No More Learning

The juvenile works of Ovid and the spondaic period of his metrical
art, by Professor Robert S. Radford . . .
Radford, Robert Somerville, b. 1869. [Hartford, 1920]
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Extracted from Transactions of the American Philological
Association, Vol. LI, 1920.
XI. The Juvenile Works of Ovid and the Spondaic Period of
His Metrical Art 1
BY PROFESSOR ROBERT S. JRADFORD
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE
CO
GD I. Introduction. Ovid and the Messalla Collection
to IN his chapter on famous orators, Quintilian aptly observes
That, for later generations, Cicero had become not so much
name of a person as the designation of the art of oratory,
may apply a similar remark to the Latin poet Ovid. To
students of Roman literature Ovid means the perfected
^elegiac art, the supreme mastery of the technical side of
Latin verse, to which he contributed an unparalleled ele-
gance and grace. Yet it is certain that he was also a person,
and we know more of the actual details of his life than of the
I*-
? life of any other Roman, with the single exception of Cicero.
Every schoolboy is familiar with the charming picture which
^ he has given in the Tristia of his early devotion to the Muses,
^ in spite of the remonstrances of his father and the arguments
which the latter urged against unprofitable literary pursuits.
X. ' Bibliography : Hultgren, Observationes metr. in poetas elegiacos Gr. et Lat. ,
^ Leipzig, 1871; Kone, Sprache der ram. Epiker, Minister, 1840; Radford,
" Licensed Feet in Latin Verse," Studies in Honor of Maurice Bloom-field (New
. V Haven, 1920), 251-272; O. F. Gruppe, Rom. Elegie, Leipzig, 1838; Klee-
mann, De libri tertii carminibus quae Tibulli nom. circumferuntur, Strassburg,
^- 1876; Teuffel, Studien u. Charaktcristiken , Leipzig, 1871; Fuss, De elegiarum
^ libra quern Lygdami esse putant quidam, Miinster, 1867; Krafft, De artibus
^/ quas Tib. et Lygd. in versibus concinnandis adhibuerunt, Halle, 1874; Paroli,
De Tib. arte metr. cum Lygd. comparata, Brescia, 1899; Hartung, De pane-
u _ gyrico ad Messallam pseudo-Tib. , Halle, 1880; Ehrengruber, De panegyr.
O Messallae pseudo-Tib. , partes i-x, Kremsmiinster, 1889-1899; Knappe, De
3 Tib. libri quarti elegiis, Dud -stadt, 1880; Nemethy, Albii Tibulli carmina,
3 etc. , Budapest, 1905 ; Lygdami carmina, Budapest, 1906; K. F. Smith, Elegies
of Tibullus, New York, 19,13; Burman, Ovidii opera omnia, Amsterdam, 1756,
with Index Verborum; Eschenburg, Wie hat Ovid einzelne Warier u. Wort-
klassen im Verse iierwandt? , Lubeck, 1886; H. de la Ville de Mirmont, " Le
poete Lygdamus," Musee Beige, vm (1904), 339-403; Plessis, La poesie
latine (Paris, 1909), 361-376 ; Schanz, Gesch. d. rom. Lit. n 3 , i, 232 ff. ; Ullrich,
Studia Tib. : De libri n editione, Berlin, 1880.
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 147
He was one of the most precocious of Roman poets, and like
Cowley or like Pope he " lisped in numbers, for the numbers
came. " 2 According to his own account, when he first re-
cited his juvenile poems to a public audience, his " beard
had been shaved only once or twice. " 3 This plain statement
is usually misinterpreted, but clearly the natural meaning is
that when he first entered the circle of his patron, Messalla,
he was only fifteen or sixteen years of age. 1 Beginning to
write at so early a period, when the simpler and more natural
school of Catullus. Gallus, and Fropertius was still in the
ascendant, Ovid passed through a long period of apprentice-
ship and, after much wavering and much experimentation,
eventually abandoned the more natural manner with which
he had begun, and went over wholly to the more artistic and
more epigrammatic style of Tibullus, which he found better
suited to his own rhetorical training and to which he finally
gave an undisputed supremacy in the domain of Roman
elegy. It is true that a different opinion is usually held
today, and it is everywhere assumed that he devoted himself
from the first to the imitation of Tibullus and possessed from
the beginning the remarkable facility and skill which make
him easily the first of Roman metrical artists. This view-
seems to me wholly erroneous, and I shall begin in the present
study to trace the various stages by which Ovid, the -historical
person, the friend of Messalla, the disciple first of Catullus
and later of Tibullus, reached the acme of artistic perfection.
As is well known, the poet Ovid possessed brilliant powers
of description, and was both a natural story-teller and a
- Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
Et quod temptabam scribere (in prose), versus erat. Trlst. iv, 10, 2;.
Ub. 5 7-
4 There was no definite time fixed for the dcpositio barbac, but it usually-
coincided with the assumption of the toga 'drills (Suet. Calig. 10). Most
writers incorrectly make this statement refer to Ovid's twentieth or twenty-
second year, as Schanz, Gcsch. d. rom. Lit. n 3 , i, 293; J. Heuwes, De teni-
porc quo Of. A mores conscripti sint (Miinster, 1883), 14; Cruttwell, Rom.
Lit. 3c<>, etc.
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? 148 Robert S. Radford [1920
highly trained rhetorician. He is noted for his " swift light-
ness of touch," his brief, snappy sentences, his sharp con-
trasts, and his terse and highly polished epigrams (cf.
K. F. Smith, op. ciL Introd. 103 ff. ). Since we seek, how-
ever, to trace an actual historical development, it may be
worth while to return for a moment to ' Ovid ' in the mean-
ing of the perfected art of elegy, and to picture clearly the
numerous refinements which his finished technique embraces.
These rules include the breaking up of the long sentence and
the restriction of the thought to a single distich, the avoid-
ance of elision, especially in the latter half of both the hex-
ameter and the pentameter, the marked preference given in
the hexameter to the favorite masculine caesura (the semi-
quinaria), the ending of the pentameter with a dissyllable,
which should not be an adjective, but either a noun or a
verb, and above all the preponderance of dactyls in the
distich in direct opposition to the original and native char-
acter of the language. Through the observance of these
complex requirements the elegiac couplet gains an incom-
parable elegance and precision, at the same moment that it
loses its larger variety, freedom, and ease. Tibullus himself
had narrowed the sphere of Roman elegy by rejecting the
natural period and restricting the thought within the mini-
mum space of two lines. This limitation, which is unknown
to Catullus and Propertius, is undoubtedly a serious mistake,
and it finds little justification of any kind in the previous
history of the elegy. Yet, although he gave an artificial
form to the distich, Tibullus, through the expression of simple
and natural emotion, invariably retained its proper content,
and he could not foresee perhaps that the more brilliant but
more wayward Ovid would too often, through the absence
of sincere and genuine feeling, merge the elegy in the epigram
and make both form and content unduly artificial. Both
Tibullus and Ovid then were consummate artists, but both
yielded too much to the prevailing tendency of the Augustan
age in restricting the liberty and the spontaneity of their
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 149
verse. Tibullus is excessively rhetorical in form, Ovid is
excessively rhetorical in both form and thought. (See also
some just observations in Sellar, Horace and the Elegiac
Poets, 307. )
Even more characteristic of our poet, however, than the
unity of the distich and the tyrannis of the dissyllabic close
is the dactylic preponderance. We may say that Ovid is the
poet, par excellence, of the dactylic virtuosity, which appears
alike in his epic and his elegiac verse. While the Greek lan-
guage is twice as rich in dactyls as in spondees, in Latin this
relation is reversed, and the Roman language has almost
twice as many spondees as dactyls. In all the other poets
of Rome (with the exception only of Valerius Flaccus and a
few genuine elegies of Tibullus' second book) the spondees
considerably exceed the dactyls; Ovid alone has known -
like the Medea or the Circe of his own exuberant fancy -
how to transform, by the magic of his art, the slow but stately
spondees of his native speech into the light and graceful
dactyls of Hellenic verse. Through this supreme refinement
he has brought to fulfillment the mission which Ennius, the
hardy pioneer, had vaguely dreamed of nearly two centuries
before, and has banished from Latium the last trace of Italian
rusticity (cf. Hor. Epist. n, i, 160). He is the greatest artist
in verse that Rome produced, the supreme master both in
the elegy and in the epos. It is no wonder then that Lucian
Miiller exclaims in ecstatic admiration (De re metrica-, 522) :
" Hunc igitur virum, qui principatum haud dubie tenet artis
Latinae, veneremur, hunc imitemur. hie sciat se plurimum
profecisse, cui plurimum probetur Ovidius. huius quot sunt
versus, totidem sunt artificia, quovis Phidiae ilia vel Praxitelis
opere nonminora. " 6 Our chief metrical scholars have carried
their worship and adoration so far that they have ended by
creating a veritable ' Ovid myth. ' Ovid is Rome's one white
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? 150 Robert S. Radford [1920
crow and he was always white. His art is free from the
trammels of place and time, and knows no process of growth,
no stage of development, but the Fates conferred upon the
divine man 7 at his birth a faculty that was miraculously
complete. Hence Lucian Miiller, op. oil. 346, pronounces a
passage in the Amores, which contains several elisions, inter-
polated, and declares those Epistles of the Heroines, which
show one or two polysyllabic closes, to be spurious (ib. 29 ff. ,
259). Hultgren, op. cit. 26 ff. , insists that the comparative
lack of virtuosity in the de Medicamine fragment is not the
result of immature art, but of pure accident, and asserts
that to attribute to Ovid any work actually lacking the
virtuosity would be to " place the head of Thersites upon
the body of Agamemnon " (ib. 32).
In all the other poets
of Rome (with the exception only of Valerius Flaccus and a
few genuine elegies of Tibullus' second book) the spondees
considerably exceed the dactyls; Ovid alone has known -
like the Medea or the Circe of his own exuberant fancy -
how to transform, by the magic of his art, the slow but stately
spondees of his native speech into the light and graceful
dactyls of Hellenic verse. Through this supreme refinement
he has brought to fulfillment the mission which Ennius, the
hardy pioneer, had vaguely dreamed of nearly two centuries
before, and has banished from Latium the last trace of Italian
rusticity (cf. Hor. Epist. n, i, 160). He is the greatest artist
in verse that Rome produced, the supreme master both in
the elegy and in the epos. It is no wonder then that Lucian
Miiller exclaims in ecstatic admiration (De re metrica-, 522) :
" Hunc igitur virum, qui principatum haud dubie tenet artis
Latinae, veneremur, hunc imitemur. hie sciat se plurimum
profecisse, cui plurimum probetur Ovidius. huius quot sunt
versus, totidem sunt artificia, quovis Phidiae ilia vel Praxitelis
opere nonminora. " 6 Our chief metrical scholars have carried
their worship and adoration so far that they have ended by
creating a veritable ' Ovid myth. ' Ovid is Rome's one white
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? 150 Robert S. Radford [1920
crow and he was always white. His art is free from the
trammels of place and time, and knows no process of growth,
no stage of development, but the Fates conferred upon the
divine man 7 at his birth a faculty that was miraculously
complete. Hence Lucian Miiller, op. oil. 346, pronounces a
passage in the Amores, which contains several elisions, inter-
polated, and declares those Epistles of the Heroines, which
show one or two polysyllabic closes, to be spurious (ib. 29 ff. ,
259). Hultgren, op. cit. 26 ff. , insists that the comparative
lack of virtuosity in the de Medicamine fragment is not the
result of immature art, but of pure accident, and asserts
that to attribute to Ovid any work actually lacking the
virtuosity would be to " place the head of Thersites upon
the body of Agamemnon " (ib. 32). Ehrengruber, who has
computed or collected the percentages of so many Latin
poets, announces the rule that each author has his definite
dactylic proportion from which he never greatly departs
(op. cit. x, 12 ff. ). Even such a master of statistics as Dro-
bisch, when he acutely observes that " the Amores of Ovid,
especially in the hexameter, fall short by a little more than
2% of the virtuosity attained in the Ars " (Ber. sacks. Ge-
sellsch. xxin [1871], 33), does not seem to have grasped the
full truth ; for he apparently thought of the decline in the
virtuosity as evenly distributed over the entire Amores.
In point of fact, nothing could be more erroneous than these
views. Thus Quintilian, ix, 3, 70, had before him a collection
of Ovidian epigrams quite similar to the Priapea and con-
taining rather frequent polysyllabic closes ; he actually
quotes the line, Cur ego non dicam, Furia, te ftiriam ?
In order to determine the whole question definitely, I have
carefully examined the three books of the Amores which we
now possess and which were not published before 2 B. C. ,
when the poet was forty-one. It is well known that there
was an earlier edition in five books, published in 14 B. C. ,
when the poet was already twenty-nine. According to my
7 Cf. Cic. Arch. 7, 16 : hunc dii'iiuim hominem, Africanum.
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 151
results, nearly one-fourth of the poems in our present Amores
have been retained from the first edition with little change,
and still show the original spondaic form which they pos-
sessed at their first publication. The mature works of Ovid,
such as the Ars, show 57% of dactyls in the distich, while
the first edition of the Amores, according to my reconstruc-
tion, did not greatly exceed 48. 5%. The remaining three-
fourths of our present edition consists of poems which have
either been fully revised or newly written, and if the spondaic
fourth be subtracted, their percentage rises to more than $6 r , .
In other words, the remaining poems show practically the
same virtuosity as the mature works. In the second section
of this paper I shall exhibit these results more fully and in
tabular form. It is evident therefore that Ovid first com-
posed in spondees, which is precisely what we should expect
on a priori grounds. For, Latin being a highly spondaic
language, it seems just about as possible for a youthful poet
to lisp in Chinese or in Choctaw as in Latin dactyls. We
may go further, however, and assert that even if Ovid, on
his first appearance in 27 B. C. , had possessed all the miraculous
gifts with which he has been credited, he would not have
actually composed in dactyls. It is true that even at this
early date Tibullus was highly esteemed, 8 yet the memory
of the free republic was still cherished, and the more natural
school of Catullus was still preferred. Hence, in all proba-
bility, even if the youthful Ovid had possessed the dactylic
faculty, he would have lacked the will to virtuosity, since
the latter implies also a willingness to sacrifice the larger
perspicuity of expression and the normal descriptive word
orders. Furthermore, two of the three highly dactylic elegies
of Tibullus' second book were not composed until 22 B. C. ,
five years later, as is shown by their imitation of Propertius
(Xemethy. op. cii. . ^S).
The importance of the reconstruction of the first edition
* . . . Leunturque Tibullus
Kt placet, et iam Ir (xc. A Honshu prhiripe notus erat. Trist. n, 464.
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? 152 Robert S. Radford [1920
of the Amores and of the consequent recovery of the youthful
or ' spondaic ' Ovid cannot easily be overestimated. Freed
from fanciful and unwarranted presuppositions, we are at
liberty to restore the actual, historical Ovid, and we shall be
able to show in the sequel, as I believe, that this great artistic
genius, beginning, just like Catullus, with simple nature and
therefore in some cases with only 37% of dactyls in the distich,
has made in less than twenty years an unparalleled develop-
ment in his art, and, by veritably creating a new language,
such as Ennius and his eager successors achieved only in
part, has been able, in the works of his full maturity, com-
posed after the age of thirty-five, to rise to 57% of dactyls
in the distich. I do not seek, however, to reconstruct the
spondaic period of Ovid's art for a purely theoretical purpose
nor with the aim of contrasting in an abstract manner the
first Amores with all the remaining works; I wish rather to
restore the poet's early life, and partly by following in the
footsteps of eminent critics, such as Gruppe, Plessis, Klee-
mann, Ehrengruber, Ribbeck, Marx, Schanz, and Cartault,
partly by completing and enlarging their work. I hope to
endow him with an appropriate set of spondaic works. These
juvenile works are, from the Appendix Vergiliana. at least
Catalepton, ix, and from the Corpus Tibullianum the whole
of the Messalla Collection as well as two of the six elegies
contained in Tibullus' second or posthumous book. The
proper discussion of these poems naturally requires a series
of articles. In the present study I shall deal only with the
metrical development, while in several articles to be published
shortly in the American Journal of Philology, I shall examine
in detail, with the help of Burman's much neglected Index,
the language of the juvenile poems in relation to Ovid's mature
works and also sketch more fully the history of the contro-
versy which has raged for more than a century among critics
over the authorship and value of the Messalla Collection. 9
9 So far as concerns the Lygdamus elegies, a most just and admirable ac-
count of the controversy is given by H. de la \~ille de Mirmont, op. cit. 339-
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 153
A briefer outline, however, of the various opinions of
scholars cannot be wholly omitted here, especially as the
controversy over the Lygdamus poems constitutes one of the
most amazing chapters in the whole history of literary criti-
cism. I may begin with the so-called Messalla Collection.
This latter is a collection of famous poems emanating from
the household of the great Augustan statesman, Valerius
Messalla. In our fourteenth-century codices it forms a
single book, added to the unfinished second book of Tibullus
and apparently published, like the posthumous second book,
in 19 B. C. The Italian scholars of the fifteenth century have
wrongly divided this additional book into two, the so-called
third and fourth books of Tibullus, and for the purpose of
avoiding confusion it seems best to retain this division.
(Probably, as all the mediaeval citations show, there were
originally only ' two books of Tibullus,' and the second book
of 1 1 ii verses was first divided at the close of the Middle
Ages into the second and third books which our late codices
exhibit ; see Ullrich, op. clt. 69. ) In the six elegies of the
third book a youth apparently of eighteen or nineteen, yet
already famous as a poet and employing the pseudonym of
Lygdamus, seeks to w r in back the love of the fair Neaera,
who has divorced him. It is probable, too, that he has given
cause for the divorce, though naturally this is not admitted
and he pleads a difficult case with wonderful facility. Al-
though the poems of unhappy love easily admit. of being
turned to ridicule by an unfair critic like Voss, I know of no
juster criticism upon them than that of Teuffel, written in
mature life and before he (like Dissen) had lent an ear to the
slanders of Voss : " These elegies, through the freshness and
sincerity of the feeling and the graceful ease of the verse, do
their author no discredit. " 10 As is well known, Lygdamus
403. Although the author does not fully understand the real issues, I \vish
to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to the historical part of this fine study.
10 Quoted by Kleemann, op. cil. 17, from Pauly's Rcalcncyclopaedie, vi. 2,
1950 (1852).
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? 154 Robert S. Radford [1920
tells us the exact date of his birth (5, 18). " My parents
first beheld my birthday," he says, " in the year in which
both the consuls met an equal fate " (cum cecidit fato consul
uterque pari) he means in 43 B. C. , when Hirtius and Pansa
were both slain in battle before Mutina. Now precisely the
same pentameter (cum cecidit, etc. ) is used by Ovid, Trist.
iv, 10, 6, to give his own birth-date of 43 B. C. The Renais-
sance editors, Scaliger and Vulpius, perhaps attached less
importance to the dozen or more whole lines and half-lines
which Ovid and Lygdamus have in common, and the numerous
other amazing coincidences, but they knew well that, in the
case of different poets, the date of birth and the birth-line
cannot be borrowed. Wishing therefore to preserve the third
book for Tibullus and to prevent it from being assigned to
Ovid, they pronounced the birth-line an interpolation from
the Tristia and bracketed the whole distich. The same pro-
cedure was followed later by Broukhuysen (1708), Wunderlich
(1817), Bahrens (1876), and Ramsay (1887).
Matters remained in this state until the German peasant
poet of Mecklenburg and the great classical translator, Johann
Heinrich Voss, appeared upon the scene (1810). Voss's works
abound in homely and realistic scenes of village and country-
life, and his idyl, Luise, published in 1795, furnished Goethe
with a model for Hermann und Dorothea. He was naturally
much attracted by the simple pastoral elegy of Tibullus, and
when he came, in the third book, to the poems of Lygdamus
with their brilliant pictures of elegance and wealth, he saw
at once that this courtly city poet could not possibly be
Tibullus. He therefore removed the name of Tibullus from
the third book and substituted that of Lygdamus. So far
he showed himself an excellent critic, but he did not stop
here. He poured forth against the romanticist masquerading
under the name of the unworldly Tibullus a torrent of vitupera-
tion and of coarse abuse that is well-nigh incredible, and that
many of our editors of Tibullus and many of our orthodox
historians of Roman literature have ever since repeated in the
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 155
most credulous or most servile fashion, but naturally in lan-
guage somewhat more decorous and more restrained. 11 Al-
though Voss never possessed any great vogue in Germany at
large as a critic, his authority among classical philologians
was immense, and it is chiefly to his violent attack upon the
Lygdamus elegies that we must ascribe the hopeless con-
fusion that has since arisen among scholars and that has
made the question of the authorship of these poems an in-
soluble ' mystery. ' A part of the responsibility for the en-
tanglement belongs, however, to W. Hertzberg, the well-
known editor of Propertius. He also was possessed of great
authority in his day, although his conclusions were usually
hasty and Plessis, Etudes sur Properce, 80, charges him with
an " incurable recklessness " (une incurable legerete). Otto
Friedrich Gruppe, a critic of the first order, had just published
his standard work, Die rdmische Elegie (1838). In a brilliant
and forceful chapter of this book (pp. 105-143) he confidently
identifies Lygdamus with Ovid and Neaera with Ovid's second
wife, the " blameless spouse " of the Tristia, iv, 10, 71, who
did not, however, long remain married to the poet. Hertz-
berg at once came forward to answer Gruppe and, as Teuffel
believed (op. cit. 380), to make the identification with Ovid
forever impossible. He apparently believed that the Her aides,
which stood first in the older editions, were the earliest works
of Ovid. Naturally he experienced little difficulty in showing
that these poems consist almost entirely of dactyls, 12 and
11 Of course every classical scholar must entertain the kindliest feeling and
the greatest respect for the famous translator of the Odyssey and of the Georgics,
but no account of the Lygdamus controversy can be intelligible which fails
to bring out strongly Voss's violent prejudices and his scurrilous language.
Fuss, op. cit. 54, cites numerous examples of the latter, and protests earnestly
against such unfair methods of controversy. It appears to the present writer,
however, that greater blame attaches to Voss's obsequious followers than to
Voss himself. For Voss was a privileged character as a man of genius who
had a distinct point of view the simple life and the return to nature. Many
of the scholars, however, who have been content to take their criticism at
second hand from Voss, have no special point of view and no excuse that seems
valid.
" In his versification Ovid skips and dances, so that his hexameter, even
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-26 11:20 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc2. ark:/13960/t45q4vr7s Public Domain / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd
? 156 Robert S. Radford [1920
show an excessive accumulation of rhetorical effects. There-
fore, he concludes, the Lygdamus elegies, which are written
in spondees and in a natural style, cannot possibly be the
work of Ovid. With the recklessness which Plessis has
justly noted, he adds : " These characteristics of the metre
are precisely those which stand out most sharply in youth. "
The truth is just the reverse, and Hultgren correctly lays
down the rule that the more the poet advances towards the
prime of life, the more the proportion of dactyls and of dactylic
beginnings increases.