Loving Writing/Ovid’s Amores by Ellen Oliensis (review)

Throughout her study, Oliensis makes, and readily defends, the case that Naso is the chief character of the Amores, the lover and the poet, the failure and the success, the id and the ego (and superego), and she only concedes the authorial presence of Ovid himself in the very last poem of the collection, 3.15, where he slips out from behind the curtain to sign off, saying he will write no more elegy. The collection thus solely features Naso stumbling through his attempts to get his poetics and his love life in order, and failing at both just enough to fool us into thinking that we are occasionally seeing realism (the wife in 3.13!). [...]in 2.7, when Naso is himself accused of cheating with Corinna’s slave (whereupon he blames poor Cypassis in 2.8 for the betrayal), he has failed to notice that the parrot was quite capable of revealing to Corinna what Naso had been up to in her chambers, and likely lost its life for loquaciously replaying the salient moments in her presence. [...]Oliensis explains, “Naso was obviously unaware of this back-story when he composed what turns out to be a totally inappropriate eulogy for the dead parrot, a poem that . . . seems calculated only to enrage her the more” (68).