ABSTRACT
An aging Ovid, having failed to persuade Augustus to allow him to return to Rome, sought comfort in the composition of one final poem. He arranged for this poem to be buried with his bones in Tomis with the hope that his physical remains and this final addition to his literary corpus might eventually make their way back to his motherland. We are told as much in the prose accessus of this Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman), which was preserved in an ivory capsule, “consumed by no rot,” and discovered over a thousand years after Ovid’s death.1 The poem was sent to Constantinople where it was translated and recognized as the last work of the great poet whose bones, by that time, had long since dissolved into dust.2 Ovid had foretold as much in the closing lines of his Metamorphoses-that his poetry would long outlast his body.3 Indeed, the final word of the poem, vivam (“I will live”), demonstrates Ovid’s faith in the words he gives to Pythagoras, his philosopher of change: omnia mutantur, nihil interit (“all things change, nothing dies”).4 That Ovid’s fleshy corpus would become his textual corpus is the last transformation promised in the Metamorphoses.5 The accessus of De vetula thus announces two provenances; the story of this “final text” of the Ovidian corpus is inextricable from the story of Ovid’s body. It is fitting, then, that this final literary incarnation, which is everywhere about the vicissitudes of corporeal boundaries, survives intact while Ovid’s absent body serves as a testament to the exigencies of old age, death, and decay. These are exigencies to which the eponymous vetula and the author himself are vulnerable. Ralph Hexter has characterized the pseudo-Ovidiana of the high Middle
Ages as supplements or grafts onto Ovid’s corpus, understood both as his literary body of work and the body of the poet himself, especially in those instances where Ovid himself appears as an embodied subject in these texts (as in De vetula and Ovid’s medieval biographies).6 Read as an appendage to the medieval Ovid’s body, De vetula is not, as the accessus announces, the final, definitively bounded incarnation of the poet, for it is a testamenttogether with other pseudo-Ovidiana-to the permeability of that body.7
Ovid’s corpus, both body and text (De vetula does not allow the two to be put asunder) tends to spill from its proper boundaries.8 In this regard,
Ovid’s body is not so different from the monstrous bodies that populate De vetula itself: it functions as a semantic system and a corporeal system, occupying an unsteady position where the two overlap. The “Ovid” who appears in De vetula-the poetic corpus within the autobiographical textexemplifies this instability as he himself is a reader of unstable bodies, and by way of that reading, undergoes his own series of transformations.9
