Sustainable Ovid? Humans, Hunting, and the Environment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

My argument is that one of the ways to ‘sustain’ the reading of Ovidian and other pre-modern poetry in the contemporary world is to explore it through the lens of the greatest challenge of our time, the ecological crisis. In this paper, I take hunting as a trope with which to examine the relationships between different inhabitants of the biosphere, using the stories of Actaeon and of the Calydonian boar hunt to show how Ovid’s Metamorphoses can draw the reader into engagement with clashes of needs and values, that have been at work since before the dawn of civilisation, and have reached a level of unprecedented urgency in the 21st century.