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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
THRACIUM NEFAS
tit How now, Lavinia? Marcus, what means this?
Some book there is that she desires to see.
Which is it, girl, of these? …
boy. Grandsire, 'tis Ovid's Metamorphoses …
(Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus 4.1)Explicitly invoked by the Fury in the prologue and by Atreus in his inspired monologue, the allusive pattern which links significant moments of Thyestes to the Ovidian tale of Tereus and Procne (Met. 6.412–674) is crucially important. Both stories culminate in the revengeful slaughter of children who are then cooked and served to their ignorant fathers in perverse banquets; neither narrative spares its readers the goriest details.
Seneca's recognition of Ovid's Tereus as the foremost archetype of narrative violence will be heeded centuries later by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus, a play steeped in classical sources (Seneca and Ovid), and routinely criticized for its grotesque excesses of violence and goriness. As Marcus first catches sight of Lavinia's violated body, he not only evokes the Ovidian model, but reiterates the agonistic comparison with Ovid inaugurated by Seneca's maiore numero (2.4.38–43):
Fair Philomel, why she but lost her tongue,
And in a tedious sampler sew'd her mind;
But, lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee.
A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met,
And he hath cut those pretty fingers off,
That could have better sew'd than Philomel.
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