OVID, VIRGIL AND THE ECHOING ROCKS OF THE TWO SCYLLAS

What is it about?

Ovid Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara’s famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus’ description of the sea-monster Scylla’s lair at Aeneid 3.432: resonantia saxa. The allusion tropes its own intertextual status as an ‘echo’ and contributes to the ludic confusion of the two Scyllas in this episode and elsewhere. The collision of the ‘tiny pebble’ with the Virgilian rocks further tropes the episode’s elegiac and Callimachean recasting of epic material. The childishness of the game is also part of the self-conscious puerility of the Metamorphoses’ poetics.

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