Tianqi Zhu (University of Cincinnati)
In the Ovidian corpus, nervus frequently appears in association with poetry and songs to refer to the string of a musical instrument (chorda, Met. 5.340; cithara, Met. 10.108), producing poetic opera (Her. 15.13), verba (Met. 10.40), and carmina (Met. 1.518). Considering the evident poetic significance of the word, the lack of focused scholarship on its metapoetic properties (most commentaries concentrate only on its bodily connotations: e.g. McKeown 1987, Helzle 2003, Tarrant 2004, West 2010, Formicola 2018) requires correction. My new analysis of nervus in Ovid demonstrates that the word, even in non-musical contexts representing sex, sinew, and strength, contains meaningful metapoetic resonances that should shape our understanding of Ovid’s larger poetic projects.
First, building upon the obvious slippage between erotic activity and poetic composition in elegy, I argue that nervus carries both sexual and poetic overtones throughout the Amores. Though scholars have noted this phenomenon (Kennedy 1993, Sharrock 1995, Oliensis 2019), the centrality of nervus to its development remains underexplored. It is specifically the nervus that rises (surrexit) and shrinks (attenuat) at Am. 1.1.17-18, reflecting not only the rising hexameter and the falling pentameter of elegiac meter, but also the rhythm of male arousal and release in sexual activities. Composing elegy becomes equivalent to having sex—and vice-versa—a correlation whose efficacy finds its focal point in the sexual-poetic hybridity of nervus.
Next, nervus appears in several violent death scenes in the Metamorphoses where, I argue, careful lexical and contextual details activate the word’s metapoetic valences alongside its primary sense of human sinews. For example, Hercules’ nervi, as he burns alive, sonant as if singing (Met. 9.174). Furthermore, Ovid’s Hercules is closely tied to Apollo, the god of poetry, via an intensive allusion to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Nethercut 2016). Ovid’s anachronistic arrangement of Hercules’ birth immediately after his death likewise renders Hercules’ apotheosis into a physical manifestation of poetic immortality. The poetics of nervus becomes intertwined with that of the character.
Finally, given the generic intimacy between the themes of poetry and politics in the Epistulae ex Ponto (Myers 2014 and Lehmann 2018), I argue that nervus in this work embodies Ovid’s literary strength and his only hope of return to Rome. Ovid repeatedly exploits the nervus as he flatters Germanicus’ rhetorical teacher (meis numeris tua dat facundia neruos, Pont. 2.5.69), pleads with the empress (cunctisque incumbere neruis, Pont. 3.1.39), and petitions Germanicus directly by extolling his mastery of the nervus of both lyre and bow, poetry and war (uenit ad sacras neruus uterque manus, Pont. 4.8.75-78). Conversely, if the poet’s nervus fails, downfall would soon follow (flecti neruos si patiere, cades, Pont. 2.7.78). Nervus thus serves as the binding thread for poetics and politics, the work’s central concerns.
In conclusion, the physical nervus in Ovid reflects not just bodily experience but the primary poetic concerns of the work in which it appears, and for this reason the word deserves primacy of place in considerations of Ovid’s metapoetic achievements.