Ronald Syme and Ovid's Road Not Taken

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore Ovid’s usefulness to Syme, and the narrative strategies of History in Ovid. In doing so, it investigates the structure of the monograph, and finds it more coherent than some have supposed. Likewise, I argue that it shows Syme aware of his readership’s familiarity with his own habit of electing spiritual precursors amongst the authors of antiquity—and exploiting that habit to make points about the texture of history in the last decade of Augustus’ reign.