Playboy Interviews Ovid:

An Oblique Character Study

Stephen L. Cain

22 May 1996

LATN 366-024

Publius Ovidius Naso is one of the greatest Latin Elegists and the last of the Golden Age. His works have been in continuous circulation since their composition, despite imperial attempts to squelch them. He has produced diverse works, from the Epic Metamorphoses to the erotic elegies of the Amores.

The Amores was published very early on, while he was still in school. This established his reputation as the next link in the logical succession of erotic elegies. Not too long afterward, he produced his Heroides. A lost tragedy, Medea, was produced a little before his Ars Amatoria, which was published about 1 BC. His exile in AD 8 cut short the final drafts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti. After his exile, he penned the Trisitia, Ibis, and the Epistulae Ex Ponto. There is also some evidence of a poem about Caesar written in Getan, the language of Tomis on the black sea.

His exile has never been fully explained, and Ovid says of it, "duo crimina, carmen et error" (Tristia, II.207). Most scholars agree that the "carmina" was his Ars Amatoria, but almost nothing about his error is known. He says that it was something he saw: "inscia quod crimen viderunt lumina" (Tristia III.5.49).

Playboy sent contributing editor Steve Cain, an aficionado of Classical Literature and pseudo-literate in Latin, to Los Angeles to interview the poet. They had lunch at Ovid’s Malibu house on the beach. "Thoroughly engaging man. Much more intelligent than I am, and makes a hell of a pastrami on rye," says Cain. "As to the structure of the interview, this is the only way to get myself and Ovid together. Some of the analogies between the Classical and Modern world come best from Ovid"

Playboy: Now that Imperial Rome is long gone, why not return to Rome?

Ovid: It wasn’t the city itself, it was the people that I was in touch with. I am very much a product of the people of the time. Without the people, Rome is just another city with falling and broken old buildings. I’ve never been back there. It would be like Aeneas going to Troy fifty years later. Nothing that held him there remains. Just damaged buildings and the spirits of lost loved ones.

Playboy: So then why go to L. A.? What’s its attraction?

Ovid: In some ways, Los Angeles is very like my Rome. There are the literary circles, the masses of ideas and creativity. You have the same things going on, the same situation where the people are doing exactly what they want while some parts want a return to traditional values. All modern America is missing is an autocratic government. If you want to see and be seen, to participate in the debauching of the young, to seduce and be seduced, even to be a part of the learned few, you have to come to L. A. It has Hollywood, UCLA (which has a good collection of my work) and all the seedy deals and fun that go with it. The Doors, poets, dreamers, movie makers, all of it. It all comes from L.A. The music and film worlds are ruled from Los Angeles. That’s another reason it attracts me: Rome was the political and social center of the world, and L. A. is the center of America’s institutionalized artistic world. The U.S. is essentially the center of the world, the peace-keeper. Pax Romana has become Pax Americana. Plus, its warm.

Playboy: That’s a criterion for a living place?

Ovid: Absolutely. I wish Miami or Rio had such a thriving artistic center. I like those places even better. After all that time on the Black Sea? Never again. If Anchorage or Oslo or Moscow ever becomes the cultural center of the world, I’d ask to be deserted, I’d pull an Anchises and stay in my burning city and I’d make sure there was no Aeneas to save me.

Playboy: Where else have you spent time like that. What other cities have been like Rome and L.A., world cultural centers?

Ovid: Paris, with the American Expatriates, New York for a while, Oscar Wilde’s grey London, Swift’s stinky London, Baghdad when it was Persian, Constantinople when it was Byzantium, Renaissance Italian cities like Naples, Florence and Genoa, Mozarabic Spain, Avignon, chilly Vienna, the list goes on.

Playboy: What are your favorites?

Ovid: Rome, the original, and L. A. They match together uncannily.

Playboy: Do the sexual climates match?

Ovid: To an extent, yes. Homosexuality in Rome was much more open. The Christian stigma hadn’t attached to it yet. As long as you were in charge, you could do it. It wasn’t a truly valid form of lonhg-term relationship, and you had to be of different ages or social classes. Other than that, they are very much the same. The modern fear of sexually transmitted diseases is the major difference.

Playboy: You don’t subscribe to homosexuality in your poetry like your elegiac predecessors. Catullus and Tibullus both write to their young men.

Ovid: I used the Ars Amatoria to sound off about that. Being a participant to the female orgasm is so much fun. To hear her voice and feel the tremors is really the goal of seduction. You don’t get that same sort of mutuality in homosexual love.

Playboy: As a man famous for seduction and sex games, why did you marry? It seems that you would want to stay single and have affairs.

Ovid: [Laughs] Not at all! Illicit love is lots of fun, no matter who you are cheating on. Actually, the first and second marriages weren’t much of anything. The last marriage was of love. I was getting old and too tired to keep up the intrigues. The Amores aren’t wholly autobiography, but then they aren’t all untrue.

Playboy: In what way?

Ovid: Well, I’m not quite that personally devious or promiscuous. It is, for the most part, an act, a poetic facade, if you will. Obviously you didn’t pay too much attention to my Tristia. "Magnaque pars mendax operum est et ficta meorum," from Book Two. I made this up. I was almost never unfaithful to my three wives.

Playboy: Almost never?

Ovid: No comment. Certainly not to my last wife. I married for love that time.

Playboy: O.K. How about your literary successors and your influence? You may be the most influential poet in existence. Some say that Chaucer is your reincarnation. Others look at your monologues and compare them to Robert Browning. Others look at your short elegies and compare them with Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Ovid: Well, that’s some weighty stuff. I’m flattered that some people think I’m that good. I think I just hit a chord in some hearts. Actually, I’m surprised that my work with the tired elegy has that much influence all over the world. Browning? I don’t know about him. the Heroides are monologues, but elegiac and amatory, not serious and with a thesis. Also, I wrote from the female point of view for the Heroides. Browning’s work is almost exclusively male. Take "Fra Lippo Lippi," for example. [He quotes] "The world’s no blot nor blank for us. It means intensely and means well, and finding its meaning is my meat and drink." That’s pretty heavy stuff, the meaning of the world. Browning has his niche. Flirting means intensely and well, and finding its end is my meat and drink. I’m not about sententiae and philosophy. Storytelling, human psychology and sexual relations are my domain, not the History of Renaissance Ideas.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets? That’s a little closer. He is a product of the Renaissance. He cut his teeth on my Metamorphoses. Of course he knows his stuff and mine. He is truly a man after my own heart, working in a new medium. He concentrates on getting his theme across with excellence in language. Particularly the sonnet form. That is a very difficult form, to get rhyme, meter, subject and length all in harmony with a Germanic language. It really is a polished and showy form. I tried and only made a couple of good ones. He’s got over a hundred solid poems. He’s showing off in his form, just like I did with the elegy, and if you are good enough, flaunt it. I particularly like number 135. It is my style [quotes]:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I that vex thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right and gracious,

And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

And in abundance addeth to his store,

So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will

One will of mine to make thy large Will more.

Let no unkind, no unfair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

That’s my kind of work! Puns, exquisite attention to word choice, craftsmanship that delights. Horace, although he is a little too crotchety sometimes, has it all right: To instruct and delight. Some of Shakespeare’s stuff is straight from me and the elegiac conventions. Love as a contest, battle, hunt, and so on. However, his senectos topos literary trope, about the world growing old. I don’t believe it. In my time at Rome, it was the only place to be, the only time to be. Nothing else would do, or has equaled it yet. Some people thought that the world was coming to an end, that it was the worst time to live since the dawn of time. It was, they thought, the Iron Age. This is untrue. The world isn’t old, you are. [Using a mock actor’s tone:] "Devouring Time, march like as waves to the pebbled shore, for the Earth dies tomorrow." That’s not me or my style. He must’ve gotten it from his mother.

Playboy: And Chaucer?

Ovid: We’ll need some more sandwiches and beer. [Laughs.] Chaucer? Hmm. In what way?

Playboy: As a masculine proto-feminist, as a proprietor of amour courtois and the romance tradition, as the greatest of his age.

Ovid: Ahh! It is true that we both took the part of the woman. But feminism? No. Female psychology is useful, but only like criminal psychology to the police. It helps you catch them. Chaucer and the Wife of Bath... I originated the form. Propertius has one example, but I made the form. It is kind of cool to be the father of a poetic form.

Chaucer does the same thing I do in my Heroides: take a female character from a male-dominated world, immerse yourself in their psyche and make them come alive. I admit that at the time, my view was a bit immature, but it was all the ancient world had, aside from Sulpicia and Sappho. Somebody had to make up the difference. I just like to play with words.

However, Chaucer was into a different medium. I have elegy, Shakespeare sonnets, Pope heroic couplets, and Chaucer has his fabliaux. That is a genre I enjoy reading, but cannot claim as a derivative. His fabliaux, and indeed the genre as a whole, isn’t so interested with the language. Their clever usage revolves around dirty puns and plot devices. Stock characters aren’t my thing, either. I like the inner intellectual workings of men. The fabliaux aren’t about the idea of craftsmanship as much as the idea of storytelling. They might as well be novels as verse pieces. Not that novel’s aren’t art, just a different form, not my form.

His romances are a little closer to my point, but again they are about storytelling not careful "wordsmithing." They maintain the ideas of love as a hard physical labor, a battle, imprisonment, sickness, madness or whatever. That is common to the genre. Every semiliterate romance writer does it. I founded a part of that tradition. However, their love usually doesn’t get requited or it is by definition impossible to be consummated. I don’t like that. As much as I like the pursuit, the capture is better. You can’t go too far and trivialize it, though, like the fabliaux. They treat lovemaking and sex as plot devices and rewards, not bonding experiences or chances to reveal sexuality and personality. If you combined the two forms from Chaucer, you might get something really interesting. Maybe like "William of the Falcon." I haven’t read that in a long time. I’ll have to look at it.

Playboy: So, you’ve been part of the public literary life since you started until the Age of Reason?

Ovid: Yes. Since Pope, I’ve been declining in popularity, except for a few Romantics and dusty professors. Very few people can read the Latin any more. And that is a shame, since the language lends itself to poetry so readily.

Playboy: Now, about your exile...

Ovid: You know the official reason as well as I: the Ars Amatoria, with its pretense of teaching matrons how to participate in illicit love.

Playboy: It isn’t just the poem. You said it was a "carmen et error." You saw something in addition to the poem.

Ovid: I kind of like the speculation. I enjoy reading whole books devoted to my shortcomings. I’m not going to say any more.

Playboy: Is it a coincidence that you and the younger Julia were exiled at about the same time?

Ovid: Hey! Do I pry into the last time you were at the Deer Park? How about that girl, what was her name? Do you even remember? No comment!

Playboy: Point taken. How do you think The Metamorphoses stands up as an epic, given the history of the genre and th other authors?

Ovid: I really was concerned only with challenging Virgil and his pompous Augustan sobriety. Dactylic hexameter isn’t my natural meter, no more than it was Pope’s or Shakespeare’s. I wanted build a long piece with a combination of story-telling and fine verbal work. Epics other than Virgil really don’t matter that much except as source material or derivatives. I took from Homer and gave to the rest. Beowulf is something I had very little to do with. Milton is definitely a Vergilian at heart, although his etiological point, "justifying the ways of God to Man" is something like what I intended, although not so seriously. Come to think of it, nobody has made a light poetic epic. They are all so serious and sober. They are almost as bad as priests or something.

Playboy: The sources for the Metamorphoses are very eclectic and sometimes obscure. Is doctus a requirement for your poetry, to throw in references to look educated?

Ovid: You do it too, don’t you?

Playboy: Well, yes...

Ovid: It is a release for all that stuff they packed into you in school. In your case, it shows your parents that you’ve learned something, although it just isn’t as useful as, say, organic chemistry or bioremediation. It is another aspect of making poems carefully. Finding mythic or historic precedents or analogies that fit your situation is almost as hard as making the meter come out right and choosing the right word. It sets the tone for the poem when you get the right analogy; that way the audience’s expectations are set up and the scene is already half-painted for you by somebody else’s pen.

Playboy: Did you actually get whipped for verse by your father and cry out that you would never write it again--in verse?

Ovid: [Laughs] I love that apocryphal story! No. I avoided versifying at that occasion.

Bibliography