The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ovid · a book of elegies in three books · forty-nine poems in elegiac couplets on the usual numbering, the second edition, the only one that survives · in Ovid’s Latin, with Green’s The Erotic Poems (1982) for sense and notes, and Lee’s close version (1968) and Marlowe’s All Ovids Elegies as English context
Mode
Book of love elegies; programmatic poems, diptychs, a lament, comedies of the lover’s life, set in one sequence
Mythos
Cupid the thief of a foot; the lover as soldier; the poet’s survival in his verse; Corinna as a name the book declines to make a myth
Phase
From Cupid’s theft of a foot and the turn from epic, through the affair, the lie, the blackmail and the abortion, to the lament for Tibullus, the renunciation and the farewell to elegy
Presentation
Poem; three books of fifteen, nineteen and fifteen elegies on the usual numbering, forty-nine in all, in elegiac couplets, under a prefatory epigram
Register
From the comedy of impotence and the parrot’s funeral to the noon of 1.5 and the grave lament for Tibullus; wit throughout
Scale
One lover, one city and one genre, entered one situation at a time
Governing Proposition
A young poet takes up the love elegy of Gallus, Tibullus and Propertius, swears devotion to one mistress called Corinna, and in forty-nine poems shows the devotion as a performance: the lover lies, blackmails, fails and grieves in couplets that know exactly what they are doing. The wager of the book is that in this genre passion is a rhetoric and the lover a role, and that the poet who exposes the role can still win from it the one thing elegy promised, survival in the verse.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Qui modo Nasonis fueramus quinque libelli, / tres sumus”
We who were lately Naso’s five little books are now three. The book speaks first, before any poem, and says what it is. A first edition in five books once stood and is lost; on Ovid’s own word he cut it, and the three books that remain are the work as its maker left it, not a remnant. They hold forty-nine poems on the usual numbering, fifteen, nineteen and fifteen, all in elegiac couplets; some editors divide a few of them, 2.9 and 3.11 among them, so that counts of fifty to fifty-two occur. The writing began about the mid 20s BC, and it was Ovid’s first work. When the second edition was made is unsettled, somewhere between about 16 BC and the turn of the era.
The first poem opens as an epic: “Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam”, arms and violent wars, in the weighty measure. Then Cupid is said to have laughed and stolen one foot, risisse and unum surripuisse pedem. A hexameter with a foot taken is the pentameter, and the hexameter and the pentameter together are the elegiac couplet. The theft turns hexameter epic into elegy. It is a small myth of the poet’s vocation, and the book bears it to the end: the limping second line of every couplet is the sign that love has conquered epic.
The metre stays the subject. In 2.1 the poet has begun a war of the Giants against the gods, and abandons it. In 3.1 Elegy and Tragedy, personified, contend for him. In 3.15 he takes leave of the metre as of the love. These poems, with 1.1 and the close of the first book in 1.15, stand at the joints of the sequence and set and close its terms. Between them the couplet does the work the frame describes. The pentameter regularly closes on a word of two syllables; balance and antithesis are set within the couplet and across it; and the clinching turn of each argument is placed at the line’s end, so that the closure of the couplet is the clinch, poem after poem, with a speed and a lightness that Propertius, for all his power, does not have.
Movement II
“Aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat horam”
It was hot, and the day had passed its middle hour. The fifth poem of the first book is a noon. The light is half-shuttered, the scene is still, and then “ecce, Corinna venit”: look, Corinna comes. The poem is a model of narrative compression, a scene of sensual stillness that later love poetry kept returning to; Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed” stands behind it. It is one of the few places where the book lets height stand, and like the others it is soon framed by the wit around it.
Corinna is a name. The pseudonym stands in a line, after Catullus’ Lesbia, Tibullus’ Delia and Propertius’ Cynthia, and it names the genre’s first requirement, one mistress. The elegy that Ovid inherited from Gallus, Tibullus and Propertius was twenty or thirty years old, and its premise was the lover’s exclusive and ruinous devotion to her. The book keeps the name and declines to make it an archetype. Whether Corinna is one woman, several or none is a question it leaves open, and that refusal is part of its point: the mistress is the occasion of the poem, and the poem is the lover’s performance.
In 1.13 the lover pleads with the Dawn, in an argument of mounting accusation. At its centre is the line “lente currite, noctis equi”
Run slowly, horses of the night. Marlowe’s Faustus would take the words into the hour of his damnation. The plea is a lover’s, and the poem builds it as a case, charge upon charge. Such heights come four or five times in forty-nine poems: here, the noon of 1.5, the close of 1.15 and the lament for Tibullus. Each is undercut or framed by irony soon after, because the register of the book is wit.
Movement III
“Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido”
Every lover is a soldier, and Cupid has his camp. The ninth poem of the first book makes the lover a type that later literature inherits. The city around him is the field of his campaign. There are the door-keeper and the guardian, the lover shut out at the door, the maids, money and the bawd (1.8); there are the races (3.2), the porticoes and the theatres, and a triumph imagined (1.2). Love in this Rome is a game of access, money, guardians and timing, and the poem is itself a move in it.
The lover of the genre swore he loved one woman. This one confesses in 2.4 that he loves all women alike. In 2.7 Corinna has accused him of an affair with her maid, Cypassis, and he answers with a perfect speech of injured innocence. In 2.8 he writes to Cypassis herself. The affair was real, the speech was perjury, and the same eloquence now turns to blackmail. The two poems cannot be parted: the first alone is a lover’s complaint, the second alone is a cynic’s note, and together they are the joke and the disclosure at once. The poet who swears fidelity is the man most fluent in the lie, and the book shows him at it.
Not every poem carries so much. The book is a sequence of single situations, each pressed to its witty turn, and many could change places or go: another complaint against a guardian, a ring that wishes it were its owner’s finger (2.15). Within a poem the habit is the run of exempla, Atalanta, Andromache, Ariadne, Leda, Danae, summoned as ornament and argument and often with a smile at their use, and cleverness at times carries a poem past its point. The middle of Book 2 uses the form competently without adding to what it knows. The parrot’s death in 2.6 shows the same habit at its best: it parodies the funeral lament and Catullus at once, with perfect tact.
Movement IV
2.13 and 2.14 are the poems of Corinna’s abortion. Here a real danger and a real body break through the play. The poems are still elegies, in the same couplet and the same voice; whether they crack the play or extend it is one of the questions the book leaves open on return. They hold within its law as the place where the performance meets a cost. They also hold the body as the book holds it everywhere: in sex, in illness, in the abortion, and in the failure of 3.7.
3.7 is the comedy of impotence. The lover has failed in bed, and makes a poem of it. It is the book’s claim, that anything can be made into verse, tested at its most absurd, and the claim holds: the same instrument that turned the noon of 1.5 to stillness turns this to farce. The genre’s gestures are all kept, the devotion, the complaint, the plea, and their sincerity drained, so that elegy is shown as an art of performance by a lover who is also, and first, a poet. The wit that serves the lover exposes him, and here it exposes him entire.
3.9 is the lament for Tibullus, the book’s one sustained grave poem. Elegy is turned to its oldest use, the mourning of the dead, and the poet mourns one of the masters of his own genre. The instrument that played the farce of 3.7 is held grave. It ends in the consolation of poetic survival. That is the claim 1.15 made for Ovid himself, and it is the one the whole book stakes. The farthest poems of the sequence, the lament and the comedy of impotence, obey one law: every situation is an occasion for the poet, and death is one of them.
Movement V
The first book closes with the poet’s claim on the future: “vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit”
I shall live, and a great part of me will survive. It is the proudest close in the book, and the lament for Tibullus answers it two books later. In 3.11 the lover renounces his mistress and cannot quite do it. The divided will is stated in one line: “odero, si potero; si non, invitus amabo”
I will hate, if I can; if not, I will love against my will. The renunciation turns within the line, hate in its first half and love in its second, and the clinch is the will against itself.
The last poem takes leave of the genre: “Quaere novum vatem, tenerorum mater Amorum”
Seek a new poet, mother of the tender Loves. The farewell to the metre is a farewell to the love, as the theft of a foot in the first poem was the love’s beginning. No major Roman elegist followed. The book changed what Latin love elegy could be, and in effect closed it. The stake was a young poet’s first book, playing a fashionable game with more daring than its masters, under a regime whose laws on adultery the book brushes against; the cost to Ovid came later, and through the Ars, not here.
The text of the three books survives whole. It came down through Carolingian and later medieval manuscripts, was taught in the medieval schools, passed into the Latin and vernacular love lyric, was put whole into English by Marlowe and stood behind the Ovidian elegy of the 1590s and Donne’s, and later behind Goethe’s Roman Elegies. It has been read less than the Metamorphoses, and for long stretches beside it and the Ars rather than for itself; its renewed critical life is largely of the last half century. 3.5, the dream of the heifer, is widely held spurious, and it is named here as transmitted. The book promised the poet a great part of himself would survive, and in the three books he cut from five, it has.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds much that could go. The book is a sequence of single situations, each pressed to a witty turn, and many are interchangeable: another poem at the door-keeper’s post, a further complaint against a guardian, a ring that wishes to be its owner’s finger (2.15). Within a poem the habit is the run of exempla, and a mythological instance can often be dropped without loss of the point. The architecture carries the necessity. The prefatory epigram says the poet cut five books to three; programmatic poems set and close the terms (1.1, 1.15, 2.1, 3.1, 3.15); and the Cypassis diptych (2.7, 2.8) cannot be parted without losing both the joke and the disclosure. Necessity lives in the frame and the pairs, not in the run of the poems, and clears the cap by a tenth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What the book discloses can be stated: the elegiac lover is a role and his passion a rhetoric; the poet who swears fidelity is the man most fluent in the lie; love in the city is a game of access, money, guardians and timing, in which the poem is itself a move. The Cypassis diptych enacts it, 2.7 a perfect speech of injured innocence that 2.8 reveals as perjury and turns to blackmail. In 2.13 and 2.14 a real danger and a real body break through the play, and 3.11 states the divided will exactly. Held below the summit because the disclosure is chiefly of a convention’s falseness, delivered as wit: the women are seen almost wholly as occasions, and what is revealed is a manner more than a meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The register is wit, and the book rarely aims at height. Where it rises, the height is real: the noon of 1.5, heat and half-shuttered light and then ecce, Corinna venit, a sensual stillness that later love poetry kept returning to; the plea to the Dawn in 1.13, whose lente currite, noctis equi Marlowe’s Faustus took into the hour of his damnation; the lament for Tibullus in 3.9, the book’s one sustained grave poem; and the proud close of 1.15. Those are four or five summits in forty-nine poems, and irony undercuts or frames each one soon after. Height is occasional and its frequency low, and the axis weighs the two together; it stands two tenths below the Universal Minimum.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Myth is everywhere in the book and almost nowhere load-bearing. The exempla, Atalanta, Andromache, Ariadne, Leda and Danae, are summoned as ornament and argument, often with a smile at their use. The best built figure is Cupid the thief of 1.1, who is said to have laughed and stolen one foot from the verse, and so turns hexameter epic into elegy: a small myth of the poet’s vocation, and it does bear the book. The other built pattern is the soldier-lover of 1.9, a type that later literature inherits. The lover shut out at the door, and Elegy personified in 3.1, are conventions handled, not founded. Corinna is a name, not an archetype; the book declines to make her one, and the refusal is part of its point.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is Gallus, Tibullus and Propertius: a genre twenty or thirty years old, whose premise was the lover’s exclusive and ruinous devotion to one mistress. Ovid turns it on itself. His lover confesses that he loves all women alike (2.4), sleeps with the maid and lies about it (2.7, 2.8), fails in bed (3.7), and makes the metre the subject of the first poem. The gestures of the genre are kept and their sincerity drained, so that elegy is shown as an art of performance. The turn is wide and lasting. The stake was real but bounded: a young poet’s first book, playing a fashionable game with more daring than its masters, under a regime whose laws on adultery the book brushes against.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The elegiac couplet is not a container here but a subject: 1.1 makes the limping pentameter the sign of love’s conquest of epic, 2.1 and 3.1 stage the choice of metre as the choice of a life, and 3.15 takes leave of the metre as of the love. The knowledge that passion in this genre is formal performance is carried by a couplet whose closure enacts the clinch of each argument: the end of the pentameter delivers the turn, poem after poem. The sequence carries knowledge too, in the diptychs and in the place of 3.9 among the late poems. Held off the top because much of the middle of Book 2 uses the form competently without adding to what it knows, and the single-situation elegy repeats one shape.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Return yields at two levels. Formally, the play with Propertius and Tibullus, and with Ovid’s own later works, keeps opening under close reading. Semantically, the question of sincerity stays open: whether the book is parody, or a deeper statement that all love speech is performance; whether Corinna is one woman, several or none; whether 2.13 and 2.14 crack the play or extend it. The evidence of two thousand years of rereading is real but uneven. For long stretches the Amores was read beside the Metamorphoses and the Ars rather than for itself, and its renewed critical life is largely of the last half century. The well is deep at the sentence and in the intertext, shallower in the human matter.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is Latin poetry of the Augustan age, and within it love elegy. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the genre, which makes its own premise the object of its wit, and a handling of the couplet that set the standard of Latin elegiac verse for the poets after: Ovid’s own later work, the epigrammatists of the Silver age, the medieval Latin lyric. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the medieval schools read the Amores, and its figures pass into the Latin and vernacular love lyric; Marlowe put the whole into English, and the Ovidian elegy of the 1590s followed, Donne’s above all, with 1.5 behind “To His Mistress Going to Bed”; later came Goethe’s Roman Elegies. Held at 8.0 because the reach passes mostly through the poet’s larger works, and the book ended its genre in Rome more than it redirected the field.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival over two millennia is demonstrated. The three-book edition survives whole. The five-book first edition is lost, but by the author’s own revision, as the prefatory epigram says, and the loss is not the work’s. The doubtful 3.5 and the usual interpolations are a small charge on form. The book has been copied and read without break from the Carolingian age, taught in the medieval schools, translated in the Renaissance and studied ever since. It has been read less than the Metamorphoses, at times eclipsed by it or held in suspicion for its matter, and in the modern age chiefly in the Latin classroom and the academy, which holds it below the top of the axis. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment beyond what the book makes into matter: Rome, its races and its festivals.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on the Latin. The command of the elegiac couplet is as complete as any in the language: the pentameter regularly closing on a disyllable, balance and antithesis set within and across the couplet, the clinching turn placed at the line’s end, and a speed and lightness that Propertius, for all his power, does not have. 1.5 is a model of narrative compression; 1.13 builds an argument of mounting accusation; 2.6 parodies the funeral lament and Catullus at once, with perfect tact; 3.9 holds the same instrument grave. Held below the top on three charges: the run of exempla, where cleverness carries a poem past its point; a sameness of procedure across the forty-nine; and the fluency itself, which at times makes the couplet a machine for antithesis, a fault Quintilian named in Ovid generally.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the whole: every situation is the occasion for a performance by a lover who is also, and first, a poet, and the wit that serves the lover also exposes him. The two most distant poems obey it. The lament for Tibullus (3.9) is elegy turned to its oldest use, and it ends in the consolation of poetic survival that 1.15 claims for Ovid himself; the comedy of impotence (3.7) tests the same claim, to make anything into verse, at its most absurd. The abortion poems hold within the law too, as the place where the performance meets a cost. Held at 8.2 because the range, wider than it first appears, is the range of a single genre and a single voice, and narrowness of register is not coherence.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged as a book of elegies. It holds erotic consciousness fully; the body, in sex, illness, abortion and impotence; the city of Rome, its races (3.2), porticoes and theatres, and a triumph imagined (1.2); slavery, in the door-keeper and the maids; money and the bawd (1.8); the poet’s vocation and its fame (1.15); religion, in the festival of Juno at Falerii (3.13); death, in the parrot and in Tibullus. One wit and one situation join them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage: everything enters as an occasion for the lover, the state is glimpsed only in the triumph and the soldier’s metaphor, history and the family across time hardly appear, and the natural order is decoration. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, with The Made at 8.8 and The Living Form at 8.3. A text that survives whole in the edition its maker cut and has been copied and taught without break since the Carolingian age; a command of the elegiac couplet as complete as any in Latin; and a form that is its own subject, the limping pentameter standing for love’s conquest of epic and the choice of metre staged as the choice of a life.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8, held by the vantage of a book of elegies: everything enters as an occasion for the lover, the state is glimpsed only in a triumph and a metaphor, and history and the family across time hardly appear. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.3, below the Universal Minimum: four or five real summits, the noon of 1.5, the Dawn of 1.13, the close of 1.15 and the lament for Tibullus, each soon undercut or framed by the wit that is the book’s register.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.8, The Living Form at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.3 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.3, two tenths below 7.5, with The Archetypal Deep meeting it exactly at 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.0, from a sum of 95.4, at the foot of the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading of the Amores in Ovid’s Latin: the second edition in three books, the only edition that survives, scored as one book of elegies in the order transmitted, under its prefatory epigram, every poem included. Forty-nine poems on the usual numbering; where editors divide a poem the count rises as high as fifty-two, and nothing here turns on the division. 3.5, the dream of the heifer, is widely held spurious; it is named as transmitted and weighed lightly either way. No text of the poem was in hand to be measured by script, and nothing on this page is counted from one. The Latin is quoted only where its words are certain, and citations are by book and poem, without line numbers. Every score is judged on the Latin. Translations · Peter Green’s The Erotic Poems (Penguin, 1982), for sense and for its notes; Guy Lee’s close version (1968) and Marlowe’s All Ovids Elegies as English context. No translation is quoted. English set after a Latin phrase is the page’s own literal gloss, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the poem. Citations are by book and poem of the Latin.