Cecilia Cozzi, University of Cincinnati
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ajax and Ulysses advance their claims to Achilles’ arms by enumerating their family histories (Met. 13.22-34 and 140-58). The rhetorical aspects of these speeches have inspired much scholarly debate (Otis 1970, Kennedy 1972, Gross 2000, Hopkinson 2000, Pavlock 2009), especially given the broader engagement of the carmen perpetuum with tragedy (Keith 2002, Gildenhard and Zissos 1999, Dangel 2009, Curley 2013). I analyze echoes of two Sophoclean plays in these speeches, demonstrating that thematic insistence on father-son bonds enables Ovid to establish himself as a poetic “heir.” Through Ajax’s and Ulysses’ discussions of biological kinship, I argue, Ovid situates himself as the legitimate successor of a literary inheritance.
First, I suggest that Ovid amplifies Ajax’s familial background for metapoetic purposes, expanding the Sophoclean hero’s exclusive focus on his father into a web of larger familial relations. In Ajax, the hero’s assessment of Telamon focuses on his fatherly disappointment that his son failed to achieve glory at Troy (Aj. 435-36: τὰ πρῶτα καλλιστεῖ᾿ ἀριστεύσας στρατοῦ / πρὸς οἶκον ἦλθε πᾶσαν εὔκλειαν φέρων). Ovid, in turn, positions Telamon within a lineage that includes his father Aeacus (Met. 13.25-26) and begins from the divine father par excellence, Jupiter (Met. 13.28: sic a Iove tertius Aiax). I argue that this phrase presents a metaliterary reference to Ovid’s own representation of Ajax as a third version in a chain of literary models, from Homer to Sophocles to Ovid.
Next, I argue that Ulysses’ status as “a significant surrogate for Ovid” (Pavlock 2009: 129) relies on Ovid’s references to fatherhood in Sophocles’ Philoctetes. At Met. 13.32, Ajax judges Ulysses disdainfully as Sisyphus' offspring: Sisyphio furtisque et fraude simillimus illi. After locating Sisyphus in the Underworld under the jurisdiction of his own grandfather, Aeacus (Met. 13.26), Ajax accuses Ulysses of sharing with his parent a superlative inclination towards deception (fraude simillimus). In claiming Sisyphean heritage for Ulysses, Ovid’s Ajax reifies the Sophoclean Philoctetes’ rejection of Laertes as Odysseus’ true parent (οὑμπολητὸς Σισύφου Λαερτίῳ, Ph. 417) and his celebration of Neoptolemus’ detachment from his “putative” father, Odysseus (Ph. 1311-12: ἐξ ἧς ἔβλαστες, οὐχὶ Σισύφου πατρός / ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ Ἀχιλλέως). Indeed, Odysseus’ earlier demands that Neoptolemus fabricate a tale (specifically about the allocation of Achilles’ arms, Ph. 56-67) disclose an intent to shape Achilles’ son into an heir of his own deceptive storytelling; though this attempt ultimately fails, Ovid’s staging of the same narrative forges an intertextual link between the episodes that foregrounds authorship as a mode of inheritance.
I conclude that the allusions to Sophoclean plays are instrumental to Ovid’s metaliterary goals, where subtle references to Greek drama become the most effective tool for portraying poetic filiation. In introducing the heroes as an extension of their ancestors and embedding their inherited qualities with questions of authorship and mythmaking, Ovid not only displays the learned quality of his poesis, but also entangles his carmen perpetuum in tragic discourses about inheritance and storytelling.