alberto comparini (Ed.)

Ovid’s comparini Metamorphoses in Twentieth-Century comparini (Ed.) Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ed.) in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature Italian Literature

his book aims to show the metamorphic nature of Ovid’s reception in twentieth-century Italian literature.

It is a study of the aesthetic effects of Ovid’s poetics Italian Literature in Twentieth-Century Ovid’s Metamorphoses within both the novel and poetry tradition in Italy. By using a historical and philological methodology, the authors of each essay have shown the hermeneutic power of Ovid, read as a constant intertextual presence. From Giovanni Pascoli to Eugenio Montale, from Italo Calvino to Antonio Tabucchi, in this book Ovid’s recep- tion is finally shown to be as important as Virgil’s and offers new important tools in order to understand the personalisierter Sonderdruck / personalized offprint for ORDER-ID WV-2018-000061, erstellt am created 07.03.2018 role of Latin literature in the twentieth century.

Universitätsverlag winter isbn 978-3-8253-6788-6 Heidelberg

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) bibliothek der klassischen altertumswissenschaften

Herausgegeben von jürgen paul schwindt

Neue Folge · 2. Reihe · Band 157 alberto comparini (Ed.)

Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature

Universitätsverlag winter Heidelberg Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

cover illustration © Barbara Heinisch: Prozessmalerei im Düsseldorfer Atelier mit der Tänzerin Sayonara Pereira, 1992, Privatsammlung, Gelsenkirchen, Nutzung und Bildbearbeitung gemäß Creative Commons-Lizenz cc by-sa 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36243658

isbn 978-3-8253-6788-6

Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2018 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum, 87700 Memmingen Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier. Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de Notes

Maria Massucco translated from Italian the essays by Raffaella Bertazzoli, Massimo Co- lella, Lucilla Lijoi, and Rosalba Galvagno. Maria was also responsible for revising the essays by Sergio Casali, Francesca Irene Sensini, Alessandro Giammei, Laura Bardelli, Barbara Olla, Alberto Comparini, Bart van den Bossche, and Vilma De Gasperin, which were written in English. Dylan Montanari translated from Italian the essays by Susanna Pietrosanti and Ales- sandro Fo. With Maria Massucco, he translated and revised the introduction by Alberto Comparini.

Unless otherwise indicated, Ovid’s texts are cited from the following editions:

Ovid: Epistulae ex Ponto, ed. by John Richmond, Stuttgart and Leipzig 1990;

Ovid: Amores, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, ed. by Ed- ward John Kenney, Oxford 1994;

Ovid: Tristia, ed. by John Barrie Hall, Stuttgart and Leipzig 1995;

Ovid: Fasti, ed. by Donald Wormell Alton, Donald Ernest Wilson Wormell, and Edward Courtney, Stuttgart and Leipzig 1997;

Ovid: Metamorphoses, ed. by Richard Tarrant, Oxford 2004. Contents

Alberto Comparini Italian Ovid. A Perspective on the Ever-Presence of Metamorphosis ...... 13

I Ovidian Philology

Sergio Casali Ovid and Italian Philology ...... 25 1 “Quellenforschung” in the Early Twentieth Century...... 26 2 Between the Two Wars ...... 31 3 The 1940s, the 1950s, and the Bimillenary Celebrations of 1957-1958 ...... 38 4 Ovid and the Self-Consciousness of Poetry ...... 45

II Ovid and the (Two) Italian Crowns

Francesca Irene Sensini “Referre idem aliter.” Vestiges of Ovid in Giovanni Pascoli’s Work...... 57 1 Introduction...... 57 2 Ovid in the Anthologies ...... 58 3 Ovid on the Bookshelves and in the Archives...... 62 4 Ovid Translated (and Metamorphosed) ...... 64 5 Ovid in the Backstory...... 71 6 Conclusion...... 75

Raffaella Bertazzoli “Nec species sua cuique manet.” D’Annunzio, Ovid, and the Re-Use of a Classic...... 79 1 The “Will to Sing” ...... 79 2 Other Myths (beyond Ovid) ...... 81 3 What Myth? ...... 82 4 The Metaphorical Muse...... 86 5 Between Myth and Vision...... 87 6 The Metamorphosis of the Self ...... 93 7 The Etiologic Myth and Beyond ...... 96 8 The Reuse of the Myth ...... 98

III Ovid and the Lyric, Part I

Massimo Colella “Tu che il non mutato amor mutata serbi.” Ovid and Montale...... 107 1 Introduction...... 107 2 Montale versus D’Annunzio. Different Models and Strategies of Metamorphosis ...... 110 3 Montalean Mythology: Annetta...... 118 4 Montalean Mythology: Clizia...... 123 10 Contents

IV Ovid between Modernism, Magism, and Surrealism

Alessandro Giammei Massimo Bontempelli’s Re-Inventions. Magism, Metaphysics, and Modern(ist) Mythology...... 129 1 Those Who Had “an Ovid” in the Novecento...... 130 2 Rescuing vs. Restoring Ovid, from Prussia to Valòria ...... 134 3 Taking Mythology Seriously, or How to Remake Ovid ...... 138

Lucilla Lijoi “Degno del canto di un Ovidio.” The ‘Metamorphoses’ as Key to Understanding Moder- nity in the Poetics of Alberto Savinio...... 143 1 Ovid as ‘persona agens’ ...... 143 2 Savinio’s Metamorphic Poetics...... 147

Laura Bardelli The Lure of the Apennines. The Myth of the Were-Goat in Tommaso Landolfi ...... 157 1 Introduction. Ovid, Landolfi, and the Apennines ...... 157 2 Goats’ Footsteps (Ovid, Landolfi, Pavese, Montale, Levi) ...... 158 3 The Village/Mountain Dichotomy and Pivotal Role of the Were-Animal ...... 165 4 A Poetic Initiation ...... 170

V Interdisciplinary Ovid

Rosalba Galvagno The Metamorphosis of Daphne in Carlo Levi ...... 177 1 The Portrait of Daphne in Verse...... 183 2 The Portrait of Daphne in Painting...... 190 3 The Prose Portrait of Daphne and Apollo...... 191

Bart van den Bossche Pavese’s Dialogue with Ovid. The Destiny of Metamorphosis in ‘Dialoghi con Leucò’ (1947) ...... 199 1 Pavese and Ovid...... 199 2 Tweaking the Motif of Metamorphosis ...... 202 3 Metamorphosis as a Hybrid Condition. The Story of Lycaon ...... 204 4 Lycaon and the Sovereign Ban...... 207 5 A New Order. Gods, Animals and Otherness...... 209 6 Conclusion...... 214

Vilma De Gasperin Protean Metamorphoses in Anna Maria Ortese...... 217 1 “Familienähnlichkeit.” Metamorphoses in Ortese and Ovid ...... 217 2 “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit” ...... 221 3 “Volucres animae.” Wings, Wind, Voice, and Poetic Imagination ...... 224 4 The Metamorphosing Gaze in ‘L’Iguana’ (1965) ...... 228 5 Decline, Fear, and Longing. Metamorphosis in ‘Il Cardillo addolorato’ (1993) ...... 233 Contents 11

VI Ovidian Rewrtings between Modernism and Postmodernism

Barbara Olla “L’arcano della favola splendida.” Gadda’s Re-writing of the Narcissus Myth...... 239 1 A Classical Heritage...... 239 2 Behind the Ovidian Symbolism: Gadda’s ‘Emilio e Narcisso’ ...... 242

Alberto Comparini Calvino, Ovid, and the ‘Metamorphoses.’ A Reading of ‘Le cosmicomiche’ (1965) .....257 1 Textual Inferences. Calvino, Reader of Ovid ...... 257 2 Postmodernist Mythologies. Calvino’s ‘Cosmicomiche’ ...... 267

Susanna Pietrosanti “Ariadneanly.” Secret Ovid in Antonio Tabucchi ...... 277 1 ‘Ars allusiva.’ Ovid, the Storyteller...... 277 2 The Metamorphosis after ‘The Metamorphoses:’ ‘Sogni di sogni’ ...... 281 3 ‘Letters mingle souls:’ the ‘Heroides’ ...... 285 4 “Ariadneanly.” Ovid, the Mythographer ...... 290 5 “Quoniam coniunx mea non potes esse, / arbor eris certe:” ‘Lettera da Casablanca’...293 6 “Since it is nature’s law to change, / constancy alone is strange:” Vertumnus...... 297 7 ‘La tessitura del labirinto.’ Ovidian roots in Antonio Tabucchi ...... 302

VII Ovid and the Lyric, Part II

Alessandro Fo Traces of Ovid. A Look at Recent Italian Poetry...... 307 1 In Search of a Face...... 307 2 “Metamorphoses Exist.” The Transformations of Myths ...... 312 3 “Inhabitant of Distance.” The Metamorphosis of Ovid in Exile...... 329 4 Digression and Conclusion...... 340

Index ...... 347 Bios and Abstracts...... 357 Sergio Casali 25

Sergio Casali

Ovid and Italian Philology

At the end of the nineteenth century Ovid was considered little more than a frivolous, facile, and immoral minor poet. In Italy he was regarded, at best, as a suitable tool for students to learn Latin, or as a textbook in mythology, but hardly worthy of proper scholarly attention.1 As Scevola Mariotti asserted in his 1957 seminal article, the nineteenth century negative judgment of the Romantics about Ovid – “il poeta che aveva ripreso senza originalità la genuina mitologia greca e l’aveva trasmessa al classicismo di tutti i tempi, [ ] l’allievo dei retori, [ ] l’uomo che, anche perseguitato, non aveva rinunciato all’adulazione”2 – remai- ned valid for a large part of the twentieth century.3 Still in 1987 Stephen Hinds

1 I would like to thank Alberto Comparini for his patience and helpfulness, and also Alessandra Rossi of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” for assistance in finding various bibliographical items. I also thank my friend Luigi Galasso with whom I have fruitfully discussed many of the issues treated in this chapter. 2 Scevola Mariotti: La carriera poetica di Ovidio, in: Belfagor 12 (1957 ), p. 609. 3 The obscuring of Ovid in the nineteenth century was noticed by scholars already at least in the 1920s (cf. e.g. Raymond Huntington Coon: The Vogue of Ovid since the Renaissance, in: The Classical Journal 25 (1930), p. 288: “The nineteenth century is the dark age, in which the spirit of our poet is banished”), probably even earlier, and it is a rhetorical move already widespread in the studies of this period that of referring to the present age as a possible, and desirable, ‘Ovidian age.’ In 1921, for example, Émile Ripert closes his book on Ovid (Ovide. Poète de l’amour, des dieux et de l’exile, Paris 1921) with the following wish: “Que ce respect des nouvaux Barbares [sc. the Rumanians and the Germans mentioned before, who honor Ovid] soit por la gloire d’Ovide le début d’une ère nouvelle” (p. 283, but all the final paragraphs of the book are to be read, pp. 283-284). In 1930, in the US, Coon was wondering if by chance we are “witnessing an Ovidian renaissance” (The Vogue of Ovid, pp. 288- 290); and, after having considered the present scholarly production about Ovid (for example, Arthur Palmer’s commentary on the Heroides, S.G. Owen’s edition of the exile poetry, both mentioned below, and, more strangely, some pages on Ovid in Gil- bert Murray: Essays and Addresses, London 1921, pp. 115-117 ), he concludes that “the present generation has not completely ‘turned its blind spot toward Ovid,’ or ra- ther that it is beginning to alter the direction of its vision” (p. 189). In any case, the reading of Ripert’s book on Ovid convinces him that, at least as far as regards France, “the spirit of Ovid, never dead, is flowering again, and that we may perhaps anticipate another aetas Ovidiana.” In fact, for a proper new ‘Ovidian age’ we have to wait until the Ovidian renaissance of the middle 1980s, as we shall see. Until then, Ovid contin- 26 Ovid and Italian Philology proposed to counteract three commonplaces about Ovid: (1) that he is a superfi- cial and overly explicit poet, (2) that he is excessively literary, and (3) that he is a passive panegyrist.4 The history of Ovidian criticism in Italy (but not only in Italy) in the course of the twentieth century is the history of overcoming these three prejudices.

1. “Quellenforschung” in the Early Twentieth Century

At the beginning of the twentieth century Luigi Castiglioni (1882-1965) was studying at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where he earned his degree in 1904 with a dissertation on the Greek sources of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which will be published two years later as Studi intorno alle fonti e alla composizione delle ‘Metamorfosi’ di Ovidio (1906).5 But even before the publication of this book, he had already published an article on Ovid’s Heroides (1903).6 Following the respectable Macmillan school edition (1879),7 the Heroides had been edited and published with a commentary by Arthur Palmer in 1898, but it seems the young Castiglioni was not aware of these works, just as he also ignored the 1896

ues to be ‘judged,’ positively or negatively; it is rare to find a book on Ovid prior to the 1980s which does not begin with an official declaration that it is time to revaluate Ovid as a poet, and maybe as a great poet (starting at least with Ripert: “je serais heu- reux si ces quelques pages pouvaient marquer pour lui l’instant d’une réhabilitation souhaitable,” in: Ovide, p. XI). As matter of fact, around the middle of the century, the scholars of Ovid seem to have opened their eyes: Thomas Wright: The Augustan Poets, in: Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship, ed. by Maurice Platnauer, Oxford 1954, p. 331: “The comparative poverty of scholarly works on Ovid, despite the great bulk of his writings, is eloquent testimony to the general neglect into which he has fallen in the twentieth century;” and Lancelot Patrick Wilkinson begins his Ovid Re- called, Cambridge 1955, with the assertion that “comparatively little has been written about Ovid lately” (p. IX). 4 Stephen Hinds: Generalising about Ovid, in: Ramus 16 1-2 (1987 ), pp. 4-31, now re- printed in: Oxford Readings in Ovid, ed. by Peter Knox, Oxford 2006, pp. 15-50. 5 Luigi Castiglioni: Studi intorno alle fonti e alla composizione delle ‘Metamorfosi’ di Ovidio, Pisa 1906. On Castiglioni’s life and works see at least the following works: Antonio La Penna: Luigi Castiglioni, in: Belfagor 17 (1962), pp. 42-68, then reprinted in: I critici. Storia monografica della filologia e della critica moderna in Italia, ed. by Gianni Grana, Milan 1969, IV, pp. 2525-2543; Ignazio Cazzaniga: Luigi Castiglioni, in: Gnomon 38 1 (March 1966), pp. 106-108; Alberto Grilli: Castiglioni, Luigi, in: Di- zionario Biografico degli Italiani 22 (197 9), pp. 169-17 1. 6 Castiglioni: Intorno alle ‘Eroidi’ di Ovidio, in: Atene e Roma 6 56 (August 1903), pp. 239-249. 7 P. Ovidii Nasonis Epistulae Heroidum XIII [187 9], ed. by Shuckburgh, London 1885.2 Sergio Casali 27

Johns Hopkins dissertation by James Nesbitt Anderson. In fact, in his notes he characteristically only refers to German scholars. Two of them, Karl Dilthey (1839-1907 ) and Georg Knaack (1857-1905), appear to have been directly con- tacted by Castiglioni, who thanks the former for having sent him a copy of Dilthey 1884-1885,8 and the second for having shown him Knaack’s Handexam- plar from 1880.9 First of all, Castiglioni considers the issue of Ovid’s originality in composing the collection of the Heroides: it is already typical of what will be his critical ap- proach to Ovid that he inclines to agree with Dilthey in thinking that, after all, the poet must have had some Alexandrian predecessors; Ovid’s claim of origi- nality for the plan of the Heroides10 would be justified by the fact that he had been the first to move an already existent genre of poetic love letters from Greece to Rome, perhaps implying that no such collection of verse epistles exist- ed before him. As to the letter of Arethusa to Lycotas (IV, 3), it is uncertain who precedes whom, but probably both Ovid and Propertius were drawing on a common Alexandrian source. Even if Castiglioni’s approach is evidently in- spired by the German Quellenforschung of the end of the nineteenth and the ear- ly twentieth century, his view of Ovid’s practice of imitation is neither rigid nor reductive:

Egli, dice il Dilthey, partito dagli esempi del genere epistolare greco, volse e fuse insieme a vantaggio dell’opera sua la tragedia antica, l’elegia alessandrina e la re- torica greco-romana. Nulla di più vero! Ricercare una fonte unica per ogni opera del poeta sulmonese è, per me, opera vana: nessuno meglio di lui ha saputo fonde- re, contaminare, come si dice, le diverse narrazioni, adattando alle une particolari e pensieri tratti da altri luoghi: imitando, insomma, originalmente. Lo sviluppo della favola sta nelle mani dell’artista e dalle qualità sue assimilatrici prende for- me e colori; solo il nucleo conserva i caratteri primi dell’origine sua.11

So, notwithstanding his declaration of faith in the existence of an Alexandrian genre of poetic epistles, Castiglioni devotes the rest of his article to a considera- tion of the epic, tragic, and Alexandrian ‘sources’ of some of Ovid’s Heroides. There is hardly anything new in this cursory discussion; Castiglioni relies on Birt for the parallels between Euripides’ Medea and Her. XII (but Birt does not men- tion the influence of Apollonius), and for those between the Second Hippolytus and Her. IV, including the view according to which Ovid made use also of Eu-

8 Karl Dilthey: Observationum in epistulas heroidum Ovidianas particula I, Göttingen 1884-1885. 9 Georgius Knaack: Analecta Alexandrino-Romana, Greifswald 1880. 10 Ovid: Ars am., III, 345-346. 11 Castiglioni: Intorno alle ‘Eroidi’ di Ovidio, pp. 242-243. 28 Ovid and Italian Philology ripides’ lost First Hippolytus;12 on Knaack for the possible connection between the treatment of Phyllis in Her. II and that in Callimachus.13 Impressive in this article is the fact that Castiglioni appears to be completely free of negative prej- udices in his evaluation of one of the least appreciated of Ovid’s works; in fact, he abstains from any reductive assessment of Ovid’s art of imitation in the Heroides, and as to the notorious theme of the influence of Roman rhetoric on them, he limits himself to the cursory hint in the passage quoted above. Castiglioni’s Studi intorno alle fonti e alla composizione delle ‘Metamorfosi’ di Ovidio is pure late eighteenth/early twentieth century Quellenforschung.14 In the same years, other studies similarly devoted to the study of the sources of Ov- id’s major poem came out in France (1904)15 and in Germany (1905).16 The book is divided in three parts. In the first part, Castiglioni analyzes Ovid’s descriptions of the moment of the metamorphosis, and classifies them in various groups, studying the modifications, the developments, and the combinations that the metamorphosis legends experienced before they assumed a literary form, taking into consideration the influence of scholars and mythographers. In the second part, he examines various groups of tales from the poem: the ‘unwilling hunt- resses:’ Apollo and Daphne; the boys loved by gods: Cyparissus and Apollo, Ampelus and Bacchus, Hyacinthus and Apollo, and so on. In the third part, Castiglioni studies the composition and narrative techniques of Greek catalogue poetry, giving special consideration to the lost Heteroioumena of the Hellenistic poet Nicander, of whose work we have only the prose summaries ascribed to him

12 Theodor Birt: Animadversiones ad Ovidi Heroidum epistulas, in: Rheinisches Muse- um für Philologie 32 (187 7 ), respectively at pp. 401-403 and 403-406. 13 Knaack: Analecta Alexandrino-Romana, pp. 29-48. Nevertheless, Castiglioni’s article is listed in the Heroides bibliography of Schanz-Hosius: Martin Schanz, Carl Hosius: Geschichte der römischen Literatur bis zum Gesetzgebungswerk des Kaisers Justini- an, II, Die römische Literatur in der Zeit der Monarchie bis auf Hadrian, fourth new edition by Carl Hosius, Munich 1935, p. 215 (admittedly, not a very significant fact in itself, teste Castiglioni himself: in Schanz’s bibliographies on Ovid, “accanto a scritti pregevoli, sono alla rinfusa prodotti i titoli di lavori insignificanti o del tutto inutili,” Castiglioni: Ovidio Nasone, Publio, in: Enciclopedia Italiana 25 (1935), p. 829), and still cited, e.g., in the Phaedra chapter of Howard Jacobson: Ovid’s ‘Heroides,’ Princeton 197 4, pp. 142-158. 14 For useful surveys of the practice of Quellenforschung in this period, see Gian Franco Pasini: Dossier sulla critica delle fonti (1896-1909), Bologna 1988, and Glenn Warren Most: The Rise and Fall of ‘Quellenforschung,’ in: For the Sake of Learning. Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. by Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing, Leiden 2016, II, pp. 933-954. 15 Georges Lafaye: Les ‘Métamorphoses’ d’Ovide et leurs modèles grecs, Paris 1904. 16 Johannes Dietze: Komposition und Quellenbenutzung in Ovids Metamorphosen, Hamburg 1905. Sergio Casali 29 by a second- or third-century AD mythographer, Antoninus Liberalis (plus a four-lines fragment on the metamorphosis of Hecuba quoted by a scholiast on Euripides). In a rather paternalistic review, Concetto Marchesi, while recognizing the value of Castiglioni’s book, also highlights some of its defects, mainly the lack of organization, the prolixity of the style, and the absence of conclusions: the book is “uno zibaldone ricchissimo di appunti,” that would have benefitted from a considerable reduction in size.17 An important aspect of his work on Ovid, however, will receive careful attention many years later from La Penna: Castiglioni’s book, “se paragonato a ricerche e a giudizi anteriori o contempora- nei, è una rivalutazione del genio ovidiano.”18 In Castiglioni’s view, Ovid does not string together a series of Hellenistic epyllia; he is able to develop, according to his culture and his genius, even embryonic hints contained in his models; he contaminates different sources, and, even if perhaps all the transitions from one story to another go back to Hellenistic or Hesiodic techniques, he is able to mod- ify his source material with originality. For it stands that, since the very begin- ning of his book, Castiglioni emphasizes the unity of Ovid’s art, in its various works and genres, stressing how there is a continuity from Ovid’s amatory works, already influenced by Hellenistic poetry and Roman elegy, to his Meta- morphoses.19 Also, the fact that Castiglioni sets limits to the then widespread idea of an Ovid accustomed to using mythographic manuals instead of poetic sources is indicative of a revaluation of Ovid’s culture and personality.20 In the following years21 Castiglioni will return to Ovid only from a strictly philological point of view, with the notable exception of the ‘Ovidio’ entry in the

17 Concetto Marchesi: review to Luigi Castiglioni’s Studi intorno alle fonti e alla com- posizione delle ‘Metamorfosi’ di Ovidio, Pisa 1906, in: Rivista di Filologia e di Istru- zione Classica 35 (1907 ), p. 37 7 . 18 La Penna: Luigi Castiglioni, p. 2528. For example, see Carlo Pascal: Alcune osserva- zioni sopra l’arte ovidiana nelle ‘Metamorfosi,’ in: Atene e Roma 11 118-119 (Octo- ber-November 1908), pp. 346-357,whose patronizing ‘observations on Ovid’s art in the Metamorphoses’ consist basically in a list of Ovid’s ‘mistakes’ and stylistic incon- veniencies. 19 Castiglioni: Studi intorno alle fonti e alla composizione delle ‘Metamorfosi’ di Ovidio, pp. 4-5. 20 La Penna: Luigi Castiglioni, pp. 2528-2529. 21 Castiglioni: I codici Ambrosiani e la recensione critica dei ‘Fasti’ di Ovidio, in: Ren- diconti dell’Istituto Lombardo, Classe di lettere, scienze morali e storiche 60 (1927 ), pp. 409-427;Castiglioni: Storia del testo dei ‘Fasti’ di Ovidio, in: Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica 67 17 (1939), pp. 319-341. Cf. also his revisions of Carlo Landi’s edition of the Fasti (Turin 1928) in the ‘Corpus Paravianum’ (Turin 1960). 30 Ovid and Italian Philology

Enciclopedia Italiana (1935).22 Here we find the essential unity of Ovid’s works stated more clearly:

L’attività di Ovidio prima dell’esilio, in qualunque forma si estrinsechi, è l’espressione di un uguale indirizzo d’arte e di pensiero; non solo il poeta delle Metamorfosi, ma anche quello dei Fasti, il cantore, cioè, delle venerande origini dei culti e delle feste romane, più o meno temperate talune crudità, è sempre il cantore delle gioie d’amore e della giocondità della vita. I toni differiscono e le leggi dei ‘generi letterarî’ si fanno sentire, ma l’unità di spirito e d’indirizzo è sempre evidente.23

The Heroides are now defined according to the notorious formula of the ‘suaso- ria in versi.’ There is also a balanced assessment of the originality of the Meta- morphoses; furthermore, in the case of the evaluation of Ovid’s major poem, central importance is given to the ‘powerful unity’ that the poet succeeds in im- printing on the various materials which constitute his work. This stance was not to say, however, that Ovid was not to be seen as a ‘superficial’ poet: “Ovidio non è poeta profondo e non poteva esserlo per sua natura; ma supplisce il declamato- re e l’abile colorista, ottenendo che la somma di tanti versi, formi, non un’accolta di episodî, ma un poema epico.”24 About the Fasti Castiglioni gives a mixed judgment: notwithstanding “molta superficialità e molte parti aridamente trac- ciate,” Ovid did substantially succeed in his poetic aim, that is to give a Greek and Callimachean form to his Roman, antiquarian source material; in any case, Ovid’s achievement cannot compete with the “vera poesia” that Virgil had been able to extract from his antiquarian sources.25 More surprising is Castiglioni’s partial ‘defense’ of Ovid’s exile poetry: in his view, the “condanna tradizionale” of all the exile poetry contains something true, but also “molta affrettata superfi- cialità.” The traditional faults of Tristia and Ex Ponto (monotony, lack of expres- sive vigor) are confirmed, but in those collections “la pena e lo spasimo sono realtà,” and they intensify towards the end of the last work, when Ovid gives up all hope of returning home.26 Nothing revolutionary, but it is significant that in

22 See, with due caution, Fausto Giordano: Filologi e fascismo. Gli studi di letteratura latina nell’Enciclopedia italiana, Naples 1993, pp. 61-68. 23 Castiglioni: Ovidio Nasone, Publio, p. 826. 24 Ibid., p. 827 . A view that more than forty years later La Penna still considers essential- ly correct (“Ovidio è artista piuttosto che poeta,” Luigi Castiglioni (1969), p. 2529); this says as much about La Penna’s prejudices as about Castiglioni’s – as we shall see later. 25 Castiglioni: Ovidio Nasone, Publio, p. 828. 26 Ibid., p. 828. Sergio Casali 31 his portrait of Castiglioni, La Penna will find the need to label as “difficilmente accettabile” Castiglioni’s ‘defense’ of Ovid’s exile poetry.27

2. Between the Two Wars

During the period between the two world wars, Ovid ceased to interest the source-hunters, and seems to have attracted only sporadic interest from Italian Latinists. Not only in Italy but in all of the Western academic world, “the nine- teenth centennial of Ovid’s death in 1917 passed virtually unnoticed during the war.”28 Nevertheless, in other countries we see the publication of some important works, especially in Germany,29 and above all of three general introductions to Ovid, all with a clear apologetic, if not even proselytizing purpose: in France, Ripert (1921);30 in the US, Rand (1925);31 in Germany, Martini (1933) – admit- tedly, much less sympathetic to Ovid than the first two.32 The three monographs entirely devoted to Ovid and published in Italy during this period are not very important. Ovidio e i suoi tempi. Amori fasti e scandali di Roma imperiale (1930),33 written by the interesting figure of a socialist labor leader and politician from Sulmona (Mario Trozzi, 1887-1932) who was not a professional Latinist (he had a law degree from the University of Naples), in spite of its inclusion in the ‘general bibliography’ on Ovid in Schanz-Hosius, is a very minor work, does not exercise any influence on the critical debate on Ovid, and is nowadays alto-

27 La Penna: Luigi Castiglioni, p. 2529. 28 Theodore Ziolkowski: Ovid in Germany, in: A Companion to the Reception of Ovid, ed. by John Miller and Carole Newlands, Malden and Oxford 2014, p. 388. 29 Richard Heinze: Ovids elegische Erzählung, in: Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 71 7 (1919), pp. 1-130, a classic essay, now reprintend in Heinze: Vom Geist der Römer- tums, ed. by Erich Burck, Stuttgart 1960, pp. 308-403; Alfred Rohde: De Ovidi arte epica capita duo, Berlin 1929; Hans Diller: Die dichterische Eigenart von Ovids ‘Me- tamorphosen,’ in: Das humanistische Gymnasium 45 (1934), pp. 25-37 , then reprinted in Ovid (‘Wege der Forschung’ 92), ed. by Michael von Albrecht and Ernst Zinn, Darmstadt 1968, pp. 332-339. 30 Ripert: Ovide. Poète de l’amour, des dieux et de l’exile. 31 Edward Kennard Rand: Ovid and his Influence, Boston 1925. 32 Edgar Martini: Einleitung zu Ovid, Prague 1933. In Germany, more significant than Martini in the process of revaluation of Ovid will be the Real-Encyclopädie article on the poet (Walther Kraus: Ovidius Naso, in: Real-Encyklopädie 18 2 (1942), pp. 1910- 1986, then reprinted in: Ovid (‘Wege der Forschung’ 92), pp. 67-166. 33 Mario Trozzi: Ovidio e i suoi tempi. Amori fasti e scandali di Roma imperiale, Cata- nia 1930. 32 Ovid and Italian Philology gether forgotten.34 In his monograph, Don Anacleto Cazzaniga (1901-1996), fu- ture archbishop of Urbino, analyzes the rhetorical aspects of Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto in the attempt to show that the structure and the content of this work closely follow the rules dictated by rhetoricians and authorities like Aristotle and later Greek scholars, pointing out, for example, the relationships between Ovid’s constant laments over his present surroundings and Menander Rhetor’s precepts about lauding a place;35 at least, he gets various reviews from distinguished scholars.36 Maria De Cola’s Callimaco e Ovidio (1937 , published in a series ed- ited by Bruno Lavagnini) is a compilation of parallels between the two poets, which systematically follows the succession of Ovid’s works. This book re- ceived some (excessively?) benevolent reviews, and many quotations in subse- quent literature, and in fact there are some original findings here and there (for example she is the first to note the parallel between the epiphany of Janus in Fasti I and that of Apollo in the prologue to the Aetia);37 however, one cannot escape the feeling of a certain overestimation.38 De Cola’s judgment about Ov- id’s exile poetry is sadly symptomatic of the spirit of the times:

34 Schanz, Hosius: Geschichte der römischen Literatur bis zum Gesetzgebungswerk des Kaisers Justinian, p. 207 . Trozzi had already published a lecture on Ovid’s exile (L’esilio di Ovidio. Conferenza, Rome 1925). 35 Anacleto Cazzaniga: Elementi retorici nella composizione delle ‘Lettere dal Ponto’ di Ovidio, Varese 1937 , pp. 101-106. 36 Erich Reitzenstein, substantially negative (“Gewiß hat C. mit Fleiß die Epistulae ex Ponto und mit ebensolchem Fleiß die griechischen Rhetoren gelesen, aber es fehlt der leitende Gedanke. Über die Arbeitsweise des Ovid erfahren wir so gut wie nichts,” re- view to Anacleto Cazzaniga: Elementi retorici nella composizione delle ‘Lettere dal Ponto’ di Ovidio, 1937 , in: Gnomon 13 (1937 ), p. 686); Christian James Fordyce (The Classical Review 52 1 (February 1938) p. 40), neutral; Luigi Alfonsi (Aevum 14 1 (Ja- nuary-March 1940), pp. 150-153), substantially positive. From Alfonsi’s review we learn that Cazzaniga’s research had been supervised by Luigi Castiglioni and Mons. Giuseppe Ghedini (1887 -1953), also a professor at the Cattolica of Milan, and author of various publications on ancient Christian literature; on him see Aristide Calderini: Giuseppe Ghedini, in: Aegyptus 34 1 (January-June 1954), pp. 148-153. 37 Maria De Cola: Callimaco e Ovidio, Palermo 1937 , p. 87 . 38 Among the reviews, see especially Albert Severyns (L’Antiquité Classique 8 (1939), p. 256) and Luigi Alfonsi (“indagine che non esitiamo a definire ottimamente riusci- ta,” Aevum 14 1 (January-March 1940), p. 150); Eric Arthur Barber (The Classical Review 52 2 (May 1938), p. 65) and William Stuart Messer (The American Journal of Philology 61 1 (January-June 1940), pp. 117 -119) are more critical. For a positive evaluation, see also e.g. Wilkinson: Ovid Recalled, p. 450, n. 30: “a detailed and judi- cious analysis of Ovid’s debt to Callimachus.” For the Janus-Apollo parallel see Ales- sandro Barchiesi: Il poeta e il principe. Ovidio e il discorso augusteo, Rome-Bari 1994, p. 302, n. 20. De Cola does not seem to have published anything else in the field of classics. Sergio Casali 33

Per la prima volta nei carmi dell’esilio il poeta mostra a noi la sua anima debole, oltre che superficiale, priva delle virtù migliori della razza romana. Se questi car- mi talora ci annoiano, per la poca dignità del poeta, per la sua debolezza dinanzi al dolore, ad essi dobbiamo di aver potuto conoscere, in parte, l’anima di Ovidio.39

During the 1910s, however, Ovid did find an enthusiastic admirer in Italy. Con- cetto Marchesi (187 8-1957 ) published three articles on Ovid, and a critical edi- tion of the Ars Amatoria.40 The first article is on Tristia II, a verse letter ad- dressed by the exiled Ovid to Augustus.41 Marchesi proposes to see in this long elegy two distinct parts (1-206, 207-578) that Ovid would have composed in two different moments in time and that he would have subsequently joined together without removing some inconsistencies and repetitions. Now, surely we find in- consistencies and repetitions in Tristia II, and Marchesi effectively highlights some of them; however, his idea has failed to convince many interpreters, and today we tend to explain those inconsistencies and repetitions as part and parcel of Ovid’s poetic strategy in Tristia II. Nevertheless, the very fact that Marchesi tries to explain what he feels as Ovid’s ‘mistakes’ not by blaming his ‘superfici- ality’ or carelessness but by appealing to ‘external’ reasons may be seen as in- dicative of a respectful attitude towards the poet. This respectful attitude be- comes outright admiration in his two articles on the Ars Amatoria.42 Marchesi

39 De Cola: Callimaco e Ovidio, pp. 121-122. 40 On the important figure of Concetto Marchesi, one of the most famous Italian Latin- ists of the twentieth century, there is a vast bibliography: on Marchesi’s scholarly pro- duction see especially Gaspare Campagna: Concetto Marchesi, in: Letteratura ita- liana, pp. 2465-2484; La Penna: Concetto Marchesi. La critica letteraria come sco- perta dell’uomo, Florence 1980; on his political activity as a communist militant and deputy in the Italian parliament see Luciano Canfora: Marchesi, Concetto, in: Dizio- nario Biografico degli Italiani 69 (2007). 41 Marchesi: Il secondo libro ovidiano dei ‘Tristi,’ in: Atene e Roma 15 160-161-162 (April-June 1912), pp. 159-167,then reprinted in: Scritti minori di filologia e lettera- tura, Florence 1978,III, pp. 1065-1073. 42 Cf. Marchesi: Il primo libro dell’‘Ars Amatoria,’ in: Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzio- ne Classica 44 (1912), pp. 129-154, then reprinted in: Scritti minori di filologia e let- teratura, III, pp. 1111-1133; Marchesi: Il secondo e il terzo libro dell’‘Ars Amatoria,’ in: Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica 46 (1918), pp. 41-77, then reprinted in: Scritti minori di filologia e letteratura, III, pp. 1183-1215. “In seguito egli [Mar- chesi] scoprì, con entusiasmo francamente eccessivo, la fantasia dell’Ars amatoria, che illustrò in due ampi saggi” (La Penna: Concetto Marchesi, p. 44). Marchesi’s edi- tion of the Ars Amatoria (P. Ovidi Nasonis Artis amatoriae libri tres, Turin 1918, 19332) is the sixteenth book in the recently inaugurated ‘Corpus scriptorum Latino- rum Paravianum,’ edited by Carlo Pascal. It is characterized by a sort of veneration for ms. R (Par. Lat. 7311), which sometimes leads the editor to make some questiona- ble choices (see Edward John Kenney: The Manuscript Tradition of Ovid’s ‘Amores,’ 34 Ovid and Italian Philology considers the Ars with extreme seriousness: against those who see in the Ars a parodic attitude, Marchesi affirms that, though the tone is admittedly playful, there is no parody nor irony in it. Ovid creates “una vera opera d’arte,” with a totally serious purpose:

È quest’opera una profonda fisiologia dell’amore corrente fatta con immaginazio- ne e con parola squisita di poesia: e il valore didascalico non danneggiò qui la po- tenza dell’espressione artistica, perché l’amore è un atto della vita piuttosto che una riflessione dello spirito, e si risolve meglio in una serie di quadri che in una successione di concetti, e vuole essere meglio rappresentato che definito. Così è che l’amore, più che il dolore, più che la gioia, i quali sono beni privati dello spiri- to, ha potuto essere teorizzato, senza scapito dell’arte, in una magnifica celebra- zione poetica, qual è questa di Ovidio. Il quale conobbe del resto e sentì quel tra- smutarsi del comune sentimento amoroso in pena e tormento dell’individuo, e quel terribile assottigliarsi dell’istinto in passione e il prorompere cupo del sesso nelle tragiche vicende dell’esistenza. Se anche la Medea s’è perduta, le altre opere ce ne fanno fede.43

‘Ars Amatoria,’ and ‘Remedia Amoris,’ in: The Classical Quarterly 12 1-2 (1962), p. 15, n. 3; Kenney’s own 1961 edition of Ovid’s amatory works has superseded any previous editions, see below). Notice, the year before, the publication of Carlo Lan- di’s edition of the Tristia (P. Ovidii Nasonis Tristia, Turin 1917 ), two years after the appearance of the Oxford Classical Text of all of Ovid’s exile poetry (P. Ovidi Na- sonis ‘Tristium libri quinque,’ ‘Ibis,’ ‘Ex Ponto libri quattuor,’ ‘Halieutica,’ ‘Frag- menta,’ ed. by S.G. Owen, Oxford 1915). (Even after John Barrie Hall’s P. Ovidi Na- sonis ‘Tristia,’ Stuttgart and Leipzig 1995, we still miss a really affordable edition of the Tristia.) Some years later Landi publishes, for Paravia again, an edition of the Fasti (P. Ovidi Nasonis Fastorum libri sex, Turin 1928, later revised by Castiglioni, as we have seen above; Castiglioni in fact limits himself to correct Landi’s apparatus, leaving practically intact the text, despite his disapproval of some of Landi’s choices). Later works on the manuscript tradition of the Fasti, later editions (Publii Ovidii Na- soni Fastorum Libri Sex. The Fasti of Ovid, edited with a translation and a commen- tary by James George Frazer, London 1929, and P. Ovidius Naso. Die Fasten, ed. by Franz Bömer, Heidelberg 1957-1958), and finally the Teubner edition by Donald Wormell Alton, Ernest Henry Alton, and Edward Courtney (P. Ovidi Nasonis Fasto- rum libri sex, Leipzig 197 8, 1997 4) have inevitably reduced the importance of Landi- Castiglioni’s edition, which remains however much better than the new Paraviana by Giovanni Battista Pighi (Publii Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum libri, Turin 1973); see the harsh review by Michael Reeve (The Classical Review 26 1 (January-June 197 6), pp. 36-37 ). On Carlo Landi (187 2-1930) see the commemoration of Ferruccio Calonghi: Commemorazione del Prof. Carlo Landi, Palermo 1931, and also (on his role as an in- terventionist militant in the Paduan nationalist circles) Giulia Simone: Il Guardasigilli del regime. L’itinerario politico e culturale di Alfredo Rocco, Milan 2012, pp. 7 6-77. 43 Marchesi: Il primo libro dell’‘Ars Amatoria,’ p. 132. Sergio Casali 35

Ovid in the Ars broaches “il massimo argomento della vita umana,” namely the satisfaction of the sexual need; and it is no matter of mere romantic pastimes: the Ars is the poem of love, with no sociological limitations: from the house of the courtesan one arrives at the houses of the princes.44 In the following passage, Marchesi exalts the Ars as a work that will never cease to say “cose vere e cose belle” to its readers, and goes so far as to affirm its superiority over epic poems (including the Aeneid, one presumes), because it deals with the nature of man- kind, not with its history:

È un capolavoro l’Arte di amare, per il duplice valore che Orazio richiedeva, dell’ingenium e dell’os magna sonaturum. In qualunque luogo e in qualunque tempo quel libro dirà a chi lo sappia leggere ed intendere cose vere e cose belle: più di ogni poema di gesta eroiche e di nobili imprese; perché la storia degli uo- mini muta per brevi giri di secoli: la natura degli uomini non muta mai.45

The second book of the Ars is the one Marchesi prefers (“il più perfetto per compostezza di fattura, vigore di ispirazione e ricchezza di forme”),46 whereas less enthusiastic is his judgment about the third book (“un’opera spossata”).47 Marchesi’s very sympathetic approach to Ovid is confirmed in his Storia della letteratura latina. Especially interesting is his defense of Ovid’s exile poetry, with the highlighting of some passages which betray an attitude of defiance on the poet’s part vis-à-vis the Emperor who had banished him:

Si ripete da gran tempo che Ovidio non ebbe dinigtà né forza nel sopportare l’esilio: è questo un giudizio comune a quanti hanno la comoda costumanza di suggerire altri altri, siano vivi siano morti, la condotta più degna. Ovidio è il pri- mo a riconoscersi questa mancanza di eroica sopportazione: Sive pium vis hoc, sic hoc muliebre vocari, | confiteor misero molle cor esse mihi [Ex P. I, 3, 31-32]. Ma

44 Ibid., pp. 134-135. 45 Ibid., p. 135. Marchesi (Il primo libro dell’‘Ars Amatoria’ and Il secondo e il terzo libro dell’‘Ars Amatoria’) cites very few titles in his bibliography: the history of Latin literature by Schanz, the history of Roman poetry by Otto Ribbeck (Geschichte der Römischen Dichtung, II, Augusteische Zeitalter, Stuttgart 1889), some German essays (Joannes Tolkiehn: De primo artis amatoriae Ovidianae libro, in: Festschrift zum fünfzigjährigen Doktorjubiläum Ludwig Friedlaender dargebracht von seinem Schülern, Leipzig 1895, pp. 433-437;Richard Bürger: De Ovidi carminum amatorio- rum inventione et arte, Wolfenbüttel 1901; Arthur Klimt: De artis amandae Ovidia- nae libri primi compositione, Weida 1913), and from Italy only an article by Remigio Sabbadini (Per la cronologia delle poesie amorose di Ovidio, in: Rivista di Filolo- gia e di Istruzione Classica 37 (1909), pp. 166-169, as discussed by Schanz), and one by Romano Sciava (Procri, Cefalo e l’Aurora, in: Athenaeum 4 (1916), pp. 181-217). 46 Marchesi: Il secondo e il terzo libro dell’‘Ars Amatoria,’ p. 41. 47 Ibid., p. 64. 36 Ovid and Italian Philology

egli non fu così costante o almeno così sempre accorto adulatore da non rinfaccia- re una volta al principe la ipocrisia di quell’editto di relegazione [Tr. II, 131-138]: e tra le voci imploranti o disperate dei sui carmi di esilio si leva pure talvolta un accento di fierezza e come di sfida all’imperatore: “La patria, le persone care, la casa, tutto quanto poteva essermi tolto, mi fu strappato; ma l’ingegno, no: esso è il mio compagno e il mio conforto; su di esso Cesare non poté avere nessuna pote- stà. Mi si tronchi pure d’un gran colpo di spada questa mia vita; la mia fama dure- rà eterna, e l’opera mia sarà letta finché dai suoi colli la Roma di Marte sarà do- minatrice del mondo” [Tr. III, 7,45-50].48

Only on the Ibis does Marchesi deliver a negative comment:

È un componimento di poco gusto e scarso valore; non c’è impeto né collera, e pare a un certo punto che lo sdegno svanisca di fronte alla compiacenza di quei tanti malaugurosi ricordi mitologici che la fervida erudizione del poeta veniva as- sommando. Ovidio non era fatto per l’acerbità dell’invettiva.49

The rise of fascism in Italy did not help the critical fortune of Ovid. The Fascist regime adopted Virgil as the national poet, and the bimillennial of his birth in 1930 was celebrated with great pomp. As Ziolkowski says,

after Virgil had been celebrated in 1930 as the poet of empire, the bimillennial of Augustus’s birth in 1937 provided an occasion, especially in Fascist Italy, for a large-scale experiment in politico-cultural and militaristic propaganda. [ ] In the face of cries for order and stability – both by the Fascists and National Socialists and by their democratic opponents in Europe and the US – there was little interest in poets like Ovid, who seemed to represent a pure poetry untouched by politics, who spoke for the rights of the individuals rather than the nation, and who pro- claimed a world of change and metamorphosis. [ ] For these reasons a British scholar lamented in 1934, following the worldwide celebrations in honor of the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth, that “Ovid died, for at least the third time, in the nineteenth century, and was buried deep under mountains of disparaging argu- ment to make a throne for Virgil.”50

It is significant, for example, that in 1937 the American scholar Marbury Bladen Ogle, in his survey Some Recent Italian Contributions to the Study of the Clas-

48 Marchesi: Storia della letteratura latina, Messina 1927 , II, p. 533 (here and below I quote from the edition of 1953). This observation is already contained in nuce in Mar- chesi: Il secondo libro ovidiano dei ‘Tristi,’ p. 162. 49 Marchesi: Storia della letteratura latina, Messina 1953, pp. 551-552. 50 Ziolkowski: Ovid and the Moderns, Ithaca and London 2005, pp. 97 -98. The quota- tion is from Thomas Farrant Higham: Ovid. Some Aspects of his Character and Aims, in: The Classical Review 48 3 (July 1934), p. 105. Sergio Casali 37 sics, does not mention Ovid at all, observing instead that “of individual writers Virgil has perhaps received the most attention during the last decade, owing part- ly to his position as the national poet of Italy and partly to the celebration of the ‘Bimillenium Vergilianum’ in 1930.”51 At the end of his survey Ogle draws the conclusion that there are at least “two distinct trends which have been character- istic of Italian scholarship in the field of the classics during the past decade: on the one hand, the interest in aesthetic criticism, in which the influence of Croce is clearly apparent, and the resulting eagerness to interpret the classics on the ba- sis of aesthetic theories [see below]; on the other, the tendency to view the litera- ture of the past through glasses colored by the rebirth of national pride.”52 In fact, if it is true that in Italy, as in the rest of Europe and the US, Ovid falls into a certain neglect in the period between the two world wars (with the German exceptions noted above), we do not find in the Italian histories of Latin literature of that period the same deep-rooted contempt for Ovid we find for example in René Pichon’s popular Histoire de la littérature latine (seventh edition, revised, 1919), who closes his chapter on Ovid with this conclusion:

Il écrit un livre d’Amours sans aimer, un poème mythologique sans comprendre la mythologie, un poème national sans avoir l’esprit romain, des recueils d’élégies douloureuses sans être vraiment ému. [ ] Par là il a exercé une influence consi- dérable et pernicieuse: modèle des écrivains de salon, il est responsable de la fri- volité de la littérature impériale. Avec lui, le monde commence à confisquer la poésie, et il ne la confisque que pour la tuer.53

Nevertheless, we must remember that Marchesi is wholly exceptional in his al- most unreserved admiration for Ovid: if we look for example to Vincenzo Ussani’s Storia della letteratura latina (1929), we find a chapter on Ovid con- taining all the usual, patronizing strictures against the poet who writes the Meta- morphoses being alien to the meaning of ancient myths, and the Fasti being alien to the religious spirit of the Augustan reformation.54 Ovid the adulatory poet is compared to a dog who licks the hand that beats it: “Come il cane lecca la mano che lo percuote, il cortigiano bacia la mano del suo offeso signore, e a lui si ri-

51 Marbury Bladen Ogle: Some Recent Italian Contributions to the Study of the Classics, in: Italica 14 2 (June 1937 ), p. 67 . 52 Ibid., p. 69. 53 René Pichon: Histoire de la littérature latine [1898], Paris 1919, p. 431. The first sen- tence of this passage is also quoted, in English translation and without mentioning the name of the writer, by Higham (Ovid, p. 106), as a specimen of the current hostility towards Ovid; Higham continues by examining Martini (Einleitung zu Ovid, 1933), whom he calls “far less hostile” to Ovid than the unnamed Pichon. 54 Cf. Vincenzo Ussani: Storia della letteratura latina nelle età repubblicana e augustea, Milan 1929, p. 396. 38 Ovid and Italian Philology volge con inesauste preghiere, sollecitando dalla sua clemenza ora il perdono, ora una mitigazione della meritata pena.”55 Ovid’s exile poetry is “fastidiosa e stucchevole;”56 if he is the best story-teller of the Latin literature until Apuleius, nevertheless he is to be blamed for the superficiality and the frivolity of his spir- it;57 for his carelessness as regards historical, geographical, and astronomical da- ta; for verbal oversights; and of course for his “deplorabile influenza morale.”58

3. The 1940s, the 1950s, and the Bimillenary Celebrations of 1957 -1958

The grand bimillennial celebrations of Ovid’s birth in 1957-1958 were surely an important moment in the process of critical revaluation and ‘rehabilitation’ of Ovid, especially in Italy, where the bimillenary was celebrated with an interna- tional conference at Sulmona in May 1958, whose proceedings were published the next year by the ‘Istituto di Studi Romani.’ However, Ziolkowski59 perhaps gives too much importance to this occasion by making it a watershed in the criti- cal reception of Ovid in the Western academy, for it is also true, on the one hand, that influential works on Ovid precede the bimillennial celebrations,60 and on the other, that the 1960s will see again a kind of stagnation in Ovidian studies (with the due exceptions, of course, as we shall see). But let’s take a step back. In 1942-1943 Hermann Fränkel (1888-1977), a German Hellenist who had emigrated to the United States some ten years before due to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, unexpectedly decided to give his Sather Lectures at the University of Berkeley on the topics of Ovid, an author about whom he had never published anything before. The book which arose from those lectures was published in 1945 with the title Ovid. A Poet between Two Worlds. According to Fränkel, Ovid locates himself between the two worlds of pagan an- tiquity and Christianity; and in this liminality lies his ‘modernity.’ At nearly the same time that Fränkel proclaimed Ovid’s modernity, in Italy Piero Scazzoso (1912-197 5), a professor of Greek language and literature at the Cattolica of Mi- lan, published, si parva licet, an article entitled Inattualità della poesia di Ovidio (1946), a kind of manifesto of all the negative commonplaces and stereotypes about Ovid’s supposed inferiority and ‘outdatedness’ as a poet: “Ovidio, a meno che non lo si riduca ad un mezzo di indagine filologica è il punto di riferimento

55 Ibid., p. 397 . 56 Ibid., p. 398. 57 Ibid., p. 382. 58 Ibid., pp. 400-402. 59 Ziolkowski: Ovid and the Moderns, p. XI; Ziolkowski: Ovid in Germany, p. 392. 60 Cf. Hermann Fränkel: Ovid. A Poet between Two Worlds, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1945; Wilkinson: Ovid Recalled. Sergio Casali 39 di un gusto passato; nell’uno e nell’altro caso ci appare un poeta inattuale, tale cioè da non venire incontro ad interessi presenti, soddisfacendo a particolari esi- genze della cultura moderna.”61 Scazzoso’s theoretical framework is clearly based in the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, whose opinion about what constitutes a ‘true poet’ is quoted with unreserved approval:

il vero poeta è costretto sempre a scavare in sé per trovare la sua propria forma, il suo proprio colore, la sua propria musica, e quand’anche si sia reso fine esperto nelle esercitazioni retoriche e se ne possa in certo senso giovare, se ne gioverà so- prattutto in senso negativo, e negarle deve ad ogni modo nell’atto di porre la pro- pria firma.62

It is clear that if the criterion for deciding the ‘trueness’ of a poet is his ‘denial’ of his rhetorical education, things for Ovid are not going very well:

In Ovidio il contenuto è per lo più un materiale ricco d’episodi e di motivi ch’egli accetta dalla tradizione e dall’ambiente in cui è vissuto. Questo materiale, come puro dato di fatto, è sì adornato da una tecnica prodigiosa, ma non mai arricchita o trasfigurata da una profonda interiorità spirituale sia per la superficialità di Ovi- dio, sia per la sua indifferenza alle forme di cultura dell'età di Augusto. In altre parole la materia ovidiana non è riscattata da possibili elementi sentimentali fanta- stici o religiosi che possano superare l’episodio come semplice soggetto. Il poeta non ha convinzioni religiose o filosofiche, è più facile a subire i tempi che a in- fluenzarli come egli stesso afferma [Ars am. III, 121-122 ego me nunc denique natum | gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis].’63

Scazzoso goes on with remarks on Ovid’s “abusata ricerca del patetico,” “mancanza di intimità passionale,” and comes to this portrait of Ovid the man:

Ovidio uomo non ha una personalità spiccata: nella sua epoca trova tutti i proble- mi risolti e si compiace di accettare un costume di vita già pronto anziché creare da se stesso, attraverso la cultura dell’ambiente, come fa il grande artista, un nuo- vo ideale di vita: spirito statico, femminilmente ricettivo, gli manca il senso della progressività dell’arte, il bisogno del nuovo, l’ansia dell’imprevisto.64

The ‘modern’ judgment about Ovid is seen as coinciding with that of the an- cients, in a rhetorical move that is typical of Ovid’s detractors from all ages (see

61 Piero Scazzoso: Inattualità della poesia di Ovidio, in: Paideia 1 5 (September- October 1946), p. 263. 62 Benedetto Croce: Storia dell'età barocca in Italia. Pensiero, poesia e letteratura, vita morale, Bari 1929, p. 262. 63 Scazzoso: Inattualità della poesia di Ovidio, p. 266. 64 Ibid., p. 268. 40 Ovid and Italian Philology

the limitative assessments of Ovid in Seneca the Elder, Controuersiae (II, 2) and Quintilian (X, 1, 88), the notorious nimium amator ingenii sui).65 This negative judgment would contrast with the traditional one consecrated by the following ages. Ovid, with his “precocità straordinaria di istinto,” his “anima femminile che attende le impressioni dal mondo esterno per essere fecondata,” the “assenza di una qualsiasi problematica supplita da un gusto edonistico,” is compared to poets like Marino, Monti, and D’Annunzio.66 Scazzoso’s conclusion is that today there is no justification for reading Ovid’s works on purely aesthetic grounds; Ovid must be read only in order to reveal the discrepancies and the contrasts be- tween ancient and modern aesthetics.67 A similarly disparaging attitude towards Ovid is found in the first edition of Ettore Paratore’s Storia della letteratura latina (1951). Paratore’s chapter on Ovid opens with the following statement:

Alla poesia più alta succede, con Ovidio, nell’elegia erotica, la più raffinata e mali- ziosa letteratura. Mai poeta latino è stato così preso, così pieno di sé e dei suoi suc- cessi; e quando questi saranno interrotti dal rude colpo dell’esilio, mai voce meno dignitosa e più fastidiosamente querula della sua si leverà a implorare perdono.68

Paratore (1907-2000) goes on listing the usual commonplace remarks about Ov- id’s superficiality and lack of discipline. The Ars is defined as “la fusione e l’ingrandimento di una serie di epigrammi erotici con le loro tipiche situazioni,” the Fasti as “un ipertrofico allargamento degli Aitia callimachei;” even the Me- tamorphoses seem “un gigantesco conglomerato di epilli.”69 As in Scazzoso’s article, Ovid is compared to D’Annunzio, but unfavorably: Ovid is inferior to D’Annunzio as regards “sobrietà e concentrazione di immagini e capacità di ri- solvere in visione plastica gli elementi intellettualistici del discorso poetico.”70 The Heroides are rather surprisingly seen as the most remarkable of Ovid’s

personalisierter Sonderdruck / personalized offprint for ORDER-ID WV-2018-000061, erstellt am created 07.03.2018 works: in them “il poeta è riuscito spesso a farci lampeggiare, in mezzo alla fa-

65 On this trope of modern Ovidian criticism, see Alison Goddard Elliott: Ovid and the Critics. Seneca, Quintilian, and “seriousness,” in: Helios 12 (1985), pp. 9-20. 66 Scazzoso: Inattualità della poesia di Ovidio, p. 271. 67 Ibid., p. 272. Twenty years later, Scazzoso will restate his negative judgment of Ovid in his Dulce litterarum otium. Storia della letteratura latina, Milan 1966, where we find again all the familiar repertoire of anti-Ovidian clichés, including a reference to his “sensibilità quasi femminea, capace di una continua emozione” (p. 323); the Met- amorphoses lack unity, and most of the times we simply cannot understand the gen- eral design of the poem (ibid., p. 327); Ovid’s exile poetry is disposed of as a “lettura tediosa” (ibid., p. 330). 68 Ettore Paratore: Storia della letteratura latina, Florence 1951, p. 486. 69 Ibid., pp. 486-487. 70 Ibid., p. 487.

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) Sergio Casali 41 stidiosa retorica dell’insieme, un livido bagliore rischiarante abissi di perversione erotica o drammi di tormentata sensibilità femminile,”71 even if all things consi- dered they do not escape the charge of being “scomposta orgia di intellettualisti- che, frigidissime variazioni” which cannot but provoke in the reader “un senso di invincibile pesantezza.”72 The Metamorphoses deserve a harsh judgment as an overlong and convoluted poem characterized by “un’indicibile monotonia,” and the Fasti are even worse. The exile poetry is nothing but an “interminabile, lamentosa melopea in distici”73 and marks the irreversible decadence of the poet. On this basis, it seems rather peculiar to find Paratore, of all people, giving the inaugural address at the bimillennial ‘Convegno internazionale di studi ovi- diani’ at Sulmona in May 1958; Paratore himself edited the volume, with help from some of his assistants (Giorgio Brugnoli, Michele Coccia, Giovanni D’Anna, Cesare Questa). And it is again Paratore who in that very May 1958 pronounces at Rome the “orazione commemorativa” which will be published the next year as Ovidio nel bimillenario della nascita.74 This lecture begins with a four-pages excursus on D’Annunzio before we encounter the young Ovid com- ing to Rome from Sulmona, but also in the remainder of the paper the two poets will be continuously and artificially compared. Paratore’s treatment of Ovid here is understandably a very softened version of the one he gave in his Storia della letteratura latina, but even in this celebratory context Paratore cannot refrain from betraying his ill-concealed dislike of the Metamorphoses (a “rischioso compromesso tra le predilezioni spontanee della fantasia ovidiana e motivi ispi- ratori ad essa repugnanti”),75 of the Fasti (a miserable failure), and of the exile poetry (“una lunga e piuttosto uggiosa querimonia’”).76 Three collective volumes of essays arise from the bimillennial celebrations of 1957-1958, the already mentioned Atti of the Sulmona conference, Nicolae Herescu’s edited book, and a little volume of Studi ovidiani. Paratore is present in all of them, with a paper on the evolution of the sphragis in Ovid’s works,77 one on Tristia (IV, 10), in which he attacks style and content of Ovid’s autobio- graphical elegy,78 and the already mentioned “orazione commemorativa.”79 The

71 Ibid., p. 492. 72 Ibid., p. 494. 73 Ibid., p. 498. 74 Paratore: Ovidio nel bimillenario della nascita, in: Studi ovidiani, Rome 1959, pp. 113-131. 75 Ibid., p. 128. 76 Ibid., p. 129. 77 Paratore: L’evoluzione della “sphragis” dalle prime alle ultime opere di Ovidio, in: Atti del Convegno Internazionale Ovidiano (Sulmona, 1958), Rome 1958, I, pp. 173- 203. 78 Paratore: L’elegia autobiografica di Ovidio (‘Tristia’ 4, 10), in: Ovidiana, pp. 353- 378. 42 Ovid and Italian Philology

Atti of the Sulmona conference contain forty-three papers, around a half of which were written by Italian scholars. Unfortunately, the majority of the contri- butions are not of outstanding value. Kenney, soon to become one of the most distinguished Ovidianists of the twentieth century, in his review cruelly entitled ‘Quid iuuat exstinctos ferrum demittere in artus?’ (= Ex P. IV, 16, 51, Ovid to Liuor, ‘What pleasure to you to drive the sword into limbs already dead?’), blames the many faults that in his view mar these discussions, among which “the woolliness of thought, the rhapsodizing, the word-spinning, and (in at least one case) the pure lunacy.”80 Among the few papers he singles out as particularly rewarding, the majority concern Ovid’s reception; of Salvatore D’Elia’s Linea- menti dell’evoluzione stilistica e ritmica nelle opere ovidiane he writes that “the main thesis is unacceptable, but the argument reveals great critical acumen”81 (on D’Elia’s monograph on Ovid see below). Whereas the Sulmona Atti are arranged according to no discernible order, the thirty-nine contributions contained in the collection edited by the Rumanian scholar Herescu are grouped under six heads: (a) general studies (rhetoric, meter, Ovid’s influence on painting), (b) the poet of love, (c) the poet of the gods (mainly on the Metamorphoses), (d) the poet in exile (the exile poems, his pre- sumed Getic poem, the cause of his relegation), (e) ‘minora et incerta’ (Nux, Halieutica), (f) influence, survival, and ‘actuality’ (Peeter’s disappointing con- cluding piece on Ovidian contemporary studies).82 There are here some papers that will become standard scholarship on Ovid: for example, Bertil Axelson wit- tily enough, considering the technicality of his subject, studies the (rather mo- notonous) ways in which the Schnelldichter Ovid closes his pentameters;83 and Kenney himself considers the influence of the didactic poetry of Lucretius and Virgil on the Ars Amatoria.84 Interesting, notwithstanding a certain excess of na- ivety, are two papers (by René Marache85 and Herescu86 himself) which detect anti-Augustan overtones hidden in Ovid’s exile poetry. There are seven contribu- tions from Italian scholars, including the already mentioned one by Paratore.87 Francesco Arnaldi studies the theme of Ovid’s rhetoric starting from the con-

79 Paratore: Ovidio nel bimillenario della nascita. 80 Kenney: review of Atti del Convegno Internazionale Ovidiano, in: The Classical Re- view 10 3 (December 1960), p. 223. 81 Ibid., p. 224. 82 Among the reviews of this book see especially Otis: review of Ovidiana, in: The American Journal of Philology 81 1 (January 1960), pp. 82-89. 83 Bertil Axelson: Der Mechanismus des ovidischen Pentameterschlusses. Eine mikro- philologische Causerie, in: Ovidiana, pp. 121-135. 84 Kenney: ‘Nequitiae poeta,’ in: ibid., pp. 201-209. 85 René Marache: La révolte d’Ovide exilé contre Auguste, in: ibid., pp. 412-419. 86 Herescu: Le sens de l’epitaphe ovidienne, in: ibid., pp. 420-442. 87 Paratore: L’elegia autobiografica di Ovidio (‘Tristia’ 4, 10). Sergio Casali 43 trouersia that Seneca the Elder attests he discussed in his youth (Contr., II, 2), and concludes that Ovid later overcame the ‘abstracteness’ of the contemporary rhetorical schools, as we can see by comparing the Heroides, still heavily influ- enced by rhetoric, and the Metamorphoses.88 (On the subject of Ovid’s rhetoric, Higham’s paper proves more interesting, if only for the memorable statement that “Ovid the rhetorician is an invention of modern critics.”)89 D’Elia’s article on the chronology of the amatory poems argues that Ovid’s own statement in his autobiographical elegy (Tr. IV, 10, 61-62) suggests that in the second edition of the Amores he did not introduce any new elegies (a very dubious claim); fur- thermore, the artes Amoris in Am. (II, 18, 19) would refer to the Amores, and not to the Ars.90 Luigi Alfonsi takes seriously the Pythagorean philosophy of Metamorphoses XV.91 Pietro Ferrarino discusses the mixture of elegiac and Lu- cretian elements in the ‘laus Veneris’ of Fasti IV, 91 ff.92 Franco Munari careful- ly identifies the manuscripts of the Metamorphoses used by Heinsius.93 France- sco Della Corte treats the possible sources for the Perseus-episode in Met. IV-V.94 In fact, if these two collections obviously mark a significant resurgence of in- terest in Ovid, there are other works, in Italy and elsewhere, which were pub- lished, by chance or otherwise, around the years of Ovid’s bimillenary and which perhaps prove even more important. First of all, in 1955 Wilkinson publishes his Ovid Recalled, which, notwithstanding the author’s statement that he does not “suggest for a moment that we should put Ovid back on his pedestal beside Vir-

88 Francesco Arnaldi: La “retorica” nella poesia di Ovidio, in: ibid., pp. 23-31. 89 T. F. Higham: Ovid and Rhetoric, in: ibid., p. 41. 90 Salvatore D’Elia: Il problema cronologico degli ‘Amores,’ in: ibid., pp. 210-223. 91 Luigi Alfonsi: L’inquadramento filosofico delle ‘Metamorfosi’ ovidiane, in: ibid., pp. 265-272. 92 Pietro Ferrarino: ‘Laus Veneris’ (‘Fasti,’ 4,91-114), in ibid., pp. 301-316. 93 Franco Munari: Identificazioni di codici heinsiani delle ‘Metamorfosi,’ in: ibid., 347- 349. In the 1950s Munari (1920-1995), a former pupil of Giorgio Pasquali at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, publishes a series of extremely important and strictly philo- logical works on Ovid, including an excellent critical edition of the Amores (with translation: P. Ovidi Nasonis Amores, ed. by Franco Munari, Florence 1951); a cata- logue of the manuscripts of the Metamorphoses (Catalogue of the MSS of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ London 1957); and other articles on the identification of the manu- scripts used by N. Heinsius (Codici heinsiani degli ‘Amores,’ in: Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 24 (1949-1950), pp. 161-165; Manoscritti ovidiani di N. Heinsius, in: Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 29 (1957), pp. 98-114). In the next decade, oth- er important works include a little book on Ovid in the Middle Ages (Ovid im Mit- telalter, Zurich and Suttgart 1960) and one on the manuscript Hamilton 471 of Ovid (Il codice Hamilton 471 di Ovidio. ‘Ars amatoria,’ ‘Remedia amoris,’ ‘Amores,’ Rome 1965). For a portrait of Munari, see Widu-Wolfgang Ehlers: Franco Munari, in: Gnomon 69 (1997), pp. 90-92. 94 Francesco Della Corte: Il Perseo ovidiano, in: Ovidiana, pp. 258-264. 44 Ovid and Italian Philology gil,”95 is without doubt the single most important step towards a rehabilitation of Ovid in the twentieth century – at least until the Ovidian renaissance of the mid- dle 1980s. Turning to Italy, in 1957 Scevola Mariotti publishes in the journal Belfagor a very influential article dedicated to the development of Ovid’s poetic career.96 In the same year, La Penna publishes a critical edition with commentary of one of the most neglected works of Ovid, the Ibis.97 It goes without saying that this edition is “a very solid achievement”98 from a philological point of view, but in his introduction La Penna does not refrain from expressing the most trite and disarmingly dull judgments on the supposedly bad quality of Ovid’s po- etry, and not only as far as regards the Ibis:

Ovidio è uno di quei poeti a cui il Romanticismo ha inferto un colpo decisivo: al- tri si sono risollevati, Ovidio no. E credo che qualunque tentativo di rimetterlo su- gli altari che occupò dal sec. XIII [sic: lege XII] al XVIII, o di cancellare sostan- zialmente la condanna romantica, sarebbe destinato al fallimento.99

La Penna appears to ignore Wilkinson 1955, and goes so far as to attack not only Fränkel’s attempt at a revaluation of the poet (“il Fränkel non sembra neppure essersi reso conto delle ragioni dell’insoddisfazione romantica, ragioni che sussi- stono tuttora”),100 but also the positive judgment of Ovid expressed by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in his study of Hellenistic literature (“Nur ein un- sterbliches episches Gedicht entstand noch unter Augustus, das sich an Kunst- wert mit der Aeneis messen kann und an Wirkung auf die Nachwelt nicht sehr viel unter ihr bleibt, die Metamorphosen Ovids”):101 “Con tutto il rispetto per il grande filologo, è difficile negare ogni ragione a quelli che lo accusavano di ot- tusità per la poesia.”102 But fortunately this is not La Penna’s last word on Ovid. D’Elia’s 1959 monograph is the only one dedicated to the whole of Ovid’s work to have appeared in Italy in the twentieth century; unfortunately, deeply imbued as it is with the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, it is a book that was al- ready old when it came out.103 Francesco D’Elia (1928-2002), a former student

95 Wilkinson: Ovid Recalled, p. XV. 96 Mariotti: La carriera poetica di Ovidio. 97 P. Ovidi Nasonis ‘Ibis,’ ed. by La Penna, Florence 1957. 98 Kenney: review of La Penna’s 1957 Ibis edition, in: The Classical Review 9 1 (March 1959), p. 41. 99 P. Ovidi Nasonis ‘Ibis,’ ed. by La Penna, p. LXXII. 100 Ibid., p. LXXII, n. 1. 101 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachus, Berlin 1924, I, p. 241. 102 P. Ovidi Nasonis ‘Ibis,’ ed. by La Penna, p. LXXII, n. 1. 103 For Croce’s judgment on Ovid see the unflattering comparison he establishes between the Latin poet and Ariosto: “Onde, per esempio, raccostato che si sia l’Ariosto ad Sergio Casali 45 of Francesco Arnaldi at the University of Naples, systematically surveys the works of Ovid, giving us at every turn his idiosyncratic judgment about the aes- thetic value of every poem he considers.104

4. Ovid and the Self-Consciousness of Poetry

Notwithstanding the bimillenary celebrations, in the 1960s there is again a stand- still in the studies on Ovid, especially in Italy. Probably the best works of this decade are two seminal articles by Rosa Lamacchia on the reception of the Aene- id in the Metamorphoses.105 Much less significant is the monograph on the Met- amorphoses by Antonio Menzione (1964), now altogether forgotten.106 In Ger- many in 1969 Franz Bömer starts his monumental commentary on the Metamor-

Ovidio, – narratore senza nessuno spirito religioso delle favole mitologiche e solo at- tratto dalla vaghezza e varietà di queste, – bisogna subito affrettarsi a soggiungere che, tranne questo lato, per ogni altro l’Ariosto è diverso e superiore al poeta latino, poco fine nell’arte, tutto affogato nella materia piacente e dilettosa, improvvisante e sovrabbondante per incapacità di fermo disegno e di freno, modello, piuttosto che al castissimo in arte Ariosto, ai lussuriosi verseggiatori italiano dei Seicento” (Ludovico Ariosto, in: La Critica 16 (1918), p. 111). For a thorough review of D’Elia’s book, see Paratore’s review, in: Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medievale 2 (1960), pp. 225-238. 104 For other Italian monographs on Ovid in the 1950s, see Ignazio Cazzaniga: La saga di ‘Itis’ [sic] nella tradizione letteraria e mitografica greco-romana, II, L’episodio di Procne nel libro sesto delle ‘Metamorfosi’ di Ovidio. Ricerche intorno alla tecnica poetica ovidiana, Milan and Varese 1950 (a learned analysis of the sources of the Procne-episode in Met. VI); Silvia Jannaccone: La letteratura greco-latina delle ‘Metamorfosi,’ Messina and Florence 1953 (a very bad treatment of the sources of the Metamorphoses); Paolo Tremoli: Influssi retorici e ispirazione poetica negli ‘Amores’ di Ovidio, Trieste 1955 (a little monograph on the influence of rhetoric on the Amores); Giomini’s 1958 critical edition of the Heroides; Lucia Rosa: Su alcuni aspetti della critica ovidiana in Italia, in: Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 21 1 (January-April 1959), pp. 215-221, which superficially surveys the Italian works on Ovid in the late 1950s. 105 Rosa Lamacchia: Ovidio interprete di Virgilio, in: Maia 12 (1960), pp. 310-330; La- macchia: Precisazioni su alcuni aspetti dell’epica ovidiana, in: Atene e Roma 15 2-3 (April-September 1969), pp. 1-20. 106 Antonio Menzione: Ovidio: le ‘Metamorfosi.’ Sintesi critica e contributo per una ri- valutazione, Turin 1964. Despite some inexplicably favorable reviews, cf. e.g. Raoul Verdière’s review of Menzione’s 1964 book: “Cette étude est extrêmement impor- tante,” in: Latomus 24 3 (July-September 1965), p. 676. 46 Ovid and Italian Philology phoses, that will be completed only seventeen years later;107 in 1957-1958 he had already published a commentary on the Fasti. In 1969 H.-J. Geisler, under the supervision of Franco Munari, produces a very thorough commentary on the first 396 lines of the Remedia.108 In the United Kingdom Kenney publishes the Ox- ford Classical Text of Ovid’s amatory works (with the exception of the Heroides).109 From the United States, we must mention Otis’s monograph on the Metamorphoses as an epic poem.110 Things begin to change in the middle 1970s with a new approach especially to the intertextual aspect of Ovid’s poetry. It must be said very clearly in advance that I concentrate on the works produced in the milieux of Pisa and Florence, but the flourishing of Ovidian studies is by no means limited to these universities. Important contributions are written for example by Nino Scivoletto,111 Emilio Pianezzola,112 by his pupil Gianluigi Baldo,113 by Paola Pinotti,114 by Giorgio Brugnoli and Fabio Stok,115 and by many others, in many different directions; it is just impossible to mention all the significant contributions. We can start from a book that has had a great influence on Latin intertextual studies, Gian Biagio Conte’s Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario (1974, 19852).116 In the chapter entitled Storia e sistema nella memoria dei poeti,117

107 P. Ovidius Naso: Metamorphosen, ed. by Franz Bömer, books I-III (1969), IV-V (1976), VI-VII (1976), VIII-IX (1977), X-XI (1980), XII-XIII (1982), XIV-XV (1986). 108 H. J. Geisler: P. Ovidius Naso. Remedia Amoris. Mit Kommentar zu Vers 1-396, Diss. Berlin 1969. A commentary on the second half of the Remedia will be published some years later by Christine Lucke: P. Ovidius Naso Remedia amoris: Kommentar zu Vers 397-814, Bonn 1982. 109 P. Ovidi Nasonis ‘Amores,’ ‘Medicamina Faciei Femineae,’ ‘Ars Amatoria,’ ‘Remedia Amoris,’ ed. by Kenney, Oxford 1961. 110 Brooks Otis: Ovid as an Epic Poet, Cambridge 1966; in the second edition of his book (1970), Otis changes his mind about many issues regarding the Metamorphoses. 111 Nino Scivoletto: Musa iocosa. Studio sulla poesia giovanile di Ovidio, Rome 1976. 112 Emilio Pianezzola: Conformismo e anticonformismo politico nell’‘Ars Amatoria’ di Ovidio, in: Quaderni dell’Istituto di Filologia latina dell’Università di Padova 2 (1972), pp. 37-58; La metamorfosi ovidiana come metafora narrativa, in Retorica e poetica, ed. by Daniela Goldin, Padua 1979, pp. 77-91; Ovidio. Modelli retorici e forma narrativa, Bologna 1999. 113 Gianluigi Baldo: Dall’‘Eneide’alle ‘Metamorfosi.’Il codice epico di Ovidio, Padua 1995. 114 Paola Pinotti: P. Ovidio Nasone: Remedia amoris, introduction, text, and commentary, Bologna 1988. 115 Giorgio Brugnoli and Fabio Stok: Ovidius παρῳδήσας, Pisa 1992 116 Gian Biagio Conte: Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario. Catullo, Virgilio, Ovidio, Lucano [1974], Turin 1985 (I quote from the 1985 edition); partially translated in Conte: The Rhetoric of Imitation. Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. and trans. by Charles Segal, Ithaca and London 1986. Sergio Casali 47

Conte discusses the assimilation of poetic memory to a rhetorical function: there are allusions that can be compared to metaphors, and others that can be compared to similes; in the first group we have the ‘standard’ allusions, in which a poet recalls in his own poetry a phrase coming from the work of another author, and in so doing he or she ‘transfers’ or anyway somehow evokes in his or her own text part of the meaning of the former text (“allusioni integrative,” in Conte’s terminology); in the second group, instead, there are allusions that are, in a sense, ‘tautological,’ since they do not add to the mean- ing of the alluding text (“allusioni riflessive”). The first examples of “allusioni riflessive” he makes are two Ovidian ones. In the last book of the Metamor- phoses, in the context of the apotheosis of Romulus, Mars reminds Jupiter of a promise he had made to him in an earlier council of the gods: ‘tu mihi concilio quondam praesente deorum | (nam memoro memorique animo pia uerba no- taui) | “unus erit, quem tu tolles in caerula caeli” | dixisti ’.118 Now, the words of Jupiter that Mars remembers come from an earlier poem, the Annals of Ennius (fr. 54 Sk.), where in fact Jupiter made that promise to Mars. In the second example, Ariadne on a beach laments that Bacchus, the god who had saved her and married her when Theseus abandoned her on a desert island, is going in his turn to abandon her, having fallen in love with the daughter of an Indian king:

‘En iterum, fluctus, similis audite querellas. en iterum lacrimas accipe, harena, meas. Dicebam, memini, “periure et perfide Theseu!”; Ille abiit, eadem crimina Bacchus habet. Nunc quoque “Nulla uiro,” clamabo, “femina credat.”’

Ariadne makes explicit reference to her prior abandonment by Theseus, and “re- members” (memini) the precise words she had said to him – words that come from the lament of Ariadne in Catullus’ Poem LXIV (132-135; 143-44).119 What Ovid does here, according to Conte, is simply to call attention to the very litera- riness of his discourse: “il poeta non si nasconde la natura sostanzialmente artifi-

117 Ibid., pp. 15-74. 118 Met., XV, 812-815; a very similar situation occurs in Fasti, II, 483-II, 489. 119 Ovid: Fasti, III, 471-475. Both of Conte’s examples had been already discussed by Moriz Haupt: Opuscula, Leipzig 1876, II, pp. 171-172; cf. Wilhelm Kroll: Studien zum Verständnis der römischen Literatur, Stuttgart 1924, pp. 176-177; see also John Miller: Ovidian Allusion and the Vocabulary of Memory, in: Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 30 (1993), pp. 153-164, now reprinted in: Oxford Read- ings in Ovid, ed. by Peter Knox, Oxford 2006, pp. 86-99. 48 Ovid and Italian Philology ciale dell’atto letterario che sta compiendo (ma che invece presenta come mimesi della realtà).”120 Conte’s treatment of these two Ovidian examples has been tremendously successful,121 and has had the effect of attracting the attention on Ovid’s intertex- tual imagination, and especially on the ‘artificiality’ and the metapoetic character of his poetry. In 1979, in an article published in Materiali e discussioni, the jour- nal Conte himself had founded just the year earlier, Gianpiero Rosati wrote an article entitled L’esistenza letteraria. Ovidio e l’autocoscienza della poesia, which can be seen as a kind of manifesto of the new ‘formalist’ and self- reflexive approach to Ovid’s poetry. Rosati reconstructs an Ovidian poetics of the autonomy of poetry by reviewing Ovid’s programmatic statements in the course of his poetic career. Rosati closes his article with a consideration of the notion of intertextuality:

Consapevole della sua irriducibile alterità dal reale, [la letteratura] si chiude nalla sua dimensione più autentica: sottrattasi al mondo della realtà comune, vivrà in quella sorta di mondo ricreato che è il Testo letterario. Chi abita lo spazio della finzione, chi esiste nell’universo letterario non è più allora mendacium, ma acqui- sisce una sua identità, una sua realtà nel regno dell’apparenza: Giove e Marte, Arianna, Biblide, Ulisse e gli altri ‘abitanti’ del mito letterario sono coscienti di una loro identità, di un loro passato di cui si sentono responsabili, di una loro esi- stenza letteraria già vissuta in altri innumerevoli testi. Nel testo ovidiano, dove ne diventano consapevoli, essi vengono fuori a dichiarare questa loro coscienza, a professare la loro natura letteraria. La letteratura prende coscienza di sé come di un incrocio di relazioni, una combinazione di testi: nell’intertestualità essa indivi- dua la sua vera dimensione. Il segno si reifica, si fa esso stesso referente: la lette- ratura non rinvia ad altro che a sé. E allora, sottrattasi ormai definitivamente alla tutela del reale, orgogliosa dello spazio conquistato nell’artificio, questa poesia non potrà che essere poesia riflessa, che autospecchiarsi, che alludere narcisisti- camente a se stessa.122

Rosati’s reference to Jupiter and Mars, and to Ariadne, obviously allude to Conte’s Memoria dei poeti, whereas those to Byblis and Ulysses refer to two other articles which had been published in that period: in his article, Giuliano Ranucci shows how Byblis in Met. IX allude to a different version of her own

120 Conte: Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario, p. 45. 121 Denis Feeney, in his review of Conte: The Rhetoric of Imitation, in The Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989), pp. 206-207, wrote that “Some fascinating pages on Ovid show the energy of allusion in its most startling form; it is worth buying the book for pp. 60-63 alone” (pp. 60-63 are those on Ariadne). 122 Gianpiero Rosati: L’esistenza letteraria. Ovidio e l’autocoscienza della poesia, in: Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 2 1 (January-June 1979), pp. 135-136. Sergio Casali 49 story; and on his part, Mario Labate calls attention to the fact that when in Met. XIII Ajax says to Ulysses that, since he is accustomed to fighting in night am- bushes, Achilles’ weapons are not apt for him, because the helmet would reveal him by shining in the darkness, and the armour would slow him when fleeing, he ‘alludes’ to events that never happened to Ulysses himself, but that instead did happen to a literary heir of him, namely to Euryalus in Aeneid IX (373-374; 384- 385). Mario Labate does not limit himself to the study of Ovid’s intertextuality.123 In a series of articles,124 and then in his very important book L’arte di farsi amare (1984),125 he explores the amatory works of Ovid in terms of ‘cultural models,’ with the aim of demonstrating that Ovid’s treatment of love in the Amores and the Ars Amatoria is not in opposition with the cultural norms and moral values of Augustan Rome; rather, love is just one of the many aspects of the diverse life of Rome: to be a lover is not the totalizing experience recounted in the elegies of Tibullus and Propertius, but is compatible with participation in other spheres of public life. In the first chapter, Labate emphasizes two important differences between Ovid and his elegiac predecessor Propertius: Propertius can- not imagine of writing poetry in other genres, since love is all his life; Ovid, in- stead, sees love poetry just as a stage in his poetic career, and in so doing he re- descovers the ancient topos of youth as the age of love and of the life of love, a topos that had been appropriated by Roman traditional culture as a way of limit- ing and neutralizing tensions that otherwise could have been dangerous. Just in the same way, according to Labate, Ovid limits and neutralizes the ‘dangerous- ness’ of love elegy. Secondly, whereas Ovid’s elegiac predecessors had mani- fested a contradictory attitude towards the city, and had often phantasized about a different world, sometimes about a rural and pastoral one, Ovid completely embraces the ideology of the city, resolving the contradictions of love elegy. He is like a Hellenistic court-poet (Labate cites for example the description of the crowded city in Theocritus, Idyll XV, pp. 56-57), and, through his total and en- thusiastic acceptance of the city as the perfect environment for the lover, he indi- rectly signals his acceptance and approval of the social order created by the prin- ceps. This theme continues in the second chapter, where Labate attempts to demonstrate that many aspects of Ovid’s love elegies, far from being in any way

123 See also his article on Canace’s epistle and its relationship to the Aeolus of Euripides: La Canace ovidiana e l’‘Eolo’ di Euripide, in: Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 7 2 (April-June 1977), pp. 583-593. 124 Labate: Tradizione elegiaca e società galante negli ‘Amores,’ in: Studi Classici e Orientali 27 2 (October 1977), pp. 283-339; Labate: Poetica ovidiana dell’elegia. La retorica della città, in: Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 3 2 (July- December 1979), pp. 9-67. 125 Labate: L’arte di farsi amare. Modelli culturali e progetto didascalico nell’elegia ovi- diana, Pisa 1984. 50 Ovid and Italian Philology

‘subversive,’ can be seen as consonant with, and even supportive of the Augus- tan ideology, even if always in a very unorthodox way; for example, Ovid con- demns the abortion (Am., II, 14) and the compliant husband (the leno maritus of Am., II, 19, 57-58), playfully but in a way that recalls language and motivations of the Augustan marriage legislation, such as the Lex Iulia de adulteriis. Else- where Ovid exploits the ideological repertoire of Roman imperialism: in Am., I, 2 the figure of Cupid recalls that of the triumphant princeps; in Am., II, 9 Ovid assimilates the dominion of the god of love to the imperial dominion of Rome. The topos of the militia amoris (the lover is only a soldier of love, and rejects military life and career) had a clear antimilitaristic stance in Tibullus and Proper- tius; Ovid, instead, promotes the cohexistence of the various spheres and inter- ests of life, and so even of love and war: a lover is like a soldier, and a soldier can be a lover. When Ovid prescribes to his disciple a behaviour which collides with the social code, such as betraying a friend, immediately after he adds two distichs in which he condemns this same behaviour when it is applied to the oth- er areas of life (Ars am., I, 585-588): love is a separate sphere of life, and the other spheres must maintain their own autonomy without clashing with each oth- er; and recognizing this Ovidian strategy also allows us to maintain in the text those very lines, which Kenney instead secluded as as too contradictory with the preceding precept, which is now defined as a crimen. In the third chapter Labate shows how the virtues that the lover must practice, such as obsequium, comitas, and decorum, offer significant points of contact with the traditional virtues of the Roman citizen, and Ovid’s Ars constantly evokes the ‘scientific’ treatment of those virtues in works like, especially, Cicero’s De officiis. The fourth and final chapter traces a parallel between the lover Ovid pretends to instruct and the fig- ure of the adulator (kolax). Labate, like Rosati, had been a pupil of Antonio La Penna, and we can see a consonance between his approach and the one La Penna shows in his 1979 arti- cle on Gusto modernizzante e modello arcaico nell’etica dell'eros di Ovidio,126 even if it is probably Labate who influences La Penna rather than the other way round (in fact, La Penna refers to Labate’s ongoing research in his footnotes). In any case, La Penna’s article marks a significant change in his attitude towards Ovid: now the poet is taken very seriously, and there are almost no traces of the disparaging remarks we found in the introduction to the edition of the Ibis. La Penna singles out two different cultural models in Roman society and literature, which he calls with the self-explanatory names of “modello arcaizzante,” and “modello modernizzante”. Whereas poets like Tibullus, Propertius, and Horace did not engage themselves in an explicit polemics against the archaising model,

126 La Penna: Gusto estetizzante e modello arcaico nell’etica dell’eros in Ovidio, in: Fra teatro, poesia e politica romana. Politica e cultura in Roma antica e nella tradizione classica moderna, Turin 1979, pp. 181-205. Sergio Casali 51

Ovid goes on to a systematic destruction of it: the derision and the negation of the rusticitas, one of the most important components of the archaising model, is the fundament itself of Ovid’s world in the Amores and the Ars. In his major works, instead, Ovid follows a different path, accepting the traditional values, and also a sort of “arcaismo etico,” characterized by poverty and simplicity, such as we can see in many pages of the Fasti, or in the Baucis and Philemon episode of the Metamorphoses. La Penna concludes that the poet, in spite of all his “gu- sto modernizzante,” when it comes to the proposal of an ethics which can be val- id for the whole society, embraces the archaic model, characterized by the neces- sity of the limit. La Penna also writes a preface to one of the most influential books of the 1980s, Rosati’s Narciso e Pigmalione (1983).127 In this monograph Rosati devel- ops the themes of his 1979 article (L’esistenza letteraria. Ovidio e l’autoco- scienza della poesia), focusing on illusion as the leitmotiv of the Metamorphoses through an analysis of the episodes of Narcissus and Pygmalion.128 The book is divided in three chapter, Narciso o l’illusione letteraria, Pigmalione o la poetica della finzione, and Lo spettacolo delle apparenze. Rosati gives a metapoetic reading of both the Narcissus and the Pygmalion episodes. Ovid is a Narcissus poet, “il poeta chino nell’ammirazione del proprio virtuosismo che si esalta specchiandosi nello stupore del suo pubblico, il poeta nimium amator ingenium sui,” according to the definition given by Quintilian, which however this time is not quoted with a derogatory intent, but as a “felice definizione.”129 The story of Pygmalion is read as a meditation on the relationships between art, reality, and illusion. In the final chapter, among many analyses, Rosati takes also into consi- deration the ways in which the style of the Metamorphoses coheres with its con- tent: “L’artificio della parola, mostrata nella sua natura proteiforme, sfuggente, nelle sue potenzialità illusionistiche, non ci apparirà allora che un aspetto, un fe- dele riflesso del più generale spettacolo del mondo.”130 Another protagonist of the Ovidian renaissance in Italy is Alessandro Bar- chiesi, who is the scholar who most systematically develops a personal approach to Ovid’s intertextuality with a series of articles published from the middle of the 1980s, many of them then collected in his 2001 book Speaking Volumes.131 The

127 Rosati: Narciso e Pigmalione. Illusione e spettacolo nelle ‘Metamorfosi’ di Ovidio, with an essay by La Penna, Florence 1983. See for example the thoughtful review by Kenney, in: The Classical Review 34 2 (1984), pp. 186-188. 128 The fruitfulness of Rosati’s approach can be appreciated by considering that Ovid the illusionist will still be a protagonist of the early twentyfirst century Ovidian studies: see Philip Hardie: Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion, Cambridge 2002. 129 Rosati: Narciso e Pigmalione, p. 50. 130 Ibid., p. 170. 131 Barchiesi: Speaking Volumes. Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets, London 1997. 52 Ovid and Italian Philology first of these articles is a collection of short exegetical essays in which Barchiesi demonstrates the importance of an intertextual reading for the solution of textual problems.132 In Heroides, III, 44, for example, where, according to the transmit- ted text, Briseis asks nec uenit inceptis mollior meis?, the conjecture of Lehrs malis instead of meis is undoubtedly confirmed if consider the intertextual rela- tionship of Her. III with the Iliad: for the words of Briseis in Her., III, 44 ‘corre- spond’ to those of the Homeric Briseis in Il. XIX 290 ὥς μοι δέχεται κακὸν ἐκ κακοῦ αἰεί (“thus for me evil always follows hard on evil”). In Remedia amoris, 281-282, Circe, in her vain attempt to detain Ulysses, says to him: Quae tibi causa fugae? non hic noua Troia resurgit, | non aliquis socios Rhesus (var. l. rursus) ad arma uocat. When Circe says to Ulysses (who is sailing along the coasts of Italy just before the arrival of Aeneas) that “a new Troy is not rising again here, no Rhesus is calling again allies to arms,” the sorceress does not know that the things she is presenting Ulysses as impossible are destined to hap- pen soon after. As the reader of the Aeneid knows, a new Trojan war really is on the verge of being fought in Latium, and it is precisely there where a new Troy is fated to rise again: as the disguised Venus says to Aeneas (Aen., I, 205-206): tendimus in Latium | illic fas regna resurgere Troiae.133 The appreciation of this intertextual irony helps us in deciding in favor of the reading rursus in the pentameter, since another Virgilian context evoked here is the speech of Venus in Aen., IX, 26-29, where the goddess laments that a precise repetition of the Trojan war is about to happen in Italy: muris iterum imminet hostis | nascentis Troiae nec non exercitus alter, | atque iterum in Teucros Aetolis surgit ab Arpis | Tydides: “Nei ripetuti iterum di Virgilio trova spiegazione e completamento anti- frastico il rursus di Ovidio.”134 Finally, in Her. X, when Ariadne lists all the dangers to which she is exposed to when abandoned by Theseus on a desert is- land, she refers enigmatically, in connection to the sky, to her fear of “the images of the gods”: caelum restabat: timeo simulacra deorum (Her., X, 95); Ariadne’s reference seemed so strange that it was adduced as a reason for secluding the lines in question. In fact, the simulacra deorum are the constellations that repro- duce the figures of gods,135 and Barchiesi highlights also in this case the narra- tive irony hidden in Ariadne’s words: she who now “fears the images of the gods” is just about to be saved by a god, Bacchus, a god who arrives on a chariot

132 Barchiesi: Problemi di interpretazione in Ovidio. Continuità delle storie, continuazio- ne dei testi, in: Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 16 1 (January- June 1986), pp. 77-107. 133 Barchiesi: Problemi di interpretazione in Ovidio, pp. 82-93. 134 Ibid., p. 92. 135 As Ariane Hewig will conclusively clarify in her article Ariadne’s Fears from Sea and Sky (Ovid, ‘Heroides’ 10.88 and 95-8), in: The Classical Quarterly 41 2 (1992), pp. 554-556. Sergio Casali 53 pulled by tigers (and Ariadne had also expressed a very strange fear of tigers, Her., X, 87), and who will transform her exactly into one of those constellations she now so afraid of. Barchiesi’s article closes with some general reflections on Ovid’s “intertextual imagination.” This brief summary cannot do justice to the great richness of this article, that originated in Barchiesi’s work to prepare a commentary on the first three of the Heroides, which was published in 1992.136 Among Barchiesi’s many contribu- tions to Ovid, there is also the first book (almost) entirely devoted to the Fasti, Il poeta e il principe.137 There is no space left to follow in any detailed way the development of the Ovidian renaissance in Italy and outside Italy in the 1990s. Important books on the Metamorphoses have been published by scholars like Peter Knox (1986)138 and Stephen Hinds (1987),139 only the first of a long series of important studies in English.140 Luigi Galasso, after a commentary on Ovid’s Ex Ponto II (Florence 1995),141 published a commentary on the whole of the Metamorphoses in 2000.

136 Barchiesi: P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistulae I-III, Florence – a model for subse- quent commentaries on the Heroides such as those by Sergio Casali (on Her., IX Flor- ence 1995), Rosati (on Her. XVII-XVIII, Florence 1996), and Federica Bessone (on Her., XII, Florence 1997). Among the many other commentaries on the Heroides pro- duced in the 1990s and 2000s, especially noteworthy are that on selected epistles by Peter Knox (Cambridge 1995) and that on the double epistles by Kenney (Cambridge 1996). An affordable critical edition of the Heroides, on the contrary, is stil a major desideratum. As to commentaries on Ovid’s amatory works, it must be mentioned at least the extraordinary commentary on the Amores by James McKeown (vol. I, text and prolegomena, Liverpool 1987; vol. II, commentary on book I, Leeds 1989; vol. III, commentary on book II, Leeds 1998; the fourth and final volume is still in prepa- ration, and will be published in a few years by McKeown in collaboration with R. Joy Littlewood). In Italy Emilio Pianezzola, Gianluigi Baldo and Lucio Cristante have published a valuable commentary on the Ars for the Fondazione Valla, Milan 1991. 137 Barchiesi: Il poeta e il principe. 138 Knox: Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry, Cambridge 1986. 139 Hinds: The Metamorphosis of Persephone. Ovid and the Self-conscious Muse, Cam- bridge 1987. 140 See a brief survey in Casali: Ovidian Intertextuality, in: A Companion to Ovid, pp. 350-353. 141 Part of a renewed interest also in Ovid’s exile poetry; an important part in this revival has been played by articles like those by Francesca Lechi: La palinodia del poeta ele- giaco. I carmi ovidiani dell’esilio, in: Atene e Roma 23 (1978), pp. 1-22; by Labate: Elegia triste ed elegia lieta. Un caso di riconversione letteraria, in: Materiali e di- scussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 19 (1987), pp. 91-129; and by Barchiesi: Inse- gnare ad Augusto: Orazio, ‘Epistole’ 2, 1 e Ovidio, ‘Tristia’ II, in: Materiali e discus- sioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 31 (1993), pp. 149-184. Mario Citroni’s contribu- 54 Ovid and Italian Philology

A useful survey of the Ovidian studies at the end of the century is provided by Sara Myers (1999)142 and Ulrich Schmitzer (2002).143 The multi-authored com- mentary on the Metamorphoses edited by Alessandro Barchiesi for the Fonda- zione Valla series (2005-2015) is just one of the many signs that we are now liv- ing in a new aetas Ovidiana.144

tions to Ovid concentrate on the special relationship of the poet with his readers, and often focus on the exile poetry, which is particularly revelatory of what Citroni calls Ovid’s “scoperta del ‘lettore affezionato’” (Poesia e lettori in Roma antica, Rome- Bari 1995, pp. 431-474). 142 Sara Myers: The Metamorphosis of a Poet. Recent Work on Ovid, in: The Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999), pp. 190-204. 143 Ulrich Schmitzer: Neue Forschungen zu Ovid, in: Gymnasium 109 (2002), pp. 143- 166. By the same author, see also: Neue Forschungen zu Ovid, Teil II, in: Gymnasium 110 (2003), pp. 147-182; Neue Forschungen zu Ovid, Teil III, in: Gymnasium 114 (2007), pp. 149-179. 144 Ovidio. Le metamorfosi, ed. by Barchiesi, Milan 2005-2015 (commentary on books I- III by Barchiesi; IV-VI by Rosati; VII-IX by Kenney; X-XII by Reed; XIII-XV by Hardie). Not by chance Damien Nelis entitled Aetas Ovidiana? the collection of Ovidian studies originated in a 2002 Dublin conference that he edited for Hermathena 177-178 (2004-2005). The explosion of the Ovidian studies at the beginning of the twentyfirst century is best described by the almost contemporary appearance of three companions to Ovid: Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. by Barbara Weiden Boyd, Leiden 2002; The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. by Hardie; and the already mentioned A Companion to Ovid, ed. by Knox. The famous definition of the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries as aetas Ovidiana, to which all these references allude, comes back to the distinguished German mediaevalist Ludwig Traube (1861-1907); see his Einlei- tung in die lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters, Munich 1911, pp. 113-115.