This essay seeks to explore Ovid’s usefulness to Syme, and the narrative strategies
of History in Ovid. In doing so, it investigates the structure of the monograph, and
finds it more coherent than some have supposed. Likewise, I argue that it shows Syme
aware of his readership’s familiarity with his own habit of electing spiritual precursors
amongst the authors of antiquity—and exploiting that habit to make points about the
texture of history in the last decade of Augustus’ reign.
