Intimations of Mortality

Ovid’s poetry repeatedly addresses eschatological themes, starting with the apocalyptic flood visited by Jupiter upon the world at the very beginning of the Metamorphoses. This chapter suggests that there are recurrent features of Ovid’s eschatological thought which can be traced across both the Metamorphoses and the poetry from Pontus. The main feature is a form of “conditional eschatology,” which is first on display in the flood narrative: destruction is intimated, or initiated, but can be staved off by the benevolent intervention of a providential ruler. The same pattern applies to the katabatic description of Ovid’s journey into exile in Tristia 1.2, where he is almost shipwrecked, and is the aspiration that underlies his permanence in Pontus. Here, eschatology is embodied in space, in an extreme landscape, rather than in time, while year after year, book after book, Ovid lives in the hope that another providential intervention may put an end to his suffering. Instead of his recall to Rome, however, Ovid experiences the passing of time as perpetual stillness, as a form of deferral and repetition that finds its most explicit representation in the Ibis.