From the early love poetry to the literature of exile, Ovid’s work displays the use of rhetoric throughout. Its influence is particularly evident in the Heroides, elegies written while he was still a young man, where Ovid plays with the structure of suasoriae, a circumstance that directly reflects his rhetorical education. The elder Seneca (Controv. 2.2.8-12) mentions that the young Ovid was a student of the Roman rhetoricians Marcus Porcius Latro and Arellius Fuscus and provides a vivid testimony, which is partly anecdotal, to Roman rhetorical education of this time. At the beginning Seneca sums up Ovid’s rhetorical talent: habebat ille comptum et decens et amabile ingenium. oratio eius iam tum nihil aliud poterat videri quam solutum carmen (‘‘He had an elegant, tasteful, and pleasurable talent. Already at that time his speech could be seen as nothing other than poetry in prose,’’ Controv. 2.2.8). The expression solutum carmen is noteworthy: it shows that rhetoric and poetry are inseparably connected. Seneca further informs us that Ovid was highly talented in declaiming controversiae (fictitious law cases) but that he preferred suasoriae (fictitious speeches of persuasion): declamabat autem Naso raro controversias...; libentius dicebat suasorias: molesta illi erat omnis argumentatio (‘‘but Naso rarely declaimed controversiae...; he preferred speaking suasoriae; all argumentation was tiresome to him,’’ Controv. 2.2.12). After that Seneca adds an anecdote that sounds ‘‘like other good anecdotes... truer than the truth’’ (Frankel 1945: 7): some of Ovid’s friends had agreed with the poet to select three verses out of his work that should be eliminated for reasons of taste, while Ovid himself was to choose three verses that he liked most. The verses chosen were identical. Seneca cites two of them: first, semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem (‘‘the man half-bull and the bull half-man [the Minotaur],’’ Ov. Ars Am. 2.24); secondly, et gelidum Borean, egelidumque Notum (‘‘and the frozen Boreas, and the unfrozen South [two winds],’’ Am. 2.11.10). In both verses the rhetorical point, which results from chiasmus and paronomasia, takes precedence over the content. With this anecdote goes Quintilian’s famous judgment of Ovid that he had been nimium amator ingenii sui (‘‘a lover too much of his own talent,’’ Inst. 10.1.88). With regard to the poet’s (now lost) drama Medea, Quintilian remarks that it would have been better for Ovid’s work si ingenio suo imperare quam indulgere maluisset (‘‘if he had chosen to control his talent rather than indulge it,’’ Inst. 10.1.98).
In his ‘‘autobiographical’’ Tristia Ovid himself refers to the education he had received together with his brother, whose rhetorical talent made him more suited to a political career, whereas he himself was attracted by poetry (4.10). Humorously he describes his fruitless attempts to write in prose: et quod temptabam scribere versus erat (‘‘and whatever I tried to write was verse,’’ 4.10.26). The view the elder Seneca sketched of Ovid as a student of rhetoric can be transferred to his poetry: the expression comptum et decens et amabile ingenium (Controv. 2.2.8) is a suitable characterization of his elegant and artistic style.
World History
