Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination. By VICTORIA 
RIMELL. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. viii 
+ 235. Cloth, $96.00. ISBN 0–521–86219–1.

Order this text for $96.00 from Amazon.com using this link and benefit 
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Print Version: CJ 103.4 (2008): 332–4

Recent scholarly focus on Ovid’s interest in change and boundary 
transgression has raised new questions about how constantly transforming 
subjects relate to one another. Victoria Rimell’s book addresses some of 
these questions by seeking out moments in Ovid’s poetry when a competition 
between desiring subjects, rather than the decisive mastery of one subject 
over another, shapes the poet’s verse. Borrowing Irigaray’s concept of the 
“being-in-relation” (p. 4), R. has chosen to reconsider power in Ovid as 
relational, rather than hierarchical (p. 3). Her study of relationships 
between subjects looks primarily at the Ars, Heroides and Medicamina, 
though there is some discussion of the Metamorphoses and occasional 
reference to the Amores and exilic poetry. By using a less hierarchical 
approach to explore how subjects relate to one another, R. hopes to revise 
predominant models of the Ovidian artist, which view Pygmalion (e.g., 
Anderson (1963)), Orpheus (e.g., Segal (1989)) or most recently Narcissus 
(e.g., Hardie (2002)) as the artist par excellence. Though Narcissus and 
Orpheus play significant roles in the development of R.’s argument, she 
offers Medusa as totemic for the Ovidian artistic process, since her myth 
implies a more dialectical process of viewing and creating. R. suggests 
that within the Medusa myth we find an “aition of poetry to rival that of 
Narcissus” (p. 16).

The book has some impressive moments, and R. is good at tracking internal 
reminiscence throughout Ovid’s erotic poetry. In Chapter 2, her reading of 
the Cephalus and Procris story (pp. 97–103) at the end of Ars 3 reveals how 
the tale replays and brings to tragic conclusion the contradictory signals 
prescribed throughout the Ars. For R. a frustrating “mirror-logic” (p. 96) 
governs the relationship between books and lovers in the poem, and the 
author demonstrates a proliferation of reflections and mimicry among male 
and female pupils. R. also highlights, especially in the Heroides (Chapters 
4–6), how traces of the praeceptor’s advice on epistolary discourse inform 
our impression of Ovidian erotics as fuelled by two creating, and often 
competing, subjects.

Unfortunately, these positive contributions are undermined by an overall 
lack of clarity, evident initially in R.’s haphazard chronological grouping 
of Ovid’s works. R. concedes that she is not concerned to “plot a teleology 
of Ovidian erotics” (p. 8), yet she explains her choice of texts (Heroides, 
Ars, Medicamina and Metamorphoses) as an attempt to define a period of the 
poet’s life, an impulse toward relationality. Thus, “…[a]ll these texts, 
with the exception of Heroides 1–15, were written between four and eight 
years of each other, and make up the backbone of Ovid’s life’s work” (p. 
4). By omitting the Amores from her list of core elegiac texts (!) and 
describing their presentation of lover and beloved as “more 
straightforwardly formulated” (p. 4), R. bypasses the difficulties of 
dating the twice-published work, though a good deal of composition and 
revision of these poems probably occurred around the same time as that of 
the Ars, Medicamina and Heroides. [n. 1]

A more significant problem is the methodology, by which links proposed 
between texts are often based on a single word. Though careful use of a 
word may constitute literary allusion, R.’s efforts to establish verbal 
parallels are weakened when, for example, a common participle (e.g., 
repercussus linking Met. 2.110, 3.434 and 4.783; pp. 28–9) or an emendation 
not found in the manuscript tradition (e.g., sponte at Her. 18.76 ties it 
to Aen. 4.361; p. 196) is said to relate one passage to another. R. is 
careful not to claim allusivity for many passages she cites (p. 29 n. 88), 
though she does not explain to my satisfaction any other rationale for her 
constant comparison of passages sharing but a single word. Similarly, 
Narcissus and Medusa show up in places that lack obvious verbal or thematic 
parallels. In R.’s discussion of Met. 10, decapitation (or neck-breaking) 
seems to link the death of Hyacinth with Euryalus in Aen. 9, Catullus’ 
poet-lover in 11.22, and Medusa (which Medusa? which text?). Perhaps R. has 
a conceptual basis for connecting these passages with her omnipresent 
gorgon, but she does not linger over any of them long enough for us to find 
out.

Equally important to the substance of R.’s argument about erotic 
relationships in Ovid is the matter of the poet’s elegiac predecessors. R. 
occasionally cites Tibullan or Propertian precedents, and insightfully 
points to the dream recounted in Propertius 2.26 as one background against 
which the Hero and Leander epistles are staged. Propertius had already 
presented, within the context of drowning, a rivalry between lover and 
beloved for poetic nomen (2.26.7; p. 12), and thus Hero’s identity as a 
creator, rather than poetic materies, may constitute “the point at which 
Ovid’s vision of female identity unleashes its ambitious edge” (p. 184). In 
general, however, R.’s treatment of Propertius and Tibullus is less astute. 
For instance, in her discussion of the Medicamina, evidence for the natural 
look advocated by the two elegists is problematic. Propertius 1.2 
foregrounds poetic artifice and complicates its own prescriptions for 
unadorned beauty, [n. 2] and in Tib. 1.8, the speaker gives advice not to 
Delia (as R. asserts) but to the puer Marathus (p. 49). The same lack of 
attention to the details of previous elegy can be felt in the opening of 
Chapter 2, where R. confirms the existence of a seriously doubted 
three-book edition of Tibullus’ elegies (p. 71). While a third book is 
attached to the corpus, the overwhelming scholarly consensus is that it is 
not Tibullan. Also, while Ovid may be the most overt of the elegists in 
juxtaposing the puella’s disturbing lack of self-fashioning with the 
elegist’s artistic auctoritas, R. fails to mention Propertius 3.24–5 
(joined in the manuscript tradition), in which the poet-lover holds a 
mirror up to Cynthia in an attempt to erode her fictive allure (3.24.1–2, 
25.13–16).

Regarding more formal matters, readers will find R.’s prose difficult to 
follow, in part because she equates terms, often through liberal use of the 
slash mark (e.g., “textual ecstasies/fallacies,” p. 8; “creative forces of 
desire and/as alterity,” p. 105; “epistolary/romantic contract,” p. 129), 
when the equation needs more explaining. She is also imprecise in her use 
of the term “empire” and its variants. R.’s study rarely engages with the 
Augustan socio-historical context (in itself not a failing), yet she 
describes a “high imperial culture which … seems to breed self-awareness” 
(p. 41) without external evidence to substantiate the characterization. R. 
also refers in a confusing way to the Ovidian poet: she names the poet of 
the Ars the “poet lover,” “praeceptor” and even “Ovid,” collapsing the 
distinction between the poet and his persona (p. 101). R. admits that she 
has created a “portrait of the proliferating and at times bewildering 
reflections” that define Ovid’s concept of self (p. 13) rather than a 
“jigsaw of precise and detailed arguments” (p. 12). Indeed, her portrait 
has many insightful strokes; I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to 
trace the topos of letter-writing or mirroring within the lesser known 
works. One only feels that for the book to be an effective piece of 
scholarship, it might have been less of a portrait and more of a jigsaw 
puzzle.

[n. 1] The Amores, first composed as a five-book edition, were later 
published in three volumes not before 16 BCE, the Ars around 1 BCE/CE, 
though the revised edition of the Amores may have been published about the 
same time as the Ars. See J.C. McKeown, ed., Ovid: Amores, vol. 1 
(Liverpool, 1987) 84–9.

[n. 2] See esp. Curran, “‘Nature to Advantage Dressed’: Propertius 1.2,” 
Ramus 4.1 (1975) 1–16.

HUNTER H. GARDNER
University of South Carolina


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