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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2021
Many attempts have been made to define the precise philosophical outlook of Ovid's account of cosmogony from the beginning of the Metamorphoses, while numerous different and interconnected influences have been identified including Homer, Hesiod, Empedocles, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius and Virgil. This has led some scholars to conclude that Ovid's cosmogony is simply eclectic, a magpie collection of various poetic and philosophical snippets haphazardly jumbled together, and with no significant philosophical dimension whatsoever. A more constructive approach could see Ovid's synthesis of many of the major cosmogonic works in the Graeco-Roman tradition as an attempt to match textually his all-encompassing history of the universe that purports to stretch from the first beginnings of the world up to the present day (Met. 1.3−4). Furthermore, if the beginning of the Metamorphoses is designed to be both cosmologically and intertextually all-encompassing, it is surprising that the influence of arguably the major philosophical work on cosmogony from the ancient world, Plato's Timaeus, remains to be evaluated.
1 Wheeler, S.M., ‘Imago mundi: another view of the creation in Ovid's Metamorphoses’, AJPh 116 (1995), 95−121Google Scholar. Wheeler argues that the Homeric ekphrasis describing the Shield of Achilles (Il. 18.478−608) is programmatic for Ovid's cosmogony.
2 S.M. Wheeler, Narrative Dynamics in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Tübingen, 2000); I. Ziogas, Ovid and Hesiod: The Metamorphosis of the Catalogue of Women (Cambridge, 2013). Wheeler and Ziogas have emphasized the connection with Hesiod's depiction of χάος (Theog. 116).
3 Hardie, P.R., ‘The speech of Pythagoras in Ovid Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean epos’, CQ 45 (1995), 204−14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hardie has frequently highlighted the importance of Empedocles and Lucretius especially in the Speech of Pythagoras (Metamorphoses Book 15). Nelis, D., ‘Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.416−51: noua monstra and the foedera naturae’, in Hardie, P.R. (ed.), Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2009), 248−67Google Scholar; Campbell, G., Lucretius on Creation and Evolution (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar. Nelis and Campbell have also shown the importance of Empedocles, Apollonius Rhodius (specifically the Song of Orpheus) and Lucretius in Metamorphoses Book 1. Garani, M., ‘The advent of maiestas (Ovid, Fasti 5.11−52)’, in Michalopoulos, A.N., Papaioannou, S. and Zissos, A. (edd.), Dicite, Pierides: Classical Studies in Honour of Stratis Kyriakidis (Newcastle, 2017), 266−97Google Scholar; Garani, M., ‘Lucretius and Ovid on Empedoclean cows and sheep’, in Lehoux, D., Morrison, A.D. and Sharrock, A. (edd.), Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (Oxford, 2013), 233−60Google Scholar. Garani has also highlighted frequent points of contact between Ovid and Empedocles, especially via Lucretius.
4 Nelis (n. 3) and Campbell (n. 3).
5 P.R. Hardie, Lucretian Receptions (Cambridge, 2009); Hardie has also demonstrated the importance of Lucretius.
6 McKim, R., ‘Myth against philosophy in Ovid's account of creation’, CAMWS 80 (1984), 97−108Google Scholar. McKim, arguing against the claim that Ovid directly alludes to the Presocratics, shows the influence of the Stoics and in particular Cicero (De natura deorum). See also the commentary of Barchiesi, A., Ovidio Metamorfosi Volume I Libri I−II (Rome, 2005)Google Scholar, which provides a good overview of the above influences.
7 Galinsky, K., ‘The Speech of Pythagoras in Ovid's Metamorphoses’, PLLS 10 (1997), 314−16Google Scholar. Galinksy argues that in the Speech of Pythagoras and in the opening cosmogony Ovid ‘flattens out philosophy to the point where it is indistinguishable from generalized, popular ideas’.
8 Robinson, T.M., ‘Ovid and the Timaeus’, Athenaeum 56 (1968), 254−60Google Scholar remains the only work to argue that Ovid was reading and alluding to the Timaeus, if not first hand, at least in Cicero's translation. Wheeler (n. 1), 96 also states that ‘Ovid's conception of a divine fabricator is comparable with the demiurge in Plato's Timaeus (cf. 30a2−6) and with Stoic accounts of divine providence (cf. Cic. Nat. D. 2.58; Diog. Laert. 7.136−7, 156)’, but highlights that there are more differences than points of contact. L. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven, 1986), 30 mentions the importance of the Timaeus for Ovid, but does not elaborate further.
9 Volk, K., ‘Letters in the sky: reading the signs in Aratus’ Phaenomena’, AJPh 133 (2012), 209−40Google Scholar demonstrates the widespread use of the ‘parallelism’ between ‘verse and universe’ in the literature of this time period. This is perhaps most easily seen in Lucretius, whose ‘alphabet analogy’ uses the way in which letters and words appear upon the page to demonstrate the complexities of atomic arrangement.
10 Wheeler (n. 1), 118.
11 See Sedley, D., Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley, 2008), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This phrase is borrowed from Sedley's discussion of the crossing and recrossing of generic divisions in the Timaeus, which is discussed further below. The terms ‘crossing’, ‘recrossing’ and indeed ‘criss-crossing’, along with ‘collapsing’ and ‘cloaking’ are used throughout to elucidate Ovid's nuanced movement between and synthesis of different philosophical concepts, genres and textual allusions. Hinds, S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge, 1987), 117−20Google Scholar discusses the ‘transgression’ of generic boundaries of epic and elegy in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti and views this transgression as ‘essential to the poem's makeup’ (120). The same concept is applied here to the relationship between ‘myth’ and ‘science’.
12 Volk (n. 9), 212 states that this ‘parallelism’ could easily be mistaken for a scholarly or postmodern metaphor, rather than for a historical reality for the ancient reader. Volk, K., ‘Cum carmine crescit et annus: Ovid's Fasti and the poetics of simultaneity’, TAPhA 127 (1997), 287−313Google Scholar also discusses the concept of ‘simultaneity’ in the Fasti, whereby the unfolding of the poem, the creation of the poem, and the passing of the year, which constitutes the poem's subject matter are presented as the same process. This concept is here extended to include the historical development of literature over time.
13 All displayed passages from the Metamorphoses follow R. Tarrant's OCT edition (Oxford, 2004), unless otherwise stated, with W.S. Anderson's Teubner edition (Berlin, 2008) frequently consulted. Translations of the Metamorphoses are my own unless otherwise stated, with D. Hill's text and translation (Warminster, 1985−2000) providing an aid.
14 Wheeler (n. 1).
15 Wheeler (n. 2), 12 and Ziogas (n. 2), 58.
16 Compare especially Empedocles, fr. Inwood 28.5−6 (= DK 26): … ἄλλοτε μὲν φιλότητι συνερχόμεν’ εἰς ἕνα κόσμον, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖ δίχ’ ἕκαστα φορούμενα νείκεος ἔχθει, … ‘… at one time [the elements] coming together by love into one cosmos, and at another time again all being borne apart separately by the hostility of strife …’.
17 Wheeler (n. 1), 95−6.
18 Sedley, D., Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998), 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides a useful list of Lucretius’ different terms for atoms.
19 In contrast, at the beginning of Book 2, Ovid overtly turns to ekphrasis in his depiction of the imago mundi on the doors of the palace of the sun god. See also Wheeler (n. 1), 98.
20 G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield (= KRS), The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1984), 37 state that χάος originally meant a great yawning or chasm: ‘the noun is derived from √χα meaning gape, gap or yawn as in χαίνειν, χάσκειν’, pointing in particular to Aristophanes (Av. 693; Nub. 627). Hesiod positions χάος as the gap between the earth and the sky, and this may have led to its alternate interpretation as ‘air’ or the region in which birds fly as seen in Bacchylides (5.27), Euripides (fr. 488) and Aristophanes (Nub. 424; Av. 1218).
21 Wheeler (n. 1), 96 discusses Ovid's ‘revision’ of the Apollonian model.
22 The concept of ‘subordinating appropriation’ may be considered as an alternative means of envisaging Ovid's simultaneous incorporation and revision of a multitude of cosmogonic systems; this concept was most recently applied in a Platonist context in T. Engberg-Pedersen (ed.), From Stoicism to Platonism (Cambridge, 2017). See especially Engberg-Pedersen's introduction to the volume, 10−16.
23 This slight simplification is permitted in order to illustrate the precise dynamic at play in the Metamorphoses. On the mixing of myth and natural philosophy in Empedocles and Lucretius, see further Gale, M., Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar and Garani, M., Empedocles Redivivus: Poetry and Analogy in Lucretius (London, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Burneyat, M., ‘The upside-down back-to-front sceptic of Lucretius IV 472’, Philologus 122 (1978), 197−206, at 202Google Scholar discusses this passage and whether it can be authentically ascribed to Epicurus.
25 Text and translation are adapted from M. Gale's Aris and Philips edition of Lucretius, Book 5 (Oxford, 2009).
26 While the degree to which Phoebe and Tellus are personified is left open, the way in which Amphitrite is said to stretch out her arms around the edges of the lands leaves no doubt that we are meant to imagine her as a fully personified deity.
27 Hardie (n. 5), 144 shows that this passage from the De rerum natura is in turn a ‘close imitation’ of a passage from Empedocles (fr. 27 DK = 31 Inwood). Here Empedocles describes how the different elements of the universe cannot yet be distinguished in their primordial state: ἔνθ’ οὔτ’ ἠελίοιο διείδεται ὠκέα γυῖα | οὐδὲ μὲν οὐδ’ αἴης λάσιον μένος οὐδὲ θάλασσα ‘There the shining form of the sun is not discerned nor indeed the hairy might of earth, nor the sea.’ Empedocles also personifies the different cosmic elements (fr. 38 DK = 39 Inwood): εἰ δ’ ἄγε τοι λέξω πρῶτ’ ἐξ ὧν ἥλιος ἀρχήν | τἆλλά τε δῆλ’ ἐγένοντο τὰ νῦν ἐσορῶμεν ἅπαντα, | γαῖά τε καὶ πόντος πολυκύμων ἠδ’ ὑγρὸς ἀήρ | Τιτὰν ἠδ’ αἰθὴρ σφίγγων περὶ κύκλον ἅπαντα ‘Come then! I shall tell you first the sources from which the sun in the beginning and all other things which we now see became clear: earth and billowy sea and moist aēr and Titan aithēr binding all of them around in a circle.’ Ovid's anthropomorphizing of the Titan (sun), Phoebe and Amphitrite at Met. 1.10−14 is strikingly similar to this passage from Empedocles, especially the image of Amphitrite stretching her arms around the edges of the lands, and the air surrounding the earth (Met. 1.13−14).
28 Myers, K.S., Ovid's Causes: Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses (Ann Arbor, MI, 1994), 54−5CrossRefGoogle Scholar describes how Ovid ‘reacts against Lucretius’ purely materialistic explanation of natural phenomena, and by incorporating physics into his unrelentingly unnaturalistic and supernatural metamorphoses he consciously “remythologizes” Lucretius’ rationalist allegorizations of myth’. See also Hardie, P., ‘Lucretius and the delusions of Narcissus’, MD 20/21 (1988), 71−89Google Scholar. Lucretius also frequently draws into question the relationship between myth and materialist physics; most notable for the current passage, he concedes that people may call the sea Neptune and corn Ceres, provided that they refrain from tainting their minds with such superstitions (2.655−60).
29 This summary is a shortened version of that provided by Sedley (n. 11), 97.
30 In short, men who act in a cowardly way change into women in their subsequent lives; light-witted but harmless men, who contemplate the heavens but imagine that they can understand it purely through observation, change into birds; men with no interest in the heavens but instead focus on earthly matters transform into land animals; the most vile and polluted of all are transformed into fish which are not even permitted to breathe the air (Tim. 90e−92c).
31 G. Campbell, ‘Zoogony and evolution in Plato's Timaeus, the Presocratics, Lucretius and Darwin’, in M.R. Wright (ed.), Reason and Necessity, Essays on Plato's Timaeus (London, 2000), 145−80 observes a number of connections between metempsychosis and metamorphosis in both texts. Sedley (n. 11), 131 also states that there is an affinity between the ‘highly articulated aetiologies in Ovid's Metamorphoses’ and the transmigration of souls in the Timaeus as well as ‘Plato's own eschatological myths of rebirth as a morally appropriate animal’, especially in the myth of Er from the Republic (620a2−d5). Both Campbell and Sedley, however, fail to capture the intricacies of Ovid's representations of metamorphosis, where gods frequently turn into animals and animals can be the embodiment of the divine, not a degeneration of human beings. P.R. Hardie, Ovidio Metamorfosi Volume VI Libri XIII−XV (Milan, 2015) discusses the complex set of intertexts in the speech of Pythagoras, including Empedocles, Ennius, Lucretius and Virgil.
32 Sedley (n. 11), 82−3.
33 Volk, K., Manilius and the Intellectual Background (Oxford, 2009), 242−3CrossRefGoogle Scholar summarizes the difficulty of establishing the nature and extent of the influence of Pythagoreanism in the Roman sphere, and highlights the impossibility of knowing ‘to what extent Plato and later Platonists, rather than being influenced by Pythagoras, actually “invented” Pythagoreanism by fathering their own ideas on a revered and semi-mythical figure’. We then encounter the further problem when attempting to identify the influence of the Timaeus on Roman authors from Cicero onwards, as they are inheriting two parallel traditions which frequently intersect and indeed reinterpret each other.
34 This becomes more relevant, though outside the scope of the current paper, if we consider the cosmogony of Metamorphoses Book 1 as operating in conjunction with, or in counterpoint to, the Speech of Pythagoras from Metamorphoses Book 15.
35 D. Sedley, ‘Cicero and the Timaeus’, in M. Schofield (ed.), Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the First Century b.c. (Cambridge, 2013), 187−205 has identified a number of difficulties concerning Cicero's translation of the Timaeus, arguing that the section of Cicero's translation which survives is not a large fragment of a complete translation of Plato's text; instead, he states that it is more than likely that Cicero intended to translate only this specific section, which was designed to be part of a philosophical dialogue that would have also included an equally large section from one of Aristotle's works on physics. Sedley further argues that Cicero abandoned this text, so that what we have is a completed section of an incomplete work rather than an accident in the text's transmission. While this presents an interesting hypothesis for explaining the text of Cicero's translation that has come down to us, not enough evidence exists to confirm Sedley's theory.
36 Ovid's initial identification of the demiurge with natura could also hint at Aristotle's use of divine craftsmanship imagery to illustrate natural processes. For Aristotle's reformulation of the craftsman imagery from the Timaeus, see Sedley (n. 11), 173−4.
37 For the receptacle's ‘mysterious’ combination of space and matter, see Sedley (n. 11), 3, who describes it as an ‘indefinite substance or container’. On this passage in the Timaeus and the fragments of Proclus’ commentary, see further F.M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis, 1935), 182−3.
38 Timaeus does not supply a complete list of the elemental qualities; this, however, can be extrapolated from Book 10 of Plato's Laws, where the Athenian explains how the materialists believe that the elements exist through chance and how their turmoil resulted in the formation of the world (889b5−c3): τύχῃ δὲ φερόμενα τῇ τῆς δυνάμεως ἕκαστα ἑκάστων, ᾗ συμπέπτωκεν ἁρμόττοντα οἰκείως πως, θερμὰ ψυχροῖς ἢ ξηρὰ πρὸς ὑγρὰ καὶ μαλακὰ πρὸς σκληρά, καὶ πάντα ὁπόσα τῇ τῶν ἐναντίων κράσει κατὰ τύχην ἐξ ἀνάγκης συνεκεράσθη, ταύτῃ καὶ κατὰ ταῦτα οὕτως γεγεννηκέναι τόν τε οὐρανὸν ὅλον καὶ πάντα ὁπόσα κατ’ οὐρανόν ‘All move by the chances of their several powers, and according as they clash and fit together with some sort of affinity—hot with cold, dry with moist, soft with hard—and in other mixtures that result, by chance, of necessity, from the combination of opposites. From these things and in this way the entire world came into being and all things in it.’ Plato of course strongly refutes the materialists’ world view.
39 S. Broadie, Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus (Cambridge, 2012), 188−9 discusses Plato's linguistic choice of adjectival elemental qualities over named elements.
40 Sedley (n. 11), 109.
41 Cornford (n. 37), 28−31.
42 Brisson, L., ‘Why is the Timaeus called an eikōs muthos and an eikōs logos’, in Collobert, C., Destrée, P., Gonzalez, F.J. (edd.), Plato and Myth (Leiden, 2012), 369−92, at 390Google Scholar. Grasso, E., ‘Myth, image and likeness in Plato's Timaeus’, in Collobert, C., Destrée, P., Gonzalez, F.J. (edd.), Plato and Myth (Leiden, 2012), 343−68, at 344Google Scholar also shows that Plato presents the difficulties concerning the status of his cosmogony in the context of blurring the boundaries between μῦθος and λόγος.
43 Sedley (n. 11), 97.
44 Wheeler (n. 1).
45 See the commentary of Littlewood, R.J., A Commentary on Ovid's Fasti, Book 6 (Oxford, 2006), 89−94Google Scholar, for a detailed discussion of this passage.
46 Cited from the edition and translation of A.E. Douglas (Oxford, 1985).
47 The Stoic Balbus in Cicero's Nat. D. 2.88.10−89.1 also uses the sphere of Archimedes as a means of attacking the Epicurean materialist account of cosmic formation: … et Archimedem arbitrantur plus ualuisse in imitandis sphaerae conuersionibus quam naturam in efficiendis; praesertim cum multis partibus sint illa perfecta quam haec simulata sollertius ‘And they [the Epicureans] believe that Archimedes was more successful in his working model of the heavenly revolutions than nature who achieved them, especially since nature's role is considerably more ingenious than are such representations.’
48 P.R. Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge, 2002), 7.
49 Feldherr, A., Playing Gods: Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction (Princeton, 2010), 2−3Google Scholar. von Glinski, M.L., Simile and Identity in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Cambridge, 2012)Google Scholar likewise argues that a simile forces the reader to keep in mind both the original and the comparand, thus simultaneously highlighting their similarity and difference.
50 On which, see in particular Nelis (n. 3) and Wheeler (n. 2), 35−6.
51 On the Speech of Pythagoras as an Empedoclean epos, see Hardie (n. 3).
52 The depiction of the primordial universe in Metamorphoses Book 1 reworks a number of aspects of this passage from the Ars amatoria; in referring to chaos as inane ‘an empty space’ or ‘void’, Ovid suggests a closer link to the ‘gaping chasm’ of χάος in the Theogony, while also potentially alluding to the Song of Silenus from Virgil's sixth Eclogue, where a great inane ‘emptiness’ likewise prefigures universal creation (31−3). The retreat of chaos appears to instigate the creating of the cosmos, which takes shape through its own volition; this could perhaps be compared to the retreat of Strife in the Empedoclean system.
53 Hardie, P.R., ‘The Janus episode in Ovid's Fasti’, MD 26 (1991), 47−64Google Scholar.
54 Conte, G.B., Stealing the Club from Hercules: On Imitation in Latin Poetry (Berlin, 2017), 17−18Google Scholar.
