The love of his life : the programmatic recurrence of the God Cupid in Ovid

In contrast to the earlier love elegists, who use the god of love Amor, sometimes called Cupid, primarily as a personification of the power of love, Ovid brings Amor forward as a personality who interacts with the poet. The love-god thus plays a more prominent and complex role in Ovidian elegy. This synoptic study of the god Cupid in Ovid spans the poet's career and provides a new approach to Ovid's self-referential poetics through his refigurarion of the god as he moves from elegy to epic to the poetry of exile. The first chapter focuses on the Amores, in which Amor/amor rules the poet. In Amores 1.1 and 1.2 Cupid controls Ovid, first as poetic dictator and then as triumphant military general, even before the appearance of a love-interest. In the programmatic poems of the Amores the god, with the puella and Elegia herself, replays his coercion of Ovid to write elegy. In the Ars Amatoria (Chapter Two) Ovid and Cupid reverse roles to meet the didactic framework, and the tyrannical deity of the Amores becomes the poet's student. Chapter Three on the Remedia Amoris focuses first on the prologue that reworks the encounter with Cupid in Amores 1.1 and then on a later epiphany of Amor (Rem. 549-78). The fourth chapter, on the Metamorphoses, discusses three stories motivated by Cupid's assaults on gods: Daphne and Apollo, the Rape of Persephone, and Venus and Adonis. Within each story the innovative inclusion of Cupid comments on the place of elegy in epic. The fifth chapter examines Epistulae Ex Ponto 3.3, in which Ovid relates an epiphany of a mournful and disheveled Amor. Ovid recasts his previous relationship with Amor in the Amores and in the erotodidactic poems in terms of exilic themes. Ovid's portrayal of Cupid again represents his elegy, this time the elegy of exilic lament. All of the passages redefine Ovid's poetry from the touchstone of his original erotic poetry. Therefore Cupid comes to represent Ovid's love elegy, and Cupid's appearance, personality, and effect on all subsequent poetry relate to the poetry's elegiac content.