Ovid Studies: the Next Millennium

Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed, coerced, and threatened over 80 women in the course of his decades-long career. Jupiter deceived and preyed upon countless nymphs and innocent girls in order to gain sexual satisfaction. Matt Lauer of NBC News installed a door-locking button at his desk to trap women in his office so that he could force himself upon them. Tereus locked Philomela away in a hut in the woods after raping her and cutting out her tongue so that she could not expose him.

Besides his own volumes of poetry from the Black Sea (Tristia 1-5, Epistulae ex Ponto 1-4, Ibis), only two references to Ovid’s exile in Tomis are extant from classical antiquity (Stat. Silv. 2.1.253–5, Plin. NH 32.152; later sources collected in Clark, Miller-Newlands).

Ovid has always been a controversial writer. But, as Hawes argues, ‘flexibility of significance’ allows Ovidian narratives to remain relevant as they migrate through different interpretive communities ‘in the face of changing social, poetic, moralistic and personal concerns’ (Hawes 2018). The Actaeon myth is a case in point: in London in 2012 a major exhibition of Renaissance and contemporary art and poetry explored fresh interpretations of this myth. Reception studies of Ovid, however, tend to focus on works produces by great metropolitan centres.

This paper looks to the future of Ovidian scholarship by starting with a meta-critical reading of the last 30 years of Ovidian research, then forecasting future trends.