Spicilegia Ovidiana

Abstract

These few inconsequent notes have no excuse but the amusement their composition gave to the author. If they are of interest to a handful of readers the frivolous use in wartime of some horae subsecivae may be justified.How fond Ovid is of using res in a personal sense! Augustus is addressed (Ars am. 1. 213) as pulcherrime rerum and Heracles (Her. 9. 107) as maxime rerum. In Fast. 1. 103 Chaos says somewhat comically referring to himself sum res prisca: ‘I'm an old thing’. Indeed Ovid is much given to the use of substantives with unusual meanings. Here are some examples: alea grandis inest (Ars am. 1. 376) ‘there is great danger’; discrimen=the parting of the hair (Ars am. 2. 303); color=a good complexion (cui color est, umero saepe patente cubet, Ars am. 2. 504. Did he borrow this from Vergil's nimium tie crede colori?). Elsewhere Ovid uses color=style; cf. Trist. 1. 1. 61, ipso noscere colore’, ‘your very style will bring you recognition’. In Ars am. 3. 172 a woman is asked quis furor est census corpore ferre suos, ‘why she wears her fortune on her back’—an expression of which he may have been reminded by Propertius’ matrona incedit census induta nepotum (3. 13. 11). What is the Latin for ‘dimples’? Ovid uses lacunae (Ars am. 3. 283 parvaeque utrimque lacunae), whereas Martial borrows the Greek word γɛλασīνοι (Mart. 7. 25. 6 nec grata est facies cui gelasinus abest). No doubt ‘inspiration’ might be expressed in Latin in many ways; Ovid uses pectus—aspicies quantum dederis mihi pectoris, he cries to Augustus at Trist. 2. 561. There seems at first sight little connexion between pecten and elegiac verse; yet at Fast. 2. 121 Ovid writes canimus… alterno pectine=‘I write in elegiacs’. In Fast. 5. 270 there occurs the word nebulae in the sense of the scum on wine—a use not noticed in Lewis and Short. Fatum=the evil genius (Fast. 5. 389 Troiae duo fata, of Heracles and Achilles) is not specifically Ovidian, for Cicero can write (pro Sest. § 93) duo ilia reipublicae paene fata, Gabinium et Pisonem.