Environmental Change in Ovid's Poetry
type: CreativeWork
description: What does Ovid tell us about how humans have changed the world? This thesis argues that a narrative of culture’s impact on nature—habitually invoked by scholars to describe this process—does not do justice to the subtlety and complexity of Ovid’s poetry. Reading Ovid requires thinking of "cultivation" (Latin, "cultus") as an emergent and unstable process of negotiation with nonhumans (plants, animals, minerals, the land, and the gods). The thesis shows that, throughout his career, Ovid displays a persistent fascination with the liminal spaces of art’s emergence and disintegration, continually staging scenarios in which practices of cultivation turn out to repeat primal behaviours, or even natural phenomena. In making this argument, the thesis draws on a body of writing in the social sciences, philosophy, and literary theory, known as “ecocriticism”, which challenges readers to scrutinise their normal ways of talking and thinking about relationships between humans and nonhumans. I use ecocriticism to reveal in unprecedented detail Ovid’s nuanced understanding of such interspecies relationships, providing the first sustained analysis of environmental themes throughout his entire oeuvre. The introduction to this thesis reviews previous arguments for and against the compatibility of Ovid’s poetry with current ecological thought. It then grounds these arguments in the literature, philosophy, and poetry of the Augustan period. In particular, I note that writers of this period were experimenting with the idea of starting civilisation again—a notion that Ovid is usually thought to reject. I argue that Ovid does, in fact, explore connections between a civilised and a primitive condition, though these connections rarely entail a desirable kind of cultural regeneration. The next four chapters examine in sequence portrayals of the arrival and collapse of cultivation in Ovid's didactic poetry on cosmetics, the "Metamorphoses", the "Fasti", and the "Tristia". The first chapter ar…
abstract: What does Ovid tell us about how humans have changed the world? This thesis argues that a narrative of culture’s impact on nature—habitually invoked by scholars to describe this process—does not do justice to the subtlety and complexity of Ovid’s poetry. Reading Ovid requires thinking of "cultivation" (Latin, "cultus") as an emergent and unstable process of negotiation with nonhumans (plants, animals, minerals, the land, and the gods). The thesis shows that, throughout his career, Ovid displays a persistent fascination with the liminal spaces of art’s emergence and disintegration, continually staging scenarios in which practices of cultivation turn out to repeat primal behaviours, or even natural phenomena. In making this argument, the thesis draws on a body of writing in the social sciences, philosophy, and literary theory, known as “ecocriticism”, which challenges readers to scrutinise their normal ways of talking and thinking about relationships between humans and nonhumans. I use ecocriticism to reveal in unprecedented detail Ovid’s nuanced understanding of such interspecies relationships, providing the first sustained analysis of environmental themes throughout his entire oeuvre. The introduction to this thesis reviews previous arguments for and against the compatibility of Ovid’s poetry with current ecological thought. It then grounds these arguments in the literature, philosophy, and poetry of the Augustan period. In particular, I note that writers of this period were experimenting with the idea of starting civilisation again—a notion that Ovid is usually thought to reject. I argue that Ovid does, in fact, explore connections between a civilised and a primitive condition, though these connections rarely entail a desirable kind of cultural regeneration. The next four chapters examine in sequence portrayals of the arrival and collapse of cultivation in Ovid's didactic poetry on cosmetics, the "Metamorphoses", the "Fasti", and the "Tristia". The first chapter ar…
author: Freeman, William
language: eng
keywords: Agriculture, Augustan Poetry, Ecocriticism, Ecology, Environment, Latin Literature, Nature, Ovid
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4a62602b-7043-4691-8901-b6b7ae680c13/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-01-28
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:24Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.122104