Seruitium, the Puella, and the Narrator in Ovid’s Amores

Caroline A. Perkins (Marshall University)

One feature of the puella of Augustan elegy is her duritia.  Propertius’ narrator especially delights in a mistress who attacks him physically, verbally and emotionally, and who haunts him with her accusations even after she has died. This duritia does not necessarily emasculate the narrator (e.g. Wyke, 1995; James, 2001), but either becomes "another strategy for amatory success and domination" (Kennedy, 73), and/or allows the narrator to confirm his masculinity through his poetic discourse (e.g. Myers, 1996). Indeed, the duritia of the puella enforces and enhances the narrator's masculinity, by presenting both an object and an endeavor that are inherently worthy (Greene, 1998, 2005). Seruitium amoris becomes militia amoris (Wyke, 2002), and this modification legitimizes the writing of elegy in the larger cultural context of Augustan Rome.  In the Amores, Ovid acknowledges the concepts of the dura puella and seruitium amoris. Yet he never allows his narrator to sacrifice his essential masculinity by allowing the elegiac mistress of the Amores to be dura. He is committed to endowing with authority the writing of elegy. Yet he achieves this authority either by focusing solely on militia amoris and not making it an extension of seruitium, or by making the very writing of elegy inherently valuable.

Ovid’s narrator is very aware of the concept of the dura puella. In a generic sense in Amores 1.9, he asserts that the task of the amator is to lay siege to the threshold of the durae amicae, and in Amores 2.4 he mentions the dura puella, who, however, will soften at the touch of a man. But, significantly, he does not refer to his own mistress as dura, and indeed he goes out of his way not to call her dura when he could and should.  In Amores 1.2, for instance, bedclothes are dura,and in Amores 1.6 the narrator characterizes as durus chains (twice), the doors, the wood of the doors, the threshold and the doorkeeper. The same sort of metonymy occurs in Amores 2.1.21-22 when the poet pronounces his resumption of the writing of elegy as a means to softening (mollierant) obstacles that are durus. Yet the puella is emphatically mollis, a quality she shares with Elegy herself (Am. 3.1. 7-10).  By the same token, when the narrator has to admit defeat, it is not the puella who conquers.  Instead, Cupid is his uictor in Amores 1.1 and 1.2, the uir, possibly, in Amores 1.4, the ianitor in 1.6,  Aurora in 1.14, and, most often the narrator himself (e.g. 3.11).  Furthermore, when the speaker could easily attribute control to the puella, he avoids doing so. In Amores 1.12, for instance, he blames Nape initially for his own failure, but then turns to full force of his wrath on the writing tablets, and scarcely mentions the puella throughout the poem. 

In a similar way, the narrator acknowledges the concept of seruitium amoris without ever embracing it significantly. He begins Amores 1.3 with appropriate expressions of humility and servitude (e.g. deseruiat, l.5), but undercuts these sentiments with hyperbole (ll. 13-14), a materialistic take on the relationship, and a final expression of the immortalizing power of poetry.  In Amores 2.17, perhaps the strongest expression of servitude in the Amores, the narrator reveals his seruitium as a sham as he shifts emphasis from his beautiful mistress (ll. 1-14) to himself and his poetry. In these poem mythological exempla reveal the narrator’s true intentions: ostensibly they support his arguments that poetry immortalizes women (1.3) and women can love men of lesser rank (2.17).  In fact, in 1.3 the exempla reveal the inherent helplessness of women and, not incidentally, allow the speaker to equate himself with Jupiter, and in 2.17 they support the superiority of the male.

Thus the speaker remains a male in a male world. There is no subtext to his seruitium because there is no real seruitium to a dominating mistress, and there certainly is not a dominating mistress. He also establishes for the writing elegy an importance that equals that of epic by blending the form and conventions of both. He introduces his program in Amores 1.1 when he shows that he is capable of writing epic in his very protestations that he will not, in 1.2 when he creates Cupid as a triumphant general, in 1.9 when he gleefully blends the functions of miles and amator, and elsewhere.  Ovid closes modern discussions on gender politics by allowing his narrator to retain his masculinity, and ancient discussions on the politics of writing elegy by making the act openly a negotium rather than the product of an ostensible otium.