The Ovidian Sublime. Antiquity and After
Philip Hardie
Ovid gets just four index entries in James I. Porter’s monumental book on The sublime in antiquity. That, one might think, is not very surprising. ‘Ovidian’ and ‘sublime’ are terms which do not often appear in the same sentence. Nor is a positively valued sublimity one of the features which has been much enlisted in the rehabilitation, over the last half century, of Ovid as one of the greatest of Roman poets. The chief exception to this relative lack of interest in the Ovidian sublime has been the Phaethon episode in the Metamorphoses, on which more below.
To provide some contexts: Porter’s 2016 book is a massive manifestation of something that has been going on for some time, the diagnosis of sublimity in a range of Greek and Roman texts outside of pseudo-Longinus. More particularly, in the field of Latin poetry, sublimity is a quality or effect for which recent studies have looked to Lucretius, Virgil, Manilius, Lucan, Statius, and Silius Italicus, if rarely to Ovid. Yet that list of Latin hexameter poets is marked by the glaring absence of the name of Ovid, who, in other ways, is inextricably woven in to the development of the Latin hexameter tradition, from Republic to Empire.
To use the terminology of the now outdated ages of metal scheme, the _Metamorphoses_ has often been seen as a late work of ‘Golden’ Latin poetry that anticipates, and is the model for, features of ‘Silver’ Latin poetry, in the matter of such things as rhetoric, spectacularity, descriptions of extreme violence, hyperbole, and paradox. A number of these features are rather negative labels for what, viewed in a more positive light, could be seen as sources of the sublime. For example, pseudo-Longinus takes hyperbole as productive of the sublime (9.5, 38), although a hyperbole taken too far can fall into the opposite of sublimity. One of the signs of Ovid’s interest in the sublime, and, I would suggest, his interest in an already well-developed literary-critical discourse on the sublime, is precisely his testing of the boundary between the sublime and the ridiculous, between hupsos and bathos, in the sense given to the latter word by Alexander Pope, in Peri Bathous, or the art of sinking in poetry (1727). The best analysis of Ovid’s knowing embrace of the puerility with which he is charged by later critics, in contexts that seem to demand a sustained grandeur, is Llewelyn Morgan’s article on ‘Child’s play: Ovid and his critics’. ‘Grandeur’ is a word used on several occasions by Morgan, in discussion of the younger Seneca’s charge that in his description of the Flood, Ovid reduces the magnitudo rei to pueriles ineptiae (NQ 3.27.13-15), but the words ‘sublime’ and ‘sublimity’ do not appear in his article. Nor does the name of Longinus, who comments that (Subl. 3.4) ‘while tumidity seeks to outdo the sublime, puerility (τὸ μειρακιῶδες) is the exact opposite of grandeur.’ Longinus observes of Isocrates’ use of hyperbole that (38.2) he ‘fell into unaccountable puerility through his ambition to amplify everything’ (ὁ γοῦν Ἰσοκράτης οὐκ οἶδ᾿ ὅπως παιδὸς πρᾶγμα ἔπαθεν διὰ τὴν τοῦ πάντα αὐξητικῶς ἐθέλειν λέγειν φιλοτιμίαν).
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Greene, Groatsworth:
"...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country."
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John Soothern, Pandora:
(snip)
...Amongst our well renowned men
*De Vere merits a silver pen
Eternally to write his honour*[…]
And it pleases me to saye too,
(With a louange, I protest true)
That in England we cannot see,
Anything like De Vere, but he.
Onelie himselfe he must resemble,
Vertues so much in him assemble.
