Rivers and poetic genres in Ovid
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Abstract
Starting from the perspective of the structures of poetic genres, and how the poet Ovid (43 BC – 17/18 AD) explores diverse effects of tradition, transgression and expansion of these structures, this research seeks to analyse rivers by comparing their representations at different moments in Ovid's work. In it, rivers can perform various functions, as patches of scenery, entries in catalogues, or even as characters and narrators, although, in general, they are regulated by the code required by the poetic genre. Thus, we find in Amores 3.6 a river in the mode of erotic elegy, in which the watercourse is established as the cause of separation between lover and beloved and, consequently, as the cause of lament. In the Metamorphoses, whether in the extensive catalogue of Book 2 or in the autodiegetic episode of Achelous between Books 8 and 9, rivers are used in epic modulation: they are adventurous and challenging environments, which can fight, speak and metamorphose. In Tristia, it is the Danube River's turn to figure prominently, functioning as a river opposite to the expected nature of rivers and as a metaphor for the inert and desolate state of the poetic persona of the exilic elegy. An ecocritical reading is also added to the comparison of formal criteria, which, in synchrony with the structural perspective of genres, can offer new layers of understanding of these passages, as well as deepen discussions, still incipient, about the conceptions and uses of natural (or non-human) elements in classical Latin poetry and their possible effects in the present day.
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