Im Katalog nach Korinth: Medeas Rundflug zu sich selbst (Ovid, Metamorphosen 7,350‒393)
After murdering Pelias, Ovid’s Medea boards her famous chariot driven by dragons in order to get to Corinth. She does not, however, take a direct route, but makes a detour around the Aegean Sea, which allows the narrator to present 17 metamorphoses...
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After murdering Pelias, Ovid’s Medea boards her famous chariot driven by dragons in order to get to Corinth. She does not, however, take a direct route, but makes a detour around the Aegean Sea, which allows the narrator to present 17 metamorphoses as stations of her flight. Whereas the resulting catalogue is traditionally understood as a prime example of a praeteritio which resembles a number of myths that were otherwise leftover in the Metamorphoses, this paper argues that the route Medea takes and the stories she sees from above reflect her own thoughts at this stage of her character-development and above all prepare her fatal decision to kill her own children at the destination of her voyage in Corinth. This circuitous flight and the view from above related to it thus form essential parts of her own metaleptic transformation into the mythological Medea whom the reader in Ovid’s time already knew so well.
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