Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination

This book positions Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the western history of environmental thought. The poem is about new bodies. Stones, springs, plants and animals materialize out of human origins to create a world of hybrid objects, which retain varying degrees of human subjectivity while taking on new physical form. In bending the boundaries of known categories of being, these hybrid entities reveal both the porousness of human and other agencies as well as the dangers released by their fusion. Metamorphosis unsettles the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it.

Drawing on a range of modern environmental theorists and approaches, the contributors to this volume trace how the Metamorphoses models the relationship between humans and other life forms in ways that resonate with the preoccupations of contemporary eco-criticism. They make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in Ovid’s poem as an exemplar of the ’premodern’ ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate. They also highlight critical moments in the history of the poem’s ecological reception, including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of Medieval and Renaissance responses to Ovid.

Giulia Sissa is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Classics at UCLA, USA. She is the author of The Daily Life of the Greek Gods (with M. Detienne, 2000), Greek Virginity (1990), Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World (2008), Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion (2017) and Le Pouvoir des femmes. Un défi pour la démocratie (2021).

Francesca Martelli is Associate Professor of Classics at UCLA, USA. She is the author of Ovid (2020) and Ovid’s Revisions (2013).