JANICE SIEGEL ABSTRACT FOR CAMWS 2002 (SUCCESSFUL) BEATING HORACE

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JANICE SIEGEL ABSTRACT FOR CAMWS 2002 (SUCCESSFUL) BEATING HORACE
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look up Horace's comments on the chorus

Janice Siegel: Abstract for CAMWS 2002 (Successful)

Beating Horace at his Own Game:
Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Counterpoint to Ars Poetica

In this paper I argue that in his Metamorphoses, Ovid launches a subtle yet unrelenting attack against the limitations on both form and content foisted upon Roman literary artists by Horace in his Ars Poetica, a portion of which outlines the kind of scenes no one should ever be forced to watch:


non tamen intus/digna geri proomes in scaenam, multaque tolles/ex oculis, quae mox narret facundia praesens;/ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,/aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus,/aut in avem Procne vertatur, Cadmus in anguem./quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi. (Horace, Ars Poetica, 182-188)


With characteristic wit, Ovid crafts a response to Horace by writing a play-within-a-poem which manages to dramatize all of the above plot complications: the Procne episode in Book 6 of his Metamorphoses. Readers are treated to a fully developed five act play (neve minor neu sit quinto productior actu (AP 189) whose gruesome scenes are among the more memorable from the literary corpus of classical antiquity, scenes which dramatize each of the forbidden scenarios described above by Horace: Procne does kill her son on stage (and butchers him, too); Procne does cook her son on stage (Ovid relishes the detail); Procne does turn into a bird in front of our eyes; and Philomela’s tongue – after it is hacked out of her mouth by Tereus – does become a snake in simile.

But Horace’s warning concerning the treatment of scenes deemed unsuitable for public consumption is just the beginning for Ovid. The restriction on dramatic formulation in the Ars Poetica is the challenge Ovid cannot resist: to illustrate all of the above, and in a dramatic context - according to the precepts intended to ensure decorum but with the purpose of violating that same sense of decorum - simply to prove that it could be done...and done artfully.

In my paper I will outline how, in his Procne, Ovid addresses many of the rules set forth in Horace’s Ars Poetica, in each case in order to mock the hubris in writing a code designed to delimit “what is art.” Every practice the critic forbids, the artist embraces – and artfully so, thereby proving not only the narrowness of Horace’s vision, but Ovid’s own brilliance as well. Two examples will suffice here: first, Horace limits the number of speaking characters in each scene to three (nec quarta loqui persona laboret", AP 192). Brink’s commentary on this line explains that “if a fourth persona appears at all, it should be muta.” Not coincidentally, there are as many as three (directly or indirectly) speaking characters in several scenes of Ovid’s Procne, and in the one scene which does have four characters – the penultimate scene in which the identity of the feast-victim is revealed - Philomela is muta and Itys is cena. We also recall that Horace explains that the role of the chorus should be to “keep secrets” and pray to the gods for a happy outcome (actoris partis chorus officiumque virile/defendat,… ille tegat commissa deosque precetur et oret/ut redeat miseris abeat fortuna superbis, AP 193-201). Ovid’s act-by-act authorial intrusions take the place of choral odes here: as the omniscient narrator he knows the terrible secrets of his characters, which he cannot reveal; he can only bemoan the human tragedy unfolding in the wake of pietas perverted.

Early in the Ars Poetica, Horace provides the example of a craftsman who can create the most wondrous details for a vase but whose overall work is a failure: his concern, Brink explains (in his commentary on AP), is "the wholeness of a poem - words, order, subject - not only the logic of a plot....an artist must be able to envisage the totality of a work." (117) Ovid’s Procne is driven by the idea that fas est et ab hoste doceri (Met. IV.428). The structural, grammatical, philological and symbolic reciprocal response of Act IV (Procne’s crimes) to Act II (Tereus’ crimes), with the entire plot balanced upon the fulcrum of Act III, proves that Ovid was wholly concerned with the overall coherence of his presentation and allows him to play Horace’s game according to his rules…and win.





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