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OVID, AUGUSTUS, AND THE EXILIC JOURNEY IN THE TRISTIA AND EPISTULAE EX PONTO By THOMAS GEORGE HENDREN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 Thomas George Hendren 2 For Gary and Cindy 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I started this project piecemeal in a number of graduate seminars on Latin epic and elegy at the University of Florida. I owe innumerable thanks to my advisor, Jennifer Rea: I have benefited from her patience and willingness to read (and reread) since my very first graduate course, in the fall of 2007. My committee members, Victoria Pagán, Gonda Van Steen, and Stephanie Smith provided excellent revisions, corrections, and fruitful points of discussion. I am very grateful to audiences at UF and elsewhere at the APA and CAMWS who entertained my larger obsession with all things metapoetic and encouraged my nascent ideas. I must also thank Gareth Williams for his engaging conversation and insightful comments on my second chapter. Any mistakes, infelicities, and errores are, of course, my own. To my compatriots in the Classics Department, James Lohmar, Megan Daly, Bob Brewer, Seth Boutin, Jeff Yeakel, and David Hoot: not only have you provided guidance and advice; as model students and teachers you set a high bar for my own academic accomplishments. Thank you all for hours of support, both scholarly and friendly. I thank my fiancée, Madison, who listened intently to my endless brainstorming, no matter how far-fetched. And finally, I thank my parents, Cindy and Gary Hendren: when I questioned myself, you supported me, and when I succeeded you pushed me to work harder. Thank you for everything. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 9 Ovid’s carmen et error ............................................................................................ 14 Politics and Literature in Augustan Rome ............................................................... 19 2 POETRY AND SAILING IN THE TRISTIA AND EPISTULAE EX PONTO ............. 31 Thematic Adaptations: Jason and the Argonauts ................................................... 35 Metapoetic Adaptations: The Vocabulary of Sailing ................................................ 42 Seafaring Language in Ovid ................................................................................... 46 Compositional Metaphor as a Political Tool in Ovid’s Exilic Letters ........................ 54 3 THE PONTIC UNIVERSE ....................................................................................... 64 The Pontic Sky ........................................................................................................ 66 The Pontic Sea ....................................................................................................... 72 The Pontic Earth ..................................................................................................... 77 The Pontic Populace ............................................................................................... 82 4 OVID’S AUDIENCE AND THE EMPEROR IN THE EXILIC EPISTLES .................. 90 Letters to Philoi and Sophoi: Cotta (P. 2.3) and Messalinus (P. 2.2) ...................... 99 Poet, Emperor, and Sophoi ................................................................................... 111 Letters to Sophoi in ex Ponto 4 ............................................................................. 117 5 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................... 126 Destabilization of the Physical Environment ......................................................... 128 Destabilization of Language and Art ..................................................................... 130 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 136 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 149 5 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum OCD3 Hornblower, S., and Spawforth, A., edd. Oxford Classical Dictionary. 3rd edition. (Oxford, 1996). OLD Glare, P.G.W., et al. edd. Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1968– 1982). PIR2 Klebs, E.; Dessau, H.; and Rohden, P. von, edd. Prosopographia Imperii Romani. 2nd edition. (Berlin-Leipzig, 1933). PMG Page, D.L., ed. Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford, 1962). RE Wissowa, G., et al. edd. Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classichen Altertumwissenschaft (Stuttgart 1894–1975). TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Journals are abbreviated according to the conventions of L’Année Philologique. Abbreviations of the ancient authors derive from the OCD, OLD, and LSJ. 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy OVID, AUGUSTUS, AND THE EXILIC JOURNEY IN THE TRISTIA AND EPISTULAE EX PONTO By Thomas George Hendren May 2013 Chair: Jennifer Rea Major: Classical Studies Ovid’s extensive references to act of writing poetry, both the superficial self- deprecating claims to poetic decline, as well as the thinly veiled proclamations of poetic novelty and genius, remain major points of scholarly contention. By reevaluating Ovid’s persistent focus on his own poetic act through various metapoetic devices, this project reconsiders Ovid’s literary response to exile and his strategy of rebalancing his own political position opposite the emperor within the eyes of the Roman elite. Based on the assumption that at least part of Ovid’s exile was the result of his offensive Ars Amatoria (Tr. 2.211–12), I argue that Ovid’s fantastic depiction of his own exilic journey and of the Pontic region is in fact an enactment of the emperor’s misguided reading, which mistook the poem’s narrator for the poet himself. This accounts for Ovid’s mixture of poetry and reality in exile: indeed, he merges fiction and history to such an extent that judicious scholars continue to question the authenticity of the entire debacle. Ovid’s rewriting of the exilic journey as a novel poetic undertaking and his dream-like descriptions of Tomis and the Pontic landscape break down the barriers between poetry and history, and thus between narrator and poet. In doing so, Ovid not only mocks the emperor as a malus 7 interpres, unfit to stand for Roman aristocratic values, but aggrandizes his own poetic accomplishments. This project attempts a new, unified reading of the exilic epistles, one which incorporates Ovid’s literary and political responses to exile. My reexamination of Ovid’s dissimulation in Tomis as well as his stance of poetic degredation addresses not only Ovid’s exilic lies, but also the nearly two millennia of intellectual exile he suffered at the hands of the scholarly community who, until the mid-twentieth century, rejected the final third of his work as sycophantic, redundant complaint. 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Second only to the “mystery of Ovid’s exile,”1 in terms of interest to literary critics, is the relationship that Ovid presents between himself and the emperor in his exilic epistles, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. The self-contradictory nature of that relationship continues to beguile even the most seasoned readers:2 it allows Ovid, for example, to claim that his life was preserved by the emperor’s leniency3 and simultaneously consider exile a death sentence.4 This type of “dissimulation”5 creates a subtext of power struggle between the exile and the emperor:6 Augustus has exercised his power of life and death over the poet,7 and it remains for the poet to employ his 1 The title of Thibault (1964), which remains fundamental when considering the theories proposed for Ovid’s exile. 2 See Williams (1994: 2) who catalogues Ovid’s “large scale deception” in great detail. 3 Tr. 1.1.19–20, 2.125–8, 5.4.19–22, 5.9.11–14; P. 4.5.31–2, etc. 4 Called the “debitor vitae-motif” by Helzle (1989: 131). Tr. 1.1.117, 1.3, 1.4.27–8, 1.7.35, 3.3.53–4, 3.14.20; P. 1.1.65–6, 1.5.85–6, 1.7.9–10, 1.9.17–18, 2.3.3–4, 3.4.75–6, 4.15.3–4, etc. 5 For the term see Williams (1994); I use it as a blanket expression for points at which Ovid appears to contradict himself in the process of creating an ironic subtext. On the fictional qualities of the verse epistle itself, see Rosenmeyer (1997) and (2001); Gaertner (2007: 168–72). 6 I will not argue that Ovid posed any political opposition to Augustus, on which see Boissier (1909); Kennedy (1992); Davis (2006). I follow Raaflaub and Samons (1993: 448–54), Oliensis (2004: 286), McGowan (2009: 2–3) and others, in that “political opposition” may not have existed in the modern sense under Augustus, and that subversive irony played to the expectations of Ovid’s elite audience, undermining the position of Augustus and elevating that of the poet. 7 The manner in which Augustus exercised power has been increasingly shown to reflect his republican ideologies, rather than monarchic pretensions. Following Galinsky, I focus on Augustus’ auctoritas, or his mutually accepted influence on the Roman state, for which see