Identifies the similarities and differences between the various worldviews generated across Ovid’s works, with particular attention given to the beginning of the Fasti. Here Janus presents an alternative vision of how the world came to be through his evolution from primordial chaos. In encouraging us to explore the correspondences and divergences between his different cosmogonies, Ovid introduces a further level of instability into the world and text alike. Ovid also continues to combine allusions to conflicting cosmogonies, with Empedocles and the myth of Statesman from Plato’s Politicus operating as important intertexts for Fasti 1. In the Politicus, Plato parodies and subverts Empedocles’ cosmic system so as to question the parameters of natural philosophy and the approaches of the Presocratics. In the Politicus natural philosophy is seen as largely dependent upon myth to provide an oblique vision of phases in the history of the cosmos that have fallen away from collective human consciousness.