The spinner and the poet: Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Abstract

Two artistic competitions in the Metamorphoses , those between the Muses and the daughters of Pierus (5.250–678) and between Arachne and Minerva (6.1–145), are now widely recognised as exploiting familiar generic differentiations. Ovid's treatment of these differentiations is further seen to have a bearing on establishing the elusive poetic identity of the whole poem, and to locate that identity firmly within the Roman response to Alexandrian poetics. The significance of these sections for the literary programme of the Metamorphoses has been persuasively argued by H. Hofmann and E. W. Leach for the Arachne competition, and more recently by Hofmann and S. Hinds for the Pierides . It is now clear how wide the range of literary forms represented at this pivotal point in Metamorphoses actually is, at the close of the first pentad and at the start of the second. Each of the episodes spanning this juncture has its winning and losing side, and there is an obvious way in which the positive and negative judgements in an artistic competition refine the reader's literary discrimination: the outcome of the contests encourages us to see in the competition itself at least an implicit comment on the relative qualities of the participants.