July 26, 2018
Aliénor Cartoux, « Phoébus et Phaéthon dans les Métamorphoses : la mythologie ovidienne comme miroir du Prince inversé », Interférences, ID : 10.4000/interferences.6395
By pointing out straight from the beginning the overwhelming presence of Augustan symbolism, Ovid constructs the myth of Phaethon as a reflect of the Principate, not as much for his successes—as we can expect for a divine transposition of the Augustan regime—as for the failures incurred. Ovid questions the way the succession of an almighty person must be handled by presenting successively Phoebus, Phaethon and Jupiter as countermodels to Augustus. As such, the ovidian myth is a reverse mirror, and, in a typical process of the ovidian poetics, it enhances issues without offering solutions, which must be found by the sagacious reader.