A charming illustration in a manuscript of Brunetto Latini’s 13th-century poem Tesoretto shows a figure garbed in robe and scholar’s cap sitting before a writing desk that bears a codex, ink well, and pen. Above this figure’s head hovers the caption Ouidio filosafo che fece libri d’amore (“Ovid the philosopher who wrote books about love”).[1] Ovid, who chose the title lusor amorum for his epitaph (Tr. 3.3.73), might have chuckled to find himself promoted to philosopher, but his confounding of conventional binaries such as (love-)poetry/philosophy is the central theme of Ovid and Plato: Disturbing Realities by Peter Kelly.
The philosophical aspects of Ovid’s works, which scholars have long noticed, received fresh energy from the 2021 volume Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher,[2] and Ovid and Plato adds to this work. Kelly makes an important contribution by focusing on Ovid’s engagement with Plato’s works, which have garnered less scholarly attention than their impact on Greek and Roman intellectual discourse would warrant. Such an extended study of Platonic presences in Ovid’s works fills a gap in Ovidian studies, a field where much intertextual study has been done. The task is not easy because, as Kelly acknowledges implicitly and explicitly, the philosophical texture of Ovid’s works is dense and fluid, often resisting definitive identification. Even so, Kelly can make a case that, at least in some passages, Ovid is likely drawing directly on Plato’s texts. The bigger picture that emerges is of a complex process of mediation and refraction of Platonic (and others’) ideas, as they move through the works of later writers. This is never just a story about Ovid and Plato. It is also one about Lucretius, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Cicero, Aratus, Callimachus et al. and their complex interrelations with Plato and with one another.
The philosophical diversity within Ovid’s corpus has been called idiosyncratic, but Kelly aims to unite Ovidian philosophies under a single interpretive framework. Umberto Eco’s concept of opera aperta (“open work”), introduced in Chapter 1 (“Introduction”), provides the thread that knits together the philosophical complexities that Kelly unearths in the book’s many close readings.[3] The juxtaposition of conflicting philosophical traditions thus becomes a deliberate and positive feature of the text, which actively flouts a simple reading.
Each of the seven body chapters that follow is organized around a big concept (e.g. creation, love) rather than a single Ovidian or Platonic text, and the analysis in each moves through a great deal of material that defies easy synopsis. The following chapter summaries keep the focus on Plato.
Chapters 2 and 3 form a pair focused on chaos, a concept which, in its ability to contain opposites, symbolizes what Kelly means by the “open” nature of Ovid’s work. In Chapter 2, “Chaos and Creation,” Kelly closely reads the proem and creation myth of Metamorphoses 1. From allusions to Lucretius and Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, Kelly detects a potential conflict between materialist and creationist views of the world’s beginnings; this tension is a feature of Ovid’s text, which refuses to resolve it and endorse a single “true” theory or to respect any binary divisions such as that between myth and natural philosophy. Plato’s Cratylus is introduced for its discussion of the relation between world and word, the instability of which leads Plato to develop his theory of forms. Later in the chapter, the demiurge from the Timaeus is discussed in comparison to Ovid’s creator-deity, and Kelly concludes that “Ovid reads Plato against the grain in order to counteract the notion of unity, order, determinism, and permanence” (p. 42).
Chapter 3 (“Turbulent Worlds: Phaethon and the Flood”) continues with the theme of chaos in two episodes from the Metamorphoses. Rather than being limited to the state of the universe before creation, chaos is a threat that looms over the created world and to which the destructive forces of flood and fire nearly return it. The Platonic texts discussed here are the Timaeus, which used the same myths as the Ovidian episodes (of Deucalion and Pyrrha and of Phaethon) to contemplate what access to truth we can get from such stories, and the Phaedrus, whose description of the soul-chariot has parallels to the oft-allegorized Phaethon.
Chapter 4 (“Janus and the Many Worlds”) turns to the Fasti, where Janus is both chaos (Fast. 1.103) and another demiurgic figure. This connects Fasti 1 back to Met. 1 and adds another dimension to our understanding of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti as a dyad in intimate dialogue with each other. A Platonic precedent for Janus’ double nature is found in the Politicus (Statesman) and its version of the myth of Cronus.
Chapter 5 (“Archimedes and the Model Universe”) continues with the Fasti, specifically the description of the Earth that occurs within the episode of the Vestalia (Fast. 6.249–468). Kelly highlights the way in which that description of Earth (in which Earth is compared to the armillary sphere invented by Archimedes) and the framing description of the temple of Vesta (in which the round temple-form imitates a flat Earth topped with a heavenly dome) draw on two different models of the universe’s structure. The simultaneous presentation of the two contrasting models is another case of Ovid purposefully not choosing a single reality, which puts him at odds with Plato. The Phaedo is discussed, as “the only concrete account of a replica of the cosmos prior to Aratus” (p. 82).
Chapter 6 (“Pythagoras: The Early Lives”) turns to the most-discussed passage of philosophical material in Ovid’s corpus, the speech of Pythagoras at Met. 15.75–478. Kelly’s contribution to our understanding is attention to the Platonic dimensions of theories of the soul, its immortality, and its transmigration (developed across the corpus; Meno, Phaedrus, and Timaeus form the core of the discussion in this chapter). The final section considers Pythagoras’ claim that “everything flows” (cuncta fluunt, Met. 15.178), a principle attributed to Heraclitus, but one that Kelly shows to be constructed in significant ways by Plato.
Chapter 7 (“The Philosophy of Desire”) turns to Ovid’s love poetry, particularly the Ars Amatoria as a riff on the ἐρωτικὴ τέχνη, a genre traceable back to Plato and the Phaedrus. Two additional Ovidian texts are then discussed in connection to the Phaedrus: the story of Dawn and Tithonus in Amores 1.13 (via the figure of the cicada) and the story of Narcissus in Met. 3 (via the role of sight in creating desire for the beloved). Finally, Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium is paired with the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Met. 4.
Chapter 8 (“The Exile of Philosophy”) marks the last of the body chapters. In the exilic poetry, Ovid’s very status as exile places him in the position of philosopher. The primary focus is on passages in the Tristia and Ibis that reference Socrates. Discussion of the Ibis then continues with an argument that Callimachus, in his Ibis of which almost nothing is known beyond what Ovid tells us, likely engaged with the Phaedrus and its myth of Theuth and mediated Ovid’s engagement with the theme of writing and memory—potent in works that foreground the dislocation of poet from audience. Kelly then brings in the Platonic Epistles to show that both letter writers draw attention to the constructedness of the textual reality and the ease with which the text can be destroyed.
There are several weaknesses in this chapter that pertain to broader method. The first is a matter of the presentation of another scholar’s argument. On page 155, Kelly is comparing Ovid’s expressed wishes that he had burned some of his work (specifical the Ars Amatoria at Tr. 5.12.67–68, but Tr. 1.7.27–40 about the Metaphorphoses is also in the mix) to Plato’s Second Epistle and its injunction to the reader to burn it after reading. In an effort to show that Ovid’s main model for this motif was Plato’s letter and not (as often assumed) the Vergilian biographical tradition, Kelly cites Andrew Laird’s argument that Tristia 1.7.27–40 provided the inspiration for the VSD’s anecdote that the dying Vergil wanted the Aeneid burned.[4] In summarizing Laird’s argument, Kelly provides the following quote: “‘But it is obvious … that Ovid’s conceit of burning the Metamorphoses was what prompted the report that Virgil wanted to “cremate” the Aeneid’ [ellipsis in the original].” No citation accompanies this quotation, but in Laird’s text the following sentence can be found on page 41: “There are grounds for giving serious consideration to the possibility that Ovid’s conceit of burning the Metamorphoses was what ultimately prompted the earliest testimony we have that Virgil wanted to “cremate” the Aeneid [emphasis added].” Whether or not one is persuaded by the parallels Laird draws, he is more cautious than Kelly represents. In fact, I did not find the phrase “it is obvious” anywhere in Laird’s chapter.
The above also exemplifies the second weakness: a thinness of references to support certain interpretations, including a reliance at times on a single scholarly reading. For instance, the discussion of the Ibis that makes up a substantial portion of Chapter 8 (pp. 147–53), where Kelly connects Ovid’s poem to the Phaedrus myth of Theuth’s invention of writing and argues that Callimachus played a key mediating role, largely re-presents the more nuanced analysis of Hawkins.[5]
Chapter 9 (“The Afterlife of Ovid and Plato”), an epilogue, offers a very brief look ahead to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The case of a manuscript from Tours that contains Calcidius’ Latin commentary on the Timaeus alongside the almost-complete works of Ovid offers a justification as compelling as those given in the Introduction for studying these two authors together.
An Ovidian philosophy as it emerges from this study is one concerned with obliterating conventional binaries and denying singular meanings, in favor of a text that forces a confrontation with competing understandings of the world. A view of Ovid’s works as sites of unstable meaning does not mark a significant departure from dominant approaches to this poetry, and the reframing of intertextuality through the concept of opera aperta and other more transient metaphors does not always add much,[6] but the spotlight on Platonic texts reveals another layer to this most intertextual of poets. The book’s strength lies in chasing down many varied strands of philosophical thought, and for this reason it will provide a resource to scholars interested in the reception of Platonic ideas and the influence of philosophical traditions on Greek and Latin poets.
Notes
[1] Viewable as Figure 1 in Julie Van Peteghem, Italian Readers of Ovid from the Origins to Petrarch (Brill, 2020), 4.
[2] Katharina Volk and Gareth D. Williams (eds.), Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2021).
[3] Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta: ‘The Open Work’ (Harvard University Press, 1989).
[4] Andrew Laird, “Fashioning the poet: biography, pseudepigraphy and textual criticism,” in The Ancient Lives of Virgil: Literary and Historical Studies, edd. A. Powell and P. Hardie (The Classical Press of Wales, 2017), 29–49.
[5] Tom Hawkins, Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 51–62.
[6] E.g. the term “rhizomatic,” conspicuously introduced on p. 2 but used only once (p. 95) to characterize Ovidian intertextuality. The description of the beginning of the Metamorphoses as “intertextual chaos” makes a nice phrase within a chapter titled “Chaos and Creation,” but how this represents something distinct from the poetics of other Roman Callimacheans, who also weave dense and sometimes contradictory allusions, is not addressed.