Ovid narrates two versions of the deification of Ino and her son Melicertes, one in the Metamorphoses and one in the Fasti. As is the case with the other episodes shared between both poems, we are encouraged to read one version in the light of the other and a comparison can reveal important similarities and differences between the two poems.1 Most obviously, in the Fasti Greek mythology becomes the background for Roman religious aetiology.2 In the Metamorphoses Ino and Melicertes are transformed into the Greek deities Leucothoe and Palaemon (4.416-562), while in the Fasti they are also identified with the Italian gods Mater Matuta and Portunus (6.473-568).3 Generic contrast has been suggested in the epic episode’s emphasis on Juno’s wrath and her visit to the Underworld, while in the elegiac Fasti episode Ino’s suffering is strongly featured.4 Both passages, however, share a marked intertextual engagement with Vergil’s Aeneid, which establishes links between Ino and Aeneas’ deifications and between the two Ovidian passages. Ovid’s two narratives of Ino’s apotheosis address the question of female deification, a topic of contemporary political relevance.5 In the Metamorphoses there are only four female deifications, while this number doubles in the Fasti. In each poem Ino’s deification is matched with another female deification that can be associated with Augustus’ wife Livia: Hersilie in the Metamorphoses, Carmentis in the Fasti. While Ino’s deification provides a model for the divine elevation of a woman, her mythological background troubles this identification.

Ovid would have had numerous literary sources for the myths of Ino, and the associated figures Athamas, Phrixus and Helle, and Melicertes. Ino appears in Greek literature as early as Homer (Od. 5.333-5) and Hesiod (Th. 976). The tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides all treated the myth; its popularity in ancient drama continued up to the Latin authors Ennius and Accius.6 There are three main events in the mythology of Ino, daughter of Cadmus. She first receives prominence by nursing the newly born Dionysus, her (dead) sister Semele’s child (Met. 3.313-15, F. 6.485-6). Next, she is variously the first, second, or third wife to Athamas, and is alternatively victim or victimizer, murderer or attempted murderer of her own children or her stepchildren (Phrixus and Helle: F. 3.849-76; Apollod. 1.9.1, Hygin. Fab. 2)7 or victim of a plot by another wife of Athamas.8 Finally, as a result of her care of Bacchus, Ino is driven mad by the jealous Hera/Juno and attempts to kill herself and Melicertes. In some versions she does kill Melicertes (Apollod. 3.4.3), but in others she is rescued and deified along with her son and they are worshipped as the Greek gods Leucothea and Palaemon (Met. 4. 539-42, F. 6.543-8).9 In a Roman sequel Ino and Melicertes are identified with Mater Matuta and Portunus (F. 6.545, 547).

While Ino’s deification as Leucothea is attested already by Homer (Od. 5.333-5), her identification with the Roman Mater Matuta appears first in Cicero (Tusc. 1.28 Quid? Ino Cadmi filia nonne Λευκοθέα nominata a Graecis Matuta habetur a nostris?, ‘What? Is not Ino, daughter of Cadmus, called Leucothea by the Greeks, regarded by our people as Matuta?’). Cicero’s source is unknown and he does not explain the syncretism. Spencer Cole suggests that it was the death of his daughter Tullia and the case for her possible consecration that first motivated Cicero to consider female deification: “The really surprising – and of course necessary – development with the Consolatio is the explicit inclusion of women.”10 The reason, however, for Ino’s insertion in Cicero’s list in the Tusculan Disputations of “boundary-crossing mortals” along with the conventionally cited Romulus, Hercules, Liber, and the Dioscuri, who “furnish established precedents for the divinization of mortals,”11 is difficult to understand. As a “precedent for merit-based deification”12 what can she have achieved? In fact, in the De Natura Deorum Cicero has Cotta object to Ino’s claim to deification simply on the grounds of her paternity (3.48 Ino dea ducetur et Λευκοθέα a Graecis a nobis Matuta dicetur cum sit Cadmi filia? ‘Is Ino to be considered a goddess and be called Leucothea by the Greeks and Matuta by us because she is the daughter of
Cadmus?’).13 Ino’s paradigmatic role as the only mortal woman to be deified in Cicero’s list gives her deification a prominence that should not be ignored. She may be seen to serve as a precedent for Ovid’s seemingly invented divinizations of Hersilie in the Fasti and that of Carmentis in the Metamorphoses.14 Carmentis’ prophecy of the future divinization of Livia, which was resisted by both Augustus and Tiberius but widely discussed and propagated outside of Rome, specifically links these poems with this contemporary issue. It is well known that “Ovid writes more about Livia and the question of deification than any other surviving writer of his lifetime, not only reflecting the tensions and biases that underpin the new representations of elite women, but also helping to forge the discourse.”15

Metamorphoses 4.416-562

Deification is an unusual form of transformation in the Metamorphoses, but it notably becomes more frequent at the end of the poem in Books 14-15.16 While the deification of Hercules at Met. 9.239-72 has most often been seen to serve as the paradigm for the imperial apotheoses, the episode of Ino and Melicertes stands out as the first extended example of apotheosis in the Metamorphoses (4.416-562), when the two mortals are turned into the Greek deities Leucothoe and Palaemon.17 The involvement of Venus in Ino and Melicertes’ deifications prefigures her advocacy on behalf of Aeneas and Caesar at the end of the poem, thus connecting Ino and Melicertes with the later imperial apotheoses.18 The next female deification in the poem will be that of Hersilie, Romulus’ wife, in Book 14 (829-51), which has been seen as prefiguring the empress Livia’s deification.19 The Ino episode’s numerous echoes of the Aeneid are well known.20 Philip Hardie has argued that these Vergilian echoes are part of a Theban “anti-Aeneid” in Met. 3.1-4.603.21 Juno’s indignant speech replays her soliloquy in Aen. 1 (F. 4.22-3 ~A.1.37-40, cf. A. 7.293-322) and introduces the epic theme of anger, which is followed by an extensive description of her visit to the underworld to rouse the fury Tisiphone that is indebted to Juno’s summoning of Allecto in Aen. 7 and Vergil’s underworld in Aeneid 6.22 Tisiphone’s attack on Ino and Athamas recalls Allecto’s assault of Amata and Turnus in Aen. 7 (341-77).23 These epic elements are absent in the retelling of Fasti 6, although the Aeneid continues to be an important intertext.

Ino is introduced as Bacchus’ aunt (417 matertera ‘mother’s sister’) and ominously said to be the only one of her sisters not to have suffered tragedy.24 Juno, angry at the power of Semele’s son Bacchus and Ino’s familial pride in him (421 alumno numine, ‘divine foster-son’),25 decides to punish Ino and her husband Athamas with madness, on the model of Bacchus’ punishment of Pentheus (428-31).26 Her prime motivation is ‘that the royal house of Cadmus should fall’ (470-1 ne regia Cadmi / staret). Driven mad, Athamas hunts down and kills their young son Learchus, while Ino flees with their other son, Melicertes, and in her mad fearlessness (529 nullo tardata timore, ‘delayed by no fear’) leaps from a cliff into the sea. Ino’s leap with her son could be considered as infanticide caused by her madness, but Ovid’s language seems to exonerate her of any crime.27 She seems less affected by the madness than grief at her son’s murder (519-21 tum denique concita mater,/ seu dolor hoc fecit seu sparsum causa venenum/ exululat, ‘then finally the mother having been stirred up howled, either grief caused this or the cause was the sprinkled poison’).28 This apparent contradiction or hesitation in the causality of Ino’s motivation leaves open the possibility that “when Ino leaps into the sea, it is at least possible to read it as an attempt to protect her remaining son, Melicertes, rather than to kill him.”29 At this point Venus (mother of Cadmus’ wife Harmonia, cf. 3.132) is said to ‘pity the undeserved sufferings of her granddaughter’ (531 at Venus immeritae neptis miserata labores) and she entreats Neptune to deify them both as sea deities (536 dis adde tuis). The motivation of pity occurs nowhere else in the poem for apotheosis, but it does recur for metamorphosis in similar cases of attempted suicide or death (6.135 (Arachne/spider), 11.339 (Daedalion/bird), 11.784 (Aesacus/bird). Neptune agrees and turns them into the sea gods Leucothoe and Palaemon:30

adnuit oranti Neptunus et abstulit illis
quod mortale fuit maiestatemque verendam
imposuit nomenque simul faciemque novavit
Leucothoeque deum cum matre Palaemona dixit. (4.539-42)

Neptune approved her prayer and took from them that which was mortal,
and bestowed on them a majesty worthy of reverence
and at the same time changed their name and appearance;
he called the new god Palaemon and his mother Leucothoe.

Venus rescues Ino as she does Aeneas in Book 14 (581-608) and both “are rewarded with apotheosis, of a watery kind.”31 The language of deification here both recalls that of metamorphosis (cf. 2.674-5 novata est / et vox et facies, ‘both voice and appearance were changed’),32 but also prefigures the process described in later deifications in the poem where the loss of the mortal element (quod mortale fuit) is also specified. We see a similar process in the apotheoses of Hercules (9.268 mortales Tirynthius exuit artus, ‘the Tirynthian shed his mortal limbs’), Aeneas (14.603 quidquid in Aenea fuerat mortale repurgat, ‘she washed away whatever was mortal in Aeneas’), Glaucus (13.950 mortalia demant, ‘they remove what was mortal’), and Romulus (14.824-5 corpus mortale per auras / dilapsum tenues, ‘his mortal body dissolved into the thin airs’). Ino and Melicertes’ acquisition of a ‘majesty worthy of reverence’ (540 maiestas verenda) is analogous to the process Hercules undergoes (9.270 augusta . . . gravitate verendus, ‘venerable in his august gravity’), as well as Romulus, who becomes ‘more worthy’ (14.828 dignior), which suggests “a ‘morphing into something larger’, i.e. assuming the more-than-human stature traditionally attributed to the gods.”33 The description of the actual physical and metaphysical processes involved in deification, which assimilates apotheosis to metamorphosis, is limited to the deifications in the Metamorphoses and does not occur in the Fasti.

The involvement of Venus in Ino’s deification, which is not attested elsewhere,34 connects Ino with the later deifications of Aeneas and Caesar, also engineered by Venus (14.585-608, 15.761-851). I have also suggested that Ino’s apotheosis in Ovid anticipates and prefigures the seemingly invented catasterism of Romulus’ wife Hersilie at Met. 14.829-51.35 There is no mention in Met. 4 of the Greek cults for either Leucothoe or Palaemon,36 instead, as if to emphasize the theme of metamorphosis and to contrast with the sequence of the Fasti episode, a pendent narrative of the metamorphoses of Ino’s Theban companions into stone or birds is added, which seems to be original to Ovid.37 The omission of Ino and Melicertes’ Roman names is a component of the erasure of Rome from this Theban “anti-Aeneid.” The Vergilian echoes in the Metamorphoses episode, however, already suggest that Ino’s story will continue in Italy, as does that of Aeneas. In an example of “divided allusion,” 38the Ino passage in the Fasti continues the allusions to the Aeneid from Book 7 to Aeneas’ arrival at Pallanteum in Book 8.

Fasti 6.473-568

Ovid’s Fasti episode begins with a short reprise of the episode of Ino and Athamas’ madness in Met. 4. and then proceeds to supply a revised sequel, inventing a pendent story to account for the origins of the Italian goddess Mater Matuta and her rites at the Matralia celebrated on June 11. We might well wonder how Ino, a figure linked in Greek myth with infanticide, could become associated with a Roman festival celebrated by ‘good mothers ‘(6.475 bonae matres).39 The origin of the identification of Ino with the Italian Mater Matuta, “one of the most enigmatic female deities in the Etrusco-Italic pantheon,”40 is unclear, appearing, as we have seen, first in Cicero. Mater Matuta was an indigenous Italic deity, not an imported god from Greece; but, as Maureen Carroll has suggested, “some common elements of Mater Matuta and Leukothea, perhaps the connection to motherhood and the protection of children, allowed the two to be translated and equated.” 41The origins of her name and even the nature of her cult are disputed.42 Matuta is associated with the sea at F. 6.543 (numen eris pelagi: natum quoque pontus habebit, ‘you will be a divinity of the sea, your son also the sea will claim’; cf. Met. 4.536),43 but this designation seems to fit the Greek Leucothea and Palaemon/Portunus better than Mater Matuta.44 Ovid’s Italian sequel to the Greek story seems to be original,45 although Peter Wiseman has suggested that it originated in stage performances.46 In the Roman aetiological tradition scholars and poets had long been making Greek gods and cults the origins for Roman ones.47 Servius Tullius, Rome’s sixth king (578-535 BCE) is credited with the foundation of temples to Fortuna and Mater Matuta in Rome (F. 6.569-71, Livy 5.19.6, 23.7), which have been identified with excavations near the Church of St Omobono, in the Forum Boarium.48 The pairing of their temples is reflected in Ovid’s treatment of both goddesses on June 11 in the Fasti. The myth of Ino explains features of the festival and cult of the Matralia, such as the exclusion of slave women (F. 6.551-8, Plut. Camillus 5.2; Q.R., 16 [Mor. 267D]), the offering of cakes (testucia, Varro LL 5.106 ) and the participants’ prayers for nieces and nephews, instead of their own children (F. 6.559-62, Plut. Camillus, 5. 1-2; Q.R. 16-17 [Mor. 267D-E]; De frat. amor. 21 [Mor. 492D]).49 The late second-century Christian writer Tertullian records a custom that seems to have no connection with Ino, that only univirae could participate in the Matralia (Monog. 17).50

The passage opens with a request for Bacchus’ help in explaining the goddess Mater Matuta and the features of her festival that are explained by Ino’s story:

Quae dea sit, quare famulas a limine templi
   arceat (arcet enim) libaque tosta petat,
Bacche racemiferos hedera redimite capillos,
   si domus illa tua est, derige vatis opus (6.481-4)

who the goddess is, why she excludes (for she does exclude) female slaves from the threshold of her temple, and why she asks for toasted cakes, may you, O Bacchus, whose grape-bearing curls are bound with ivy, steer the work of the poet, if her house belongs to you.

Ovid next gives a summary in a mere twelve lines (487-98) of the events familiar from Greek mythology and narrated at much greater length in Metamorphoses 4 (416-562).51 Here, in what is merely a prequel to the following Italian narrative, we hear how Juno’s anger was turned towards Ino after she nursed Bacchus, that it was Athamas who was driven mad by Juno (489 hinc agitur furiis Athamas et imagine falsa, ‘then Athamas was driven by furies and a false image’), while Ino first buries Learchus before she seizes Melicertes ‘with frenzied arms’ (497 insanis natum complexa lacertis) and leaps into the sea. In the Metamorphoses Venus rescues the two from a watery death by turning them into the gods Leucothoe and Palaemon, but in this version they are instead transported, untransformed (nondum), to Italy by Panope and her sister nereids: 52

excipit inlaesos Panope centumque sorores,
   et placido lapsu per sua regna ferunt.
nondum Leucothea, nondum puer ille Palaemon
   verticibus densi Thybridis ora tenent (6.499-502)

Panope and her hundred sisters receive them unharmed and bring them through their realms in a smooth glide. They reach the mouth of the Tiber dense with eddies, she not yet Leucothea, nor that boy Palaemon.

The echo of Vergil’s description of the Tiber at Aeneas’ arrival in Italy establishes a parallel between Ino and Aeneas (Aen. 7.30-1 Tiberinus . . . verticibus rapidis) that continues throughout the passage.53 Like Aeneas in Aeneid 8, Ino arrives at the site of Rome during a Greek festival being celebrated by Arcadians/Italians ruled by Evander, although her visit predates Aeneas’. She finds, as did Aeneas, violence in primitive Italy and is further pursued by Juno’s wrath. In the (in either case) aptly named lucus Semelae Stimulaene54 Ino comes across Maenadas Ausonias (504, cf. 505 Arcadas, 507 Latias . . . Bacchas), women whose bi-culturalism prefigures Ino’s own transformation from Greek to Roman deity.55 Although the festival’s Dionysian focus should bode well for Ino, Juno once again attempts to punish her through a reprisal of Pentheus’ murder (509-12) and she instigates (508 instimulat) the women to attack Melicertes by emphasizing Ino’s foreignness (510). This time it is Hercules, rather than Venus, who comes to Ino’s assistance as the women flee at his arrival (523 turpia femineae terga dedere fugae, ‘they disgracefully retreated in womanish flight’). Hercules’ easy routing of the women constitutes a humorously female ‘elegiac’ version of his epic defeat of the monster Cacus, an event which was narrated to Aeneas by Evander (Aen. 8.213-67) and appears in Fasti 1 (543-78, cf. 6.79-82).56 Ino’s visit dates to the period described by Evander to Aeneas in Aeneid 8 when Hercules was passing through Italy while driving the cattle of Geryon (F. 6.519 vaccas . . . Hiberas), although it is left unclear whether Cacus has already been defeated. Hercules recognizes Ino, addressing her as matertera Bacchi (523), and she tells him her story—in an edited version:

illa docet partim, partim praesentia nati
   continet, et furiis in scelus isse pudet (525-6)

She tells her story in part, but in part the presence of her son restrains her,
for she is ashamed to have been driven to a crime by the furies.

Although her embarrassment is specified as the crime caused by her moment of temporary madness, Ino’s omission of her leap with her son only serves to draw attention to another more negative part of her story, which was in fact narrated earlier in Fasti 3.849-76, where as a wicked stepmother (853 sceleratae fraude novercae, ‘by the treachery of an evil stepmother’) she had attempted to have her step-children Phrixus and Helle sacrificed to end a famine she had caused by toasting the grain seed.57 This episode is mentioned again as an explanation for why servant women (551 ancillas) are excluded from her cult at 6.551-7, where we are told that Cadmus had an affair with one of Ino’s handmaids and it was from her that he learned of Ino’s plot against Helle and Phrixus. Hugh Parker has argued that this prejudiced source of information and Ino’s subsequent denial absolves her of any crime (557 ipsa quidem fecisse negas, sed fama recepit, ‘you yourself deny that you did this, but tradition has accepted it’),58 but her deliberate obfuscation to Hercules and Ovid’s own earlier account of this well-known event (fama) makes this doubtful. How do we reconcile these two conflicting portrayals of Ino’s character? While Parker has argued that Italy has an ameliorative effect and wipes away Ino’s Greek past, Carole Newlands and others have suggested that Ino’s earlier background continues to resonate and “‘contaminate’ the story of Mater Matuta” (526 scelus isse pudet, ‘she is ashamed that she committed a crime’).59 As we have seen, a central feature of Mater Matuta’s cult is explained by Ino’s failure as a mother to her own children (and step-children): mothers pray for the children of their siblings and not their own because Ino was ‘shown to be an unlucky parent’ (560 ipsa parum felix visa fuisse parens) and ‘more useful as foster-mother to Bacchus than to her own children’ (562 utilior Baccho quam fuit ipsa suis).60

After her second rescue Ino is welcomed into the home of Carmentis, Evander’s mother. Here again her actions repeat or prefigure those of Aeneas, who is received into Evander’s humble home in Aeneid 8.61 As Lily Panoussi has observed, “Ovid uses Vergil’s foundational story, which centers on men’s actions, and transforms it into one revolving around women.”62 Carmentis entertains Ino with cakes that serve as the aetion for those offered at the Matralia (533 nunc quoque liba iuvant festis Matralibus illam, ‘even now the cakes please her at the festival of the Matralia’).63 Carmentis, here called Tegeaea vates (537) to remind us that she too is a Greek immigrant, proceeds to predict Ino and Melicertes’ deifications as both Greek and Roman divinities:

'laeta canam: gaude, defuncta laboribus Ino'
     dixit, 'et huic populo prospera semper ades.
numen eris pelagi: natum quoque pontus habebit.
     in vestris aliud sumite nomen aquis:
Leucothea Grais, Matuta vocabere nostris;
     in portus nato ius erit omne tuo,
quem nos Portunum, sua lingua Palaemona dicet.
     ite, precor, nostris aequus uterque locis.'
adnuerat, promissa fides; posuere labores,
     nomina mutarunt: hic deus, illa dea est (6.541-50).

‘I will sing happy news: rejoice, Ino, you have completed your labors,’
she said, ‘and may you always be favorable to this people.
You will be a deity of the sea; the sea will also have your son.
Both of you take a different name in your own waters:
you will be called Leucothea by the Greeks and Matuta by our people.
All authority over ports will be your son’s, whom we call Portunus, his
own tongue Palaemon. Go each of you, I pray, friendly to our lands.’
Ino nodded in agreement, her fidelity promised. They put aside their labors,
they changed their names: this one is a god, she a goddess.

Unlike in their rescue from death in Metamorphoses 4, no reason or explanation is given for Ino’s or her son’s deifications.64 This is in fact typical of the Fasti, which, unlike the Metamorphoses, usually does not offer justification for apotheosis nor describe the procedure,65 even in cases of the imperial family. We can compare, for example, the extended (but not unambiguous) lists of Caesar and Augustus’ achievements in Met. 15.745-870 with Caesar’s succinct apotheosis at F. 3.697-710 (701 ipsa virum rapui,‘I myself snatched him up,’ 703 caelo positus, ‘placed in the sky’, cf. 2.144 caelestem fecit te pater, ille patrem, ‘your father made you divine, Augustus Caesar made his father divine’).66

Carmentis’ prophecy reprises her earlier prophecies in Fasti 1, in which she predicted the apotheoses of Hercules and the Julian rulers, as well as of herself and the empress Livia (1.509-36, 583-4).67 As has been seen, the combination of Carmentis, Evander, Hercules in Fasti 6 forms a “neat symmetry” with the earlier episode in Fasti 1 on the Carmentalia (Jan. 11),68 and constitutes one of many closural gestures in Book 6.69 The passage in Book 1 begins with Evander’s arrival in Italy and includes Hercules’ defeat of Cacus at the recently founded Pallanteum (1.461-586). At the end of her prophecy delivered in Book 1 Carmentis offers her own deification as a precedent for that of Livia: ‘and as I will one day be consecrated at eternal altars, so Julia Augusta will be a new divinity’ (1.535-6 utque ego perpetuis olim sacrabor in aris, / sic Augusta novum Iulia numen erit).70 Livia’s deification was in fact delayed until the reign of Claudius in 42 CE, which, as Anke Walter observes, “makes this one of the very few ‘actual’ prophecies in Latin literature, which can only have been inserted into the Fasti after AD 14, when Livia was adopted into the Julian family as Julia Augusta in Augustus’ will (Tac. Ann. 1.8)”.71 While Livia had received divine honors in her lifetime in the Eastern provinces and was represented with the attributes of divinity, especially those of Hera and Demeter, both Augustus and Tiberius resisted efforts to deify her both while she was alive and after she died.72 After the death of Augustus, Tiberius had considered but rejected deifying his mother, insisting, according to Tacitus, that ‘honors accorded to women should be limited’ (Tac. Ann. 1.14.2 ille moderandos feminarum honores dictitans).73 The question of her deification arose again when Livia died in 29 CE and was again rejected by Tiberius.74 When she was finally deified under Claudius, Marleen Flory argues, “There is no evidence that there was any discussion of Livia’s merita [‘merits or services’] in Claudius’ announcement to the Senate that he wished her deified; rather, her merita was that she had produced the heirs to the throne and had been married to Augustus. On that basis rested the claims as well of all future female relatives of emperors to divine status.”75 In his post-exilic poetry Ovid, however, treats Livia as a “goddess-in-the-making.”76 Carole Newlands has argued that with his invented story of Carmentis, “Ovid presents the idea of female deification as not foreign to Roman practice, linking it moreover to Rome’s noble origins and thus establishing a precedent for Livia.”77 Herbert-Brown has argued that the episode in Book 1 is a post-exilic attempt to eulogize Livia and has the “design of highlighting the theme of maternal dynastic superiority.78 The prophecy in Book 1 also has the effect of associating Livia with Ino’s deification in Book 6.

Carmentis’ two prophecies in Fasti 1 and 6 connect Livia and Ino narratologically, but Livia is also directly linked with the cult of Mater Matuta through her dedication of a shrine to Concordia (Aedes Concordiae) on the same day: ‘Livia dedicated also to you, Concordia, a magnificent shrine, which she offered to her dear husband’ (6.637-8 te quoque magnifica, Concordia, dedicat aede / Livia, quam caro praestitit ipsa viro). This shrine was built in or near the Porticus Liviae (dedicated jointly by Livia and Tiberius in 7 BCE) on the Esquiline.79 Barbara Kellum has underlined the significance of concordia in the Augustan era, when “the concord of the state and the concord of the imperial family became one and the same.”80 Flory has suggested that Livia chose June 11 because she wished to associate her shrine to marital harmony with the two other women’s cults celebrated on that day, the Matralia and the shrine of Fortuna, associated with fertility and marriage.81 Mater Matuta shared the day of her festival with the celebration of the shrine of Fortuna, which was adjacent to her temple and also associated with Servius (6.569 lux eadem, Fortuna, tua est, auctorque locusque, ‘the same day, Fortuna. is yours, as is the founder and location’).82 Yet, as has been seen, the “dysfunctional family relationships”83 and destructive women featured in the stories associated with both of these cults contrast with the image of Livia as a model wife and mother, and the dynastic harmony represented by her dedication of the shrine to Concordia.84 Ovid’s narrative of a veiled statue in the temple of Fortuna includes both mention of an affair between Servius and Fortuna (573 furtivos. . . amores, ‘secret loves’) and the story of the parricidal and power-hungry Tullia (6.585-620).85

For Geraldine Herbert-Brown, “Ovid’s less than satisfactory rendering of the female cults and their connection with Livia on 11 June seems to reflect his own predicament as a witness to the dynastic tensions of his time.”86 She suggests that Ovid’s notable failure to mention any aspect of Livia’s maternal role in the context of the Matralia exposes contemporary dynastic struggles involving Tiberius’ marriage and succession.87 In the post-exilic revised mention of the presumably the same altar of Concordia at Fasti 1.649 Ovid seems to attempt to compensate for the awkwardness of the June 11 passage by praising Livia as a mother: hanc tua constituit genetrix et rebus et ara, ‘this godhead your mother established both by her deeds and with an altar.’88 Ino cannot be considered a model mother or step-mother.89 As we have seen, in the Metamorphoses and Fasti Ovid offers two versions of Ino’s history, one negative and one more positive. Ino as nurse of Bacchus represents a positive image of nurturing that is reflected in the Matralia.90 Attempts to erase Ino’s Greek mythical history in Italy are belied by Ovid’s insertion of Ino’s plot against Phrixus and Helle in Fasti 3. Cicero had already broached the question of Ino’s qualifications for deification (Nat. D. 3.48)91 and, considering her mythological background, we may well question her function as a paradigm for Livia’s eventual divinization.92 For Newlands, Ino’s apotheosis casts doubt on the whole nature and basis of imperial deification and a similar case has been made for questioning the authority of the imperial deifications in the Metamorphoses.93 For others, Ino’s Greek past is erased and the comparison uncomplicated.94 Mythological comparisons, however, carry with them baggage and, while panegyric in general often demands a “selective memory,” 95the terms of comparison cannot be “fixed or controlled”96 and all versions of myths, positive and negative, remain available for different readings.97 Stephen Hinds has proposed the influential idea of the 'hermeneutic alibi' to explain the possibility of alternative readings of Ovid’s poetry, as either encomiastic or dissonant and oppositional.98

Ovid’s interest in exploring the procedures and motivations for apotheosis is evident in both the Metamorphoses and Fasti and has been well examined.99 In his interest in deification, Ovid is entering into a contemporary and wide-ranging religious, philosophical, and political discussion and debate. From the late Republic, in the works of Cicero and Varro and in political discourse, the deification of humans was “high on the cultural and political agenda” and was actively discussed and debated.100 It was, however, largely the work of poets such as Horace, Vergil, and Ovid which constructed the mythological narratives providing justifications and precedents for these political divinizations.101 Ovid is unique in his emphasis on female deification and his inclusion of Livia.102 More women than men are deified in the Fasti, among these the nymphs Lara (2.611-16), Flora (5.183-206), Carna/Cranaë (6.1.125-30) are turned into Italian divinities through rape by a god and similarly Callisto’s catasterism results from her rape by Jupiter (2.153-92). At Fasti 3.459-516 Bacchus comforts Ariadne (upset at his infidelity) by promising her an apotheosis as the Italian goddess Libera and the catasterism of her crown.103 Anna Perenna is variously identified with Dido’s sister Anna (3.653-6), Themis, Io (3.658), or an old woman (661-74).104 The female focused Fasti 6 concludes with praise of two more women, Marcia and Atia, matertera Caesaris, younger sister of Augustus’ mother Atia: ‘O glory, O woman worthy of a sacred house!’ (810 o decus, o sacra femina digna domo).

As with other narratives shared between the two poems, comparison between the two episodes of Ino shed light on both the Metamorphoses and Fasti. I have suggested that Ovid was perhaps motivated by Cicero’s evidently novel insertion of Ino into his list of precedents for the deification of mortals to include her in his own exploration of the theme of female deification, with Livia perhaps specifically in mind. In the Fasti Ino’s apotheosis is linked with the projected deification of Livia through the shared prophecies of Carmentis in Books 1 and 6. This suggests that in the Metamorphoses Ino’s deification may anticipate that of Hersilie in Book 14, which provides the only other significant example of female deification in the epic. Hersilie’s deification, seemingly original to Ovid, would seem to suit better Livia’s public image as model wife than Ino.105 Juno is responsible for Hersilie’s deification and the justification given is her relationship with her husband Romulus/Quirinus: ‘most worthy of such a great man’ (14.833-4 dignissima tanti . . . viri), language which is reproduced in Ovid’s praise of Livia at F. 1.650 sola toro magni digna reperta Iovis (‘alone found to be worthy of the bed of great Jove’) and elsewhere.106 Intertextual engagement with the Aeneid also connects the two Ino passages. The allusions to the Aeneid in Met. 4 take us to Italy, Amata, and the outbreak of war in Aeneid 7, while the Fasti 6 passage continues these allusions to the arrival of Aeneas at Evander’s proto-Roman settlement in Aeneid 8, where Ino and Carmentis adopt the roles of Aeneas and Evander, in another example of Ovid’s ‘feminization’ of the Aeneid.107 Reading the two Ino passages together brings out the different focus of the Fasti on Roman religious aetiology, but also brings out the shared interest in deification, and specifically female deification, evidenced in both poems.108