Ovid Scholarship

Question 1

Eisenberg (On masculine desire)

Answer 1

“Ovid uses masculine desire as a source of motivation for women to follow his instruction.”

Question 2

Mary Beard (On the joke of the Ars 3)

Answer 2

“You could never follow these spuriously technical instructions; that’s the joke.”

Question 3

Carol Merriam (On men’s fantasies)

Answer 3

“Women are being taught how to fit into men’s fantasies and thus all the advice given to them is for the benefit of men.”

Question 4

Eisenberg (On Ovid’s narrator)

Answer 4

”..Ovid’s narrator exerts social pressure on female readers to adhere to inherently objectifying standards.”

Question 5

Sharon James (On the Ars 3 as subversive)

Answer 5

“We must consider the possibility that some women readers found the Ars not just tolerable but intriguing … not just oppressive but subversive.”

Question 6

Nandini Pandey (On Ovid’s familiarity with Roman beauty)

Answer 6

“Ovid shows an intimate and clear-eyed familiarity with the labour Roman women conduct behind the scenes to ready themselves for public display.”

Question 7

Hall (On the mocking of women)

Answer 7

“Ovid isn’t writing to women, he’s mocking them.”
(Argument over whether the audience of the Ars 3 is actually women at all, or just something aimed at men for them to laugh at)

Question 8

Brunelle (On benefit to the author)

Answer 8

“[It] may be the only didactic work of antiquity explicitly designed to bring more benefit to its author than to its intended audience.”

Question 9

Zuckerberg (On the use of elegiac couplets)

Answer 9

“His use of the elegiac couplet, the meter of erotic poetry … emphasises the disconnect between the poem’s form and its content.”
(Didactic poetry would usually be in dactylic hexameter)