Thebes, Narcissus and Political Crisis: Ovid’s Metamorphoses Politics and Poetics 7 Thebes, Narcissus and Political Crisis: Ovid’s Metamorphoses

John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus (1903)

It’s complicated, because… Ovid’s carmen perpetuum is fragmented, polyphonic: individual epic heroes appear only as flashes; there are no ongoing opposing factions, or groups on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sides of history. Readers get lost in a labyrinth of stories: epic drive (towards an ending/political goal) is lost/prone to a myriad deviations. Political ‘seriousness’ is undercut by the elegiac, comedic, the paradoxical, playful and ironic. The poet’s voice does not unify the poem or give it direction: indeed, when the poet ‘speaks’, he often teases us about his reliability, or calls into question the veracity of accounts.

The politics of metamorphosis: empowering, or destabilizing? Live political/politicized issues that cannot simply be reduced to political belief or partisanship Examples suggested so far: The politics of metamorphosis: empowering, or destabilizing? Allusion to the poet’s authority or creative power, relative to that of the Princeps or emperor.  Ovid’s fascination with (the politics of) time.

Metamorphoses Book 3 Exceptionally, a book about a city, unified by this location Thebes not Rome Not successful foundation, but failed, tragic foundation Civilization undone by civil war Epic becoming tragedy/infected by elegy? Met.3 a key book in terms of exploring Ovid’s response to the Aeneid

Political readings of Met.3 ….as an index of the Metamorphoses’s provocative ‘reversal’ of the Aeneid’s civilization-building teleology. …as a book that, in indirect and subtle ways, does important ideological work by elaborating a negative mirror-image of Rome and its evolution. ….as a complex meditation on civil war and its role in Roman history

…as a suggestive portrayal and examination of the theme of artistic failure, and of the punishment of artists by tyrannical powers …as engaging with and exploiting the political intensity of (Athenian) tragedy …as paradigmatic of an ideologically loaded reflection on modes of representation (visual, written, oral) in Ovidian poetry.

Actaeon’s VOICE (2nd c. AD , found in villa of Antoninus Pius)

Allusion to/engagement with Aeneid Cadmus’ defeat of the great serpent at Met.3.50-95 replays Hercules’ defeat of monstrous Cacus in Aeneid 8, and symbolically takes revenge on the snakes that kill Laocoon and his sons in Aen. 2.   Juno’s punishment of Semele, near the beginning of the book, sees her decide not to play her usual role of angry rhetorician and catalyst for epic war (Aeneid 1.36ff.). Instead, Ovid makes her quiet and wily; she disguises herself as Beroe, a nurse, and gets inside Semele’s head, in a scene much inspired by Allecto’s poisonous manipulation of Amata in Aeneid 7.

Pentheus and Dido, lost in the wilderness: at Aen. 4 Pentheus and Dido, lost in the wilderness: at Aen.4.469-70 crazed Dido is compared to Pentheus ‘when he saw Thebes double’. Acoetes/Bacchus as modelled after lying Sinon in Aeneid 2? Bacchus the ‘outsider’ is reviled as effeminate in the same way as the incoming Trojans are insulted by Turnus and the Latins at e.g. Aen. 9.614-20.  

Narcissus, Echo and the politics of artistic expression   The poet as Narcissus? (Quintilian 10.1.88: Ovid, poet of illusion, was ‘too much in love with his own genius’) The poet as Echo? The ‘derivative’ speaker, or the genius in spite of censorship and oppression? Keep in mind the analogy Ovid draws between his punishment by Augustus and Actaeon’s unjust punishment by Diana, in the exile poetry.

Pentheus and Dido, lost in the wilderness: at Aen. 4 Pentheus and Dido, lost in the wilderness: at Aen.4.469-70 crazed Dido is compared to Pentheus ‘when he saw Thebes double’.   Acoetes/Bacchus as modelled after lying Sinon in Aeneid 2? Bacchus the ‘outsider’ is reviled as effeminate in the same way as the incoming Trojans are insulted by Turnus and the Latins at e.g. Aen. 9.614-20