Nescio quo turbine agor: turbine o trottola di Eros? (Nota a Ovidio, Amori, 2.9.27-28)

In Amores, 2.9.27-28 Ovid says that just when he finally aspires to leave the militia amoris, his mind is suddenly overwhelmed by an unspecified “perturbation” (turbo), dragging him to new struggles under the banner of the god of Love. If the immediate context seems to leave no doubt about the meaning of “whirlwind”, to be attributed to the latin term turbo, a more careful analysis, interwinning a multiplicity of literary and figurative data, suggests the presence of an ecphrastic game, which Ovid proposes to his reader. The poet would allude here to one or more turning objects (a spinning top? a iunx?) variously connected to the iconography of Eros ludens as well as capable of visually evoking the “reversibility” of the elegy in which they are inscribed. This could confirm the reading of Amores, 2.9 as a dramatic pair, composed of two distinct elegies (2.9a = vv. 1-24; 2.9b = vv. 25-54) but closely connected to each other.