THE BE(A)ST OF THE ACHAEANS: TURNING TABLES / OVERTURNING TABLES IN OVID’S CENTAUROMACHY (METAMORPHOSES 12.210–535)

Ovid's Centauromachy is a sustained engagement with epic poetics: Nestor, figured as a Homeric narrator in a Homeric setting, entertains an internal audience of banqueters with a tale of another banquet that degenerated into a spectacular brawl. His representation there of epic masculinity ironically critiques the traditional epic uirtus model of his audience: it is argued that transgressive violence, loss of integrity, and the signature rhetoric of mutilation, disfigurement, and dismantling (of bodies, fixtures, landscapes, and generic boundaries) double as tropes for the super-narrator's metaliterary operation of dismantling and parodying the uirtus ideology of his epic pre-text.