Variatio in the myth of Echo and Narcissus, in the Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as an exercise by a lascivus poet

• Autor(a) principal: Nascimento, Dreykon Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Leite, Leni Ribeiro, Paulino da Silva, Camilla Ferreira
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Codex : Revista de Estudos Clássicos
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/CODEX/article/view/31795
• topic: Classical Studies; Ovid; Lasciv; Metamorphoses; Variatio; Roman erotic elegy; Letras; Literaturas Clássicas; Ovídio. Lasciv. Metamorfoses. Variatio. Elegia erótica romana

Quintilian, in several passages of his Institutio oratoria (IV, 1, 77; X, 1, 88-9; X, 1, 93), categorizes Ovid and his works of being excessively lascivi. Unlike Horace, however, who exercised literary criticism while also occupying the social position of a poet in the Augustan principate, Quintilian exercises it in an exclusive position as an orator, on behalf of a solid rhetorical institution focused mainly on the public forum. Thus, not believing that lascivus is just a word whose meaning is easily located in a latin dictionary, we investigate in the present work the objectively rhetorical value underlying the term, and whether it is suitable or not for the Ovidian work, analyzing the variatio or the generic variation worked on by Ovid, above all, in the myth of Eco and Narcissus, present in book 3 of Metamorphoses. Our analysis is based on studies by Barchiesi (2006), Farrell (2009), Fedeli (2010), Fonseca (2015), Feldherr (2006), Harrison (2006), Hutchinson (2013), Keith (2002), Oliva Neto (2013), Pavlock (2009) Perutelli (2010), Vansan (2016) among others on the use of poetic genres in Ovid, and with Feldherr studies’ (2006) and Fox (2007) on the relationship between rhetoric and literature, Quintilian’s position and under which instance of power he speaks when he labels Ovid as lascivus.