Ovid: A Very Short Introduction by Llewelyn Morgan

Author:Llewelyn Morgan [Morgan, Llewelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192574688
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

One thing that Ovid is doing here is beating epic at its own game, allowing the narrative to flow even from book to book: compared with the books of Virgil’s Aeneid, which tend to be quite self-contained, this is indeed ‘an unbroken song’, spectacularly so, barely pausing to drawing breath between 1.1 and 15.879. But given Jupiter’s designs on Europa, and making some generalizing but not unreasonable assumptions about Ovid’s core Roman readership, the interruption of this narrative is likely to have caused them some fustration. Europa’s loose clothes fluttering in the breeze (recalling an image familiar to Ovid’s readers from domestic wall paintings), not to mention the erotic image of the horn, anticipate the sexual encounter that will follow Europa’s abduction. But turning to Book 3, we discover that this encounter has been entirely elided, and the story moves smartly on to the search by Cadmus for his sister Europa, the upshot of which is Cadmus’ foundation of the city of Thebes. The frustration would be greater for an ancient reader, since their text of the poem would be fifteen separate book rolls, uolumina (see Figure 5). In other words, that titillated Roman reader is not just turning a modern page, but throwing aside one volume and searching out Volume 3, a much less convenient operation.

5. An image from the Casa del Cenacolo in Pompeii of a young man, perhaps a poet, holding a uolumen or book roll: a label (in Latin, index) identifies the author of the text on the scroll as Homer.

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