Ibis (Ovid)

Last updated

Ovid's Ibis is a highly artificial and history-bound product and does not make pleasant reading. But it is interesting, among other things, because it illustrates the writer's propensity for moving on more than one plane of reality. The poem contains elements from three distinct modes of reacting to the same outrage; of these, the first may be called realistic, the second romantic, and the third grotesque.

Contents

Hermann Fränkel, Ovid: A Poet
between Two Worlds [1]

Ibis is a curse poem by the Roman poet Ovid, written during his years in exile across the Black Sea for an offense against Augustus. It is "a stream of violent but extremely learned abuse," modeled on a lost poem of the same title by the Greek Alexandrian poet Callimachus. [2]

Identity of Ibis

The object of the poet's curses is left unnamed except for the pseudonym "Ibis", and no scholarly consensus has been reached concerning the figure to whom this pseudonym might refer. Hyginus, Cassius Severus, Titus Labienus, Thrasyllus of Mendes, [3] Caninius Rebilus, Ovid's erstwhile friend Sabinus, and the emperor Augustus [4] have all been proposed, as well as the possibility that "Ibis" might refer to more than one person, [5] : 185  to nobody at all, [6] [7] or even to Ovid's own poetry. [8]

Structure and themes

The 644-line poem, like all Ovid's extant work except the Metamorphoses , [9] is written in elegiac couplets. It is thus an unusual, though not unique, example of invective poetry in antiquity written in elegiac form rather than the more common iambics or hendecasyllabics. [5] : 184  The incantatory nature of the curses in the Ibis has sometimes led to comparisons with curse tablets (defixiones), though Ovid's are elaborately literary in expression; [10] [11] the poem has also been seen as a type of devotio . [4]

Drawing on the encyclopedic store of knowledge he demonstrated in the Metamorphoses and his other work — presumably from memory, as he purportedly had few books with him in exile [12] — Ovid threatens his enemy in the second section of the poem (lines 251–638) with a veritable catalogue of "gruesome and mutually incompatible fates" that befell various figures from myth and history, [13] including laming, blinding, cannibalism, and death by pine cone. Ovid also declares in the poem's opening salvo that even if he dies in exile, his ghost will rise and rend Ibis's flesh. [14] : 129 

The basic structure of the poem is as follows: [15]

I. Introduction
1–66: Proem which lays out Ibis' crime and declares war
67–126: Prayers to the gods to inflict on Ibis poverty, hunger, and exile
127–208: The eternity of Ibis' torment, which will outlast both Ovid's death and Ibis' own
209–250: A biography of Ibis' infancy and a divine mandate given to Ovid to curse him
II. Catalogue
251–638: Catalogue of mythological and historical torments which Ibis should suffer
III. Coda
639–644: Promise of an iambic followup should Ibis not cease and desist

Afterlife

The Ibis attracted a large number of scholia and was widely disseminated and referenced in Renaissance literature. [16] In his annotated translation (1577), Thomas Underdowne found in Ibis a reference guide to "all manner of vices punished, all offenses corrected, and all misdeeds revenged." [14] : 131  An English translator noted that "a full reference to each of the allusions to be found in this poem would suffice to fill a small volume." [17]

Online texts and translations

The editio princeps of Ovid's complete works, including the Ibis, was published in Italy in 1471. Full-text versions of the following Latin editions and English translations of the Ibis are available online.

Latin

English translations

See also

Related Research Articles

Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme frequently used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The scheme of the hexameter is usually as follows :

The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.

Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe, daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi.

In poetry, metre or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poetry</span> Form of literature

Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ovid</span> Roman poet (43 BC – AD 17/18)

Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.

<i>Metamorphoses</i> Influential mythological narrative poem by Roman poet Ovid

The Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem from 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his magnum opus. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar in a mythico-historical framework comprising over 250 myths, 15 books, and 11,995 lines.

The adjective elegiac has two possible meanings. First, it can refer to something of, relating to, or involving, an elegy or something that expresses similar mournfulness or sorrow. Second, it can refer more specifically to poetry composed in the form of elegiac couplets.

<i>Tristia</i> Elegiac poetry collection by Ovid

The Tristia is a collection of letters written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet Ovid during his exile from Rome. Despite five books of his copious bewailing of his fate, the immediate cause of Augustus' banishment of the most acclaimed living Latin poet to Pontus in AD 8 remains a mystery. In addition to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto. He spent several years in the outpost of Tomis and died without ever returning to Rome.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Latin poetry</span> Poetry of the Latin language

The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of Greek models. The verse comedies of Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205–184 BC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heroic verse</span> Class of poetic verse

Heroic verse is a term that may be used to designate epic poems, but which is more usually used to describe the meter(s) in which those poems are most typically written. Because the meter typically used to narrate heroic deeds differs by language and even within language by period, the specific meaning of "heroic verse" is dependent upon context.

<i>Appendix Vergiliana</i> Collection of Poems written by Virgil.

The Appendix Vergiliana is a collection of Latin poems traditionally ascribed as being the juvenilia of Virgil.

<i>Amores</i> (Ovid)

Amores is Ovid's first completed book of poetry, written in elegiac couplets. It was first published in 16 BC in five books, but Ovid, by his own account, later edited it down into the three-book edition that survives today. The book follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, as made famous by figures such as Tibullus or Propertius, but is often subversive and humorous with these tropes, exaggerating common motifs and devices to the point of absurdity.

This is a glossary of poetry terms.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:

Greek and Latin metre is an overall term used for the various rhythms in which Greek and Latin poems were composed. The individual rhythmical patterns used in Greek and Latin poetry are also known as "metres".

<i>Medicamina Faciei Femineae</i> Poem written by Ovid

Medicamina Faciei Femineae is a didactic poem written in elegiac couplets by the Roman poet Ovid. In the hundred extant verses, Ovid defends the use of cosmetics by Roman women and provides five recipes for facial treatments. Other writers at the time condemned women's usage of cosmetics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exile of Ovid</span> Exile of Ovid from Rome to Tomis (now Romania) by emperor Augustus

Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 AD from Rome to Tomis by decree of the emperor Augustus. The reasons for his banishment are uncertain. Ovid's exile is related by the poet himself, and also in brief references to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius. At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world; it was loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace, and was superficially Hellenized. According to Ovid, none of its citizens spoke Latin, which as an educated Roman, he found trying. Ovid wrote that the cause of his exile was carmen et error, probably the Ars Amatoria and a personal indiscretion or mistake. The council of the city of Rome revoked his exile in December 2017, some 2000 years after his banishment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iambus (genre)</span> Genre of ancient Greek poetry

Iambus or iambic poetry was a genre of ancient Greek poetry that included but was not restricted to the iambic meter and whose origins modern scholars have traced to the cults of Demeter and Dionysus. The genre featured insulting and obscene language and sometimes it is referred to as "blame poetry". For Alexandrian editors, however, iambus signified any poetry of an informal kind that was intended to entertain, and it seems to have been performed on similar occasions as elegy even though lacking elegy's decorum. The Archaic Greek poets Archilochus, Semonides and Hipponax were among the most famous of its early exponents. The Alexandrian poet Callimachus composed "iambic" poems against contemporary scholars, which were collected in an edition of about a thousand lines, of which fragments of thirteen poems survive. He in turn influenced Roman poets such as Catullus, who composed satirical epigrams that popularized Hipponax's choliamb. Horace's Epodes on the other hand were mainly imitations of Archilochus and, as with the Greek poet, his invectives took the forms both of private revenge and denunciation of social offenders.

Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.

References

  1. ↑ Hermann Fränkel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (University of California Press, 1956), p. 152.
  2. ↑ Oliver Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 437 online.
  3. ↑ The Athenaeum, No. 2840, April 1, 1882
  4. 1 2 A. Schiesaro, "Ibis Redibis," Materiali e Discussioni 67 (2011): 79–150.
  5. 1 2 Martin Helzle, "Ibis," in A Companion to Ovid, edited by Peter E. Knox (Blackwell, 2009) online.
  6. ↑ A. E. Housman, "The Ibis of Ovid," Journal of Philology 35 (1920): 287–318
  7. ↑ G. D. Williams, The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid's Ibis (1996).
  8. ↑ Krasne, Darcy (2012-12-01). "The Pedant's Curse: Obscurity and Identity in Ovid's Ibis". Dictynna. Revue de poétique latine (in French) (9). doi: 10.4000/dictynna.912 . ISSN   1765-3142.
  9. ↑ The Metamorphoses is written in dactylic hexameter; the first line of a Latin elegiac couplet is dactylic hexameter, however, so the Metamorphoses itself is not a metrical exception in Ovid's extant work. His lost tragedy Medea presumably used other measures.
  10. ↑ Gareth D. Williams, "On Ovid's Ibis: A Poem in Context," in Oxford Readings in Ovid (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 447, note 12 online.
  11. ↑ Andreas Dorschel, "Entwurf einer Theorie des Fluchens", Variations 23 (2015), § 24, pp. 167-175, p. 173.
  12. ↑ Ov. Tr. 3.14.37–38
  13. ↑ Kenney, E. J.; Clausen, Wendell Vernon; Clausen, W. V. (1982-03-18). The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-21043-0.
  14. 1 2 Kerrigan, John (1996-04-18). Revenge Tragedy : Aeschylus to Armageddon: Aeschylus to Armageddon. Clarendon Press. ISBN   978-0-19-159172-3.
  15. ↑ Krasne, Darcy A. (2016). "Crippling Nostalgia: Nostos, Poetics, and the Structure of the Ibis". TAPA. 146 (1): 149–189. ISSN   2575-7199.
  16. ↑ R. Ellis, "On the Ibis of Ovid," Journal of Philology 7 (1877) 244–255, full text online.
  17. ↑ Henry T. Riley, "The Invective Against the Ibis," in The Fasti, Tristia, Pontic Epistles, Ibis, and Halieuticon of Ovid, Literally Translated into English Prose (London 1885), pp. 475ff.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.