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Some Say the World Will End in Fire

This chapter argues that Ovid recasts the bees from Vergil’s fourth Georgic as the avian Memnonides in Metamorphoses 13 in order to enact a cyclical process of ekpyrōsis and palingenesis in natural philosophical, primarily Empedoclean, terms. It demonstrates, through an examination of fragments of Empedocles and several Lucretian passages, the pervasive availability of cosmogonic and cosmophthoric—as well as zoogonic and heliogonic—language throughout the episode. The narrative of Memnon’s cremation thus becomes part of a multistage analogical process that replicates the narrative of Phaethon’s incineration (Met. 2), looks forward to the regeneration of the phoenix (Met. 15), and implicates Rome’s perpetual powers of rebirth from the ashes of civil war.