tu face nescio quos esto contentus amores
inritare tua, nec laudes adsere nostras!' 1.461-2
One of the very Italian things about Ovid is his sprezzatura -- his art of concealing art. Every time we blithely skate from one tale to the next as though we were changing channels on TV, we run the risk of missing some degree of pertinence arising from the relation of one tale to the next.At least we might ask, as we run, say, from the tale of the flood in Metamorphoses 1 to that of Apollo slaying the Python to the vivid pursuit of Daphne, whether there is some connection to be made, some relation worth considering, between these tales. Are they just individual items on a chain, or could they form segments of a larger semantic structure?
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| Heracles & Hydra: Louvre |
