Ovid’s tale of Cipus, the returning general who discovers that horns have miraculously appeared on his forehead, combines narrative elements that point back to the poem’s early books with others that ...suggest historiography. Cipus’ own hybridity, therefore, figures a generic combination that simultaneously invites incredulity and belief. These different interpretative strategies feature in the different responses to the prodigy within the episode. The general’s determination to keep his horned presence, and the kingship it predicts, out of Rome makes space for Republican history to proceed as normal, while his likeness to other metamorphic figures within the poem complicates that strategy. As a representation of the Roman past, Ovid’s Metamorphoses necessarily summons up foreign, even tyrannical, comparands at the moment of their exclusion and questions the very reality on which history’s authority depends by grounding it in unbelievable stories. The second half of this article uses this Ovidian perspective as a vantage point for re-examining the blending of myth and history at the conclusion of Aeneid 6, intermittently recalled by the language and imagery of the Ovidian episode. Reading Vergil back through Ovid exposes the earlier poet’s refashioning of history to serve dynastic ends: Cipus’ prescription for the Roman future, ‘no kings’, sets up a Republican response to the entire Vergilian spectacle and suggests how its internal contradictions persist in the normative conclusions Anchises draws from it.
This article explores the representation and thematic importance of time within Ovid’s account of Narcissus. It argues that perceiving Narcissus for the characters within Ovid’s narrative provokes a ...recognition of the experience of time that becomes central to both the tragic and erotic aspects of his story. In presenting Narcissus as both the subject of a diachronic narrative and a static image, Ovid at once uses the medium of his representation to illustrate his theme and makes his poem a mirror in which his own audience can apprehend the mutability of time.
Playing gods Feldherr, Andrew; Feldherr, Andrew
2010., 20100816, 2010, 2010-08-16
eBook
This book offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid's epic poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, Playing Gods ...argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. The book also provides the fullest account yet of how the poem relates to the range of cultural phenomena that defined and projected Augustan authority, including spectacle, theater, and the visual arts.
This article analyzes the representational strategies Vergil uses in the description of the shield of Aeneas to shape the reception of his text. Three aspects of the ekphrasis highlight its ambiguous ...status as a literary representation figuring itself as a material presence that can become part of history as well as depicting it. First, descriptions of rivers frame narrative units within book 8 as though the text were a visual image, while failing to perform such a function in the case of the shield itself. Rivers also symbolize both the linear progression of the narrative and its static visual surface. Second, the presence of multiple levels of internal spectators simultaneously reminds Vergil's audience of the differences between poem and image and image and reality and provides focalizing perspectives from which each represented image can be perceived as real. Finally, intertextual references to defining features of historiography as a literary genre provide a model for how literary accounts of the past can influence events. But the comparison with historiography also draws attention to what Vergil does differently, particularly his direct representation of divine action and his refashioning of history's linear order into a circular, spatial image that can be viewed synchronically.
Sallust’s account of Catiline’s first speech contains a verbal echo of Cicero’s First Catilinarian ( BC 20.9 ~ Cat . 1.1). By raising the question of whether Catiline or Cicero counts as the author ...of the phrase, Sallust invites attention to the double nature of historiography as at once a literary representation of reality and a part of the historical processes it documents. Hearing Catiline as author points up the historicity of texts: the phrase itself changes meaning and significance as it is appropriated by a sequence of authors. An awareness of Cicero as source recalls the textuality of history: the struggles to control the meaning of actions and language staged through intertextuality overlap with actual political conflicts.
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