forehead, the position of the eyes, nose, lips, chin. I feel her laughing and my whole body rushes into her mouth. What more
can I say? Naked, I am received with much gentleness. My whole body delights in the smell of old love.
This description of the parts of her body is much more abbreviated and not nearly as meticulously structured as his first. The fewer details allow the aged puella to appear more organic and alive than the (fantasized) virgin puella whose body was fragmented and magnified to monstrous degrees. Although the body of the aged puella is being evaluated, it is not so much in the interest of “Ovid’s” arousal as verifying the identity of his lover. The aged puella is the silent object of this anxious touching, but she smiles, even laughs, as he explores her body. Perhaps she is remembering the bed-trick and is amused at “Ovid’s” caution, for her body has indeed transformed, aged, given birth, but she is not the dreaded vetula. There is passionate kissing (ruo totus in oscula), “each satisfied the other,” each received the other “with peace.” And that is all “Ovid,” so practiced in scrupulous readings of the female body, has to say: “I am silent about what remains; it is enough to have said that we came together on one couch.”150
This account of the long-awaited union with the puella is pleasant, more
“romantic” than any lovemaking depicted in the Ovidian corpus, more reciprocal, with an emphasis on gentleness and unity. Perhaps the closest comparandum is Amores 1.5 where Ovid tells of his rendez-vous with Corinna one hot afternoon:151
150Quod superest taceo, satis est dixisse quod unum
Venimus in lectum, quod uterque sategit utrique,
Qui cum pace receptus eram, cum pace recessi (DV 2.673-675).
151 I have tried to maintain a practice of referring to the narrator of the Amores and the Metamorphoses as
Ovid, and the narrator of the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris as the praeceptor amoris. It should be clear that, by this arrangement, I do not mean to imply that the narrator of the former two poems represents the “true” voice of Ovid while the narrator of the latter two represents a literary persona. While no narrator is really Ovid, the Amores and Metamorphoses more often preserve than undermine the illusion, the one by creating an autobiographical voice, the other by maintaining a more distant, objective style of narration in which the first person voice is nearly absent. I have avoided assimilating Ovid and the praeceptor amoris
ut stetit ante oculos posito velamine nostros, in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit:
quos umeros, quales vidi tetigique lacertos! forma papillarum quam fuit apta premi! quam castigato planus sub pectore venter! quantum et quale latus! quam iuvenale femur! singula quid referam? nil non laudabile vidi, et nudam pressi corpus ad usque meum. cetera quis nescit? lassi requievimus ambo.
Amores 1.5.17-25 As she stood before my eyes, her clothing cast off, there was no flaw in her whole body: what shoulders, what arms I saw and touched! How fitting to be squeezed was the shape of the breasts! How flat the stomach beneath the slender chest! the shape of her side! how youthful the thigh! But why should I describe her piece by piece? I saw nothing unworthy of praise, and I squeezed her, naked, close to my body. Who doesn’t know the rest? Exhausted, we both rested.
Like Pseudo-Ovid’s earlier description of the virginal puella, Ovid’s account of
Corinna’s body focuses on individual parts, but Ovid gazes as a prelude to lovemaking, while Pseudo-Ovid’s (fantasized) gaze leads only to further elaboration, the narrative fragmentation of the puella’s body becoming an end in itself.152 Corinna of Amores 1.5 is more akin to the aged puella; the evaluation of her body parts leads to mutually desired erotic activity, but with an important difference. Where Ovid “squeezes” Corinna’s naked body to him and makes love to her in a way that leaves them both “exhausted,” “Ovid” and the aged puella receive each other “in peace,” the phrase repeated twice for
say, the same caveats apply to using the name “Ovid,” to refer to the author, first person narrator, and protagonist of De vetula .
152 Ovid’s ability to gaze upon the naked body of Corinna by the light of midday, however, underscores the
part that visual objectification plays in the eroticism of the poem. Inasmuch as the poem moves from Ovid’s looking to the two of them tired from lovemaking, Ovid’s gaze is the erotic activity expressed in the poem. Where the intercourse occurs, we have instead a rhetorical question emphasizing the certain effect of looking at a woman’s body parts one at a time: “Who does not know the rest?” There is a sense that the lovemaking is secondary to the gazing. The Pseudo-Ovidian author, by contrast, his eyes blinded by darkness, must physically engage with the body he desires.
emphasis in his account: Qui cum pace receptus eram, cum pace recessi.153 This is not the salacious tryst of a young man convinced, as “Ovid” admits he once was, that he could not live without the female sex. This is eros in moderation as befits an aged man of philosophy and an aged puella worn out from birthing babies. In this romantic affair, the problem of two Ovids recedes, and in its place is a mixture of the two, an “Ovid” who has found his remedy for lust while not utterly renouncing the pleasures of the female sex, now understood in much broader terms than when he lusted after the virgin puella.
Yet this engagement is not entirely free from the anxieties about the female body that animate the poem. We might expect as much, considering that this encounter with the aged puella seems so much like a repetition of the encounter with the vetula. His caution demonstrates his own doubts about the possibility of another traumatic mutatio. We might also expect as much from an author whose words and narrative techniques conflict with his surface message. Just as his use of fragmentation and magnification made monstrous the puella’s pure and ordered body, phrases in this passage suggest that, despite “Ovid’s” apparent attraction to the aged puella, female bodies and especially old ones, threaten disorder and contamination. His assertion about the pleasure he takes in the “smell of old love” seems to echo the stench of the vetula. The poet’s use of
antiquus, rather than the more negative vetulus, to describe the love he finds in this encounter indicates some effort to represent the aging female body as more than an object of disgust. Yet it is clear that “Ovid” is relieved to find his aged puella instead of a foul
vetula. One of the most poignant phrases in the passage—sentio ridentem, ruo totus in oscula—suggests a similar stirring of anxiety. This phrase artfully conveys the feeling of abandoning oneself to kisses, of collapsing into the body of a lover, but it also suggests
“Ovid’s” relief at not finding the rictus of the vetula. He pours himself into the aged
puella in kisses that replace the fantasized rush of foul liquid from the cursed vetula’s mouth. Finally, “Ovid’s” later meditations on the sexual encounter evince lingering anxieties about the nature of the female body:
Quod fuerat meminisse iuvat, quantique fuisset Integra fracta docet; numquam matrona totennis, Precipue post tot partus, fuit aptior ulla.
Nullaque munda magis fuit aut melioris odoris.
DV 2.669-672