Ovid

Throughout the Metamorphoses, Ovid associates the verb satiare with Diana rather than with Juno Saturnia, turning the Vergilian usage of the verb on its head. In the Aeneid, Vergil repeatedly plays with the poetic etymology between Saturnia and satiare to suggest that Juno is insatiable in her quest for revenge until the end of the poem, when she reconciles with Jupiter (12.791ff.) (O’Hara).

Ovid composed two evocative descriptions of the music associated with mystery cults: the procession of Cybele’s Galli during the Ludi Megalenses (Fasti 4.181-190, echoed at 4.341-2), and the murder of Orpheus by Thracian Maenads (Metamorphoses 11.15-19). Ovid’s emphasis on the distinctive sonorities of the tympanon (Met. 11.17, Fasti 4.183-4) and the curved “Phrygian” aulos (“Berecyntia tibia cornu” Met. 11.16 and Fasti 4.181) evokes a long-standing literary trope.

This paper examines Ovid’s usage of historicizing rhetoric and Golden Age imagery in the Ars Amatoria, showing how the poet genders these concepts to provide contrasting characterizations of his male and female students. Scholars such as Myerowitz, Labate, and Volk, focusing on the praeceptor’s praise of cultus at 3.101-128, have seen the poet’s persona in the Ars as a champion of modernity, preferring the sophistication of modern Augustan Rome to any imagined historical or mythological past.

After concluding the tale of Europa at the beginning of Metamorphoses 3, Ovid transitions to her brother Cadmus’ founding of Thebes (3.6-137). He first likens Cadmus to Vergil’s Aeneas (Bömer 1969; Hardie 1990), but this favorable comparison soon gives way to one with another sort of hero. Cadmus dons a lion skin (3.52-53) and recalls, most noticeably, the monster-slaying Hercules of Aeneid 8 (Bömer 1969; Hardie 1990).

This paper argues that Rome’s two-faced god of boundaries and doorways, Janus, who strikes a commanding figure as the narrator’s first interviewee at the opening of Ovid’s Fasti, reveals himself to be a dangerous and untrustworthy character by his actions later in the poem. Janus’s appearance in the initial scene has been interpreted as crucial to the structure of the poem as a whole (Green 2004). He has been seen as a foundational, programmatic figure who exists on a spectrum between seriousness and humor (see Miller 1983, Hardie 1991, and Murgatroyd 2005).