The Hair that Was: Ovid’s Amores I.14 and the Coma Berenices (Callimachus fr.110 Pf. = Catullus 66)

Kristin O. Lord (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Ovid’s description of Corinna’s hair at Amores 1.14 invites readers to consider his Alexandrian literary antecedents: before dye destroyed the tresses, they were tenues (5), like the silk of the Seres (6) and the thread spun by a spider with delicate foot (7 pede... gracili), and graciles et lanuginis instar (23). The hair is learned enough to ‘instruct’ (erudit) its own hair pins (30). It is not surprising, then, that scholars draw comparisons to Callimachus’s Hecale, whose long-defunct cloak was the work of spiders.

However, we should also view Amores I.14 in the light of the Coma Berenices (fr.110Pf. = Catullus 66). Ovid and the Coma depict their women as once having locks that flowed in an erotic state of dishabille (Ovid 18-22 and Coma 80-81, lines perhaps inserted by Catullus), and both describe the hair as an independent entity. Corinna was once afraid to ‘dress’ her hair (5 quos ornare timeres);  the maiden Berenice used no ointments (77 omnibus expers/unguentis, 91 unguinis expertem). Similar ethnographic descriptions appear: Ovid’s Chinese fabrics correspond to the perfumes wished for the married Berenice (myrrh in the Greek (78) and the contents of the onyx in Latin), which are imports via one of the silk routes. The Coma and Ovid both utilize the high rhetoric of mock tragedy, such as hyperbole and anaphora. Finally, the poems play on the idea of distance and what can and cannot be seen. Berenice’s lock is visible after its catasterism, but only because of the astute royal astronomer Conon. Ovid’s analogy with the Seres is about a people too far away to know, and the cobweb is under a neglected beam.

Issues of intertextuality between Catullus and Callimachus are discussed, to the extent that the evidence allows, in the context of Ovid’s numerous rearrangements of themes and ideas. Berenice’s role as wife and queen contrasts with Ovid’s non-wife, Corinna, whose vir has already appeared in Amores I.4; this in turn undermines the attack on adultery in Catullus’ version of the Coma. Berenice’s lock does its own mourning, but Corinna’s hair does not speak, and most of  the anguish (real and not so real) is in the mouth of the poet. Ultimately, while the dedication of Berenice’s hair upon her husband’s return from battle conveys at least some sense of earnestness, both the creation and the loss of Corinna’s delicate lock are a game which will go to the next round when the tresses grow back. Ovid’s Alexandrianism becomes as much a tool for his audience’s amusement as a statement of literary identity.

Back to 2007 Meeting Home Page