Two Amorous Problems
Ov. Fast. 4.1; Met. 3.405
I
Alma fave, dixi, geminorum mater amorum!
Be gracious, I said, O bountiful mother of twin loves!
So opens the fourth book of Ovid’s Fasti, beginning its discussion of the month of April with an invocation of its tutelary goddess Venus.
It has never been obvious who or what are the twin loves whose mother Venus is. Elsewhere (Am. 3.15.1) Ovid calls Venus tenerorum mater amorum, the mother of tender loves. At Epist. 7.59 she is the mother of love tout court and at Epist. 16.203 she is the mother of winged loves, but nowhere is a number specified. At Ars 2.15 Ovid speaks of puer et Cytherea; here are two loves, but one of them is mother Venus herself. It seems appropriate to call Venus the mother of either a great many loves or else of just one, Cupid; therefore it is puzzling that she should be said here to be the mother of exactly two. (A similar riddle, I think, is posed by Seneca’s epithet geminus Cupido, which comes up twice [Phaedr. 275; Oed. 500] without explanation.)
I have sometimes seen Horace’s description of Jest and Cupid flitting around Venus brought up in connection with our verse (Carm. 1.2.31–2 Erycina ridens quam Iocus circumvolat et Cupido), but this is inapposite, since of these two ministers of Venus, only Cupid represents love itself.
Perhaps Ovid means Eros and Anteros, Love and Love-Requited, who each had an altar in Athens and whom Plato famously mentions in the Phaedrus. Antonie Wlosok rightly judged this interpretation to be implausible for the reason that these gods are simply never mentioned in Latin literature except in a technical or antiquarian context.1
In her very interesting article Wlosok then went on to defend a thesis of her own, namely that the gemini amores of Fast. 4.1 are the twin gods Amor and Cupido, who are frequently mentioned in tandem or compared with each other in Latin poetry and prose. But she did not supply the evidence which would have been necessary to prove her point, which would have been a passage in Ovid or some other Augustan poet describing Amor and Cupid mythologically as the distinct sons of Venus. (The most apposite passage she could find was in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival: Amor und Cupîdô unt der zweier muoter Vênus). Nor did she show that Ovid himself would have thought of Amor and Cupido as two separate deities, rather than two names or two aspects of the same one.
Other theories depart from the observation that Ovid goes on in the opening of Fast. 4 to discuss his own literary work in a dialogue with Venus. She chides him for having abandoned the theme of love which occupied him in his youth. ‘But’, Ovid replies, though I now write of grander matters as a mature man, I was always concerned with you.’ Perhaps this autobiographical discussion is the frame in which the opening line of the book is to be understood.
The most popular suggestion along these lines is the one proposed by John F. Miller, which Alessandro Barchiesi states that Michael Reeve also proposed independently in a seminar in Cambridge 1990.2 It is to take gemini amores as a pun referring to the two redactions of Ovid’s own Amores (to which Ovid alludes in that poem’s opening epigram). I think this proposal is most implausible. Most importantly, neither in modernity nor in antiquity has it ever been normal to refer to two editions of the same work as a pair of books. Could Paradises Lost ever describe the editions of 1667 (in ten books) and 1674 (in twelve)? Or if a German referred to the Fäuste, could he possibly be understood by anyone as referring to Faust and the Ur-Faust?
But while I think of Ovid’s own works, another idea comes to mind which I think is more attractive. The two subjects of Ovid’s Art of Love are 1) the love of men for women, which he covers in the first two books, and 2) the love of women for men, which he covers in the third. At Ars 3.341–2 he refers to his own work as the carmina quis partes instruit ille duas: ‘the poems in which he [Ovid] fits out both parties’, i.e. men and women. Could not these two loves be the gemini amores?
I think we can even settle on a version of this interpretation without necessarily supposing that Ovid is making a specific reference to his own Art of Love. It takes two to tango and two to love, and therefore romantic love, whether successful or only fantasized, always comes as a couple: the love felt by the lover and the love felt by the beloved, who enter together into the ‘mutual contests of love’ (Am. 2.10.29 Veneris certamina mutua). Now in a sense we are back to Eros and Anteros; not, however, conceived of as mythological gods supposed to be children of Venus, but as the twin feelings which they personify, to which the goddess of April gives birth.
II
In the third book of the Metamorphoses we read the story of Narcissus, who refused the advances of his many admirers, to their terrible cost and his. At last one of these rejected lovers cries out to the goddess of vengeance (3.405):
sic amet ipse licet, sic non potiatur amato.
Now it seems obvious what this verse has to mean: ‘he himself should love like I do; like me he should not obtain the object of his love.’ The problem is that it is difficult to get this or any other meaning from the verse as it stands. What after all is the word licet? One instinctively reads sic amet ipse licet as ‘even though he loves like this’ or else ‘it may be he loves like this’, neither of which makes any sense at all in context. Even though licet can sometimes have a weakened meaning, or one that shades off from the basic ones ‘although’ or ‘it is permitted’, the closest it ever comes to introducing a true wish is in passages like Plaut. Rud. 139 mea quidem hercle causa salvos sis licet (‘as far as I care you can be well’). But this example still has a note of permission in it, as if the speaker is setting his interlocutor free to do something: and in our verse we have the opposite; it is a solemn prayer to Nemesis that she should force Narcissus to suffer the pains of love.
It is no wonder that modern critics have wanted to be rid of licet altogether. R.J. Tarrant questioned the received text of this line in his 2004 OCT edition, and tentatively proposed the emendation ‘sic amet ipse precor’ (‘so, I pray, should he love’). I think this is eminently reasonable, especially given another instance of corruption from precor to licet later in the Metamorphoses,3 but I think Tarrant would have done just as well to put daggers around licet and leave things at that.
And now along comes J.B. Hall, who wrote the following in his contribution to a Festschrift:4
Tarrant is right to question the soundness of licet, though his precor does not, I think, resolve the problem. sic amet ipse licet means literally “so is it permitted that he himself love”, when what we want to justify the answer “so may he not gain the object loved” is an antecedent wish. sic amet hic liceat is thus one possibility, but another, and I think better, is sic amet hic aliquem.
I am sorry to say I find this rather pitiably reasoned. Hall misinterprets sic amet ipse licet as a question (or I think he does), and he throws out Tarrant’s suggestion precor when in fact it does indeed form an ‘antecedent wish’ that resolves the problem as he states it. His own two conjectures, meanwhile, lack both the boldness and the plausibility of precor. The danger of wanton emendations like these is that they can frighten a reader into clinging to a bad received reading; and that, in the long run, they give conservatives confidence and even some justification in tarring textual critics in general as meddlesome know-it-alls.
In this case we are best off just treating Hall’s proposals as if they were never made. And whatever we make of precor, if we can be sure of anything at this line, it is that licet cannot stand.
Antonie Wlosok, ‘Amor and Cupid’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 79 (1975): pp. 165–79.
John F. Miller, Ovid’s Elegiac Festivals: Studies in the »Fasti«, Studien zur klassischen Philologie 55 (Lausanne: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 172 n. 76; Alessandro Barchiesi, Il poeta e il principe. Ovidio e il discorso Augusteo (Roma/Bari: Editori Laterza, 1994), pp. 285–6 n. 22.
As pointed out by T. E. Franklinos and S. J. Heyworth, ‘Notes on the Text and Interpretation of Horace’s Odes and Carmen Saeculare’, in Classical Enrichment. Greek and Latin Literature and Its Reception, ed. Antony Augoustakis et al., Trends in Classics (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2025), 217–33, at pp. 224–6.
J. B. Hall, ‘Textual Metamorphoses in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, in Secretes bene uiuere siluis: Studies in Latin Literature in Honour of Robert Maltby, ed. Stratis Kyriakidis and Charilaos N. Michalopoulos (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024), pp. 306–70, at p. 323.