Passing Over Cephisos' Grandson: Literal Praeteritio and the Rhetoric of Obscurity in Ovid Met. 7.350-93

Abstract

After tricking Pelias' daughters into killing their father, Ovid's metamorphic Medea flies in her (future reflexive) Euripidean dragon chariot from Thessaly to Corinth by a very circuitous route. In so doing, she performs a physical and narrativepraeteritio, passing rapidly over both the landscape and its local myths, which remain unnarrated. This article will reflect on some of the metapoetic connotations of thepraeteritioand its rhetoric of obscurity, and propose an identification for one of the most obscure of the figures over whom Medea passes. It will also identify a technique whereby Ovid plays with concepts of obscurity anddoctrinato unmask and dramatise a common reading practice.Medea's literal enactment of a rhetorical strategy is one among many instances in the poem of the reification of figurative language, an operation which most commonly takes place in the process of metamorphosis or the depiction of personifications, but by no means always. Among such reifications, the particular instance of the ‘literalpraeteritio’ has antecedents in Apollonius’Argonautica, where the Argonauts ‘passed by’ (παϱάμειβον) Calypso's island, and in Virgil'sAeneid, where Aeneas and the Trojans on at least three occasions pass by sites such as Ithaca, the land of the Phaeacians, and Circe's island. In each of these four cases the epic narrator is also ‘passing over’ the Odyssean narrative associated with the site.

A Brutal Hack: Tyranny, Rape, and the Barbarism of Bad Poetry in Ovid's Pyreneus Episode

“… 29 On the reification of tropes and figurative language: Rosati (1983) 166–70, Kaufhold (1997), Tissol (1997) 11–26, 61–88, Hardie (2002) 231–6, Cowan (2011). …”