Blackwell Reference Online

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Ovid's interest in testing the boundaries of didactic elegy is evident from both his extended exploration of the confrontation of ratio and furor in the three books of Ars amatoria and his juxtaposition of time and (the absence of) consequentiality in Fasti . The basic function of a boundary is to define, to establish a division between yours and mine, history and myth, love and war. Ovid's consistent commitment to the transgression of such boundaries is evident, beginning with the opening lines of his first published work (or at least the first surviving published work: cf. Cameron 1968 ; Boyd 1997 : 142-7; Holzberg 1997 : 41-3; Barchiesi 1988 : 101-3), Amores: arma graui numero uiolentaque bella parabam / edere ( Am . 1.1.1-2). That commitment finds what is perhaps its most mature and challenging expression in the poet's one non-elegiac work, Metamorphoses: the unceasing cycle of change, expressed repeatedly on the levels of language, style, subject matter, and organization all interacting with and responding to each other, constantly blurs the boundaries between animate and inanimate, reward and punishment, male and female, life and death, and even between human and divine. As a result, Ovid's readers are challenged repeatedly to revise, reconsider, and rethink their own understanding of the natural order of things, and to contemplate the implications of a literary ... log in or subscribe to read full text