IOS Panel Ovid and the Natural World, SCS 2022

This paper reads the deluge and conflagration narratives in Metamorphoses 1 and 2 as human-induced disasters and argues that they figure the experience of living under the Augustan regime. My discussion draws on an anthropological perspective that defines disaster through its disruptive effects on society and that reframes the nature-society duality as a “mutuality, positing that nature and society are inseparable… each contributing to the resilience and vulnerability of the other” (Oliver-Smith 2019: 42).

The Anthropocene is a famously contested concept. The initial caution with which geologists' hedged their claim that the Holocene had been superseded by a new epoch of geological time, marked by human intervention (Crutzen 2002), has given way to further debates about when this new epoch began: with the industrial revolution; the Columbian exchange; or, indeed, with the advent of agriculture.

Ovidian influences on landscape gardens in the Renaissance and neoclassical eras are well understood: from the Villa d’Este to Stourhead, Ovid’s myths inspired various features of many formal landscapes, and helped to structure the visitor’s experience of the space and their reading of its neoclassical pretensions. Yet less attention has been paid to the 20th- and 21st-century gardens in which Ovid remains a powerful influence, and with quite different effects.

The goal of this paper is to draw out the interpenetration of the human and vegetable worlds as created in Ovid’s epic poem, to explore not only how an ancient audience might have been in a position to visualise damage to plants in terms of human suffering, but also how a modern reading of an ancient poem may encapsulate contemporary concerns beyond the literal imaginative possibilities of Ovid and his first readers, in this case with regard to the effects of climate change.

While many authors have written on fluid identities in the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s epic of

change, the role of rivers and fluid characters in the Fasti has been less explored. It is widely

agreed that rivers are often used to mark intertextual engagement with poetic sources (Jones

2005). River characters are given agency and allowed to speak as the Tiber does in Fasti 5

but too often this is dismissed as an instance of “pathetic fallacy”. However, Ovid’s portrayal

The face of ‘intertextuality’, as a new master term, is less a simple, single, and precise image, a bronze head by Rodin, than something shattered, a portrait bust by an avid exponent of analytic cubism too poor to afford a good chisel.1