Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-dfsvx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T16:44:11.400Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Materiam superabat opus: Lucretius Metamorphosed*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2014

Alessandro Schiesaro
Alessandro Schiesaro*
Affiliation:
Sapienza Università di Roma
*
alessandro.schiesaro@uniroma1.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Ovid's narrative of Phaethon's failed attempt prematurely to emulate his father in his unique expertise can be read as a reflection on the virtues and limits of Lucretius' philosophical poetry. The paper suggests that, while he gives much credit to the De Rerum Natura's literary quality and its striving for the sublime, Ovid also critiques the hubristic connotations of Lucretius' rejection of divine authority and agency from the workings of nature. The second part of the article explores how this particular version of the myth touches upon issues of poetic authority, political positioning, and Oedipal competition.

Keywords

OvidLucretiusEpicurusdidactic poetrysublime
Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 104 , November 2014 , pp. 73 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2014. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This paper was first delivered at Oxford on 7 May 2009 as the Don Fowler Memorial Lecture. I offer it to Peta and Sophie Fowler in memory of Don's deeply missed friendship and inspiration: omne immensum peragravit mente animoque. I am very grateful to the Fowler Fund Committee for the invitation and to Armand d'Angour and Tobias Rheinhardt for their warm welcome. Further versions were delivered at Athens, Geneva, Leiden, Pisa and Edinburgh, at the kind invitation of, respectively, Eleni Karamalengou and Myrto Garani, Damien Nelis, Antje Wessels, Gian Biagio Conte and Donncha O' Rourke. I thank my hosts and audiences on those occasions, as well as Andrea Cucchiarelli, Luigi Galasso, Ingo Gildenhard, Philip Hardie, Stephen Hinds, Stefano Rebeggiani and Victoria Rimell for their incisive criticism. Thanks are also due to the Editor and referees of JRS, who provided much helpful guidance.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, J. N. 1982: The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, BaltimoreCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alfonsi, L. 1978: ‘L'avventura di Lucrezio nel mondo antico … e oltre’, in Gigon, O. (ed.), Lucrèce. Huit exposès suivis de discussions, Genève, 271–321Google Scholar
Barchiesi, A. 2009: ‘Phaethon and the monsters’, in Hardie, P. (ed.), Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture, Oxford, 163–88Google Scholar
Bignone, E. 1936: L'Aristotele perduto e la formazione filosofica di Epicuro, FirenzeGoogle Scholar
Boitani, P. 2004: Parole alate. Voli nella poesia e nella storia da Omero all'11 settembre, MilanoGoogle Scholar
Brown, R. 1987: ‘The palace of the Sun in Ovid's Metamorphoses’, in Whitby, M., Hardie, P. and Whitby, M. (eds), Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, Bristol, 211–20Google Scholar
Canfora, L. 1993: Vita di Lucrezio, PalermoGoogle Scholar
Choisy, M. 1950: ‘Le complexe de Phaéthon’, Psyché. Revue Internationale de Sciences de l'Homme et de Psychoanalyse 48, 715–31Google Scholar
Ciappi, M. 2000: ‘La narrazione ovidiana del mito di Fetonte e le sue fonti. L'importanza della tradizione tragica’, Athenaeum 88, 117–68Google Scholar
Clark, H. 2005: ‘Tracking the thought-fox: Sylvia Plath's revision of Ted Hughes’, Journal of Modern Literature 28, 100–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conte, G. B. 1966: ‘Hypsos e diatriba nello stile di Lucrezio’, Maia 18, 338–68Google Scholar
Conte, G. B. 1990: ‘Insegnamenti per un lettore sublime’, in Tito Lucrezio Caro, La natura delle cose, ed. Dionigi, I., Milano, 7–47Google Scholar
D'Alessio, G. B. 1995: ‘Una via lontana dal cammino degli uomini Parm. Frr.1 + 6 D.-K.; Pind. Ol.VI 22–27; pae.VIIb 10–20’, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 88, 143–81Google Scholar
Davisson, M. H. T. 1997: ‘The observers of Daedalus and Icarus in Ovid’, Classical World 90, 263–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Degl'Innocenti Pierini, R. 2008: Il parto dell'orsa. Studi su Virgilio, Ovidio e Seneca, BolognaGoogle Scholar
Diano, C. 1946: Lettere di Epicuro e dei suoi, FirenzeGoogle Scholar
Doblhofer, E. 1966: Die Augustuspanegyrik des Horaz in formalhistorischer Sicht, HeidelbergGoogle Scholar
Duret, L. 1988: ‘Néron-Phaéthon ou la témérité sublime’, Revue des Études Latines 66, 139–55Google Scholar
Ferri, R. 1993: I dispiaceri di un epicureo. Uno studio sulla poetica delle Epistole con un capitolo su Persio, PisaGoogle Scholar
Fontenrose, J. E. 1939: ‘Apollo and Sol in the Latin poets of the first century B.C.’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 70, 439–55Google Scholar
Fontenrose, J. E. 1940: ‘Apollo and the Sun-God in Ovid’, American Journal of Philology 61, 429–44Google Scholar
Fowler, D. P. 1995: ‘From epos to cosmos: Lucretius, Ovid, and the poetics of segmentation’, in Innes, D., Hine, H. and Pelling, C. (eds), Ethics and Rhetoric. Classical Essays for D. Russell, Oxford, 3–18Google Scholar
Fowler, D. P. 2000: ‘Philosophy and literature in Lucretian intertextuality’, in Fowler, D. P., Roman Constructions. Readings in Postmodern Latin, Oxford, 138–155Google Scholar
Fowler, D. P. 2002: Lucretius on Atomic Motion. A Commentary on De rerum naturaBook Two, lines 1–332 (ed. Fowler, P.), OxfordGoogle Scholar
Fucecchi, M. 2002–2003: ‘La protesta e la rabbia del sole: un'ipotesi su Ovidio lettore di Omero nella scena finale dell'episodio di Fetonte’, Sileno 28–29, 3–27Google Scholar
Gale, M. R. 2000: Virgil on the Nature of Things. The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition, CambridgeCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gigante, M. 1983: Ricerche filodemee (2nd edn), NapoliGoogle Scholar
Gildenhard, I. 2011: Creative Eloquence. The Construction of Reality in Cicero's Speeches, OxfordGoogle Scholar
Gowers, E. 2007: ‘The Cor of Ennius’, in Fitzgerald, W. and Gowers, E. (eds), Ennius Perennis. The Annals and Beyond, Cambridge, 17–37Google Scholar
Giussani, C. 1897–8: T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura, TurinGoogle Scholar
Hardie, P. 1986: Virgil: Cosmos and Imperium, OxfordGoogle Scholar
Hardie, P. 1988: ‘Lucretius and the delusion of Narcissus’, Materiali e Discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 20–21, 71–89Google Scholar
Hardie, P. 1993: The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of Tradition, CambridgeGoogle Scholar
Hardie, P. 1995: ‘The speech of Pythagoras in Ovid Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean epos’, Classical Quarterly 45, 204–14Google Scholar
Hardie, P. 2002: Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, CambridgeGoogle Scholar
Hardie, P. 2009: Lucretian Receptions. History, The Sublime, Knowledge, CambridgeGoogle Scholar
Hadzsits, G. D. 1963: Lucretius and his Influence, New YorkGoogle Scholar
Havelock, E. A. 1958: ‘Parmenides and Odysseus’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63, 133–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinds, S. 1987: The Metamorphosis of Persephone. Ovid and the Self-conscious Muse, CambridgeGoogle Scholar
Hoefmans, M. 1994: ‘Myth into reality: the metamorphosis of Daedalus and Icarus Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII 183–235’, L'Antiquité Classique 63, 137–60Google Scholar
Holzberg, N. 1998: ‘Ter quinque volumina as carmen perpetuum. The division into books in Ovid's Metamorphoses’, Materiali e Discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 40, 77–98Google Scholar
Ingleheart, J. 2010: ‘The literary “successor”: Ovidian metapoetry and metaphor’, Classical Quarterly 60, 167–72Google Scholar
Innes, D. 1979: ‘Gigantomachy and natural philosophy’, Classical Quarterly 29, 165–71Google Scholar
Jones, R. M. 1926: ‘Posidonius and the flight of the mind through the universe’, Classical Philology 21, 97–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knoche, U. 1962: Vom Selbstverständnis der Römer, HeidelbergGoogle Scholar
Korpanty, J. 1990: ‘De Ovidio Lucreti imitatore’, Eos 78, 183–6Google Scholar
Kovacs, D. 1994: ‘Notes on Ovid's Metamorphoses’, Museum Criticum 29, 245–9Google Scholar
Kranz, W. 1916: ‘Über Aufbau und Bedeutung des Parmenideischen Gedichte’, Sitzungsberichte der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 47, 1158–76Google Scholar
Landolfi, L. 2003: “Integra prata”. Manilio, i Proemi, BolognaGoogle Scholar
La Penna, A. 2001: ‘Tra Fetonte e Icaro. Ardimento o amore della scienza?’, Maia 53, 535–63Google Scholar
Lecocq, F. 1999: ‘De la création du monde: les De rerum natura d'Ovide ou Lucrèce métamorphosé’, in Poignault, R. (ed.), Présence de Lucrèce, Tours, 129–47Google Scholar
Lentini, G. 2006: Il ‘padre di Telemaco’ Odisseo tra Iliade e Odissea, PisaGoogle Scholar
Lloyd-Jones, H., and Parsons, P. J. 1978: ‘Iterum de “Catabasi Orphica”’, in Beck, H. G. et al. (ed.), Kyklos. Griechisches und Byzantinisches Rudolf Keydell zum neunzigstes Geburtstag, Berlin-New York, 88–100; now in H. Lloyd-Jones, Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion and Miscellanea (The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones), Oxford (1990), 333–42Google Scholar
Long, A. A. 1986: Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (2nd edn), LondonGoogle Scholar
Lyne, R. O. A. M. 1994: ‘Subversion by intertextuality. Catullus 66. 39–40 and other examples’, Greece & Rome 41, 187–203Google Scholar
Martin, R. P. 1993: ‘Telemachus and the last hero song’, Colby Quarterly 29, 222–40Google Scholar
Mercuri, R. 2009: ‘Ovidio e Dante: le Metamorfosi come ipotesto della Commedia’, Dante. Rivista internazionale di studi su Dante Alighieri 6, 21–37Google Scholar
Momigliano, A. 1960 (1941): ‘Epicureans in revolt’, in Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Roma, 379–88 (Journal of Roman Studies 31, 151–7)Google Scholar
Morgan, L. 2003: ‘Child's play: Ovid and his critics’, Journal of Roman Studies 93, 66–91Google Scholar
Mourelatos, A. D. 1970: The Route of Parmenides: a Study of Word, Image, and Argument in the Fragments, New HavenGoogle Scholar
Murnaghan, S. 2002: ‘The trials of Telemachus: who was the Odyssey meant for?’, Arethusa 35, 133–53Google Scholar
Myers, S. 1994: Ovid's Causes. Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses, Ann ArborGoogle Scholar
Nisbet, R. G. M., and Hubbard, M. 1978: A Commentary on Horace Odes Book 2, OxfordGoogle Scholar
O'Hara, J. 2007: Inconsistency in Roman Epic, CambridgeGoogle Scholar
Oliensis, E. 2004: ‘The power of image-makers: representation and revenge in Ovid Metamorphoses 6 and Tristia 4’, Classical Antiquity 23, 285–321Google Scholar
Palla, R. 1983: ‘Appunti sul makarismos e sulla fortuna di un verso virgiliano’, Studi classici e orientali 33, 171–92Google Scholar
Pretagostini, R. 1995: ‘L'opposta valenza del “tuonare di Zeus” in Callimaco e in Plutarco’, Studia classica Iohanni Tarditi oblata, Milano, 1.617–24Google Scholar
Quinn, K. (ed.) 1980: Horace, The Odes, Basingstoke (repr. Bristol, 1996)Google Scholar
Quint, D. 2004: ‘Fear of falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius in Paradise Lost’, Renaissance Quarterly 57, 847–81Google Scholar
Quint, M.-B. 1988: Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Horaz-Rezeption, Frankfurt am MainGoogle Scholar
Ratkowitsch, Ch. 1981: ‘Ein ‘Hymnus’ in Ciceros erster Catilinaria,’ Wiener Studien 15, 157–67Google Scholar
Salemme, C. 1978: ‘Strutture narrative nel preludio di Lucrezio’, Giornale Italiano di Filologia 30, 151–73Google Scholar
Schiesaro, A. 1997: ‘The boundaries of knowledge in Virgil's Georgics’, in Habinek, T. and Schiesaro, A. (eds), The Roman Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, 63–89Google Scholar
Schiesaro, A. 2007: ‘Didaxis, rhetoric, and the law in Lucretius’, in Heyworth, S. J. (ed.), Classical Constructions. Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean, Oxford, 63–90Google Scholar
Schiesaro, A. 2011: ‘Ibis redibis’, Materiali e Discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 67, 79–150Google Scholar
Schrijvers, P. J. 1970: Horror ac divina voluptas. Études sur la poétique et la poésie de Lucrèce, AmsterdamGoogle Scholar
Segal, C. 2001: ‘Intertextuality and immortality. Ovid, Pythagoras and Lucretius in Metamorphoses 15’, Materiali e Discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 46, 63–109Google Scholar
Segal, C. 2003: ‘Ovid and Lucretius on virgin sacrifice’, in Defosse, P. (ed.), Hommages à Carl Deroux, Bruxelles, 4.531–39Google Scholar
Setaioli, A. 1999: ‘L'impostazione letteraria del discorso di Pitagora nel XV libro delle Metamorfosi’, in Schubert, W. (ed.), Ovid. Werk und Wirkung. Festgabe für M. von Albrecht, Frankfurt am Main-Berlin-Bern-New York-Paris-Wien, I.487–514Google Scholar
Sharrock, A. 1994: Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria, CambridgeGoogle Scholar
Slaveva-Griffin, S. 2003: ‘Of gods, philosophers, and charioteers: content and form in Parmenides’ proem and Plato's Phaedrus’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 133, 227–53Google Scholar
Sumner, G. V. 1978: ‘Varrones Murenae’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82, 187–95Google Scholar
Syme, R. 1939: The Roman Revolution, OxfordGoogle Scholar
Tarrant, R. J. 2002: ‘Ovid and ancient literary history’, in Hardie, P. (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Ovid, Cambridge, 13–33Google Scholar
Tzounakas, S. C. 2006: ‘The personified “Patria” in Cicero's First Catilinarian: significance and inconsistencies’, Philologus 150, 222–31Google Scholar
Watkins, O. W. 1985: ‘Horace Odes 2.10 and Licinius Murena’, Historia 34, 125–7Google Scholar
Wheeler, S. M. 1995: ‘Ovid's use of Lucretius in Metamorphoses 1.67–8’, Classical Quarterly 45, 200–3Google Scholar
Wheeler, S. M. 1999: A Discourse of Wonders. Audience and Performance in Ovid's Metamorphoses, PhiladelphiaGoogle Scholar
Wise, V. M. 1977: ‘Flight myths in Ovid's Metamorphoses’, Ramus 6, 44–59Google Scholar
Zingerle, A. 1869–71: Ovidius und sein Verhältniss zu den Vorgängern und gleichzeitigen Römischen Dichtern, Innsbruck-(repr. Hildesheim 1967)Google Scholar
Zissos, A., and Gildenhard, I. 1999: ‘Problems of time in Metamorphoses 2’, in Hardie, P., Barchiesi, A. and Hinds, S. (eds), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on The Metamorphoses and its Reception, Cambridge, 31–47Google Scholar