Ovid and the discourses of love

Abstract

All poets speak in quotations. In the decades immediately before Ovid wrote his love poetry, Propertius and Tibullus (and Gallus and Catullus before them) developed an elegiac genre in which the speaker is enslaved to a mistress, and chooses a life of decadence and devotion rather than civic and military success. The poems beseech and reproach the beloved, show her off to friends, and occasionally celebrate her and the relationship, rhetorically laying out in public the life of a young man in Augustan Rome: all this through a poetics which is clever, difficult, artistic, and stylized. Then Ovid did it again - differently. Much of Ovid’s amatory work is infused with an aesthetics of repetition: of material, of style, of himself, and in his characters. All lovers speak in quotations. This precept of the modern erotodidact Roland Barthes was implicitly foreshadowed by Ovid when he outrageously reminds us that militat omnis amans (‘every lover is a soldier’, Am . 1.9.1): that is, every lover enters into a discourse of erotic imagery in dialogue and in conflict with his society, literary, social, and political. Ovid’s amatory works put private life on display – or rather, show us how private life is always already on display, a fiction played out for real, a reality fantasized. The discourses of love, the erotic as discourse, discourse as erotic – these things are at issue throughout the Ovidian corpus: in this chapter, I shall confine the discussion to the Amores , the Ars amatoria , and the Remedia amoris .