Book II is unique in Ovid’s exilic poetry in several ways. It consists of one poem only, about four times the length of any other elegy. It is a libellus (1) not only in the sense of being a whole book (like Juvenal’s Sixth Satire), but also as a quasi-legal brief (see below) addressed to the Emperor and perhaps to posterity, a combined plea for mercy and vigorous self-justification. Its tone veers between studied adulation and equally studied ironic attack or mockery; at times, not least when Ovid is comparing Augustus, in detail, to Jupiter, the two modes converge with ambivalent force. This effect was undoubtedly deliberate. Ovid composed Tr. II during AD 9; like Tr. I, it was complete, and dispatched, by autumn at the latest (Ovid is not yet aware either of Tiberius’s final victory in Pannonia or of Varus’s crushing defeat in the Teutoburger Forest). The years 6–9 saw the Principate in serious trouble both at home, from famine and widespread popular discontent, and abroad, with dangerous military insurrections (Wiedemann, pp. 265ff): Ovid has heard much of this news, and makes thinly disguised and embarrassing allusions to it. The blend of obsequiousness and oblique insult, to the point where one can be taken for the other (Ovid, like Euripides before him, was a past-master at the art of letting arbitrary divine actions condemn themselves), is, as the reader should by now be well aware, absolutely characteristic of Ovid’s work-in-exile.
It used to be maintained by some scholars (e.g. Meiser, Marchesi) that Tr. II was, if not two separate poems, a bid for mercy (captatio beneuolentiae, 1–206) and an apologia pro vita sua (207–578), at least made up of two halves written at different times and awkwardly cobbled together. But since Owen’s analysis (Tr. II, pp. 48–54) it has been generally agreed (e.g. by Dickinson, pp. 170–73, Focardi, pp. 87ff. and Luck Tr. ii, p. 93) that the whole poem is rhetorically structured as a suasoria, if not as a legal brief to be delivered in court. We have (i) the exordium (1–26), an attempt to placate the judge (i.e. Augustus); (ii) a propositio (27–8), outlining the speaker’s object; (iii) the tractatio, or ‘handling’, ‘treatment’, in which the case is expounded in detail (29–578). This main section can be further broken down into (a) probatio, or proof by evidence (29–154); (b) first conclusion (epilogus), entering a plea for mitigation of sentence; (c) refutatio, rebuttal of the charge (a rag-bag arguing, inter alia, that just as to the pure all things are pure, so, equally, perverted minds can be corrupted by anything, and that anyway literature, like the theatre, is full of instances of vice that goes unpunished, 207–572); and (d) second conclusion, once more appealing for clemency.
In this long, formal poem Ovid ‘comes as near as anywhere in the Tristia to defiance’ (Kenney (2), p. 446), with an increasingly mordant and satirical tone making itself heard almost immediately after the beginning of the refutatio (211ff.). Critics have noted ‘a desperation and wildness and overelaboration’ (Dickinson, p. 172) in this section; to me it seems rather that the poet is playing an irremediably weak hand with considerable finesse. The shots, cheap or not (e.g. against Augustus’s notorious passion for dicing), are more often than not palpable hits. We may query the wisdom of a prostrate suppliant taking time out to spit on the monarch’s feet; yet we cannot but applaud the stylish way in which servility is consistently undercut by venomous contempt or parodic mockery (which adds insult to injury with a deliberate pastiche of the banned Art of Love). Above all, it is hard not to admire Ovid’s ringing defence of the independence and autonomy of art, ‘a spiritual domain where the writ of temporal rulers does not run’ (Kenney, ibid.). Though Ovid’s appeal failed in his own lifetime, his pen did, in the end, win out over the Emperor’s fulminous vengeance: neither righteous divine wrath nor its thunderbolts have looked quite the same ever since.
8 Luck’s reading iam pridem emissa, which I accept, stresses — a point Ovid would not have been slow to exploit — the delay between the publication of the Art of Love (about 1 BC) and Ovid’s exile in AD 8: the clear implication is that the poem was largely camouflage for a more serious political offence. See Green CE, pp. 206–7.
13 The ‘Learned Sisters’ are the nine Muses: cf. Tr. V. 12.45.
23–4 The Italian harvest-goddess Ops was identified by Roman writers with the Asiatic Greek Great Mother Cybele (Livy 29.37.2; Ovid Fast. VI.285), and in this function assumes Cybele’s turret crown. When the Great Mother’s temple on the Palatine was destroyed by fire in AD 3, Augustus rebuilt it (cf. Fast. IV.347), and it is possible that Ovid is here referring to ceremonies which marked the new temple’s opening. Augustus liked to emphasize his family’s Trojan or Anatolian connections, and Virgil has Cybele intervene to rescue Aeneas’s fleet, Aen. 9.77ff.
25–6 The Games in question were the Secular Games (Ludi Saeculares) of 17 BC, held to inaugurate the pax Augusta, and featuring a hymn composed by Horace, to be sung by a mixed boys and girls choir on the Palatine.
33ff. Once again it is impossible to miss the mocking tone with which Ovid describes Jupiter’s noisy and indiscriminate fulminations. ‘The gods’ sire and ruler’ was a formula going back to Homer (Il. 1.544 etc.; Hes. Theog. 47; adapted by Ennius Ann. 175 and Virg. Aen. 1.65 etc.). For the Augustus-Jupiter analogy cf. Fast. II. 131–2.
39 Augustus was granted the title ‘Father of his Country’ (pater patriae) on 2 February 2 BC: Res Gest. 35; cf. Ovid Met. XV.857ff., and below, Tr. II.157 and 181, IV.4.13.
43–52 For Augustus’s calculated policy of clemency to the defeated see Res Gest. 1.14, Suet. Div. Aug. 21 and 51. Ovid’s frequent references to this characteristic (e.g. Tr. IV.4.53, V.4.19 and 8.26; EP I.2.59 and 121, II.2.115–20, III.6.7) often lace flattery with irony. Augustus also, in AD 4, acted with remarkable generosity to a group that had plotted against him, even making its leader, Cn. Cornelius Cinna, consul the following year (Dio Cass. 55.14 and 22). There was at least one instance of his honouring a freedman who hid his (proscribed) patron: Suet. Div. Aug. 27; Dio Cass. 47.7; cf. Tr. I.5.39. Ovid clearly hoped to invoke precedent for Augustus treating him in like fashion, and thus offers a broad hint as to what his offence may have been. When he insists (51–2) that he himself never actively plotted armed rebellion against the Emperor, he is, we may conclude, drawing a fine line between principal and accessory. This point is brought up again and again in various forms, with nagging insistence: Tr. I.5.41–2, III.5.45–6, cf. II.446, III.5.47–8; EP II.9.69–70. The frequent claim (e.g. by Owen Tr. II, p. 131) that Ovid is taking credit for not having fought on the wrong side in the civil wars, is, since he was only born in 43 BC, curiously wrong-headed, despite casuistical arguments (‘He means that his case is better than that of active opponents still alive, who had been pardoned’).
57–60 Prayers for the emperor’s good health (Augustus was a chronic invalid) would, we may assume, take precedence over pious declarations of faith in his posthumous assumption of godhead. Horace (Odes 1.2.45–6) and an inscription on the shrine to the Lares Augusti (Owen Tr. II, p. 132) testify to the presence of both elements ab initio in the Imperial cult. Cf. Met. XV. 868 and below, Tr. V.2.50.
65 For references to the Caesarean house in the Metamorphoses see especially Book XV, where lines 745–849 describe Julius Caesar’s apotheosis, and 850–70 are devoted to praise of Augustus himself.
71–2 Ever since the Amores (II.1.11ff.) Ovid had been tinkering with the idea of writing an epic Battle of Gods and Giants (Gigantomachia). Whether he actually composed such a work remains uncertain; if he did, its obvious political symbolism may have provided Augustus with one more minor cause for irritation, and such an early work would certainly add point and resonance to Ovid’s equation of Augustus with Jupiter, and in particular to his emphasis on the god-emperor’s partiality to assault with lightning or thunderbolt (e.g. Tr. I.1.81–2, 7.49–50 and 9.19–22; II.143–7 and 178–80; III.5.7; IV.3.63–70, 5.5 and 8.45–50; EP III.6.17–24, IV.8.55–6, 59–60 and 63–4). There was, clearly, something inherently comic to Ovid about the whole idea of Augustus’s deification, which he could no more resist in exile than he had been able to do as a young man (when his abandonment of the project may well have been due to official disapproval of work-in-progress rather than to literary recusatio or the alleged boredom of his mistress, Am. II.1.17).
82 Here (as at 31–2) it is hard not to detect irony, if not downright flippancy: with Ovid, as with Oliver Edwards, cheerfulness was always breaking in.
83–6 Ovid uses the image of the falling house as a metaphor for his own downfall elsewhere: Tr. I.9.17–19, III.5.5–6; EP I.9.13–14, III.2.11–12.
89–92 Under the Republic certain select members of the Equestrian Order (equites equo publico) had been granted a horse at State expense as a mark of special honour: the list was revised annually by the Censors, and any unworthy member who failed to pass scrutiny was formally deprived of his horse. Augustus, with his penchant for old Republican customs, preserved the tradition, and indeed carried out the Censors’ duties personally. He further instituted an ‘annual ride-past’ (equitum transuectio) of these equites Romani, who wore a special dress (trabea) for the occasion. See Suet. Div. Aug. 38–9, Livy 38.28.2, 43.16.1. Ovid’s point is that since he was not positively disapproved in this ceremony, the Emperor (equally positively) approved of him. Cf. below, 541–2.
93–6 Ovid’s legal and administrative positions (cf. Green OEP, pp. 29–30) included membership of the three-man board of the tresuiri (Tr. IV.10.34) — possibly the monetales, mint officials, but more probably the capitales, who were prison commissioners. He was also, as this passage shows, a member of the centumviral court, and in addition (Fast. IV.383–4) sat on the board (decemuiri stlitibus iudicandis) which supervised the court’s functioning: it dealt for the most part with civil actions involving property, especially disputed wills (the ‘Probate Division’). He also was liable for duty, being an eques in good standing, as a private arbitrator.
99–102 The storms of Tr. I.2 and 4 now become an open metaphor for Ovid’s condition. Cf. Tr. I.1.85ff., and see below, 469–70.
103–6 For Ovid’s insistence that his fault was to have seen, rather than done, something culpable cf. Tr. III.5.49–50 and 6.27–8. Actaeon is chosen as a mythical example in this context because (as Ovid himself had elsewhere stressed, Met. III.141ff., cf. 251–2) he was guiltless of criminal action. We are no longer, happily, regaled with theories, drawn from this passage, to the effect that Ovid was exiled for the lèse-majesté of observing either of the Julias, or even Livia, naked in the bath.
109–16 Ovid perhaps overstresses his familial claims; however, it seems clear that he did spring from old Paelignian landowning stock, which for several generations, at the very least, had enjoyed not only Roman citizenship but also equestrian status. Ovid reminds his readers, here and elsewhere, that this privilege, in his family’s case, was due neither to new wealth nor to recent promotion as a result of the Civil Wars: Am. I.3.8, III.15.5–6; Tr. IV.10.7–8; EP IV.18.17–18. It is just worth noting that the phrase in 109, ‘my fatal error misled me’ (me malus abstulit error) is a direct echo of Virg. Ecl. 8.41, where the error is a hopeless infatuation.
129–38 As one condemned to relegatio (even in perpetuum) as opposed to exilium, Ovid retained his Roman citizenship and his property; on the other hand, his place of exile was specified (cf. Tr. IV.4.46, V.2.55–8, 11.9ff. and 21–2). He was not tried in the public courts, or by the Senate; had he appeared before either body, on a charge of maiestas, he could only have hoped, at the best, for formal exile accompanied by confiscation of goods, a ‘banning from water and fire’, aquae et ignis interdictio. The comparatively new penalty of relegatio in locum (Della Corte OT pp. 96ff.) offered a choice of milder alternatives, and could be — in this case was — decided by the Princeps privately (intra cubiculum) without a formal trial or senatorial decree. The ‘sparing treatment of my fortune’ (138) is a neat ambiguity (parcaque fortunae sunt ibi uerba meae): the Latin can mean either that Augustus in his edict was discreet in his references to Ovid’s fate, or inserted a clause guaranteeing the exile possession of his property. I have tried to suggest both in my translation.
161–4 Ovid is fond of saying that Livia could have married no one else but Augustus: perhaps an artful way of excusing (and in any case reminding the reader of) the well-known fact that the wedding took place (17 January 38 BC) after Livia’s forced divorce from Tib. Claudius Nero, by whom she was already pregnant: cf. Suet. Div. Aug. 62.2, Tib. 4.3; Ovid EP II 8.29, III.1.118; Fast. I.650. Since Augustus’s sexual adventures were notorious (Suet. Div. Aug. 69.1–2, 71.1), the remark about his remaining a bachelor is not only pert, but a palpable barb.
165–8 Tiberius, Livia’s son by Tib. Claudius Nero (Suet. Tib. 4), was not only Augustus’s adopted son (Tac. Ann. 1.3; Suet. Tib. 15) but also his stepson, as a result of marrying the Princeps’ daughter Julia (Tac. Ann. 1.53; Suet. Div. Aug. 63, Tib. 7). Augustus’s grandsons referred to here are Drusus and Germanicus. The increasing popularity of catasterism brought with it the (to us) curious habit of addressing individuals as stars or constellations (rather than merely comparing them to them, as, e.g., Hom. Il. 6.401, Hor. Odes 3.9.21): see Posidonius ap. Plut. Marcell. 30, Hor. Odes 1.12.46ff., Suet. Calig. 13, and below, EP III.3.2. Since stars could be baneful, the appellation was not always complimentary: Lucan 10.35 describes Alexander as ‘a baneful star to the nations’ (sidus iniquum gentibus).
168–78 The victory here referred to is that imminent (but not yet known to Ovid, cf. 177) in the summer of AD 9, when Tiberius — the laurelled commander of 171–2, though because of the disaster suffered by Varus in Germany he did not actually celebrate his triumph until January AD 13 — together with Germanicus defeated the Dalmatian and Pannonian rebels in the so-called Second Illyrian War: cf. my note on 225ff. below. Illyricum/Dalmatia became an imperial province in AD 11.
189–94 When we look at the other places of exile selected for those condemned to relegatio (Della Corte OT, p. 101) we see that Ovid’s complaint has some substance. Meroë in Upper Egypt perhaps offered hardships of equal severity (though very different type); Lugdunum (Lyons) and Vienna (Gallia Narbonensis) were fairly remote from an educated Roman’s world; but the rest are chiefly notable as modern holiday resorts (which, indeed, Tomis-Constanţa has itself become in summer: cf. p. xxiv): they include Rhegium (Reggio), Massilia (Marseilles), Surrentum (Sorrento), Tarentum (Taranto), and the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus, Capri, Sicily and Lesbos (where the present writer survived very happily from 1963 to 1966 without any noticeable urge to be elsewhere, even in winter).
197ff. ‘The Black Sea’s bend sinister’: Ovid, as we have seen (above, note to I.2.83), frequently puns on the double sense of sinister or laeuus (left, left-handed; ill-omened) as applied to Pontus or the Euxine: Tr. I.8.39, IV.1.60 and 10.97; EP I.4.31, II.2.2, IV.8.42 and 9.97, 119. ‘Euxine/Pontus-on-the-left’ was the regular Roman (and Greek) term for the west coast of the Black Sea. I have tried to catch this ambiguity in my translation.
205–6 Luck (Tr. ii, p. 116) points out that since Augustus was in duty bound to protect his fellow citizens, and Ovid retained his civic status, the argument had some technical validity.
207ff. For a full discussion of the two charges brought against Ovid see Green CE, pp. 202ff., OEP, pp. 44ff. A brief account is given above, Introduction, p. xviii.
211–12 The couplet presents a clause in which two of three nouns, ‘poem’ (carmine), ‘adultery’ (adulterii), and ‘professor’ (doctor) are provided with pejorative epithets: the poem is ‘improper’ (turpi), the adultery ‘foul’ or ‘obscene’ (obsceni). It seems a fair inference that the professor, too, has his derogatory label, and that this lurks, miswritten, in the last word of 211, where the MSS read, variously, factus (which has the strongest support), laesus, dictus or lectus — all, be it noted, epithets (however weak or inappropriate) qualifying doctor. Luck’s emendation lecto (‘because people have read my improper poem’) makes good sense but destroys the symmetry of the couplet. Read falsus, which, with its varied connotations of ‘wrong’, ‘improper’, ‘deceitful’ and ‘mistaken’, is a peculiarly appropriate term for the indictment; it could also, in some ill-written hands, very easily be corrupted into factus.
219 ‘Desert your station’ (statione relicta) could well be another sly dig at Augustus, since statio very commonly meant a military post, and the Emperor’s tendency in youth to develop a convenient illness just before a battle, withdraw, and leave his subordinates to do the fighting, was notorious. Ovid had in fact made the point before: see Am. I.2.51–2.
225–30 For the various campaigns by which Augustus — or rather, again, his commanders — pacified the empire, cf. the very similar lists given by Suetonius (Div. Aug. 21.1) and Florus (4.12). Pannonia and Dalmatia (Illyricum) were, as we have seen (note to 168ff.), by now more or less subdued: Pannonia (covering the area between Vienna and Belgrade) became an imperial province in AD 10. The ‘Alpine insurgents’ occupied the area known as Raetia (eastern Switzerland, Bavaria and the Tyrol), and were similarly defeated by Drusus and Tiberius: Raetia, too, became an imperial province (c. AD 15). A Thracian rebellion was put down in AD 11 by L. Piso.
The topical allusions are followed by a flashback: in 20 BC Armenia had become a pro-Roman dependency, a buffer state, under a king, Tigranes, who had been brought up in Rome (Tac. Ann. 2.3, Res Gest. 27.24). Phraates IV, king of neighbouring Parthia, was scared by this move into restoring the Roman standards captured from Crassus at Carrhae (53 BC) and from other Roman commanders in 40 and 36 (Res Gest. 29.40; Suet. Div. Aug. 21). The court poets, predictably, converted this diplomatic coup into a great victory: Virg. Aen. 7.606, 8.726; Hor. Odes 2.9.19ff.; Prop. 4.6.79; Ovid Fast. V.579ff.
237ff. Ovid now moves into the defence of his Art of Love. A trifle, he begins, and beneath the Imperator’s notice — but at the same time legally unindictable, and carefully designed to keep respectable Roman wives at arm’s length: one is reminded of those formal notices on the entrance-doors of pornographic bookshops. Lines 247–50 are, indeed, quoted — with one significant modification, stressing the poet’s adherence to the letter of the law still more emphatically — directly from A A I.31–4.
259–62 The Annals referred to here is the hexameter epic by Ennius (see Glossary), recounting Rome’s history from the advent of Aeneas down to his own day; it is described as ‘roughly bristling’ (hirsutius) partly because of its warlike, macho spirit, and partly in covert criticism of its rough and primitive style. Ilia (or Rhea Silvia, Livy 1.3), daughter of Aeneas (so Ennius and Naevius, Serv. on Virg. Aen. 1.273, cf. 6.777) or Numitor (Livy 1.3.10ff., Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.76.1ff., Plut. Rom. 3ff.), was, as a Vestal Virgin, raped by Mars in a cave during an eclipse, and subsequently gave birth to the twins Romulus and Remus. The opening words of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura are Aeneadum genetrix, ‘ancestress of Aeneas’s line’: Aphrodite (Venus) became mother of Aeneas through her liaison with Anchises (HH 5.155ff., cf. A A III.86 and elsewhere). Since Augustus stressed his supposed Caesarean descent from Aeneas’s line, this again could be construed as a not-so-subtle piece of emperor-baiting: cf. Am. I.2.51–2.
281–2 ‘The Enclosure’ (saepta), cf. P. H. Damsté, Mnemos. 46 (1918), p. 6, was originally the voting area in the Campus Martius. Julius Caesar began its reconstruction in marble, and the project was finally completed by Agrippa, who dedicated it in 26 BC (Cic. Att. 4.16.8, Dio Cass. 53.23.1). For Augustus’s staging of gladiatorial combats there see Suet. Div. Aug. 43, Dio Cass. 55.8.5 and 10.7.
287 ‘Nothing’s more august [augustior] than a temple’: this verbal echo, followed by an allusion to Jupiter’s polyphiloprogenitive habits (289–90), cannot fail to remind the reader, again, of the emperor’s well-known sexual proclivities (above, n. on 161–4).
293ff. In the oldest form of the myth, here referred to (293–4), Pallas Athena seems to have given birth to Erichthonius as a result of her rape by Hephaestus; the myth was subsequently modified in various ways to preserve Athena’s virginity, notably by presenting Erichthonius as the child of Earth (Ge), impregnated by Hephaestus’s premature ejaculation during his struggle with Athena (see Apollod. 3.14.6; Hyg. Fab. 166). ‘Mars’ great temple’ was that of Mars the Avenger (Ultor) in the Forum Augusti, built as the result of a vow by Octavian at Philippi (42 BC) to avenge the murder of his adoptive father Julius Caesar, and finally dedicated in 2 BC. As this passage makes clear, the statues of Mars and Venus were together in the shrine, while the goddess’s lame and regrettably banausic husband Vulcan (Hephaestus) was relegated to the outer lobby — hardly (as Ovid implies) a good advertisement for Augustus’s much-touted moral reforms. The ‘poor cow’ (297–8) was Io — commonly confused by Roman writers (Ovid among others: see A A I.77, Met. IX. 687, Fast. I. 454) with Isis — whose liaison with Zeus (Jupiter) brought down on her the jealous fury of Hera (Juno). When Zeus changed Io into a heifer to protect her, Hera sent a gadfly that drove her in torment from Europe to Asia via the Bosporus (Cow Ford): cf. Apollod.. 2.1.3, Hyg. Fab. 145, Prop. 2.28.17, Ovid Her. XIV. 85ff., Met. I. 568ff. For other allusions see Glossary, ‘Anchises’, ‘Endymion’, etc.
309–10 It is not clear whether Ovid is here describing the prostitute who conducted her business coram publico in the nearest back-alley, or the slightly classier lady who (as in Amsterdam’s red-light district in modern times) exhibited herself naked at her window in the hope of attracting customers: cf. Tac. Ann. 15.37, Dio Cass. 79.13, etc.
319–20 The ‘fratricidal brothers’ were Eteocles and Polyneices, best known through Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes (see Glossary).
331 Against Diggle (p. 416), who argues for the indicative dubito rather than the subjunctive dubitem of the MSS, I prefer to retain dubitem, but treat the parenthesis as an ironic (and not wholly rhetorical) question.
333–4 On Ovid’s Gigantomachia cf. above, note on 71–2.
335–6 Yet again Ovid presents Augustus with an ambiguous compliment that could also be taken as an insult. Caesar’s acts are described as immania, i.e. either (a) tremendous, vast, far-reaching, or (b) frightful, savage, brutal; while how the poet is to treat them depends on the verb condere, found not only with the meaning (a) to record, describe, write about, but also, and more commonly, (b) to secrete, hide, camouflage or bury. Does it demand real talent then, to celebrate Augustus’s achievements — or to conceal his crimes? And how would the Princeps react to a double-edged tribute of this sort?
357–60 I am not happy about the text of these four lines. In particular, the treatment of 359–60 as the apodosis of a conditional that wholly lacks a protasis (Owen’s hypothetical subject, with condition implied in the context — see Tr. II, p. 201 — merely begs the question) makes for intolerable Latin. I suspect the loss of a couplet between 358 and 359. However, the general sense is, fortunately, clear enough.
365 Another ambiguity, erotic this time, and hard to catch in English: Ovid’s Latin can mean either ‘What did Lesbian Sappho teach girls but to love?’ or ‘What did Lesbian Sappho teach, but to love girls?’: Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?
367–8 This is not (as has sometimes been supposed) a reference to putative love-elegies, now lost, by Callimachus, nor, I think, to his retelling of mythic legends (e.g. that of Acontius and Cydippe), but rather to his popular erotic epigrams, which were much imitated in Rome (see Aul. Gell. NA 19.9.14, who cites such an imitation by Q. Catulus).
369–70 Ovid earlier (Am. I.15.17–18) had promised Menander immortality ‘while the world holds one devious servant,/stern father, blandishing whore, or ponce on the make’, but as Luck reminds us (Tr. ii, p. 133), morally speaking his plays were highly respectable, always ending in marriage, so that there was no need for Augustan censorship to ban them from school curricula.
379–80 The two goddesses were Calypso and Circe (see Glossary), both of whom welcomed Odysseus as guest and lover: Hom. Od. 5.13ff., 10.133ff.
383ff. The ‘stepmother blinded by passion’ in Euripides’ Hippolytus was Phaedra; Ovid had already treated this myth twice, in Her. IV passim and at Met. XV. 492ff. Pelops’ ‘Pisan bride’ was Hippodameia, daughter of King Oenomaüs of Pisa in Elis. See Glossary.
389–90 For the myth of Tereus, his wife Procne, mother of Itys, and her sister Philomela (whose tongue Tereus cut out after seducing her) see Glossary.
390–91 ‘That criminal brother’: Thyestes was the brother of Atreus, and thus, more precisely, Aërope’s brother-in-law. It was in horror at Atreus’s revenge for their adultery (he served up Thyestes’ sons to him at dinner, cooked), that the Sun turned back in its course and set in the east. Cf. schol. Eur. Orest. 812, Apollod. Epit. 2.10.3–4.
393–4 If there was a tragedy dealing with Scylla, and the passion (see Glossary, ‘Scylla’) that drove her to sever the purple lock on which her father’s life depended, no record of it has survived. Ovid treated the theme at Met. VIII. 1–151.
397–8 Bellerophon’s ‘queenly hostess’ was Anteia (or Sthenoboea), wife of Proetus, king of Tiryns; after failing to seduce her husband’s guest, she then accused him, like Potiphar’s wife in similar circumstances, of making improper advances to her. For further details of the myth see Glossary, ‘Bellerophon’.
402 Alcmena’s ‘two nights in one’ (see Glossary, ‘Alcmena’) were specially provided to facilitate the proper begetting, by Zeus, of that mighty future hero Heracles: Hyg. Fab. 29, cf. Ovid Am. I.13.45–6.
409–10 Ovid here is probably (but not certainly) referring to satyr-drama, of which our only complete surviving specimen is Euripides’ Cyclops.
411–12 Both Aeschylus, in the Myrmidons, and Sophocles, in his satyr-play Achilles’ Lovers, had represented Achilles as homosexual: see Aesch. Myrmid. frs. 228–9, and cf. Aeschin. 1.142. Martial (2.84.1) casually describes the hero as ‘gay and an easy lay for men’ (mollis erat facilisque uiris). W. M. Clarke, ‘Achilles and Patroclus in love’, Hermes 106 (1978), pp. 381–96, is sensible on this topic.
413ff. Aristeides, a Greek writer of the 2nd cent. BC, composed a famous series of Milesian Tales, somewhat in the manner of Boccaccio’s Decameron. They were translated into Latin (cf. 443) by the Roman historian Sisenna, and their popularity may be judged from the fact that a copy turned up in the baggage of one of Crassus’s officers at Carrhae (Plut. Crass. 32). Eubius, of whom nothing else is known, apparently wrote either stories, or else a mock-medical treatise, featuring various methods of abortion. The author of ‘the latest gay-sybaritic novel’ was Hemitheon (‘Semi-divine’) of Sybaris: cf. Lucian Adv. Indoct. 23.
418 Though some of the most notorious ancient pornographers were, in fact, women (e.g. Astyanassa, who wrote in the persona of Helen of Troy’s maid (!), Elephantis or Elephantine, Laïs, Philaenis and others: Suda s.v. ‘Astyanassa’, Suet. Tib. 42, Mart. 12.43.1, Priap. 4.1, 63.17, Plin. HN 38.81, Athen. 8.335b), there is no need to read quae (Luck) rather than qui in this line: male obscenity-peddlers (Sotades, Botrys, Paxamos, Timon of Phlius, etc.) were equally well represented.
419–20 Though for some while conquering generals had made a practice of raiding eastern libraries for Rome’s benefit (Plut. Aem. Paull. 28, Sull. 26, Lucull. 42, etc.) it is clear that Ovid has something more recent and specific in mind. In 39 BC Asinius Pollio opened the first public library in Rome (Plin. HN 7.115, 35.10, Suet. Div. Aug. 29), thus pointing the way for Augustus himself, who, eleven years later, attached two large library wings — one for Greek works, one for Latin — to the temple he dedicated to Apollo on the Palatine after Actium (Suet. Div. Aug. ibid., Hor. Epist. 1.3.17, cf. Tr. III.1.60, Dio Cass. 53.1). He also built another public library in the Portico of Octavia, in memory of her son Marcellus (Tr. III.1.69, Plut. Marcell. 30, Dio Cass. 49.43). Once again Ovid is trying, with singular lack of tact, to make the Princeps what today would be termed an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in his alleged offences against public morality. Cf. 509ff. below for an even more persistent restatement of this theme.
435–6 Like Riese and Owen in his OCT text (contra, Luck) I transpose this couplet to follow 432, on the grounds that Ticidas we at least know (Apul. Apol. 10) to have written poems to Metella (whoever she may have been) under the pseudonym of ‘Perilla’; and it is therefore reasonable to assume that a reference to her will follow directly upon the mention of the poet with whom she was associated. At the same time Owen’s point (Tr. II, p. 237) that the poets who employed pseudonyms for their literary mistresses never revealed their true names is well taken; and I assume that those who wrote of Metella telle quelle are not identical with Ticidas and his friends.
447–62 This whole passage is an ingenious revamping of Tibullus himself: primarily 1.6.5–32 but also 1.2.15 and 5.73. Ovid had previously laid the motifs under contribution in the Amores: see (in that order) II.19.33–4, I.4.17ff., II.19.37ff., II.4.30. The reading excreet (‘coughs’) at 460 is confirmed by Tib. 1.5.74. The reading excrepet (M3; = ‘farts loudly’) is perhaps worth mentioning if only as evidence that at least one monastic scribe had a (predictably, Rabelaisian) sense of humour.
465 For Ovid’s friendship with Propertius cf. Tr. IV.10.45–6.
471–82 For a parallel passage to this description of Roman dice and board games cf. AA III.353–66, with my notes ad loc., OEP, pp. 391–2. Four dice were regularly thrown together: the ‘Dog’, the lowest possible score, was four ones or aces; surprisingly, the highest, the ‘Venus throw’, was not four sixes, but a 1–3–4–6 sequence (Mart. 14.14), with a numerical total of only fourteen, rather than twenty-four. The details of the game, or games, that Ovid describes here (475–80) are problematical: parallels with draughts, backgammon and halma have been suggested. Cf. Laus Pison. 190–208. The game played ‘on a small board, with three marbles’, etc. (481–2), and known in Greek as pentégramma, was a slightly more sophisticated version of noughts and crosses (recently resurrected and repopularized, in the five rather than three-marble version). Once again Ovid is twitting the Emperor for failing to practise what he preached, since Augustus was notoriously addicted to the (officially illegal) pastime of dicing: Suet. Div. Aug. 70–71, 72; Plut. Ant. 33, Mor. 319F–320A.
487 The only surviving fragment on ancient cosmetics is that by Ovid himself, On Facial Treatment for Ladies (De Medicamine Faciei) of which we have a mere hundred lines (translated Green OEP, pp. 264ff.).
495 The best solution to date of this notorious textual crux is Housman’s, except — as Diggle, pp. 418–19 correctly pointed out — that tot idem, for tot de, misrepresents the sense of the passage: ‘The poets were not writing the same thing as Ovid, for his subject was different from theirs, and they were not writing the same thing as each other, for their subjects were various.’ Idem can easily be got rid of by reading describentibus, which imparts just the right touch of patronizing contempt to Ovid’s term for these non-creative, merely expository writers.
504 Ovid is fond of playing on the word pudenda, as ‘shameful [things]’ or the female genitals: cf. AA III.441–2 and 767–8; Rem. 431.
513–4 I owe this interpretation of the text to Liberman (p. 80).
533–6 The reference is to Aeneas’s famous liaison with the ‘Tyrian’ Dido, queen of Carthage, in Book 4 of the Aeneid. See Glossary.
541–2 On Ovid’s status as a select member of the Equestrian Order see above, note to 89–92.
549–50 Though only six books of the Fasti survive, the work was planned to cover every month of the year, and this couplet can only mean that Ovid originally drafted all twelve books, the final six presumably in such rough outline that they were not preserved. The work was originally dedicated to Augustus (II.3–18, III.116), but in AD 14, after the Emperor’s death, Ovid began to revise Book I, with a new dedication (I.1–26) to Germanicus. However, he does not seem to have pursued the revision with any great energy, since at the time of his death in the winter of 17/18 he had still got no further than Book I, and the dedicatory allusions to Augustus had not been excised. For Ovid’s hopes of winning the patronage of Germanicus see, e.g., EP IV.8.65ff.
555–62 The passage in the Metamorphoses to which Ovid here alludes is XV.745–870, where he expatiates on Julius Caesar’s career and describes the advent of the pax Augusta.