TIRESIAS, OVID, GENDER AND TROUBLE: GENERIC CONVERSIONS FROM ARS INTO TRISTIA

Abstract

The brief story of Tiresias’ punishment in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Met. 3.316–38) becomes a privileged site for mapping the different ways readers can reinterpret episodes of the poem in the light of the rest of Ovid's corpus. Tiresias, the first human uates of the poem, who is punished with blindness for voicing what he should have kept silent, can be included among those punished artists who double the poet in the Metamorphoses: while Tiresias is condemned for having voiced his knowledge of both sexes, Ovid is exiled for giving amatory advice to, and therefore knowing, both men and women. Thus the Tiresias episode reads as a pendant to that of Actaeon in the same book (the latter explicitly likened to Ovid's fate in Tristia 2.103–8), with the pair suggesting a veiled allegory of the carmen and error that caused Ovid's exile.