Violence and Vulnerability in Ovid's Amores 1.5–8

This essay analyzes a series of close verbal echoes in descriptions of violence against slaves and violence against the female beloved in Book 1 of Ovid's Amores. Poems 1.5 and 1.7 describe sexualized violence against Corinna, while poems 1.6 and 1.8 threaten violence against a chained ianitor and a dependent retired courtesan. This arrangement juxtaposes the vulnerable body of the beloved puella with the vulnerable bodies of her social inferiors and therefore, I argue, works to highlight the elegiac woman's embodied vulnerability in comparison with the corporal and social mastery of the elegiac speaker.