Ovid's Theban History: The First ‘Anti-Aeneid’?

Abstract

The magnificence of Augustan Rome is the indispensable setting for Ovid the urbane love poet,rusticitasis the one unforgivable sin. Yet in Ovid'sperpetuum carmencities are for the most part invisible, at best incidental backdrops; the countryside, present in many vividly drawn landscapes, constantly thrusts itself on our attention, a place where mysterious powers menace the individual's identity. This neglect of the city makes a striking, and deliberate, contrast with theAeneid, a ktistic epic whose meaning is governed by constant reference forward to the ‘altae moenia Romae’. Ovid, whose main epic time-scale does include the foundation of Rome, devotes five words to the making of those walls. The one major exception to this indifference to the central theme of Virgilian epic is the Theban episode inMetamorphoses3.1–4.603. The story of Cadmus and his family forms a self-contained unit within the flux of Ovid's epic of transformation. It tells of aktisisthat goes wrong: Cadmus obeys Apollo's injunction to found a city (3.13 ‘moenia fac condas’), but in the end the exile who had founded a new home is driven into a second exile: ‘exit | conditor urbe sua’ (4.565f.).