ABSTRACT
Book II's subject is the most basic and physical of the virtues, demanding simply the control of the appetites. As it depends upon the capacity to resist desire, it obviously has much in common with the Aeneid's ethos of the sacrifice of private desire to public good, and Guyon thus resembles the self-denying Aeneas rather closely. But while this kind of self-control is necessary to avoid the enslavement of the reason to the appetites, Spenser also explores its limitations. While Guyon pursues an Aeneid-based career of self-control whose logical ultimate goal is Stoical apathy, an Ovidian subtext to which Guyon is oblivious provides a critical commentary, revealing the shortcomings and contradictions of his virtue. In this subtext, conjugal and familial love emerges as a positive value beyond the ken of Guyon's Virgilian ethos and under threat from it, just as in Ovid's Metamorphoses mortals fall victim to oppression by the Olympians which, whether it takes the form of the severity of Diana or the rapacious libido of the male gods, displays an indifference towards the emotions of individuals which parodies the Aeneid's ethos. In the rapes of the Metamorphoses, and in the militaristic, exploitative affairs ironically depicted in the Amores and the Ars amoris, Ovid exposes the corrupt forms taken by desire in a society where power and military strength are valued more highly than sympathy and care. Spenser's Bower of Bliss makes a similar point. Though the intemperate appetites of the Bower need and deserve to be quelled by temperance, nevertheless their intemperance is the result of a lack and a blindness they share with Guyon's Stoic and Virgilian outlook. Unable like Guyon to conceive of or value true love, the Bower's denizens are restricted to selfish and predatory lust. Sharing his high valuation of military prowess and moral condemnation of sexual love, they practice love as something depraved, selfconsciously abandoning all moral principles (like Ovid's persona in Amores Lii, who assumes that to follow Cupid is to abandon Mens Bona and Pudor in favour of Error and Furor), and at the same time import the antagonism, cruelty and aggression of war into their amatory relations.
