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TIRESIAS, OVID, GENDER AND TROUBLE: GENERIC CONVERSIONS FROM ARS INTO TRISTIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2018

Elena Giusti
Elena Giusti*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Extract

The brief story of Tiresias’ punishment in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Met. 3.316–38) becomes a privileged site for mapping the different ways readers can reinterpret episodes of the poem in the light of the rest of Ovid's corpus. Tiresias, the first human uates of the poem, who is punished with blindness for voicing what he should have kept silent, can be included among those punished artists who double the poet in the Metamorphoses: while Tiresias is condemned for having voiced his knowledge of both sexes, Ovid is exiled for giving amatory advice to, and therefore knowing, both men and women. Thus the Tiresias episode reads as a pendant to that of Actaeon in the same book (the latter explicitly likened to Ovid's fate in Tristia 2.103–8), with the pair suggesting a veiled allegory of the carmen and error that caused Ovid's exile.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , June 2018 , pp. 27 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Ramus 2018 

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Footnotes

Different versions of this paper were presented in Rome, Nottingham, Venice and London. I am most grateful to the audiences for their comments, to Christina Tsaknaki for prompting me to work on this material again and helping me through it, to Alessandro Barchiesi and Alessandro Schiesaro for supervising this project in Venice, and to Catharine Edwards and William Fitzgerald for allowing me to rewrite the paper in the light of ‘conversion’. Alex Dressler, Emily Gowers, Philip Hardie and John Henderson helped me convert this essay at more than one stage; for its troubling arguments and remaining mistakes, I am of course the one to blame.

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