After the Ars: Later Ovid

While Anius’ account of his daughters’ fate in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (13.640-74) superficially lacks erotic elements, it evokes an erotic context through allusion to prayers made in previous scenes of attempted rape. Anius relates how during the Trojan War Agamemnon stole his four daughters to feed the Greek army, as Bacchus had given them the ability to turn anything into grain, oil, and wine. The daughters subsequently escaped and fled (effugiunt 13.660), two to Euboea and the other two to their brother in Andros.

The inscrutable temporality of Ovid’s Ibis has received little scholarly attention, though it is one of the most remarkable features of his work. In this paper, I argue that Ovid skews the contours of time in the poem in order to enact a cognitive dissonance that is endemic to exilic experience.

Consideration of violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses has most often been within the context of his rape narratives, and my own inquiry began with a question much like that of Amy Richlin, who, in the introduction of an important article, “Reading Ovid's Rapes,” says: “we must ask how we are to read texts, like those of Ovid, that take pleasure in violence” (1992, 158). Both my point of departure and conclusions are rather different, however, and I see this pleasure as part of a larger pattern of poetic attention to violence, lack of control, and the victim’s awareness of the loss.

Ovid was the first Latin poet to employ the word viscera as a metonymy for both wombs and children (Bömer 1976). While a number of commentators have remarked on individual instances of viscera, observing that the word appears in “charged contexts” (Knox 1995) and “for shock effect” (Fantham 1998), no one has yet undertaken a comprehensive study of these metaphors.

This paper argues that dreams are central to the structure, style, and program of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although recent scholarship (Tissol (1997), Hardie (2002), Von Glinski (2012), Lévi (2014)) has emphasized individual dreams’ functions as poetic metonymies, this work demonstrates that, when taken as a joined set, and when viewed in light of the role of dreams in the Greco-Latin epic tradition, Ovid’s dreams serve as privileged vehicle for this song of changed forms.