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    The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid's Ibis
    The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid's Ibis
    The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid's Ibis
    Ebook305 pages4 hours

    The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid's Ibis

    By Gareth D. Williams

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    A radical reassessment of Ovid's curse poem, Ibis, asserting its central place in his poetry of exile.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCambridge Philological Society
    Release dateAug 30, 2020
    ISBN9781913701253
    The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid's Ibis

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      The Curse of Exile - Gareth D. Williams

      PREFACE

      This study owes many debts. Neil Hopkinson, James E. G. Zetzel and Sergio Casali patiently read and commented thoroughly on various drafts; David Langslow generously supplied bibliographical information on medical matters raised in the fifth chapter; Stephen Hinds offered many acute suggestions to improve the work when it was in its penultimate form; Philip Hardie and Stephen Oakley gave much welcome advice, editorial and otherwise; at a late stage John Henderson forced me to reflect more carefully on numerous questions; and Susan Moore expertly prepared the text for publication, removing many imperfections in the process. To all I am grateful; but my greatest debt is to Byron Harries, who offered invaluable encouragement and assistance at every stage in the project’s development. This study was facilitated by a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in the Humanities awarded in 1990; a fellowship from the Columbia University Council for Research in the Humanities hastened its completion; and Columbia University generously contributed to the costs of publication.

      The text of the Ibis used in this study is that of La Penna (1957). In the notes accompanying each chapter the following are cited by author’s name only: J. André (1963); R. Ellis (1881); A. La Penna (1957); R. Pfeiffer (1949–53); and L. Watson (1991).

      Introduction

      Ovid’s Ibis is one of those poems – the Astronomica of Manilius is another – which have for long dictated the nature of their readers’ responses and confined them within a narrow spectrum. This is in at least one respect surprising, as the Ibis combines the mythical range and diversity of the Metamorphoses with the highly individualized, injured persona of the exile poetry, of which it forms a notable but neglected part, and contrives to unify the whole in a tightly controlled and subtle overall scheme which has no parallel in Latin literature. This last point may be part of the trouble: in the absence of Roman parallels, and lacking (as yet) the opportunity for comparison with more than a few fragmentary Hellenistic precedents, the Ibis has largely trained and conditioned its own readers, and – even though it is a major composition of Ovid’s later years – has found few willing to submit themselves to the effort. The very consistency of critics’ responses over five centuries, responses which explained so much while at the same time asking so little, itself calls for comment and explanation. For the purpose for which they used the Ibis is one to which, after all, the poem conveniently lends itself; and as they felt so much at home among its hidden allusions and bewildering obscurities, they were not, for the most part, inclined to ask how such a strange and improbable composition could have come into being in the circumstances it purports to describe.

      Take, to begin with, Robinson Ellis, who gives the impression of relishing the puzzles which Ovid sets before him. In the preface to his 1881 edition of Ovid’s Ibis, he claims not only to have consulted better manuscripts than any previous editor and to have made use of scholia which his predecessors had either never seen or scarcely read, but also to have shed fresh light on certain of the obscurities which abound in the curse-catalogue: ‘Ex Lycophrone … Phoenodamanteos leones u. 383 reposui, ex Apollonio Rhodio Aphidantum u. 327, ex Hygino et Parthenio Teleique u. 434, ex Homero Panthoides u. 447, ex Etymologico Magno Dexionesque u. 470, … ex Callimacho in Isidis u. 621.’¹ Through restorations of this sort Ellis makes his own contribution to a learned industry which had engaged the foremost scholars of previous generations, among them Politian, Tumebus, Nicolaus Heinsius and Joseph Scaliger. Ellis self-consciously locates himself in this distinguished tradition, for his preface amounts to a historical survey of scholarship on the Ibis and an assertion of his own place in the order of luminaries who had previously applied their learning to the poem’s mysteries. Ellis is implicitly engaged in a form of scholarly competition with his predecessors, just as they had contended with each other in trying to decipher Ovid’s obscurities. Some of those ambages inevitably defeated Ellis; but even when he could not claim to have solved a problem, he still competed for honours in the arena of conjecture: ‘De locis quos Salvagnius interpretari alium posse ratus est neminem 287, 310, 621–624 divinare saltem aliquid, si non decernere, licuit.’²

      Ellis held in the highest regard the work of Salvagnius, or Denis de Boissieu de Salvaing (1600–83), who published his Commentationes in Ibin in 1661.³ In his preface Salvagnius had asserted that an explanation of lines 287, 310 and 621–4 could be provided only ‘ab illis scriptoribus qui temporis injuria amissi triste nobis et acerbum sui desiderium reliquerunt’.⁴ He was wrong. Since his time each of the couplets has been satisfactorily explained, partly through the efforts of Ellis.⁵ But even though Ellis could reasonably claim to have shed new light on these and other obscurities in the Ibis, the nature and function of scholarship on the poem had changed little in the two centuries separating him from Salvagnius; Ellis engages in the hunt for the usual quarry. In his preface Salvagnius had likened the task of wrestling with Ovid’s obscurities to entering an Olympic contest (‘plurimi … in hoc poëmatio, tanquam in Olympico stadio, non citra pulveris tactum desudarunt’);⁶ he goes on to list (like Ellis) the many eminent scholars who had taken up the challenge before him and had sweated in the process, from Politian to Micyllus, Calderinus to Lipsius, Ascensius to Tumebus and the younger Scaliger;⁷ the task of the succeeding generation will indeed be superhuman, since it is evident that ‘multos huic poëmatio manus admovisse, nonnulla tamen in eo superesse, quibus enodandis Oedipo vel Sibylla sit opus’.⁸ By stressing the difficulty and remoteness of the exercise in this way, Salvagnius not only enhances his own reputation as a scholar embarking on a formidable enterprise; he also constructs (or perpetuates) the myth of the Ibis as a work accessible only to a closed community of erudite scholars, as if Ovid had written the poem solely for the entertainment and sleuth-like proclivities of an exclusive group of readers, ancient or modern. That the Ibis has attracted such contestants over the centuries will help us to sharpen our own response to the poem in a modern context. Our understanding must take into account the interest consistently shown by a certain kind of critical intelligence, so that we can make that aspect of the poem’s appeal an integral part of a broader interpretation. But first let us resume for a moment our role as spectators of the Olympic contest among the learned.

      Ellis’ preface, which draws heavily on Salvagnius’ survey of older scholarship on the Ibis, reads much like an updated version of its model: Salvagnius now enters the roll of honour in Ellis’ review of past scholarship, with the elder Burman, Merkel and Riese representing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁹ Salvagnius, in his preface, is generous in his praise of earlier scholars’ efforts, but Ellis passes a more stringent judgement:

      Nihil Victorius, aliqua Turnebus ac Schottus, unum alterumque Iosephus Scaliger, ad has solvendas ambages contulit: non multa Sanctius, qui nimium sibi defuit in Commentario quem in Ibin edidit Salmanticae 1598, etsi primus videtur Astacidaeque in 515 restituisse.¹⁰

      Each scholar whose work Ellis appraises is judged by the same old criteria. By compiling what amounts to a register of achievement in this one field, Ellis conveys the impression that for generations of scholars the Ibis was a text of convenience – a poem which happened to cater for the predilections of a certain class of reader, and whose attraction lay almost exclusively in the crossword-like challenge which it posed. His judgement of the efforts of his forebears, such as that which he passes on Nicolaus Heinsius, barely disguises his own competitive instinct:

      … perpauca feliciter correxit [sc. Heinsius], nisi quod 391 Sex bis, 602 Orpheos, 502 Phalaeceae reduxit. Cetera aut dubia velut 189 reorum pro virorum, 434 Tereidesque, 508 Phryx tu venator, aut manifeste falsa, 225 palustribus ulvis, 366 Pisaeae foris, 418 quae tibi peior erit, 599 Meliti pro Anyti.¹¹

      Verdicts of this sort oblige Ellis in turn to show his own hand, to declare what he himself has contributed in the way of new insight into the catalogue’s mysteries, and so to stake his own claim to a place in the scholarly firmament. Hence the sample of proposed restorations which he goes on to give later in his preface¹² – a list which confirms his commitment to ‘traditional’ interpretatio and scholarly elucidation of the poem.

      Ellis’ preface gives way to prolegomena which, before his discussion of the MS tradition and its accompanying scholia, raise time-honoured questions. Who is Ibis? What had he done to provoke Ovid’s curse? What can be inferred from the Ovidian poem about the length, metre and (extra-)literary purpose of Callimachus’ Ἶβις? Who was Ἶβις? Ellis usefully surveys the opinions of past scholars on these and other issues, interestingly discusses the biology and habits of the ibis and its reputation in antiquity, and painstakingly surveys the range of sources which Ovid may have drawn on in compiling his curse-catalogue.¹³ But for all his innovations on these fronts, Ellis offers nothing that is fundamentally new or different from what Salvagnius had offered two centuries before. ‘Who is Ibis?’, asked Salvagnius, naming C. Julius Hyginus;¹⁴ Ellis disagrees,¹⁵ but the terms of the debate (‘Consider the candidates …’) have not changed since Salvagnius’ time. What led Ovid to curse? ‘Causa triplex ab ipsomet affertur’, writes Salvagnius, who then cites lines 11–22 in evidence;¹⁶ Ellis takes the same approach to the passage in constructing a more extensive profile of Ibis’ character and conduct.¹⁷ Who was Ἶβιςς? Apollonius of Rhodes; both Ellis and Salvagnius give credence to the myth of bitter rivalry between Apollonius and Callimachus.¹⁸ And yet while Ellis asks these traditional questions, he, like Salvagnius before him, offers nothing in the way of a creative response to the poem, being simply content to supply ingenious solutions to a succession of puzzles. That is their response, for they never pause to reflect on the assumptions underlying generations of scholarship on the Ibis. Can we be so sure that Ibis existed? When it comes to assessing Ovid’s personal and/or literary aims in the curse, is it really relevant to ask whether Apollonius was Callimachus’ target in the Ἶβις? As the likes of Ellis and Salvagnius went to work on the Ovidian catalogue, cutting away at the vast undergrowth of scribal error and confusion in the MS tradition, they failed to ponder what kind of impact Ovid’s ambages were likely to have made on their astonished target. A literalist approach to the Ibis envisages an enemy quaking at the terrifying prospects which await him. A.E. Housman would have none of it.

      In 1920 Housman wrote his last significant words on the Ibis after three decades of intermittent work on the poem.¹⁹ Perhaps partly stirred to action by the many imperfections which he found in Ellis’ text, Housman had published his own recension in J. P. Postgate’s Corpus Poetarum Latinorum (1894); but he later took it upon himself to open scholarly eyes on more than a purely textual front. In 1920 he shattered the complacency of past ages by asserting that Ibis was a figment of Ovid’s imagination.²⁰ At one stroke, the efforts of Ellis and his predecessors to identify Ovid’s enemy were rendered futile by Housman’s appeal to common sense; for who could deny that the imprecations in the catalogue can ‘neither be read nor written seriously’?²¹ Even if Housman’s claim is still disputed, those scholars who believe that Ibis existed can no longer simply assume as much: they now have to argue their case.²² But while Housman fundamentally challenged literalist attitudes to the Ibis on one front, he was less radical in other ways. As soon as Ibis is dismissed as a fiction, the poem is easy for Housman to explain away merely as a set-piece of vitriolic cursing followed by a self-indulgent show of learning;²³ he makes no attempt to explain or analyse the poem as the work of an intensely active imagination. All that Housman the scholar (as opposed to Housman the poet, who responded so differently to English poetry) found here was a technical exercise on which to practise his ingenuity, and the critic’s task remained for him what it had been for Salvagnius and Ellis: the restoration of the text and the elucidation of Ovid’s more arcane allusions. For all his innovative remarks on Ibis’ fictitiousness, Housman shared the interests and priorities of more literal-minded scholars.

      Housman’s influence on all subsequent scholarship on the Ibis has been immense. Indeed, modem literary interpretation of the curse-catalogue arguably began and ended with Housman, since his dismissal of this part of the poem as ‘merely a display of erudition’ has been almost uniformly accepted and echoed by later scholars.²⁴ But quite apart from the fact that critical writing on the poem has never really emerged from Housman’s shadow, the Ibis’ reputation for impenetrability has been enough to ward off all but the most tenacious of readers; and, in the tradition of Salvagnius and Ellis (and, of course, Housman), exegetical scholarship has continued to predominate. The modem editions of La Penna and (to a lesser extent) André are the most obvious monuments to this continued industry, and La Penna in particular has used new editions of Callimachus and papyri to shed important light on many obscurities in the catalogue. Yet both he and André have little to contribute in the way of an original approach to reading the poem as a work of a literary imagination. In a section of his introduction entitled Ibis come documento letterario’, La Penna describes the poem as ‘uno sfogo d’ira e di dolore …, uno sfogo riversato in uno dei piŭ infelici espedienti della letteratura alessandrina’;²⁵ and later:

      Del valore poetico dell’ Ibis non vale neppure la pena di discutere. Resta il suo valore di documento letterario, di mosaico, cioè, di pezzi provenienti da letteratura ellenistica, di frutto d’una tradizione che risale fino a Callimaco; resta, in qualche punto, il valore di fonte mitologica o storica.²⁶

      This is once again tantamount to admitting that Ovid’s poem is of little interest except as a means of gaining second-hand knowledge about something else, now lost to us and (therefore) supposedly more attractive. André also claims that the literary interest of the Ibis lies mainly in Ovid’s redeployment of Hellenistic curse-techniques;²⁷ and in this respect the poem is of obvious importance to L. Watson’s recent survey of the Hellenistic curse-genre.²⁸ Watson minutely documents the literary features of the Ibis which find parallels in its Hellenistic precedents, and on numerous fronts he makes novel contributions to old controversies, such as the possible extent and nature of Ovid’s debt to Callimachus’ Ἶβις. But to show that the Ovidian Ibis displays various Hellenistic characteristics is not, of course, to show that Ovid surrenders every claim to being an original artist who manipulates his precedents in order to realize his own imaginative creation. It is this fuller approach to an understanding of the poetics of the Ibis that I offer here, departing from tradition in some vital respects while drawing on it to support some novel insights.

      The interpretation of the Ibis advanced in this study departs from previous scholarship by arguing for radical reassessment on two main fronts: first, my objective is to show that the familiar perceptions of the curse as a slavish replica of Hellenistic prototypes (especially the Callimachean Ἶβις), and of the catalogue as ‘merely a display of erudition’, are fundamentally misguided; secondly, that the Ibis is no mere appendage to the rest of the exilic corpus, or a work which modern scholars can safely afford to ignore as they concentrate their attention only on the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. The Ibis, it will be argued, plays an integral role in creating the ‘wholeness’ of the poetic persona featured so centrally in the exilic corpus; for in the broader context of an all-pervading melancholy, the curse takes on a special significance as the expression of a manic, desperate and inevitably futile frustration. And as we follow up this insight we shall find that the catalogue proves to be anything but an exercise in wanton excess which Ovid undertakes merely to fill his idle hours in exile. On the contrary, we shall see that he exploits the familiar apparatus of Hellenistic curse-catalogues to portray himself as descending ever further into a solipsistic fantasy of revenge which is first stimulated in the earlier stages of the curse. As that fantasy grows, the Ibis raises in an acute way the questions of how Ovid plans that ‘Ovid’ will impress us. If much more is said here about the Ovidian persona than about its poet-creator, the reason is partly that I want to redress the balance in the tradition of Ibis-interpretation, and partly that the poet is here accessible (if at all) only through an analysis of the persona. The wider interplay between Ovid and ‘Ovid’ (I shall not persist in using quotation marks whenever I intend the latter) is a theme which carries me beyond my present purpose; in what follows, all references to the Ovidian state of mind portrayed in the Ibis are limited to the description of a projected persona.

      I begin by challenging the views that Ibis himself ever existed and that Ovid seriously believed that he could inflict real damage on a purely notional enemy by exaggerating the number and ferocity of his curses. My subsequent reading of the poem will then attempt to explain why any understanding of Ovid’s exile poetry is incomplete without recognition of what the Ibis contributes to the overall collection.

      NOTES

      1. xv.

      2. xv.

      3. On Salvagnius’ life and scholarly career see Pökel (1966), 236 s.v. Salvaing with Ellis xi-xii. He had in fact published an earlier volume on the Ibis: Ovidii libellus in Ibin Dionysii Salvagnii Boesii opera restitutus et illustratus (Lyons, 1633). His preface and commentary of 1661 were subsequently printed in the fourth volume of P.Burman’s P. Ovidii Nasonis Opera Omnia (Amsterdam, 1727). Since Burman’s edition is now more accessible than the original, all quotations from Salvagnius in what follows are cited from Burman.

      4. (1727), 6.

      5. See Ellis 118 and 171 on line 287, 121 and 174–5 on 309–10, 167–8 on 621–4; cf. La Penna 60–1, 70–1, 167–8 ad loc.

      6. (1727), 3.

      7. (1727), 3–5.

      8. (1727), 3.

      9. See for Salvagnius and these later scholars xi-xiv.

      10. x

      11. xiii.

      12. xv, as quoted on p. 1 supra.

      13. xix–xliv, then discussing the structure of the catalogue (xliv–xlviii), possible traces of Egyptian influence on the curse (xlviii–l), and echoes of the Ibis in later literature (l–liii).

      14. (1727), 11–16.

      15. See xix–xxii.

      16. (1727), 9.

      17. See xx §3, xxi and xxii. Cf. chapter 1, p. 20 infra for a different approach to the passage.

      18. Salvagnius (1727), 9–11; Ellis xxxi–xxxiii. Cf. chapter 1, p. 10 infra.

      19. (1920), 287–318 = (1972), 1018–42. Housman’s only subsequent writing on the poem was a review of Rostagni (1920); see (1921), 67–8 = (1972), 1049–51.

      20. (1920), 316 = (1972), 1040.

      21. (1920), 316 = (1972), 1040.

      22. See in answer to Housman La Penna xiii–xvi and André xvii–xxii.

      23. (1920), 317–18 = (1972), 1041–2.

      24. Cf. e.g. Wilkinson (1955), 356–7, Kenney (1982), 454, Mack (1988), 42.

      25. lxxiii.

      26. lxxiv.

      27. xxxviii.

      28. See chapters 2 (‘Hellenistic curse-poetry’) and 3 (‘The Hellenistic Ἀϱαί in their literary context’).

      1

      In search of Ibis

      In Tr. 1.6 Ovid praises his wife for seeing off those who, after his exile, sought to profit from his downfall:

      tu facis, ut spolium non sim, nec nuder ab illis,

      naufragii tabulas qui petiere mei (7–8)

      Were it not for Ovid’s wife, one faithless friend in particular was set to succeed in his designs:

      … mea nescioquis, rebus male fidus acerbis

      in bona venturus, si paterere, fuit. (13–14)

      Like the nescioquis of Tr. 1.6, Ibis is a disloyal friend (male fido, 85; cf. Tr. 1.6.13) who tries to plunder the very property which it was his duty to protect (cf. 19–20). Ovid reuses the image of figurative shipwreck to describe the attempt at Ibis 17–18:

      cumque ego quassa meae complectar membra carinae,

      naufragii tabulas pugnat habere mei.

      Some critics assume on the strength of these parallels that Ibis and nescioquis are identical.¹ But if they are, a chronological problem complicates the relationship between Tr. 1.6 and the Ibis. If Ovid’s wife finally managed to thwart the enemy, Tr. 1.6 would seem to be later than the Ibis, which was evidently composed when that enemy was still active: ‘le texte des Tristes présente le danger comme écarté, les prétentions comme définitivement rejetées (cf. 14, venturus … fuit; 15, submovit), tandis que l’Ibis est contemporain de l’affaire (cf. 18, pugnat; 21, nititur)’.² André therefore dates the Ibis to between A.D. 10 and 12 and prior to Tr. 1.6, ‘qui passe, peut-être à tort, pour un des premiers poèmes’.³

      But André’s claim that Tr. 1.6 was composed later than the Ibis is open to various objections. His chronological argument is based on the assumption that the verbal parallels between the two poems must allude to the same enemy in each. In the exile poetry, however, Ovid frequently describes his various loyal friends in generic terms, defining their character through a shared typology.⁴ Viewed from this perspective, Ibis and the enemy portrayed in Tr. 1.6 need be no more than typologically equivalent, a possibility which André overlooks in constructing his own narrative of events around a single enemy: after Ovid failed to deter his assailant by cursing him in the Ibis, his wife came to the rescue as described in Tr. 1.6. But why not equally suppose that, after an initial defeat as described in Tr. 1.6, Ovid’s enemy launched a fresh assault some three years later and provoked the Ibis in retaliation? That Tr. 1.6 was the earlier composition poses no difficulty on this rendering; but André’s unprovable hypothesis has merely been replaced by another. For present purposes, however, André’s argument is at its weakest in what it assumes about the nature and function of the Ibis. Ovid sets out to curse his enemy in full earnest, but loses his way in rising to the challenge of literary aemulatio: ‘Les Alexandrins avec leurs poèmes à

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