Styling the hunt for Amor

The moment Ovid's praeceptor of Love takes the podium, he's selling something -- starting with himself. The poet of the Ars Amatoria promises to dispense knowledge gained through long experience -- usus -- of love, to those seeking the guidance of a Chiron of Amor.

The cautious reader will be on guard. Who is this Tiphys et Automedon Amoris? What's he selling, and what's his angle?

The poet will keep us wondering. Sooner or later, it dawns on us that the lesson here is not "how to pick up girls," or various technical aides to "out-Hercules Hercules." Something else, very much other than the ostensible subject matter, is in play.

To enter this relationship with the praeceptor is not unlike entering a relationship with a lover -- at least, with one of those common types he depicts -- a creature of empty words, signs written in spilled wine on a messy dinner table, or composed in invisible ink - or, milk. Or the promise might be encrypted on his face through silent expressions. After all, he's a promise-making animal.

Motifs of writing, promising, hunting and gaming run through the Ars, next to, but not necessarily comporting with, another thread: the series of myths related to Minos, four of which -- Pasiphae, Ariadne, Daedalus/Icarus, and Procris -- receive expansive treatment. The shifts in tone between these moments of Euripidean solemnity and the wiseguy world of contemporary (in either sense) Rome make for a dislocating experience.

I'll teach you to hunt, says the Tutor:

The hunter knows where to spread nets for the stag,
     he knows what valleys hide the angry boar:

He's reticent on how, in this pursuit, one can swiftly go from hunter to prey.

The Tutor's pupil is advised to roam through the boulevards and valleys of Rome, amid an abundance of candidates for love. No single object of affection actually swims into view, nor is any particular relationship mapped. No specific human relationship gets to develop from initial acquaintance to happy (or otherwise) consummation and contentment. Ovid's praeceptor guides us as if we were armed with a metal detector. Moving rapidly over the terrain, we scan this one at the theater, then rub shoulders, thighs or feet with that one at the races.

The Tutor's charge moves through the crowded Roman spectacles. For him, the reason for being at the Circus or theater has nothing to do with devotion to sport or to Melpomene. And this is basic to the Tutor's lesson: When dealing with Amor, one is usually not interested in the ostensible subject that has drawn the crowd. One is not there for the play, unless it's the interplay with the lady who catches one's eye.

On the stage, one beholds those seized, nay, cursed -- like Phaedra -- with uncontrollable, fated desire. But in the audience, one plays the field: the object of desire glances from lady to lady, rapidly aroused by others' desire:

Sed cur fallaris, cum sit nova grata voluptas      

Et capiant animos plus aliena suis? 

But why should you be disappointed, when a new pleasure's most fun,
   and the heart craves someone else's things more than its own?  I.346-7

Moments before, the Tutor's song had risen to dramatic apostrophe, intoning the names of tragic lovers:

Cui non defleta est Ephyraeae flamma Creüsae,
     Et nece natorum sanguinolenta parens?
Flevit Amyntorides per inania lumina Phoenix:
     Hippolytum pavidi diripuistis equi.

Who hasn't wept at the burning of Ephyrean Creusa
    and the mother drenched in the blood of her murdered sons?
Phoenix, son of Amyntor, wept from blinded eyes;
    maddened horses, you tore apart Hippolytus!  I.335-38

But now, amid the many ladies in the amphitheater, the displacing power cannot rest on any one, because there is always an other - a nova. Desire runs through the crowd, not coming to rest with the mad horses of Hippolytus, but looking out upon prosaic country sights: big, bovine numbers:

Fertilior seges est alienis semper in agris
     Vicinumque pecus grandius uber habet.

The grass is always greener in someone else's field,
     and the neighbor's cattle have got the fatter udders. 1.349-50

What prompts the hunt? Why do we love?

According to the Tutor, at its extremes, Amor is excessive obsession with a single, immutable target that destroys lives and dynasties; and, or: desire displaces any possible target to infinity. What's our goal here? Some one, some thing, to have and to hold and put finis to the hunt? Or are we perpetually trapped, needing the hunt in order to experience desire?

To ask whether we desire love, or love desire, is to grapple with the Tutor's lesson. With Amor, there is always the sense that our interests might be other than they appear (we're attending Phaedra, but we're here for the chicks). Lovers -- including the praeceptor -- are not what they, we, seem, thanks to love.

It's compounded in the negotiation of the hunt and courtship, as both parties face this difficulty. How to know what -- or whom -- the other actually desires?

To the extent that the Ars is about knowing whom to trust (hence whom to love), it's about reading. The lesson throughout this ever-changing poem involves making sense of its signals. Put another way, the "content" (logos) of the poem -- i.e., the ostensible subject matter of the "art" of Love -- is pretext. If you wish to win that lover who is right for you, attend not to what I say (logos), but to how I say it (lexis, modus).

Nec tibi conveniet cunctos modus unus ad annos:     
     Longius insidias cerva videbit anus.
Si doctus videare rudi, petulansve pudenti,     
    Diffidet miserae protinus illa sibi.
Inde fit, ut quae se timuit committere honesto,     
    Vilis ad amplexus inferioris eat.

 A single style won't work for you for every age;
    the seasoned doe will spot a trap further away.
If you seem learned to the simple, or aggressive to the chaste,
    she'll lose confidence in herself at once, poor thing.
Thus it happens that one who's afraid to entrust herself to
    a decent man goes cheap to a worse one's embrace. 1.765-770.

English translations are from J.D. Hejduk's The Offense of Love.

Ovid and Postmodernism

A conference on Ovid and Postmodernism at Oxford.

It is by now a critical commonplace to demonstrate the affinity between Ovidian and postmodern concerns: a playful insistence on the rhetorical nature of ‘reality’; on the instability of meaning; on the permeability of borders and on the arbitrariness of time. Our project takes as its starting point the appeal of Ovid’s preoccupations with desire, transition, transgression, power, violence, subversion and alienation to the cultures of the late twentieth / early twenty-first century world. It seeks to discover what recent engagements with both the poet’s biography and his rich and varied corpus have contributed to our still-evolving conceptualizations of postmodernism.

• How has Ovid changed the politics of classical scholarship in the last forty years?
• What can a reception history of the postmodern Ovid tell us about the history of postmodernism itself?
• Is Ovid just ‘play’ or does he speak seriously to politically aware (feminist, ‘minority’ and/or postcolonial) concerns about postmodern relativism and its denial of agency?

via rogueclassicist

Circe and Pomona, Greece and Rome

Book 14 of the Metamorphoses offers the suggestive juxtaposition of Circe and Pomona, so different in their modes of work, and in their relationship to desire. Circe seems to find certain men sexually irresistible. If they reject her passion, her speedy exercise of dark powers compels their understanding that amor does not necessarily consort with iustitia.

Pomona, on the other hand, appears uninterested in the opposite sex, and is one of numerous figures in the later books (Galatea, Glaucus, the Cumaean Sybil, Picus, Anaxarete) to reject would-be suitors, who are characterized as agrestis -- coarse, rude, uncivil, not unlike the Apulian shepherd.

The two female figures are worth pondering with respect to desire, knowledge, and power.

Circe is queenly, full of knowledge of the powers of nature and the techniques to abstract them. Here's Macareus describing her coven of pharmacists:

Circe

pulchro sedet illa recessu
sollemni solio pallamque induta nitentem
insuper aurato circumvelatur amictu.
Nereides nymphaeque simul, quae vellera motis
nulla trahunt digitis nec fila sequentia ducunt:                 265

gramina disponunt sparsosque sine ordine flores
secernunt calathis variasque coloribus herbas;
ipsa, quod hae faciunt, opus exigit, ipsa, quis usus
quove sit in folio, quae sit concordia mixtis,
novit et advertens pensas examinat herbas.

‘She sat in a lovely inner room on her sacred throne, wearing a shining robe, covered over with a gold-embroidered veil. Nereids and nymphs were with her, who do not work wool with nimble fingers, nor, then, spin the thread: they arrange herbs, scattered without order, separating flowers and grasses of various colours, into baskets. She herself directs the work they do: she herself knows the use of each leaf, which kinds mix in harmony, examines them, and pays attention to the weighings of the herbs.'

Circe comes across here as a kind of Faustian queen bee capable of combining materials gathered by drone labor with arcane techniques to produce unnatural results. We might here see one aspect of Ovid's critique of the legacy of Greece.

Pomona on the other hand holds herself aloof, but is all activity. She does not speak, but this doesn't necessarily place her in the line of mute, victimized female figures in literature, as some have suggested. She prohibits access, she shuns men - this virgin in the orchard is no weak sister.

For that matter, it would be somewhat diminishing to regard her strictly as a human female (as it would to regard Perseus or Vertumnus as mere males). Her powers come from attention to living things, from amor and studium:

Pomona 

                                         nulla Latinas
inter hamadryadas coluit sollertius hortos
nec fuit arborei studiosior altera fetus;                       625
unde tenet nomen: non silvas illa nec amnes,
rus amat et ramos felicia poma ferentes;
nec iaculo gravis est, sed adunca dextera falce,
qua modo luxuriem premit et spatiantia passim
bracchia conpescit, fisso modo cortice virgam             630
inserit et sucos alieno praestat alumno;
nec sentire sitim patitur bibulaeque recurvas
radicis fibras labentibus inrigat undis.
hic amor, hoc studium, Veneris quoque nulla cupido est;
vim tamen agrestum metuens pomaria claudit               635
intus et accessus prohibet refugitque viriles.

No other hamadryad of the wood nymphs of Latium tended the gardens more skilfully or was more devoted to the orchards’ care, hence her name. She loved the fields and the branches loaded with ripe apples, not the woods and rivers. She carried a curved pruning knife, not a javelin, with which she cut back the luxuriant growth, and lopped the branches spreading out here and there, now splitting the bark and inserting a graft, providing sap from a different stock for the nursling. She would not allow them to suffer from being parched, watering, in trickling streams, the twining tendrils of thirsty root. This was her love, and her passion, and she had no longing for desire. Still fearing boorish aggression, she enclosed herself in an orchard (pomaria), and denied an entrance, and shunned men.

Neither a boss nor a hunter, Pomona is a nurturing semi-divine spirit that enhances growth and variety through natural means. Ignoring vim agrestum -- rude sexual force -- she embodies the "art that nature makes," as Perdita puts it in The Winter's Tale. This is Ovid's version of the warm, Italic integration of amor and studium, nature and art.

Pomona at Plaza Hotel

The unhappy consumer

In The Tempest, Ariel is trapped in a tree, and owes his liberty to the magic of Prospero, who managed the spirit's liberation from the wood.

Erysichthon

In Book 8 of Metamorphoses, a devotee of Ceres who lives in a sacred oak protests when Erysichthon begins to chop it down:

He was hewing at the oak-tree repeatedly, when the sound of a voice came from inside the oak, chanting these words:

“I am a nymph, most dear to Ceres,
under the surface of this wood,
who prophesy to you, as I die,
that punishment will follow blood:
out of my ruin, the only good.”

“Nympha sub hoc ego sum Cereri gratissima ligno,
quae tibi factorum poenas instare tuorum
vaticinor moriens, nostri solacia leti.”

The nymph is linked to the oak; instead of feeling liberated from the dark wood, she falls with it, her last words a vatic prophecy of the poenas that will be visited upon her unwanted liberator.