Flaxen-haired Ceres, Your fine tresses wreathed with ears of wheat, why must your sacred rites inhibit our pleasures? Goddess, people everywhere praise your munificence. No other goddess so lavishes men and women with everything good. In earlier times the uncouth peasant never roasted grains of wheat, never knew a threshing floor, but oak trees, those first oracles, provided them with gruel. Acorns, tender roots and herbs made their meal then. Ceres first taught seeds to ripen in the fields, taught how to follow Her with scythe against their golden hair, first broke the oxen to yoke and reveal the fertile earth beneath its curved blade.
Commentarius · Commentary
Ovid is indignant: the festival of Ceres demands abstinence, and the lover is left with nothing.
The elegy opens like a prosecution speech — "why do you obstruct our pleasures with your holy days?" — and at once turns to flattery: you are the most generous of goddesses, you taught the earth to bear, you gave laws. The praise is functional: the more generous the goddess, the more absurd her prohibition.
Behind the seam Ovid produces his main argument, and it is shameless. Ceres loved too — Iasion in the Cretan field — and knew separation herself; so why does she now impose on others what she suffered from? "Why should I be sad, when your daughter has been found?"
An elegy constructed as a legal action against a deity, in which the charge is built out of the defendant's own biography.
