Lampas - Volume 56, Issue 1, 2023

This paper considers misunderstandings found within the story of Cephalus and Procris in Metamorphoses 7, misunderstandings that are regularly repeated in the scholarly interpretations and English translations of this episode. The interpretive challenges posed by Cephalus’ tale are indeed akin to those faced by the Ovidian translator, whose interpretive choices will influence how later readers construe his often ambiguous words. Whereas others see Cephalus as an unreliable narrator whose claim to have been raped by Aurora is open to doubt, I argue that his words are best read as he tells us to read them. Misunderstanding is due not to Cephalus’ unreliability but to the interpretive challenges posed by the changeable Ovidian world he inhabits, a world that is labyrinthine and ambiguous. Ovid himself helps us navigate the mazelike structure of Cephalus’ narrative by verbal clues and intra-/intertextual parallels that clearly align Cephalus with other rape victims in the epic. By understanding Cephalus first and foremost as a rape victim, his actions and words become more intelligible and shed light on the themes of rape, masculinity, and power within the epic as a whole.

Emotions make a story more than a list of events. While reading, readers assign emotions to characters, and this constitutes an important, if not crucial, aspect of understanding narrative texts. Information in the text enables this process of assigning emotions, but readers’ pre-existing knowledge and their previous (emotional) experiences also play a role. In this article, I aim to provide more insight into the interaction between reader and text, and present different types of information that play a role in understanding emotions in narratives. These types are based on research on text comprehension and reading processes and concepts from cognitive and affective narratology. Examples include knowledge about typical plot structures, types of characters and emotional scripts. I provide illustrations taken from the set texts of the 2023 Latin Dutch exam (Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Some passages in this corpus provide detailed descriptions of a character’s emotions, while others appeal more to the reader’s background knowledge. The collected texts contain many stories with a romantic plot line. We find gods with sudden feelings of desire, unrequited love, budding and forbidden relationships, long and happy marriages. Deception, misunderstanding and bad news (Fama) are obstacles to these relationships, creating strong emotions.