The Gate of Horns: History and Fiction in Ovid’s Cipus Episode (Met. 15.565–621)

Résumé 0

Ovid’s tale of Cipus, the returning general who discovers that horns have miraculously appeared on his forehead, combines narrative elements that point back to the poem’s early books with others that suggest historiography. Cipus’ own hybridity, therefore, figures a generic combination that simultaneously invites incredulity and belief. These different interpretative strategies feature in the different responses to the prodigy within the episode. The general’s determination to keep his horned presence, and the kingship it predicts, out of Rome makes space for Republican history to proceed as normal, while his likeness to other metamorphic figures within the poem complicates that strategy. As a representation of the Roman past, Ovid’s Metamorphoses necessarily summons up foreign, even tyrannical, comparands at the moment of their exclusion and questions the very reality on which history’s authority depends by grounding it in unbelievable stories. The second half of this article uses this Ovidian perspective as a vantage point for re-examining the blending of myth and history at the conclusion of Aeneid 6, intermittently recalled by the language and imagery of the Ovidian episode. Reading Vergil back through Ovid exposes the earlier poet’s refashioning of history to serve dynastic ends: Cipus’ prescription for the Roman future, ‘no kings’, sets up a Republican response to the entire Vergilian spectacle and suggests how its internal contradictions persist in the normative conclusions Anchises draws from it.