Lucan's Reception of Ovid's Metamorphoses

Abstract

Two new trends emerged in Latin literary studies at the close of the last millennium. One was the surge of interest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an Augustan-age alternative to Vergil’s Aeneid; the other was the revaluation of the post-Augustan epics written by Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. Both trends helped lift the fortunes of these poets, which reached bottom as classicism and romanticism peaked in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. It is consequently tempting—and partly correct—to ascribe the rehabilitation of the Metamorphoses, on the one hand, and Neronian and Flavian epic, on the other, to a set of common causes. But more significant recently may have been the methodological tendency to dissociate Ovid from his followers in the epic genre. It used to