Ovid and some ideas about life

Ovid by Luca Signorelli

“Quid mihi cum facili” says the Roman poet Ovid in the 19^th elegy of the second book of his work Amores which translates: “Why would I bother with the easy one?” Ovid here talks about his lover’s husband and insists that he keeps his loved one locked making his courtship difficult. Now, a logical person would definitely object to this mentality. Is Ovid serious? Why would anyone say that?

The poet-lover was supposedly locked out
The famous topos of the exclusus amator 

Well, Ovid is partly serious: he is never completely serious; it’s simply not his style. The entire poem talks about the necessity of difficulties in a clandestine love affair which inspires poetry, simply because 1^st century BC Roman elegy, the genre of the Amores, had a certain set of conventions. One of them is that the domina, the loved one, is fickle and does not always respond to the poet-lover’s expressions of admiration. The poet-lover then crying records his hardships, argues with doorsteps and talks to the winds remembering myths and stories.

Ovid was the last famous and noteworthy Roman elegist. And this is not a coincidence, we Classicists think: Ovid in his entire work reworks all the conventions of the genre by ridiculing them and finally deconstructing them. This is a quite recent discovery of scholars even though it is quite evident at some parts of his work that he cannot be serious. Now, we are sure that for the most part he is not serious.

His witty work has troubled us very much but I guess this must have been 

Callimachus

one of his goals. Ovid and the other elegists followed the artistic doctrines of Hellenistic poet Callimachus. They chose to compose short works—at least shorter than the epic poems of Homer and Vergil—which were very carefully worked like jewels. They used to call their work “labor limae”, the labor of the file. The poetic process according to the Callimachean ideal and also antiquity’s ideas in general had to be laborious and difficult. Exactly as Ovid says in elegy 2.19, the love affair and therefore the poetic work have to be difficult. That is why the aforementioned elegy is a covert programmatic poem.

The elegies, these small jewels were very difficult to compose not only because they were art but also because they had to be original. Their originality is not obvious to a modern audience but we must have in mind that during that time writers were trying to imitate older works, especially the Homeric epics. The elegists were not. On the contrary they were creating a new tradition following Hellenistic ideas.

Callimachus, of course, pointed out that imitating Homer was quite impossible as he was the first poet and therefore his work was insuperable. Aspiring authors, nevertheless, would flood the libraries of the great kingdoms of the ancient world which held manuscripts of all the works known until then trying to imitate them or copy sections. That was the time Classical philology was born, but we’ll talk about that another time. 

So, as we were saying,  Roman elegists—for various reasons— preferred to have it the difficult way just like Hercules chose the difficult path of Virtue. I cannot help but wonder: is this the only way to succeed? Well, I guess, it must be if the Classics say so.

Hercules at the Crossroads by Annibale Carracci

However, others have demonstrated an easy, primrose path to success reminding us that there are some detours. Of course, if you are willing to take the detour you might end up having trouble or even worse suffer remorse. And let’s not forget that these are probably the people who created financial bubbles and economic collapses of entire countries leading a lot of people to impoverishment.

Then, I suggest that we might have to refresh our Classics and follow their advice to avoid easy choices.