Title: Metamorphoses

By -Ovid

Publishing Info: --

Genre: -Epic Poem

Sub-genre: -Fantasy

Nationality: -Roman // Italian

Time Period: -Classic

First and Last Read by Dr. Rearick: Spring 1998 / Spring 2001

Rated: - A+

Location: - Dr. Rearick's Office // The Nortan Anthology

Use: This is used in Masterpieces of World Literature

Comments: It is especially striking to me how much of the Geneses account matches this pagan narrative. To me this indicates just how ready the world was for the expansion of the Jewish awareness of God. God's timing waited until the world was ready for Christ. It is also interesting for me to know that several commentators have noted that Caesar Augusts, during whose reign Ovid wrote, was trying to return his empire to the ethical standards that he perceived had made Rome great. Several sources have suggested that it was because of this "conservative morality" that Ovid was banished.

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Edward John Kenney. (Professor Emeritus of Latin) Ovid's Metamorphoses is a nexus of some 50 epyllia with shorter episodes. He created a convincing imaginative world with a magical logic of its own. His continuous poem, meandering from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, is a great Baroque conception, executed in swift, clear hexameters. Its frequent irony and humour are striking. Thereafter epics proliferated.

Ovid's Metamorphoses, must also be interpreted against its contemporary literary background, particularly in regard to Virgil's Aeneid. The unique character of Virgil's poem, which had been canonized as the national epic, posed a problem for his successors, since after the Aeneid a straightforward historical or mythological epic would represent an anticlimax. Ovid was warned against this pitfall alike by his instincts and his intelligence; he chose, as Virgil had done, to write an epic on a new plan, unique and individual to himself.

The Metamorphoses is a long poem in 15 books written in hexameter verse and totaling nearly 12,000 lines. It is a collection of mythological and legendary stories in which metamorphosis (transformation) plays some part, however minor. The stories are told in chronological order from the creation of the universe (the first metamorphosis, of chaos into order) to the death and deification of Julius Caesar (the culminating metamorphosis, again of chaos--that is, the Civil Wars--into order--that is, the Augustan Peace). In many of the stories, mythical characters are used to illustrate examples of obedience or disobedience toward the gods, and for their actions are either rewarded or punished by a final transformation into some animal, vegetable, or astronomical form. The importance of metamorphosis is more apparent than real, however; the essential theme of the poem is passion (pathos), and this gives it more unity than all the ingenious linking and framing devices the poet uses. The erotic emphasis that had dominated Ovid's earlier poetry is broadened and deepened into an exploration of nearly every variety of humanemotion--for his gods are nothing if not human. This undertaking brought out, as his earlier work had not, Ovid's full powers: his wit and rhetorical brilliance, his mythological learning, and the peculiar qualities of his fertile imagination. The vast quantities of verse in both Greek and Latin that Ovid had read and assimilated are transformed, through a process of creative adaptation, into original and unforeseen guises. By his genius for narrative and vivid description, Ovid gave to scores of Greek legends, some of them little known before, their definitive form for subsequent generations.

No single work of literature has done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity. By AD 8, the

Metamorphoses was complete, if not yet formally published; and it was at that moment, when Ovid seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful achievement, that he was banished to Tomis by the emperor. Ovid arrived at his place of exile in the spring of AD 9. Tomis was a semi-Hellenized port exposed to periodic attacks by the surrounding barbarian tribes. Books and civilized society were lacking; little Latin was spoken; and the climate was severe. In his solitude and depression, Ovid turned again to poetry, now of a more personal and introspective sort.

The Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto were written and sent to Rome at the rate of about a book a year from AD 9 on; they consist of letters to the emperor and to Ovid's wife and friends describing his miseries and appealing for clemency. For all his depression and self-pity, Ovid never retreats from the one position with which his self-respect was identified--his status as a poet. This is particularly evident in his ironical defense of the Ars in Book ii of the Tristia.

That Ovid's poetical powers were not as yet seriously impaired is shown by his poem Ibis. This, written not long after his arrival at Tomis, is a long and elaborate curse directed at an anonymous enemy. It is a tour de force of abstruse mythological learning, composed largely without the aid of books. But in the absence of any sign of encouragement from home,

Ovid lacked the heart to continue to write the sort of poetry that had made him famous, and the later Epistulae ex Ponto make melancholy reading.

The loss of Ovid's tragedy Medea, which he wrote while still in Rome, is particularly to be deplored; it was praised by the critic Quintilian and the historian Tacitus and can hardly have failed to influence Seneca's play on the same theme.

Assessment.

In classical antiquity, Ovid's influence on later Latin poetry was primarily technical. He succeeded in the difficult task of adapting the intractable Latin language to dactylic Greek metres, and thereby perfected both the elegiac couplet and the hexameter as all-purpose metres and as instruments of fluent communication. Ovid's verse is remarkable for its smoothness, fluency, and balance. The elegance of his verse masks its extreme artificiality, and the casual reader may overlook the quiet ruthlessness of Ovid's linguistic innovations, particularly in vocabulary. Ovid's hexameters in the Metamorphoses are a superb vehicle for rapid narrative and description.

To this technical facility Ovid added an unrivaled power of invention that enabled him to exploit ideas and situations to the utmost, chiefly through the use of vivid and telling details. His undoubted rhetorical gifts have caused him to be dubbed insincere and even heartless, and he seemsindeed to have lacked the capacity for strong emotion or religious feeling.

Judged, however, by his gift for fantasy, Ovid is one of the great poets of all time. In the Metamorphoses he created a Nabokovian caricature of the actual world, the setting for a cosmic comedy of manners in which the endless flux and reflux of the universe itself is reflected in the often paradoxical and always arbitrary fate of the characters, human and divine. Pathos, humour, beauty, and cruelty are mingled in a unique individual vision. Ovid's talent is not of that highest order which canpierce the outward semblance of men and things and receive intimations of a deeper reality; but what he could do, few if any poets have ever done better.

Influence.

Ovid's immense popularity during his lifetime continued after his death and was little affected by the action of Augustus, who banned his works from the public libraries. From about 1100 onward Ovid's fame, which during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages had been to some extent eclipsed, began to rival and even at times to surpass Virgil's. The 12th and 13th centuries have with some justice been called "the age of Ovid."

Indeed, he was esteemed in this period not only as entertaining but also as instructive, and his works were read in schools. His poetry is full of epigrammatic maxims and sententious utterances which, lifted from their contexts, made a respectable appearance in the excerpts in which medieval readers often studied their classics. Ovid's popularity was part, however, of a general secularization and awakening to the beauties of profane literature; he was the poet of the wandering scholars as well as of the vernacular poets, the troubadours and minnesingers; and when the concept of romantic love, in its new chivalrous or "courtly" guise, was developed in France, it was Ovid's influence that dominated the book in which its philosophy was expounded, the Roman de la rose. (The Romance of the Rose)

Ovid's popularity grew during the Renaissance, particularly among humanists who were striving to re-create ancient modes of thought and feeling, and printed editions of his works followed each other in an unending stream from 1471. A knowledge of his verse came to be taken for granted in an educated man, and in the 15th-17th centuries it would be difficult to name a poet or painter of note who was not in some degree indebted to him. The Metamorphoses, in particular, offered one of the most accessible and attractive avenues to the riches of Greek mythology.

But Ovid's chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing: its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality. It is these things that have recommended him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, J.W. von Goethe, and Ezra Pound. (E.J.Ke.)