ABSTRACT
Ovid’s “Ceyx and Alcyone” tale parodies an obsessive love in epic form. Poetic repetition reinforces the elegiac duo in una theme, and that topos varies Cephalus and Procris’ earlier disastrous “dualism.” Poetic expressiveness employs doubling tropes: repeated sounds, vocabulary and thoughts, other mirroring themes and two focalizing characters (with the charming, novel Doppelgänger Morpheus). Forms of rhetorical doubleness include anaphora, anadiplosis, epanalepsis, hendiadys and polypototon, e.g. sine me me, ossibus ossa meis, at nomen nomine tangam. Ovid’s insistent doubling in “Ceyx and Alcyone” has been misunderstood as admiration of the couple, although we show that it mocks their excessive reciprocity, as it does in four other doubling narratives of “couples”: Narcissus, Echo, Procris and Baucis. Ovid undermines sympathy for the codependent couples by mirrored words, actions and structures. Ovid’s gemination slyly satirizes the sentimental “togetherness” of love idylls.
