Minerva Rava an Torva?

1. 1. Ovid Ars 2.659: Si paeta est, Veneri similis, si torva, Minervae

   torva Merkel: flava R in marg. cum plerisque codd.: rava Heinsius: parva R cum aliquot dett.: fulva F.

2. 2. Priapea 36.4: Minerva torvo lumine est, Venus paeto

   torvo scripsi: flavo libri edd. vett.: flava et post hoc verbum commate interpunxit De Rooy (probant Vollmer, Clairmont, Parker): ravo Haupt: glauco Antonius.

I

Most codices for line 2.659 of Ovid's Ars amatoria give flava in place of torva, but this reading does not suit the context (Ovid is suggesting ways of moderating the flaws of one's puella), which requires a word with a negative connotation.¹ Among the proposed emendations, Heinsius' rava has been adopted by almost all editors of the Ars, but the elusive meaning of this adjective, in conjunction with its very limited use by the Latin poets and some other considerations that I explore below, allow us to look at this emendation afresh. In fact, apart from its appearance in the two lines under discussion, ravus seems to have been employed only on two other occasions, and only by Horace; and in one of them it is not the only codices reading (see note 11 below).²

As a color term, ravus suggests a grey-yellowish or grey-bluish tinge, which corresponds to the implications of the Greek .³ The Greek word, however, was more extensively employed (see the respective entries in LSJ and OLD) and more varied in meaning. With reference to eyes, for example, charopos appears to denote either the color of the iris (mostly in prose) or the flash, the glow of the gaze (nearly always in poetry; see note 5), which in turn may be due either to exuberant joy⁴ or-albeit not as frequently-to unrestrained fury.⁵ It appears, however, that in reference to human eyes charopos is a more or less complimentary term,⁶ whereas in reference to the eyes of animals, it carries rather negative overtones, whether it describes the color of the eyes or thegleam in them.⁷ We can thus account for the last explanation of charopos in Hesychius' Lexicon (). It seems that the connotation of the fierce glare, the awe-inspiring gaze, passed, at least to a small extent (see references in LSJ), from animals to humans, so that in a Lucian passage the goddess Athena is disparagingly depicted as charope (Dial. deor. 23.1: ).⁸

It would follow, then, that rava, as applied to Minerva in the Ars amatoria passage, cannot refer to the color connotations of charopos (for these are positive)⁹ but only to the notion of a fierce glare, as is indeed appropriate to the warlike Athena.¹⁰ It may not be accidental, after all, that just before the first appearance of Athena in Homer (A 206), it is the glaring eyes of the goddess, not their color, that we encounter: (A 200; cf. Eustathius's commentary).¹¹ On the other hand, one could argue that the eye color that the Greeks liked (charopon) was one that the Romans disliked (in which case rava would be appropriate), but the only evidence for this comes from the two passages we are discussing here.¹²

In my view, the shortcoming in the puella that Ovid wants moderated is her grim, sullen countenance, her glaring look, not the color of her eyes. This is somewhat corroborated by the paeta of the first hemistich (again a kind of look, not color)¹³ and the comparison with Athena, who, as a war goddess, would have looked fierce. Yet, the adjective rava is not only used nowhere else by Ovid in any context;¹⁴ it is never attributed to Athena/Minerva/Pallas throughout Latin poetry.¹⁵ Even in Lucretius 4.1161, where the context is almost identical with that of Ars amatoria 2.659, Athena is only indirectly described as caesia (which translates see Aul. Gell. 2.26.19 and cf. André 1949, 178f.), a quality that is actually never attributed to Minerva by Latin poets (see Carter 1902, 113).¹⁶ By contrast, the adjective torvus...