Ovid and the Amores: a young poet's gallant war

Publius Ovidius Naso was born at Sulmona in 43 BC and was the last of the great Latin elegists. The Amores, his first work, have reached us in a second edition in three books: an epigram placed at the head of the collection explains that there were originally five books and that the author has reduced them. At the centre is Corinna, a woman about whom we know nothing and who, according to many scholars, may never have existed.

A playful opening

The first poem opens with a witty device: the poet was preparing to write an epic in hexameters, but Cupid stole a foot from his line, turning the hexameter into a pentameter and forcing him into elegy. The metrical joke announces at once the tone of the collection. Ovid knows the conventions of Tibullus and Propertius perfectly and takes them up with irony, exposing the artifice of the genre.

Corinna first appears on a summer afternoon, in the half-light of a room with the shutters ajar, in a scene of the first book described with sensual grace. But Ovid's lover is not Propertius's desperate prisoner: he is a self-aware seducer, who can even confess to loving two women at the same time or to being attracted by all of them, fair or dark, learned or simple.

Militat omnis amans

The ninth poem of the first book develops a comparison with almost legal rigour: «Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido», every lover is a soldier and Cupid has his camp. Like the soldier, the lover keeps watch at night, endures the cold, faces long marches, spies on the enemy and besieges doors. The militia amoris, already present in earlier elegists, here becomes a complete system.

The comparison is not merely a game. In a Rome that celebrated military virtues and that under Augustus sought to restore traditional morality, presenting seduction as an enterprise equal to war meant distancing oneself, elegantly, from official values. Ovid does not openly attack power, but he empties its language with a smile.

Between irony and melancholy

The Amores also contain poems of a different tone. In one elegy the poet mourns the death of Corinna's parrot, echoing the sparrow of Lesbia sung by Catullus; in another he reproaches his beloved for having undergone an abortion, a delicate subject that reveals the tensions of Roman private life; in yet another he laments the death of Tibullus, celebrating poetry as a form of immortality.

The last poem of the third book is a farewell: Ovid takes leave of elegiac Venus and announces a more demanding work. His career would continue with the Heroides, imaginary letters from mythical heroines to their distant lovers, with the didactic poems on love and finally with the Metamorphoses, the great poem of transformations in which the loves of gods and mortals fill a great many pages.

With the Amores Latin elegy reaches both its peak and its parody. The language of passion becomes a repertoire to be handled with detachment, and for that very reason easy to hand on. In the Middle Ages, when Ovid was read and commented on in every school, many of these motifs passed into the poetry of clerics and into vernacular lyric.