!! fällt aus !! Vortrag am 13. Dezember 2017 Prof. Dr. Alison Sharrock

In this paper, I attempt to present Ovid’s Metamorphoses as of itself an ‘epiccycle’, from creation to the aftermath of the Trojan War and beyond – that is, beyond Virgil. This argument is set against the background on the one hand of reading the poem in the tradition of universal history, and on the other hand of the acknowledged interactions between Ovid’s Trojan books and the parts of the ‘Greek Epic Cycle’ about which we know most, the non-Homeric Trojan epics such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, and Nostoi. I shall suggest that Ovid is deliberately flying in the face of the Callimachean stated aversion to the τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν (Ep.30.1), but does so in the form of miniaturisation into a single epic poem – which is itself a Callimachean act. This is one way, the Ovidian way, to write epic after Virgil.