legere enim et non intellegereneglegere est.
(To read and to misread is to miss a reading of one's world.)
Prologue to Dicta Catonis 1 (3rd Cent. CE)

The heart does hurt.
And that's no metaphor.

The feeling is
that ‘throbbing muscle’ you can't say—
since that's ‘steel comic sex meat’.

But it does hurt
top-mid-left
under my shirt with its atrocious beat.

‘Didactic Poetry is poetry which is primrily intended to instruct. Most commonly, the label is used for poetry which teaches a moral. It can also refer to poetry which conveys factual information.’ Classicists will take issue with such a definition: that ‘also’ is provocative, and so are the priorities it signals; the wedge that is being driven between poetics as ‘moral’ as against poetics as ‘factual’, those terms—… Besides, what weight is to be placed on the opposition ‘teaches’ vs. ‘conveys… information’? What concept of ‘teaching’ can there be that stands proud of ‘conveying… information’?

This is the subject of the present essay. If we put this question—these questions—to the Satires of Persius, we will find in them both: (1) a strategic manoeuvre within the developing construction of imperial subjectivity within Roman discourse that has been strangely overlooked in the recent burst of critical attention devoted to this area; and also (2) a paradigmatic response to repressive encroachment on individual and collective liberties from the ‘defensive’ writer who contrives from the very constriction of the civic voice a vindication of the freedom to mean. Our freedom… to dissemble(,) dissent. Reflection of and on bur predicament: ‘meaning’ in the meaning-fullness of emphasis, the protocol of reading that problematises the containment of reading this side of the Diktat of Power/Knowledge. Hoc ridere meum (1.122).

On 5th February 1989, the review section of The Observer carried a full-page article on a film about Camille Claudel, the sculptress who was Rodin's mistress and who spent the last thirty years of her life in a mental asylum. The iconography of this page, supposedly concerned with the film and the woman, was telling. A large central image of Rodin, arms crossed and staring masterfully forward, is ringed by three, small, peripheral images of Claudel. Each is (of course) a photograph: one of the woman herself, one of the statue of her by her lover Rodin, and one of the actress who represents her in the film. The images display the slippage between women and artistic representations or creations (of women)—a slippage which is at the heart of the Pygmalion story. The title of the article is Love that turned to stone.

In Metamorphoses 10.148-739, Ovid has the master-poet, Orpheus, react to the double loss of his wife, Eurydice, by singing to surrounding nature a set of tales, including that of Pygmalion (245-97). Pygmalion, it will be remembered, created a beautiful statue, with which he fell in love. With the help of Venus and in response to the artist's erotic attentions, the statue came to life.

At F. 6.3-8 Ovid lays claim to the kind of vatic authority (cf. fas mihi praecipue…, ‘I have a special right’, 7) which entitles him to a visitation from Juno (13ff.); but this pose soon turns out to be less stable and assured than he would have us believe at the start of the book (cf. facta canam, ‘I shall sing the truth’, 3). Cautioned by Paris' experience and the dangers implicit in favouring one goddess over others in a competitive iudicium (99f), he proves unable to judge between Juno, Juventas and Concordia as the source of the month's name (97f.). Throughout the Fasti, of course, gods and goddesses are invoked to authenticate the causae which Ovid reports for given festivals or rituals, but at the start of Fasti 6 (as at the start of Fasti 5) he is reduced to aporia through the very mechanism—divine invocation—which is normally the bedrock of his vatic authority. This adjustment in his role as vates, from the authoritative mouthpiece of the gods to the uncertain, judicially impotent arbiter, is but one illustration of a broader phenomenon in the Fasti: far from occupying a position of rigidly inflexible authority as he moves through the calendrical cycle, Ovid's vatic persona proves to be a flexible narratological instrument which compromises his vatic authority at different points within the poem.