Juliette Delalande, Sorbonne Université - EDITTA
In Ovid’s work, several mythical characters practice retrospection, as they recount past adventures of which they were heroes or witnesses. These past adventures are often already well known in the literary tradition. Thus retrospection on the one hand allows characters to tell their past, and on the other hand enables the poet to allude to literary sources (Conte, 1986).
When a character himself recounts his past and his own exploits, the retrospection could guarantee the veracity of his version of the events due to his firsthand knowledge. However, Ovidian characters often seem to revise and embellish their past as they tell it. For example, when Cephalus, in the Metamorphoses, narrates his love story with his late wife Procris, he doesn’t mention their respective faults and shamelessness, otherwise known in the tradition (Otis: 1970; Green: 1979; Tarrant: 1995, 2005; Peek, 2004…). Cephalus thus creates a version of his myth more to his liking. More generally, by letting a character tell his own past in a retrospective manner, Ovid revises the mythological tradition and introduces a new version of the story.
In my paper, I will consider three stories narrated by a character who recounts parts of his life:
- Met. 7.661-865: Cephalus gives a lengthy account of his past, with a strong emphasis on his love for Procris.
- F. 5.521-528: Flora brags about her powers to the poet and claims she caused the metamorphoses of Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Crocos, Attis and Adonis.
- F. 1.259-275: Janus tells the poet how he saved Rome from the Sabine invasion by creating a hot spring.
These passages are particularly remarkable because they present three different cases regarding Ovid's sources and rewriting practices. First, it is worth noticing that they don’t have the same relation to mythic tradition. The story told by Cephalus contradicts an old Greek version (Pherecydes, FGRH 3 F 34; Antoninus Liberalis, 41 (Delattre: 2019)). Flora’s catalogue takes up metamorphoses whose Hellenistic sources are diverse and contradictory, and of which no unified version seems to exist before Ovid. Finally, the story of the hot spring is presented as a Roman myth and is probably an Ovidian invention. Therefore, when recounting their past, the characters do not all seem to be referring to an already well-known literary past.
Secondly, they are contradicted by Ovid himself in another passage of his corpus. Indeed, the betrayal of Procris is alluded to in Rem.452-453, while the metamorphoses of the young boys are attributed to other gods than Flora in the Met. In addition, Venus and Roman Nymphs (instead of Janus) create the hot spring in Met.14.778-799. Such contradictory passages undermine the account of the internal narrators and instil doubt on their version of the story, as well as on the alternative version given by the main narrator. The reader himself is thus invited to re-read the two versions and to wonder retrospectively whether any truth is to be found in Ovidian myths.