This passage forms the diegetic confluence for the denouement of the Cadmean Cycle and the adventures of Perseus. Nonetheless, the narrative of this hero begins retrospectively. With the bacchanalian references to debellata…India (605), Ovid employs five dactyls on both line 606 and 607 to Hellenise the overall sense of the exposition. In part, this reasserts the – at least to some extent - didactic function of the wider narrative. Here, Ovid moralises the contemporary reader’s obligation to worship Bacchus - who spreads from the East. Intratextually, the poet makes a similar ekphrasis on India in his hymn to Bacchus (4.20-21). Contestably, then, this brands the larger personae of our narrator as self-referential and validifying, forming a…show more content… Hence, does the ubiquity of such metamorphoses challenge Barthes’ symbolic code of oppositions? No. Contestably, change forms an interaction between that which is mortal and immortal which Ovid didactically explores here in heroic figures like Perseus. The alternative would be that our implied author doesn’t believe in the god he has, quite literally, praised to the skies – because his worship and reverence for Bacchus would have…show more content… Yet, much of this sense arises from Ovid’s presentation of the text itself. Given that our implied author has portrayed himself as omniscient (his genealogical knowledge for instance), it follows that Ovid may even employ textual presentation in the didactic method. Evidently, this sense is highlighted on 610 where the poet deploys a mirroring around the main third foot caesura. Here, the pause and inversion of the indirect statement esse Iouis stresses Acrisius’ particular non-belief in Persea. At this point in the diegesis the concept seems to work with the interaction between mortal and immortal; a subtle comparison of Perseus and Bacchus. Arguably, by line 616, however, Perseus’ unheroic flight - juxtaposing the near equilibrium of 610 - may validify Acrisius’ former incredulity with great irony. Hence, Ovid employs syuzhet not only to manipulate the signified but also to interact with various didactic readings. In a sense, this tortuousness is the embodiment of the serpentine extended metaphor sliding through Book
