Abstract
Abstract Ovid’s version of the armorum iudicium is a grand verbal aristeia and notable site for literary-generic debate where competing aesthetic positions are played off against each other. When Ajax—epic heavyweight, simplicitas rudis personified, advocate of deeds over words—disparages Ulysses as frivolous and unworthy contender (Met. 13.103-112), he conspicuously (mis)appropriates and turns against his ‘lesser’ adversary some signature literary-critical tropes used by Roman neoterics to resist those same epic values (natural inability, elegiac propriety, the excessive burden). As stylistic characterization, this ironic mismatch between discourse and speaker connects the debate with current literary polemic, signals Ovid’s creative generic transgressions, and self-consciously calls attention to the genre-defying poetics of Metamorphoses. The poetological dimension is reinforced through the elaborate contrast with the ‘modernist’ Ulysses, figured symmetrically as cultural and generic foil to Ajax and the archaic worldview.
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