• 1 Ventum est ad summa naturae exemplorumque per rerum ordinem, et ipsum sua sponte occurrit inmensum (...)
• 2 As I was reminded by Margaret Graver, the toolbox of these piscine Houdinis could also be interpret (...)

1For Pliny, the depths of the sea represent the quintessence of nature’s strangeness. The ‘hidden potency’ revealed in ocean creatures evokes the subversive powers of magic and strains the reader’s credulity.1 First in his list of marine wonders, the tiny remora, ἐχενηΐϛ (‘shipholder’), despite its small size, overcomes nature’s most powerful forces in a way that all human technology cannot by retaining ships in storms that would rip up the strongest cables and anchors (HN 32.2–6), and the mere sight of a female sea hare can cause pregnant women to miscarry, disrupting the existentially natural process of birth (HN 32.8–9). One of Pliny’s sources for this book’s marvels will turn out to be Ovid himself, or at least the Halieutica Pliny believed was his: Mihi videntur mira et quae Ovidius prodidit piscium ingenia in eo volumine, quod halieuticon inscribitur (‘the characters of fish which Ovid reveals in the book which is called Haleiutica also seem wondrous to me’, HN 32.11). The particular ingenia to which Ovid bears witness will turn out to be miraculous in part because of their ability to challenge categories involving mankind’s place in nature. His fish show an almost human cleverness at escaping traps (themselves of man’s devising) and also make it possible to recognize, and emphathize with, human emotions, as when the scarfish, seeing another of its species struggling, comes to its aid, and, to continue the civil war theme suggested by Pliny’s description of ‘nature overcoming herself’ (ipsa se vincente natura, HN 32.1), ‘springs back free with the citizen he protected saved’ (liber servato, quem texit, cive resultat, Hal. 18).2

• 3 Correspondingly, Pliny banishes Ovid to the borderlands of his own text, for this reference to Ovid (...)

2Ovid’s poem of transformations displays phenomena that provoke a similar sense of wonder for those observing them within the text. Indeed, one of the first occurrences of the cognate verb mirari in Metamorphoses recalls the marvelous fishes of Halieutica by placing human artifacts in an unfamiliar, underwater world: during the flood, Nereids marvel to see ‘groves, cities, and homes’ beneath the waves (1.301). Yet, in a way that the surface of the sea can itself symbolize, wonder has very different effects within the fictional universe of Ovid’s poem and in a work, like Pliny’s, that calls itself historia, a form of narrative defined by its claim to depict the truth. The Ovidian reader may entertain the perspective of Nereids, but even here Ovid has provided a cause, the flood, that makes the marvelous comprehensible. So too the poet, when speaking of his Metamorphoses, will remind readers that its transformations are not to be believed (in non credendos corpora versa modos, Trist. 2.1.64). But across the generic boundary between fiction and history, Ovid is made to perform precisely the opposite service for Pliny, proving that things otherwise hard to believe are true. As Beagon 2007 has shown, what makes miracles credible for Pliny is precisely their distance from the organizing perspective of Rome. The strangeness of things at the edges of the world affirms by contrast the regularity of the center. Hence Ovid’s own banishment to the liminal spaces of the empire by Augustus turns him into a witness that the wonders of Pontus are true: ‘To these [creatures] we will add the animals described by Ovid, found in no other source but perhaps occurring in Pontus, where he began that volume at the end of his life’ (his adiciemus ab Ovidio posita animalia, quae apud neminem alium reperiuntur, sed fortassis in Ponto nascentia, ubi id volumen supremis suis temporibus inchoavit, HN 32.152).3

• 4 On this theme in Ovid’s work, see Hinds 1999, esp. 51–53, and, specifically on the transcendence of (...)

3The further twist Ovid here gives to the problem of the credibility of miracles, by vouching for the reality of these sea-dwellers, thus depends on a recognition of his own historical circumstances, as a figure incontrovertibly subject to the real power of Augustus. But on closer inspection, the language in which Pliny makes Ovid’s fish believable itself evokes the differences, if not between fiction and truth then between poetry and history, to suggest how these imperial limits contrast with the world of Ovid’s own creation. Note first how Pliny’s sentence offers a memento mori by juxtaposing references to the end of Ovid’s life and to the fishes’ coming into being (nascentia), a pattern that forms a ring within book 32 by closely recalling the word natura, which, as we saw, featured in its first sentence as a programmatic reminder of Pliny’s title. The birth of the fish signals the death of the author. The phrase ‘things born in Pontus’ already places us in a poetic universe by also recalling Alphesiboeus’ declaration in Vergil’s Eclogues that ‘very many things are born in Pontus’ (nascuntur plurima Ponto, 8.96), and anyone recollecting this passage in reading Pliny might remember that the effect of those Pontic herbs was metamorphosis. The reference to the magic within books, believable to their characters, also highlights the metapoetic limits of those books. For Ovid’s ‘last times’ superimposes his own end on the telos of his epic narrative, which he promises to extend ad mea tempora (1.4), an allusion of course to the tempora of his other project the Fasti, which never reached their own end.4

• 5 We meet a fish called the glaucus at Hal. 118.
• 6 On this phrase, and particularly the significance of reassigning the Heraclitean dictum to Pythagor (...)

4While fish seem almost programmatically excluded from the Metamorphoses, the surface and edges of water provide symbolic borders in that poem as well that juxtapose simultaneously truth and fiction and the limits of human power. In book 4, one of the Minyads, themselves about to be the victims of a miracle wrought by a god whose divinity they deny, hesitates whether ‘to tell about you, Babylonian Dercetis, whom the Palestinians believe, with form changed, with scales veiling her limbs, stirs the pools, … or how the Naiad turned young bodies into silent fish until she endured the same fate herself’ (4.46­–51) before settling on Pyramus and Thisbe instead. There is also Glaucus, who is almost turned into a fish. A fisherman himself, he noticed that a mysterious patch of grass was making his catch leap back into the sea. After testing its power by tasting it, he too bounds into the waves and is transformed into a sea god with a green beard and fish tail (13.916–965). The case of Glaucus points to the sea as the place where categories are crossed: like the uncannily human fish ‘Ovid’ vouches for in Pliny, his new form is part human and part fish,5 but also divine. And the sea is the home of many such hybrid divinities: for example, Proteus, who can change himself almost endlessly into animal and elemental forms (8.731–737), and also permanent hybrids like Triton, who, after the gods attempt to destroy the human race with a flood—again setting up water as a boundary between man and god—blows his trumpet to recall the waves (1.334). More generally, water is the supremely metamorphic element: ‘everything flows’ Pythagoras says (quoting Heraclitus) in offering his own natural history of metamorphosis (cuncta fluunt, 15.178).6 And the movement of water itself, in that context, suggests an understanding of time that can distinguish a divine recognition of this flow from an all-too-human misconception that things always were as they are now.

• 7 See Harrison 2020 on how the fragments of the Halieutica have provoked translators and editors to r (...)

5This glimpse into the Ovidian depths of Pliny’s account of natura suggests that the perception of the natural world as uncanny and paradoxical always exists as one term in an unstable dialectic. In Ovid’s case, seeing nature’s miracles means entering into a fictional universe and looking away from the actual status of his narrative as unbelievable fable. This tension ramifies and changes as we re-read Ovid through the eyes of Pliny. For Pliny does not just cite information from Ovid, he also imitates him.7 The authorial voice of Ovid becomes simultaneously recognizable within Pliny’s catalogue, and its fish are, from that perspective, not those that Ovid found, but those that he wrote. In this sense, Pliny’s text forms part of a process of literary evocation that takes in not only the Halieutica but the other works that Ovid’s times opposed. Ovid escapes mortality by a means that he had himself scripted in the Metamorphoses. For the end of that work too, when Ovid reaches his ‘times’, makes another reference precisely to the mortal ending Pliny describes. He has left behind a work that nothing can destroy, even old age, vetustas, whose rights encompass only his body (15.872–874). For ‘wherever Roman power extends through conquered lands, I will be read in the voice of the people’ (quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris / ore legar populi, 15.877–878). To see nature’s miracles as projections of an Ovidian text contributes to a confusion of generic categories in which Ovid’s fictions continue to shape a view of the world that now becomes true as it is vouched for through the conventions of historia. But at the same time as Ovid comes into view as a source, the facts of his own life relegate the world of wonders to the edges of the earth and balance it against the inexorable ordering force of Roman political power. Indeed, a possible alliance between natural miracles and empire had been suggested when the ship-holding remora, after figuring in a civil war within nature (ipsa se vincente natura, HN 32.1), enters Roman history by immobilizing Antony’s flagship at the battle of Actium (32.3). Already in the Halieutica, the piscine behaviors that provoke Pliny’s wonder take place in a world that has accepted the law, accepit mundus legem, coincidentally the first words of the extant text. And that law imposes, above all, mortality, of which the fish are ignorant (omnibus ignotae mortis timor, Hal. 8).

• 8 Here I draw specifically on Morton 2013, 1–24; Latour 2017, esp. 7–40 offers another formulation of (...)
• 9 The term ‘hyperobject’ first formulated in Morton 2010, 130–136, is explained and developed in Mort (...)

7One prompt for seeing these connections in this way comes from new perspectives on Ovidian poetry that themselves draw inspiration from varied manifestations of the post-millennial environmental turn in literary studies. I define by that phrase a critical insistence that human intervention in the global environment radically transforms (or ought radically to transform) how we conceptualize not only the natural world but human representations of it, even if their authors could not themselves have recognized the emergence of human activity as a force in geological time.8 What precisely such a transformation entails differs according to the emphases of different theorists, but concerns and debates coalesce around the very issues highlighted by my admittedly impressionistic reading of Ovid’s aqueous limits. Morton’s development of the concept of the ‘hyperobject’, to take one productive example, confounds at once the separation of subject and object and perception and reality. Hyperobjects, being more than objects, possess a reality that transcends what is merely perceptible by the senses. Thus, climate change represents a truth that lies beyond a specific set of measurements and observations. Hyperobjects also possess a quality Morton terms ‘viscosity’, which implies not only their inevitability, but also a persistent clinging to the human observer that erodes the boundaries of the subject and rules out a distant view. We no longer look on nature from outside in part because we are causally embedded in ecology and, conversely, because it shows us a view of human activity that is measured in geological as well as historical time.9

• 10 Good overview in von Glinski 2012, 7–8, also Barkan 1986, 20–27 and Segal 1998.
• 11 For a recent reading of the poem centered on Pythagoras’ views of metempsychosis, see Sissa 2019.
• 12 See particularly Rosati 1981, Barchiesi 1989, Wheeler 1999, esp. 79­–84, and Rosati 2002.

8But rather than take the immanence of such hyperobjects as a premise for reading Metamorphoses, in the article that follows I aim to present it as a problem, both for the poem’s modern interpreters and for the characters within it. As the environmental challenge posed by critics like Morton prompts readers to see themselves differently precisely by losing a sense of their distinctiveness from the environment, not only does metamorphosis provoke a much-studied loss of recognizability as a discrete human entity,10 but the summary natural history of metamorphosis offered by Pythagoras shows killers and consumers as victims and humans as animals; and the philosopher makes his case by stretching time beyond the boundaries of a human life so that individuals become the composite of their past selves.11 Yet, as I have tried to suggest through Pliny’s handling of Ovid as a source for information about nature, this elision of a distinct identity becomes at once empowering and threatening to a poetic voice that repeatedly says ‘I’, that begins paradoxically by insisting his poem will both be eternal and extend to ‘my times’ (1.4), and that defies the age that withers individual human bodies (15.872–873) by flying beyond the stars (super alta perennis / astra ferar, 15.875–876) and embedding itself in the spatial dimensions of an imperial cosmos (quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, 15. 877). My aim in this paper will be to bring the challenges of recognizing the immanence of the environment to bear on the enunciative acts within Ovid’s epic. Ovid’s handling of internal voices, particularly his seeming to speak through characters while also maintaining his own voice, is one of the most distinctive aspects of his narrative art.12 This formal way of problematizing identity within the ‘hyperobject’ of the narrative, which transcends the consciousness of any of its characters, will provide a way of relating the imperative of environmental criticism to re-think the edges of self and environment with an authorial will to cling to a finite identity within the vaster temporal and spatial frames of the cosmos. The act of representation, paradigmatic for and yet distinct from, the poetic whole, brings to bear different perspectives on the world that matter both for its audiences’ conceptualization of the cosmos, within and outside the poem, and for their recognition of the representations themselves as produced by individual agents. Pliny’s very act of making Ovid visible as the source of his account also reminds us that to focus only on the realities within the representation means losing sight of the very precise distinctions of power and identity that are made manifest through the act of narrative.

• 13 On the architectural centrality of book 8, see esp. Crabbe 1981 and Hardie 2004. For the narratolog (...)

9Since viscosity in its less specialized sense also characterizes some of my interpretations, I hope a roadmap of the main points of the sections to follow will help readers orient themselves. My argument will focus on the second half of book 8 because this programmatically charged central panel of the poem stands out equally for its depiction of violent transformations of the environment and for its self-reflexive interest in narrativity.13 Both of the main inset tales told at the banquet where Achelous entertains Theseus’ entourage feature a landscape permanently transformed by a single narratable event, the divine punishment of the impiously inhospitable Phrygians that turns their homesteads into a swamp and Erysichthon’s willful uprooting of the tree at the center of Ceres’ grove. Yet the environmental changes that feature in the stories also find an echo in the context of their telling. For the narrative necessity of Achelous’ hospitality itself arises from the violent deformation of its natural setting: the storyteller who recounts Erysichthon’s crime and punishment is also legible as a personification of the flooding river that has halted Theseus’ return to Athens. The slippage in ontological levels, as river becomes character, coincides with a metaleptic blurring of narrative and narrative context that hinges on the description of environmental change. In this way, the objects of narration within the stories become a kind of hyperobject that implicates the readers in the story in a manner that can be extended to figure the loss of difference between Ovid’s internal audience and an encompassing environmental reality. Conversely, the figural use of landscape can help distinguish between narrative levels: this banquet too takes place at the edge of the sea, as will its concluding episode, the self-transformation of Erysichthon’s daughter. For all the possibility of being swept away like the semi-divine victims of Achelous’ rage, the audience for the story resembles the pious Phrygian couple in keeping their feet on dry land. These different ways of relating to narrated environments will depend directly on whether they fall into the category of true tales or fictions, the same distinction we have seen particularly evoked in Pliny’s glimpse beneath the sea. This opposition between absorption and distance will above all draw attention to the many ways in which environmental change can be described: as a consequence of human action, whether as reward or punishment, or as an expression of divine power. And the approach each narrator takes to explaining environmental change correlates with observable strategies of self-representation deployed by that narrator as a character within the enveloping story of the banquet. Introducing and unpacking the imbrication of environmental concerns at multiple narrative levels with the specific aims of character narrators will be the task of section one of this discussion. Its main point will be to highlight a tension between perspectives by which the identity of individual narrators comes into focus in inverse relationship to absorption in the narrated environment.

• 14 Ziogas 2013, 136­–145 and infra, section III.

10The second section will expand the argument by relating this oscillating consciousness of narrators as standing out from and disappearing into the landscape of their narratives with the mythical diagnosis of humanity’s place in the natural world as developed in Hesiod and explicated in the work of structuralist critics like Vernant, a set of concerns that runs throughout book 8, not least in its concluding tableaux of gods and humans problematically sharing a table. Then, in section III, I develop these intratextual cues for understanding narrative as a distinctively human art by concentrating on Erysichthon’s unnamed daughter, herself an important figure in Hesiod’s fragmentary Catalogue of Women,14 who provides nourishment for her father’s belly through a distinctively Ovidian transgression of the boundaries of human identity which also takes place at the edge of the sea. The same figure also polarizes narrative roles to an extreme degree. Not only does she appear at the conclusion of the second tale within a tale, but attention will be drawn to the different ways in which internal narrators, including Achelous and her own father, depict her to reflect their own status. On the other hand, this character’s very self-concealment through metamorphosis goes together with a use of fictional misdirection that gains new significance in an episode focused on truth and lies. The emergence of Erysichthon’s daughter as narrator extends towards the ultimate narrator of the epic, Ovid himself, and the discussion ends with a suggestion for how Mestra’s empowering strategy of concealing herself within the narrated environment reflects Ovid’s simultaneous submission to and escape from natural and political limits.

• 15 Martelli and Sissa 2023, 2–3 and Sissa 2019. The importance of the concept ‘possible world’, which (...)

11First, it will be helpful to clarify my approach to Ovid’s representation of the natural world further by placing it in dialogue with some essays in Sissa and Martelli’s 2023 collection, which collectively showcases the gains and promise of various environmentally inspired approaches to the epic. The editors of this collection begin from the premise that Metamorphoses constructs a ‘possible world’, one that obeys a consistent set of rules and makes sense in its own terms, which, as Sissa has elsewhere argued, is revealed by, and in turn validates, the injunctions of Pythagoras to abstain from eating animal flesh.15 The world of the poem may not be one in which contemporary Romans would easily see themselves at home; on the contrary, it will challenge their credence at every turn. But it nevertheless coheres as a cosmic system, and the general principle of flux that informs it overturns not only political structures but the stable concept of identity essential to status and position within the Roman order.

• 16 See especially Formisano 2023, 61–62.

12The emphasis on the poem’s systemic coherence in Sissa’s work goes together with another strand of recent criticism that turns the encounter with the possible world of Metamorphoses into a model for alternative ways of knowing the natural environment. Marco Formisano and Claudia Zatta, drawing respectively on the ethical and ontological theories of David Wood and Arne Naess, see in Ovid’s poem a way of experiencing nature that emphasizes the radical and irreducible strangeness of objects: ‘No longer a detached observer, the human being now participates in the natural world that surrounds her: embedded in a network of relations, her sense perceptions and emotional responses become constitutive of the beings she relates to. The result is the emergence of a natural world deeply interconnected where humans (and all the other beings) constitute integral parts of the whole’ (Zatta 2023, 163). For Formisano, object theory offers an important corrective to the privileging of intertextual connections in earlier scholarship on the Metamorphoses: ‘Looking at any text, but especially at Ovid’s Metamorphoses from this perspective, i.e., considering its textual universe as an immense ‘inside’ where everything is somehow, in a fuzzy and opaque manner, connected with something else, reveals an undeniable truth about the poem which nonetheless disturbs all our usual hermeneutic categories’ (Formisano 2023, 56, emphasis in the original). By contrast, attention to intertextuality ultimately directs attention to the subjective perspective of the author as a controlling and historically contingent presence which distracts from the experience of raw nature afforded by an encounter with the text as story.16

• 17 For intertextual links to Callimachus and Apollonius uniting the Calydonian boar hunt with the them (...)

13Book 8 abounds in confused and overturned landscapes that inspire existential questions about the limits of human power and responsibility. A glimpse of Daedalus and Icarus provokes the fisherman and plowman to ‘believe that those who are able to ‘harvest’ (carpere) the air must be gods’ (8.219–20). Daedalus confronts an equally uncanny sight, but by looking in the opposite direction, down from great height. Seeing, again, feathers in the unfamiliar context of the waves, he ‘curses his own arts and buries the body on land’ (8.234–235). From there we move to Calydon, where Diana has let loose an ‘avenger’ of impiety, a boar ‘greater than the bulls the fields of Epirus possess, and even those of Sicily’ (8.282–283). This monster in turn combines the forces of sea (spuma, 8.288) and air (fulmen, 8.289) to wreak havoc on croplands and forests. The setting for the final narratives of Baucis and Philemon and of Erysichthon and Mestra is a landscape destroyed by a flooding river whose devastation, like that of the boar, involves both agricultural artifacts and natural phenomena (8.551–557).17 And those inset stories themselves feature the flooded plains of Phrygia, where Philemon sees his wife turn into a tree as she sees him (8.714–715), and the grove of Ceres, remarkable first for the presence of a monstrous tree (‘as high above the rest of the forest as the grasses are beneath it’, 8.749–750) then for the devastation caused by its destruction, with an interlude in the Scythian desert where Fames (‘Hunger’) dwells (‘a sad soil, and a sterile land without crops and without trees’, 8.789). Throughout, boundary violations, both literal (between earth, sky, and water or wild and cultivated) and conceptual (between man, beast, and god) bleed into an incorporation of the observer into the environment, signaled by the different narrative levels through which characters who have experienced the desolation of Calydon describe or are told of those of Phrygia and the land of Fames. These are spaces that by their nature challenge description and do not stand apart or outside the way a setting provides a background for a story. The plowman’s view of Icarus, which would in Brueghel’s famous painting highlight the separation of myth from real world setting, pivots precisely to that of a Daedalus forced to pull from the landscape a body that itself is all too easy to identify as his own. Again, the relationship between these different landscapes is what Formisano calls rhizomatic (2023, 58). Since there is no cause and effect between them, the act of comparison extends in every direction within the text, suggesting some uncanny organizing pattern or its even more uncanny absence.

• 18 This approach to the environment constructed in Metamorphoses resembles, and owes much to, Hinds’ 2 (...)

14These elements of discursive confusion might appear as epiphenomena of the experience of the environment itself, radiating out from the innermost level of the narrated world of the poem. But my aim here is to highlight an alternative perspective, one which may itself be easily dissolved/resolved into this pattern of boundary violation but also has the potential to re-focus the discussion of the environment on a sequence of human or anthropomorphic narrators. If the environment as described within the story impacts all levels of observers in ways that transcend their abilities to identify the borders of the self, narratives of the environment serve very precise purposes of definition within a distinctly and emphatically political hierarchy. The radical disorientation produced by many of these narratives comes from the overlap of available narratological positions within them and these in turn invite the audience to experience the environment as a touchstone for the distribution of power within human society.18

• 19 See, conveniently, Ellinger 1991[1981] and, on Diana’s role as an avenging goddess in the Metamorph (...)
• 20 On the importance of misogyny as a theme in the episode, see Bretzigheimer 1994, 507.

15To begin with Calydon, the goddess Diana is easily glossed as a personification of the ungovernable aspects of the environment. Modern accounts often subsume Artemis/Diana to a force of wild nature, and Calydon’s Oeneus would follow in a line of male kings whose offspring/agricultural livelihood is destroyed as punishment for an impious or hubristic attempt to control or ignore such forces.19 However, the Ovidian narrative, not least through its strong personification of Diana, points in a different direction. Oeneus does not have the appearance of one who scorns the gods (cf. deorum spretor, 8.612–613); he scrupulously and methodically gives other divinities their due. Ceres, Dionysus, and Minerva are all have their ambitiosus honor satisfied (8.277). Nor does he at this point seem particularly high-handed in regard to ‘female nature’ in the way that an Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter would be—although Althaea suggests some such history when one of her justifications for killing Meleager is that ‘happy’ Oeneus should not ‘enjoy his son’s victory’ (8.486), where the agricultural force of the adjective felix and the verb fruetur seem to look back to the context of the original sacrificial violation.20 Rather than seeing Oeneus’ neglect of Diana as the symbol of a larger cognitive failure to think about the place of man in the world, the way the tale is told seems to reduce the interaction with the divine to a breakdown in a purely human exchange. Diana responds as any human character would to not getting what she thinks she deserves: she becomes angry, which of course a real god, in the Platonic or Epicurean sense, would never do. The very story that the boar was sent by Diana in revenge for the king’s sacrificial failure is explicitly couched as narrative: ‘they say’ (ferunt, 8.273). And without the intrusion of this extraneous explanation, a big pig could be just that. In other words, there are multiple explanations for the destroyed landscape of Calydon. It could be caused by a god, a man, or a beast. How that destruction is narrated, and how that narrative is interpreted, depends on the position of its putative author and audience within a highly anthropomorphized hierarchy, as Althaea’s suggestive reconstruction of the backstory also implies.

• 21 Murray 2004, 238 notes that ‘the deeds of the river-god [esp. lines 8.583 and 8.588] … concretize a (...)
• 22 Kenney 2004, 362.

16The two landscapes at the mouth of the Achelous again prompt narratives that reveal quite contrasting images of divine and human power relations and draw attention to the self-interestedness of their narrator, none other than the personified river. The story of the Echinades reiterates precisely the narrative of Calydon but casts the river-god himself in the role of the Olympian: Naiads who celebrated choruses in honor of the other divinities but neglect him are violently punished by Achelous, who rends and divides the land (8.579–589).21 But the island ‘which the sailor calls Perimele’ is a more complex index of divine power (8.590–610). The act of rape puts the spotlight on divine injustice rather than presenting Achelous as the victim of unfair neglect, especially when viewed from the human perspective of the victim’s father. But the divinity re-casts the narrative as far as possible to minimize his guilt, both through the euphemism22 that reduces rape to merely representational violence—removal of a virgineum nomen (‘the title of maiden’, 8.592), which goes together with Achelous’s failure to acknowledge that Perimele was the name not just of an island but of a girl—and also through his shifting the focus of the story from his own crime to the actions of figures above and below him in the political hierarchy. The metamorphosis results not from his violation of the girl but from the ‘bestiality’ (feritas, 8.8.601) of the human father who cast her into the sea. In this telling, Achelous tucks himself into a securely ordered authority structure where he becomes the agent of salvation through an appeal to the higher power of Neptune. By contrast, the mortal father, presumably trying to preserve his own status within the human world by avoiding the shame resulting from his daughter’s rape, is demoted to the wild through the emphasis on his cruelty.

• 23 See Crabbe 1981, 2290–2291.

18Water, too, is everywhere in these narratives, and this recurring natural element helps establish the metamorphic continuity of a poem where everything flows.23 But as the floodwaters move from within the narrative to become a circumstance in which narration occurs, as we become conscious of the difference between narrative levels as well as the similarity that will allow the stories to become exemplary, what seems the same element acquires a more complex value as an index of authority. The Olympian floods of the Baucis and Philemon story, recalling the Jovian original of book one, both resemble and differ from Achelous’ swelling rage.

• 24 The essential discussion is Feeney 1991, 229–232; see also Wheeler 1999, 165–171, and Boyd 2006. On (...)

19Pirithous’ expression of doubt in response to Achelous’ tales has long been recognized as a crucial self-reflexive moment in the narrative.24 It can prompt Ovid’s audience to shake themselves free of their own enchantment or, perhaps, provide a measure of the strength of that enchantment by keeping Pirithous in the story world. But, importantly, the question of how the audience balances their absorption in the ‘possible world’ of the poem with an awareness of the poem itself as built on overlapping layers of performance appears to Pirithous himself as an issue of power. Reporting fictions makes the gods ‘too powerful’ (nimiumque … potentes, 8.614). Because Pirithous’ claim emerges from the same narrative world of wonders it challenges, the distribution of power aligns closely with the problem of where we put the boundary between reality and fiction. From one perspective, the gods Pirithous wants to limit can have no power because they are themselves fictions. But as those gods come to figure humans, the narrative situation looks more and more like an imaginable instance of performance in the real world, and the issue of potentia gains a new immediacy.

• 25 On the presence or absence of slaves in Roman accounts of agricultural activity, see the memorable (...)
• 26 For the motif of slavery in the Mestra story and book 8 as a whole, see Feldherr 2010, 106–120. Fan (...)
• 27 Cf. the contrasting reading of Hallett 2000, who views the episode as consistently emphasizing how (...)

20This theme of divine power is immediately picked up by Lelex, who pleonastically amplifies the idea that the potentia caeli is ‘measureless’ and ‘does not have an end’ (8.618–619). Pliny’s purpose too had been to translate the wonders of the sea into a ‘measureless demonstration of hidden power’ (inmensum potentiae occultae documentum, 32.1). But before turning to the ways in which human power relations are written onto the natural phenomena in these tales, let us notice how transparent many of the landscapes throughout the book are to social hierarchies. Phrygia will be turned into a countryside of extremes: as everything else is depressed into a swamp, Baucis and Philemon’s house rises on columns. The human world is effectively eliminated in a space that contains only undifferentiated, uninhabitable swamp and a domus fit for the gods. Ceres’ grove too abounds in vertiginous distinctions of height. The tree’s altitude is made both precise and incredible when the other trees of the forest are said to be as far below it as the grass is beneath them (8.749–750). These extremes of separation within the landscape, moreover, provide the context for strong expressions of power differentials. The pastoral hierarchy of nymphs will be mimicked in the manifestation of command and authority shown by Erysichthon, who, making literal what has often been assumed as unspoken in Roman agricultural manuals, first orders his servants to chop down the tree (8.752),25 and the distinction between masters and servants highlights the unusual prominence of slaves in this book, from Daedalus the faber (‘craftsman’, 8.159), to Mestra herself, who, unlike in Hesiod, where it is a matter of bride-prices, is here explicitly sold to a master.26 In Baucis and Philemon’s household, such distinctions are initially challenged: it makes no difference whether you ask for masters or servants (8.635). But this image of human equality takes on a different cast after the gods transform the landscape to one where the only humans visible are the servants of the gods.27 As a consequence of Fames’ conceptual opposition to Ceres, the account of the space where she lives emerges only from multiple acts of command. Not only does the goddess have to impose her will on the personification, but she must do so first by ‘compelling’ a mountain nymph to bring her a message (8.787).

• 28 Cf. Cat. 64.407, here the gods’ no longer deigning to be seen in banquets like the one where the Pa (...)

21The hierarchies that feature so prominently in the narrated environment of these stories draw attention to and result from the subtle assertions and evasions by which the narrators themselves construct status through the act of narrating. Lelex’ account of the changed world of Phrygia zeros in on the rewards given to two human figures, Baucis and Philemon. It at first seems to offer a hyperbolical account of the power inequalities between man and gods that may gloss the notional unboundedness of the natural world: the power of the gods cannot be exaggerated because it is ‘measureless’ (immensa, 8.618) and has no end. The first of these terms contains a play on words which again highlights the problems of representing such conceptual vastness that accentuates the issue of the believability of divine figures. Both within the story and the framing narrative, humans and gods measure one another’s capacities over the table (mensam, mensae, 8.660–661), an act that is itself one of the standard impossibilities of the current human order;28 divine power cannot be bounded by reducing the gods to entities that can be visualized as dining with humans. The landscape then continues the problem of giving a real-world manifestation of the limitless and indefinable: the natural element that proves that the gods’ powers have no end is a pair of trees that share a limit (contermina, 8.620). This contrast could, on the one hand, simply show the difference between the mortal and divine realm, but it simultaneously highlights the paradox of Lelex’ efforts to convey an entity without bounds through the medium of a myth about anthropomorphic deities. Pirithous’ point had been that stories that showed the gods changing shapes made them too powerful, but Lelex’ opening suggests by contrast that any description of the divinities in representable forms diminishes them.

• 29 Gamel 1984, 121: ‘Lelex can’t maintain a consistent attitude of admiration towards the idyll he is (...)
• 30 Kenney 2004, 376.
• 31 haec mihi non vani (neque erat, cur fallere vellent)/narravere senes (‘these things were told to me (...)

22There are two practical consequences of this metaphysical conundrum that play out over the course of Lelex’ narrative. The first is to alert us to a subtle political strategy of contradiction in his message: the very act of exaggerating divine potentia also helps constrain it. For, within the story, the emphasis shifts from a representation of the gods’ power as an instrument for indulging themselves and harming humanity to one where that power is expressed as an ability to benefit mankind. This picks up on the final image Achelous had offered of himself, not as a rapist but a savior, and encodes it in a new story based on the landscape. As in the concluding narratives of the book, a gesture of apparent deference may turn out to be a way of asserting control. And if, as we shall see, Achelous’ human form leads him to curry favor with the human authority figures at the banquet, Lelex the narrator is able to express his own superiority on the human plane by looking at the humble banquet through the eyes of the gods. Both turn up their noses at the meal presented by the poor couple.29 The second effect of the resonance of Pirithous’ objection within the tale is to intertwine the ethical/political interpretation of the story with the credible and effective representation of a landscape. For the gods’ power to be what Lelex says, the landscape that has been transformed must be real. And for that reason, the moral consequences of the tale, the message that most explicitly harnesses divine power for rewarding humans, is practically written into the landscape itself. Within and outside the narrative, the metamorphosis of the verbal to visual consolidates both the proof and the moral of the story.30 For Lelex, the oral stories of old men, whose unreliability is highlighted by being so emphatically denied,31 are affirmed by the sight of the garlands (8.722–723) hanging from the trees; for the reader, the character’s own act of speaking (dixi, 8.723) becomes visible as a single hexameter in Ovid’s text: ‘cura deum di sunt, et qui coluere coluntur’(‘those whom the gods care for are gods, and those who have worshipped receive worship’, 8.724).

• 32 On the authenticating strategies of Lelex, see Myers 1994, 92–93.
• 33 Cf. the interpretation of Gamel, 1984, esp. pp. 128–129, who similarly questions the relationship b (...)

23This strategy of authentication itself depends on reading continuity between the landscape and the narrative that produces it, much as a historical Ovid will vouch for Pliny’s piscine wonders, yet various aspects of the poem’s language simultaneously allow us to prise the two apart. Lelex’ testimony also presents itself as a continuation of a series of earlier acts of commemoration. While he has not witnessed the miracle of metamorphosis, he has heard the stories and seen the memorials of those who may have.32 And each moment of commemoration creates problems of contiguity and difference in relation to the event remembered. The serta (‘garlands’) are made up of vegetation, as though they were part of the trees themselves, yet they are of course different in asserting the voices and interpretations of their authors. When Achelous will describe the great oak of Ceres to be felled by Erysichthon, it is adorned not only with garlands, serta, but also with more emphatically commemorative representations, memores tabellae, the proofs left by those who gained possession of their vows (8.744). Achelous’ highlighting of the narrative content and evidentiary power of these dedications casts a retrospective light on Lelex’ tale that stresses its difference as well as its likeness to the serta within which it forms a series. Lelex too places garlands, yet his garlands transform into words (equidem pendentia vidi / serta super ramos ponensque recentia dixi / ‘cura deum di sunt, et, qui coluere, coluntur’, ‘indeed I saw garlands hanging upon the boughs, and placing fresh ones, I said, “those whom the gods care for are gods, and those who have worshipped receive worship”’, 8.722–724). The adjective recentia, implying the fresh replacement of old garlands/leaves with new, at first seems to describe the object of the participle ponens, but it could also anticipate the object of the main verb dixi, further eliding the difference between spoken claims and visual proof, as well as between the matter of the trees and what it conveys. Is his meaning implicit in the environment Lelex describes, or does it constitute one, partial, reading tenuously superimposed upon it? In this way, the uncertain relationship between the garland and the tree figures at once that between the event itself, represented as landscape, and the narrative use Lelex, as part of a series of old narrators, makes of it. Cura and coluere/coluntur suggest the how the farmer transforms wildness to productivity. As Gowers (2005, 339) has observed, the meal that the couple serves to Jupiter and Mercury is strikingly pre-agricultural, consisting for the most part of natural products that can be gathered rather than farmed. So too the final landscape of Phrygia, instead of allowing for the interaction of gods and men, resolves into an inhuman and inarable swamp and a purely divine temple, with no place for humans in the middle. Lelex’ ‘graft’ of words, from one perspective, summons up the way human life continues through cultivation and care. However, the meaning of the phrase is itself uncertain; alongside the notion that human cultivation connects nature and the gods, as will be proven by divinization of those the gods cherish, the first clause cura dei di sunt, more naturally points to a rupture in this hierarchy by implying that the gods care only about themselves.33

• 34 This line plays an equally important role in Fabre-Serris’ 2009 analysis of what makes Lelex an aut (...)

24This interpretation of Lelex’ response to Pirithous has stressed the importance of keeping an eye both on nature within the narrative and on the nature of narrative as a tool for negotiating status within the framing story. As Ovid points out, the impact of Lelex’ tale on his audience derives both from its substance and its author (cunctosque et res et moverat auctor, 8.725).34 The represented space both figures the telos of the narrative—it is what it describes—and is produced by it, just as the actual setting of the banquet provides both a prompt for stories and has its meaning changed through them when it becomes a belvedere on scenes of divine violence and redemption. The fundamental ambiguity of the Ovidian environment, as something that seems to be itself and to provide the matter of Achelous’ tale as well as Ovid’s, balances against the recognition of the political work this environment does in constructing and distinguishing the authority of each level of narrator.

• 35 Such a reading complements the metapoetic approach to Achelous as a narrator whose status as raging (...)

26In the last section, we considered how his first set of tales highlighted Achelous’ ambiguous status as narrator, in his human guise, and narrative subject as a feature of the landscape. These different manifestations of Achelous within the stories he told and in the context in which he told them pointed in turn to his ability to use the stories both to inflate and strategically mask his power.35 The narratological in-betweenness of Achelous, by which the fictive environment within the tales flows into the space of the banquet, mirrors that same figure’s political indeterminacy as a rusticum numen (‘country divinity’, 1.192) between men and the gods of the sky. So, too, as he takes on the role of narrator for the second time, the god’s natural potency as a river/divinity in his tales about himself contrasts with the almost comical deference he shows within the humanized setting, as he continues the task of rebutting Pirithous. For Achelous’ impetus to follow up Lelex’ story comes not from a desire to reinforce the danger of disregarding present divinities, nor even from wounded amour propre, but rather from a very anthropomorphic desire to curry favor with the mortal powers that be. He notices Theseus’ enjoyment of the previous story (8.726–728) and builds on it with a narrative that will affirm the power of the divine figure who is the very father of his target audience, the Athenian king later to be emphatically called ‘Neptunius heros’ (‘the Neptunian hero’, 9.1).

• 36 As Ziogas 2013, 133, observes, Perimele is the sister of Mestra’s great-grandmother according to He (...)
• 37 8.730, and again with the emphatic claim that Mestra ‘possesses no less of this power’ than Proteus (...)
• 38 The hypothesis that this was already the narrative in Hesiod, who deferred mention of Mestra’s only (...)

27Achelous’ story of Erysichthon and Mestra serves as both the complement and the sequel to Lelex’ tale. Its main narrative emphasizes punishment in place of reward, and that punishment seems both more just and more ominous for Pirithous because, like him, Erysichthon disregards the very tokens of veracity that Lelex has deployed to convert a fabula into natural historia, a tale that he can verify through evidence and autopsy, the votive images hanging on the doomed tree (8.744–745). But the god’s focus on Mestra rather than Erysichthon helps point out equally important similarities with the narrative strategies of his earlier accounts of himself. As it had in the story of the Echinades, the powerlessness of nymphs relative to Olympian gods, in this case Ceres, stands out in the first half of his tale. And Mestra’s experience will turn out to replay Achelous’ violation of the maiden who became Perimele, but with his own culpability even further suppressed.36 Here it is Neptune who has raped the girl, but that turns out to be backstory; the emphasis falls on the reward the god offers in compensation; again, the god’s power seems directed towards compensating rather than harming. Concomitantly, the real cause of the girl’s suffering is displaced onto a human father, Erysichthon, whose own selfish concerns with feeding his belly suggest that he has fallen below the status of human. As Lelex’ tale ended with a maxim that threatens to expose what the story ostensibly aimed to mask, that divine power was above all a tool of self-gratification dangerous to humans, so here Achelous’ effort to preserve the hierarchy separating gods and mortals creates narrative inconsistency. Achelous twice presents the capacity for multiple transformation as a ius, whose possession actually cuts across the boundaries between gods and humans.37 But when Achelous reaches Mestra’s story, it turns out to be the god Neptune, not the girl herself, who initiates the transformation. And this marks a possible reversal of Ovid’s Hesiodic source, where her rape by Poseidon ends rather than initiates the cycle of transformations by which Mestra eludes potential husbands. There, as at the start of Achelous’ speech, the power of change seems ultimately her own. Here it is bestowed by the god.38

• 39 Classic statements of the structuralist position outlined below include Vernant 1988, Vernant 1989, (...)
• 40 See esp. Kamil 2021 and Gowers 2023.
• 41 Contra Fratantuono 2008, 350, who, after a thorough unraveling of the mythographic traditions of Hi (...)

28The notion of divine gifts which form part of a longer negotiation, since the power of transformation turns out to be recompense for rape, suggests reading the tale within a larger Hesiodic context that looks not only to the Catalogue of Women but to his accounts of divine powers and human obligations in the Theogony and Works and Days.39 The explicit reference to sacrifice in the simile describing the uncanny bleeding of the sacred oak violated by Erysichthon (8.793–794) both shockingly blurs the boundary between animals and plants40 and also operates associatively to remind us how many of the phenomena with which sacrifice was connected in Hesiod also become prominent in the book: agriculture, fire, women in their sexual and reproductive aspects, and the various forms of commensality that measure the limits of divine and human interaction. What is more, none of these practices essential to humanity’s survival appears to be functioning properly in a book where a pattern of polarized anomalies marks the exclusion of the norm. Agriculture turns out not to be the god’s gift but their means of punishment. Rather than reproduction providing succor and futurity for human parents, the book’s beginning, middle, and end highlight some aspect of intergenerational destruction. Nisus pursues his daughter Scylla for securing his own defeat; Daedalus’ attempts to raise up his son Icarus have a disastrously opposite effect, perhaps as punishment for his own killing of young kin; Althaea uses fire to destroy her child in the book’s centerpiece, and finally Erysichthon will sell his daughter into slavery to feed his hunger. Each of these stories equally highlights the breakdown of the diversely unifying bonds created through marriage. Scylla fails to secure the exchange she hopes for with Minos, though she may herself be aiming merely at sexual satisfaction not marriage. To remember her namesake in book 10, the bride of Hippomenes, reminds us that marriage forms no part of this, unnamed, Atalanta’s story.41 Correspondingly, Althaea betrays her loyalty to her own husband, Oeneus, to avenge her birth family. So too, we have seen, the models of dining and consumption in the paired stories of Lelex and Achelous lurch from a pre-agricultural golden age ideal (although here with the ironic twist that humans are feeding the gods rather than the earth feeding men) to an image of unsustainable consumption.

• 42 This body part may recall the deceptively genial humanized appearance of Achelous himself, who spea (...)

30When Fames enters the picture, the nutritive and cultic elements of the Hesiodic paradigm that measure Erysichthon’s subjection are complemented by a sexual one. Hesiod had described high summer as the time when ‘women are lustiest and the men most depleted’ (μαχλόταται δὲ γυναῖκες, ἀφαυρότατοι δέ τοι ἄνδρες, Hes. Op. 566). The scene where Fames blasts Erysichthon with the ‘heat of hunger’ (ardor edendi, 8.828) possesses a shocking corporeality that shades into the sexual. She enters his thalami (8.817, a word that suggests conjugality as much as repose, cf. OLD s.v. §2) and embraces him with both her arms (geminis amplectitur ulnis, 8.818).42 If Erysichthon’s corporeal subjection to the personification of want looks like a rape, it equally recalls the incestuous couplings by which the reproductive capacities of daughters are destroyed or polluted. Myrrha’s incestuous tryst with her father again takes place secretly and in disguise—and not only will she become a tree, but her unsuccessful struggle against her desire is described by a simile comparing her to a beam being chopped down (10.372–373).This double pattern of transgression, therefore, portrays Erysichthon as on the one hand radically disempowered by sexual violation at the hands of a goddess, whether Ceres or her elaborately evoked surrogate, and participating, albeit through association, in the divine prerogative of endogamous reproduction, both alternatives to the human channeling of sexual desire into the creation of legitimate offspring through marriage. In this sphere too, what is excluded is the mean of humanity’s proper management of its own insufficiencies.

• 43 Note especially that her skin is so dried and hardened that one can see through to the viscera whic (...)

31Erysichthon’s subjection to hunger both knots together the Hesiodic themes that recur throughout the book and also connects them to the depiction of the environment. Not only does hunger possess the clinginess of one of Morton’s hyperobjects, it also links the individual Erysichthon to an environmental whole. When Ceres accedes to the Dryads’ prayer that Erysichthon be punished, a strange line intervenes in which she is said to ‘strike the fields burdened with heavy crops’ (concussit gravidis oneratos messibus agros, 8.781). This has been interpreted by Hollis (1970, 138) as a simple description of her gesture of assent, but, especially coming so shortly after Diana’s Calydonian boar takes vengeance through the destruction of crops, it also gives a glimpse of a more common form of divine punishment, indeed the one used by Ceres herself in book 5 (5.476­–486). From this perspective, Erysichthon’s inner suffering seems an inversion of this pattern. In place of the ‘supply-side’ approach of destroying the sources of nourishment in the world, Ceres here afflicts the body of the consumer. And the figuring of Fames herself reflects a similar descriptive strategy: she is a personification of hunger who manifests on her outside what Erysichthon suffers on the inside.43 Achelous’ narration of that hunger, however, must reverse this inward trajectory, just as Ovid does in presenting the allegorical figure of Fames. Thus, the river-god describes Erysichthon’s sufferings with a series of similes that substitute macrocosm for microcosm:

• 44 Ash 2013, 433–434, notes how Ovid’s Erysichthon is recalled by Suetonius’ description of Augustus’ (...)
• 45 Murray 2004, 236, also stresses the ‘Erysichthon-like characteristics’ of Achelous in the surroundi (...)

32But the forces that turn Erysichthon back into a figure for the cosmos also unite narrative levels in a way that will be important for my argument about how political self-interest drives environmental description. In one sense, the motion outward in the imagery derives from hunger itself, and so can be focalized through the character of Erysichthon. It is after all his hunger that makes him a cosmic devourer.44 This perfectly crystallizes the aptness of the punishment. For if Erysichthon’s fault was to believe himself a god, this desire to consume the universe mimics that transgression, but it is now a sign of his subjection, and above all, of his imprisonment in the human body—again by contrast to the shape-shifting gods. This double vision of Erysichthon’s punishment, therefore, as an expression of his will to power, from his own perspective, and of his defeat by true divinities, if we think of Ceres as its ultimate cause, again shows the transparency of environmental narrative to the positions of authors and audiences. And to amplify this pattern, the intermediate narrator, Achelous makes himself visible precisely in the simile with which he can be seen to augment the goddess’ punishment by comparing the villain to the sea drinking up rivers. Achelous, the character who had highlighted his own power and masked his all-too-human transgressions by flowing into the sea, so to speak, in his paired narratives of the Echinades and Perimele here helps point the goddess’ moral by his rhetorical enhancement of her victim’s suffering. At the same time, he advertises his narrative authority by elevating his own semi-divine riverine perspective over Erysichthon’s. We can see him as the host receiving the journeying travelers in the image of the sea drinking up foreign rivers, but we can also get a sense of his Erysichthon-like rapacity when Theseus is advised not to trust his own ‘rapacious’ waves (rapacibus, 8. 551) but to wait until his own belly/stream has received back his tender waters’ (dum tenues capiat suus alveus undas, 8.559).45 Thus Achelous himself undergoes metamorphosis in the act of narrating by appearing both outside the simile, in anthropomorphic guise as its quasi-divine author, and inside of it as the rivers consumed by the sea (while also making himself recognizable in the sympotic imagery of the all-consuming sea, which in turn loops back to the thirst of Erysichthon, the human punished for transgressing his status). And all of this takes place, as I have observed, in landscapes organized around command, both Erysichthon’s elaborate delegation of tree-violation, and the substitution of Ceres’ visit to the land of hunger (which she is forbidden to see) with an ekphrasis embedded in orders to subordinates.

• 46 An anonymous referee points out the relevance of Cavarero’s feminist exposition of the narratology (...)

33The last section expanded the account of how environmental narrative in book 8 acquires a political dimension, as a way for the narrators to position themselves in a cosmic hierarchy in addition to winning the favor of, or asserting power over, the immediate audience for their stories. Specifically, we turned our attention from descriptions of natural features or of elements found in the landscape, like Lelex’ votive tablets, to the set of practices that Hesiod’s mythical discourse of human origins had presented as means by which mortals interact with gods and the natural world to ensure their survival. These practices themselves possess an intrinsic ambiguity that allow them to be perceived as gifts of the gods or potentially transgressive and destructive human technologies. Marriage/reproduction, fire, sacrifice, agriculture, and nutrition, not only provide the subject of many of the book’s narratives, but narrative becomes crucial for the audience’s negotiating a response to their ambiguities. Concomitantly, the representation of sacrifice, marriage, or dining practices becomes a particularly telling manifestation of the narrator’s own alignments. To recall a simple example, the simile that compares Erysichthon’s felling of the tree to sacrifice characterizes his act as transgressive and creates an expectation of, even a desire for, the ‘tree-killer’s’ punishment on the part of its audience. If we consider Achelous to be the author of this simile, a further element of his characterization emerges: we recognize how the intermediate figure of the river here again aligns himself with a larger divine order—although such recognition of Achelous’ stake in the story equally opens a space for suspecting exaggeration in his representation of Erysichthon’s action. I begin the argument in this final section, which will focus on the fate of Erysichthon’s daughter, known from other sources as Mestra, by making explicit the double relation of narrative to the means of human self-preservation: for narrative not only describes such practices as sacrifice and dining, it takes its place among them as a technology for preserving the author’s status and autonomy. Mestra’s case will reveal this most clearly, for she is simultaneously raw material for Achelous’ narrative strategies and herself uses a consciously deceptive narrative, or rather an ambiguously deceptive one, to preserve her status as free and to provide nurture for her father.46

• 47 Cf. supra, n. 8.
• 48 See, conveniently, the overview in de Jong 2014, 47–72.

34This final stage in my interpretation of environmental dialectics at Achelous’ banquet also suggests the methodological gains for a reading of Ovid that brings together environmentally focused readings with a more traditional narratological approach. One common element that gives urgency to many environmentally informed critical positions is an insistence that climate change must transform, or inevitably transforms, understandings of relationality.47 Alongside a destabilization of oppositions between nature and culture resulting from the existential threat human activity poses to the current environmental regime comes an even more radical challenge to the possibility of distinguishing between a viewing subject and a perceived object. Studies of narrative have in different ways made it a focus for instantiating these relationships, and for deconstructing them. It is common to speak of the objects of narration, or of narrative as an expression of subjectivity, however much individual readers may want to resist these potential implications of the form. Classic Dutch narratology, again for example, provides a clear and convenient tool for showing how narrative can blur these distinctions by creating multiple focalizations, allowing what might seem an ‘objective’ narrative, which I would describe as a narrative that we receive as a representation of its object, as variously subjective when we recognize different focalizations around which it can be perceived as organized.48

• 49 See Gowers 2023.

35Ovid’s poetry has received particular attention for the complexities of the focalizations it constructs, most visibly through the use of tales within tales, where the story may be filtered through the perspectives of many narrators’ ostensible aims (supra, n.12). These stories not only become component stages in other stories, as Lelex’ account of Baucis and Philemon forms part of the plot of the narrative of Achelous’ banquet, but they have as their ultimate object of representation a change of state that surprises or disorients audiences within each level of narration because it challenges the boundaries of the human at the same time as it reveals the audience’s own implication in the story. The capacity to speak or bleed calls into question a tree’s otherness from a human audience, and this goes together with a new consciousness of narrative roles. Where the interpreting subjects of narrative find themselves within the story, whether trees are like people,49 depends on and determines attitudes towards the story itself. If we see real trees as possessing human characteristics, whether because we gullibly believe myths or notice actual properties that connote ‘hair’ and ‘limbs’, we attribute different levels of truth to the stories. If we assume that stories presenting trees as people must be false, we may be more inclined to withhold such belief and will assess the authority of its narrators differently. It is with these connections in mind between the problematic insides and outsides of Ovidian narrative levels and the metamorphic ‘objects’ they each ultimately depict that I want to begin by treating Erysichthon’s daughter’s own double role in her narrative, as an affirming instance of Achelous’ claim that metamorphosis is real, and therefore the gods are powerful, and as an agent in engineering her own survival. Appropriately, the environment will provide the lens through which these different potentialities come into focus. We can see the protagonist as standing out against the background of the landscape or as vanishing into its setting. This environment, furthermore, is itself a liminal one, a seashore that metaleptically knits the tale into the setting in which Achelous’ narrative takes place, but also, to borrow again from the Plinian perspective with which this essay began, an environment where the presence of the miraculous suggests the immanence of nature in its most extreme and elemental form. And Mestra’s story will possess its own fundamental ambiguity as an instantiation of how some remediation of human subordination and victimhood, however transient, is made possible through an approximation of normative social practices that culminate in the art of narrative.

• 50 The sea’s description as aequora (8.849) makes the environmental manifestation of the divinity itse (...)
• 51 For another treatment of the Mestra myth as a reflection on the institution of marriage, this time (...)

36Contrasts with the book’s framing episodes throw into relief the tale’s shared thematic preoccupations with institutions of marriage and nutrition and its relatively successful resolutions of the conflicts that drive the book’s own progress. Where Scylla is cheated of the erotic bargain by which she aimed to destroy her father, who threatens her in turn, Mestra becomes the deceiver and ‘offers undeserved nourishment to her hungry parent’ (8.874). And where Daedalus’ efforts to achieve freedom through ingenium tragically enable his offspring to fly too high and give his name to a land (tellus a nomine dicta sepulti, ‘the earth called by the name of the buried one’, 8.235), Mestra’s father, named from the destruction of the earth, again receives sustenance thanks to her strategies for escape. From another perspective, however, the deceptions that Mestra practices are all enabled by a bargain kept; for where Minos refuses the praemia (‘rewards’) sought by Scylla, Neptune grants Mestra’s prayer in return for the praemia he has already taken (8.92~8.851–853), and in not rejecting her prayer, he also reverses the practices of her mortal father, who despises the power of the gods and will not give them due sacrifices (sperneret, 8.740~prece non spreta, 8.852).50 Yet the god’s keeping his promise may seem irrelevant, for Mestra’s only escape from slavery derives from her already having suffered rape, the likely consequence of her new master’s finding her.51 The link between rape and enslavement makes clear that even the relationship of fides which enables deception is based on a fundamental inequality. The divinity has already taken absolute possession of Mestra, in a manner not dissimilar, as I have argued, to the way Fames takes possession of her father.

• 52 Suam, 8.871; note the contrast with sua in the previous line to describe Mestra’s form as her own p (...)

37Mestra’s story then, provides an ambivalent resolution to the atmosphere of bad faith among humans and between humans and the gods that pervades the book and gives a context for Pirithous’ own disbelief. But like the Hesiodic exchanges that establish human existence through the give and take of sacrifice, fire, and female sexuality/fecundity, Mestra’s strategy of sustainable metamorphosis also expresses the fundamental deficits of the human condition; her arts can delay but not prevent her father’s inevitable death, and these ambiguities, especially the power relations inscribed within them, take different forms when seen through the eyes of different potential authors of Mestra’s plot. As mentioned before, the god Achelous who tells the story ends up reserving the power of metamorphosis for the supreme sea-god and transforms the Hesiodic narrative by making Mestra already at once his victim and his debtor. By contrast, a denier of the gods to the last, Erysichthon believes that the daughter he emphatically thinks of as ‘his own’,52 herself possesses a body that can be transformed. What her father never senses is that it is the god who has changed her, and as a result he thinks of her powers as an augmentation of what is already his. And neither the god who relates her story nor the father who hands over the girl herself seems conscious of her own perspective, and her absence as a focalizer must also raise questions for Ovid’s audience, such as whether she offers her father nourishment willingly, or as a result of the double bonds within which she is trapped. The emphasis is rather on the conflict between the justice of her bargain with the god, resulting in a power to which she is entitled (iuris, 8.739), and the injustice of the nourishment given to the criminal (non iusta, 8.874), which may be again reduced to a matter of which story we hear, since Erysichthon denies that she is, as a Roman jurist might put it, sui iuris. Such justice, of course, provides another link to the Hesiodic worldview, wherein the right apportionment of property and honor underpins human survival.

• 53 Youth, lion, boar, serpent, bull, stone, tree, water, and fire (8.732–737). For a complementary ana (...)
• 54 See Gais 1978 for further discussion and examples.

41Achelous claims precisely two metamorphoses for himself, into a serpent, and into a bull, a quantitatively impoverished repertoire in relation to the other two shape-changers he has described. ‘Bull’ and ‘serpent’ were two of the nine shapes that exemplified Proteus’ metamorphoses;53 and Mestra herself takes on four shapes (horse, bird, cow, and deer), not counting the fisherman, which itself mirrors Proteus’ first ‘iuvenis’, and this time only one overlaps with Achelous’ (she can become a cow, but not a snake, 8.875). This pattern of ‘exponential’ decline in Achelous’ metamorphic repertoire maps the self-revelation by which he comes to speak about himself. But there is more. The penultimate disguise of Proteus had been to a river (flumen eras, interdum undis contrarius ignis, ‘you were a river, and sometimes fire, the opposite of water’, 8.737). Not only is there an allomorphic relation between the serpentine river and its horned avatar, since rivers were often themselves depicted with horns,54 but the struggle between fire and water figured in the final description of Proteus’s disguises will play an important role in the later imagery of Achelous’ story, where, as we have seen, he uses both contrasting forces (which, however, resemble each other in their liquidity) to depict the hunger of Erysichthon. Thus, Proteus’ disguises themselves mask and reveal both Achelous’ tale and his narratorial persona, both the author and his ‘matter’. The blurring of the distinction between Mestra’s made-up self, the speaking persona of the fisherman, and her actual identity, turns out to make her the inverse mirror of her own narrator. Put another way, she succeeds where Achelous fails, in that by never revealing her own identity she retains the upper hand over the audiences that she has deceived and so is never reduced to the status of a slave. Perhaps this is because her story is never allowed to reach its end.

• 55 In this sense, she recalls the fisherman who witnesses Icarus’ fall, an apparent detail of the land (...)

42This attention to truth and fiction, and the analogous opposition between seeing individual identities, whether Proteus’, Achelous’, or Mestra’s, and perceiving environmental realities receives a further complication when we consider that the landscape itself oscillates between fictionality and a transcendent, ‘elemental’ reality. Proteus’ final transformations to water and fire point at once, as we have seen, to the imagery of similes, there to figure a hunger which is invisible. Yet fire and water, especially water, are everywhere themselves in these narratives—they describe a visible reality as well as connoting what cannot be seen. The way that environment is created out of acts of narrative appears nowhere more clearly than in the scene of Mestra’s vanishing. The sea seems at first conjured out of nowhere; it is first mentioned when she evokes its god, Neptune, and the coincidence that she happened to be by the sea may seem too good to be true (8.849). Neptune, on the one hand, takes his cue from the environment by turning her into a fisherman, so that she will blend in. But from another perspective, we may consider the presence of the fisherman itself as a kind of scene painting. Indeed, the use of figures engaged in characteristic activities, including fishing, to define a painted landscape was described by Pliny the Elder as the artistic innovation of a certain Studius during the Augustan period (HN 35.116).55 Again, Mestra’s invisibility and the conspicuousness of the landscape where she hides are symbiotically balanced. Within the story too, not just Achelous but Ceres herself as an internal narrator are both implicated in the construction of a landscape that serves as the personification of a figure, Fames, whose primary quality is want. She possesses not a stomach, but the place where a stomach would be. You would think her breast ‘was hanging’ (pendere, 8.805–806). This shift to the second person makes the readers participants in their own deception, or to put it another way, they also take part in building the visual landscape. Indeed that ‘hanging’ breast recalls both the tantalizingly ‘hanging’ garlands that won credence for Lelex tale (8.722) and the hanging hooks (pendentia, 8.855) which fisherman conceal with bait to deceive the fish.

• 56 Marzano 2013, 16–18, who also surveys the opposite tradition that fishing was a lazy, sedentary alt (...)

45The ‘false’ figure of the fisherman seems perfectly chosen to convey this paradoxical multi-directionality of narrative. There is an obvious reason why the choice of fisherman suits Mestra’s situation, and it is, delightfully, asserted not by her but by the target of her own disguise. Achelous, as external narrator, refers to her costume as ‘apt for those catching fish’ (cultus piscem capientibus aptos, 8.854). He does not, therefore, make her a fisherman but suggests only her likeness to them. His description of what a fisherman does will also appear, in retrospect, a little imprecise: fisherman take or capture fish, but how? The ‘dominus’, who despite being so named appears as the victim of the disguise because he thinks she is what the narrator had merely said she seemed to be, reveals its aptness by specifying that fisherman ‘take’ fish by deceiving them, by hiding hooks with bait and by depending on the fish’s own credulity. Yet what seems merely to be the threshold between reality and appearance, with the audience being able to see Mestra as what she really is and the internal audience taken in, actually points out the relativity of the narrative act. Fish are not always credulous, indeed as the Halieutica itself reminded Pliny, they are the masters of all sorts of strategies that belie appearance and make even a tiny slip of a fish like the remora more powerful than nature’s storms and human crafts. Indeed, as we shall see, the cunning of fish was one of their distinguishing characteristics and explains why fishing is, in the words of those who praise it, superior to hunting, namely because it requires mental as well as physical aptitude.56 The deceptive fisherman thus resembles the fish he deceives and provides a further conduit likening the matter inside narrative—or perhaps outside it, for this truth about fish remains unspoken here—to the various levels of representation through which this reality reaches its different audiences.

• 57 Ziogas 2013, 136–137 (with further bibliography) accounts for the absence of her name as a gesture (...)
• 58 This gendered aspect of her anonymity links her not just to the Hesiodic Catalogue, where women are (...)

46One of the most obvious ways in which Mestra’s own propensity for concealment emerges through all outer levels of narration is that she remains unnamed.57 By contrast to the first of Achelous’ examples, Proteus, apostrophized by name before he is described (8.731), she will be introduced as ‘the wife of Autolycus and daughter of Erysichthon’ (8.738). This anonymity within Ovid’s poem is, further, a function of the perspective of characters within the story, and as such may be on one level another indication of Mestra’s effective enslavement since slaves themselves lost their names. Because Achelous is the internal narrator, it is of course up to us whether to attribute her anonymity to Ovid or to the river-god. In the latter case, the absence of Mestra’s name provides a clue to where his own interest in the story lies, with the beneficence of the supreme divinity who has answered his own prayers in the echoing story of Perimele. Correspondingly, Erysichthon, who perceives Mestra as his own, is said to hand her over to each successive master using the patronymic, Triopeida, the descendant of Triopas (saepe pater dominis Triopeida tradit, ‘often the father handed the descendant of Triopas over to masters’, 8.872). Since Triopas was his own father, the name he uses further assimilates Mestra to himself and makes his sale of her of a piece with his impending consumption of his own limbs, suos artus (8.877).58

• 59 Slatkin 1996, esp. 235–237.
• 60 The metamorphic capacity of the octopus, which ‘takes and changes color from the law of the place’ (...)

47In giving human natures to fish, the poet of Halieutica seems especially Ovidian because the problem of species boundaries was central to the Metamorphoses and because there too the margin between land and sea came especially to figure the challenge of recognizing human forms and perspectives in nature. But one crucial human attribute had always been uncannily present beneath the waves. Marcel Detienne and J.-P. Vernant (1991, 133–174) have observed the many ways in which fish in Greek thought are made to exemplify mêtis, the cunning intelligence that allows Hesiodic mankind to sustain an existence constrained by punitive exchanges. Laura Slatkin has applied the paradigm of this fishy mêtis to interpreting the plot of another epic, the Odyssey.59 She compared the narrative cunning of Odysseus, who preserves himself by concealing his identity both from the Phaeacians and ultimately from the suitors, while also telling stories that are about himself and so perpetuate his fame, to the mêtis exhibited by fish, such as the octopus which conceals itself against its background or the even more extraordinary fishy device of turning itself inside out to shake off the baited hook.60 So Mestra’s father ultimately resorts to the hopeless and contradictory strategy of consuming his own body to nourish it, perhaps the ultimate expression of the paradox that human attempts to transcend their mortal status always also risk accelerating mortality. And Mestra herself, who will be renamed and obscured by the various figures who seem to have control over her, survives reduction to slavery by becoming invisible.

• 61 Marquardt 1992 gives a history of the controversy about the spelling of Clytem(n)estra, pointing ou (...)
• 62 ὣς ἄρ᾿ ἔφαν ἀπιόντες, ἐμὸν δ᾿ ἐγέλασσε φίλον κῆρ, / ὡς ὄνομ᾿ ἐξαπάτησεν ἐμὸν καὶ μῆτις ἀμύμων. (‘so (...)
• 63 Winkler 1990, 144–145: ‘we had been informed that a crafty game was being played between Odysseus a (...)
• 64 On such future reflexive allusions, see Barchiesi 1993. Odyssean presences in Callimachus’ Erysicht (...)
• 65 As it does in Hesiod, who concludes the tale of Mestra’s many engagements with Poseidon’s rape, lea (...)

48Yet Mestra’s self-erasure of her name will be corrected by a masterstroke of allusivity that simultaneously exalts her through the very act of concealment and brings into focus the cunning of the even more elusive author of the episode, Ovid himself. The only anciently attested form of Erysichthon’s daughter’s name, Mestra, resembles one of the alternative spellings of another net wielding female, Agamemnon’s wife, who is called both Clytemnestra and Clytemestra. Patricia Marquardt has argued that the distinction is significant, for while Clytemnestra would be ‘renowned for her wooing/suitors’, Clytemestra is renowned for her cunning, mêtis.61 Thus the unmentioned name of Erysichthon’s daughter would associate her too with mêtis, whose particular power, as its apparition in fish especially suggests, comes from revealing itself only in its concealment. When her first potential master asks the supposed fisherman about the girl that he just saw standing on the shore, she replies for a long time no one, nemo, has stood on that shore except her (8.867). Odysseus makes one of his aborted first efforts at self-concealment to protect himself from the Cyclops Polyphemos. When Polyphemos asks his name, Odysseus answers that he is not Odysseus, but Οὖτις (‘no one’), and when Polyphemos tells the other Cyclopes that ‘no one’ is destroying him they say that they cannot help him and advise him to pray to the gods instead. As they depart, Homer, or rather Odysseus, says ‘my heart laughed at how my name had deceived them and my blameless mêtis’.62 That word mêtis, as Winkler pointed out, is the way that Οὖτις would appear in this construction, but it also reveals that pretense of non-identity as mêtis, cunning, itself.63 Mestra, unlike Odysseus, who disastrously boasts of his identity to Polyphemos, continues to conceal her name, becoming at once what she represents, mêtis, the more she is disguised, and the mythical ancestress, the ideal model, of the strategy that her more famous grandson would fail to apply fully.64 Therefore, at the point where Mestra herself seems to blend into the background, to have become the fisherman perfectly camouflaged in the marine landscape where the story has placed her, she is also most fully identified within her concealment and in this verbal sense becomes its author, despite what Achelous says about Neptune’s changing her physical appearance. As opposed to Achelous’ own climactic exposure of his own disgrace, a physical disfigurement that translates into Latin as a loss of status (capitis … damnum, 9.99–100), Mestra’s existence only within the environment, and in someone else’s story, deprives her own tale of its ending,65 and thus she escapes enslavement.

• 66 Cf. esp. Formisano 2023, 57.

50Different approaches to Ovid’s epic have often sought the historically transcendent: timeless tales set free from contextual constraints that can speak to audiences directly. The method of reading Formisano develops with the inspiration of contemporary ecocriticism explicitly promises to reveal the represented world of the poem to readers in the Anthropocene without the need to recover an Ovidian view of the environment as a pretext.66 Although it has been conducted in a more historicist vein, my discussion of the representation of the natural world in book 8 aims to have contributed to his exposure of how the epistemic problems raised by encounters with the environment transform audiences at all levels of the poem’s narrative. The dualisms familiar from the structural study of myth construct the biological experiences of death, reproduction, and nurture as contexts where the differences that define the human emerge and vanish, and the landscapes in this portion of Ovid’s book becomes the settings, prompts, and symbols for such encounters. But all these efforts to read through the poem must also recognize that thanks to Ovid’s use of internal speakers, narrative is as much the subject as the vehicle of Metamorphoses, and my other aim has been to place the multiple contextualizations of each represented landscape within the poem back into critical engagement with its depiction of the natural world. From this perspective, representations of the environment reveal at least as much about the rhetorical and social aims of speakers and audiences as about any immanent reality. This new tension between the social and the natural could of course be folded back into the problematization of the human evoked by environmentalist readings. But it also allows the natural world itself to become a representation of human power relations. The poem’s problematic anthropomorphization of gods, rivers, and even physical experiences like hunger is a two-way street, which, as it lessens the plausibility of the poem as a true depiction of the natural world, simultaneously reveals the stakes in describing that world for establishing status in a competitive human environment. By this means, the environment in Ovid at once reveals non-negotiable facts about constraints on the human, but also the social realities immanent in the layered narrative acts through which we experience them, and thus leads ultimately to a view of Ovid’s own poem as a performance.

• 67 Hollis 1970, 132, developed by Kenney 2004, 384, drawing on Hinds 1985, 27.
• 68 Hinds 1985, 32 n.39: ‘the echo gains in piquancy if the reader of Trist. 3.10.75 happens to recall (...)

51One moment where this double vision possesses particular force comes in the opening line of the book’s most threatening and uncanny narrated landscape, Ceres’ ekphrasis of Fames’ habitat: triste solum, sterilis, sine fruge, sine arbore tellus (‘a sad soil, a sterile land without produce and treeless’, 8.787). The sine arbore tellus creates a suggestive intratextual echo of the devastating effect of Erysichthon’s violence on Ceres’ sacred grove, again tightening the reciprocity between punishment and crime and emphasizing the natural world as a place where one’s sense of authority and prerogatives are dramatically re-calibrated. But, as a number of commentators from Hollis on have observed, many elements of the description would be re-used in Ovid’s account of his place of exile at Trist. 3.10.75.67 As Hinds points out, in this latter passage Ovid is not only emphasizing the extent to which Tomi is a constructed landscape antithetical to the Golden Age ideal; he is also re-writing the Metamorphoses. And I conclude with some reflections on how this re-writing—or indeed writing because the fact that line begins with triste seems too good to be true68—relates to the double vision of the environment as immanent and constructed developed here. First, within the poem the line describes a land as remote narratologically as it is geographically: Achelous is reporting the description Ceres offers to her own nymph factotum, and her authority for doing so is suspect, to say the least, since unlike Lelex, she is describing a place that she can never have seen. By contrast, when we perceive the reference to Ovid’s own life, the highly artificial landscape seems inescapably real, a reflection of the actual constraints under which his text is produced. When heard as Ovid’s, the words take on a very different kind of authority, one that evacuates the speeches of both Ceres and Achelous of their credibility and authenticity. Indeed, the language of the description in itself negates the particular capacities of both divinities—its sterility and absence of fruges writes Ceres out of the picture. Similarly, the land lacks the copia which symbolizes the presence of Achelous, whether we think of the abundant feast he has provided, the copious flow by which he imposes himself on the landscape, or the Cornucopia, the horn of plenty by which he asserts this abundance even in the face of his defeat by Hercules (9.88). In respect to the represented divinities, Ovid’s brief evocation of reality has turned them into absences just as his own ekphrastic powers make something out of the quintessential nothing, fames (‘hunger’). Like Mestra, without ever directly naming himself, he incorporates elements of his reality into deceptive fictions. And by doing so he not only defies the orders that have excluded him from the world, gaining a limited access to communication and exchange, but enables himself to speak as the gods who order punishments rather than the mortal who receives them, and so to escape the constraints of reality even in the act of representing it.