Ovid’s collection of elegies, Amores (The Loves), abounds with double entendres. Although it is a stitch in Latin, it can seem dry in English even in the hands of an expert translator. On the other hand, Ovid’s masterpiece, Metamorphoses, his epic collection of transformation myths, is a vivacious and bubbly narrative in English. But the elegies portray the pursuit of love in an ancient world that can seem exotic and foreign.
I have been rereading Ovid’s charming Latin elegies, and decided to translate Amores, II.iii, to give you a glimpse of Ovid’s world. It is the second of two monologues addressed to a eunuch who is his mistress’s chaperone.
The persona of the poem tells the eunuch that, if he had been able to enjoy the “mutual joys of Venus,” he would have sanctioned his mistress’s affair with Ovid. But Ovid also subtly derides the eunuch’s sexual impotence: he uses words like mollis (soft) and facilis (yielding), similar to Catullus’s slangy references to not being durus (hard). Ovid advises the eunuch to implere (fill) the mistress with kindness. Will the eunuch yield or resist?
Here is my literal translation of the poem – for the sense, not the poetry, alas!
Amores, II.iii
Oh! You are neither male nor female who guard my mistress, and you cannot know the mutual joys of Venus (love). The man who first gelded boys should suffer the wounds he dealt. If your love had grown warm in any woman, you would be soft in compliance, you would yield to those asking. You were not born for the horse, or useful with brave weapons: A warlike spear did not fit in your right hand. Let the masculine men manage wars. Put away virile hopes; you must instead bear the standards of your mistress. Fill her with kindness, and her friendship will profit you. If you lose your mistress, what use will you be? Her beauty – these are years fit for sexual sport – and figure are unworthy to die in sluggish abstinence. She could deceive you, though you are troublesome What two have wished for they will get. But it is more fitting to have made a request : we ask you while you still have an opportunity to place your favors well, with a good return.
In view of the Supreme Court’s recent draft of an opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, I have reposted an adapted version of one of my former posts on Ovid’s abortion poems.
Ovid wrote two poems about abortion (Amores 13 & 14). He was the first Roman poet, to my knowledge, to write elegies about abortion. The first poem in Ovid’s diptych is sympathetic to his ailing mistress Corinna, whose abortion has gone drastically wrong. He begins the first poem (I cannot write poetry; this is my quick, literal translation):
While she rashly is overthrowing the burden of her pregnant womb,
Weary Corinna lies in danger of her life.
Having attempted so great a danger without telling me
She deserves my anger, but my anger dies with fear.
But indeed she had conceived by me, or so I believe.
It is often for me a fact because it can be.
In the next lines Ovid writes a formal prayer to Isis, a maternal goddess and healer who had a cult in Rome, and assures her that Corinna honors her and has participated in her rites on the designated days. Then he prays to Ilithia, the Greek goddess of childbirth. He promises to bring gifts and incense. “I will add the inscription, “Naso has given this for Corinna’s recovery.” (Ovid’s full name is Ovidius Publius Naso.)
He is frantic about Corinna’s illness. He wants above all for her to live. But he ends the prayer – and poem – with a gentle rebuke to Corinna.
If it is right to have warned in such great fear,
let it be enough for you to have struggled in this combat once.
The second elegy in the diptych is a furious attack on abortion. He begins with a reference to Euripides’s Medea, who said, “I would rather stand in front of the shield three times than give birth once.” He argues that Medea’s killing her children was comprehensible because she wanted revenge on Jason; but he says the tearing of an embryo from the womb is wrong, because it must naturally grow first and why deprive it of its life?
He attacks women who have abortions, saying that the first to do so should have died as a punishment. He accuses women who are exempt from military service of taking their own weapons and using them against themselves, rather than taking up those of Mars. And he argues that Corinna, the Roman population, mythological heroes, and he himself would not have been born if their mothers had had abortions. (N.B. He does not mention the cruel ancient practice of exposing babies, especially female babies, on a hillside.)
But in the last two lines he relents somewhat, praying for her safety and echoing the last two lines of the first poem.
Gods, concede that safely she has sinned once.
and it is enough: let her bear the punishment a second time
But which poem reflects Ovid’s feelings? The first is gentler than the second. The points of view seem different. The name Corinna is not mentioned in the second poem. Only the last couplet seems to link it to the first poem.
I would buy a ticket if Ovid gave a reading on Zoom. If he is resurrected from the dead let me know. I might even be persuaded to attend “Ovid in Conversation with a Modern Poet.”
Ovid is the wittiest, most elegant of Roman poets, but here is what translators conceal: he is extremely bawdy, positively filthy at times.
You would think Amores II.15, an elegy addressed to the ring he plans to give his mistress, would be simple and sweet. That would be too facile for Ovid, who glories in eroticism and jokes. I have translated a few lines to unveil the double entendres.
O ring, about to encircle my mistress’ finger… May she put it on joyfully and rub it on her knuckles. May you fit together as my cock fits her vagina, and may you rub her finger – perfectly sized.
Did you know that Shakespeare used the word “ring” for “vagina” in The Merchant of Venice, V.1.307? Ovid was hugely influential.
Translators tone down the Amores, while scholars explicate the double entendres and argue over problems in the text. The sexual puns are Roman, understood by Roman readers.
Brilliant Ovid had his detractors. Augustus tried to legislate morality. He banished Ovid to an island for carmen et error, “a poem and an error,” and perhaps his poetry would raise hackles in the #MeToo era, too.
You know what I say: love the writing, but don’t bother about the writers’ personal lives. You don’t need to approve them as your best friends. You just need their words.
You may well know his epic poem, Metamorphoses, a collection of myths linked by the theme of change, and undoubtedly the most renowned Latin poem after Virgil’s Aeneid. Ovid wrote many delightful poems, including the silly didactic Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), and his eclectic Amores (Loves).
One of the Amores (Loves) is of particular interest, a prayer for his girlfriend Corinna, who has an abortion and lies between life and death. It is, as far as I know, one of only two Latin poems to treat this controversial subject in detail, the second also being by Ovid. Ovidians say the word onus (burden) is used of the fetus for the first time in Latin here; and gravidus venter (swollen belly) the first time for “pregnant womb.” Fascinated by the odd juxtaposition of Ovid’s examination of his love and anger and the formal prayer to Isis, I decided to translate this. You can find the Latin poem below my translation.
My translation of Amores, II.13
When she rashly shook the burden from her womb, Corinna lay weakened, in doubt of her life. Having borne such peril without my knowledge She deserved my anger, but anger died from fear. She had conceived by me, or so I trust: But that could be my theory, not fact. I pray to you, Isis, dweller of Paraetoneum and the fertile plains of Canopus, Memphis and palm-bearing Pharon, And where the swift Nile, having fallen In a wide bed, travels through seven mouths Into the waters of the sea; I pray by your Isis-rattles, by the revered head of Anubis, may pious Osiris love your sacred rites, May the slow serpent slink around the altar And may horn-bearing Apis, sacred bull, accompany you in procession. Turn your face hither and spare two in one: You will give my mistress life, she to me. Having honored you often, she sits on certain days when the crowd of priests waters your laurel. And you, Ilithyia, having pitied the pregnant girls Whose hidden burden distends their bodies, Be gentle here and well-disposed to my prayers. She is worthy whom you command to your service. I myself, in white robes, will burn incense on your smoky altars. I myself will bear gifts to your feet and prayers. Let me add the title, “Ovid for your saving Corinna”: Just make a place for the inscription and gifts. and if it is lawful to have given warning in such fear, let it be enough for you to have fought on this side in the battle.
Ovid’s poem in Latin
XIII
Dum labefactat onus gravidi temeraria ventris, in dubio vitae lassa Corinna iacet. illa quidem clam me tantum molita pericli ira digna mea; sed cadit ira metu. sed tamen aut ex me conceperat—aut ego credo; est mihi pro facto saepe, quod esse potest. Isi, Paraetonium genialiaque arva Canopi quae colis et Memphin palmiferamque Pharon, quaque celer Nilus lato delapsus in alveo per septem portus in maris exit aquas, per tua sistra precor, per Anubidis ora verendi— sic tua sacra pius semper Osiris amet, pigraque labatur circa donaria serpens, et comes in pompa corniger Apis eat! huc adhibe vultus, et in una parce duobus! nam vitam dominae tu dabis, illa mihi. saepe tibi sedit certis operata diebus, qua cingit laurus Gallica turma tuas. Tuque laborantes utero miserata puellas, quarum tarda latens corpora tendit onus, lenis ades precibusque meis fave, Ilithyia! digna est, quam iubeas muneris esse tui. ipse ego tura dabo fumosis candidus aris, ipse feram ante tuos munera vota pedes. adiciam titulum: ‘servata Naso Corinna!’ tu modo fac titulo muneribusque locum. Si tamen in tanto fas est monuisse timore, hac tibi sit pugna dimicuisse satis!
In one of my notebooks, I scribble down references to Ovid I chance to find in novels. There are a surprising number of novels in which characters quote Ovid, or, conversely, in which Ovid himself appears. Two of the best are about Ovid’s exile, David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and the Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World. These classics seem entirely forgotten. But my book club so far has voted me down every time I suggest them.
I have been smitten with Ovid for years. Reading his epic poem Metamorphoses, a collection of myths of transformation, was transformative. And Ovid’s Amores (love poems) might well be adapted as a Netflix film about the problems of modern couples. In one of the poems, Ovid mockingly consoles his girlfriend Corinna when her hair falls out after a bad dye job; in a diptych, he fumes and fulminates about Corinna’s abortion, which he learns about only after she almost dies.
So who is my favorite Ovidian in a novel? One of my favorite characters is Christopher Tietjens, the statistician-gentleman-soldier-linguist hero of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a Modernist tetralogy set in England and Europe during World War I. In the first novel, which has the unpromising title Some Do Not…, he argues with Miss Wannop, a suffragette and classicist, about the wording of some lines from Ovid’s Fasti.
Tietjens is a true gentleman, of the kind we never meet in real life. Let us say that Ovid would not have believed in him. When Miss Wannop and a suffragette friend appear on a golf course to shout their slogans and the friend falls down, Tietjens courteously helps them get away. And he and Miss Wannop (Valentine), a daughter of an old friend, turn out to have much in common. Both are bookish–well, intellectuals really–and not at all snobbish. Tietjens, a genius, unfortunately irritates many people with the breadth of his knowledge.
And so he is not at all upset when Miss Wannop turns out to know more Latin than he does. “Upon my soul!” Tietjens said to himself, “that girl… is theonly intelligent living soul I’ve met for years.”
Even if you don’t know Latin, you’ll feel the sexual tension.
And I admire Miss Wannop’s stubborn bluestocking style:she does not resort to flirtatious self-denigration, which is still a problem in women’s discourse. She proves her familiarity with the vocabulary of Ovid, who really does use certain words more than others, and points out alliteration and matters of the ear.
She says, “The reason why I’m unconcerned about your rudeness about my Latin is that I know I’m a much better Latinist than you.You can’t quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in….It’s vastum, not longum….“Terra tribus scopulis vastum procurrit“… It’s alto, not coelo…“Uvidus ex alto desilientis…”How could Ovid have written ex coelo?The “c” after the “x” sets your teeth on edge.”
Adelaide Clemens as Miss Wannop and Benedict Cumberbatch as Tietjens in “Parade’s End”
Tietjens’ world is peopled by characters who know poetry.In the second novel, No More Parades, Tietjens is an officer in the army, but even when hehas just been splattered by the blood of a man blown up by a bomb, he finds an opportunity to write a sonnet.While scribbling some paper work for men who are about to go to the front, he declares he will write a sonnet in under two and a half minutes if Captain Mackenzie provides him with end rhymes.Captain Mackenzie agrees to do so, and adds, “If you do I’ll turn it into Latin hexameters in three.In under three minutes.”
Just so you’ll know Tietjens has real problems, let me tell you that his wife Sylvia, a beautiful adulterous villain, hates him so much that she slanders him and ruins his reputation. And it seems she won’t stop till she kills him. You’ll never believe what she tells the colonel.
Parade’s End is one of the best books (well, quartets) I’ve ever read.
Every autumn I sit under multiple blankets, drinking cups of chai, surrounded by dictionaries, poring over my favorite literature in a foreign language. I swear the comfort of dictionaries—a word can change its meaning entirely when combined in different phrases, in different contexts—makes it possible to escape from the gloom of chilly fall days.Recently, reading in another language distracted me from my fierce fights with 25-mile-per-hour winds on my bike, and a wish that our leaves would blow into somebody else’s yard.
Thank God for the charm of languages! Hipsters read French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, travel, and perhaps join the Peace Corps, while nerds read classical languages and often stay home. Much as I love Latin, you will not get social points for spending the summer reading Statius.And claiming you dream in Latin is, in my opinion, always going too far. That is not to say that I have not gone far: and yet, one does not want to be a don or a scholar (unless you’re Mary Beard). A language is more than words: it shapes the culture and the structure of thought.It is difficult to translate this reality to people who do not know a foreign language. And in the U.S., where we seldom bother to learn other languages, xenophobia grows.
I hide the fact at dinner parties that my“affair” withCicero, a binge-reading of his speeches and letters, turned into a sympathetic imaginary dialogue with this brilliant, annoying, insecure orator.In a flash,I understood his character and the politics of the first century B.C. as I had never experienced through reading history.I flashed on the elaborate networking, the insane politics, the chances Cicero took with prosecuting mobsters:he wanted political fame so desperately that he wrote letters beggingfriends to write the history of his suppression of Catiline’s conspiracy against Rome.
I see Latin poetry through scrims of different readings and interpretation over the decades.Is Ovid’s myth of Daphne and Apollo in Metamorphoses humorous or tragic? Is it about unrequited love or rape? Probably both. Cupid shoots the god Apollo with an arrow of love and shoots the nymph Daphne with an arrow of repulsion.Daphne runs away, and the out-of-shape Apollo chases her, begging her to run more slowly, promising he will run more slowly, too.She is dedicated to the chaste goddess Diana, and begs her father, Peneus, the river god, tosave her.He turns her into a laurel tree, which Apollo obnoxiously claims as his own.
As an undergraduate I scribbled the following irreverent remarks in the margins:
Couldn’t Peneus have done better? Why a tree?
Is she a lesbian?Is that the arrow of repulsion?
Why does Prof think this erotic?The wreath holds her rumpled hair “without law.” She is a mess and prob stinks from running.Unshaven legs, I’m sure. A modern feminist. (N.B. We didn’t often shave our body hair back the.)
I could have garbled on like this forever, but I doubt it went into my paper on Ovid.
Ancient Rome was violent and decadent.If you’ve binge-watched the TV series Rome or perused Mary Beard’s best-selling history SPQR, you know that Rome seethed with wars, civil wars, conspiracies, gang warfare, assassinations, exile, poisonings, insanity, promiscuity, lead poisoning, and capricious emperors.
War veterans in ancient Rome obviously suffered PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but the psychological cost of exile is also treated in Roman history and literature.In Virgil’s Aeneid, the traumatized hero-warrior Aeneas survives the fall of Troy but then must reluctantly lead the survivors into exile—because the gods force him to.
And Ovid, the frivolous, brilliant poet, was capriciously exiled by the emperor Augustus in 8 A.D. for carmen et error (a poem and an error).In letters written in the form of poetry, Tristia (Sad Things) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), the urbane Ovid begs his friends to intercede on his behalf, because he does not thrive among barbarians in Tomis on the cold shores of the Black Sea. But he died in exile in 17 A.D.
And then there’s Cicero, the most eloquent lawyer and orator in Rome, who was elected consul (the highest office) in 63 B.C. He boasted of his achievements, especially of having crushed the revolutionary conspiracies of Catiline.But in 58 B.C., he went into exile in Greece, mainly because of the political machinations of his enemy Clodius (which also benefited Julius Caesar).
Cicero’s letters home are pathetic.He wonders:has the government stripped his wife Terentia of their land and property?Are the children all right?
O desperate me! O ruined me! What now?Should I ask you to come here,a sick woman, exhausted in body and mind?Should I not ask?Should I be without you?I think I should deal with it thus:if there is hope of my return, let me know and help manage the affair; but if, as I fear, it has not been settled, come to me any way you can.And know this:if I have you, I will not seem entirely lost.But what will become of Tulliola [their married daughter]? You must see to it:I have no counsel for you.But however the matter turns out, my unhappy little one’s reputation and marriage must be saved.What else? What should my son Cicero [age 6] do?May he always be in my embrace and protection.I cannot write more now.My sorrow prevents it.
Near the end of the letter, he courageously writes,
We have lived; we have flourished.Not our vice but our virtue has ruined us.There is no sin, unless it is that I did not lose my life along with honors.
Cicero returned from exile to his beloved, deadly dangerous Rome in 57 B.C. He continued to write and deal with other powerful men until he was put to death in 43 B.C.
Mediocrity is both the medium and the message on the internet. You can blog or tweet your opinions on politics, fashion, yoga, beer, art, travel, movies, and books. You can pore over rough-hewn, poorly-researched articles at online publications. The facts may be wrong and the writing barely within the laws of syntax, but such stuff has driven newspapers and magazines out of business.
Mediocrity is good enough, writers keep saying at mediocre online publications. At Lifehacker, staff writer Nick Douglas shares his muddled thoughts on revising the high school English canon. In the first sentence he declares, “The Great Gatsby is overrated.” (You can imagine my dismay.) He asserts, “The point isn’t to build a new canon. The point is to destabilize the idea of the canon, one that has propped up too many mediocre artists and excluded too many brilliant ones, one that feeds into a monolithic idea of America that looks nothing like the country’s actual past or present.”
The so-called “mediocre artists” propped up by the canon are, of course, authors of the classics. (Yes, I’m annoyed.) Douglas smugly insists that students would benefit more from The Lord of the Rings (I read it when I was 10!) and a Y.A. author named Rainbow Rowell (whom doubtless the students read when they are 10). His background seems not to be in literature or education: he has no interest in style or structure, and is unfamiliar with the concept of reading outside his comfort zone. I recommend that he read the critic Maureen Corrigan’s excellent book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
One of the most sophomoric online publications is Book Riot, which bills itself as “the largest independent editorial book site in North America, and home to a host of media, from podcasts to newsletters to original content, all designed around diverse readers and across all genres.” I don’t mean to single out any particular writer–the articles all read like blog posts–but I was annoyed by Abby Hargreave’s essay, “I Don’t Read the Introductions in Books.” She says she used to read the introductions in college, but indicates it was kind of a bore, and now she doesn’t anymore. She really hates spoilers!
Still, unlike Nick Douglas, she tries to be fair.
She writes,
When I graduated but continued reading, I went back to ignoring the introductions and any other forewords. I find now that I’m still suffering from a lack of background on a lot of the older material I read. That’s a natural consequence, but there’s nothing saying I can’t go back and read the introduction after I finish the novel. I often don’t, but that’s not the point. Some books include afterwords as well as introductions or forewords. This is especially great because it seems obvious to me that an explanation or analysis of the book—which introductions, in my experience, often end up being—should come after the main text. Spoilers aside, it’s difficult to get much out of an analysis if you don’t have the context.
It’s not that I mind whether or not she reads introductions. After all, she’s not a scholar. And I think it’s perfectly sensible to read the introduction after reading the novel. But I dislike the “It’s-okay-to-be-mediocre” tone. Mediocrity can be dangerous, as we know from literature. I recently read Pulitzer Prize winner Booth Tarkington’s The Midlander, the third in his Growth trilogy of environmental novels. (He won the Pulitzer for the second, The Magnificent Ambersons). In The Midlander, set in Indiana in the early 20th century, Tarkington tells the story of two brothers in a wealthy family, Harlan and Dan Oliphant, who dislike each other from boyhood. Brilliant, snobbish Harlan graduates from Harvard with honors, while sweet, stupid Dan barely graduates.
Harlan is a natural aristocrat, living with their wealthy parents in their lovely home, cleverly investing his money, and spending most of his time collecting books and reading. Dan goes into business and works ceaselessly: he buys a farm and intends to build a development there when the town grows. People mock Dan as a harebrained dreamer, but the city eventually does expand in that direction and people buy the lots. Then Dan starts an automobile factory to serve the suburban residents.
Harlan sees the fall of their city as smoky factories are built in the neighborhood and families flee to the suburbs. Urban sprawl has attacked his city, as it has other American cities. By the end of the book we appreciate Harlan’s insights. Although we love Dan’s personality, Dan’s vision was destructive. And Dan pays the price.
The middle doesn’t always mean mediocrity. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the mythic engineer Daedalus devises wings of feathers and wax to escape from King Minos’s prison. He tells his son Icarus before they fly across the sea, “Fly in the middle of the path, because if you go too low, the water will weigh down your feathers, and if you go too high, fire will burn your wings.”
Daedalus does not mean mediocrity by the middle: he knows from the political climate in which he alienated Minos that flying too high was dangerous. But Icarus flies too near the sun, burns his wings, and crashes. And Ovid, too, paid dearly for flying too high. The emperor Augustus banished him for carmen et error (a poem and an error). And though Ovid wrote letters begging friends to intercede on his behalf (Epistulae ex Ponto), he died in exile.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
What I find tragic is not so much the desperation as the new self-congratulatory mediocrity.
Some poets portray Helen as a slut, others as a victim of rape. The usual story is: she committed adultery with Paris, a Trojan prince, and ran away from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. Helen, not Paris, is considered the cause of the Trojan War. It’s a pre-feminist thing. But Homer is sympathetic: in the Iliad, Helen feels her disgrace deeply, and the Greek tragedians vary, with Euripides portraying her differently in two different plays. Modern writers similarly struggle with her character.
In Pat Barker’s new novel, The Silence of the Girls, the Iliad is retold from a woman’s point of view. The narrator, Briseis, a princess enslaved by the Greeks during the Trojan war, does not have a voice in her fate. She is assigned first as a chattel to Achilles, then to Agamemnon. She is raped by both: the best she can say of Achilles is that he is quick, and she suffers extreme violence at the hands of Agamemnon.
Surprisingly, Helen, a friend of Briseis, and also a friend of King Priam, does have a voice. She is much hated by the Trojans, but she retains her dignity, boldly observing the battles from the ramparts, and painting the war scenes in her room: she is a talented artist. One day, Helen and Briseis walked through the marketplace with only one maid, and Briseis is surprised by her daring.
…she said, “Well, why not?” There was no point in her worrying what people might think. The Trojan women—“the ladies,” as she always called them—couldn’t think any worse of her than they did already, and as for the men . . . We-ell, she had a pretty good idea what they were thinking—the same thing they’d been thinking since she was ten years old. Oh, yes, I got that story too. Poor Helen, raped on a river bank when she was only ten. Of course I believed her. It was quite a shock to me, later, to realize nobody else did.
I am particularly interested in the portrayal of Helen in Roman classics. Among Roman poets, Ovid is perhaps most sympathetic. Though not a feminist, he portrayed many strong women, especially in Amores, a collection of elegies about love. And I recently read Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of poems in the form of letters between mythological lovers. The correspondence between Paris, portrayed as an attractive dum-dum prince, and Helen, a smart, flirtatious queen with a sense of decorum, is extraordinarily vivid. Helen declines his invitation to run away to Troy: she cannot be bribed with the gifts, and she wonders what could possibly have given him hope of tori (bed, or if we’re prim, the marriage bed). Helen asks, “Was it because Theseus took me by force? Once abducted, do I seem twice to deserve rape?”
She goes on to say she returned unharmed except for a few stolen kisses from Theseus. And Theseus apologized. She asks, “Did Theseus repent so that Paris might succeed him, and my name be always on men’s lips?”
Helen, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
She tells him bawdily how attractive she finds him, and teases him about their flirtation at a dinner party. If only they had met earlier…but being a king’s wife is not to be taken lightly. Menelaus went away on business, leaving Helen as hostess. But she points out that if she left Menelaus there would be war, and that Paris is a beauty, made for love not war.
Helen has said no.
Whether Paris persuades her or abducts her is not treated in the poem. But I have never read a more sympathetic portrayal of Helen.
