Reflections in a Serpent's Eye: Thebes in Ovid's Metamorphoses - Hardcover

readers not just of Ovid but also of Augustan and post-Augustan epic will find much to engage, stimulate and provoke them here. ... there is much to enjoy in this bold, challenging and intelligent work that offers many new insights and genuinely fresh perpectives on a familiar text. (Matthew Robinson, Journal of Roman Studies)

Ovid's extraordinary story of Thebes' founding and bloody unravelling spans two books of his epic poem, the Metamorphoses. His bizarre refractions of the well-ordered community engage Ovid's own Rome and the mythohistory of the Eternal City's origins, most particularly as framed in Vergil's Aeneid (Vergil's poem attained nonpareil status as the Latin epic soon after publication). The Aeneid has regularly been read as persuasively formulating how and why Rome will stride forward into history, into manifest destiny, and into `empire without end'. The Metamorphoses' strangely fantastical surface reflects what is already inherently perverse in that master-narrative, disclosing the narrative's internal contradictions. Ovid rigorously and sceptically not only interrogates the existing (Roman) political order, claimed as lasting truth, but also the very possibility of organizing any polity into a harmonious, organically unified, lasting institution.