Ibis (Ovid)

Ovid's Ibis is a highly artificial and history-bound product and does not make pleasant reading. But it is interesting, among other things, because it illustrates the writer's propensity for moving on more than one plane of reality. The poem contains elements from three distinct modes of reacting to the same outrage; of these, the first may be called realistic, the second romantic, and the third grotesque.

Hermann Fränkel, Ovid: A Poet
between Two Worlds^[1]

Ibis is a curse poem by the Roman 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 lost poem of the same title by the Greek Alexandrian poet Callimachus.^[2]

^ Hermann Fränkel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (University of California Press, 1956), p. 152.
^ Oliver Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 437 online.

[1] Hermann Fränkel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (University of California Press, 1956), p. 152.

[2] Oliver Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 437 online.

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