Love without Elegy: The Remedia amoris and the Logic of a Genre

Abstract

At a prominent point in the middle of the Remedia amoris, Ovid momentarily interrupts his series of therapeutic lessons to make room for a statement of poetics. Such statements are customary in the register of literary polemics; some evil-minded people had criticized Ovid for his daring teachings in the Ars amatoria, and the polemic tradition (of Callimachean origin) requires that the poet, in justifying the literary techniques he has chosen, also attack the envy of his critics (v. 389 livor) and vaunt his own title of author, indeed hope for ever greater successes. Ovid's declaration of principles is inspired by the same general rule that Horace too, in his Ars poetica (v. 86), had thought important: Descriptas seruare uices operumque colores-respect for the distinctions among the various literary genres and the appropriate use of expressive and stylistic devices. This is a simplified form of the theory of the prepon: Every genre has its own competence, each should do its own job. For the wrath of Achilles there is the solemn hexameter of Homer, for the loves of Cydippe the elegiac distich of Callimachus, never has stern Andromache played the part of the courtesan Thais. Thais is the character who symbolizes Ovid's poetry (the Amores, the Ars, and now the Remedia). Ovid has made no mistake; the Musa proterva who sings in distichs the free loves of women like Thais is a perfect image for his elegiac intention. If a text's intention is considered as an active tension between vir-