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Ibis is a curse poem by the Roman poet Ovid, written during his years in exile across the Black Sea for an offense against Augustus. It is "a stream of violent but extremely learned abuse," modeled on a lost poem of the same title by the Greek Alexandrian poet Callimachus.
Contents
Identity of Ibis
The object of the poet's curses is left unnamed except for the pseudonym "Ibis", and no scholarly consensus has been reached as to whom this pseudonym might refer to. Titus Labienus, Caninius Rebilus, Ovid's erstwhile friend Sabinus, and the emperor Augustus have all been proposed, as well as the possibility that "Ibis" might refer to more than one person, to nobody at all, or even to Ovid's own poetry.
Structure and Themes
The 644-line poem, like all Ovid's extant work except the Metamorphoses, is written in elegiac couplets. It is thus an unusual, though not unique, example of invective poetry in antiquity written in elegiac form rather than the more common iambics or hendecasyllabics. The incantatory nature of the curses in the Ibis has sometimes led to comparisons with curse tablets (defixiones), though Ovid's are elaborately literary in expression; the poem has also been seen as a type of devotio.
Drawing on the encyclopedic store of knowledge he demonstrated in the Metamorphoses and his other work — presumably from memory, as he purportedly had few books with him in exile — Ovid threatens his enemy in the second section of the poem (lines 251–638) with a veritable catalogue of "gruesome and mutually incompatible fates" that befell various figures from myth and history, ranging from laming and blinding to cannibalism to death by pine cone. Ovid also declares in the poem's opening salvo that even if he dies in exile, his ghost will rise and rend Ibis's flesh.
The basic structure of the poem is as follows:
I. Introduction II. Catalogue III. CodaAfterlife
The Ibis attracted a large number of scholia and was widely disseminated and referenced in Renaissance literature. In his annotated translation (1577), Thomas Underdowne found in Ibis a reference guide to "all manner of vices punished, all offenses corrected, and all misdeeds revenged." An English translator noted that "a full reference to each of the allusions to be found in this poem would suffice to fill a small volume."
Online texts and translations
The editio princeps of Ovid's complete works, including the Ibis, was published in Italy in 1471. Full-text versions of the following Latin editions and English translations of the Ibis are available online.