A Companion to Ovid by Knox Peter E

Author:Knox, Peter E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2012-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

Catullus in Ovid’s Poetic Program

How much did Catullus matter to Ovid? How seriously, that is, did he take Catullus’ poetic achievement as a predecessor to his own? Did Catullus loom anywhere near as large in Ovid’s poetic imagination as he has in the imaginations of modern poets and readers? These are questions we can never ask from a place fully outside our own historical moment and our own role as receivers of ancient and modern poetry and criticism, but that consideration does not bar or excuse us from asking them. Answers, if anywhere, are to be found in Ovid’s own poetry. To get a sense of how Catullus looked to Ovid, we need to study not just what Ovid says about Catullus explicitly but also what traces and likenesses of Catullus we can find in Ovid’s own poetic themes and language.

Our most explicit and direct evidence for Ovid’s estimation of Catullus comes at the beginning of Ovid’s own career as a poet. In his first work, the Amores (‘Loves’ or ‘Cupids’), he mentions Catullus by name twice, both times in the third and final book of the collection of love elegies as we have it. Am. 3.9 commemorates the death of Albius Tibullus, Ovid’s elder contemporary and fellow elegist, a poet whom Quintilian would later regard as the foremost exponent of the genre. Ovid’s poem imagines a fictional version of Tibullus’ funeral rites. The mourners in attendance include three divinities—Elegy herself, personified as a goddess (she had already appeared at the beginning of the book, in Am. 3.1), along with Venus, and her son Cupid—and two mortal but in some measure fictional women, Delia and Nemesis, who feature as recipients and love objects of Tibullus’ two books of elegiac poetry. At the end of the poem, Ovid completes his fictional narrative with the picture of Tibullus arriving at the Elysian Fields of the Underworld. There he is greeted and welcomed with honor by the three poets whose number he will increase. These are Tibullus’ chief poetic predecessors in the genre of Roman erotic elegy. They are, of course, Ovid’s predecessors as well (Am. 3.9.59–64):

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