SOURCE: Tissol, Garth. “Ovid's Little Aeneid and the Thematic Integrity of the Metamorphosis.” Helios 20, no.1 (spring 1993): 69-79.

In the following essay, Tissol compares Ovid's story of Aeneas in the Metamorphoses to Virgil's Aeneid.

ταράσσει τοὐς ἀνθρώπους οὔ τἀ πράγματα, ἀλλἀ τἀ περì τω̑ν πραγμάτων δόγματα.

“Things do not give people trouble, but ideas about things.”

(Epictetus, Enchiridion 5)

In all his works, and especially in the Metamorphoses, Ovid persistently recalls the Aeneid to his readers' minds. Sometimes he adapts specifically Vergilian themes such as pietas and antiqua virtus, often in humorously paradoxical contexts; sometimes he alludes to specific passages; very often, in his basic diction and modes of expression, he produces less specifically localized echoes of the Aeneid, which keep forcing it upon our notice.¹ Those features of the writer's craft, such as versification, in which the Aeneid's influence could scarcely have been avoided, do not account for its prominence in the Metamorphoses. Ovid goes well beyond the unavoidable; he...