Primus Amor Phoebi

This paper explores how Ovid’s announcement of Daphne as Ovid’s first love, and thus of the first of the numerous erotic stories in the Metamorphoses, is richly inscribed with allusions to literary beginnings—namely the openings of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, the start of the war in Vergil’s epic, the transition from Delian to Pythian story in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the beginning of Propertius’ first book of elegies, and (most famously) Ovid’s own Amores 1.1. How these epic and elegiac intertexts reverberate with one another is also considered.