Healers Who do not Heal:
the Therapy of Poetry in the Georgics and Metamorphoses

Julia Nelson-Hawkins (Ohio State University)

The topos of healers who do not do their job is a striking feature of Augustan hexameter poetry and has not received due attention in scholarship. In every extended plague or medical scene in Virgil and Ovid we find a character who is famous for healing who does not do so: Though the list includes at least 5 such major scenes of medical role-reversals, I highlight, here, only two texts: In Georgics 4, Orpheus’ renowned healing powers are not mentioned, despite the fact that he appears in the context of a bee plague, and Aristaeus, though also a famous healer in his earlier myths, is unable to cure the pestilence that has ravaged his hives and must rely on divine intervention. Conversely, in Ovid’s famous plague narrative of Metamorphoses 7, King Aeacus’ famous healing skills are not even hinted at, despite the fact that Ovid describes the pestilence as so virulent that it wipes out the virtuous king’s citizenry on Aegina.

The reason Virgil and Ovid evoke traditional healers and subsequently co-opt or silence their ability to heal, I argue, is to create a space for a new kind of healer. By thus controlling mythical healers’ powers, the poets highlight a new, post-Actian paradigm of “therapoetics” that emphasizes Augustan patronage of Roman “health” and the new Roman “healing bards.” Horace may pithily encapsulate the idea of the healing poet in his Epistles, when he claims that the bard is the one who ensures agricultural and familial productivity and averts disease from the state (Ep. 2.132-8), but Virgil and Ovid weave this idea throughout their long narrative poems as a unifying theme, claiming the power of “therapoetry” for themselves—each in a different way.

Virgil, I suggest, deviates from the Thucydidean and Lucretian plague models in his description of the apian disease by being the first author of a plague narrative to offer a lengthy practical solution for how to prevent it in the first place (4.251-80). This has been to my knowledge unnoticed before, and I argue that this diagnostic and prescriptive section is a tour de force of sound medical advice consonant with the extant medical treatises, demonstrating Virgil’s erudite and elegant therapeutic power. Ovid’s plague narrative in Book 7 of the Metamorphoses, on the other hand, are typically viewed as responding to the Lucretian plague topos, but I will show that Ovid also assimilates and responds to Virgil’s presentation of plague in Georgics 4. The fact that Ovid invites the reader to expect a bougonic mechanism of rebirth in his allusions to Virgil, but instead thwarts this expectation by relying on a corpse-less metamorphosis of ants into men, has political implications: Although Aeacus is the epitome of a just king in Greek myth, only Caesar and Augustus, whom Ovid hymns in Book 15 as saviors of a populace “plagued” by war, can heal the Roman state of its ills. Yet Ovid’s epilogue in Met.15 cheekily suggests an even better alternative: he emphatically depicts himself as a healer whose therapy for a war-ravaged citizenry rivals even that of Augustus and Caesar.