Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid As Philosopher by Gareth Williams;Katherina Volk;

Author:Gareth Williams;Katherina Volk;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

To what avail are toil and services? Or to have turned the heavy earth with the ploughshare? And yet no Massic gifts of Bacchus harmed them, no feasts, often renewed, did harm. They feed on leaves and simple grass; their cups are clear springs and rivers racing in their course, and no care breaks their healthful slumbers.

The plow ox dies like a man—despite his work and services (labor aut benefacta, 3.525) and despite the simplicity (simplicis, 528, is philosophically marked) of his untroubled life, which is quasi-Epicurean in its lack of cares (nec somnos abrumpit cura salubris, 530). As Lucretius caustically observes of the human world, and Vergil here documents in the animal realm, “fevers quit the body no more quickly” (DRN 2.34) whether one indulges in luxury or toils in the farmer’s field. The cosmic and civic devastation on display in Vergil’s Noric plague narrative is thus systematically underpinned by the Epicurean logic of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (and Philodemus’ ethical treatises).

Ovid’s Aeacus, however, does not pursue this Epicurean course. Whereas Lucretius, as we have seen (DRN 6.1156–9, 1177, 1182–3, 1208–12, 1276–81), emphasizes the fear of death that made the sufferers’ end all the worse, in accordance with his salvific Epicurean message that aims to root out our intertwined fears of religious superstition, the gods, and death,31 Ovid, by contrast, seems to take direct aim at two of the most prominent tenets of Epicurean philosophy in his treatment of the Aeginetan plague—its telos of pleasure and its atheistic strictures. Thus, whereas Lucretius lingers over the chilling details of the plague victims cutting off parts of their bodies in order to prolong their lives (DRN 6.1208–12), Ovid describes the victims of the Aeginetan plague, upon their arrival at the same desperate stage of the disease, giving free rein to their impulses (in a grotesque perversion of the common critique of Epicurean sensual indulgence) and abandoning utilitas (“advantage,” another key tenet of Epicurean philosophy)32 altogether, as they succumb to death (Met. 7.564–8):33

  utque salutis

spes abiit finemque uident in funere morbi, 565

indulgent animis et nulla quid utile cura est.

(utile enim nihil est.) passim positoque pudore

fontibus et fluuiis puteisque capacibus haerent.

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