Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Poetry of Ovid

Childbirth is one of life’s most fundamental processes, and how we think about reproduction is key to how we think about and structure society. What constitutes ‘legitimate’ sex and birth? How do we structure families, inheritance, dynasties, nations? Who has power over reproduction: the mother, the father – or the state? My doctoral thesis interrogates these vital questions within the poetry of Ovid, a central figure in contemporary conversations around gender and the Classics. Although discussion of women in Ovid has long concentrated primarily on rape, his focus on childbirth is unique within Latin poetry, offering us some of our earliest and most detailed narratives of pregnancy, childbirth and abortion. However, scholarship is yet to fully appreciate the importance of childbirth within Ovid’s poetry. My thesis is both the first study of maternity across the whole Ovidian corpus and the first to highlight his distinctive engagement with the physical processes of pregnancy and parturition. Maternity is an especially crucial topic of research, for during Ovid’s time childbirth was highly prominent within Roman politics. Augustus drew heavily on the rhetoric of reproduction as he refashioned the Republic into a hereditary dynasty and staged a ‘rebirth’ of Rome after the civil wars. My thesis therefore focuses on Ovid’s intervention in wider Augustan narratives around birth, taking inspiration from the narratological approach to reading Augustus’ marriage laws pioneered by Liveley and Shaw (2020). I explore, in turn, aspects of Ovid’s engagement with the four main strands of Augustan discourse around reproduction – the leges Iuliae, Augustus’ ‘rhetoric of rebirth’ after the civil wars, his emphasis on patrilineal succession, and his portrayal of himself as pater patriae. The first chapter, ‘Genre, Generation and the Birth of Rome’, considers Ovid’s engagement with the Augustan marriage laws. While this is a rich and much studied topic, my discussion focuses on the less well-explored angle of genre, arguing that the long-debated generic tensions of the Fasti can be examined anew through the lens of reproduction. Focusing on Ovid’s treatment of Ilia and the Sabine women, I argue that Ovid uses pregnancy to embody the ‘weightiness’ of epic and bring the epic theme of genealogy into dialogue with the elegiac theme of sex, entangling Rome’s ‘founding mothers’ in adulterous, elegiac sexuality. Ovid’s generic play thus challenges the juxtaposition of childbirth, chastity, and ancestral values that lay at the core of Augustus’ marriage laws. The second chapter, ‘Creation, Destruction and Mother Earth’, reads Ovid’s poetry against Augustus’ ‘rhetoric of rebirth’, which joined agricultural fertility, female fertility and peace to depict Rome as born again after the violence of the civil wars. I consider first the theme of time, arguing that Ovid emphasises spring as the season of birth and beginnings to suggest that the calendrical reforms of Julius Caesar and Augustus are out of step with the ‘temporality of childbirth’ that formed the basis of Romulus’ legendary calendar. I then explore the mother earth motif across the Metamorphoses and the Fasti to argue that Ovid does not emphasise peaceful, nurturing fertility, but instead highlights the violent, uncontrollable power that mothers can wield through abortion or infanticide. My third chapter, ‘Maternity, Materiality and Apotheosis’, explores the Metamorphoses against the conceptual intertwining of maternity and physical matter in classical thought. I demonstrate that Ovid both participates in and disrupts this tradition, constructing the mother as still closely related to the body, but also as far more than passive matter. Notably, Ovid figures the birthing body as the one point of certainty within the reproductive process. Tracing the theme of apotheosis throughout the Metamorphoses, I bring these themes into dialogue with Augustus’ attempts to fashion himself as the son, or even replica, of a newly deified Julius Caesar, and to found a new dynasty based on hereditary succession. The final chapter, ‘Poetry, (Pro)creation and the Pater Patriae’, explores how Ovid characterises women’s reproductive power as artistically creative as well as destructive, breaking down traditional divisions between men’s spiritual creativity and women’s physical procreativity. I focus particularly on the Tristia, examining how Ovid uses parenthood metaphors to describe his own artistic labour and suggesting that the exiled Ovid identifies with maternal suffering as he ‘births’ his poems, constructing a poetic persona that is simultaneously masculine and feminine. I then use the lens of childbirth to reassess a central question of the Tristia: who has power over a text? We will see that Ovid unexpectedly situates control over literary ‘offspring’ with the mother rather than the father, overturning traditional Roman power dynamics and challenging the authority of Augustus as pater patriae. I conclude with a close reading of Ovid’s address to a fecund female poet, Perilla, in Tristia 3.7, as he meditates on the future of his poetry. While the thread connecting all four chapters is how the physical process of birth offers a new perspective on the longstanding debate on the relationship between Ovidian and Augustan discourse, I also seek to show that Ovid’s polemical construction of birth has significant ramifications for other fundamental themes within his poetry. Ranging across gender, genre, time, ecology, materiality, religion, philosophy and poetics as well as politics, this thesis highlights the hitherto unacknowledged importance of childbirth to all aspects of Ovid’s body-centred poetic ‘corpus’.

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

• Myatt, Frances

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hardie, Philip

• Ovid
• Pregnancy
• Childbirth
• Maternity
• Reproduction
• Augustus
• Politics
• Rome

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2b91f19f-1694-4f01-97c6-994e6f47d6e0/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0009-0009-5838-4290

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/391828