Luciana Furbetta contributed ‘Les Métamorphoses (et pas seulement) d’Ovide dans les vers et les lettres de Sidoine Apollinaire: quelques sondages’ to Hélène Vial (ed.), La poésie augustéenne et la rhétorique, Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2022, 369-87.
ToC in Academia
Marco Onorato has contributed to a new volume of Présences ovidiennes with ‘La parola e il silenzio. Echi dell’ultimo Ovidio in un dittico paratestuale sidoniano’. See bibliography page 2020 and Academia
‘Tracce di un fecondo confronto con Ovidio e, in particolare, con la sua produzione dell’esilio affiorano nella praefatio epistolare del c. 22 di Sidonio, delineando l’esistenza di un paratesto ‘espanso’ che deborda nei primi versi del componimento e che sviluppa una riflessione organica sullo statuto del canto e sul rapporto con l’orizzonte d’attesa del pubblico. Emergono inoltre nuovi indizi della fortuna dell’Ibis nella Gallia tardoantica.’
Today, on the occasion of Sidonius’ death on a 21/23rd August some 1,540 years ago, a striking piece of literary reception giving an unexpected twist to the famous Carmen 12 on the impossibility of writing poetry among the barbarians.
Playwright and stage director Hartmut Lange (born 1937, in exile to West-Berlin from the DDR in 1965), in his 1972 play Staschek oder das Leben des Ovid on the dilemmas of compromising with the powers that be, has the protagonist meet Sidonius in Bordeaux instead of meeting Ovid in Tomi, as he expected. Staschek persuades Sidonius to smear his hair with rancid butter to assuage the barbarians. These, indeed, become nicer, but the stench makes Sidonius vomit all the time and prevents him from reciting his ‘ode to Venus’.
The play is a vivid satire of cowardice and self-interest in the face of totalitarianism (Horace and Vergil figure on the wrong side whereas Ovid refuses to collaborate). In the end, everybody has to compromise one way or another, even Sidonius.
See the Reception/Germany page for fuller detail on discussions by Kurt Smolak and Theodore Ziolkowski.
Text to be found in Hartmut Lange, Vom Werden der Vernunft und andere Stücke fürs Theater, Zürich: Diogenes. 1988, 307-41, esp. 338-39.
Featuring Chiara Battistella (Udine), ‘Ovidio e Sidonio Apollinare’
