Ovid Repeats Himself

Variation within repetition is common in Latin epics, but Ovid is the undisputed champion of its usage.

Fulkerson-Stover-Repeat-Performances-cLaurel Fulkerson and Tim Stover conversed recently about how the genre of Latin epic poetry lends itself to repetition. They explore a distinct form of repetition in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the new UWP book they’ve edited. Repeat Performances: Ovidian Repetition and the Metamorphoses is published in the longstanding University of Wisconsin Press series Wisconsin Studies in Classics.

Laurel  Let’s start at the beginning: we had an idea for a conference on Ovid. The Classics Department at Florida State University, thanks to a generous bequest from the George and Marion Langford family, is able to host one or two conferences a year. Tim is a scholar of Latin epic, and I’m an Ovidian, so we thought it made good sense to focus on the Metamorphoses. One of the things we both had been thinking about was the ways Ovid seems to be doing a slightly different thing in his epic, in terms of how he structures episodes. That’s an immediately obvious feature of the poem, but we wanted to pay more attention to it, and we hit upon repetition. Many of the stories in the Metamorphoses are so similar, and there are innumerable cross-references back and forth between episodes.

Tim  Repetition is certainly a feature of later epic as well, so we wondered if there was a kind of repetition that was particularly Ovidian. We wanted some of our contributors to identify and elucidate the Ovidianism of post-Augustan epic’s repetitious gestures. A systematic study of Ovid’s influence on Flavian epic and beyond is a critical desideratum for our field. One of the exciting things about this book is that several of its papers demonstrate how deeply Ovid influenced later writers of epic, while also pointing to new avenues for research on the reception of Ovidian repetition specifically. Perhaps the most salient example of the latter is the use by Neil Bernstein of Tesserae, a web-based interface for exploring intertextual parallels in Latin literature. It’s a strength of this volume that it brings together more traditional approaches to Ovidian repetition and newer cutting-edge technology on intertextuality.

Laurel  And, of course, epic itself is a repetitive genre. We say in the introduction that we think it’s more repetitive than many other genres. All of literature is necessarily repetitive, but the body of epic material becomes codified so early on; the whole Homeric cycle is predicated upon the notion that everyone already sort of knows these stories.

Tim  Precisely. The point of the cycle seems to be in telling the same stories in a different way, so that what is deemed  “innovative” in any new version is not the basic plot of a given story, but rather what kinds of material will differentiate it from its predecessors at a microcosmic or atomic level. This practice is foundational for later poetry, but is most pronounced in epic and tragedy, two genres that over time cross-fertilize each other in complex ways. That’s another angle explored in our book. Variation within repetition is a key factor of all of Latin epic, but Ovid is the undisputed champion of its usage, as the contributors to this volume reveal. Ovid’s example then sets repetition on a new and exciting path, which is discernible in the specifically Ovidian nature of the repetitiveness of post-Ovidian epic.

Laurel  Or so we think; you’ll have to read the book to make up your own mind.

Fulkerson at WadhamLaurel Fulkerson is a professor of classics and an associate dean at Florida State University. She is the author of The Ovidian Heroine as Author and No Regrets: Remorse in Classical Antiquity.

 

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATim Stover is an associate professor of classics at Florida State University and the author of Epic and Empire in Vespasianic Rome.

Contributors to the book are Antony Augoustakis, Neil W. Bernstein, Barbara Weiden Boyd, Andrew Feldherr, Peter Heslin, Stephen Hinds, Sharon L. James, Alison Keith, Peter E. Knox, and Darcy Krasne.

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