Marco Fucecchi

The irregular character of Ovid’s battle scenes in the Metamorphoses is mirrored by their unconventional, idiosyncratic narrative technique, tracing back to their remote antiquity. In their attempt to ‘reconstruct’ ancient pre-homeric battles – thus providing an actual ‘ex post’ background to Iliad and Aeneid – the Flavian epicists capitalize on Ovid’s lesson, in that they actually give Ovidian audacious innovations a license of epic ‘regularity’...