[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The volume under review originated from a conference at Columbia University in 2019. This event brought together some of the most distinguished scholars of Ovid to interrogate whether and how this most ludic of authors might be read differently with a sustained focus on philosophy as more than “mere window dressing” (10). From the outset, the editors, Katharina Volk and Gareth Williams, seek to compare and contrast Ovidius Philosophus with his near contemporaries and forebears in order to appreciate not only how he manipulates philosophical ideas similarly to other poets of his milieu (e.g., through both ‘hard’ allusion and “‘soft’ evocation of a less source specific kind” (3)), but also to analyze how he imposes his own “idiosyncratic imprint” (6) on philosophy through play. “Idiosyncratic” represents something of a buzzword in the volume’s introduction: Ovid, a poet with allegiance to no school or philosophy, explores the endless diversity of possibilities that philosophy (or philosophizing parody?) can offer to a master of generic fluidity.
The volume opens with a programmatic framing chapter by Francesca Romana Berno, in which she offers a comprehensive philological study of the nuances of sapientia and its cognates across Ovid’s corpus. In the elegiac works, Berno notes a marked opposition between Ovid’s use of the adjectives sapiens and stultus, recognizing an intentional privileging of “foolishness” over philosophical wisdom: “to love wisely” (sapienter amare) constitutes a parodic variation on the traditional philosophical trope of living wisely. As Berno progresses through the corpus, however, she demonstrates a changing valence of sapientia – from a political shrewdness in the Fasti and the Met. to a Ulyssean endurance in the exilic works. Ovid thus works across genres to develop a protean notion of sapientia which is noteworthy for how it differs from that of his philosophical forebears.
The next five contributions constitute the most challenging case-studies for reading “philosophy in Ovid,” since they are devoted to the ostensibly playful elegiac corpus. This subsection opens with Laurel Fulkerson’s chapter on Ovid’s parody in Amores 3.1 of Prodicus’ choice of Heracles, which Ovid reworks into a decision over generic affiliation. According to Fulkerson, Ovid aligns his choice between two personifications of genre – Elegy and Tragedy – with its philosophical forebear but reverses the dynamics of the choice: ironically, Tragedy and Elegy seem inversely correlated to Virtue and Vice. More importantly, Ovid seems not only to parody Heracles’ choice, but also to call into question the entire notion of choice as a singular crossroads moment. Choice, especially in elegy, is “iterative,” “not fixed”: it need not be binary, as in Prodicus’ allegory; there is always an opportunity to return to the crossroads.
Within this subsection, Roy Gibson’s chapter “Hedonic Calculus” (3) forms a nice pendant with Del Maticic’s “Imago Mundi Muliebris” (ch. 5), as both treat philosophical elements in Ars Amatoria. Whereas Gibson explores how Ovid embodies an “erotic extremist” (63) in the Ars to surreptitiously undermine the Lucretian pleasure calculus, Maticic’s close reading of Ars 3 and feminine cultus as an adaptation of the epic shield constitutes an implicit commentary on the relationship between cosmology and cosmetics. For Gibson, Ovid rejects Lucretius’ culture-history of DRN 5 by suggesting, in parodic exaggeration, that sexual pleasure is the only meaningful element in the evolution of civilization. At the end of Ars 2, however, he is chastised by Apollo, thus reasserting (contra Lucretius) the existence of gods and their roles as cultural authorities. Maticic, on the other hand, suggests that Ars 3’s advice on cosmetics invests the female body with the weighted significance of the imago mundi – a site of allegorical interpretation since the Hellenistic period, but one Ovid transfers to the realm of cultus to enable the female “body to merge with the cosmos” (122).
In Chapter 4, Erin Hanses astutely argues that the Ovidian narrator exhibits, through repetition and Epicurean parrhesia, a shifting didactic relationship to his philosophical-poetic predecessors to “build an alternative view of love to that of the Epicureans” (103). Across the elegiac corpus, Ovid develops his persona from student addressing teacher (Lucretius in the Amores), to eroto-didactic teacher chastising student, Amor (Ars), and finally, to student remonstrating against a former teacher’s advice (Remedia) – ‘correcting’ through parrhesia Lucretius’ misguided Epicurean approach to amor. Lastly, this section closes with Katharina Volk’s provocative study of the Ars and Remedia (ch. 6), which posits (controversially) that Ovid’s eroto-didactic texts are not only “like philosophy” in the way that they engage with philosophical doctrines and schools of Ovid’s epoch, but also that they are “philosophical in their own right” (125; her italics), insofar as they promote their own model(s) of living. Drawing parodically on theories of the ars vitae – especially, therapeutic “techniques of the self” – Ovid stakes out a claim as praeceptor amoris which is as ambitious in its aspirations as Seneca’s later attempts to model philosophical techniques of therapy.
The second overall grouping of chapters tackles philosophy in the Metamorphoses, adopting as its premise that reception represents a mode of doing philosophy. Thus, Myrto Garani begins this subsection (ch. 7) with a meticulous study of Seneca’s creative quotation – or rather, misquotation – of Ovid’s narratives of the flood and Phaethon’s ekpyrosis in the Natural Questions. For Garani, Seneca not only “demythologizes” the Ovidian flood narrative by providing scientific explanations for Ovid’s fabulous tales through layered intertextual reference; he also pedantically complains of a famous critical issue in Ovid’s flood – namely, the wolf and lamb swimming together in an Iron Age destruction narrative – in order to heighten philosophical problems that parodic epic fails to address.
Within this grouping, Alison Keith’s study (ch. 9) of labor and pestis in three destruction narratives (the flood, the plague, and Hercules’ death) speaks well to Garani’s piece. Whereas the latter sees Seneca demythologizing Ovid, the former shows how the Met. itself constitutes a site of creative reception of Lucretius and Vergil, which takes an “antipathetic” (206) view towards Epicurean and Stoic philosophies by “remythologizing” poetic-scientific discourses. In her careful readings, Keith reveals how Ovid intentionally nods to Epicurean and Stoic views of disaster through “a suite of lexical and thematic resonances” (201). Ovid’s mode of adaptation, however, reveals a triumph of religio and ultimately, a rejection of Epicurean and Stoic cosmogonies and ethics.
Ovid’s reception of Lucretius and Vergil continues in Charles Ham’s and Darcy Krasne’s contributions (chs. 8 and 11), both of which explore the Lucretian-Empedoclean background to Golden Age, destruction, and palingenesis narratives. Both demonstrate quite convincingly how Empedocles is mediated through Lucretius (and Lucretius, in turn, through Vergil) to inform Ovid’s appropriations and/or reversals of Epicureanism. For Ham, the song of Calliope in Met. 5 presents Venus as a foil to Empedoclean Philia and the Lucretian Venus, whose creative impulse brings about springtime. Ovid’s Calliope, by contrast, represents Venus as the destructive force behind Proserpina’s rape and thus, as the power enacting the end of the “Golden Age.” According to Ham, however, Ovid transforms Venus’ creative impulse into a manifestation of discordia, thereby meditating on the parallelism between creation and destruction. In a similar vein, Krasne elucidates how the palingenesis of the Memnonides episode recapitulates Phaethon’s ekpyrosis in reverse: it reveals how the rebirth of ashen birds represents in microcosm the cosmic palingenesis occasioned by Phaethon.
In terms of content, Peter Kelly’s chapter on “Cosmic Artistry” (ch. 10) is a refreshing outlier, as it turns not to Epicurean or Stoic issues, but rather, to the influence of Platonic cosmology on Ovid and the analogous relationship between writing and world-building that Ovid inherits from Plato. Beyond drawing more general connections between the Platonic demiurge-artist and Ovid’s own creative adaptations of the cosmos, Kelly argues, in particular, that Ovid inherits from the Timaeus the wax image he uses as a metaphor for creation in the Pygmalion episode. In the final analysis, Ovid becomes, according to Kelly, simultaneously an anti-Platonic reader of Plato and a paradigmatic representation of the textual openness to which Plato himself may have aspired.
The third major section is devoted to Ovid’s exilic corpus, which all the contributors read against his earlier experimentations with genre. For K. Sara Myers (ch. 12), Ovid’s journey to the region of Pontus is a movement not only to a realm where the “impossible becomes ‘real’” (253) and the Pythagorean world of flux is halted to stagnancy; it also represents a traversing backwards in time towards the original state of Chaos. There is a confusio elementorum (258), which evokes the primordial state – a “philosophical state of disorder or strife that precedes the emergence…of life” (262).
Donncha O’Rourke intervenes in chapter 13 with a fascinating thought experiment, reversing Degl’Innocenti Pierini’s seminal study of Seneca’s reception of Ovidian exile poetry[1] by excavating where “Seneca can be found in Ovid” (267) – that is, by retrojecting Stoic theories of personal agency (well-attested before Ovid) back onto the Ovidian corpus. If Ovid’s erotic works display a conscious failure to achieve akrasia, Ovid’s exilic poetry meditates on questions of agency differently in Tomis, where he is dependent on the arbitrariness of someone else’s impulses.
Schiesaro’s chapter (14) forms a fitting pendant to the first two contributions: it explores the collision of Epicurean and Stoic eschatologies at critical junctures in the Met., in order to demonstrate how Ovid as a character in his exile poetry inhabits a kind of eschaton but longs to travel back to the real space-time of Rome. After elucidating how Ovid inherits philosophical eschatologies in the Met., Schiesaro suggests that he then dramatizes these eschatologies in Tomis, the literal eschaton of the world. Discussion on the exilic corpus concludes with a contribution from Gareth Williams, which approaches Ovid’s transition from pre-exilic to post-exilic writing as a philosophical entropy from “structure” to “unstructure.” Whereas the Fasti and Met. exhibit a tight structural coordination in their reception of Lucretius and Vergil, the “tightly bound conglomerate” (314) in framing references gives way to a realm of “unstructure” in Tomis – “to a vision of philosophical inefficacy, inconsistency, and inertia” (320).
To close this wide-ranging volume, Philip Hardie offers a magisterial postscript, demonstrating how different eras (many much less cynical than our own) revered Ovid as a philosophical forebear. Where Christian poets of Late Antiquity appropriated Ovidian cosmology to buttress their own retellings of the creation story, Early Modern poets and translators of Ovid discovered in pivotal episodes of the Met. seeds for their own reflections on human nature and the cosmos.
As a whole, Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher successfully demonstrates that readers can find a great deal more engagement with philosophy in the works of an author who has usually been written off as excessively ludic and rhetorically flashy, and I take this as a positive sign for future directions in Ovidian scholarship. As I read through each contribution, however, I could not help but feel a nagging concern over an uninterrogated assumption that many in the collection seem to take for granted. Throughout the collection, we are to assume that Ovid’s primary mode of doing philosophy is via intertextual reference. Ovid is no doctrinaire partisan of any school, to be sure, and discussion throughout the volume meditates as much on Ovid’s ‘anti-philosophy’ – a way of doing philosophy in its own right – as it does on his channeling any school of thought. However, most contributions, while offering dense and carefully dissected studies of intertextuality, do not then go on to elucidate how layered intertextuality adds up to interpretation, how it constitutes a mode of philosophizing.
Related to the volume’s undertheorized stance(s) on intertextuality as philosophy is the similarly thorny issue of hunting for philosophy amidst parody – an issue which the editors acknowledge at the outset with their claim that “literary and philosophical impulses are inextricably conjoined in [Ovid]” (10). The intersection of literary aesthetics and philosophical ethics is a well-known philosophical problem – one which can be traced back, of course, to Plato. However, to cite only one instance, Peter Kelly’s troublesome oversimplification of Platonic myth – how he divorces it from its own dialogical context and boldly states “Plato’s view” (211) to make Ovid’s reception into parodic philosophy – reveals precisely how tricky it is to make sense of authors who play ironist and meaning-maker simultaneously. Intertextuality, “remythologizing,” and reinscribing the literature of the past into a series of experiments in genres are, indeed, forms of world-building, and these represent, I would submit, the very experiments that many philosophers themselves perform. Perhaps I am asking too much, but I would have liked to see a clearer articulation of how Ovid’s parodic experiments via intertextuality contribute to a more coherent program of engaging with ‘serious’ ideas.
That said, I also felt invigorated to see these assumptions in print and so uniformly sustained throughout because, to my mind, they offer Ovidian scholarship (and Latin literary studies more broadly) a potential pathway out of the inescapable labyrinth of hunting for intertexts as mere Hellenistic games. Indeed, the notion that there is some ‘there’ behind Ovid’s reception of his poetic-philosophical predecessors opens up thrilling possibilities for continued work on an author who sits at the intersection of so many crossroads. For my part, I look forward to seeing the fruit that blossoms from these initial seeds.
Authors and Titles
Introduction – Katharina Volk and Gareth D. Williams
- Ovidius Sapiens: The Wise Man in Ovid’s Work – Francesca Romana Berno
- Elegy, Tragedy, and the Choice of Ovid (Amores 1) – Laurel Fulkerson
- Ovid’s Ars amatoria and the Epicurean Hedonic Calculus – Roy Gibson
- Criticizing Love’s Critic: Epicurean parrhesia as an Instructional Mode in Ovidian Love Elegy – Erin M. Hanses
- Ovid’s imago mundi muliebris and the Makeup of the World in Ars amatoria 101-290 – Del Maticic
- Ovid’s Art of Life – Katharina Volk
- Keep Up the Good Work: (Don’t) Do It like Ovid (Sen. 3.27-30) – Myrto Garani
- Venus discors: The Empedocleo-Lucretian Background of Venus and Calliope’s Song in Metamorphoses 5 – Charles Ham
- Labor and pestis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses – Alison Keith
- Cosmic Artistry in Ovid and Plato – Peter Kelly
- Some Say the World Will End in Fire: Philosophizing the Memnonides in Ovid’s Metamorphoses – Darcy A. Krasne
- Ovid against the Elements: Natural Philosophy, Paradoxography, and Ethnography in the Exile Poetry – K. Sara Myers
- Akrasia and Agency in Ovid’s Tristia – Donncha O’Rourke
- Intimations of Mortality: Ovid and the End(s) of the World – Alessandro Schiesaro
- The End(s) of Reason in Tomis: Philosophical Traces, Erasures, and Error in Ovid’s Exilic Poetry – Gareth D. Williams
- Philosophizing and Theologizing Reincarnations of Ovid: Lucan to Alexander Pope – Philip Hardie
Notes
[1] R. Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990) Tra Ovidio e Seneca. Bologna.