In this article I propose to explore the disposition which the reader must bring to bear to Ovid's exilic works. More specifically, I want to begin by considering the way in which Ovid himself shapes or represents the attitude of his reader; that is, the way in which the text explicitly or implicitly shapes his ideal reader, and gives him indications as to how to read the new works which gradually reach Rome from Pontus. We start at the beginning: Tr. 1.1.
The shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8 is the culmination of the poem's ‘propaganda', the political climax of the Aeneid. We can read the ecphrasis in optimistic mode, as Hardie and Binder did, for example; or like Gurval and Putnam we can try to cast a pessimistic light even on this passage that is so obviously encomiastic and ‘ideologically sound'. However, what I shall be concerned with in this paper is not so much the shield itself as what Vergil has to say on his own composition of the shield, on the motivation of the artist in writing this encomiastic passage, on his ‘inspiration', or (if you prefer) on the ‘constraints' which compel him to deliver the ecphrasis. In my view Vergil gives us not only the ‘propaganda' of the shield, its mannered distortion of history, its praise of those in power, together with the critical reactions to that ‘propaganda' made out by pessimistic critics; he gives us also some metapropagandistic reflections on his writing of the shield as a piece of ‘propaganda' and encomium, an illustration of the forces that drive an artist to write a piece of this sort (that is, his ‘inspiration'), and he gives us some thoughts on the nature of the distortion and repression that are in operation here.
For StefaniaThe Amazon's sonTwo things distinguish Phaedra's from the other letters in Ovid's Heroides. In the first place, Phaedra's is not a letter without consequences. On the contrary, it will have a decisive effect on the addressee. But above all, Phaedra's letter is important just as a letter. The very fact of Phaedra's writing a letter touches a fundamental point in the story, and a controversial one. In the Heroides problems of communication are important in themselves, but, after the gratuitous letters by Penelope, Phyllis and Briseis, this is the first (and it will remain the only one) in which the complication always caused by an epistolary intrusion into the body of the story is superimposed on a pre-existent problem. Phaedra's declaration of her love to Hippolytus is a crucial point, a turning-point for the various tragic treatments of the history. Ovid adds problem to problem.
Dawn. Aeneas has just left. As soon as Dido notices that the Trojan fleet is sailing far away from Carthage she is overcome by despair and launches into an enraged monologue(Aeneid4.590–629), which climaxes in her curse against Aeneas and all of his descendants (607–29). In the first part of the monologue (590–606) Dido reproaches herself for how she has dealt with Aeneas:
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