Toward an Ovidian Poetics of Eating

Tom A. Garvey (University of Virginia)

One of the great many themes that unify Ovid’s epic work is, I believe, food and proper eating. Although there are relatively few episodes in the Metamorphoses that have a direct bearing on such a discussion, Ovid situates each strategically, in the most significant of any poem’s loci – the beginning, middle, and end. This arrangement, coupled with the unity with which Ovid treats the theme, bespeaks its importance. I propose that the episodes of Lycaon (Book 1), Philemon and Baucis (Book 8), Erysichthon (Book 8), and Pythagoras (Book 15) are meant, on one level at least, to be read in tandem, that Ovid presents in them a consistent picture of what should properly be considered food, and that this is as serious a message as any he proffers his readers in the Metamorphoses.

At the heart of this discussion lie both the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis and the rites of ancient Greek and Roman religion, skillfully interwoven by means of a set of recurring type-scenes over the course of these four episodes. In order to develop a notion of proper eating, Ovid focuses in these scenes on the maintenance, transgression, and ultimately the fluidity of the proper boundaries between the various living beings inhabiting the earth - gods, humans, animals, and even trees. By detailing an improper and then a proper theodicy (in the Lycaon and Philemon and Baucis scenes respectively), Ovid reaffirms the part of the assumed hierarchy that places gods above men. On the other hand, in the many scenes detailing proper sacrifice, he purposefully blurs the distinctions between the other groups, effectively placing humans, animals, and trees on an even par. In so doing, he explicitly equates the killing of animals (and sometimes even the chopping down of trees) with murder and the consumption of flesh with cannibalism, an equation graphically displayed by Erysichthon’s autophagy.

Finally, I must mention also that although this paper shows how intricately connected and consistent Ovid’s myths of Lycaon, Philemon and Baucis, Erysichthon, and Pythagoras are, we must resist the temptation to ascribe to the poet himself beliefs in either vegetarianism or the doctrine of metempsychosis, or even any particular attitudes towards animals. Nevertheless, Ovid clearly shows that, in his Metamorphoses at least, proper eating happens to be vegetarian.