Homer is often, indeed nearly always, Virgil’s “exemplary model” … but he is also constantly the “code-model.” That is, he is present as the model divided into a series of individual sedimented units, but he is also representative of the epic institution that guarantees the ideological and literary functions of poetry itself – functions that Virgil uses for their exemplary value and restores by direct, unmediated contact.
Back again he darted from the high-roofed hall, laughing loudly; the arrow burned in the girl, underneath her heart, like a flame. Ever she shot sparkling eyes at Aeson’s son, and in distress prudent thoughts were blown from her chest; no other memory she held but flooded her heart with sweet pain.
A return to allusive space. Fallible memory and fictional memory. Tracking weavers of text and following poetic threads in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; from the daughters of Minyas to the Fates, from Rome to Alexandria and back again.
Once upon a time in the wilds of Babylon, Thisbe saw a lion. But I saw three… An exploration of allusive space and what lurks within: Ovidian lions mixing with Theocritean lions merging with Catullan lions. How many intertexts make a pride?
‘The locus demands I proclaim the virgin’s rape. You’ll recognise many things, and a few you ought to learn.’ Is ‘locus’ a location in space and is that space in the real world, on a page, or in the mind? Is ‘locus’ a point in time? Is it some when and where we have been before? How many things can fit in a ‘locus’?