'In the name of the father': Ovid's Theban law
When Ovid turns to epic in the Metamorphoses, he eschews the genre's preoccupation with either founding or defending polities;1 instead, he constructs a largely 'pastoral' epic of sinister bent.2 There would seem to be no place for Rome in a landscape where cities Wgure largely as backdrops established perfunctorily at the beginning of a tale, mere names isolated in wilderness. Rome and her history are indeed curiously patchy presences in the epic. From 13.623 onwards, the Metamorphosesdoes nominally contain the story of her founding. However, Ovid divides the story of Aeneas' journey from Troy to Italy, the founding of Alba Longa, and the reigns of the early Alban and Roman kings into hasty summaries bracketed between leisurely divagations into extraneous narratives. Anius' magical daughters (13.632-74), Polyphemus' love for Galatea and revenge on her lover Acis (13.740-897), Circe's passion for Glaucus and her retaliation against his beloved Scylla (13.898-14.74), all these stories and more interrupt the Roman narrative, swallowing most of the space in Such as Troy, Ithaca, Thebes, Persia, Colchian Aia, Carthage, Rome-the centres of attention in, respectively, Homer's Iliadand Odyssey, Antimachus' Thebais, and Choerilus of Samos' Persica(both late Wfth century bce), Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica, Naevius' Bellum Poenicum, Ennius' Annales, and Vergil's Aeneid. On the eclipse of the city in favour of the countryside in the Metamorphoses, see Hardie (1990: 224).
