Ovid's Dream, or, Byblis and the Circle of Metamorphoses

This article explores the role played by the Byblis episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a form of authorial self-portrait. Byblis, placed at what this paper shows to be the poem’s chronological centre, is both the work’s first long-form writer and its first, and only, dreamer of fully human dreams. Where Morpheus in the Metamorphoses’ House of Sleep may serve as model for the poet as shape-shifter and creator, Byblis represents the intimate connection between creativity and self-deception in Ovid’s poetic programme. Through Byblis, this paper argues, Ovid comes to recapitulate Latin literature’s ‘primal scene of instruction’, the Hesiodic and Callimachean dream of Homer that opens Ennius’ Annales. The metempsychotic dimension of Ovid’s representation of his own poetic project, this paper concludes, has important affinities with the circular form of the self-perpetuating fountain into which Byblis is transformed, and with the anthropocentric dreams that make possible Byblis’ metamorphosis, and the circle of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a whole