Gods and humans in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses': Constructions of identity and the politics of status

This dissertation is a study of Ovid's presentations of gods and humans in the Metamorphoses. My thesis is that Ovid's constructions of human and divine identity are intricately interrelated and constitute a sustained exegesis of the human relationship with the gods in contexts where identity and status are continually contested and problematized. In an artistic dialogue with its Roman cultural context, Ovid's Metamorphoses, I argue, explores the boundaries between god and human which had begun to be transformed after the political apotheosis of Julius Caesar. In addition, Ovid constructs poetry as a culturally powerful signifier of immortality and divinity. The first chapter analyzes the programmatic artists of the poem and suggests that the creation of art is continually linked, via artistic agon, with conflict between human and divine perspectives on teleology. The second chapter delineates the nature of the gods as constructed in the poem, both by the narrative and through the gods themselves, and explores how Ovid's anthropomorphic gods engage in his broader discourses of power and status. The third chapter investigates human nature in the poem, and shows how humans define and transcend their status, limitations, and identity by imitating the gods. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine apotheosis, the medium through which the divine and human are integrated, and suggest that Ovid's poem is a key text in the cultural dialogue between political and artistic immortality.