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The Be(a)st of the Achaeans: Turning Tables / Overturning Tables in Ovid's Centauromachy (Metamorphoses 12.210-535)
- Arethusa
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 46, Number 1, Winter 2013
- pp. 87-116
- 10.1353/are.2013.0005
- Article
- Additional Information
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Ovid's Centauromachy is a sustained engagement with epic poetics: Nestor, figured as a Homeric narrator in a Homeric setting, entertains an internal audience of banqueters with a tale of another banquet that degenerated into a spectacular brawl. His representation there of epic masculinity ironically critiques the traditional epic uirtus model of his audience: it is argued that transgressive violence, loss of integrity, and the signature rhetoric of mutilation, disfigurement, and dismantling (of bodies, fixtures, landscapes, and generic boundaries) double as tropes for the super-narrator's metaliterary operation of dismantling and parodying the uirtus ideology of his epic pre-text.