Close Encounters

Abstract

This chapter explores the metaleptic incursions of deities into various spheres of narrative and acts of narration, focusing on two cases in Latin love elegy. It first sketches some of the key dynamics of divine epiphany in Greco-Roman poetry from Homer on, differentiating epiphanies in which the divinity inspires the poet from those in which characters receive prophetic information. In Latin love elegy, these categories can overlap, since the elegist is both the hero of his own story and simultaneously the omniscient extradiegetic narrator. So in [Tibullus] 3.4, Apollo appears to the poet Lygdamus, but, instead of acting as the god of poetic inspiration, simply informs Lygdamus of the infidelity of his puella Neaera, tells the story of his own love affair with Admetus, and offers advice about love. This epiphany is compared with its primary intertext, the visit of Amor to the exiled poet in Ovid, Ex Ponto 3.3. The chapter argues that elegy, as a genre in which author and narrator usually share a name but fulfil multiple narrative functions, is especially liable to a strong form of metalepsis; and that these two poems in particular use metaleptic divine epiphany to elide the differences between gods and poets, revisit the Augustan-era obsession with who has the authority to say what to whom, and thereby show how the forces of elegy destabilize hierarchies beyond those of gender and class. The chapter suggests in conclusion that both poems may owe something to the lost work of their predecessor Gallus.