HSSB 4080.
A significant insight that we have gained from the idea of the Anthropocene is that the time of the human is entangled with that of the non-human in ways that we can no longer ignore. Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains material that speaks to this insight in a number of ways. Yet the poem’s interests in the temporalities of non-human species, are often overlooked by scholars whose anthropocentric bias leads them to focus exclusively on the linear narrative of human progress. In this paper, I seek to complicate their picture of time in the Metamorphoses by demonstrating how Ovid depicts a number of non-human species as knotted in time to the human, and by showing how this focus on their cycles of living and dying disrupts the poem’s linear chronology.
