ON REACHING the Mutability Cantos, we seem to have come full circle iback to the first book's procedure of grounding moral and political self-interpretation in a revealed metaphysical order. But here even “heauens eternall towers” (VII.vi.20) figure as the rhetorical construct of a usurping regime asserting after the fact its own myth of aboriginal legitimacy; and though behind the dubious basis of Jove's jurisdiction deeper grounds of judgement are asserted, avenues exist for the powerful scepticism directed at Jove's authority to cascade onto them as well, much as the scepticism directed at Cynthia's authority soon cascades onto Jove's (VII.vi.12, 18). For the interpretation of the world that confirms Jove “in his imperiall see” (VII.vii.58–59) appears to seize on the self-confuting parts of Mutability's argument (her invoking of seasonal and stellar rounds), but to ignore her potent polemics (“But you Dan Ioue, that only constant are, / … Where were ye borne? [VII.vii.53]), so as finally only to echo, albeit in impersonal terms, the patently contrived metaphysical justification Jove has ventured for his own sovereignty (VII.vii.48). The poem, by not just participating in, but re-enacting as a story event, the Platonic allegorising of Homeric myth that raised the Olympians from conquerors and de facto rulers into eternal hypostases in a metaphysical order, draws the act of allegorical exaltation into the web of narrative motivations, and makes the Platonic version of the facts seem partial in every sense.