Well, Ovid’s overall could hardly have been less calculated to appeal to an emperor who wanted to encourage respect for the traditional gods and a return to traditional sexual morality. Metamorphoses, as I mentioned before, is the work in which Ovid pays most attention to mythology, but most of his work concentrates on amatory poetry, on poetry written about love affairs.
His first published work, Amores, that’s a title that basically just means loves or love affairs, was written, was published rather, around 16 BC, i.e. two years after Augustus had passed his moral legislation, and Amores is a collection of short love elegies to Ovid’s mistress whom he calls Corinna.
Now, in these poems, Ovid makes it quite clear that he is not married to Corinna and has no intention or desire of marrying her, is quite happy having an affair with her. His second work, Arsamatoria, which means more or less the art of loving or perhaps the seducer’s art would be a better way to translate it, was published around 1 BC, and if Amores was calculated to annoy Augustus, Arsamatoria would have infuriated him, because it contains advice for both men and women, mostly for men, but some for women as well, on how to find and attract lovers.
He gives very practical advice, such as telling young men that a good way to find a lover is to go to the circus, to the entertainment, and sit next to an attractive woman. And while everybody else is watching the races, put your foot on top of hers and rub your knee against hers and so forth. And the rest will just happen on its own. He also advises young men specifically to have affairs with older married women, partly because they’re so grateful to you for paying them any attention and partly because they can’t make a fuss when you dump them.
So in Ars Amatoria, Ovid is specifically advocating, although in a very ironic, playful and humorous manner, he is specifically advocating adulterous affairs of precisely the kind that Augustus has outlawed, has made criminal offenses. Ovid’s third main work, on amatory matters is called Remedia Amoris, which means the cure of love. This was written and published probably between 1 B.C. and A.D. 2, and it advises the reader on how to get out of a love affair. Once you’ve attracted a lover, what do you do when you’re tired of her or him and want to move on to somebody else?
Here his advice consists in practical suggestions such as thinking of one of your lover’s flaws. Everybody has something wrong with them, some flaw. Think of the flaw, concentrate on it, don’t allow yourself to think of anything else. And he says fairly soon you’ll find that you’re not attracted to the person anymore after all. He also wrote books about makeup for women, all sorts of this kind of thing.
These, obviously, were not going to get him into the Emperor Augustus’ good graces. What about metamorphoses itself? Metamorphoses was written probably between AD 4 and AD 8 and in it Ovid takes myth as his stated subject specifically myths about transformations that of course is what metamorphoses means he says in the opening lines that he’s going to sing or write about bodies transformed into other shapes about transformations such as Daphne into a laurel tree that kind of thing and that is the ostensible link between all the stories he tells throughout Metamorphoses.
Every story he tells includes some sort of transformation, though some of them are pretty minor transformations and are mentioned so briefly that you could almost overlook them. But even here, even in a work of mythology, of recounting mythological stories, and of talking about transformations of bodies into other shapes, most of the stories Ovid tells contain some element of sexuality, sexual adventure, sexual perversion very frequently.
Even when he is supposedly writing about myth, he’s really writing about strange sexual encounters as much as he’s writing about myth. In the story of Daphne, for instance, Ovid lays much less emphasis on the ideological aspects of the story and concentrates on Apollo’s passion and Daphne’s revulsion.
And as I already mentioned in many of the stories of Metamorphoses, the transformation, the change of form seems to be added almost as an afterthought so that Ovid will have an excuse to tell the story that he wants to tell. and a lot of them are pretty shocking stories indeed. Metamorphoses is a fascinating work. I wish we had time to spend several lectures on it alone because it runs the whole gamut from really horrifyingly violent and grotesque stories through some of the most emotionally charming and attractive stories that have survived from classical antiquity.
He runs the whole gamut of emotions and of possibilities of human interaction. In it, he includes stories of men in love with women, men in love with men, women in love with women, men in love with animals, women in love with their fathers, a man in love with a statue. Just about anything you can think of, Ovid has got somewhere in Metamorphoses.
So the sexual side of metamorphoses, the emphasis on strange sexual adventures, is one aspect that would have made it unlikely to please Augustus. Another aspect of this work that also probably annoyed Augustus is that in it the treatment of the gods and of the traditional stories about the gods is done very humorously and anything but seriously. For instance, often makes a great deal of fun of the anthropomorphism of the gods in Metamorphoses, as I’ll get back to in a few minutes.