In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arms and the Man:Wordplay and the Catasterism of Chiron in Ovid Fasti 5Barbara Weiden BoydIn a recent essay, Ian Brookes has drawn attention to the way in which Ovid's description of the catasterism of Chiron in Fasti 5 "suppresses Chiron's hybrid nature" as centaur "in order to allow us to sympathize with him as a fellow human."1 Brookes also directs us to the ironic ambiguity used by Ovid to (...) portray the episode's three main characters, Chiron, Achilles, and Hercules, each of whose histories, as alluded to by Ovid, shares with or borrows from the mythical histories of the other two characters.2 Thus, the wordplay associating Chiron's name with the Latin manus (as if derived from ), an etymological link already discussed by Santini (1976, 49-56), is demonstrated by Brookes to point instead here to the character of Achilles, whose "man-slaying hands" () are known from Iliad 18.317 and 24.478-79; the arrow wound in the left foot here fatal to Chiron is suggestive of Achilles' vulnerable heel; and the poison here responsible for Chiron's death is the same poison that Deianira will one day use to kill Hercules.3I want in the following discussion to extend the line of argument begun by Brookes through a fuller consideration of Ovid's exploitation of shared motifs in the mythical histories of each of these characters, and to focus in particular on the important role of wordplay, of a sort not previously observed, in the episode. My reading, while demonstrating that Brookes has made a valuable start on the literary analysis of the passage as a whole, will reach a somewhat different conclusion and suggest that Ovid's narrative intentionally subverts the superficial solemnity of the story told.It will be useful to begin with a full quotation of the episode (Fast. 5.379-414): [End Page 67] Nocte minus quarta promet sua sidera Chiron380 semivir et flavi corpore mixtus equi. Pelion Haemoniae mons est obversus in Austros: summa virent pinu, cetera quercus habet. Phillyrides tenuit: saxo stant antra vetusto, quae iustum memorant incoluisse senem.385 ille manus olim missuras Hectora leto creditur in lyricis detinuisse modis. venerat Alcides exhausta parte laborum, iussaque restabant ultima paene viro. stare simul casu Troiae duo fata videres:390 hinc puer Aeacides, hinc Iove natus erat. excipit hospitio iuvenem Philyreius heros, et causam adventus hic rogat, ille docet. respicit interea clavam spoliumque leonis, 'vir' que ait 'his armis, armaque digna viro!'395 nec se, quin horrens auderent tangere saetis vellus, Achilleae continuere manus. dumque senex tractat squalentia tela venenis, excidit et laevo fixa sagitta pede est. ingemuit Chiron, traxitque e corpore ferrum:400 adgemit Alcides Haemoniusque puer. ipse tamen lectas Pagasaeis collibus herbas temperat et varia volnera mulcet ope; virus edax superabat opem, penitusque recepta ossibus et toto corpore pestis erat:405 sanguine Centauri Lernaeae sanguis echidnae mixtus ad auxilium tempora nulla dabat. stabat, ut ante patrem, lacrimis perfusus Achilles: sic flendus Peleus, si moreretur, erat. saepe manus aegras manibus fingebat amicis:410 morum, quos fecit, praemia doctor habet. oscula saepe dedit, dixit quoque saepe iacenti 'vive, precor, nec me, care, relinque, pater.' nona dies aderat, cum tu, iustissime Chiron, bis septem stellis corpora cinctus eras.I have discussed elsewhere4 Ovid's effective use of second-person address to the reader at Fasti 5.389 to draw attention to the novelty of his narrative: this is the only extended narrative in the extant literary tradition [End Page 68] in which Achilles and Hercules actually meet as a result of their mutual acquaintance with Chiron. This meeting is, as Brookes (1994, 496) has observed, "something of a coup": only the most elastic of relative mythological chronologies could permit this meeting to occur. I propose that in fact we take Ovid's videres, appearing immediately after Ovid has set the scene by describing the landscape (379-82) and by introducing each of his three protagonists in three successive couplets (383-88), as an invitation to scrutinize carefully the play with characterization thus made possible, a play signaled first and foremost in this episode through Ovid's use of the epithet semivir (380) to describe... (shrink)

This article presents texts recovered by post-processing of multispectral images from the fifth- or sixth-century underwriting of the palimpsest Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Texts identified include the Anonymous II Proemium to Aratus’ Phaenomena, parts of Eratosthenes’ Catasterisms, Aratus’ Phaenomena lines 71–4 and 282–99 and previously unknown text, including some of the earliest astronomical measurements to survive in any Greek manuscript. Codex Climaci Rescriptus also contains at least three astronomical drawings. These appear to form part of an illustrated manuscript, with considerable (...) textual value not merely on the basis of its age but also of its readings. The manuscript undertexts show significant overlap with the Φ Edition, postulated as ancestor of the various Latin Aratea. (shrink)

The story of the death and catasterism of Chiron is one of the most charming and skilfully-presented episodes in the Fasti. Ovid relates how Hercules, in the course of his twelve labours, came to Mount Pelion, and was hospitably received by the centaur Chiron and his pupil, the young Achilles. While admiring Hercules' splendid arms, Chiron drops one of the hero's poisoned arrows onto his foot. Despite desperate attempts to find a remedy, he fails to recover, but is transformed into (...) the constellation of Centaurus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Playing with Time. Ovid and the FastiSara MackNewlands, Carole E. Playing with Time. Ovid and the Fasti. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xii 1 254.I learned a great deal from Carole Newlands’ Playing with Time about a poem with which I have always had difficulty. Newlands takes the Fasti seriously as a poem. She sees it as an artistically shaped creation, not a mishmash of (...) religious and mythological lore, and she regards its constantly shifting perspectives as intended and effective. I think she is right.The introduction, “The Problem of Ovid’s Fasti,” looks briefly at past assessments of the poem before setting out Newlands’ own thesis: The Fasti is “an exciting, experimental game with genre that offers a profound meditation on the changes and tensions in Roman society in the latter years of Augustus’ reign and the early years of Tiberius’” and that expresses “disenchantment with a political system that could guarantee neither the peace nor the freedom in which the elegiac [End Page 149] poet could flourish” (18). The rest of the chapter is devoted chiefly to outlining the argument of the remaining chapters.Chapter 1, “Stellar Connections,” examines the star myths of the Fasti. “Far from providing attractive digressions from Roman ritual, the myths interact with the Roman material, occasionally confirming but more often challenging or undermining the points of view encoded there” (31). Whether they in fact “contribute substantially to the dynamic tension in the poem between Ovid’s former erotic preoccupations and his new national themes,” it is certainly true, as she claims, that Ovid’s introduction of the astronomical theme at F. 1.295ff. has more to do with poetics than it does with astronomy. As always Ovid writes with an eye on his predecessors.In chapter 2, “Narrator and Interlocutors,” Newlands argues that “Ovid invites us to follow his development as a student and teacher of ‘sacra’ who discovers in the Roman past not an inspirational repository of noble heroes, but a patchwork of license and repression, nobility and violence, that is contingent on a variety of competing interests” (52). The narrator becomes increasingly reliant on sub-narrators for information as he becomes less confident in his own ability as narrator and in the feasibility of his project: an elegiac poem on Roman themes.In chapter 3 Newlands argues the need to look at the description of the temple of Mars Ultor in the context of the whole of book 5 and with an eye to the bias of its narrator in order to assess its presence in a poem that initially claims to oppose aras to arma. “The star myths of Chiron (379–414) and Orion (493–544), offer divergent perspectives upon the key concepts of war, Roman history, and revenge that are enshrined in the temple” (89). Mars, who takes over the narrative, has his own perspective on things. Furthermore, Mars has taken over the role of the Scorpion in Ovid’s rewrite of the catasterism myth of Orion and Scorpio “in a substitution that... gives a hint that the concept of revenge, glorified in the war god’s new Augustan temple, cannot be wholly refined of brutal elements” (114). I found this a very interesting chapter, although I was not convinced by some of the details, such as the contrast between Achilles’ and Romulus’ pietas. The analogy with the dream vision in the Aeneid is a bit misleading because the proper parallel is not Aeneas in tears vs. Romulus dry-eyed, as the argument suggests, but rather Aeneas in tears vs. the twins’ parents in tears.Chapter 4, “Priapus Revisited,” examines book 6 as “a negative mirroring of the themes of Book 1” (125). One of its major topics is Ovid’s treatment of Vesta. Newlands examines the Priapus-Vesta episode in book 6 which is usually read as a failed and expendable doublet of Priapus-Lotis in book 1. I think she is right that each has a spot in the poem and that part of the fun of the Vesta episode is that Vesta doesn’t fit into a world where nymphs may get raped while they sleep off the... (shrink)

Since we cannot hope to witness a catasterism for ourselves, we are fortunate to have a detailed first-hand account of the inauguration of Coma Berenices, the last constellation to be added to the ancient list until the seventeenth century. However, the description of the critical stages in the process presents various difficulties resulting not so much from obfuscation on Callimachus' part as from the circumstances of the poem's transmission and the problems to be expected in interpreting occasional verses more than (...) two millennia after the event to which they refer. In this note I shall attempt to clarify some of the obscurities surrounding the Lock's translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:La poétique d’Ovide, de l’élégie à l’épopée des Métamorphoses: Essai sur un style dans l’histoirePramit ChaudhuriAnne Videau. La poétique d’Ovide, de l’élégie à l’épopée des Métamorphoses: Essai sur un style dans l’histoire. Rome et ses renaissances. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010. 608 pp. Paper, €22.Anne Videau’s detailed study of Ovidian elegy and epic is, above all, about the stylistic manifestations of Ovid’s response to power: how the (...) macroscopic interplay of lover and beloved, ruler and subject, are represented in antitheses, allusions, and verbal conceits. In addition to several smaller, recurrent themes [End Page 528] running through the book—ambiguity of expression and apotheosis, to name but two—the larger argument attempts to sketch a unified picture of Ovid’s poetics as informed by generic expectations and historical context. The book consists of two parts, the first of which is as much a history of Roman elegy as a study of Ovid and identifies some distinguishing features of the genre that will resurface in the Metamorphoses. The second part, though it begins with a similar attempt to contextualize the epic’s place in the genre, focuses on a selection of episodes in the Metamorphoses, principally the Theban cycle of Books 3–4 (those interested in this part of the poem now have plenty to digest in Videau’s substantial reading set alongside Micaela Janan’s recent monograph). Despite the politico-cultural analyses promised at the outset and discussed mainly in the final chapter and conclusion, concerns of generic tradition and verbal play predominate and, indeed, this is where the strength of the book lies.The author engages with a wide range of scholarship in multiple languages, though she makes especially extensive use of work by Gilles Tronchet and Jacqueline Fabre-Serris. Readers less familiar with the French scholarship will find Videau’s concerns and approach a particularly refreshing complement to recent Anglophone studies of Ovid and Augustan culture by, e.g., Andrew Feldherr and Michèle Lowrie. Those who know Videau’s own earlier work, however, will recognize an unusually large proportion of the book’s content from previous publications. The attempt to yoke them together has mixed results, and some readers will find the whole less compelling than the individual components, despite their frequent brilliance.The chapters in part 1 explore the coherence in the Roman elegiac tradition both internally and in its relationship to Greek precedents. Videau is primarily interested in the historical moment of Roman elegy, its meditations on erotics and power, and (in part 2) the related developments of the erotika pathēmata theme in the Metamorphoses. Before getting to Ovid, she introduces the main topics through an extended reading of Catullus 66 (chap. 1), a precursor to Roman love elegy and a useful comparandum with the Hellenistic tradition (given the length of her analysis, a text of the poem might have been included). Videau traces its themes of liminality, feminine perspective, and dependency on a figure of power through the later poets, culminating with Ovid’s exile poetry. She shows in particular how Catullus’ poem inaugurates a tradition by combining and adapting the generic functions of ex-voto and funerary epigram through Berenice’s dedication of the lock for the welfare of Ptolemy and the lock’s separation from the queen through catasterism (59 ff.). The duality of the poem and its unusual protagonist—hovering between generic roles and states of existence—describes the situation of the elegiac poet and lover learning to cope with a new and destabilizing condition, whether political or erotic. These issues are explored in greater depth in the subsequent chapters, which discuss, among other subjects, the generic roots of the oscillation between anger and peace in Ovid’s depiction of the princeps (178 ff.), and the increasingly marked tension between elegy and epic from Tibullus to Ovid (205 ff.). In certain cases the exposition of familiar [End Page 529] issues can seem belabored, but even the overlong treatment of liminality in Tibullus, for instance, contains rewarding close readings of the text, such as the spatio-temporal effects... (shrink)