Intertextuality, parody, and the immortality of poetry: Petronius and Ovid

Immortality of poetry is crucial to Ovid’s self-fashioning as a canonical love elegist. In the epilogue to the Metamorphoses (15.871-9) Ovid celebrates his apotheosis as a poet and predicts his transformation into a textual body. Poetic memory and the art of allusion participate in this process of transfiguration of Ovid into an elegiac voice. By intertextuality Ovid’s love poems show their perennial, latent vitality. In alluding to or reusing Ovid’s language and themes the reader-imitator transforms his model into a new elegiac text. This artistic process of literary ‘metamorphosis’ becomes much more evident in parody, comic intertextuality, that recreates – and revitalizes - the distorted model in paradoxical forms. This paper re-examines a limpid case of parody of Ovid’s amatory works in Petronius’ Satyrica. It focuses on the evocation of Ovid’s elegiac texts in the love-story between Circe and Encolpius/Polienus and, in particular, on the comic manipulation of the Heroides in the epistolary exchange between the two lovers (Petr. 129-30). It tries to demonstrate that parody, as a form of literary recreation (though in humorous fashion), actively contributes to the transfiguration of Ovid into the exemplar par excellence of love elegy.