Anatomies of failed revolution in Ovid’s Aeginetan Plague and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man1

Abstract

This essay examines the way that plague discourse allows two writers, Ovid and Mary Shelley, to contemplate the power of a revolution to transform a civic body. The author focuses initially on Ovid’s rendering of plague on Aegina in Metamorphoses 7, contextualizing it as a response to the changing significance of pietas as well as to the succession crisis faced by the Principate in the 20’s BCE; she interprets King Aeacus’ narrative of the tragedy he witnesses among his people and their replacement by Myrmidons (ant-people) as a cynical response to the Augustan revolution and its ability to implement lasting change in how Roman subjects interact after the prolonged civil wars of the late Roman Republic. The author then turns to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, in which a plague eradicates all of known humanity except for a single survivor and eye-witness, Lionel Verney. The essay demonstrates that Shelley taps into Ovid’s cynicism regarding the potential for human recovery after widespread devastation as she and her protagonist consider various alternatives for effective governance in England. Shelley’s exploration of the affective bonds born from familial ties (Ovidian pietas) suggest that such ties pose insurmountable problems to implementing permanent transformation within any human social order.