155

The Arachne episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses has long been identified as metapoetic. Scholars pointed to the ancient association between text and textile. They opposed the classical aesthetics of Athena’s tapestry to the Hellenistic illusionism of Arachne’s, which they related to Ovid’s own poetic program. Sauron suggested that this artistic competition was inspired by Virgil’s Eclogues (3.38-46), and Rosati 1999 by the Georgics (4.333-349). Most specialists agree on the omnipresent references to Callimachean poetics, especially to the Aitia’s proem (e.g.

This paper aims to shed light on the layers of Ovidian retrospection in Henrietta Cordelia Ray’s 1910 poem “Echo’s Complaint,” which imagines what Echo might have said to Narcissus if she had the words. Working in the tradition of the Heroides (Walters 2007), Ray imagines a complex interior life for a mythical woman whose side of the story has not often been told.

There is a long history of scholars using optical metaphors to describe knowledge. In the study of ancient literature, metaphors of reflection and mirroring have been extensively used to describe the processes of imitation and reception of texts. This paper argues that metaphors of reflection and mirroring are limited by a hierarchical relationship between the reflection and the source, where the reflection is always dependent on and by definition secondary to the source.

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).

In Tristia 3.1, Ovid’s little book finally reaches Rome. Upon its arrival, it is taken on a tour of the city, which, on closer inspection, reveals itself as a revised version of Ovid’s description of Rome and its landmarks in Ars Amatoria 1. While the tour of the Ars focuses largely on the theatrical locations of the city, this Tristia “re-tour” homes in on a different type of theatrical display, namely: the princeps’ imperial image as Pater Patriae.

The first epeisodion (ll.147-273) of Euripides’ Andromache, is an extended verbal ᾰ̓γών (“contest”) between Hermione, the Spartan daughter of Helen and Menelaus and Neoptolemus’ wife, and Andromache, the widow of Hector and Neoptolemus’ concubine. Therein, the free Hermione taunts the enslaved Andromache by arguing that she, having come into the house of her husband “with a large dowry” (πολλοῖς σὺν ἕδνοις, l. 153), had the right “to speak freely” (ἐλευθεροστομεῖν‎, l. 153).

When St. Augustine reviews his literary works at the end of his life, he says of the Confessions: in [confessionum mearum libri tredecim] excitant humanum intellectum et affectum.¹ He expects his work to rouse thoughts and feelings within the reader. The reader should see, feel, and live differently.

Once when Ovid was at a dinner party, his friends asked him to cut out three lines of his poetry. Ovid promised to do so, if he could choose three lines to protect from this request. Ovid wrote down the three lines he wanted to keep, and his friends wrote what they wanted excised. When they each revealed, Ovid and his friends turned out to have written the same lines.

In an incisive explication of reception theory, this research proposes three selected texts as representatives of classical commentary, translation, and adaptation in relation to Sophocles’ Electra. Beginning with Hanna Roisman’s commentary, the researcher examines the subjectivity of even the most unmediated form in which modern readers inherit classical texts.

In this paper, I utilize Donna Haraway’s concept of Terrapolis to expand our understanding of choreia. As theorized by Haraway, Terrapolis is an imagined space that is multiworldly and multispecies, that embraces the interconnectedness between humans and other species, and that recognizes the agency of nonhuman entities (Haraway 2016). It is a vision of a world characterized by interdependency and productive collaborations across orders of being. This concept of Terrapolis opens up new, productive avenues for exploring the phenomenology of ancient Greek choreia.