Reflections in a Serpent's Eye Thebes in Ovid's Metamorphoses [Hardcover]

Ovid's extraordinary story of Thebes' founding and bloody unravelling spans two books of his epic poem, theMetamorphoses. His bizarre refractions of the well-ordered community engage Ovid's own Rome and the mythohistory of the Eternal City's origins, most particularly as framed in Vergil'sAeneid(Vergil's poem attained nonpareil status as the Latin epic soon after publication). TheAeneidhas regularly been read as persuasively formulating how and why Rome will stride forward into history, into manifest destiny, and into `empire without end'.The Metamorphoses' strangely fantastical surface reflects what is already inherently perverse in that master-narrative, disclosing the narrative's internal contradictions. Ovid rigorously and sceptically not only interrogates the existing (Roman) political order, claimed as lasting truth, but also the very possibility of organizing any polity into a harmonious, organically unified, lasting institution.

1. Introduction: `Happy Birthday, Romulus'
2. `In Nomine Patris': Ovid's Theban Law
3. `Th' Unconquerable Will, and Study of Revenge': Juno in Thebes
4. Narcissus and Echo: The Arrows of Love's Errors
5. `Through a Glass Darkly': Narcissus as Oedipus
6. Pentheus Monsters Thebes
7. Ovid and the Epic Tradition: The Post-Augustans

This is a fully committed reading, uncompromising in its conception, and admirable for its intellectual ambition. --Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Janan's snappy prose, close readings, and slick analyses draw attention to a heretofore unnoticed link between epic cities ruined and Virgilian Rome, mirror of a master narrative but still a touchstone of Manifest Destiny. Recommended. --CHOICE

Micaela Janan is Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Duke University.