Jonathan Rolfe, Hillsdale College
Once when Ovid was at a dinner party, his friends asked him to cut out three lines of his poetry. Ovid promised to do so, if he could choose three lines to protect from this request. Ovid wrote down the three lines he wanted to keep, and his friends wrote what they wanted excised. When they each revealed, Ovid and his friends turned out to have written the same lines. The first line that Ovid protected and that his friends attacked was “semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem,” “both half-bull man and half-man bull.” Ovid's audience considered the line excessive; Ovid knew it, and still kept the line. Semibovis is Ovid's own coinage.
In 1981, Emil Linse published a study of the words that Ovid coined, in line with several other authors' studies of neologisms in other poets. Linse's dissertation (published, beautifully, in Latin) lists Ovid's coinages and organizes them by type (Latin or Greek origin, prefixed, compounded, verbs, nouns, etc.). E. J. Kenney has used Linse's study in a general discussion of Ovid’s language and style. However, neither Linse’s nor Kenney’s study discusses how Ovid uses his coined words, in what contexts and for what effects. I will look at the literary context in which Ovid coined words, discuss the nature of Ovid’s “epic” compounds, and offer one use that Ovid makes of his new compounds: humorous effect.
Using Emil Linse’s list of all the Latin words coined by Ovid, the paper studies Ovid’s use of epic compounds (defined as a compound combining two adjective, noun, or verb stems) in the Metamorphoses. The paper examines the opinions of several Roman authors on the subject of word-coining, including Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace, then looks at the types of words Ovid coins, and the types of words other poets coined. Ovid’s actual use of some epic neologisms is then examined, in contexts that demonstrate their humorous use. (As if humor can really be proven by rational argument.)