Tod und Erklärung: Ovid on the Death of Julius Caesar (Met. 15.745–851)

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Katharina Volk

Yayın yılı:

2023

Dil:

de

This chapter treats one of the most idiosyncratic and bizarre episodes of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a poem that, after all, begins with the programmatic words in nova and is generally not lacking in the unheard-of and outlandish department. I focus on Ovid's narrative of the death and apotheosis of Julius Caesar, a tale that occurs towards the very end of the poem.1 Taking up over a hundred lines, the Caesar episode features the last proper metamorphosis of the Metamorphoses, and the only one that happens to a historical character. The events recounted truly bring the poem ad mea tempora, "to my own time," as the poet had announced in the proem: Caesar died in 44, the year before Ovid was born, and while the deified Julius officially passes the baton to Augustus, there is also a sense that the poet is the one taking over once history has been transformed into the present. The dynastic theme features prominently, in all its ambiguities: the episode is presented as an extended praeteritio since Caesar's main claim to fame, so the poet, is to have fathered Augustus. The father's apotheosis is necessary, because the son needs a divine parent, and the great Julius' assumption into heaven is thus but the trailer for the anticipated main attraction, the turning into a god of his adoptee. This, however, is not how the poem ends. Rather than an unequal pair, Caesar and Augustus turn out to be but the first two cola of a triumphant tricolon crescens, which culminates in the prophecy of …

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