Ibis (Ovid)  

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Ibis is a curse poem by the Latin poet Ovid, written during his years in exile across the Black Sea for an offense against Augustus. It is "a stream of violent but extremely learned abuse," modeled on a poem of the same title by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus.

The object of this verbal assault is left unnamed except for the pseudonym Ibis, and no scholarly consensus exists as to whom the poet was directing his spleen. Titus Labienus, Caninius Rebilus, and Ovid's erstwhile friend Sabinus have been proposed, but such a wildly exaggerated figure as "Ibis" may have been a composite.

The 642-line poem, like all Ovid's extant work except the Metamorphoses, is written in elegiac couplets. It is thus an unusual, though not unique, example of invective poetry in antiquity written in elegiac form rather than the more common iambics or hendecasyllabics. The incantatory nature of the curses in the Ibis has sometimes led to comparisons with curse tablets (defixiones), though Ovid's are elaborately literary in expression.

Drawing on the encyclopedic store of knowledge he demonstrated in the Metamorphoses and his other work — he had few books with him in exile — Ovid threatens his enemy with a veritable catalogue of "gruesome and mutually incompatible fates" that befell various figures from myth and history, including a Thyestean banquet of human flesh. He declares that even if he dies in exile, his ghost will rise and rend Ibis's flesh.

The Ibis attracted a large number of scholia, and was widely disseminated and referenced in Renaissance literature. In his annotated translation (1577), Thomas Underdowne found in Ibis a reference guide to "all manner of vices punished, al offences corrected, and all misdeedes reuenged." An English translator noted that "a full reference to each of the allusions to be found in this poem would suffice to fill a small volume."

Contents

Texts and translations

The editio princeps of Ovid's complete works, including the Ibis, was published in Italy in 1471. Full-text versions of the following 19th-century Latin editions and English translations of the Ibis are available online.

Latin

  • R. Ellis, P. Ovidii Nasonis Ibis, Oxford Classical Text, 1881.
  • A. Riese, P. Ovidii Nasonis Carmina, vol. 3, 1899.

English translations

  • Henry Thomas Riley, "The Invective Against the Ibis," prose

See also

  • Libel as a genre of invective poetry




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Ibis (Ovid)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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