À la croisée des chemins (Ovide, Métamorphoses : livre XIV)

In Ovid’s works we can find a lot of duplicated structures, but Metamorphoses XIV provides a special case. That’s the time when Greekmythology crosses the path of Roman origins. So Ovid doubles Virgil’s invention of Achaemenid, adding as an embedded narrator another member of Ulysses’s crew, Macareus. By means of this duo, he combines two hypotexts, the Aeneid and the Odyssey, giving to the Cyclops and Circe a major role in an overall architecture based on duality. With consistency the poet, by accumulating various instances of reduplication, builds a network of textual connections. Such phenomena appear both in large structures and fine details of the book (a typology is outlined at the end of this paper). So, through his sophisticated way of writing, Ovid shows how the fictional imagination can result from devices based on analogy.Tronchet Gilles. À la croisée des chemins (Ovide, Métamorphoses : livre XIV). In: Vita Latina, N°185-186, 2012. pp. 3-31