Ovid

Abstract

In the beginning, Ovid’s depiction of Jupiter accords with the usual elegiac fare. There is a certain amount of rivalry, as Ovid fears Jupiter might steal his girl; some flippant one-upmanship, as Ovid drops Jupiter-cum-thunderbolt when his girlfriend locks her door; copious irony, as the praeceptor Amoris instructs his pupils to imitate Jupiter in perjuring themselves. Ovid particularly enjoys “correcting” his predecessor Propertius on certain points of Jovian theology. The great works written close to the time of Ovid’s exile add a bitter edge to this playfulness, revisiting elegiac scenarios with a dramatic shift in focalization. Jupiter’s rapes and the suffering they cause are a leitmotif of Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses. In the Fasti, Jupiter is subjected to complex manipulation, instructed, diminished, and reframed according to the poet’s wish-fulfilling fantasies. As Augustus transformed the Roman experience of time by modifying the calendar, so Ovid seizes control of the discourse by shaping the calendar to his own poetic ends. When the thunderbolt strikes, banishing him to the Black Sea, Ovid creates a Jovian/Augustan mythology all his own. Like the Metamorphoses and Fasti, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto show two possibilities for Jupiter, yet the Tristia’s impression of the cruelly wrathful Thunderer predominates over the Ex Ponto’s possibility of revivifying rain. Most importantly, by figuring himself as the heroes and—especially—heroines persecuted by the autocratic ruler of the Olympian pantheon, Ovid defines his poetry and his very self as a work of artistically fruitful, politically hopeless opposition to the new “Jupiter.”