THE OVIDIAN CAREER

Ovid has the historical privilege of being next in line and the first to react to what had been the boom in poetic self-reference and auto(bio)graphy in the times of Catullus, Virgil, Propertius and Horace. He is also the one who does the most to continue Horace's invention of a ‘literary system’ and a ‘school’ and an ‘Augustan age’ model of Roman poetry (compare e.g. Horace, Serm. 1.10.31–50 with Ovid, Tristia 4.10.41–56; Ex Ponto 4.16.5–40).

Furthermore, Ovid is unique in ancient literature for the sheer number and quasi-systematic regularity of autographic situations: in his extant production, every single work (with the exception of genres that cannot accommodate authorial self-expression: his heroic epic, and presumably his lost tragedy Medea) has a space of self-expression and, often, of recapitulation. Equally important, there is no single poetic text by Naso that remains ‘unsigned’, either through the inclusion of the author's name, or by explicit reference in another Ovidian text, or, often, both. In other words, there is almost no Ovidian poem that remains unacknowledged. Even more important, in a number of cases his texts ‘talk to each other’ (Hinds 1985; Barchiesi 2001; compare Frings 2005), with the result that each work is positioned within a career: for example, the Fasti engage the earlier elegiac/erotic work with the question ‘Who would believe that a path could lead from there to here?’ (2.8).

But Horace steals the stage not just because, thanks to the vagaries of transmission, his texts are isolated, or because of his outstanding quality and artistic personality. His carmina (poems or songs) are isolated because of authorial choice and conscious, sometimes wily, self-positioning. He is a canonical author because he wants to be canonised. This is clearly a self-conscious difference vis-à-vis his Greek predecessors. Alcaeus and Pindar must have been competitive and aggressive in their own way, but the whole idea of a canon is dependent on a world of letters based on critics, wide readership, book trade, anthologies and schools, something that came into existence through a much later process, in the centuries between Isocrates and Meleager.

(Oliver Lyne, in memoriam) Modernity hit downtown Berlin on 3 October 1760, driven and unstoppable like a cannonball. Actually, it was a cannonball. The Russian gun established a very provisional record for long-distance bombing of a city, just at the end of the Seven Years War. The Prussian Horace, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, rose to the occasion. He was ready for it. Thanks to his favourite poet, he knew how to sing about private and public destinies, and the unforeseen dangers of life; he knew that the best poetic strategy for a successful lyric was none other than apostrophe:

War technology made progress over the next 150 years, and at the end of this cycle another poet steeped in Horace realised that gas attacks were making traditional lyric not only impossible but poisonous: however, he still needed Horace to make this contradiction felt:

Periodizations are tools that very few trust but everybody uses. Some periodizations become more popular than others: the Augustan Age, as this volume will no doubt confirm, has achieved unparalleled stability among the many constructs of historicism. This result has many authors, but what is really striking is that the process of stabilization is initiated by poets contemporary with Augustus, people who pioneer the claim (Horace, Odes 4.15.4: tua, Caesar, aetas; Ovid, Tristia 2.560: tua tempora, Caesar) that a new age and a different age has come, perhaps a definitive new age for Rome. Our acceptance of the Augustan age as a well-defined period of history is deeply collusive with strategies of self-representation in Rome during the watch of Octavian-Augustus. The other obvious example that comes to mind, the periodization of the Great Century (or Generation) in 17th century France under Le Roi Soleil, is not an independent term of reference, but the result of conscious appropriation of Augustan models at the court of Louis XIV.

True, the Augustan age has consolidated under the influence of many factors, most of them political, but I would say that the crucial factor for modern scholars (and readers) has been the possibility of making multiple connections between political change, material culture, ideology, literature, and the visual arts.

The satiric gaze: the physician, the body, and the mirror

Roman satirists are experts at reading the body’s signs. The satirist’s eye, like that of a physician or an expert in physiognomy, is keen at detecting indications of sickness or health, virtue or vice. That the satirist is able to “read past” the body for the condition of the soul is an idea solidly attested already in Lucilius at fr. 678W: “we see that one who is mentally ill gives an indication of this through his body.”

The principal object of the satirist’s gaze is the world of contemporary social experiences: he catalogues his society’s distortions, sometimes aggressively, sometimes with an ironic smile, but always respecting the body’s symbolic potentials as an index of moral values and internal states. This cognitive tension, by analogy, intrudes upon language by literalizing images or metaphors and reducing abstract concepts to their real or corporeal referents, thereby extracting from them a moral significance.

QUALITY

The Carmen saeculare occupies an average of four pages in the printed editions of Horace, and leads a quiet life in an angulus at the margins of his lyric corpus. It was transmitted by our medieval manuscripts and is occasionally quoted by late antique grammatici, just like the rest of what Horace published. Yet there is some uneasiness in the background of modern and contemporary interpretation. The 76-line poem has never been the subject of specific commentaries, nor is it normally included in twentieth-century annotated editions of the Odes, or given a fair amount of space in book-length essays and explications de texte. The only clear exception flags itself as an exception, because Eduard Fraenkel's extended treatment in his Horace (1957) is a tense and vibrant apology, not a normal example of academic discussion. Had the author written in the same vein about, say, Carm. 1.10, he would be considered an eccentric instead of a master of Latin studies.

Two reasons for this special status deserve mention here. One is that the poem was performed in a context that for a long time, and for some time to come, can be perceived as pre-Fascist, and was mostly admired in the moral climate of European twentieth-century nationalism.

In modern criticism the term 'ecphrasis' ('description') is used specifically to refer to a literary description of a work of art. In ancient criticism the term belongs to a much wider area of reference, covering both the visual force and the emotional impact of verbal art (not only poetry but historiography and rhetoric). Heroic epic, in particular, was held to be a narrative form oriented towards the production of visual effects and the re-creation of an eyewitness reaction to events. Virgil is particularly famous as a maker of impressive descriptions, including e.g. a dramatic study of a brook (G. 1.104ff.), a bold vision of monstrous snakes swimming in the Dardanelles (Aen. 2.203ff), a miniature of a tame stag (7.483ff.). Didactic hexameter and heroic epic are alike very concerned with visual impact, although with divergent emphases: didactic poetry focuses on the typical and repeatable, while heroic poetry is a narrative of striking events, traditionally geared towards the grandiose and the violent. Yet in both forms the challenge of representation is at stake: how adequate is the verbal medium to convey an impression of what is being described (whether the context requires that this be vivid and fresh, or realistic and typical, or unique and shocking)? More specifically, with regard to ecphrasis in the modern sense of a verbal re-creation of a visual work of art, verbal representation tests its own limits through a confrontation between literary description and representations in other media. In this case the verbal message will be measured both against direct perceptions of reality (or visual imagination) and against the model of the visual arts.