This article argues that Ovid’s arborization narratives in the Metamorphoses would have been more meaningful, enjoyable, and rich for imperial readers able to visualize them off the page, against the cultural back-cloth of the contemporary stage, that is to say, the pantomime stage, where arboreal transformations were part of the routine repertoire of the star dancers. Ovid’s tales of tree-metamorphosis may well have been informed, even if subliminally, by his active recollection of or subconscious familiarity with real-life, danced choreographies for pantomimic transformations into trees.

Much has been written in recent years on the ways in which ritual forms, patterns and sequences are remoulded into the imagery and action of classical Greek plays. A tragedy which offers exceptionally fertile ground for studies on ‘ritual and drama' is Sophocles’ Philoctetes, since theatrical and ritual strands are so intimately interwoven in its plot as to create an inextricable knot. In forthcoming work I explore in full both the ritual liminality of Philoctetes' and Neoptolemus' existence as well as the subtle ways in which the vital dramatic experiences of ‘acting’ and ‘viewing’ are inherently intertwined in this play with the initiatory strands of rites of maturation. The present note, conversely, is less ambitious in its scope, as its exclusive focus is one pivotal moment of the play's action, namely the dramatic exhibition of the bow to Neoptolemus' and the spectator's eyes. No matter how inherently interwoven with the action Philoctetes' bow is, Neoptolemus' close look, as he accepts it in his hands (Phil. 776), ‘theatricalises’ the object by converting it into a dramatic spectacle, a thea. But even before being formally delivered to Neoptolemus' custody (Phil. 762-78), the bow is prominently singled out as the prime focus of attention, becoming, as it does, a stage-prop uniquely capturing the boy's concentrated sight.

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This article reads Ovid's foregrounding of the human body in the Metamorphoses side by side with the most flamboyant public discourse of Augustan Rome where the body was similarly privileged as a medium of communication, namely pantomime dancing, an expression-filled dance form predicated on the mute delineation of character and passion. Ovid's body-centered poetic vision is informed by the haunting materiality of the staged, dancing body, whose electrifying language had a searing effect on his literary imagination. Reading the Metamorphoses through the lens of pantomime dancing illuminates the profound, albeit underexplored, symbiosis of dance and poetry in Augustan Rome.

This article reads Ovid's Metamorphoses through the lens of its contemporary art of pantomime dancing. With a focus restricted to narratives of animalization, it argues that the dancer's exquisite bodily expressiveness has been coopted and re-calibrated for the demands of the poetic medium, as Ovid's sequences of animal metamorphosis have amalgamated aesthetic strategies borrowed from the pantomime stage. Far from having been shaped exclusively within the literary mainstream, Ovid's idiosyncratic look, astonishingly perceptive and concentrated on the movements, gestures as well as the minutest parts of his characters' bodies, was the product of a bold, intermedial cross-over between poetry and dance.