OVID’S LOVERS Central to Ovid’s elegiac texts and Metamorphoses is his pre-occupation with how desiring subjects interact with and seduce each other. This major study, which shifts the focus in Ovidian criticism from intertex- tuality to intersubjectivity, explores the relationship between self and other, and in particular that between male and female worlds, which lies at the heart of Ovid’s vision of poetry and the imagination. A series of close readings, focusing on both the more celebrated and less studied parts of the corpus, moves beyond the more often-asked ques- tions of Ovid, such as whether he is ‘for’ or ‘against’ women, in order to explore how gendered subjects converse, complete and co-create. It illustrates how the tale of Medusa, alongside that of Narcissus, rever- berates throughout Ovid’s oeuvre, becoming a fundamental myth for his poetics. This book offers a compelling, often troubling portrait of Ovid that will appeal to classicists and all those interested in gender and difference. victoria rimell teaches Latin literature at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. She is the author of Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (2002) and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (2005). She has written numerous articles on Latin literature, especially on the novel and Ovid. OVID’S LOVERS Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination VICTORIA RIMELL CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521117807 © Victoria Rimell 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2006 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-521-86219-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-11780-7 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents Note on the text page vi Acknowledgements vii List of abbreviations viii Introduction Narcissus and Medusa: Desiring subjects and the dialectics of Ovidian erotics 1 1 Specular logics: Medicamina 41 2 Double vision: Ars Amatoria 1, 2 and 3 70 3 Seeing seers: Metamorphoses 10–11.84 104 4 Co-creators: Heroides 15 123 5 What goes around: Heroides 16–21 156 6 Space between: Heroides 18–19 180 Conclusion 205 References 210 Index of passages discussed 223 General index 233 v Note on the text In quoting Ovid I have always used the Oxford Classical Text, unless otherwise indicated. All translations are my own. vi Acknowledgements This book was begun in Cambridge fog and finished in the golden light of Rome. I feel extremely lucky to have benefited from the stimulations and very different pleasures of both environments over the past few years. I’m especially indebted to the Facolta` di Scienze Umanistiche of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and the Italian Ministry for Universities (MIUR) for appointing me to my present position. There are several people I would like to thank: Roberto Antonelli, Francesca Bernardini and Piero Boitani, along with my colleagues Luigi Enrico Rossi, Andrea Cucchiarelli and Maria Broggiato, for welcoming me so warmly at La Sapienza; Alessan- dro Schiesaro, who first suggested I put all my thoughts on Ovid in one place – I couldn’t have done without his wonderful support; John Hender- son, whose humour helped me retain some small measure of sanity more than once, for his speed reading and uncannily sound advice; Alessandro Barchiesi, Philip Hardie, Charles Martindale, and the anonymous reader at Cambridge University Press, for encouragement and very useful criticisms; and my friend Jane Jones, for her big brain, big hair, and countless hours of illuminating chats. I am also very grateful to Michael Sharp, and to my editors Jackie Warren and Nancy-Jane Rucker. A version of chapter 1 (‘Specular Logics’) appeared in R. Ancona and E. Greene (eds.) (2005) Gendered Dynamics in Roman Love Elegy, reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press, while chapter 4 revises Rimell (1999) ‘Epistolary fictions: authorial identity in Heroides 15’, PCPS 45: 109–35. vii Abbreviations A&A Antike und Abendland AJP American Journal of Philology ANRW H. Temporini, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen¨ Welt, Berlin 1972 BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies BMCR Bryn Mawr Classical Review CA Classical Antiquity CJ Classical Journal CP Classical Philology CQ Classical Quarterly CW Classical World FGrH F. Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historike (1923– ) GB Grazer Beitrage¨ G&R Greece and Rome HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology JRS Journal of Roman Studies LCM Liverpool Classical Monthly MD Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary PCPS Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society RhM Rheinisches Museum TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association WS Wiener Studien viii Introduction Narcissus and Medusa: Desiring subjects and the dialectics of Ovidian erotics Ovid’s structure is not merely like a Russian doll, one story inside another, it is like a snake-pit, in which a pretty indeterminable number of snakes are devouring and being devoured by each other.1 All love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts.2 This book explores the gaps in which same and other, male and female can be seen to relate, converse, compete, and co-create in Ovidian poetry. The chapters included span a large portion of Ovid’s corpus, starting with the Medicamina, his little-read treatise on cosmetics in which women are made up in men’s image and vice versa, and ending with the ‘double’ Heroides, where heroes and heroines of ancient myth write to and from (over and across and with) each other. I am interested here in the many (flash-) points in Ovidian poetry where male and female artists/lovers are twinned as vying, mutually threatening subjects, and where a narcissistic impulse to collapse other into same/self is rivalled by a more complex dialectic or exchange which seems itself to fire and propel desire. One of the core aims of this study is to counter some curious imbalances and repressions in recent Ovidian criticism: in particular, I discuss the extent to which the dominant model for the Ovidian artist, the male viewer who spurns woman and/or (re)creates her as artwork and fetish (Narcissus, Orpheus and Pygmalion are key figures) has tended to foreclose investigation of the relationship between gendered creativities in Ovid. For sure, we can all spot competing models of the artist – from Echo, who turns repetition into originality, pronouncing novissima verba with typical satiric, Ovidian wit,3 1 Hofman and Lasdun (1994) xii. 2 Paglia (1990) 14. 3 See Knoespel (1985) 8: ‘What emerges from Ovid’s account of Echo is the power of speech and the ability of Ovid’s own written language to control that speech. Even though Echo is handicapped by Juno’s punishment, her handicap paradoxically emphasizes the adaptability of speech. Ultimately it is the power of the written language, Ovid’s own narrative, that emerges from the description of Echo’s language.’ 1 2 victoria rimell to spinner Arachne,4 tortured embroiderer Philomela,5 or the daughters of Minyas, stitching rebellion into Metamorphoses 4 – but these are not the characters usually identified with the poet himself, and feminist critics have been more concerned with making such figures visible, rather than (in addition) with scrutinizing how gendered readings and writings contend and overlap. Male artists, however, are frequently construed as synonymous with the poet. As Segal writes, for example: ‘Through Orpheus, Ovid provides a metaphorical reflection of the creative and restorative power of his own art’.6 For Anderson, Pygmalion ‘is the creative artist par excellence’,7 or as Rosati puts it, reaffirmed many times over in Hardie’s recent book: ‘Ovid is the poet Narcissus, the poet bent over in admiration of his own virtuosity, triumphantly mirroring himself in the astonishment of his public’.8 For Hardie, narcissistic desires (aligned with a bid to conjure up presences) lie at the psychological heart of Ovid’s poetry, fuelling an obsession with sameness and doubling (not least, between art and nature).9 Thus the Narcissus–Echo plot can be seen to ghost-write a string of Ovidian couplings (Ceyx and Alcyone, Leander and Hero, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Pyramus and Thisbe), in which beloveds become mirror images of lovers.10 Indeed, Narcissus reigns in recent criticism as the figure both for the poet (as he flits between credulity and cynicism, primal magic and urbane irony) and for the desiring, seduced, self-conscious reader. His myth offers a neat allegory for the move from na¨ıvety to knowingness, nature to art celebrated by postmodernism, a field of thinking owed much of the credit for Ovid’s flight to stardom at the end of the second millennium.11 We might even say that Narcissus’ psychodrama has come to define Ovidian poetics as obsessed with linguistic surfaces and passing intensities, with visual display, duplicity and (obvious) feigning.12 Also see Hinds (1998) 5–8, and Hollander (1981) on Echo as a figure of poetic allusion and as an ironist or satirist (‘Echo’s power is thus one of being able to reveal the implicit’, Hollander writes, 27). Echo’s story is one of several Ovidian myths to be appropriated by feminist thought: see Berger (1996), Spivak (1993).