El episodio de Faetón como antiapoteosis: apoteosis, estructura y cosmos en las Metamorfosis de Ovidio

Abstract

The Phaethon episode emphasizes the claim to divinity and failed divinization, and so it canbe read as an anti-apotheosis: there is a purification, an epitaph that mimics the titulus andthe elogium of the deified characters’ statues in the Forum of Augustus, a declaration of Phaethon’s fault with the language of apotheosis, and an allusion to the constellation that he did notbecome. Like Caesar, Phaethon has become a stella; as in Caesar’s passage, the poet refers tohis anima; like Caesar’s apotheosis, his anti-apotheosis occurs in Italian territory; in both passages, the sun ceases to appear. The contrast of the two episodes in the first and the last book,the first of which also has an echo (the Icarus episode) in the central part of the Metamorphoses, thus seems deliberately sought by the representation. Finally, while the anti-apotheosisis one further example in the first two books of the dynamics of chaos, normally triggered bya fault, the apotheosis structurally recovers the dynamics of cosmos.