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It is a given of scholarship on Ovid that he plays with and stretches the boundaries of genre. His designation of the Metamorphoses as a unified poem (carmen . . . perpetuum, Met. 1.4) in epic meter marks this tendency as self-conscious and deliberate. In the context of Augustan Latin poetry, such a program merits investigation. Scholars divide over the purpose, effect, and success of Ovid’s playful assault on genre, though it is probably safe to say that many, if not most, readers find him flippant, often shockingly and inappropriately so, with the result that his work is judged inferior to that of his contemporaries and predecessors (see Boyd 1997: 1–12), and that he himself is found wanting in morals, aesthetics, taste, and character .1 The Amores and Ars amatoria have been criticized for appearing to mock, satirize, parody, make fun of the works of Propertius and Tibullus, as well as Catullus and, presumably, Gallus; as a result Ovid himself has been criticized as an inferior poet, and as personally and morally defective. Such criticism ignores the playful, self-parodic elements of elegy as a whole; it further fails to establish why satirizing a genre is necessarily a bad thing or why literary satire should indicate an author’s inadequate understanding or appreciation of the genre. This type of criticism rests on the romantic misreading of elegy and the sincerity requirement (on which, see chapter 1).2 In this chapter, I take the view that Ovid knows what he is doing in his Amores and Ars amatoria—and here it is relevant to note that he worked persistently in the genre of love elegy for some twenty-seven years, revising and republishing the Amores, adding book 3 to the Ars, adding the Remedia amoris to his corpus,and undoubtedly revising poems.3 Given that Ovid spent so much of his life working consistently in elegy, it strains credulity to argue that he did not really understand the genre (especially as he and Propertius were friends; Tr. 4.10.46). Finally, since Ovid edited his 155 5. Necessary Female Beauty and Generic Male Resentment Reading Elegy through Ovid original five books down to three, and certainly revised many of the poems that remain, many years after he began composing elegy, it cannot really be argued that he did not know what he was doing.4 I take it as a given not only that Ovid considered each poem in the Amores appropriate and necessary for his poetic program but also that his placement of them is deliberate (particularly the early location of 1.7 and 1.14 and the relatively central position of 2.13–14), designed to showcase particular issues and problems in elegy. The remarks of Johnson (1985: 27), on Ovid’s editing process, merit quotation here: [T]he carefully selected, highly polished corpus now undergoes an ironic meditation on the limitations of both love elegy as a genre and on irresponsible, selfish love: the poems are now arranged (in a manner that recalls the ironies of Horace) to display not only the vacant obsessions of the poem’s hero and his genre but also the disordered sensibilities and the destructive erotic fashion that have helped create them. In 2.19 and in 3.12 we hear the voice of a master who can describe the limitations of his own art and what those limitations mean about art and the world it serves. Conte (1994: 44) speaks of “Ovid’s work in ‘interpreting’ and revising the code of elegy.”5 Our task here is to investigate some of the problems Ovid causes as he does so. What, then, is Ovid doing with Roman love elegy? Why does he find room in elegy for poems about striking a woman (Am. 1.7), her sudden baldness (1.14) and abortion (2.13–14), the lover-poet’s constant priapic condition (2.4) or failure therein (3.7), his willingness to be both exploitive and openly abusive with his mistress and her slaves (2.2–3, 2.7–8), the pimping services of his own poetry for his girlfriend (3.12),and so on?Why does Ovid’s love elegy openly express so much insincerity and so little elegiac passion and suffering? Why did he keep returning to amatory elegy in the Ars and the Remedia, focusing so intently on disingenuity, deception, infidelity, and depicting a regularized, systematic male anger and revulsion against women? To answer these questions...

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