Environmental Change in Ovid's Poetry

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 argues that the "Medicamina Faciei Femineae" and the "Ars Amatoria" use detailed attention to the technical procedure of cosmetics, as well as associated processes of resource extraction, to blur the distinction between urban and rustic forms of cultivation. The second chapter argues that the "Metamorphoses" displaces elements of agricultural and technological processes into pre- or non-agricultural contexts, focusing especially on the figures of the serpent at the foundation of Thebes and Typhoeus at the rape of Proserpina. The third chapter argues that Ovid uses the gradual arrival of spring over the course of the "Fasti" as an opportunity to observe the arts of civilisation caught between stages of development. The fourth chapter provides a detailed study of "Tristia" 3.10, Ovid’s most detailed picture of his exilic surroundings in Tomis. It argues that Ovid’s description of this region is in fact a distorted map of Rome, in which Ovid explores similarities between the features of a cityscape and a barren wasteland. The conclusion then reflects on the cumulative effect of Ovid’s deconstructions of culture-history and briefly traces their reception in a work of 21st-century eco-fiction (Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road").

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Freeman, William

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gowers, Emily

• Agriculture
• Augustan Poetry
• Ecocriticism
• Ecology
• Environment
• Latin Literature
• Nature
• Ovid

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4a62602b-7043-4691-8901-b6b7ae680c13/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122104

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/390551