Ars temporis: Resisting age in Ovidian elegy and Augustan art

This dissertation examines the depiction of time and old age in Ovid's early elegiac poetry within the context of Augustan culture. In the Augustan age, the portrait of the princeps and the public display of the younger members of his family made youth visible as never before, while the authority the princeps wielded over time took visual form in the horologium and the other monuments of the Campus Martius. The Roman citizen's experience of time became politicized in a new way. Elegiac poetry, whose protagonists are traditionally young, is the perfect medium for the poet to explore how age is performed and resisted within the confines of a genre.;Latin love elegists adapted the rules and themes of elegy from their Greek predecessors for the Augustan age. Nowhere was this adaptation more innovative than in Ovid's Heroides. I argue that the heroines of the Heroides bend their life stories to fit more comfortably into the generic rules of elegy, which require the puella to be eternally young. As a result, the heroines struggle to present a consistent image of themselves, but also have the opportunity to articulate an understanding of time to counter that of epic and tragedy, and perhaps even that of Augustus.;The pressure to stay young that is characteristic of both the elegiac genre and Augustan culture becomes a rhetorical device for the poet to justify his didactic elegies. In the elegies Ovid writes for a female audience, the Medicamina Faciei Femineae and the third book of the Ars Amatoria, I argue that the praeceptor uses fear of aging to urge the readers to take his advice on love and cosmetics. The first two books of the Ars Amatoria also encourage male readers to resist aging, but in the Remedia Amoris, the praeceptor turns his attention to time. Ovid depicts time as a threat, and the praeceptor offers the reader his expertise to overcome it. In this respect, the praeceptor rivals the princeps as master of time.