Leah Kronenberg

Aemilius Macer as Corinna’s Parrot in Ovid Amores 2.6

The similarities between ovid Amores 2.6, on the death of Corinna’s parrot, and Amores 3.9, on the death of Tibullus, have often troubled critics. 1 After all, the extreme sadness that ovid conveys over the human death risks becoming less impressive when the same degree of angst is expressed for a bird. scholars have taken several different tacks in addressing this jarring juxtaposition between human and avian death: some elevate the importance of the parrot as a sincerely missed pet; 2 some question the sincerity of the poet’s grief for Tibullus; 3 others have sidestepped the issue by interpreting the parrot metapoetically and reading Amores 2.6 as a statement not about a parrot but about poetry. 4 This article will combine the interpretations that read the parrot metapoetically and those that concede genuine grief over the parrot’s death by suggesting that ovid’s parrot is not a general symbol of a type of poetry, but is a mask for a particular dead poet. specifically, i will argue that in Amores 2.6, ovid mourns the death of Aemilius Macer in the guise of Corinna’s parrot. While many scholars have focused on the metapoetic qualities of ovid’s parrot or have interpreted it as an alter ego of the still-alive ovid, only two critics have suggested that the dead parrot might instead represent a particular dead poet, even as the close parallels between Amores 2.6 and 3.9 on Tibullus encourage such a reading. 5 J.-y.