6 OVID’S ARS POETICA: METAPOETIC DIDACTIC IN THE ARS AMATORIA Elena Giusti Didactic poetry, especially in the Latin tradition, is dense with programmatic self-reflexivity and metapoetic nuances, 1 not least because of two of the four features recognised by Katharina Volk as ‘central to the genre’: ‘poetic self-consciousness’ 2 and ‘poetic simultaneity’. 3 While neither quality is exclusive to the didactic ‘genre’, it is only here that they have the potential to enact the ‘metapoetic didactic’ of this chapter’s title: namely, to suggest that the poem’s technical content is little more than a pretext for lessons about its own poetic technique. In pursuing such a reading of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria through comparison with Horace’s Ars Poetica, this chapter will see encoded in the didactic genre one of the issues that, for modern readers, has been crucial to its definition – a contrast between technical content and poetic form. 4 Such a contrast turns didactic poetry into a battlefield for the controversial dialectics of ‘utility’ and ‘entertainment’ (prodesse and delectare, or utile and dulce), from the perspective of the pupil, and of ‘technical skill’ and ‘natural inclination’ (ars and natura/ingenium), from the perspective of the teacher. These dichotomised terms collide and interact in the epistolary and arguably didactic hexametric treatise of Horace, the very title of which parades this central opposition: the Ars [vs] Poetica. 5 The work defies the (already problematic) boundaries of the didactic genre by breaking the opposition of form and content on which it appears to be grounded: poetry itself is now the subject of a didactic poem that is written in hexameters but presented as sermo (AP 306 nil scribens ipse, docebo, ‘I shall teach poetry, without writing it myself ’). 6 In other words, the genre is flipped over, with the result that form and content are inverted. And yet, once we recognise that the Ars Poetica, ‘a “masterwork” which is also a study in self-defacement,’ 7 is only masking itself (and the Epistles, and the Satires) as non-poetry, 8 form and content (poetry and poetry) end up coinciding. This is problematic both for the work’s generic definition and for its didactic message. 9 Once the Ars Poetica unmasks itself as poetry, the poetic form and the poetic technical content start contradicting each other, in that the author seems 151 98662_Didactic.qxp_Layout 1 17/09/2019 11:37 Page 151