Kenneth Draper (Indiana University)
Ovid begins the Ars Amatoria with allusions to Homer: his address to his student-readers echoes Nestor’s advice to Antilochus in Iliad 23 (Citroni 1984; Boyd 2017: 76-85), and he then casts the young Achilles’ interaction with Chiron in terms reminiscent of the scene between the hero’s older self and Priam in Iliad 24 (Hollis 1977: 33). Amid these references, Ovid highlights the similarities between Achilles and Amor: saevus uterque puer, natus uterque dea (“each a savage boy, each born from a goddess,” 1.18). The comparison of the savagery of these two figures is an instance of militia amoris (Hollis 1977: 33), a common means by which elegists articulate their relationship with epic.
This paper investigates how an unremarked Virgilian allusion in this line contributes to Ovid’s positioning of his elegy’s relationship to the epic past. Ovid recasts the words of Virgil’s Sibyl at Aeneid 6.89-90, where she declares that there is a new Achilles in Latium: alius Latio iam partus Achilles / natus et ipse dea (“already another Achilles has arisen in Latium, he too born from a goddess”). Reusing Virgil’s phrasing, Ovid replaces one term for doubling (et ipse) with another (uterque) but preserves the metrical structure, and he too describes a second Achilles—in this case not Turnus, but Amor. In the Aeneid, the doubling of Achilles signifies—in metapoetic terms—Virgil’s retreading of Iliadic material in Aeneid 7-12. By echoing the phrasing in the context of his own allusions to Greek epic material, Ovid sets his elegy up as a rival candidate for the mantle of “new Homer.”
In so doing, Ovid engages with complex mirroring effects in his Virgilian source text. As the Aeneid progresses, the referent of the Sibyl’s alius … Achilles becomes more ambiguous. Doubling turns to tripling as Turnus and Aeneas alternate in assuming the role of the “new Achilles,” increasingly reflecting one another through their shared literary model (e.g., Anderson 1957; Van Nortwick 1980; O’Hara 1990: 51). In using the Virgilian tag, Ovid similarly expands a duo into a trio, but on the level of authors and texts. Ostensibly pairing himself with Homer through their respective “protagonists” Amor and Achilles, he refers obliquely to Virgil with a phrase that Virgil himself had used to refer obliquely to his own protagonist, Aeneas. The reference casts Ovid’s and Virgil’s interrelationship as a metaliterary analogue to the interrelationship between Turnus and Aeneas: rivals and mirror images in their shared imitation of Homer. Clément-Tarantino and Klein (2015) show that Virgil and Ovid came to be understood as “frères ennemis” in later reception, but here we can see a seed of this idea planted by Ovid himself.
I consider Ovid’s metaliterary play in this and surrounding lines, from the obsessive chiasmus that responds to the chiastic structures of the Aeneid (Quint 2018), to the transposition of Virgil’s perfect elegiac half-line from the initial position to the second hemiepes as a “mirror image” of the original, to the use of divine genealogy as a reflection of literary genealogy.