Ovid’s Amores 2.8: A Genuine Offence

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In this article, I provide a close examination of Ovid’s Amores 2.8 that focuses on how the poet-lover’s use of persuasory rhetoric enables him to bully and silence the subaltern Cypassis. My discussion challenges Patricia Watson’s claim (in “Ovid Amores 2.7 and 8: The Disingenuous Defence”) that this poem has comparably less forensic qualities and rhetorical elements than its counterpart (2.7). I argue that forensic and rhetorical elements permeate the text and become increasingly blatant as the poem proceeds. By employing declamatory and oratorical techniques, the poet-lover weaponises his rhetorical education, a privilege afforded to him by his status as an elite Roman male, in order to intimidate, manipulate, and ultimately blackmail Cypassis, the uneducated, defenceless, and mute subaltern. I suggest that it is a mischaracterisation to refer to this approach as a ‘seduction’; it is a calculated exertion of power that enacts gendered violence.