Monsters and Giants

This essay identifies unspeakable crime—nefas—as a thematic motif in Book 2 of Ovid's Fasti and proposes that stories of crime and expiation from the first half of Ovid's poetic treatment of the month of February create a cogent literary theme that is sustained throughout the book. Building off of Feeney's (1992) and Newland's (1995) observations about speech and silence in Ovid's account of the “Rape of Lucretia” in Fasti 2, I suggest that the term nefas functions as the literal nexus of crime and silence (“unspeakable crime”) in Ovid's poem.

Ovid is no giant. It is true that at several places in the exilic works, he explicitly likens himself to one struck by a thunderbolt (e.g. Tr. 1.1.72, 81-2; 2.179-80; see Barchiesi, Evans, and Scott), and when combining the theme of the thunderstruck poet together with the references to Gigantomachy in Tristia 2, it is tempting to view Ovid in this poem as a giant fighting against Jupiter-Augustus. Biographically, the metaphor works nicely, for the giants, like Ovid, were relegated to the furthest reaches of the earth for their insolence.

In his discussion of lucky and unlucky days in the first Georgic, Vergil instructs the farmer to avoid the fifth as a day of especially ill omen, claiming it as the birthday for a rogues’ gallery of mythical figures, including Orcus, the Eumenides, the Titans Coeus and Iapetus, the monster Typhoeus, and the Aloidae Otus and Ephialtes (1.277-280).

The Hesiodic Shield of Heracles is a monstrous text, which establishes an antagonistic relationship with the reader – a phenomenon not found in any other archaic Greek text, and perhaps not again until modern works of horror. The reader is cast as a viewer (several figures are described as “not to be spoken of” or “not expressible in speech”) and is confronted with a succession of nightmarish images that give the text characteristics of a monstrous body: excessiveness, disorder and a dangerous glare.