Paul Hay (Hampden-Sydney College)
This paper examines allusive references to the works of Messalla Corvinus in the early poetry of Ovid, and argues that Ovid deploys these references for a knowing audience in order to honor his benefactor in a manner other than explicit poetic dedication. I identify a reference to Messalla in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria unmentioned by previous commentators (such as Brandt 1902, Janka 1997), and I parallel it with a known reference to a famous Messalla bon mot in Amores 1.3 (Barsby 1975, Gagliardi 1984). Scholarship on Ovid typically downplays the role of Messalla in Ovid’s early career and de-emphasizes the significance of their relationship (especially in comparison with other poets of the “Messalla Circle,” e.g. Tibullus), even though it seems to have lasted for most of Ovid’s career (and throughout Messalla’s life). Such an oversight risks distorting Ovid’s positioning within elite Roman culture at the end of the first century BCE by occluding his social and political connections. This paper helps reassert the importance of Messalla to Ovid’s early career.
At Ars 2.295-300, Ovid instructs his reader to praise one’s girlfriend, no matter what she may be wearing. Ovid lists three luxury dress items, but then concludes for effect with a coarse woolen cloak, a gausapa. This rare word (cf. Rosellini 2016) also appears in a witty fragment in the surviving oratory of Messalla Corvinus, in which he mocks Antony’s failure against the Parthians (cf. Patterson 2015) by claiming that his spoils of conquest were simply woolen cloaks, gausapae. The term gausapa is marked in Latin literature as a ludic, satiric word (cf. Lucil. fr. 20.568; Hor. Sat. 2.8.11, Pers. 4.37, 6.46), and Ovid weaves the term organically into his Ars (itself a densely allusive, even parodic work; see e.g. Steudel 1992) as the punchline to his own joke while recalling his patron’s joke. My reading of Ovid’s gausapa reference is strengthened by a parallel at Amores 1.3.15, in which Ovid denies being a desultor amoris, a phrase which modern scholarship has concluded was a reference to Messalla’s “desultor bellorum civilium” insult directed at Q. Dellius (Seneca, Suas. 1.7.2). Ovid also (according to Seneca, Suas. 3.6-7) inserted the Vergilian phrase “plena deo” into his lost tragedy Medea because it was an inside joke among Messalla and his friends, further demonstrating Ovid’s interest in wordplay that was noticeable to his patron (himself a language scholar).
Following McKeown 1987’s description of Ovid’s desultor reference as “a witty compliment to Messalla,” we should read both these allusions as a clever means by which Ovid can pay tribute to Messalla without naming him directly (as he notably fails to do in his early verse). Both references also serve to assert Messalla’s post-civil war position as a loyal Augustan (cf. Butrica 1995), useful given Messalla’s shifting allegiances throughout the 40s and 30s BCE. An analysis of Ovid’s early poetry conscious of these references to Messalla’s political insults can better acknowledge the close relationship between Ovid and his patron at the beginning of his career.