Imperial Icons and Exile Poetics in Ovid, Tristia 3.11: Phalaris' Bull and Myron's Cow
Prof. Lauren Curtis
Bard College
This talk examines one of the most disturbing images through which Ovid articulates his claustrophobic suffering in exile: the bronze bull in which the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris roasted his victims, including the bull's creator Perillus (Tristia 3.11). As they died, their cries of pain emerged from the bull's mouth so that the animal, hideously lifelike, appeared to moo. The poem is highly self-referential about art's ability to elicit wonder, to deceive, and to transmit the visceral realities of pain through unsettling acts of mimesis. Moreover, I argue that Ovid's bull is actually a hybrid beast whose mimetic power is politically charged. Ovid's elegy contains a series of allusions to another renowned bovine, with which Perillus' bull was often twinned in ancient art criticism: the famously lifelike classical Greek statue of a cow by Myron, which had been looted from Athens to furnish the portico of Augustus' temple of Apollo on the Palatine. Keeping the Augustan poetics and politics of Greek statuary in mind shows Ovid not only inserting his exile persona into myth, but also crafting his voice as a haunting, disruptive force for Augustus' aesthetic agenda.
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