Dira canam: Marriage and War in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Preview this chapter:

Dira canam: Marriage and War in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Page 1 of 1

< Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/10.1484/M.GIFBIB-EB.5.124622/M.GIFBIB-EB.5.126215-1.gif

This study explores Ovid’s association of marriage and war throughout the Metamorphoses to argue that war not only often results from marriage, but can even displace marriage from the narrative altogether. Throughout the Metamorphoses, Ovid opens war narratives with marriage, most pithily in his conjunction of Paris’ rape of Helen with the outset of the Trojan War (12.4-7). Bride-theft is the primary cause of war in Homeric epic, and this opening gambit is but one way in which Ovid signals his allegiance to the Homeric fons et origo of his hexameter verse. The close association of war and marriage in the poem aligns with a frequent focus on marriage from the perspective of its failure: marriages in Ovidian myth, even if successfully broached, portend disaster, not only for the participants, but also, usually, for their families and compatriots.