ABSTRACT
Erysichthon, the destructive king who chops down a tree sacred to the goddess Ceres at the end of Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is memorably punished with a never-ending hunger that results in his own autophagy, or self-cannibalism. This punishment is fitting not only because Ceres, a goddess connected with agriculture, is able to force a man with an excessive appetite to eat everything around him without filling his belly, but also because it imposes a sort of recursive time, often associated with natural cycles and femininity, on Erysichthon, a rapacious masculine figure. Erysichthon is stuck in an infinite loop of consumption without satisfaction: his autophagy represents a fruitless attempt to regain control of his own temporal experience by consuming it. Reading Ovid’s Erysichthon with sensitivity to feminist theory concerning the connection of time and gender, I trace the intersections of gendered time and consumption in Ovid’s account of this myth.
