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21
OVID
I. FAME IS THE SPUR
There had been nothing diffident or tentative about Ovid's literary ddbut.
In the very first of his surviving works, the Amores (Loves), he manifests
astonishing confidence in himself and in his professional future. The three
opening poems of Book i, read as they are clearly intended to be read, that is
as a connected sequence, sketch a poetic programme which is then carried
through with masterful assurance until it achieves its ordained end in the double
renunciation, of'elegiac' love and of love-elegy, in the last poem of Book 3.
The design and execution of the Amores can be properly understood only in
relation to Ovid's predecessors. He had taken a genre already exploited, after
Gallus, its inventor, by Tibullus and Propertius, and exploited it in his turn,
originally but with a deadly efficiency that left no room for a successor. (The
work of' Lygdamus' shows how barren a mere recombination of the conventional
motifs of love-elegy was bound to be.) As a demonstration of technical
virtuosity the Amores verges on insolence; it was a remarkable, and tactically
profitable, feat of literary originality, as originality was understood by the
ancients, to impart to a well-established form with the inherent limitations of
love elegy this new semblance of vitality. More than a semblance it cannot be
accounted, but for Ovid's purpose that was enough. In the Amores he had put
himself on the map; he had measured himself against his elegiac precursors,
implicitly criticized them and some of the literary values accepted by them,
and shown himself at the very least their technical equal. Having established
his claim to consideration he began to look around for fresh worlds
to conquer. In his farewell to Elegy (by which he means elegiac poetry
of the Gallan-Tibullan-Propertian type) he speaks of the more important
tasks awaiting him:
corniger increpuit thyrso maiore Lyaeus:
pulsanda est magnis area maior equis. (Am. 3.15.17—18)
Horned Bacchus has struck me with a weightier thyrsus: a greater plain is to be
smitten by greater horses.
420
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