Quid facundia posset / re patuit (Οu., Μet. XIII 382-383): the oratorical strategies of Ulysses in the Ovidian armorum iudicium

Abstract

In book XIII of his Metamorphoses Ovid presents the contest for the arms of Achilles between Ajax and Ulysses. The speeches that they address to the assembly of Greek show a judicial process according to the norms of Roman rhetoric. Through his traditional facundia Ulysses persuades his public and gains victory after a confrontation that relates to a verbal fight. I will explore the construction of Ulysses’s discursive superiority focusing especially on two key-places of his speech, exordium (128-139) and peroratio (339-381). I will identify different syntactic, metrical and stylistic strategies with which Ulysses captivates his interlocutors. From a metapoetic perspective, Ovid’s tale establishes some resonances between the character’s Fama and its own textual mechanisms.