Ovid’s writing is infused with the retelling of known myths and the portrayal of heroes and heroines, whose figurae held a central role in Greek and Roman literature. This article argues in favour of reading Ariadne’s story at Ars am. 1.527-64 as a rape narrative. The exploration of the passage in question and its comparative reading with other poems (such as Prop. 1.3 and the Ovidian version of the rape of the Sabine women), illustrates and explains why Ovid reimagines Ariadne as a victim of erotic violence.
; and do we really need the memory-mongers M. Halbwachs, A. Assmann and their biggest Classical pusher K. Galinsky to pad what is a fairly basic point? The core theme (if not scheme) is worth a book. But the materia needed more intellectual heavy-lifting, and more ruthless revision. Even the slightest glance towards the huge literature on the ontology of speech vs writing would turn up that the latter was never in antiquity a straightforward consolation for the lack of the former. The theoretical shallowness and reductionism are not really offset by the more workaday modes of intertextual reading, which tend to rest on rickety props. No sign, also, of some obvious comparisons even within the Ovidian corpus (e.g. Feeney on speech and silence in the Fasti-D.C. Feeney in A. Powell [ed.], Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus [1992], pp. 1-25). Then there is the steady stream of stylistic and typographical blips, not to mention the monotonous recycling of keywords ('community' in almost every second sentence). The monograph itself could have used some therapeutic aphasia. There are interesting murmurs herebut as a book, just not enough to write home about.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.