Cosmic Artistry in Ovid and Plato

This chapter reads Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti next to Plato’ vision of cosmogony, especially in the Timaeus. Its aim is not to demonstrate that Ovid is a Platonist or that the Platonic dimensions of Ovid’s works form part of a more general eclecticism; instead, it argues that Ovid reads or misreads the dialogues in order to question the interrelationship between myth and natural philosophy and that, in doing so, Ovid picks up a playful or even subversive voice within the dialogues that has the potential to deconstruct the Platonizing tradition as it is being written. Ovid finds (or invents) in Plato’s dialogues not only a model for creationist cosmogony, but a deep obsession with the relationship between writing and how the world is brought into existence.