This chapter revisits reception theory through an exploration of the metaphysics of presence and absence across time. Bringing together the ‘Letter to Horace’ of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Horace’s own Epistles, it uses the theory of communication developed by John Durham Peters and the philosophy of the afterlife of Samuel Scheffler to elucidate the experience of, on the one hand, communicating with a past where one and so much of what makes one what one is was not present and, on the other, of projecting oneself into a future in which one will no longer exist so as to communicate with those who do not yet exist and whom one will never know. Recent metaphysical thinking has sought to make us sensitive to the existential incompleteness of people and things and the fragility of selves that are distributed across the multitude of ‘attachments’ which Bruno Latour suggests as one ‘mode of existence’ that makes us what we are. Latour suggests that we should not think of ourselves as simple, atomized, points of emission and reception for texts, and appeals to Étienne Souriau’s notion of instauration to suggest how our selves and what and whom we value are sustained.

Plato’s writings play a crucial role in bootstrapping the discourses that came to be called metaphysics, which see their task as exploring distinctions between seeming and being, reality and appearance, and what we can sense and what lies beyond our senses. Central to them is the notion of ‘theory’, which, as Andrea Nightingale has argued, Plato develops out of the social institution of theōria: a representative of the city attends a Panhellenic festival, observes what happens, and reports back on what he has seen. This model structures the story (in Republic) of the prisoner leaving the cave, ascending to the light, and reporting back to those he left behind – a structure that Lucretius reprises in the ‘theoretical’ journey of Epicurus across the universe in DRN 1. Plato’s stories are subject to a process of reception Hans Blumenberg has described as ‘re-occupation’ so as to express metaphysical positions that are at odds with Plato’s. This essay explores Lucretius’ re-occupation of a number of Platonic motifs (the cave, the pitfall of Thales in Theaetetus, the representation of Socrates as a thinking subject) to highlight the role that these motifs have played (and continue to play) in the metaphysical tradition.

The task of mapping Ovid’s presence in the twentieth century, let alone a theoretical consideration of what might constitute that presence, has hardly begun. The Metamorphoses holds pride of place in the recent reception of Ovid, it may be granted; but in what ways is its presence to be defined? In a thematics of corporeal transformation, such as we see in Kafka’s Metamorphosis or David Garnett’s Lady into Fox? In explicit acknowledgement of the poet and his work? Extravagant (and sometimes perplexing) claims are made by, and on behalf of, writers and artists of the twentieth century for the influence of Ovid on their work. Notoriously in his note on line 218 of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot invokes the figure of Tiresias, quotes 19 lines from the story told of him in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses, and suggests that 'although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character”, [Tiresias] is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest … What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.' James Joyce prefaced his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and he makes the reading of Ovid’s poem one of the formative factors in the education of its protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, but if we broaden our terms of reference to include a more general discourse of metamorphosis – manifested, for example, in the capacity of language through metaphor to ‘create as well as describe metamorphosis’ in its objects of reference – Joyce’s work (and not only his) can be seen to take on a more pervasive Ovidian character.

In Book 3 of his Ars amatoria, Ovid rounds off a survey of authors put forward as suitable reading for the would-be female lover with a characteristic claim that his works will bring him immortality. Perhaps, he surmises, his name will be ranked with those of Sappho, Propertius or Virgil; perhaps 'somebody will say: “read the cultured poems of our maestro, in which he draws up the battle-lines of the sexes”' - the Ars amatoria itself -' “or the Amores, or recite a Letter in an assumed voice; this type of work, unknown to others, he pioneered”' (uel tibi composita cantetur EPISTVLA uoce; | ignotum hoc aliis ille nouauit opus, 3.345-6). The nature of Ovid’s claim for this last work - universally agreed to be what we have grown accustomed to call the Heroides - continues to generate considerable scholarly debate. It is unlikely that the poet who was to go on to write the Metamorphoses would seek to claim that the emergence of any form – still less the invention of a literary one – takes place ex nihilo. The epistle of Penelope to Ulysses, which stands first in the collection of fifteen as we currently have it and may have been put in first place by Ovid himself as a programmatic gesture, is itself a transformation of Homer’s Odyssey, and the lament voiced by a heroine abandoned by her lover had had a long history in various generic manifestations in Greek and Latin literature, notably Euripidean tragedy and Alexandrianizing epic. Nor

In retrospect, the career of Virgil seems to trace out an inevitable progression. Working within a tradition which defined poetry composed in dactylic hexameter verse as epos (connoting 'word' or 'utterance'), the poet of the Eclogues, through the figure of the shepherd-singer Tityrus, recalls how his earliest poetic production involved a rejection of martial themes (reges et proelia, 'kings and battles', Eel. 6.3) in favour of a pastoral mode, avowedly lowly and humble (cf. EcL 4.1-2), which looked back to the 'Syracusan verse' of Theocritus (EcL 6.1-2). Taking leave of this mode at the end of the final poem of the collection, the shepherd-singer, in his characteristic pose recumbent in the shade of a tree, announces his intention to rise (surgamus, EcL 10.75), presaging the composition of the Hesiodic Georgics. He thereby attributes to that poem a more elevated stylistic level, reiterates a hierarchy within the received types of epos, and begins to map an upward trajectory through those types on to the poet's life-cycle. In the opening lines of the Third Georgic, a further move upwards is envisaged (G. 3.8-9):

To offer a survey of modern receptions of Virgil in this chapter would be to follow, with unequal footsteps and all too close behind, Theodore Ziolkowski's magisterial account in his Virgil and the Moderns, which appeared as recently as 1993. Ziolkowski suggests that Virgil's presence in the twentieth century is particularly apparent as a cultural icon and avatar appropriated by poets, novelists, historians and politicians to configure their aspirations and anxieties in the period between the two world wars:

The status accorded to the text of Virgil in this period was almost scriptural, explicitly so for Theodor Haecker, the passionate anti-Nazi whose Vergil. Vater des Abendlands of 1931 was one of the most popular works of the period on the poet, and was translated into English in 1934 (as Virgil. Father of the West), French and Italian in 1935, Dutch in 1942 and Spanish in 1945. Haecker proclaims: