Ovid in Lucan: The Poetics of Instability
In: Brill's Companion to LucanSearch for other papers by Alison Keith in
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After Vergil’s Aeneid, no text so thoroughly informed the early imperial Roman literary imagination as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (published 8 AD). This chapter examines the impact of the literary and imperial programs of the Metamorphoses on Lucan’s civil war poem, for the Bellum Ciuile is the first example of largescale negotiation of the Aeneid through the lens of the Metamorphoses. I argue that Lucan draws on Ovidian subjects, themes and poetic techniques to trace fissures in the optimistic Virgilian epic paradigm.