Fathers and Sons, Part One

Chapter 3 recaps the centrality of paternity as thematic and metatextual link between Homer and Ovid. It considers the didactic or paradigmatic connotations of paternal guidance and then turns to the Embassy to Achilles (Book 9 of the Iliad ), in which the power of a father to guide his son is validated but also shown to be severely limited. Achilles’s tutor Phoenix tries to soften Achilles’s anger with an exemplum about Meleager: this attempt on Phoenix’s part fails, and thus enacts the poem’s recurring theme of generational conflict. The chapter then focuses on the Calydonian boar hunt in Metamorphoses Book 8 and on Heroides 3, Briseis’s letter to Achilles, which feature the Meleager story and the Embassy to Achilles. In both, Ovid uses the Homeric intertext to explore the nature of his relationship with the Homeric poems and the limits of Homer’s paternal guidance.

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