Echoes of Ovid? Memories of the Metamorphoses in Philostratus’s Imagines

Abstract:This paper explores the cultural-ideological dimensions of Philostratus’s Imagines, a series of prose descriptions of paintings purportedly on display in a third-century CE Neapolitan villa. Taking a reader-response perspective, I argue that reminiscences of Ovid’s Metamorphoses complicate the avowed Hellenism of the text and its audience, transforming the Imagines into a series of reflecting pools that mirror back to readers their own images of Second Sophistic paideia. After analyzing the significance of the text’s setting in Roman Naples, I examine two types of Ovidian echoes in the Imagines: first, instances of physical metamorphosis in the fictive paintings described by the Philostratean ekphrast (Section 1); and second, constellations of ekphrases that evoke comparable thematic and narrative clusters in the Metamorphoses (Section 2). The paper concludes by reflecting on how Philostratus thematizes subjective projection as a key component of viewer-reader response (Section 3). This combines with the possible echoes of Ovid to entangle readers in the negotiation of Greek and Roman culture signaled by the text’s Neapolitan setting.