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must be heavily qualified. The epigrammatist's square of ivory is a very small
one, and technical perfection is correspondingly easier to compass; and after
all the trail had already been blazed by Ovid. In epic the debt to Ovid's hexameter
is less obvious but quite pervasive and extremely important. In the verse
of the Metamorphoses he had perfected what may be called a poetic koine, an
omnicompetent dialect of literary Latin. His verse, like Virgil's, was carefully
tailored for the work in hand; 1 unlike Virgil's, however, his style is (to a
degree) imitable. This is because his linguistic manipulations are of a kind
that can be classified and even learned. He takes liberties with Latin, but they
are, as Virgil's are not, the sort of liberties that any poet might take once he
had thought of them for himself. He is very much a craftsman, poeta in the full
sense of the original iroitixris, a maker. The technical differences between Ovid
and Virgil are a function of both temperament and aims. Virgil is ambiguous
and ambivalent where Ovid is definite; Ovid said only what he had the means
of expressing, whereas for Virgil the resources of language — the prose of
Henry James being as yet in the womb of time — were clearly insufficient to
convey all that he felt of the conflicts and uncertainties of the human condition.
The strain shows: Virgil's commentators inconclusively dispute the meaning
of a word or phrase as Ovid's hardly ever need to do. Thus the only epic poet
of the Silver Age who aspired to close stylistic imitation of Virgil, Valerius
Flaccus, merely succeeded in being obscure. Into this trap Lucan and Statius,
even (to some extent) Silius Italicus, were too prudent to fall. Statius professed
to follow Virgil, but his style owes much more to Ovid. 2 Lucan and Silius are
fundamentally more Virgilian than Statius: Silius simply and avowedly so,
Lucan as the poet of an epic that is, so to say, programmatically anti-Virgilian
and that must be read as in a sense an answer to the Aeneid. Both write hexameters
that resemble Ovid's much more than Virgil's. Neither could possibly
be mistaken for Ovid: but whereas Lucan's verse atones in weight and dignity
for what it lacks in speed and variety, Silius' is at best drearily efficient. Outside
the epic tradition Ovid also left his mark on Juvenal, the best poetic craftsman
(at his best) of the Silver Age.
Both in spirit and execution the most Ovidian of later Latin poets is Claudian,
whose native tongue was Greek. The fact invites remark, since so much of
Ovid's best work, above all the Metamorphoses, is Greek in matter, in manner,
and even in versification. 3 For the Romans the legacy of Greek culture was
a persistent problem with which in the end they never really came to terms.
Virgil and Horace took the process of assimilation begun (essentially) by
Ennius a stage further; Ovid, if he did not actually deflect the current, struck
out a course of his own. In the Aeneid Greek and Roman elements were blended
1
Kenney (1973).
3
Duckworth (1969) 73.
456
2 Vessey (1973) 11.
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