Ovid's Visceral Reactions: Reproduction, Domestic Violence, and Civil Wa

Throughout a body of poetic texts composed from the late first century B.C.E. to the early first century C.E., the Roman poet Ovid enacted a semantic shift upon the Latin word viscera. Traditionally denoting the vital inner organs of a human or animal, viscera appear in Ovidian texts as metaphors for wombs and children. This dissertation demonstrates that these visceral reproductive bodies are deployed specifically in contexts of domestic violence and civic discord. Almost without exception, visceral wombs and visceral children in Ovidian mythography mark acts of violation that threaten familial bonds and presage the civic conflicts that tear communities apart from within. Against the backdrop of a nascent dynasty whose program of rebuilding after decades of civil war exerted pressure on its citizens to produce numerous children, Ovid's visceral bodies link reproduction to destruction rather than renewal. At the end of his career, the author in exile employed viscera as a figure for his own poetic texts, implicating those dangers associated with sexual reproduction in the act of authorial production. Ovid's new visceral metaphors continue to resonate in later Julio-Claudian and Flavian literature, from the domestic bloodshed of Senecan tragedy to Lucanian civil war epic to an account of private grief in Quintilian's rhetorical handbook. In the end, these visceral bodies are demonstrative of a sharpening of Roman poetics around abortion, fertility, and women's bodies in the Augustan period. They serve as a useful point of contact with the ideological substrates of the political, cultural, and social environment in which they developed, indicating to us first what is Augustan about Ovid, and then what is Ovidian about the poet's literary successors.