Rustic Hospitality and Metamorphosis in Two Ovidian Epiphanies

Abstract: The extensive scholarship on Ovid's generic experimentation via repeated tales in elegy and hexameter (e.g. Ceres and Proserpina; Daedalus and Icarus) has largely neglected the cross-referencing narrative doublet of Philemon and Baucis in Metamorphoses 8 vs. Hyrieus in Fasti 5. In this article I explore these two matching stories of divine epiphany in a rustic context, with a view to characterization of the human and divine protagonists, narrative complication and resolution, ritual etiquette, tonal variation, and stylistic register.