follows
Augustus in further extending the imperial household to include “the young men
[sc. Tiberius’ adopted and natural sons] who are growing up under Caesar’s
name, so that this household may rule the world in perpetuity” (qui Caesareo
iuvenes sub nomine crescunt / perpetuo terras ut domus illa regat, 9–10). The
imagined imminent victory over Germany, which is to seal the dominion of the
“Caesars” over the “whole world” (Iam fera Caesaribus Germania, totus ut orbis,
/ victa, 4.2.1–2) is complemented by this proclamation of the unbounded range
of Caesarian dominion across time.
And yet this rhetoric, irreproachable, self-contained, effective though it may
be, admits of a different, a rivalrous reading. Although this poem situates Ovid
either among the celebrating Romans or among the defeated Germans—situates
him, that is, anywhere but in the triumphal chariot—the resemblance Hardie
detects between imperial and poetic triumphatores leaves open the possibility of
reading Ovid back into the place held by Caesar. Such a reading would poke
holes in the papery Caesarian triumph of 4.2 by installing in its place, with
however little fanfare, a more durably impressive image—Ovid’s poetic triumph,
something not subject to the local vicissitudes of time or fortune. In 3.7 and 4.9
I suggested that we might read the poet as an aggressively improved image of
the emperor; here, conversely, I would propose reading Caesar as an inadequate
or deficient image of Ovid. The observations Hardie makes regarding Ovid’s
overgoing of Augustus in Metamorphoses 15 apply equally well to 4.2. Unlike
the name “Caesar,” superimposed on a series of putative heirs who are, as recent
sad events had already demonstrated, all too subject to mortality, Ovid’s name
is inalienably his own, propagated through literary “offspring” who point ever
back to the author whose name they bear. The emperor’s representations (on the
clupeus virtutis, in his coinage, in his Res Gestae, etc.) refer to, and will be
judged against, a purportedly preexistent reality. But the poet makes his name
by making representations, and so need not worry about the relation between
“fama and verum.”51 That Augustus has something to worry about is suggested
by the lingering fictionality that infects his triumph. Near the end of the poem,
49. Millar 1993; on the “ideological work” of imperialism performed by Ovid’s exile poetry,
see the challenging discussion of Habinek 1998: 151–69.
50. Hardie 1997: 193.
51. Hardie 1997: 193–95 (quotation from 194).
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Ovid laments that whereas the Roman populace will enjoy a “true spectacle” (vera
. . . spectacula, 65) and the presence of their great general (praesens cum duce
turba suo, 66), he himself is condemned to a secondary experience, mediated by
imagination and hearsay:
at mihi fingendo tantum longeque remotis
auribus hic fructus percipiendus erit.
4.2.67–68
But as for me, I’ll have to harvest that pleasure only by making it up,
and by means of my far-distant ears.
These lines seem to install a sharp contrast between presence and absence, reality
(vera) and fiction (fingendo). But what Ovid’s description of the triumph has
already demonstrated is that the spectacular imperial representation which is the
triumph may be real (a palpable happening) without being true. It may be, indeed
it certainly is, at once real and fictional. It is not just that the spectators are
actually looking much of the time at representations (floats, tituli, etc.). It is
also that (as Ovid had already remarked in the comparable passage of the Ars
Amatoria) since no one is likely to know just what he or she is looking at, it will
be left to enterprising bystanders to invent plausible identities and explanations
for the vanquished (whether of flesh and blood or wood and paint) on parade
(4.2.27ff.).52 And yet the authority of the emperor depends on everyone accepting
that public spectacles such as the triumph do in fact refer, and with some degree
of accuracy, to something beyond themselves—the conquest of Germany, for
example. Ovid’s renown, by contrast, is secured by representations that succeed
precisely as fictions. Otherwise put, in the language of the Metamorphoses, where
Minerva claims homage on the basis of her represented invention of the olive,
Arachne stakes her fame on her representational inventiveness.
One final and related point of invidious comparison between the staged
Augustan and implied Ovidian triumphs involves one of the key fictions of empire,
what I’ll call the fiction of centrality. 4.2 opens with the image of a single, unified
world, dominated by Rome (“By now savage Germany, like the whole world,
totus ut orbis, may have gone down on bended knee in submission before the
Caesars,” 4.2.1–2). World conquest is synecdochically figured by the ceremony
of the triumph, which brings that world into Rome and parades it before the eyes
of the imperial city. Distant as it is, however, Tomi will be reached only by a
reduced or attenuated report of these events (famaque tam longe non nisi parva
venit, 18). Near the poem’s end, Ovid notes with regret a further impediment to
full communication and full enjoyment:
atque procul Latio diversum missus in orbem
qui narret cupido vix erit ista mihi.
52. Cf. Hardie 2002: 309–10.
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is quoque iam serum referet veteremque triumphum. . . .
4.2.69–71
. . . and there will scarcely be anyone dispatched to this other world, so far
from Latium, to relate the triumph to my eager self. Plus the triumph he
brings will be old and stale. . . .
True, this description emphasizes the vast dimensions of the empire, the enormous
distance that must be crossed by fama as it travels from the Roman center to the
margins, and thereby contributes to our sense of the empire’s awesome magnitude.
And yet Virgil’s fama, we recall, does not age or shrink but rather grows as it
goes, virisque adquirit eundo (Aen. 4.175). What the weakening of fama reveals
is that the center of the empire does not and cannot control the attention or define
the concerns of its margins; Ovid’s diversus orbis is not just a different world
but one that is quite literally turned away, as if looking elsewhere, in another
direction.53 But while imperial fama runs out of steam, the poet’s fama can be
counted on to chug happily along, ever refueled by the admiration of readers,
however far-flung they may be in space or in time. Horace is not mistaken in
claiming that he will “grow forever fresh in the praise of future generations”
(usque ego postera / crescam laude recens, Carm. 3.30.7–8); no more is Ovid in
claiming that he will “live, through all the ages, if the prophecies of bards contain
any truth, in renown” (perque omnia saecula fama, / si quid habent veri vatum
praesagia, vivam, Met. 15.878–79). Wherever and whenever he is read, the poet’s
fama is not “old and stale” but refreshed and renewed.
Tristia 4.2 ends with the prophecy causaque privata publica maior erit—the
news of a Roman triumph will bring Ovid a moment of happiness, outweighing
his merely private concerns. It is to such private concerns that Ovid turns in the
next poem, Tristia 4.3, and it is with the interplay between Tristia 4.2 and 4.3
that I will conclude this section. In 4.3, Ovid takes up the question of his wife’s
loyalty. In the absence of secure information, Ovid represents himself as racked
with doubt, tossed between confidence, anxiety, and an angry, almost Catullan
despair. Near the end of the poem, however, Ovid pulls himself together, as it
were, and exhorts his wife, in a style readers of the Tristia have encountered
before, loyally to exercise her moral excellence on her husband’s behalf, taking
adversity as an opportunity:
nec tibi, quod saevis ego sum Iovis ignibus ictus,
purpureus molli fiat in ore pudor.
sed magis in curam nostri consurge tuendi,
exemplumque mihi coniugis esto bonae,
materiamque tuis tristem virtutibus imple:
53. Cf. the casual remark at Pont. 1.2.81–82: “most of mankind doesn’t give much thought
to you, fairest Rome, or tremble before Italian arms” (maxima pars hominum nec te, pulcherrima,
curat, / Roma, nec Ausonii militis arma timet).
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Volume 23 / No. 2 / October 2004
ardua per praeceps gloria vadit iter.
....
quae latet inque bonis cessat non cognita rebus,
apparet virtus arguiturque malis.
dat tibi nostra locum tituli fortuna, caputque
conspicuum pietas qua tua tollat, habet.
utere temporibus, quorum nunc munere facta est
et patet in laudes area lata tuas.
4.3.69–74, 79–84
Don’t let my being struck by Jove’s savage flames bring the flush of shame
into your soft face, but rather rouse yourself, rise to the responsibility
of protecting me; be the model of a good wife; make this sad affair a
vehicle for your virtues; glory makes its way uphill along a steep path. . . .
The virtue that lies hidden and rests unrecognized in good times shows
and proves itself in bad times. My misfortune gives you occasion to
distinguish yourself, it has that in it which can enable your loyalty to hold
its head high for all to see. Use your opportunities; they have opened up a
wide space for your pursuit of renown.
These closing lines are full of what might well strike a reader coming from 4.2 as
specifically triumphal language: virtus exercised and demonstrated, the arduous
ascent of gloria, the public renown conferred by titulus and laudes (as if Ovid’s
wife were being primed to join the exemplary heroes whose statues lined the
forum of Augustus), the flaunted pride of the caput conspicuum, focus of all
eyes.54 4.3 might then be read as a poem celebrating the triumph of the defeated,
the arduous victory earned by moral virtus in the face of an omnipotent but perhaps
not especially moral Jove.
Such a reading is reinforced but also modulated by the opening lines of the
poem, which are taken up by an elaborate apostrophe that deserves to be quoted in
full:
Magna minorque ferae, quarum regis altera Graias,
altera Sidonias, utraque sicca, rates,
omnia cum summo positae videatis in axe,
et maris occiduas non subeatis aquas,
aetheriamque suis cingens amplexibus arcem
vester ab intacta circulus extet humo,
aspicite illa, precor, quae non bene moenia quondam
dicitur Iliades transiluisse Remus,
inque meam nitidos dominam convertite vultus,
sitque memor nostri necne, referte mihi.
4.3.1–10
54. Another link: the triumphant Caesar will ride purpureus populi rite per ora tui (4.2.48),
while Ovid’s wife is instructed not to blush at her husband’s fate, nec . . . / purpureus molli fiat in ore
pudor (4.3.69–70).
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: The Power of Image-Makers
315
You great and lesser wild beasts, alike dry, one the guide of Greek, the
other of Sidonian ships: since, set atop the north pole, you see everything
and you don’t travel below the western waters; since your orbit, high
above the earth you never touch, encircles the heavenly citadel in its
embrace: gaze, I pray, upon those walls that Ilia’s son Remus is said to
have leaped across in olden days, a job ill done, and turn your shining
faces upon my mistress, and tell me whether she remembers me or not.
By invoking both bears, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Ovid effectively acquires
a pair of celestial eyes, dry eyes (stars that never dip into Ocean, but also eyes
ever free of blinding tears) that can see everything everywhere—Rome as well
as Tomi, wife as well as husband.55 But the doubling of the bears also enables
a connection with another pair that the invocation puts into play. The walls the
bears are invited to gaze upon are those Remus overleaped, thereby enraging his
twin (quae non bene moenia quondam / dicitur Iliades transiluisse Remus, 7–8).
Evidence that Ovid is indeed connecting the bears and the brothers is furnished by
the verb regis in the opening line of the poem (“guide,” but also “rule”). These
two pairs embody two different resolutions of the problem of doubled authority.
The bears avoid a power struggle, if I can put it that way, by dividing the seafaring
nations between them, the one ruling one nation, the other the other. But no such
peaceful outcome is available to Romulus and Remus, whose desires intersect
at the site of Rome. It is clear enough which pair models the relations of Ovid
and Augustus. Insofar as the poet plays Remus to Augustus’ Romulus,56 he fills
the part of the loser—the one who failed to give his name to the new foundation
and who paid for his transgression with his life. The role of loser is also written
into his subsequent comparison of his wife to Andromache, himself to Hector,
victim of the anger of Achilles:
nec cruciere minus quam cum Thebana cruentum
Hectora Thessalico vidit ab axe rapi.
4.3. 29–30
Nor are you any less anguished [by my fate] than Theban Andromache
when she saw blood-smeared Hector dragged from Achilles’ Thessalian
chariot wheel.
Elsewhere in the exile poetry, for example at the start of this poem (summo . . .
in axe, 3), axis denotes the icy celestial pole occupied by the bears. Its use here in
connection with a triumphant chariot wheel knits 4.3 to 4.2, where a Caesar is seen
riding high in his triumphal car; the simile thus retroactively inserts Ovid into that
scene among the German defeated, which is just where he belongs. It is this defeat
55. Cf. Nisbet 1982: 49.
56. So Nisbet 1982: 50, who elicits from this association the “unspoken thought that the new
Romulus is destroying a well-intentioned man for his ill-timed mockery of decorum in the Ars
Amatoria.”
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Volume 23 / No. 2 / October 2004
that opens up the field for his wife’s moral triumph as envisioned at the end of the
poem. Thus while the twins may have been identical at birth, they are differentiated
by their life stories, and this difference expresses the asymmetrical distribution of
power between the wretchedly marginalized poet and the all-powerful emperor.
So much is true at the level of biography. And yet, every time a poem such as
4.3 reaches a reader, it effectively re-performs the leap of Remus, returning us to a
time antedating the establishment of a Romulean order. At the end of his long
invective Ibis, Ovid’s dizzying summa of horrific fates wished upon his unnamed
enemy culminates in the figures of Remus—and of Ovid himself:
utque Remo muros auso transire recentes
noxia sint capiti rustica tela tuo.
denique Sarmaticas inter Geticasque sagittas
his precor ut vivas et moriare locis.
633–36
. . . like Remus, who boldly crossed the newly constructed walls, may you
find death through rustic weapons; and—my final prayer—amid Sarmatic
and Getic arrows may you live and die in this land.
This final prayer converts the curse into an expression of self-pity: no fate could
be worse than Ovid’s. But it also suggests that every one of the tortured souls
Ovid projects onto his enemy in the course of this poem serves at the same time as
a self-portrait of the suffering poet in the here-and-now of Tomi. What Ovid seeks
in the Ibis is not just to punish his enemy but to reverse their positions: to turn
his enemy into himself while himself appropriating the position of his enemy.
The juxtaposition of Ovid with Remus suggests that the name of the enemy is
Romulus, or (as he came to be known) Augustus.57 True, the reference to “rustic
weapons” points us toward the story retailed in the Fasti (4.837–48), where it
is not Romulus but his delegate, the mattock-wielding Celer, who brings Remus
down (though Remus still has a complaint to level against his twin: Fasti 2.143).
As in 4.3, which mentions only the transgressing twin, Romulus remains in the
background. And yet (even if we swallow Ovid’s quasi-exoneration of Romulus
in the Fasti)58 once Remus has been named, Romulus can hardly be thought out
of the picture. What I have been arguing throughout this essay is that the same
is true of Ovid and Augustus, at least within Ovid’s poetry (and for me, as a
devoted Ovidian, just about everywhere else as well)—the naming of the one
conjures up the rivalrous shadow of the other. My further claim, which I think
this climactic moment of the Ibis supports, is that what Ovid wants is not just
to destroy Augustus but to take over his place and his power. In fact Remus is
not his best model here, since Remus meets Romulus on Roman ground, whereas
Ovid has his best shot at winning if the game is played at home, which for Ovid
57. On Augustus’ alignment with Romulus, see Hinds 1992: 127–29.
58. I endorse the suspicious reading of this episode offered by Hinds 1992: 142–48.
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: The Power of Image-Makers
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means in the territory of representation. Here at least Ovid can celebrate a partial
victory. “For Romulus, no publicity involving Remus can in the end be good
publicity.”59 Likewise for Augustus, no publicity involving Ovid can in the end be
good publicity. Especially when Ovid is acting as his own publicist. Whether he
wins or loses, vaunts or grovels, still, insofar as he remains present to imagination,
keeps his image before our eyes: he wins.
III. THE CATCH
I would have liked to end there. But there is, alas, a catch. Ovid’s assumption
of an imperial persona is not simply something to celebrate. Let me reiterate,
returning to the earlier, less resolute sections of Tristia 4.3, that Ovid is indulging
in this poem, just as in 4.2, in an act of fantasy. Both fantasies are centered on
Rome—one on the city’s thronged streets, the other on the interior, domestic space
inhabited by Ovid’s wife. Near the end of 4.2, Ovid claims that his mind has the
power to convey his eyes into the city’s very heart (illa meos oculos mediam
deducit in urbem, 61); at the start of 4.3, he delegates his speculative nostos to the
bears, who are to overleap the walls on his behalf. In the event, however, Ovid’s
lengthy apostrophe goes nowhere. The bears are no sooner dispatched to check on
his wife’s fidelity (sitque memor nostri necne, referte mihi, 4.3.10) than they are
dismissed, while Ovid falls back on his own imaginative resources (4.3.11–18):
ei mihi, cur timeam? quae sunt manifesta, requiro.
cur labat ambiguo spes mea mixta metu?
crede, quod est et vis, ac desine tuta vereri,
deque fide certa sit tibi certa fides.
quodque polo fixae nequeunt tibi dicere flammae,
non mentitura tu tibi voce refer:
esse tui memorem. . . .
4.3.11–18
Alas, why should I fear? I’m asking about something that’s evident. Why
do my hopes totter, mixed with doubtful fears? Believe what is the case,
and what you desire—stop fearing a sure thing—foster a steadfast belief
concerning her steadfast loyalty, and tell yourself, with a voice that will
not be lying, what those lights stuck fast at the pole can’t tell you: “she
remembers you. . . .”
What the invocation of the bears does is to draw attention to the limits of their
power. While celestial eyes may harbor illusions of omniscience, there is one
place they can’t see—that no eyes, but especially not celestial eyes, can see—
and that is inside human hearts. The best Ovid can do is to labor, with mixed
success, to convince himself that reality coincides with his desires: crede quod est
59. Hinds 1992: 143.
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Volume 23 / No. 2 / October 2004
et vis (13). The fictional report that Ovid gives himself of his wife’s behavior
(cherishing his name, doting on his image, still loving him truly, etc.) thus has
something in common with the invented details supplied by the spectator at the
triumph. The result is plausible, and highly decorous, but the relation between
representation and reality remains in doubt (this is why Ovid can’t sustain his
optimistic tone for very long). My point is that there is a latent equation being
made here between the poet’s horizontal relegation and the emperor’s vertical
exaltation, forms of distance which produce comparable forms of isolation and,
accordingly, comparable insecurities. That yes-man who keeps assuring you that
reality squares with your desires. . . . Can he (can anyone) be trusted to tell you
the truth—a truth that must be brutal if it is to ring true? Note that the eyes
Ovid co-opts in the poem’s first line are ferae, like fera Germania in the first line
of the preceding poem. Perhaps the celestial eyes of a constitutionally paranoid
emperor are themselves as “savage” as the lurking enemies they strain to see.
Ovid’s predicament in Tristia 4.3 resembles that of every ruler who, despite the
earnest endeavors of the informers who extend the reach of his ears and eyes,
can never be sure of the loyalty of his subjects.
The exiled poet’s identification with the emperor is not only aggressively
produced by him but also thrust upon him. In my reading of 4.2, I laid emphasis
on the compromising referentiality of Augustan representations as opposed to
the autonomy of Ovidian fictions. In the discussion of Metamorphoses 15 on
which I was drawing there, Hardie charitably remarks that “Ovid indeed beats
the emperor at his own game of replicating his own order of things, but only
because in that order of things the World has been completely reduced to Text.
Augustus’ problem, we may grant, was more difficult.”60 I need to concede at this
point that Ovid’s problem in his writings from exile was likewise more difficult.
In this avowedly autobiographical poetry, Ovid is caught up in just the same
nexus of fiction and fact as Augustus. No longer figuring mythological others,
Ovid is busy representing his own self, a self that looks sometimes like Minerva,
more often like the instructively punished mortals in the corners of Minerva’s
tapestry, and perhaps most like Arachne, endlessly spinning her monochrome
webs out of her own bodily substance. What I want to underscore is that Ovid has
a stake in convincing his readers that his self-representation in his exile poetry is
accurate, that it refers to something beyond and behind the words on the Ovidian
page.61 Hence the reiterated emphasis on the referential value of his poetry, its
veracity, accuracy, transparency, an emphasis which culminates in Epistulae Ex
Ponto 4 (his last book) in the summoning of witnesses to attest the credibility of
his laments (Pont. 4.7.1–6). This does not mean that we need to revert to a naı̈ve
gullibility, swallowing the exile poetry whole. We don’t have to believe that Tomi
is a frozen wasteland, beset by continual warfare, or that Ovid is deprived there of
60. Hardie 1997: 194.
61. The starting point for a recent study of Ovidian “realism” (Malaspina 1995: 14).
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: The Power of Image-Makers
319
all the civilized amenities, or that he is ill when he claims to be ill, or suicidal
when he claims to be suicidal. We don’t have to take anything he says at face
value; indeed, to do so would surely be an error (one that contemporary readers,
suspicious as they are of referentiality, are in any case unlikely to commit). But
our reading of this poetry will suffer, I think, if we fail to recognize that Ovid
is really (truly) in a certain situation, one that puts peculiar pressures on this
poetry, fueled as it is by the conflicting impulses of ingratiation and rage, hope
and despair. We need to believe, in short, in the reality of Ovid’s exile.
It is indeed a marvelous irony, one Augustus would surely have relished, that
some readers are ready to deny Ovid’s exile poetry any referential standing, to
interpret it as yet another Ovidian fiction, an extension of the technique of the
first-personal Amores and Heroides: the poet donning a new mask, this time the
mask of an exile. It is madness, in my view, to say that such a claim doesn’t matter
for our reading of Ovid. To represent the exile poetry as an autonomous fiction is
to drain off its vengeful efficacy. If Ovid and Augustus are merely characters in an
Ovidian story, then what has Ovid’s exile poetry succeeded in doing to Augustus?
If Ovid is not the victim of Augustan ira expressed as clementia (I recognize
of course that Augustus would represent the situation differently), how can his
example tarnish the imperial image? How can the will to power make use of
the will to truth if there is no truth to be laid bare? I must concede, however,
that the readings that treat the exile poetry as a self-contained invention are in
fact profoundly Ovidian, scripted in advance, perhaps even prescribed, by scenes
such as the contest of Minerva and Arachne. As Heinz Hofmann puts it (with
my emphasis), “ on the grounds of his own poems alone it can never be proved
that Ovid really was relegated and wrote those poems on the way to, and in, Tomi
itself.”62 Ovid may have fashioned the referential rope for Augustus, but it is
Arachne who ends up hanging.
University of California at Berkeley
eolien@socrates.berkeley.edu
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