Epilogue - Ovid in the Hands of Women

Summary

The epilogue shows how Ovid’s early modern legacy leads to the defense of two famous women, the Biblical Eve and the Augustan Julia, as Ovidian heroines whose life stories record their relations to parrhesia and republicanism. Milton’s Eve is the greatest Ovidian and republican creation of Paradise Lost, the first of Our First Parents to represent the “filial freedom” that counts as “true authority in men” and also the essentially republican conviction that God can and should be found in the peers drawn together within republics and social contracts. Wharton’s Julia is Eve’s counterpart. She is the first reader of Ovid who believes in the power of his poetry to create a commonwealth of letters that can and will survive his own life as well as his exile. This chapter brings to a conclusion the book’s broad concern with women as readers of Ovid who move the poet’s political convictions forward to new generations and epochs. It simultaneously gestures toward the further work that may be done to show how Ovid’s poetic legacy has long worked toward patterns of social and political change.