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Poetry, Parents and Power in Ovid’s Tristia

Frances Myatt

Résumé

There is a long history, going back to Plato and beyond, to the idea that writing is like having a child. In Ovid’s Tristia, however, metaphors of poetic parenthood are not merely a literary commonplace, but complex poetic statements that have significant implications for one of the central themes of his exile poetry – power. Who has the power to create poetry, and who has the power to determine its meaning? Using a gender-sensitive approach to Ovid’s parenthood metaphors, this article draws out the contrasts between his treatment of poetic maternity and poetic paternity, with close readings of Tristia 1.1, 1.7. 3.1 and 3.14. Ovid’s poetics of parenthood are then brought into dialogue with the gendered power dynamics of the Roman family and Augustus’ own self-fashioning as Pater Patriae, ‘father of the fatherland’. The article concludes with a new reading of the gendering of poetic creativity in Tristia 3.7, in which Ovid reflects on poetic immortality in a unique address to a female poet, Perilla.

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  • 1 Joyce 1975: 202–203, quoted in Friedman 1987: 57.

I went then into the backroom of the office and sitting at the table, thinking of the book I have written, the child which I have carried for years and years in the womb of the imagination as you carried in your womb the children you love, and of how I had fed it day after day out of my brain and my memory.1

James Joyce

  • 2 This article arose from a paper given at the 2024 Réseau Poésie Augustéenne in Durham, and I would (...)
  • 3 It appears in seven surviving plays from the period (Leitao 2012: 101–102), while earlier Pindar de (...)
  • 4 More in-depth usages are seen in Aristotle (Eth. Nic. 1168a), who compares poets’ partiality for th (...)
  • 5 On Callimachus’ use of τίκτειν for his own poetic production at e.g., Aet. 1.19-20, Bakola 2010: 28 (...)
  • 6 As observed by Davisson 1984: 11.
  • 7 Conte 1992: 152; Kyriakidis 2013: 356–357. With 11 poems in the book, Kyriakidis takes 1.6 as the m (...)

1There is a long history to the idea that writing is like having a child2. The metaphor can be traced back to at least the 420s BC, and Plato in particular developed the idea in detail across several of his dialogues.3 For several centuries after Plato, however, writers generally used the metaphor only briefly and impersonally,4 and often via the largely dead metaphors of τίκτειν, nasci, and parere.5 In the Tristia, however, Ovid repeatedly characterises his poetry as his children at structurally important points within the collection, namely in the very first poem of Tristia 1, and the first and last poems of Tristia 3.6 Perhaps most striking, however, is his specifically maternal simile of Tristia 1.7 – another structurally significant position, for Kyriakidis observes this poem opens the second half of the first book and, as Conte has demonstrated, in Latin poetry this medial point frequently offers ‘a specific declaration of poetics.’7 Here, Ovid recounts how he attempted to burn the Metamorphoses when he left Rome to go into exile:

haec ego discedens, sicut bene multa meorum,
     ipse mea posui maestus in igne manu.
utque cremasse suum fertur sub stipite natum
     Thestias et melior matre fuisse soror,
sic ego non meritos mecum peritura libellos
     imposui rapidis uiscera nostra rogis: (Tr. 1.7.15-20)

Departing I sadly placed these verses, just as I rightly placed many things of mine, on the fire with my own hand. And as Althaea is said to have burned her own son by means of a branch and to have been a better sister than mother, so I placed my innocent little books, my uiscera, on the swift funeral pyre to perish with me.

  • 8 For a gender sensitive reading, see Boyd 2017: 147–180. For grouping, see Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2 (...)

2While some scholars have been sensitive to the gender dynamics of Ovid’s parental metaphors, others have grouped his maternal and paternal metaphors together into a more generalised poetics of parenthood.8 This article aims, however, to draw out the contrasts between Ovid’s Althaea simile and his paternal metaphors of Tristia 1.1, 3.1 and 3.14 in order to reassess a central theme of the exile poetry – that of power. Who has power over poetic creativity, and who has the power to determine how and by whom poetry will be read? These are, moreover, questions that have implications beyond the realm of poetics. In her article on childbirth as a metaphor for writing, Friedman astutely observes that:

  • 9 Friedman 1987: 51.

The childbirth metaphor has always been ‘pregnant’ with resonance because childbirth itself is not neutral in literary discourse. Whether it appears as subject or vehicle of expression, childbirth has never achieved what Roland Barthes calls ‘writing degree zero’, the language of ‘innocence’, ‘freed from responsibility in relation to all possible context.’ The context of the childbirth metaphor is the institution of motherhood in the culture at large.9

  • 10 See e.g., Hug 2023; Severy 2003.

3Both motherhood and fatherhood were particularly freighted institutions in Augustan Rome, as matters of state became a family affair and the state made unprecedented interventions in the sexual lives of its citizens in a bid to return to the supposedly severe morals of Rome’s ancestors.10 I shall therefore bring Ovid’s treatment of the poetics of parenthood in his exile poetry into dialogue with the gendered power dynamics of the Roman family and Augustus’ own self-fashioning as ‘father of the fatherland’. I shall conclude by offering a new reading of the gendering of poetic creativity in Tristia 3.7, an intriguing and understudied poem in which Ovid reflects on poetic immortality in an address to a female poet, Perilla.

The Poetics of Parenthood

My idea about songs is that once you write them, you have very little say in their life afterward. It's a lot like having a baby. You conceive a song, deliver it, and then give it as good a start as you can. After that, it’s on its own. People will take it any way they want to take it.11

Melanie

  • 12 Gilbert & Gubar 1979: 7.

A notion of ‘ownership’ or possession is embedded in the metaphor of paternity… because he is an author, a ‘man of letters’ is simultaneously, like his divine counterpart, a father, a master or ruler and an owner.12

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

  • 13 On Roman awareness of the uniqueness of the paterfamilias’s power, see esp. Gai. Inst. 1.55; for su (...)
  • 14 Pater autem familias appellatur, qui in domo dominium habet, recteque hoc nomine appellatur, quamui (...)
  • 15 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.27.1-4; see Lindsay 2009: 64–65
  • 16 See e.g., ps. Quint. Declamationes maiores 19.5, Sen. Controu. 9.5.7
  • 17 Lindsay 2009: 75; cf. Thomas 1996: 231–234; S. Thompson 2006 for summary and bibliography. On the e (...)
  • 18 Ziogas 2021: 304–305.

4In their feminist critique of the pen-as-penis metaphor, Gilbert and Gubar outline the sense of ownership and control that they see as central to a poetics of paternity. This sense of authorial ownership has particular resonance in the context of Latin literature due both to the unique patria potestas enshrined in Roman law and to the institution of slavery deeply embedded in Roman society.13 Power and paternity were inextricably linked for, as Ulpian writes, ‘he is called paterfamilias, who has dominion in a household, and he is rightly called by this name, even if he does not have a child’.14 In other words, the position of ‘father’ was the necessary consequence of domestic authority. Conversely, being a father through either paternity or adoption granted a remarkable level of legal power over one’s children. In Augustan times it was believed that fathers had once had the right to sell their children into slavery,15 and while that right had long been repealed, the more extreme ‘right of life and death’ (ius uitae necisque) remained.16 While it is recognised that the exposure of infants was a common Roman practice, there has been much scholarly debate over whether or not this ‘right of life and death’ was routinely exercised over adult children, or whether it ‘represents the legal expression of the comprehensiveness of paternal power rather than a realistic picture of the working of Roman society’.17 Either way, however, we can conclude with Ziogas that, regardless of ‘whether, when, or under what circumstances Roman fathers were actually allowed to kill their children, ... the Roman father was the living symbol of sovereignty.’18

  • 19 The sense of ‘father’ rather than ‘author’ for auctor in Tr. 3.1.73 is made clear in the following (...)

5In contrast to this vision of paternal power, the American singer-songwriter Melanie speaks about her own creative process from the point of view of a mother. She emphasises her lack of authority over her creations, as after ‘birth’ they make their own way in the world, and she has no authority to determine their meaning – and an initial reading of the Tristia does seem to support this division between powerful poetic father and powerless mother. In the opening poem of the collection, Ovid styles himself not only as his book’s ‘father’ (parentis, Tr. 1.1.115-116), but also from the very first couplet as its ‘master’ (dominus, Tr. 1.1.2, 97), as he gives his book a series of ‘commands’ (mandata, Tr. 1.1.35) that it should obey upon its arrival in Rome. In Tristia 3.1, Ovid is again both ‘father’ (parenti, Tr. 3.1.57, pater, 66, auctoris, 73) and ‘master’ (domini, Tr. 3.1.5).19 This conjunction is then repeated in the final poem of the book, where Ovid uses an extended metaphor to compare his books to his offspring (Tr. 3.14.11-17), while also twice referring to himself as his poem’s dominus (Tr. 3.14.9, 20). Ovid thus seems to literalise Gilbert and Gubar’s description of the male author as ‘a father, a master... and an owner’.

  • 20 Oliensis 1995: 211. Cucchiarelli 2019: 524, 536 likewise highlights Horace’s distancing of author f (...)
  • 21 Hor. Epist. 1.20.5-6. OLD s.v. nutrio 1 ‘to feed at the breast, suckle’; emitto 7b ‘to give birth’.
  • 22 Cucchiarelli 2019: 536: ‘The book is entrusted with the task of giving information about the figure (...)
  • 23 Hor. Epist. 1.20.19-28.

6Ovid’s use of dominus to characterise himself as author is reminiscent of Horace’s characterisation of his book as a young slave, eager to set out into the world. In the last poem of Epistles 1 the book-slave is, like Ovid’s libellus, given a series of commands to carry out, as Horace uses it as a vehicle to spread his own life-story far and wide. However, although we think of the master-slave relationship as one of absolute authority, Horace’s portrayal is more ambiguous. Horace laments his book-slave’s eagerness for fame, declaring that he did not raise it so, and warns of the harsh fate that awaits it after publication – but the book will not heed his advice. As Oliensis puts it, far from exerting the undisputed authority of the writer, ‘the poem dramatizes the separation of the author from his text, the cutting of the umbilical cord that constitutes this text as a book, an independent creature with... its own destiny.’20 Oliensis’ use of the phrase ‘umbilical cord’ is telling, for in many ways Horace’s poetic persona is more reminiscent of Melanie’s maternal perspective on her own songs than Gilbert and Gubar’s poetics of paternity. Indeed, Oliensis’ image of the ‘umbilical cord’ perhaps responds to latent maternal imagery within the epistle. Horace’s book has been ‘reared’ or ‘nourished’ by him (nutritus), and he warns that it will not be able to return once it has been ‘sent forth’ (emisso) – vocabulary for the rearing and manumission of a slave that is simultaneously that of breastfeeding and childbirth.21 Horace has successfully raised his book and prepared it for publication but it flees from its master’s authority and, as Melanie says, ‘after that, it’s on its own’. Yet the poem concludes with Horace re-exerting his authority over his book-slave, as he orders it to tell its readers about its author’s life. As Cucchiarelli comments, ‘al libro… è affidato il compito di dare ragguagli sulla figura del proprio autore-padrone… quasi fosse un anziano servo fedele.’22 Even after it has run away, the personified book must faithfully repeat the words Horace has chosen for his self-portrait.23

  • 24 Hor. Epist. 1.20.13.
  • 25 Cf. Tr. 3.1.1, 23-24. Eventually the curse of exile spreads from the poet-father to infect his sons (...)
  • 26 Geyssen 2007: 376.
  • 27 E.g. Frampton 2019: 147; Geyssen 2007: 382; Hardie 2002: 298; Hinds 1985: 13–14.

7On a closer reading of Tristia 1.1, we can see that Ovid’s use of paternal imagery is even less authoritative than Horace’s persona as an author-master. Even while Ovid calls himself dominus and pater, evoking the traditional authority of the paterfamilias, he betrays a lack of control over the books’ fates as independent entities. While Horace can remain in Rome as he pleases, his book must either ‘flee’ (fugies) to Utica to escape ill-treatment in Rome or ‘be sent, bound’ (uinctus mitteris) to Ilerda.24 By contrast, Ovid opens the Tristia with the exclamation, ‘little book... go without me to the city, where your master (domino) is not allowed to go’ (parue… sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:/ ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo, Tr. 1.1.1-2).25 As Geyssen points out, Ovid here ‘inverts the usual status of master and slave, and in doing so he contrasts his own position with that of Horace. It is the book, the slave, that possesses freedom of movement, while the master, the poet, is not permitted to go to Rome.’26 A similar inversion is made with paternity metaphors in both the Tristia and the Ex Ponto, contrasting the father-poet’s powerlessness and exile with the poems’ right to visit Rome (e.g., Tr. 3.14. 11; Pont 1.1.21-22). Indeed, several scholars have observed the triple pun of lĭber (book), līber (free) and liberi (children) in the Tristia, for it is Ovid’s ‘book-children’ who are really ‘free’ entities.27

  • 28 Gibson 1999: 364.
  • 29 Pl. Phdr. 275e.
  • 30 Derrida 1981: 77 sees an implicit suggestion of patricide within Plato’s conception of literary fat (...)
  • 31 Pl. Phdr. 275d.

8Furthermore, while Horace’s book-slave is trusted to faithfully repeat the words of its author-master, the whole premise of the Tristia is that Ovid’s poetry has slipped from the control of its creator and been read in a way the author did not intend. Augustus has banished Ovid precisely because he ‘misinterpreted’ the playful nature of his poetry. Ovid himself offers similar misinterpretations of various classic texts (e.g., Tr. 2. 255-262, 371-380), ‘show[ing] how the reception of a text is not in the hands of the author.’28 Ever since Plato, the impossibility of controlling the reception of a written text was a source of anxiety for classical thinkers – yet, in Plato’s conception of this anxiety, it is the father-figure who is a locus of authority and control. As Socrates says in the Phaedrus, the written word can be accessed by anyone and cannot defend itself from misinterpretation but always needs the help of its ‘father’ (πατρός).29 Compared to the spoken word, the written word, predicated upon the father’s absence, is a miserable, abandoned orphan. By contrast, Ovid claims that the three books of his Ars Amatoria have revolted against their author to become patricides, like Oedipus and Telegonus (Tr. 1.1.114).30 Indeed, Ovid takes his lack of authorial control yet another step further than Plato. Plato argues that written texts stand still like statues, always saying the same thing, just as Horace’s book-slave repeats its master’s epitaph.31 Yet Ovid does not even allow his written texts to be fixed, unchanging monuments, faithfully repeating the word of the Father – as we can see if we look more closely at Tristia 1.7, Ovid’s most fascinating interplay between paternity, maternity and power.

Fathers, Mothers and Masters

  • 32 Fugere is used twice of Horace’s slave-book (Hor. Epist. 1.20.5, 13).
  • 33 Although this anecdote is only known from the fourth-century account of Donatus (which draws on Sue (...)
  • 34 See Pierini 2008: 34. Note that the conjunction of uiscera and crescens in Tristia 1.7 increases th (...)

9In Tristia 1.7, Ovid again calls himself the ‘master’ of his books, but again we see an inversion of roles. With ‘the flight of the master’ (domini... fuga, Tr. 1.7.14), it is Ovid who flees like a runaway slave – only he is even more powerless than Horace’s disobedient slave, for this is an involuntary, forced flight into exile.32 Ovid then characterises himself, not as his text’s father, but as its mother, through his comparison between himself and Althaea. Ovid claims that he threw his ‘child’, the unfinished Metamorphoses, into the fire as he left Rome, drawing a clear parallel between himself and Virgil, whose dying wish was that his incomplete work should be thrown on the fire.33 Yet this gesture of authorial control is immediately undercut as Ovid does not give a clear reason for why he destroyed his poetry, whether because he blamed it for his banishment, or because the work was ‘still growing and rough’ (adhuc crescens et rude, Tr. 1.7.22). His uncertainty is hardly a picture of stern authority. Notably, unlike Plato’s conception of the written word always staying the same, Ovid characterises his verses as alive and changing, ‘still growing’ like a human child.34

  • 35 Kenney 1982: 19.
  • 36 delere licebit/ quod non edideris; nescit uox missa reuerti (Hor. Ars P. 389-390).

10Ovid goes on to relate how his books resisted his attempts at destruction, for ‘they were not completely destroyed, but survive (I think they were written in several copies)’ (non sunt penitus sublata, sed extant/ (pluribus exemplis scripta fuisse reor), Tr. 1.7.23-24). This lack of narrative authority reflects literary practice in ancient Rome where, as Kenney describes it, ‘publication... was less a matter of formal release to the public than a recognition by the author that his work was now, so to speak, on its own in the world.’35 It is striking that Kenney here uses exactly the same phrase as Melanie when she says that, after birth, a song is ‘on its own’. This attitude is clearly seen among other classical authors; Horace, for example, comments that ‘it is possible to destroy that which you have not published; the voice that has been sent out cannot be recalled’.36 This is the position Ovid finds himself in, only able to beg the reader to place a new preface at the beginning of the Metamorphoses:

hos quoque sex uersus, in prima fronte libelli
     si praeponendos esse putabis, habe:
‘orba parente suo quicumque uolumina tangis,
     his saltem uestra detur in urbe locus.
quoque magis faueas, haec non sunt edita ab ipso,
     sed quasi de domini funere rapta sui.
quicquid in his igitur uitii rude carmen habebit,
     emendaturus, si licuisset, eram.’ (Tr. 1.7.33-40)

Have these six lines also, to be placed on the front page of my little book, if you think they should be: ‘whoever you are who touches these volumes, orphaned of their parent, let a place for these at least be given in your city. May you also favour them more, since these were not published by the author himself, but seized as though from the funeral pyre of their master. Whatever faults, therefore, this rough song has, I would have amended them, if it had been allowed.

  • 37 Feeney 1992: 37, cf. e.g., Hardie 2004.
  • 38 Indeed, Ziogas 2021: 321 has suggested that ‘an auctor eliminating two of his books/children and pr (...)

11This retrospective rewriting of the Metamorphoses could seem like a gesture of authorial control. However, Ovid emphasises that he was not allowed to edit the poem as he would have wished, and the addition of the preface is ultimately left to the decision of the reader – and of course, no subsequent editors of the Metamorphoses have followed Ovid’s request here. Significantly, this new preface would make the very first words of the Metamorphoses ‘orphaned of its father’, emphatically stressing the parent-child motif to highlight the absence of the author-father. We also see a return to the language of a master-slave relationship, as Ovid describes the rough, unfinished poem as ‘seized from the funeral pyre of its master’. While this funeral pyre recalls the Althaea simile a few lines earlier, in many ways the dissimilarity between Ovid and Althaea is where the real interest lies. This is typical of similes for, as Feeney puts it, ‘the slippage between tenor and vehicle is... often more to the point than the match.’37 While both Althaea and Ovid attempted to destroy their ‘offspring’, only Althaea succeeded. Ovid’s powerlessness here stands in marked contrast to his early control of the Amores, for he opens the collection by claiming that, as auctor, he cut the original five books down to three.38 By the time of the Tristia, however, the exiled auctor has lost this authority over his own work.

  • 39 Spentzou 2003: 160.
  • 40 Dixon 1988: 61–67 discusses areas where the mother could exercise informal authority within the fam (...)
  • 41 Martorana 2024: 183–184 argues for an analogous appropriation of the ius uitae necisque by Medea in (...)

12Spentzou has said of Tristia 1.7 that ‘Ovid has here resorted to the instinct of maternal procreation just as… his discourses have eluded his control in order to lead their independent, whimsical way.’39 However, closer exploration of the interplay between fathers, mothers and masters in the Tristia suggests a startling reversal of Rome’s traditional parental power dynamics, which privileged fathers over mothers.40 Whenever Ovid characterises himself as father or master in the Tristia, he also stresses his own position as a powerless exile and his lack of narrative authority. As pater and dominus he is unable to destroy his poetic child, which is still growing, multiplying, and taking on a life of its own. Even though the ‘right of life and death’ belonged by Roman law to the father, it is the dominating father who, counterintuitively, is associated with a loss of narrative authority, while the mother is able to destroy the offspring that displease her.41 Althaea might not have the legal right to kill her child, but it is she, not Ovid, who has the power to control that which she has created.

  • 42 See e.g., Gamel 1989 on Amores 2.13-14, Papaioannou 2017 on the Carmentalia, McAuley 2015: 114–166; (...)

13While this vision of maternal power appears only once in the Tristia, it is a vision that is strongly reinforced by Ovid’s insistent highlighting of maternal power over reproduction elsewhere in his poetry. Take, for example, the unique abortion poems of Amores 2.13-14, or the invented origin for the Carmentalia in Fasti 1, when Roman matrons use mass abortion as a successful means of political protest. Indeed, just as striking is the procession of murdering mothers in the Metamorphoses, which includes Agave, Ino, Procne and Medea as well as Althaea herself.42 With the contrast between his Althaea simile and his fatherhood metaphors elsewhere in the Tristia, Ovid has thus performed a far more radical upending of power structures than Spentzou suggests. He does not simply say that, like a mother, he does not have full control over his poem-children. Rather, he deconstructs the framework of both Rome’s patriarchal power structure and Gilbert and Gubar’s poetics of paternity to situate ultimate control over life and death with the mother, rather than with the father-author, the paterfamilias – or, might we also add, with the pater patriae?

The Politics of Parenthood

  • 43 O’Gorman 1997: 117. See further esp. Ziogas 2021: 304–306, 316–321.
  • 44 Aug. Res Gest. 35. He boasts not only that he was awarded the title, but that it was inscribed in t (...)
  • 45 E.g., Tr. 2.157, 181, 3.1.49; 4.4.13; Pont. 1.1.36, 3.3.88.
  • 46 See Severy 2003: 180–184 for summary. O’Gorman 1997: 117 has gone so far as to suggest that the thr (...)

14O’Gorman has indeed commented that Ovid’s self-characterisation as poetic pater ‘invites comparison with Augustus as pater patriae.43 The concept of pater patriae was central to Augustus’ self-image, as seen in the Res Gestae, where the granting of the title in the text’s final chapter is presented as the culmination of all his other honours.44 Ovid embraces the notion of pater patriae enthusiastically, frequently using the term to describe Augustus throughout his exile poetry and emphasising Augustus’ position as the ultimate authority within Rome’s family.45 Does Ovid’s destabilising of his own paternal power also reflect back on the paternal power of Augustus? We might remember that Augustus was notably unsuccessful in exercising patria potestas within his own family, for, in the very year he was awarded the title of pater patriae, his daughter Julia was found to have scandalously contravened her father’s laws against adultery, in an act of rebellion that her own daughter copied ten years later.46

15In his commentary on Fasti 2, Robinson elegantly summarises the contrasting approaches of scholars to Ovid’s treatment of Augustus as ‘supportive’ and ‘suspicious’ readings of the text:

  • 47 Robinson 2011: 10.

The suspicious reader is always looking to undermine the text: if Ovid praises Augustus, then this praise cannot be genuine; and the suspicious reader will find ways to undermine it, searching for troubling allusions, awkward juxtapositions and sinister intertexts… The supportive reader believes that when Ovid praises Augustus, he is praising Augustus; however, the supportive reader is not naïve, and is also capable of close literary reading to show how allusions and intertexts enhance Ovid’s praise.47

  • 48 On Augustus’ limiting of the paterfamilias’ powers, see Benke 2012; Edwards 1993: 60; Hug 2023: 168
  • 49 Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 671 note that the book’s ragged state in Tristia 3.1 echoes the ritua (...)

16The above reading is evidently a fairly suspicious reading of how Ovid’s metaphors of fathers, mothers and masters interact with Augustus’ role as pater patriae. A more supportive reader might argue that Ovid’s downplaying of his own authorial authority and characterisation of himself as a weak poetic father allows Augustus to take centre stage as the only true paterfamilias in Rome.48 Tristia 3.1, for example, could be interpreted in this way, for when Ovid begs Augustus to save his life by recalling him from exile, he addresses him as ‘the best of fathers’ (pater optime, Tr. 3.1.49), in contrast to Ovid’s own powerlessness as poetic father in exile, unable to recall the ‘children’ he wishes he had never begotten (Tr. 3.1.65-66).49

  • 50 Severy 2003: 159.
  • 51 Enn. Ann. 105–109 (Skutsch).
  • 52 See esp. Ziogas 2021: 305.

17At this point, it is worth reading the Tristia alongside Ovid’s detailed account of Augustus being awarded the title of pater patriae in the Fasti. Like the Res Gestae, the Fasti presents the award of the title as ‘the culmination of [Augustus’] career’ and its commemoration as the ‘greatest honour’ (maximus… honor, Fast. 2.122) that is heaped upon the calendar.50 Ovid goes on to emphatically claim Augustus’ superiority over Romulus in any aspect one might care to mention. Romulus had long been considered a father-figure; for example, Ennius described the Roman people addressing Romulus as both pater and genitor.51 Notably, given his self-characterisation as both poetic pater and dominus, here in Fasti 2 Ovid explicitly avoids naming Augustus as ‘master’, saying to Romulus that ‘you have the name of master, he [Augustus] that of princeps’ (tu domini nomen, principis ille tenet, Fast. 2.142). We have noted that Roman fathers could wield harsh power over the lives of children, but fathers could also act as powerful, protective parental figures; in other words, the concept of fatherhood in ancient Rome was freighted with opposing ideological baggage.52 Do we perhaps therefore see a splitting of the role of father in Ovid’s poetry, with negative aspects of tyranny and powerlessness displaced onto Romulus in the Fasti and Ovid himself in the Tristia, leaving Augustus as Rome’s powerful but beneficent protector?

  • 53 On which, see e.g., Barchiesi 1997: 81; Harries 1991: 150; Hinds 1992: 127.
  • 54 Hinds 1992: 133.
  • 55 Severy 2003: 184.

18While the text is, in typical Ovidian style, open to both the ‘suspicious’ and ‘supportive’ readings outlined above, there are, however, serious objections that make it difficult to sustain an unambiguously ‘supportive’ reading of Ovid’s depiction of Augustus as pater patriae. Scholars have been sceptical of whether Ovid’s celebration of Augustus at Romulus’ expense in Fasti 2 can really be read as ‘supportive’ given the identification that Augustus himself cultivated with Romulus.53 As Hinds asks, ‘how much is praise of the princeps worth, when it is coupled with dispraise of the princeps’ chosen ideological prototype?’54 We might ask a similar question of Ovid’s depiction of his own literary fatherhood. Severy has emphasised that naming Augustus specifically as pater patriae, ‘evoke[d] the specific cultural role of the Roman father… [drawing] on a familiar cultural construct to define what was ultimately an unprecedented position in the government.’55 In the Fasti, Ovid stresses that, as pater patriae, Augustus does not act as a tyrannical dominus like Romulus. However, in the Tristia he repeatedly associates fatherhood with the term dominus in his metaphors of parenthood, and associates both roles with weakness and loss of authorial control, as opposed to power and beneficent protection. He also doesn’t shrink from naming Augustus as dominus in the Tristia, when in Tristia 3.1 his book wishes that Augustus’ house should long continue under the same dominus, while in the same couplet it names Ovid as its parens (Tr. 3.1.57). In other words, we must ask ourselves – how much is praise of the pater patriae worth, when it is coupled with dispraise of the princeps’ chosen ideological prototype of paternity?

  • 56 See e.g., Tr. 1.7.23-24, 4.10.127-128.
  • 57 For poetic immortality in the Tristia, see e.g., Tr. 3.1.77-80, 4.10.121-132. For discussion, see I (...)
  • 58 On Ovid’s and Augustus’ contest over auctoritas, see esp. Ziogas 2015.

19We should, moreover, not overlook the simple fact that the Tristia repeatedly emphasises the lack of power Augustus has over poetry, depicting Augustus as unable to control the reception of poems like the Aeneid (Tr. 2.533-536) and unable to prevent the popularity of Ovid’s own poetry, which continues to be widely read even after his exile.56 Indeed, even in his exile poetry, Ovid continues the strong assertion of his own poetic immortality with which he concluded the Metamorphoses, where he claimed to have made a work that could not be destroyed by ‘the anger of Jupiter’ (Iouis ira, Met. 15.871) – and elsewhere Ovid closely associates Jupiter with Augustus.57 This statement of Augustus’ lack of power over Ovid’s poetry is most clearly expressed in Tristia 3.7, when Ovid states that ‘Caesar has no power’ over his poetic genius (Caesar… potuit iuris habere nihil, Tr. 3.7.48). The power of the pater patriae fails before even the limited power of the exiled poetic pater.58

20There is, however, another possible splitting of ideological associations that should be considered here – namely, the splitting of positive and negative associations of parenthood across the figures of mother and father. Boyd has interpreted Ovid’s comparison of himself to Althaea in a highly negative way:

  • 59 Boyd 2017: 164.

[he] invites his readers to imagine him, if only momentarily, in a stereotypically female role: defenceless, alone and overpowered by emotion, wishing to inflict harm on those he loves the most because they are his offspring yet whom he hates the most because of the ways in which they have caused, however inadvertently, his suffering.59

21She then sees a transformation over the course of the poem, as Ovid moves to describing himself as a father when he retrospectively rewrites the opening of the Metamorphoses to begin with the words ‘orphaned of its father’ (orba parente suo, Tr. 1.7.35). She reads this transformation as continuing in Tristia 3.14 when Ovid compares himself to Jupiter producing children ‘without a mother’ (sine matre, Tr. 3.14.11). In Boyd’s view, Ovid thus:

  • 60 Boyd 2017: 164.

characterizes his relationship to his work no longer as that of a high-strung mother – a mother prey to the extremes of emotion that would allow her to kill a child – but as that of a parent for whom regret is the dominant feeling… I suspect we are to understand that Ovid is at pains now to present himself as a survivor of exile’s trauma, no longer caught up in the throes of grief that accompanied his initial shock – now no longer a dangerous mother, in other words, but a sombre father.60

22The shift from poetic motherhood to poetic fatherhood is perhaps not as clear cut as Boyd’s interpretation assumes – apart from the fact that the idea of poetic fatherhood was already established earlier in Tristia 1.1, here in Tristia 3.14 Ovid also points us back to the poem in which he characterises himself as a mother, when he describes his poems as ‘orphaned of their parent’ (orba parente, Tr. 3.14.15). This phrase exactly repeats the beginning of the alternative proem to the Metamorphoses that he offers to the reader in Tristia 1.7 (orba parente suo… Tr. 1.7.35), making it difficult to feel that we have completely moved on from Ovid’s earlier comparison of himself to Althaea, even while he here claims his poems were born ‘without a mother.’ However, Boyd is evidently correct in describing Althaea as a ‘dangerous mother.’ As murderer of her own son, she reminds us that not only does Ovid’s poetry dwell on female reproductive power, but specifically on maternal power wielded destructively, as mothers exercise control over their offspring through abortion or infanticide. Can we therefore see another, potentially more compelling, splitting of ideological associations, whereby the violence of parents towards their own children – and Ovid’s violence towards his own poetry – is displaced onto the figure of the mother, while generative, creative power ultimately belongs to Ovid as poetic father?

The Future is Female

  • 61 Pl. Rep. 395e.
  • 62 See e.g., Pl. Ti. 28c, cf. 37c, 41a, 42e, 50d, 71d, Tht. 191c; Arist. Gen. an. 731b-2a; Aesch. Eum. (...)

23While we earlier observed that Plato was the first to develop the image of intellectual birth in depth, it is noticeable that his imagery of poetic parenthood goes hand in hand with a devaluing of literal (as opposed to literary) childbirth. In the Republic, he claims that it is shameful and degrading for men to imitate women, particularly ‘women who are suffering or in love or giving birth’ (κάμνουσαν δὲ  ἐρῶσαν  ὠδίνουσαν).61 A similar dismissal of women’s procreativity is seen in the Symposium. Following the traditional classical hierarchy of (male) soul over (female) body,62 Plato uses Diotima as a mouthpiece to dismiss men who beget physical children through sexual union with a woman:

οἱ μὲν οὖν ἐγκύμονες, ἔφη, κατὰ τὰ σώματα ὄντες πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας μᾶλλον τρέπονται καὶ ταύτῃ ἐρωτικοί εἰσιν, διὰ παιδογονίας ἀθανασίαν καὶ μνήμην καὶ εὐδαιμονίαν, ὡς οἴονται, αὑτοῖς εἰς τὸν ἔπειτα χρόνον πάντα ποριζόμενοι· οἱ δὲ κατὰ τὴν ψυχήν – εἰσὶ γὰρ οὖν, ἔφη, οἳ ἐν ταῖς ψυχαῖς κυοῦσιν ἔτι μᾶλλον ἢ ἐν τοῖς σώμασιν, ἃ ψυχῇ προσήκει καὶ κυῆσαι καὶ τεκεῖν·

  • 63 Pl. Symp. 208e-209a.

Those who are pregnant in the body, she said, turn more to women and are lovers in this way. They think that, through begetting children, they will receive immortality and remembrance and good fortune for all time. But those who incline to the soul – for she said that there are indeed men who, in their souls even more than in their bodies, conceive those things which it is appropriate for the soul to conceive and give birth to.63

  • 64 Hauser 2023: 156.
  • 65 Pl. Symp. 209c-d.
  • 66 Pl. Rep. 496a-b, 603a-b, 608a. See Murray 2005: 149. The Phaedrus also presents a writer as the ‘fa (...)
  • 67 e.g. Ar. Ran. 95-96; Cratinus’ Pytine (Σ Eq. 400a = Suda κ 2216 = KA test. ii). See Bakola 2010: 2 (...)
  • 68 Friedman 1987: 52.
  • 69 Friedman 1987: 57.

24In Plato’s vision of intellectual pregnancy, ‘the emphasis is purely on men as the pregnant actors.’64 ‘Those (men) who incline to the soul’, among whom Plato counts the poets, join with other beautiful (male) souls to beget ‘children’ who are ‘fairer and more undying’ (καλλιόνων καὶ ἀθανατωτέρων παίδων) than human children, in a vision of intellectual (pro)creation that entirely excludes women.65 Indeed, Plato frequently uses the image of fatherhood rather than childbirth for intellectual production in his other works. In the Republic, for example, the poet or philosopher plays the male role of begetting, while the female role of giving birth is ascribed to a personified Philosophy, or a seductive Mimetic Art/ Poetry.66 This draws upon a well-recognised image in Old Comedy that figures the male poet as an active inseminator of his passive female Muse.67 Plato’s thought is thus an early example of, to quote Friedman, ‘the structures of patriarchy that have divided labour into men’s production and women’s reproduction.’68 She sees this division in the James Joyce quotation with which this article began for, even while his analogy ‘draws together the labor of women and men..., Joyce evokes the distinction between the mind and the body, between his wife's procreativity and his own creativity.’69

  • 70 Feeney 1992: 37, cf. e.g., Hardie 2004.

25We might see this distinction similarly expressed in Ovid’s Althaea simile. As we noted earlier, in similes ‘the slippage between tenor and vehicle is... often more to the point than the match.’70 As well as the differing success of Ovid’s and Althaea’s attempts to destroy their ‘offspring’, another point of slippage is that Althaea’s offspring is a physical child, whereas Ovid’s is a literary creation. There is, to be sure, a suggestion that Althaea’s reproductive power is creative as well as destructive, for in the Metamorphoses she frames her power over her son as based upon her initial granting of life twice over, as she says to the absent Meleager, ‘you have lived by my gift… return the soul twice given, first by birth, then by the seized brand’ (uixisti munere nostro/…cape praemia facti/ bisque datam, primum partu, mox stipite rapto Met. 8.502-504). However, her power is undeniably purely procreative, rather than artistically creative.

  • 71 On maternity in the Heroides, see Martorana 2024. On the crossover between weaving and literary com (...)
  • 72 Kyriakidis 2013: 357.
  • 73 Lewis 2012: 368.

26Yet we should not forget that, in contrast to Plato, Ovid does repeatedly depict women in literary or artistic roles, from the letter-writing women of the Heroides to the weaving of Minerva, Arachne, Philomela and the Minyeides in the Metamorphoses.71 This depiction of women in artistic roles reaches its climax in Tristia 3.7, one of the most unique yet under-studied poems of the Tristia. As the poem that ends the first half of its book, this work occupies a similar medial position as Tristia 1.7 – a position that, as we have noted, is often a point of metapoetic meditation. Indeed, within the final, five-book form of the Tristia as a whole, Tristia 3.7 ‘occupies the... middle of the central book of the collection’,72 suggesting that we should pay particular attention to its characterisation of poetic creativity. Remarkably, Tristia 3.7 takes the form of a letter to the poetess Perilla, the only named addressee in the whole collection apart from Augustus himself.73

  • 74 For bibliography on daughter/stepdaughter, and the (unconvincing) counter-suggestion of wife, see L (...)
  • 75 Ovid also figures himself as Perilla’s father in Tr. 3.7.12.
  • 76 Ingleheart 2012: 237.
  • 77 e.g., Cato the Elder (Praecepta ad Filium); Cicero (De Officiis), in which he refers to a tradition (...)

27There has been much dispute over Perilla’s identity, with scholars disagreeing on whether she was Ovid’s daughter, step-daughter, or even wife, while the most recent trend has been to see Perilla as a scripta puella, a purely fictional creation of Ovid.74 Regardless of Perilla’s actual identity, it is striking that Ovid describes himself teaching her poetry ‘like/ as father to daughter’ (utque pater natae, Tr. 3.7.18).75 This father-daughter dynamic creates a sense that Ovid is passing on the baton of poetic achievement to the next generation, and several scholars have indeed linked Perilla’s role in Tristia 3.7 to Ovid’s meditations on the future of poetry. Ingleheart, for instance, comments that ‘the name [Perilla] may suggest that per illam (literally “through her”)... Ovid envisages the survival of erotic poetry.’76 While we may not agree with Ingleheart’s contention that Ovid secretly suggests to the reader that Perilla writes erotic poetry, the theme of poetic survival is central to Tristia 3.7. Yet this begs the question of why Ovid here orientates the theme of poetic immortality around a female writer. There was a rich tradition of Roman writers, especially towards the ends of their lives, addressing works to their sons.77 So what is the impact of Ovid unexpectedly choosing a daughter-figure to carry on the torch of his literary accomplishments?

28Boyd does tackle this question, arguing that daughters were thought to be faithful reflections of their parents who would not attempt to challenge or overthrow their fathers:

  • 78 Boyd 2017: 179.

One of Perilla’s most distinctive features is fidelity – she can be relied upon to represent the interests of her poetic father faithfully, without... attempting to surpass her father’s monumental achievement. Indeed, she embodies that achievement and represents her poetic father’s survival into the future.78

  • 79 Melville & Kenney 1992: 55 note that non patrio… more ‘can bear as many as four meanings; (i) diffe (...)
  • 80 We might note that various scholars (e.g., Beer 2018; Harries 1990; Lateiner 1984: 15–17; Leach 197 (...)

29There is an element of truth to the idea that, as a woman, Perilla will not threaten ‘her father’s monumental achievement’, for Ovid compares Perilla’s poetry not to his own, but to that of Sappho, placing her in a separate, female hierarchy of literary accomplishment (Tr. 3.7.19-20). Yet there is no reason to think that Perilla is distinguished by her fidelity, given that Ovid explicitly says that she writes songs ‘not in the manner of her father’ (non patrio... more, Tr. 3.7.12).79 Indeed, it is notable that Ovid’s paternalism is combined with a sense, not of faithfulness, but of commonality. He is both Perilla’s ‘leader and companion’ (duxque comesque, Tr. 3.7.18), asking her whether ‘you also’ (tu quoque) pursue ‘our shared studies’ (studiis communibus, Tr. 3.7.11), and encouraging ‘you also’ (tu quoque, Tr. 3.7.53) to write poetry that will escape the funeral pyre.80

  • 81 Lewis 2012: 378. TLL s.v. dos IA.
  • 82 TLL s.v. deduco IA2a. With Pegasidas, there is perhaps a suggestion that the fountain of the male l (...)
  • 83 Verg. G. 3.10-11. Cf. Hor. Carm. 3.30.13-14, Prop. 3.1.3-4.
  • 84 On the triumphal overtones of deducere, see e.g., Woodman 2022: 380. It is also well-recognised tha (...)
  • 85 Hor. Carm. 4.11.34-35.

30What, then, is the effect of Ovid depicting himself as ‘leader and companion’ to a daughter rather than a son, and of having a young woman represent the next generation of poets? The answer, I would suggest, lies in Perilla’s potential to embody both artistic creativity and physical procreativity, for Ovid strikingly portrays Perilla’s literary work in terms of fertility. He says that nature gave her genius and rare ‘gifts’ (dotes, Tr. 3.7.14) – a word that primarily referred to a dowry, as though Perilla is a bride bringing her genius to a marriage.81 He then says that ‘I first led this [genius] to the Pegasean waters so that the vein of fertile water should not sadly perish’ (Hoc ego Pegasidas deduxi primus ad undas,/ ne male fecundae uena periret aquae, Tr. 3.7.15-16). Here, Perilla’s genius is figured as a vein of fertile water, as though a new and fertile Hippocrene is born from her, which only needs to be joined to the original Hippocrene to fulfil its promise of fecundity. Used in conjunction with the ‘dowry’ of the line before, deduxi... ad recalls leading a woman to her bridegroom’s house in a Roman marriage ceremony.82 Combined with ego... primus, it also strongly echoes Virgil’s famous statement of his own poetic achievement in the Georgics, where he proclaims, ‘I shall be the first (primus ego), returning to my fatherland, to bring down (deducam) the Muses with me from the Aonian peak.’83 The Aonian peak is Mount Helicon, home of the Muses and the Hippocrene spring. Thus, while Virgil leads the Muses to Italy in a triumphal procession celebrating his own original creativity, Ovid reverses this movement.84 He leads a young and fertile Roman woman to the Hippocrene spring in order to ensure her future poetic achievement, rather than to celebrate his own. Remarkably, Virgil’s passive female Muses have here been replaced by an active female poet. And Perilla is explicitly a poet in her own right, in contrast to say Horace’s Phyllis, who is asked only to ‘learn poetry, which you might repeat in your lovely voice’ (condisce modos, amanda/ uoce quos reddas).85

  • 86 Indeed, Ovid uses the tu quoque address at the beginning of three of the poem’s lines (Tr. 3.7.11, (...)

31An interesting counterpoint to Tristia 3.7 can be seen in Amores 1.3. Here, Ovid tells Corinna that, although he isn’t noble or wealthy, the future success of his poetry will ensure her fame, for, like other famous literary and mythical lovers, ‘we also’ (nos quoque, Am. 1.3.25) will be sung throughout the world. Corinna’s role here is only to provide Ovid with ‘fertile material’ (materiem felicem, Am. 1.3.19) for his poetry. In Tristia 3.7, however, Ovid concludes that it is not his poetry that will guarantee Perilla’s future immortality, but rather her own. Notably the adjective felix reappears, but instead of praising Perilla for providing ‘fertile material’ for his poetry, Ovid wishes that her creative pursuits may be ‘happier/ more fertile’ than his own. Poetic object becomes poetic subject as Ovid turns from nos quoque to tu quoque: ‘you also, may a happier/ more fertile use of art remain for you!’ (tu quoque, quam studii maneat felicior usus…!, Tr. 3.7.53).86

  • 87 Hug 2023: 52. When used in pre-Christian Latin of human reproductive capacity, it refers only to wo (...)
  • 88 Cic. De Orat. 88.8; it is frequently used in such a sense later by Quintilian.

32This concluding couplet ends with Ovid’s exhortation to Perilla that she should ‘escape the coming funeral pyres’ (effuge uenturos… rogos, Tr. 3.7.54) by writing undying poetry. This final word looks back to that central line in Tristia 1.7, when Ovid tells us that ‘I placed my uiscera on the swift funeral pyres’ (imposui rapidis uiscera nostra rogis, Tr. 1.7.20). Yet in Ovid’s characterisation of Perilla as both artist and fecund young bride, we see maternal power portrayed as not simply destructive (as in Ovid’s Althaea metaphor), but rather as doubly (pro)creative. The use of fecundus in relation to a female poet here is particularly striking, for Hug’s analysis of discourse around human fertility in ancient Rome concludes that ‘fecunditas was a word for women, not men.’87 On the rare occasion when it was used of men, it was never used to denote men’s physical reproductive capacity, but was used metaphorically to denote male intellectual creativity, notably by Cicero in De Oratore and by Ovid himself in the Amores, when he refers to the ‘fecund creative licence of the poets’ (fecunda licentia uatum, Am. 3.12.41).88 For Perilla, however, both senses of the word are equally applicable, for Ovid does not set male creativity and female procreativity in opposition to one another, but rather combines these two strands of (pro)creativity in a doubled fecundity of both mind and body. Indeed, Ovid later reminds us of a daughter’s potential for physical childbirth in the closing poem of Tristia 4, when he talks of his daughter, who was ‘twice fertile in her first youth’ and ‘made him a grandfather’ (bis prima fecunda iuuenta,/… fecit auum, Tr. 4.10.75-76), thus ensuring the continuation of his family line – evoking the physical immortality through children that Plato dismissed.

  • 89 To give only a few examples: in Tristia 2.287 Ovid asks, ‘what place is more august than a temple?’ (...)

33Moreover, we should not forget that, as noted above, it is in Tristia 3.7 that we see the most explicit statement of the weakness of the pater patriae, as Ovid states that ‘Caesar has no power’ over his poetic genius (Caesar… potuit iuris habere nihil, Tr. 3.7.48). It is, I think, significant that this statement comes in the context of a poem celebrating a fertile female poet. By aligning himself with Perilla’s double fecundity, Ovid powerfully rebuts the authority of the pater patriae, who is unable to exercise his authority over the genius of poets – just as, elsewhere in Ovid’s poetry, Augustus is unable to exercise authority over female fertility and sexuality in Rome, or even in his own family.89

  • 90 Hauser 2023: 234.
  • 91 Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 675.
  • 92 See n.70 and 79, above.
  • 93 Hauser 2023: 248.

34As a final, tentative suggestion on the effect of Ovid’s address to a fecund poetic daughter, we might look to Hauser’s intriguing reading of fragments of Sappho, Erinna, Nossis and Eurydice of Macedon. She argues that ‘words around motherhood in female-authored poetic texts [function] as a claim for women’s creativity, a metaphor for poetic production and a figuration of a female poetic community.’90 Indeed, Bretin-Chabrol and Corbel have, building on unpublished work by Luccioni, recently suggested that maternal imagery in an epigram by the Hellenistic poet Moero likewise expresses her intertextual relationship with another female poet, Anyte of Tegea.91 While it is inevitably difficult to come to firm conclusions on the classical female poetic tradition due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence, it is worth here acknowledging the distinct possibility that Ovid’s address to Perilla as his poetic daughter aligns him with a largely lost female literary tradition. Earlier in his career Ovid did, after all, imagine a female epistolary tradition in the Heroides, in which he plays the role of Sappho among others. He also opens his letter to Perilla by picturing her in a female space, imaging her either ‘sitting with her sweet mother or among the books and your Muses’ (dulci cum matre sedentem,/ aut inter libros Pieridasque suas, Tr. 3.7.3-4). The possibility that Ovid is interested in a distinctly female literary tradition is perhaps strengthened by Ovid’s frequent depictions of – and possible identification with – female weavers in the Metamorphoses,92 for Hauser argues that weaving is a central image to denote ‘intertextuality between women writers’ as ‘the image of weaving passed down from mother to daughter inscrib[es] the intertextual connection between female authors onto the mother-daughter relationship.’93

  • 94 See e.g., Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 672–674; Hardie 1993: 99. Valerius Maximus (8.3.3) later de (...)
  • 95 If Perilla was truly Ovid’s stepdaughter then she may, of course, have been the only family-connect (...)
  • 96 Hallett 2009, see esp. Her. 15.79-80, Am. 2.4.10 and Tr. 4.10.65-68.

35It has long been recognised that the father-son dynamic was central to imagining intertextual relationships between male poets in ancient Rome – a dynamic that also ‘reflect[ed] historical realities’ of political succession in the early imperial period.94 Does Ovid’s choice of a female poetic successor, of future poetic maternity rather than paternity, thus align him with an alternative, female poetic tradition, and recuse himself and his own poetry from that wider Roman ideology of father-son succession?95 We noted above that Ovid does link Perilla’s poetry to that of Sappho (Tr. 3.7.19-20), placing her within an exclusively female poetic hierarchy – but does he, as Perilla’s ‘companion and guide’, participate in this female tradition? The very idea of a poetic lineage distinct to women stands in contrast to elsewhere in Ovid’s poetry where, as Hallett demonstrates, women writers are largely elided, with Sappho emerging as the unique example of a female poet. While this elision might seem as though Ovid is turning away from the female literary tradition, Hallett argues that his depiction of Sappho in Heroides 15 does closely resemble his depiction of himself as amator, as both portray themselves as soft and easily moved by love.96

  • 97 Friedman 1987: 66.

36Although the fragmentary nature of the surviving texts makes it impossible to establish conclusively whether Ovid is indeed participating in a distinctly female poetic tradition, we can certainly conclude that the relationship between physical and intellectual reproduction in Tristia 3.7 forms a radical contrast to the separation of mind and body, male and female, expressed by writers from Plato to Joyce. In her analysis of literary birth metaphors, Friedman argues that ‘where men’s metaphors tend to perpetuate the separation of creativities, women’s metaphors tend to deconstruct it:’97

  • 98 Friedman 1987: 58, quoting Lowell from Howe 1993: 40.

The female metaphor establishes a matrix of creativities based on woman's double-birthing potential. As Amy Lowell asks in The Sisters, her poem about the female poetic tradition: ‘Why are we/ Already mother-creatures, double bearing/ With matrices in body and brain?’98

37Ovid’s Perilla is likewise a ‘double bearing’ creature, ‘with matrices in body and brain’, and through association with her dual female fertility Ovid reinforces his claim to a poetic immortality over which Caesar has no power. Thus, through the figures of both Perilla and Althaea, Ovid undoes the association between auctor and authority, pater and power, to undermine the very institution upon which the narrative of the pater patriae was founded.

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Notes

1 Joyce 1975: 202–203, quoted in Friedman 1987: 57.

2 This article arose from a paper given at the 2024 Réseau Poésie Augustéenne in Durham, and I would like to thank both the organisers of the conference and the audience for the helpful feedback given. I am likewise grateful for the comments of members of the Motherhood and Latin Literature online working group, organised by Caitlin Hines and Simona Martorana, and the perceptive readings of Dictynna’s referees. I am particularly grateful to my PhD supervisor Philip Hardie and examiners, Alison Sharrock and Emily Gowers, for their insight, suggestions and support.

3 It appears in seven surviving plays from the period (Leitao 2012: 101–102), while earlier Pindar describes songs as the ‘daughters of the Muses’ (Μοισᾶν θύγατρες, Pind. Nem. 4.3). Dioscorides later refers to Sappho’s poems as ‘the daughters of the gods’ (ἀθανάτωνθυγατέρας, AP. 7.407.10), cf. Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 669–670 on similar language of Sappho by Antiphanes. For possible use of the childbirth image by Sappho and other female poets, see Hauser 2023: 231–257, and discussion of Tristia 3.7 below. Plato’s use of the metaphor is likewise discussed further below; for summary see Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 669.

4 More in-depth usages are seen in Aristotle (Eth. Nic. 1168a), who compares poets’ partiality for their own creations to parents’ bias towards their children (cf. Quint. Inst. 10.4.1) and in Catullus, whose claim that his mind cannot bring forth the sweet ‘fruits/ children’ (fetus) of the Muses seems to suggest childbirth (Cat. 65.3-4); for the poem’s wider imagery of birth, see Gale Forthcoming(a): 103–105. Catullus’ celebration of the publication of Cinna’s Smyrna after nine years of labour is also thought to recall gestation (see Gale Forthcoming(b) on Catullus 95). Cf. Cicero, who speaks not only of ‘giving birth to’ (parere) but also of ‘procreating’ (procreare) and ‘educating’ (educare) ideas (De or. 2.356-357). For Cicero’s use of birth imagery and (more frequently) imagery of agricultural fertility, see Pierini 2008: 30–31. 

5 On Callimachus’ use of τίκτειν for his own poetic production at e.g., Aet. 1.19-20, Bakola 2010: 280 observes that the verb frequently means simply ‘to produce’, and was thus ‘already a dead metaphor by the time of Aristophanes.’ For τίκτειν as dead metaphor in Aristophanes, see Ran. 1058-9 (although Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 675 note imagery of poetic fertility at Ran. 95-96); for an extension of the metaphor, see Nub. 137, 530-532. Cicero uses parere for the production of ideas or words at Rep. 1.2 and Fin. 3.3, but here there is little suggestion of ‘giving birth’ as opposed to simply ‘producing’ – although, in the pseudo-Cicerorian Rhetorica ad Herennium, the suggestion of birth inherent in parere is strengthened by association with gignere (4.4.7). Propertius describes his own Muse as ‘born from me’ (a me/ nata, 3.1.9-10) and says of the Aeneid that something greater than the Iliad ‘is being born’ (nascitur, 2.34.66), echoing Virgil’s introduction to the second half of the Aeneid, when he says that a greater order of things ‘is being born to me’ (mihi nascitur, Verg. Aen. 7.44. cf. Ecl, 4.5). Cf. Prop. 2.1.13-16, where he says that ‘the greatest history is born’ (maxima… nascitur historia) from his girlfriend’s slightest word or deed. Horace also insults Choerilos’ verses as ‘badly born’ (male natis, Ep. 2.1.233), and uses a Greek proverb to compare the literary output of over-ambitious poets to a mouse being born from mountains (parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus, Ars. P. 139). On whether montes should be taken in the nominative or the accusative, see Jacobson 2007. Note however that Gowers 2016: 110–111 does see further imagery of gestation in Horace’s work.

6 As observed by Davisson 1984: 11.

7 Conte 1992: 152; Kyriakidis 2013: 356–357. With 11 poems in the book, Kyriakidis takes 1.6 as the middle, and 1.7 as opening the second ‘half’.

8 For a gender sensitive reading, see Boyd 2017: 147–180. For grouping, see Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 671; Davisson 1984; Hines Forthcoming: 110 (see the latter also for a perceptive untangling of the implications of the word uiscera in Tr. 1.7). Spentzou 2003: 158–159 is highly sensitive to gender but does not deal with the paternity metaphors of the Tristia.

9 Friedman 1987: 51.

10 See e.g., Hug 2023; Severy 2003.

11 Quoted in https://www.superseventies.com/1972_4singles.html

12 Gilbert & Gubar 1979: 7.

13 On Roman awareness of the uniqueness of the paterfamilias’s power, see esp. Gai. Inst. 1.55; for summary see Dixon 1992: 47. I am grateful to Stephen Heyworth for the observation that, for enslaved Romans, biological father and master would often have been the same figure, given the routine sexual abuse of enslaved women.

14 Pater autem familias appellatur, qui in domo dominium habet, recteque hoc nomine appellatur, quamuis filium non habeat (Dig. 50.16.195).

15 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.27.1-4; see Lindsay 2009: 64–65

16 See e.g., ps. Quint. Declamationes maiores 19.5, Sen. Controu. 9.5.7

17 Lindsay 2009: 75; cf. Thomas 1996: 231–234; S. Thompson 2006 for summary and bibliography. On the evolution of paternal powers under the Julian marriage laws, see Moreau 2020: 6.1-2.

18 Ziogas 2021: 304–305.

19 The sense of ‘father’ rather than ‘author’ for auctor in Tr. 3.1.73 is made clear in the following line, where Ovid’s books are his ‘sons’ (nati, Tr. 3.1.74).

20 Oliensis 1995: 211. Cucchiarelli 2019: 524, 536 likewise highlights Horace’s distancing of author from text.

21 Hor. Epist. 1.20.5-6. OLD s.v. nutrio 1 ‘to feed at the breast, suckle’; emitto 7b ‘to give birth’.

22 Cucchiarelli 2019: 536: ‘The book is entrusted with the task of giving information about the figure of its own author-master, as if it were an elderly, faithful servant.’

23 Hor. Epist. 1.20.19-28.

24 Hor. Epist. 1.20.13.

25 Cf. Tr. 3.1.1, 23-24. Eventually the curse of exile spreads from the poet-father to infect his sons (67-74).

26 Geyssen 2007: 376.

27 E.g. Frampton 2019: 147; Geyssen 2007: 382; Hardie 2002: 298; Hinds 1985: 13–14.

28 Gibson 1999: 364.

29 Pl. Phdr. 275e.

30 Derrida 1981: 77 sees an implicit suggestion of patricide within Plato’s conception of literary fatherhood, as the written word dares to continue to exist in the absence of its king-like father.

31 Pl. Phdr. 275d.

32 Fugere is used twice of Horace’s slave-book (Hor. Epist. 1.20.5, 13).

33 Although this anecdote is only known from the fourth-century account of Donatus (which draws on Suetonius’ earlier Life of Virgil) I follow e.g. Hinds 1985: 22; Tissol 2005: 108–109; Ziogas 2015: 126 in assuming the story was current in Ovid’s time (as the very fact that Ovid uses the conceit strongly suggests).

34 See Pierini 2008: 34. Note that the conjunction of uiscera and crescens in Tristia 1.7 increases the parallels with both childbirth and intra-familial violence, for the two words appear together in all Ovid’s abortion scenes but are never used together elsewhere (see Am. 2.14.23-27; Fast. 1.624; Her. 11.42).

35 Kenney 1982: 19.

36 delere licebit/ quod non edideris; nescit uox missa reuerti (Hor. Ars P. 389-390).

37 Feeney 1992: 37, cf. e.g., Hardie 2004.

38 Indeed, Ziogas 2021: 321 has suggested that ‘an auctor eliminating two of his books/children and producing three evokes a father’s uitae necisque potestas over his children.’

39 Spentzou 2003: 160.

40 Dixon 1988: 61–67 discusses areas where the mother could exercise informal authority within the familia but makes it clear that ‘the Roman paterfamilias had the ius uitae necisque over his legitimate children… Mothers had no such rights.’ (61)

41 Martorana 2024: 183–184 argues for an analogous appropriation of the ius uitae necisque by Medea in Heroides 7.

42 See e.g., Gamel 1989 on Amores 2.13-14, Papaioannou 2017 on the Carmentalia, McAuley 2015: 114–166; Salzman-Mitchell 2021 on mothers in the Metamorphoses.

43 O’Gorman 1997: 117. See further esp. Ziogas 2021: 304–306, 316–321.

44 Aug. Res Gest. 35. He boasts not only that he was awarded the title, but that it was inscribed in the forecourt of his house, in the Julian senate house and in the Augustan forum. For the importance of fatherhood in the Julio-Claudian dynasty, see Cowan 2024

45 E.g., Tr. 2.157, 181, 3.1.49; 4.4.13; Pont. 1.1.36, 3.3.88.

46 See Severy 2003: 180–184 for summary. O’Gorman 1997: 117 has gone so far as to suggest that the three volumes of the Ars Amatoria that Ovid describe as parricides in Tristia 1.1 ‘could perhaps evoke the tris uomicas ac tria carcinomata sua (Julia 1, Julia II, Agrippa Postumus) whose dedecora caused their princeps/father such anguish (Suet. Aug. 65).

47 Robinson 2011: 10.

48 On Augustus’ limiting of the paterfamilias’ powers, see Benke 2012; Edwards 1993: 60; Hug 2023: 168.

49 Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 671 note that the book’s ragged state in Tristia 3.1 echoes the ritual dishevelment of those pleading cases in a Roman lawcourt, where the defendant’s children were often presented to stir pity in the judges. Ovid’s depiction of his books as dishevelled children thus strengthens his presentation of his own powerlessness, as he is dependent on the mercy of his readers, the chief of whom is Augustus.

50 Severy 2003: 159.

51 Enn. Ann. 105–109 (Skutsch).

52 See esp. Ziogas 2021: 305.

53 On which, see e.g., Barchiesi 1997: 81; Harries 1991: 150; Hinds 1992: 127.

54 Hinds 1992: 133.

55 Severy 2003: 184.

56 See e.g., Tr. 1.7.23-24, 4.10.127-128.

57 For poetic immortality in the Tristia, see e.g., Tr. 3.1.77-80, 4.10.121-132. For discussion, see Ingleheart 2015: 296–300. For Ovid’s association of Jupiter and Augustus, see e.g., Fast. 2.131-132, Tr. 3.1.35-38 – see further Hejduk 2020: 212–289.

58 On Ovid’s and Augustus’ contest over auctoritas, see esp. Ziogas 2015.

59 Boyd 2017: 164.

60 Boyd 2017: 164.

61 Pl. Rep. 395e.

62 See e.g., Pl. Ti. 28c, cf. 37c, 41a, 42e, 50d, 71d, Tht. 191c; Arist. Gen. an. 731b-2a; Aesch. Eum. 658-661; Lucr. 1.167-171; Isid. Etym. 9.5.6. For scholarship, see e.g., Crowther 2023: 56; Freidin 2024: 3; Harlow 1998: 157–160; Kelly 2022: 742; Leitao 2012: 41; O’Hara 2017: 54.

63 Pl. Symp. 208e-209a.

64 Hauser 2023: 156.

65 Pl. Symp. 209c-d.

66 Pl. Rep. 496a-b, 603a-b, 608a. See Murray 2005: 149. The Phaedrus also presents a writer as the ‘father’ of his words, his ‘lawfully-begotten sons’ (ὑεῖς γνησίους) (P. Phaedr. 275d-e; 278). Elsewhere an orator is ‘the father of the argument’ (τὸν τοῦ λόγου πατέρα, Phaedr. 257b; Symp 177d). See further Hauser 2023: 160.

67 e.g. Ar. Ran. 95-96; Cratinus’ Pytine (Σ Eq. 400a = Suda κ 2216 = KA test. ii). See Bakola 2010: 280; Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 668; Hall 2000: 411–412; Sommerstein 2005.

68 Friedman 1987: 52.

69 Friedman 1987: 57.

70 Feeney 1992: 37, cf. e.g., Hardie 2004.

71 On maternity in the Heroides, see Martorana 2024. On the crossover between weaving and literary composition, see Rosati 1999. In contrast to Ovid’s many female weavers, Plato focuses on free male citizens as weavers (see Blondell 2005; W. Thompson 1982). He does once mention Sappho at Ph. 235c, but notably he describes her as ‘beautiful’, while the male poet Anacreon is ‘wise’ (Σαπφοῦς τῆς καλῆς Ἀνακρέοντος τοῦ σοφοῦ).

72 Kyriakidis 2013: 357.

73 Lewis 2012: 368.

74 For bibliography on daughter/stepdaughter, and the (unconvincing) counter-suggestion of wife, see Lewis 2012. For scripta puella, see Ingleheart 2012; Boyd 2017: 167–180.

75 Ovid also figures himself as Perilla’s father in Tr. 3.7.12.

76 Ingleheart 2012: 237.

77 e.g., Cato the Elder (Praecepta ad Filium); Cicero (De Officiis), in which he refers to a tradition of elder statesmen writing letters to their sons (Cic. Off. 2.48). See Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 672; Kries 2003: 378–379.

78 Boyd 2017: 179.

79 Melville & Kenney 1992: 55 note that non patrio… more ‘can bear as many as four meanings; (i) different from her actual father's; (ii) different from Ovid's, her father in poetry (18)…; (iii) un-Roman, women poets being unusual; (iv) written in Greek or in Greek (lyric) metres.’ Given the utque pater natae image six lines later, combined with Ovid’s later stress that Perilla should not follow his example in writing about love (Tr. 3.7.27-30), the second option strikes me as most strongly suggested (a stance with which Wheeler and Gould’s Loeb translation agree). However, both the first and third options likewise give a sense of departure from tradition rather than fidelity to paternal or ancestral custom.

80 We might note that various scholars (e.g., Beer 2018; Harries 1990; Lateiner 1984: 15–17; Leach 1974) have argued that in the Metamorphoses Ovid identifies himself with Arachne, another young female artist. I am grateful to Simona Martorana for the observation that, due to the decline in manus marriages over the course of the first century BC, daughters commonly remained in the control of their fathers after marriage (see Thomas 1996: 236–238). Given this historical context, it is even more striking that Ovid stresses commonality rather than continuing paternal authority in his relationship with his daughter-figure Perilla.

81 Lewis 2012: 378. TLL s.v. dos IA.

82 TLL s.v. deduco IA2a. With Pegasidas, there is perhaps a suggestion that the fountain of the male literary tradition that springs from the male Pegasus is figuratively married to the fecund Perilla. However, there is arguably still an emphasis on feminine creative power, for elsewhere in Latin poetry Pegasides always refers to the Muses, associating the fountain with female creative figures.

83 Verg. G. 3.10-11. Cf. Hor. Carm. 3.30.13-14, Prop. 3.1.3-4.

84 On the triumphal overtones of deducere, see e.g., Woodman 2022: 380. It is also well-recognised that the Alexandrian poets used deducere to express their allegiance to ‘fine spun’ (λεπταλέην) poetry composed in the manner of Callimachus (Call. Aet. 1 fr.1.24). See e.g., Acosta-Hughes 2009: 242; Farrell 2004: 42–43; Hofmann 1986; Keith 2002: 246; Klein 2022.

85 Hor. Carm. 4.11.34-35.

86 Indeed, Ovid uses the tu quoque address at the beginning of three of the poem’s lines (Tr. 3.7.11, 28, 53).

87 Hug 2023: 52. When used in pre-Christian Latin of human reproductive capacity, it refers only to women, not men.

88 Cic. De Orat. 88.8; it is frequently used in such a sense later by Quintilian.

89 To give only a few examples: in Tristia 2.287 Ovid asks, ‘what place is more august than a temple?’ (quis locus est templis augustior?) before going on to show how sexually voracious women cannot be stopped from finding erotic associations (and likely assignations) in Rome’s temples, including those which Augustus himself founded or restored. Similarly in Ars am. 1.71-72 Ovid suggests that Livia’s portico is a good place to pick up women. Indeed, Ovid portrays adultery – which Augustus attempted to outlaw with the leges Iuliae of 18 BC – as a fundamental characteristic of Rome as a city, when in Amores 3.4.37-40 he points out that Romulus and Remus were born from adulterous sex. That specifically female fertility, not just sexuality, is beyond Augustus’ control is shown in e.g., the Carmentalia in the Fasti, where Ovid goes from etymologically associating Augustus’ name with ‘increasing’ (augere) to undercutting that increase with the immediately following tale of mass abortion (see Barchiesi 1997: 96). Within Augustus’ own family, there was not only the scandalous adultery of Julia (which Ovid never explicitly mentions), but the simple fact that Augustus was unable to have a biological child with Livia, and Ovid dwells on the ‘adoptive’ relations within the imperial family at e.g., Fast. 4.22, Met. 15.836 – on which, see e.g., Pandey 2013: 442; Pasco-Pranger 2006: 44.

90 Hauser 2023: 234.

91 Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 675.

92 See n.70 and 79, above.

93 Hauser 2023: 248.

94 See e.g., Bretin-Chabrol & Corbel 2025: 672–674; Hardie 1993: 99. Valerius Maximus (8.3.3) later depicts the transmission of eloquence from father to daughter as possible but unusual and inferior to that from father to son. Hortensia’s inheritance of her father’s eloquence is viewed as an ending, more than a continuation, of a fine ancestral tradition of rhetorical skill.

95 If Perilla was truly Ovid’s stepdaughter then she may, of course, have been the only family-connected successor available to him, as he had no sons and he does not speak of his only daughter as having any interest in poetry. I do not seek here to address the unanswerable question of exactly what play of circumstances and considerations motivated the choice of Perilla as addressee, but rather to consider the literary effect of having a daughter-figure rather than a son-figure represent the next generation of poets.

96 Hallett 2009, see esp. Her. 15.79-80, Am. 2.4.10 and Tr. 4.10.65-68.

97 Friedman 1987: 66.

98 Friedman 1987: 58, quoting Lowell from Howe 1993: 40.

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