Ovid's ‘Hecale’: Deconstructing Athens in the Metamorphoses

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized a cultural tension inherent in the scheme of Ovid's Metamorphoses: while most of the materia of the epic is Greek, Rome is its triumphant narrative telos. The epic's Hellenic underpinnings have received abundant critical attention; rather less well documented and discussed is the subtle undercurrent of Romanitas that sustains Ovid's overarching cultural teleology throughout the poem. This Roman ‘cultural vector’ registers in all phases of the narrative, but nowhere more insistently than in the first two books: it is there that the poet brings the overall temporal and spatial thrust of his literary project — namely, to spin down a carmen from universal creation to contemporary Augustan times (‘ad mea … tempora’, 1.4) — most forcefully to the mind of his reader.