What sort of clues does Ovid give about his poetic aims in the Metamorphoses? Most clearly, there is his confident prediction in the epilogue that per omnia saecula fama . . .vivam (15. 878-79). It is a prediction that has been amply vindicated in the course of the centuries. The reasons, therefore, for the appeal of Ovid's narrative should be a major focus of Ovidian scholarship and, in his Rom: Spiegel Europas, Michael von Albrecht has provided a paradigm of how to deal with such a theme on an even larger scale. I note with some regret that such range of humanistic interest is becoming increasingly rare in classical studies in general and the interpretation of Roman poetry in particular. Instead, there is a great deal more of arid intellectualizing-intelligent discussions, to be sure, and quite different from the mustiness of Altphilologie, but they fall short of explaining why readers over centuries would be drawn to a particular work of literature time and again.

Recent discussions of the Metamorphoses exemplify the situation. Scholarly obsession with genre, for instance, straightway leads to the claim that Ovid must have been obsessed with it also. ¹ A corollary and paradoxical phenomenon is that intentionalism is emphatically granted to an ancient author for the choice of genre or style, but, in this saga of Morte Dauteur, is denied him in all other ways, including choice and treatment of the poetic material or content, which amount only to a "text." The self-willed privileging of secondary over primary aspects is not entirely unrelated to classics being of rather secondary importance in many places, including educational systems and public life.

My following brief analysis of what can be considered the major poetological passages in the Metamorphoses should be viewed against this backdrop. Poetological interpretation has become quite fashionable. ² There is no doubt that Ovid delineates, suggests, and gives hints about the nature of his poetic endeavor and of the poet. It is legitimate to investigate his procedure and to probe its boundaries. The investigation needs to be complemented, however, by the awareness that this is only one aspect of the Metamorphoses. While it is related to Ovid's poetic self-consciousness and self-confidence, it is also subordinated to Ovid's larger goal of making his poem live on in eternity.

In all its brevity-Ovid could be concise when he wanted to-the proem is programmatic. ² Nova hints a the new undertaking: a carmen that is both perpetuum in the epic tradition and deductum in the Alexandrian manner. The allusion to this combination of traditions is continued by the appeal to the gods, which is a variation of the Homeric invocation of the Muse, and by the emphasis on the first person (coeptis . . . meis, mea tempora), which extends the matter-of-fact mnhsomai of Apollonius (Arg. 1.2). Lastly, the brevity of the proem owes more to Hellenistic epics than Homer's or Vergil's, but the anticipatory reference to the content places the poem into a more comprehensive perspective: Apollonius' arxomenow seo, Foibe yields to prima ab origine mundi, along with the invocation of the gods in general (di), and not just one.

Heinz Hofmann has argued that since the juxtaposition of Homer and Callimachus already occurred in Ennius, "no contemporary reader of Ovid would have taken this combination as serious, but would have seen it as an ironic allusion to pater Ennius and the Annales. Ovid was thus jokingly claiming to be reviving a tradition which could match Vergil's outspokenly Homeric stance by invoking the only possible alternative model." ⁴ I doubt that this is the correct interpretation. For Ovid immediately proceeds to provide an illustration of his poetic program: his account of the cosmogony is an amalgam of both Homeric and Hellenistic traditions. The Homeric aspect has been elucidated well by Stephen Wheeler, who has shown that its suggestive model is Homer's description of the shield of Achilles; by Ovid's time there had been a joining of philosophy and poetry in in the interpretation of the shield made by Hephaestus, which had come to be considered as an allegory of the creation of the universe by a demiurge. ⁵ The reference to Homer, and to his creativity, is vital; as I have pointed out elsewhere, ⁶ Ovid could lay claim to being an even truer successor to Homer than Vergil. Even more than the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses reunited all the literary streams that had flowed from Homer, the "Ocean." At the same time, Ovid integrates Callimachean inspirations into his cosmogony. ⁷

None of these inspirations are mutually exclusive: archaic Greek poetry was mediated to the Latin poets through the culture of Hellenistic Greece, ⁸ and the positive attitude of Callimachus and his followers toward Homer and, of course, Hesiod, is well attested. ⁹ The essence of Ovid's poetic program, which he clearly lays out at the beginning of his masterwork, is that it is all-encompassing. It is to be a grand mixtum compositum, a typically Augustan creation. ¹⁰ As I pointed out in my preamble, it would be far too limiting to consider this phenomenon only in terms of literary style, traditions, and genres. Rather, form follows content. The Metamorphoses is a kaleidoscope of many human (and divine) experiences, emotions, and vicissitudes. The variety and mutability of the subject find their counterpart in the variety and flux of the literary form.

This basic perspective suggests prudent limits to defining of Ovid's creative effort mainly in terms of casting a story, if not the entire poem, in the form of one genre or the other. The much discussed episode of the contest between the Pierides and the Muses in Book 5 is a good example.

Ever since Richard Heinze, the story of the raptus Proserpinae has become the locus classicus for applying taxonomies of genre He pronounced the version in the Fasti (4.471ff.) to be "elegiac," whereas its counterpart in the Metamorphoses was "epic." The thesis has had sua fata: it has been variously accepted, rejected, modified, and warmed up again with some slight aggiornamento. There is neither space nor need here to recapitulate the various arguments. The considerable scholarly disagreement is itself proof that both of Ovid's versions defy the attempt to impose tidy categorization.

Rather, it is time to add some other perspectives. The overall disposition of Ovid's poetological references is deliberate rather the accidental. They occur every five books: at the beginning of Book 1, in Book 5, in Book 10 (Orpheus and Pygmalion), and in Book 15 (Pythagoras and the sphragis); they are complemented by general similarities in the structure of motifs and narration of Books 5,10, and 15. ¹¹ Was Ovid mimicking the pentadic arrangement of the major historical work of Augustus' time, which began ab urbe condita and reached to his day? More significantly, the sequence of the poetic program appears as follows. In Book 1, as we have seen, Ovid places himself in the tradition of both archaic and Alexandrian poetry. In Book 5, Ovid claims his place vis-a-vis-Ovid. The point of the contrast between the two Proserpina stories is not elegiac vs. epic or "slightly less than epic," ¹² but another demonstration of the ability to referre idem aliter (A.A. 2.128), a cornerstone in the Ovidian poetic program. In the Orpheus story in Book 10, the poetological referent is Vergil while part of Ovid's intention (I use the word unashamedly) in the speech of Pythagoras is a comparison with Lucretius and scientific/philosophical poetry. I will comment on these instances shortly, after making a few more observations on Book 5.

Can we press the juxtaposition and judgment of the stories of the Pierides and the Muses in terms of contrasting poetic programs that tell us something about Ovid's aesthetic? ¹³ Perhaps, if we frame the discussion more elastically than in terms of genres. Some critics, as we have seen, regard the Muses' account at least of Proserpina as epic or slightly less. Before we consider Ovid's casting of the episode as a manifesto, however oblique, for the Metamorphoses, we need to enlarge the perspective to the beginning of the book, the long account (5.1-249)-even longer than the story of Proserpina-of Perseus' battle against Phineus. There is no doubt that this is meant to be a piece from the epic tradition, reges et proelia. It is hardly, however, "straight" epic: it is shot through with hyperboles, grotesquely humorous vignettes, absurdities, visually over-explicit scenes, and deliberate incongruities. The whole episode, dealing with a vengeful jilted fiancé, a new and legitimate suitor, and a weak father of the bride, is a take-off on the story of Turnus, Aeneas, and Latinus, as has been well noted. ¹⁴ It is closer to epic parody than to epic. It conveys more than one hint that traditional epic is not viable. Despite facundia prisca, it degenerates into rauca garrulitas studiumque inmane loquendi (5.677f.); the concluding lines of the book can be read as a comment on its beginning as well as on the Pierides. It is unlikely, then, that the story of Proserpina, which follows upon a lengthy episode that demonstrates the futility of epic, should be read as Ovid's proclamation of epic self-consciousness.

Further considerations impede. Calliope's song, related by una sororum, is hardly a paradigm of bel canto; it "is riddled with infelicities, glaringly so in organization and thematic emphasis." ¹⁵ While she is the Muse of epic, the composition of her song "is typical of neoteric practice; poets abandoned the balance and order of traditional epic in favour of an apparent, and sometimes even actual, disorder, discontinuity, and lack of proportion." ¹⁶ As in the following story of Arachne, the decisive reason for the punishment of the Pierides is the subject-matter of their song and not the poetic technique. Both the Pierides and Arachne depict the turpitudo of the gods. Who was Ovid to criticize them? Questions, then, are raised in the first place about the gods and, secondarily, about poetry; characterizations of the Pierides as imitantes omnia (5.299) and Calliope's song as doctos cantus (5.662) are a spur to reflection about the nature of their poetry.

Orpheus' reference to the story of Proserpina (10.28: famaque si veteris non est mentita rapinae) enhances the connection between the contexts of Books 5 and 10 and their poetological aspects. As Stephen Hinds aptly remarked at the very conclusion of his monograph, "the story of the rape has not yet left Ovid's study; but the story of its reception has already begun." ¹⁷ Two observations are apropos that bear on the issue of genre in Ovid's work and Roman poetry in general. The first is that genre is a matter of reception and develops through reception. Ipso facto, the literary work that is the first example of a genre comes into being when that genre does not yet exist. In the astute formulation of Ruurd Nauta: ¹⁸

Erst wenn sich ihm andere Werke anschließen, entsteht eine "historische Familie," deren "Familienähnlichkeiten" zunächst davon bestimmt werden, welche Merkmale des ersten Werkes die späteren Werke aufgreifen. Anders ausgedrückt: die Gattung und auch die gattungshafte Identität des ersten Werkes entstehen erst in einem Prozeß der Rezeption.

At what point, therefore, are we justified to use the term "genre"? How many topoi does it take to constitute a genre? We should not look to Ovid for specific answers: Ovid's poetological discourse is suggestive rather than explicit.

Still, and this is my second point, the Orpheus story in particular illustrates that we are better off, even for heuristic purposes, looking at la traccia del modello: ¹⁹ "Instead of genre criticism, the ancients practiced model criticism. Their allegiances and affiliations connect, not with a mode or kind, but with a father, a personal guide." ²⁰ In his Orpheus, Ovid relates to Vergil, and not to a one genre or the other. We have to be careful not to overstate the notion that in most stories of the Metamorphoses, and the Metamorphoses in general, Ovid is mindful of generic conventions when, in fact, he adapts, freely elaborates, changes, and plays with motifs found in the versions of previous, individual authors.

The wide variety of responses to Ovid's Orpheus²¹ illustrates the need for interpretation in terms of reception aesthetics and reader response rather than literary categories. The very fact of multiple and divergent receptions of Ovid's presentation of Orpheus is an impulse to reflection on Ovid's poetic aims and probably was intended that way. Modern literary theory, when it does not deny authorial intentions, sometimes tends to draw too rigid a line between those intentions (cf. Plato, Phaedrus 275E) and reader responses. ²² Ovid exhibits a different paradigm: he deliberately presents characters and situations in such a way that they are meant to evoke a variety of reactions.

It is in this fundamental sense that his Orpheus can be read poetologically. Related perspectives are similarly evident. One of the many intentional contrasts with Vergil's version is that Ovid has Orpheus recite his actual song to the powers of the underworld (10.17-39). Judgments about the artistic and emotional merits of this song have differed widely. It is not captious to discern prosaic and bathetic elements in it. What matters is that it is effective: obviously, the audience of exsangues anima (10.41) found it much more to its liking than we might or, for that matter, sophisticated Roman connoisseurs of Vergil. Ovid clearly suggests there are different audiences with different sensibilities-later authors overwhelmingly considered the Ovidian version of the Orpheus story "ein Hoheslied der Liebe" and preferred it to Vergil's²³-and he links the song of Orpheus with the speech of Pythagoras by having the latter, too, address coetus silentum (15.66). Furthermore, there is a constant play against the Vergilian model. This constitutes a central thematic link of Orpheus with the rest of the Metamorphoses: the Metamorphoses, in many ways, is Ovid's dialogue with Vergil, and it takes places here in a singularly concentrated form. And, quite fittingly, Ovid chose a Vergilian passage that also has roots in Homer; ²⁴ the double allusion is reflective of Ovid's poetic aims. All at the same time, the more extended song of Orpheus, i.e. the tales he narrates in Book 10, incorporates many of "the stylistic devices that we have come to see as characteristic of the Metamorphoses. The figure of Orpheus as a learned poet in the Alexandrian manner . . . is by this time virtually indistinguishable from Ovid himself." ²⁵

Further details enhance the equation. Like Ovid, Orpheus knows how to compose both plectro graviore (10.150)-besides, Ovid at least pretended (Am. 2.1.11-16, Trist. 2.333-38) to have tinkered with the paradigm mentioned by Orpheus, a gigantomachy-and leviore lyra (10.152). And while Orpheus does not follow through on his announced program of singing about pueros . . . dilectos superis inconcessisque puellas ignibus attonitas (10.152-54), Ovid simply leaves himself more elasticity from the very beginning (1.1-4). If we wanted to put it somewhat more trendily: Orpheus announces boundaries only to transgress them, a procedure that is central to the poetics of the Metamorphoses.

These aspects are more relevant to Ovidian poetology than any attempts to cast Orpheus in the role of the idealized singer which, with the typical fondness of classical scholars for convenient antinomies, has promptly been turned inside out into that of the (deservedly) failed artist and lover. Similar considerations apply to Pygmalion. Over a half century ago, Hermann Fränkel could view the story, in an uncomplicated way, as "one of the finest apologues on the marvel of creative imagination" and equate Pygmalion's deed with Ovid's revivification of mythology, "to stir the pulse of warm blood in those ivory statues." ²⁶ More recently, John Elsner has updated essentially the same message for the 1990's: Pygmalion's creative act of viewing is a metaphor for the reader's creative act of "how you can read the Metamorphoses."²⁷ There is more to it, and there is less. Like Orpheus, Pygmalion has his shortcomings. He is self-absorbed, not to say narcissistic. By extending the reader's horizon to the story of Narcissus, ²⁸ Ovid re-emphasizes the importance of the reader's perception (or reception) as contrasted with the perception (or, in this case, self-perception) of the characters. For instance, error at 3.447 and fallis at 3.454 have a different meaning for the reader and for Narcissus. ²⁹ As an individual, then, Pygmalion is not idealized; in particular, his busy accumulation of gifts for his lifeless puella takes both him and this elegiac motif ad absurdum. Or, before we proclaim his indirect plea to Venus (non ausus 'eburnea virgo' dicere, Pygmalion 'similis mea' dixit 'eburnae,' 10.275f.) as the epitome of sensitivity, we need only read on to the Myrrha story: qualem optet habere virum. 'similem tibi' dixit (10.363f.), where tibi refers to her father (the line of thought is continued in lines 440f.:quaesitis virginis annis 'par' ait 'est Myrrhae').

Rather, the Pygmalion story comments on Ovid's poetics by being a fulcrum of the dynamic tension, which is so central to the Metamorphoses and, for that matter, Ovid's elegiac poetry, between allowance for sentiment and self-conscious literary stylization. ³⁰ It is a creative tension that invites creative reception. Such a reception did take place³¹ and, once more, cannot be explained by academic notions such as Ovid's preoccupation with genre and its supposed boundaries.

I have recently discussed the function of Pythagoras' speech elsewhere³² and will therefore content myself with a brief summary and some additional observations.

It is typical of Ovid that Pythagoras' discourse has multiple purposes, among them several comments on his poetic aims. He uses Pythagoras' speech to allude to Ennius, Empedocles, ³³ and, in particular, Lucretius. Lucretius's attitude to myth was not simply demythologization. Rather, he wanted to be both an Epicurean and a poet. Being a poet meant that he had to use myth, precisely one of the reasons for which Epicurus seems to have rejected poetry. Lucretius proceeded to combine the two hitherto irreconcilables by retaining myth for its power to charm and attract readers and by pointing out the vera ratio of a given myth. "The mythological passages in the DRN," therefore, "act as a powerful polemical and didactic tool: at one and the same time, Lucretius is able to dispose of rival theories of myth satisfactorily by substituting his own account of its origins and nature; and to use myth didactically to illustrate and enhance his own argumentation." ³⁴

In his Pythagoras, Ovid reverses the procedure: he appropriates "philosophy" only to show, especially in the long catalogue of paradoxa and thaumasta (15.259-452), that the philosophical/scientific mode of explanation is no better than the mythical one. For Ovid, there is no vera ratio of myth in the Lucretian sense and serious philosophy is next to non-existent in Pythagoras' discourse. Throughout, Ovid mimics and even outdoes Lucretius in didactic pronouncements and protreptic injunctions. The disjunction between this stylistic mode and the minimalism of philosophical content could not be greater. And while Pythagoras addresses a similar audience, coetus silentum, as Orpheus, this time nothing is said about the effectiveness of the speech. In fact, Ovid attributes Numa's institutions to his inspiration by Egeria and the Camenae, and not Pythagoras. At the same time, Ovid uses the speech of Pythagoras, by way of contrast, to call attention to his own and much livelier narrative style in the Metamorphoses. He makes us aware of what he could have done, in terms of both form and content, but chose not to do. Befitting the archetypal singer Orpheus, Ovid calls him vates time and again (10.13, 82, 89, 143, 11.2). Pythagoras, the archetypal philosopher-according to a widespread tradition in antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with being the eurethw of the word filosofow-distrusts such vates: the underworld (to which Orpheus descended and which Ovid described with relish in Book 4, contrasting all the way with Vergil) is materies vatum, falsi pericula mundi (15.154). Pronouncements of vates -the very source that Lucretius, too, impugns for failing to come up with vera ratio-need to be taken cum grano salis: nisi vatibus omnis eripienda fides (10.282f.). vates predict the rise of Rome (15.453), a city which Ovid promptly integrates into a catalogue of cities that have risen and fallen. In the Fasti, he speaks of mendacia vatum (6.253). But there is one exception (Met. 15.878f.):

perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.

Their prophecy, for once, will be truthful precisely because Ovid, in his maius opus, declined to join in the traditional claim of the vates to have revealed the truth (Trist. 2.63f.). He lays claim only to fictions which, in their own way, tell us even more about the human condition. Fittingly, this is Ovid's ultimate insight into his own poetry.

1 S. Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone. Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge 1987) 115ff. I follow the common-sensical review by W.S. Anderson in Gnomon 61 (1989) 356-58, esp. 357: "It is not Ovid nor his Roman reader who was obsessed with elegiac and epic constraints, and neither poem [i.e. the Fasti and the Met.] is so obsessed: the 'obsession' belongs to Heinze and those who still argue, pro and con, with this artificial problem."

2 Cf. E. Fantham, "Strengths and Weaknesses of Current Ovidian Criticism," in K. Galinsky, ed., The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics? (Frankfurt/New York 1992) 196f. I have not yet been able to consult L. Spahlinger, Ars latet arte sua. Untersuchungen zur Poetologie in den Metamorphosen Ovids (Stuttgart/Leipzig 1996).

3 Cf. Bömer, ad loc. and E.J. Kenney's preface, pp. xiv -xv, to A.D. Melville's translation (Oxford 1986).

4 "Ovid's Metamorphoses: Carmen Perpetuum, Carmen Deductum," PLLS 5 (1985) 224.

5 S. Wheeler, "Imago Mundi: Another View of the Creation in Ovids' Metamorphoses," AJP 116 (1995) 95ff.

6 Augustan Culture (Princeton 1996) 262.

7 See M. Helzle, "Ovid's Cosmogony. Metamorphoses 1.5-88 and the traditions of ancient poetry," PLLS 7 (1993) 123-34. The argument is not considered by K. S. Myers, Ovid's Causes. Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses (Ann Arbor 1994) who, therefore, posits a pivotal antinomy between Hesiodic cosmogony and Callimachean aetiology.

8 See, e.g., the concise remarks of D. Feeney, "Horace and the Greek Lyric Poets," in N. Rudd, ed., Horace 2000: A Celebration (Oxford 1993) 44.

9 Helzle (above, note 6), esp. 133 n. 39.

10 See Galinsky (note 5, above), esp. chapter 7.

11 A. Bartenbach, Motiv- und Erzählstruktur in Ovids Metamorphosen (Frankfurt/New York 1990).

12 Hinds (note 1, above) 131.

13 Cf. Hofmann (note 4, above) 228-30.

14 See, e.g., Bömer, ad loc.

15 Anderson (note 1, above) 358; further details in his new commentary on Met. 1-5 (Norman 1997).

16 Hofmann (note 4, above) 229

. 17 Hinds (above, note 1) 135.

18 "Gattungsgeschichte als Rezeptionsgeschichte am Beispiel der Entstehung der Bukolik," Antike und Abendland 36 (1990) 120.

19 A. Barchiesi's title for his stimulating study of some of Vergil's adaptations from Homer (Pisa 1984).

20 T.G. Rosenmeyer, 'Ancient Literary Genres: A Mirage," Yearbook of Comp. and General Literature 34 (1985) 81f. For further discussion, cf. the exchange of views between G.B. Conte and Jasper Griffin in Galinsky (note 2, above) 104-36

. 21 Good summaries and discussion by E.W. Leach, "Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid's Metamorphoses," Ramus 3 (1974) 120-26; P. E. Knox, Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and the Tradition of Augustan Poetry (Cambridge 1986) 48-64; W.S. Anderson, "The Orpheus of Vergil and Ovid: flebile nescio quid," in J. Warden, Orpheus. The Metamorphoses of a Myth (Toronto 1982) 25-50; C. Segal, Orpheus. The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore 1989) 54-94.

22 Cf. my discussion "Intención autorial y libertad de recepción en el arte y poesía augustea," Auster. Revista del Centro de Estudios Latinos. Universidad Nacional de La Plata 1 (1996) 15-31.

23 F. Bömer, P. Ovidius Naso. Metamorphosen Buch X-XI (Heidelberg 1980) 13.

24 See J. Farrell, Vergil's Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (New York 1991) 320-24 with reference to Vergil's description of Eurydice.

25 Knox (note 22, above) 61f

26 Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds (Berkeley 1945) 96.

27 "Visual Mimesis and the Myth of the Real: Ovid's Pygmalion as a Viewer," Ramus 20 (1991) 166.

28 G. Rosati, Narciso e Pigmalione. Illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (Florence 1983).

29 Rosati (note 28, above) 43f.

30 Cf. Segal (note 21, above) 84.

31 H. Dörrie, Pygmalion. Ein Impuls Ovids und seine Wirkungen bis in die Gegenwart (Opladen 1974).

32 Papers of the International Leeds Latin Seminar 10 (1997).

33 P. Hardie, "The Speech of Pythagoras in Ovid's Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean Epos," CQ 45 (1995) 204-14.

34 M. Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge 1994) 230. Galinsky