beginnings Flashcards
(10 cards)
‘perpetuum carmen’
perpetual song - contradiction inherent from the proem of the met - describing an episodic narrative as continuous? what is the continuity? the continuous shifting and re appropriation of vocabulary, objects, characters etc into subsequent narratives
first instance of performative self-awareness: like echo surrendering her voice ‘willingly’ - it’s not real or true
meter in the proem of the met
draws attention to the shift from elegy to epic, even though the hexameter is more complete than the pentameter of the elegiac couplet, it defies expectation
the final sponge propels the reader towards an unexpected edge - the balance of the dactylic hexameter is ironically destabilising and elicits an unsteady narrative
instability in the proem
‘semina rerum…discordia’
fundamental constituents of the physical world as defined by Lucretius - these elements are fundamentally unstable in ovidian narrative
vacillation between order and disorder
degradation of repetition and the races of men in the Met One
forward motion pushes us perpetually backwards to retry and repeat - each new race is a lesser version of the last
water in the speech of pythagoras
‘time flows no differently than a river…one wave impaled by another wave’
‘time equally sleeps and equally follows’
implicit violence - moving forward at the expense of the events moving alongside us - inherently destructive
forges the connection between water and time - does time have the same tendency
think of the flood in book 10 - 10 as the biggest of something although ovid is the first source of this - the water builds where everything else degrades (just like the time itself, it weighs heavier with history)
the world ending flood in the met
returns the world to its embryonic, chaotic state, also a poetic reshuffling for ovid - permits him to refocalise from the macro and cosmic to the interpersonal (this includes the gods and monsters)
the met and the fasti
the fragility of mortal defined time - does caesar / augustus count as a mortal in this context>
the fasti already captures the uncertainty and irrelevance of the human calander - in the met we see this when Phaethon literally disorders the laws of time as dictated by the movement of the sun - with physically destructive consequences creating deserts etc
amores 1.1 and the unconventional elegiac lover
notoriously lacks an actual object of affection in beginning of book 1 - doesnt link his refusal to a particular puella until amores 2
cupid is names on 3 occasions in the opening poem - the transgression and developmental regression is sparked by a devious youth through the character of cupid - he doesn’t move onto a higher style or subject, he lingers
recusatio in amores 3 and the poetic, generic crossroad
3.1 is an explicit deferral over a rejection - ovid loses ground in the battle against epic
appeals to his insufficient talent and the amator is thus at a conceptual crossroads
choice of generic path leading to maturity (tragedy/epic) or further ignominy (elegy)
pisces amator at the helm of manhood with the promise of what he has previously denied outright
amores 1.1 and the genre
cupid steals a foot of the poetry away to create an elegiac couplet - his plan to write epic is foiled
