Playing down love-poetry: Ovid and Persius’ construction of the self,

Persius’ construction of his persona as an unconventional, not-inspired, poet telling the truth with irony relies on a complex intertextual play with his poetic predecessors. By dismissing current poetic and literary trends as stemming from the excess of libido and avarice and portraying himself as a ‘new’ satiric voice Persius engages with a consolidated literary tradition and creates a sophisticated form of poetry, in which the implied allusions to satiric models (Lucilius and Horace, in primis) serve as a form of detachment from the literary past. Following up on this scholarly interpretation, this paper investigates Persius’ multifaceted relationship with Ovid and tries to assess the impact of the poeta amans on the satirist’s polemic and skeptical vision of contemporary poetry. It reconfigures Ovid-Persius confrontation in both terms of opposition and imitation/emulation. More, it aims to demonstrate that the re-use (less or more explicit) of Ovid’s love poetry is crucial to Persius’ self-portrait as a satiric poet. By mockery of erotic poetry in the Fifth Satire and through the parodic revisitation of the topos of immortality of poetry in the programmatic Satire Persius opposes himself to the lusor tenerorum amorum and rejects erotic elegy as an immoral form of poetry. In distancing himself from his poetic antecedents Persius links his quest for eternal fame to the vision of a vicious reality, described through an intertextual network and a symbolistic language.