(updated 8/4)
In our recent chats on Ovid, some of us used translations by Peter Green, and since then I have become a fan of his. I recently acquired for a pittance the 1989 hardcover edition of his collection of essays, Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture, re-isssued on 1998 as trade paperback.
I don't think this Bryn Mawr Classsical Review does the book full justice. But then I'm not a professional historian, and much closer to Mr. Green in age and share some of his views on postmodern scholarship. Certainly some aspects will be outdated by now and new historical or archaeological facts may have been discovered. I found his approach to his subjects and his writing highly entertaining. The essays roam all over the place; a chapter list follows further below.
But getting back to the subject of Ovid: there are two chapters on him. The first, Carmen et Error, The Enigma of Ovid's Exile, deals in more depth with the subject than in the introduction to Green's translation, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters. He starts off with a brief discussion of The Mystery of Ovid's Exile by John C. Thibault, which I also acquired cheaply recently and which is available through used book sellers, a thorough work of sleuthing, sifting through ancient evidence and modern hypotheses, and not leaving out the craziest ones either. Thibault concentrates on three: cherchez la femme, Zeitgeist, and dynastic politics. Green talks briefly about this book, and ignoring the "frivolous" theories, he gives us his own view on the enigma of the error in depth. He concludes that it must have involved the Julians vs. Claudians intrigues, and that for that reason Tiberius (and Livia) did not call him back or at even allowed him to move to a more comfortable place after the death of Augustus.
"Since the charge against the Ars was nonsensical (though possessed of a certain vague, if irrational, social plausibility in the light of the Lex Iulia and Augustan moral reforms in general), Ovid, as a good rhetorician, could safely be left to refute it at eye-catching length and in loudly self-exculpatory tones, while exercising discretion over his less easily justifiable brush with dynastic power politics. This explains why he was not only allowed, but encouraged, to correspond freely with friends in Rome (EP 3.6.11-12) and to publish his exilic poems. The literary praeceptor amoris found himself, in the end, treated as a mere political pawn."
(Thibault though examined the dating of the relegation and is a bit doubtful about the validity of this argument.)
The second Ovid essay is titled Wit, Sex, and Topicality: The Problems confronting a Translation of Ovid's Love Poetry. Green first discusses the translations by Dryden et al, and then goes into the difficulties and pitfalls for modern translators of poetry, with sometimes hilarious examples, and his own approach to Ovid.
As the reading group may remember, we had planned to discuss Juvenal's Satires last November but had to give up due to chat room problems. Following the above two chapters comes Juvenal Revisited, in which Green relates, hilariously, his early fascination with and relationship to Juvenal. This lead him to search for Juvenal the person, an aspect which is highly important to him; but he acknowledges that – at least at the time of the publication in 1989 – he had become somewhat unfashionable (a theme also pursued in Chapter XVI):
"I [have] two serious strikes against me: I am an historian, which means that I believe in the objective existence of truth, and have no great faith in the binding force of critical theory; and not only do I passionately love literature, but I never forget it was written for real people, in an actual society, at a specific point in time."
Since his introduction to the Sixteen Satires, Penguin Classics, Green writes, he has reconsidered some of his views on Juvenal, which here leads him to an extensive discussion of the satirist's life. (The above-linked third edition of the book is from 1999 and may well have a revised introduction.)
The Chapters:
| I | Precedent, Survival, Metamorphosis: Classical Influences in the Modern World |
| II | Victorian Hellas |
| III | Lesbos and the Genius Loci |
| IV | On the Thanatos Trail |
| V | The Treasures of Egypt |
| VI | Delphic Responses |
| VII | Strepsiades, Socrates, and the Abuses of Intellectualism |
| VIII | Downtreading the Demos |
| IX | Sex and Classical Literature |
| X | The Macedonian Connection |
| XI | After Alexander: Some Historiographical Approaches to the Hellenistic Age |
| XII | Caesar and Alexander: aemulatio, imitatio, comparatio |
| XIII | Carmen et Error: The Enigma of Ovid's Exile |
| XIV | Wit, Sex and Topicality: The Problems Confronting a Translator of Ovid's Love Poetry |
| XV | Juvenal Revisited |
| XVI | Medium and Message Reconsidered: The Changing Functions of Classical Translation |
The above photo is from a 2003 interview at Classical Iowa which links to Green's reviews in the New York Review of Books, most of which require subscription though.
short list of Ovid works available
