Dan CURLEY Intratextual Footnotes in Ovid's Metamorphoses

The concept of "footnoting" in Latin poetry has enabled much discussion on how poets negotiate the literary past.  Ross' "Alexandrian footnote," for example, encapsulates general statements like ferunt or fama est, which both point toward an established literary tradition and characterize the poet as a scholar who has researched that tradition. (Ross 1975:78; Hinds 1998:1ff.)

     A subtler version of the Alexandrian footnote is the "memory trope," in which a character in one poem remembers his or her own experience in another poem by another poet, such as Ariadne in book 3 of Ovid's Fasti recalling her own words in Catullus 64. (Conte 1986:57ff.; Barchiesi 1986:93ff.)

     In this paper I shall discuss yet another system of footnoting, one that is on display in the Metamorphoses: the "intratextual footnote," via which Ovid establishes an allusive dynamic consisting of interdependent narratives.  The intratextual footnote as I define it involves Ovid abbreviating certain aspects of a well-known story, while expanding upon them elsewhere. (Larmour 1990; Newlands 1997.)

     An example of this abbreviation and expansion occurs in the Theseus and Ariadne narrative in book 8 (169-82), where Ovid adheres to the major plot points of the myth:  Ariadne aids Theseus, abandons Crete, is herself abandoned on Dia, and laments.  Yet all of this is played out on a much larger scale between Scylla and Minos earlier in the same book (8.1-151).

     Of specific interest is Ariadne's lament, which is treated in two words: multa querenti (176).  This phrase may be read intratextually as a footnote to the Scylla narrative.  As Minos sails away from Megara, Scylla rebukes him with a speech that embodies and expands upon the upcoming multa of Ariadne.

     This and other intratextual footnotes that I shall discuss highlight Ovid's program of singing mutatas formas, "shapes changed into new bodies" (Met. 1.1).  By seeing Scylla now as Scylla, now as Ariadne &emdash; by reading and rereading &emdash; we shall begin to uncover the innumerable connections in Ovid's carmen perpetuum.