ABSTRACT
Judgments on Ovids style have tended to exemplify something of the facility which they purport to expose. Often he has in effect been criticized for not being Virgil. In setting out to write the Metamorphoses Ovid was attempting something for which, as he envisaged the undertaking, no precedents existed; and those readers who instinctively sense in the first four words of the poem, in noua fert animus, read autonomously, a proclamation by the poet to that effect are following a hint intended by him. It is relevant to bring in Lucan at this point because the very different nature of his attempted solution and of the stylistic means by which he executed it helps to illustrate the originality of both the Metamorphoses and the Bellum Civile. Both poems were brilliant essays in a modern, or contemporary, style of epic which might legitimately challenge comparison with Virgil, not on his own ground, but on a new and independent footing.
