essay errata
This week, I was working on a final paper for a Greco-Roman art class. Please enjoy a selection of thoughts that absolutely did not make the cut.
Amores 3.7
My least favorite part about the Ovid erectile dysfunction poem (Amores 3.7), apart from the fact that it exists, is that I really like it.
truncus iners iacui, species et inutile pondus,
et non exactum, corpus an umbra forem.
Quae mihi ventura est, siquidem ventura, senectus,
cum desit numeris ipsa iuventa suis?I lay an inert body, a sham, a useless weight,
unsure whether I was a body or a ghost.
What old age will come, to me, if it does come,
when youth itself fails me in this way?—Ovid Amores 3.7.15–18
Like, I actually find that really compelling, which is embarrassing but true nonetheless.
“Amores 3.7 is the poem in which the speaker laments his erectile dysfunction in the face of a particularly lovely sexual partner" is a sentence I just put in my actual paper, which will be read not only by my professor but also my mother (who is proofreading my paper for me).
(Oh, and also I think that bit about being poisoned by hemlock in line 13 is meant to lightly imply that his limp dick is like Socrates, who was famously forced to commit suicide by hemlock.)
The Knidian Aphrodite
In a similar vein, I have to talk about the Aphrodite of Knidos in this paper, which means that I have to identify the least upsetting way to say "some dude reportedly jacked off on a particularly sexy statue and came all over it which has possible implications for the statue's preservation routine and also I bet you dollars to donuts that Ovid had it in mind while writing this bit of the Met."
And this is so not the point but the Aphrodite of Knidos? Not that hot, IMO. Like, I get its art historical significance,[1] but if I was forced to lock myself in a temple to jack off on a statue it simply would not be that one. Off the top of my head, I would absolutely go for the Nike of Samothrace before any of the Venus Pudica types. Even sticking to statues of Aphrodite in the classical period, the Venus Genetrix type is way hotter. While we're at it, Crouching Venus is later but that one's sexier too—it does the whole revealing-while-concealing thing way better.
Exhibits A–D
In case you were looking to judge my statue fuckability takes, here are pictures of the types mentioned here:
