Reading sex in Amores 1.4 and 1.5

Abstract The practice of reading two elegies closely against each other has proved illuminating for the study of Ovid’s Amores. Often there are clear verbal links between paired elegies. Such pairs provide an implied narrative and dramatic sequence; they allow Ovid to explore elegiac affairs from more than one angle; they surprise and amuse the reader; they showcase Ovid’s skill at manipulating the same theme in different ways. This chapter develops scholarship on Ovidian paired poems by analysing two elegies that tend to be read in isolation but benefit from being read in conjunction: Amores 1.4 and 1.5. Although they do not follow a clear dramatic sequence, a narrative movement from one to the other is implied, and both have highly sexualized subject matter. The first instructs an unnamed female beloved on how to conduct herself at a conuiuium that she will attend with her uir, looks to Ovid’s past sexual exploits with this woman, and ends by telling her that she should be sexually unresponsive to her uir when she leaves to spend the night with him. The much-studied 1.5 relates how Corinna, here named for the first time in the collection, visits Ovid for daytime sex. Ingleheart argues that reading the poems as a pair provides insights into the narrative dynamics of the first book of the Amores, as well as into Ovid’s construction and control of his readership. Moreover, taken closely together, Amores 1.4 and 1.5 can inform our understanding of Ovidian elegiac erotics and style.