ABSTRACT
The Latin love elegists present us with a poetic world full of imagery appealing to all the senses, smell included; references to exotic perfumes, for example, are rife. When it comes to the natural odours of the body that such perfumes mask, however, the elegiac speaker either departs into flights of fancy or, more often, remains silent. Here as in other respects, the sense of realism created by the elegists’ rich imagery is limited by the blank spots and flattering hyperboles necessitated by the tendency towards idealisation and the particular brand of decorum that are characteristic of the genre. This context makes it all the more striking when Ovid, nominally a love elegist himself, brings the elegiac world down to earth in his didactic works, reminding his male and female pupils in the art of love to ‘banish the goat from their armpits’ and dwelling on the realistically human bodies of both lover and beloved, effluvia included. This decision on Ovid’s part to exploit the comic possibilities of bodily fluids rather than shying away from the subject forms part of a larger poetic scheme: many of the central effects of his didactic works rely on reintroducing a dose of the real into a poetic world whose rich outer texture ordinarily serves to distract from its idealisation or elision of the prosaic or unsavoury aspects of reality. Ovid’s didactic, populated by a cast of lovers and beloveds whose bodies’ natural functions are neither erased and idealised nor grossly exaggerated, thus creates a unique space for itself between elegy and satire and presents us with a world whose position on the spectrum between reality and artifice is left playfully uncertain.
