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Augustanism in Ovid's Ars Amatoria The Art of Making Oneself Hated: Rethinking (Anti-)Augustanism in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris Steven Green Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780199277773 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277773.001.0001 The Art of Making Oneself Hated: Rethinking (Anti-)Augustanism in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria Sergio Casali DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277773.003.0011 Abstract and Keywords This chapter focuses on the most overtly ‘Augustan’ part of the Ars – the Parthian expedition of Gaius Caesar (1.171-228) – and invites us to read the event as an episode that exposes tensions in the dynastic family, and draws attention to the spectacle and theatricality of the Emperor's Parthian campaign. Keywords: Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, Augustus, politics, Rome, Parthia, Gaius Caesar My subtitle implies that I want to strike a balance, or to discuss the question of the Augustanism/anti-Augustanism of the Ars from a theoretical point of view. In fact, I won’t be doing that. The ‘Augustan’ side of the question has been treated in the best possible way by Mario Labate in his book L’arte di farsi amare,1 the ‘anti-Augustan’ side by Alison Sharrock, particularly in her article on ‘Ovid and the Politics of Reading’,2 and the ‘aporetic’ side by Duncan Kennedy and Alessandro Barchiesi.3 I couldn’t do it better. So, the first part of my title is more relevant for my chapter. It makes fairly clear, I think, my predilection for a good old anti-Augustan approach to Ovid. ‘The Art of Making Oneself Hated’ naively alludes to the irony of a book that, proposing to teach Romans how to love and be loved, in fact achieved the result of winning for its author the implacable hatred of the most important Roman of all—at least according to (p.217) Ovid’s construction of his own relationship with the imperial power. Obviously it also alludes to Mario Labate’s fundamental study: I hope that my irreverence will not have the same effect as Ovid’s. Page 1 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Warwick; date: 09 October 2020 The Art of Making Oneself Hated: Rethinking (Anti-)Augustanism in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria THE OBSESSION WITH ‘HIDDEN MEANING’ AND AUGUSTUS AS AN ANTI-AUGUSTAN READER ‘Now you’re really getting paranoid.’ ‘The question is not whether I am paranoid, but whether I am paranoid enough.’4 ‘Augustan’ readings of the Ars tend to deplore above all two interpretative attitudes that are usually closely related with each other. On the one hand, that it is wrong to have that ‘almost neurotic suspiciousness’, that ‘obsession with hidden meaning’ which pervades anti-Augustan readings. On the other hand, it is equally wrong that ‘the later events—which are for the most part obscure—in the poet’s life should interfere so heavily in the attempt to decipher the cultural expectations, proposals, and literary practice of Ovidian elegy’.5 The results of this ‘almost neurotic suspiciousness’ on the part of the interpreter and of the interference from what is known of Ovid’s life in his relationship with imperial power are a straining of the text—reading in more than is written, over- interpreting, and misunderstanding.6 In the case of Ovid, however, things are a bit complicated. Duncan Kennedy, in his article on ‘Augustanism’ and ‘anti- Augustanism’, rightly says that: ‘The degree to which a voice is heard as conflicting or supportive is a function of the audience’s—or critic’s—ideology, a function, therefore, of reception.’7 So, what happens when it is the author himself who gives us information about the qualities of ‘conflict’ and ‘support’ in his own work? If we say that the poet’s life ought not to interfere in the interpretation (p.218) of his work, it seems that we are acting sensibly; we need to read texts, not the biographies of authors. But in Ovid’s case it is other texts by the same author which tells us quite explicitly about the reception of his earlier texts. Ovid tells us about the anti-Augustan reception of his work—by Augustus himself—and so he himself shapes his own reception.8 When we allow his conflict with Augustus (which is biographical only in so far as Ovid tells us it is biographical)9 to interfere with our reading, and when we take up an attitude of almost neurotic suspiciousness in reading the Ars, we are displaying docile obedience to the reception of the Ars in the terms prescribed by Ovid. Now, it is by no means clear that we should display such docile obedience. What I mean is that we ought to be aware that if, under the influence of a laudable desire not to betray the ‘author’s intention’, we abstain from ‘forcing’ the Ars, we will find ourselves in the position of having to ‘force’ the interpretative response that the author himself has constructed for us. Ovid wrote the Ars, and then he devoted the rest of his poetic career, starting from the sequel itself of the Ars, the Remedia (see below), to constructing that poem as a poem that has excited Augustus’ anger. Looking for the anti-Augustan elements in the Ars is the strategy of reading that the poet prescribes to his Model Reader.10 The reader can find anti-Augustan elements in the Ars, if s/he wants, but in a sense, Page 2 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Warwick; date: 09 October 2020 The Art of Making Oneself Hated: Rethinking (Anti-)Augustanism in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria paradoxically, Ovid’s textual/political strategy might be seen as even more interesting if the reader does not find (chooses not to find) anti-Augustan elements in the Ars. For what happens if the Ars appears to be a loyal and collaborative Augustan work, but the poet himself says that, on the contrary, a very special reader such as Augustus himself finds it anti-Augustan enough to exile Ovid for having written it? An ‘Augustan’ reader of the Ars must read it in a way opposite to that which (Ovid says that) Augustus read it; an anti-Augustan reader, conversely, has to identify himself with Augustus when s/he finds Ovid’s poem (p.219) outrageous. Ovid constructs Augustus as the first anti-Augustan reader of the Ars.11 When people speak of ‘later events in Ovid’s life’, they are usually thinking of his exile, and the exilic works, especially Tristia 2, as testimony to these events. In fact, however, as regards the Ars, we do not have to go so far, chronologically and otherwise, in order to get some information from Ovid on how we might be justiWed in imagining an ‘Augustan’ reception of the Ars. Ovid’s representation of an Augustan attack on the Ars does not wait until AD 8. It is absolutely immediate, almost contemporaneous with the publication of the Ars. In fact Ovid describes an ‘Augustan’ attack in the central digression of the Remedia, the work which is an integral part of the amatory cycle, and which is usually dated to AD 2, more or less contemporaneous with the publication of the Wnal version of the Ars in three books. In Rem. 361–96, Ovid makes a violent attack on the detractors of his Ars. They are not named: in 361 he speaks of ‘some people’ (quidam), according to whom Ovid’s work is proterua. In 364 it is ‘one or two people’ (unus et alter) who attack his work. A little later, however, the detractor becomes a single individual, who is offended, or hurt, by the poet’s licentia (371–2). Finally, Ovid addresses Livor edax, that is, obviously, his jealous detractor: rumpere, Liuor edax … (389–92). Even Augustan readings willingly concede to the poet of the Ars a tone here of ‘playful aggression’ towards Augustan power; I think that it can be taken for granted that addressing the princeps in these terms (‘burst, envious one’) is a mode of joking that is decidedly over the top. These lines expose with impressive lucidity Ovid’s project of constructing his poetic career as a constant pain in Augustus’ neck. It has been rightly noticed that in this digression Ovid is creating an intertextual parallel to the proem of Georgics 3.12 Just as Vergil there announced his future Augustan poetic career, so here Ovid both starts the construction of his past poetic production as anti-Augustan, and announces his future anti-Augustan career: Vergil, modo uita supersit (Georg. 3. 10), will erect a temple on the banks of the Mincius, and (p.220) Caesar will be in the middle of it; Ovid’s poetic projects do include Caesar as well, but in a very different way: uiuam modo, plura dolebis.13 Page 3 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.
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