Excess and Restraint: Propertius, Horace, and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (review)

It is to be expected that Gibson, the author of the important recent commentary on Ars Amatoria 3 (Cambridge 2003), would display the fruits of his erudition in his monograph on the entire poem. Far beyond a supplement to the commentary, however, Gibson’s monograph presents a convincingly sustained argument for Ovid’s improbable engagement with moderation. Though book three of the Ars may have occasioned Gibson’s initial attention to moderation as an Ovidian theme (two key passages from this book appropriately anchor the midpoint of the study), Gibson systematically traces the Aristotelian and broadly Peripatetic concept of the mean (τò μέσον) through its usage in Cicero’s de Officiis and Horace’s Satires and Epistles. In a concise first section (9–16), Gibson outlines the flexibility inherent in the philosophical application of the mean to ethics in Greek literature (Hesiod) and specifically in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. While this topic alone could easily accommodate a much larger study along the lines of North’s Sophrosyne (Ithaca 1966), Gibson effectively limits his analysis to conceptualizing the relationship between the mean as a philosophical tool and the development of moderation as an ethical good. Closely related to the ethical ideal of moderation or due measure (τò μevτρον= Lat. decorum), the concept of the appropriate, or in Gibson’s rendering, the “becoming” (τòπρέπον), provides an aesthetic analogue in Aristotle’s literary criticism and the Augustan poets’ own aesthetic self-justifications. The middle, Gibson suggests, has always been a “good” place to be, but its inherent instability as a position always relative to sometimes arbitrarily set extremes, leaves the concept open to misapplication or even abuse, as he explores in the works of Horace, Propertius, and Ovid.

Gibson’s tenacious parsing of moderation as a poetic theme yields many insights into the reception of philosophical thought in Augustan poetry. He is, however, careful to state from the outset that although he notes the influence of Peripatetic ethics and aesthetics on Horace, his arguments for Propertius’ and Ovid’s responses to Peripatetic concepts do not presume that the elegists studied Aristotelian philosophy. As Gibson explains, “The Nicomachean Ethics provide a reference point by which to measure Ovid’s perversion of the middle way’ of Horace (and others)” (5). Through detailed readings, Gibson establishes Horace as an exponent of moderation in his protreptic Satires and Epistles while doing justice to Horace’s own occasions of self-irony. Horace may play the straight man to Propertius’ reactionary elegiac ethics of excess and inconsistency, but Gibson judiciously maintains a distinction between Horace’s self-consciously satirical positions and the simplifications imposed upon him by other poets. From the relatively binary antitheses between the “moderate” Horace and the “extreme” Propertius, Gibson turns to Ovid’s movement from a typically elegiac polarity between Tragedy and Elegy in Amores 3.1 to an unexpected appropriation of Horace’s own moderate precepts in the Ars. Gibson demonstrates how Ovid slyly exploits the ambiguity of “appropriateness” (decorum) in Ciceronian ethics (a common point of philosophical reference for both the Ars and Horace’s Epistles) as an effective operating principle in his advice to potential lovers; Gibson here expands the observations of Labate L’arte di farsi amare (Pisa 2001) and Myerowitz Ovid’s Games of Love (Detroit 1985) on the textual allusions of the Ars to Cicero’s de Officiis. In his last two chapters on the Ars and the Remedia Amoris, Gibson skillfully expounds Ovid’s deconstruction of Horace’s principles of ethical and aesthetic decorum through a kind of large scale “window-allusion”: Ovid subverts Horace’s adoption of Ciceronian principles of ethical moderation and literary appropriateness through recollection of Horace’s own target text, the de Officiis. As Gibson concludes, “The Ars, which emphasizes the principle of lovers acting in accordance with the becoming or the appropriate, invites (by a typically Ovidian logic) the...