Thebes Narcissus and Political Crisis Ovids Metamorphoses John William Waterhouse Echo and Narcissus 1903 Its complicated because Ovids carmen perpetuum is fragmented polyphonic individual epic heroes appear only as flashes there are no ID: 533877
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Slide1
Politics and Poetics 7
Thebes, Narcissus and Political Crisis: Ovid’s
MetamorphosesSlide2
John William Waterhouse,
Echo and Narcissus
(1903)Slide3
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. Slide4
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
.Slide5
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
AeneidSlide6
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
historySlide7
…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.Slide8
Actaeon’s
VOICE
(
2
nd
c. AD , found in villa of
Antoninus
Pius)Slide9
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.
Slide10
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.
Slide11
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
.Slide12
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