Ovid's Essay: The Apostrophe Of The Damned

The spondaic exposition of Ovid’s highly wrought ekphrasis est via declivis emphatically places Juno’s katabasis into its formulaic context. A topos in which the reader anticipates the eschatological realisation of the protagonist’s mastery over death through immortality. However, Ovid effectively divorces himself from literary precedent with the defined fourth foot caesura on line 435. Indeed, rather than portraying the infernas…sedes through the eyes of a liminal narrator as Homer (11.50), Virgil (6.268) and even Dante, our implied author rejects the didactic characterisation of a protagonist, reducing our perspective to that of the umbrae…recentes. Immediately juxtaposing the apostrophe of the Damned, see the alliterated tibi on 458 too, with those living victims of change represents a departure from metamorphoses themselves. …show more content…
Yet this world, like Ovid’s, is still perforated by the temporality of forum (444), carceris (453) and even imi tecta tyranni. Is not even the domain of the gods beyond the finis imperii for Rome? Certainly, Ovid may not deliberately juxtapose the powerful verb sustinet (447) with the parenthesis on the following line to emphasise the pettiness of the epic stereotype, in a subversive depiction of the capriciousness of belief itself. It is unlikely too that the spondaic hemistich imi tecta tyranni works with the anaphora of pars (444) to produce a powerful metaphor for Augustan totalitarianism. Arguably, however, even the opportunity for these misreadings is potentially