Ovid and ancient literary history

Abstract

Poets are fascinated by literary history, above all by their own place in it. In that respect Ovid is like his Roman predecessors and contemporaries, only more so: his references to other writers, and to his work in relation to theirs, are more numerous than those of any other Roman poet. To a degree this might be expected given the length of Ovid’s poetic career - more than forty years, from roughly the mid-20s bc to the late teens of the first century ad - and the variety of poetic forms he cultivated, forms as diverse as love elegy and tragedy, mock-didactic and epic-scale narrative, epistles of mythological heroines and letters from exile. But Ovid’s literary-historical references do more than track the stages of his literary career, as is arguably the case with Horace, his nearest rival in longevity and generic versatility. By comparison Ovid’s outlook is both more wide-ranging and more fluid. Whatever the form with which Ovid is engaged, his eye takes in the full sweep of Greco-Roman poetry, and the story he tells about his work is always being rewritten. If ‘literary history’ connotes a stable record of writers’ careers and of their relations to one another, Ovid is an anti-historian, who delights in reshuffling the data and producing constantly new accounts. For Ovid literary history is a species of rhetoric, a way of showing how a thing can be made to look depending on the perspective adopted or the effect desired.