Ovid I

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).

In analyzing the geologist James Hutton’s cyclical conception of an eternal Earth, Gould remarked that “history demands a sequence of distinctive events” but that “[u]nder the metaphor of time's cycle in its pure form, nothing can be distinctive because everything comes round again” (Gould (1987) 80).

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.

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).

From foot to Muse: metapoetic feet as structural devices in Ovid’s Amores