L'Ars Amatoria e i confini dell'elegia

The Latin poets who immediately precede Ovid worked on fixing a canon of genres that may have regulated the extreme experimentation of the Alexandrian, Callimachean production in a system of well-known and recognizable rules. If the love elegy is one of the most codified genres, Ovid plays with the perturbation of its rules, becoming the first „post-generic“ poet of the Latin literature. Back in the Amores he destroys the topos of the absoluteness of love towards one and only woman. In the Ars amatoria his role as magister amoris compels him to make love accessible to all his pupils, disclosing what seduction really is and dismantling the ideal image of the elegiac puella as naturally beautiful and young. Men are taught not to see the defects of their women, and women are taught to minimize and hide them; the lost beauty and youth can be balanced by other „qualities“, such as money. The pitiless and often ironical tones used by the poet to describe what love really is are very similar to the ones employed in the tradition of more „realistic genres“: the modi of the diatribe, the satire, the giambic and scommatic poetry invade the space of elegy, showing that already the Ars amatoria, likewise the Remedia, is a palinody of the elegy itself.