Philosophizing and Theologizing Reincarnations of Ovid

This chapter presents a selective survey of the premodern reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a repository of philosophical and theological wisdom, with a particular focus on Ovid as a cosmological and natural-philosophical poet. Ovid’s own response to the philosophical engagement of earlier Augustan poets (Virgil above all) is picked up by Lucan in his application of Ovid’s cosmic concordia discors to the Stoicizing political cosmology of his narrative of civil war. In late antiquity, Claudian deploys Ovidian models of cosmic process and time as part of his vocabulary of imperial panegyric, while in some of his carmina minora he elaborates a scientific paradoxography in an Ovidian key. In late antiquity, Ovidian cosmogony was also used by Christian poets to lend a philosophical coloring to versifications of the creation story of Genesis, to be followed by early modern hexaemeral poets (Du Bartas, and his English translator Josuah Sylvester). Edmund Spenser, like other early modern poets and translators, takes seriously the Ovidian Pythagoras’ pronouncements on mutability. As late as the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope draws on the Speech of Pythagoras in his philosophical Essay on Man.