Metamorphoses by Ovid

First transcribed: ca. 8 CE (English translation, 1480)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

Metamorphoses is generally conceded to be the Roman poet Ovid’s finest work. In this collection of poems, Ovid manages to draw together artistically most of the stories of Greek and Roman legend. The poems render more than two hundred of the myths of the ancient world into an organic work whose unifying theme is that of transformation. Thus, Jove changes himself into a swan, Narcissus is transformed into a flower, Tereus is turned into a bird, and Midas is given the ears of an ass. Ovid arranged these stories into fifteen books, containing in the original Latin version almost twelve thousand lines of sweetly flowing verse in dactylic hexameter. The poems were written when Ovid was a mature man of perhaps fifty, shortly before Augustus Caesar banished him far from the city he loved to the little town of Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. Ovid wrote that he destroyed his own copy of Metamorphoses, apparently because he was dissatisfied with his performance, but he nevertheless seemed to feel that the work would live after him. In his epilogue to Metamorphoses, he wrote,

Now I have done my work. It will endure,I trust, beyond Jove’s anger, fire, and sword,Beyond Time’s hunger. The day will come, I know,So let it come, that day which has no powerSave over my body, to end my span of lifeWhatever it may be. Still, part of me,The better part, immortal, will be borneAbove the stars; my name will be rememberedWherever Roman power rules conquered lands,I shall be read, and through all centuries,If prophecies of bards are ever truthful,I shall be living, always.

In later times, stories about the gods of the pagan Pantheon were viewed in a different light from that in which Ovid’s contemporaries regarded them. Where readers in later times could smile, Ovid’s light, even facetious, tone is regarded by serious Romans as being somewhat blasphemous. Perhaps his irreverent attitudes were even a partial cause for his exile, for Augustus Caesar was at the time attempting moral reforms. Moreover, after dealing good-humoredly with various gods, Ovid turned at the end of Metamorphoses to describe the transformation of Julius Caesar into a god. How seriously he meant this to be taken is not clear from the tone of the poem.

Ovid begins his collection with a description of how the universe came into being with the metamorphosis of Chaos into Cosmos, the ordered universe. Describing how the Lord of Creation, “Whatever god it was,” established order in the universe, Ovid gives a picture of the four ages. He starts his account with the Golden Age, when justice and right exist everywhere, and when law and punishment are absent because they are unnecessary. The god Saturn is eventually usurped by Jove, and Jove becomes chief of the gods, ushering in the Age of Silver, when human beings first build houses to guard themselves against the seasons and plant crops to provide themselves with a harvest. Next comes the Age of Bronze, when warlike instincts and aggression come into being, to be succeeded in its turn by the Iron Age, when modesty, truth, and righteousness are displaced by trickery, violence, and swindling. This age is so bad that Jove strikes down the living and brings forth a new race of human beings who are, as Ovid puts it, “men of blood.” All except Deucalion and Pyrrha, a righteous man and woman, are wiped from the face of the earth by Jove, who with Neptune’s aid causes a flood to cover the globe. Ovid’s stories of the Creation and the Flood, told in a pagan environment, are strikingly similar to the stories of Noah in the Old Testament.

Much of Ovid’s poetry in Metamorphoses deals with love. It is not romanticized, sentimentalized love, however, for the poet recognizes the physical reality of attraction, and his gods and goddesses exhibit human passions as well. In love, as Ovid describes it, there is often a strain of cruelty and brutality; the veneer of civilization is thin enough to let his readers sense the savagery of violence, revenge, jealousy, and cruelty underlying human nature. In this connection, Ovid recalls Lycaon boiling and broiling the flesh of a human hostage before the altar of Jove; Tereus raping Philomela and then cutting out her tongue to keep the deed a secret; a satyr being flayed alive by Apollo, the son of Latona, for trying to surpass him at playing the flute; sixteen-year-old Athis having his face battered to mere splinters of bone by Perseus; and Pelias’s daughters’ letting their father’s blood at the behest of Medea. In these stories, gory details are described in the account of each brutal act; brains, blood, broken bones, and screams of agony and hate fill the lines. Love and hate, both powerful, basic human emotions, are closely entwined in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Mere enumeration does not do Ovid’s poetry the justice it deserves. Practically every phase of the Greco-Roman mythology is represented in the fifteen divisions of the work. The stories are drawn together with consummate skill. However, a noteworthy fact in assessing Ovid’s mastery and craft is that he himself was a skeptic who did not believe in these stories as having actually happened. Without the sincerity of belief, he nevertheless writes in such a way as to induce in the reader the mood that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, almost two thousand years later, described as the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Ovid places believable personalities in his pages. His men and women and his gods and goddesses hate and love as human beings always have. Later readers recognize in themselves the same surges and flows of emotion they find in Ovid’s poetry. In this way, later times, despite technological advances, are little different from the Roman empire of Ovid and Augustus.

Ovid’s style also includes a large amount of specific detail with which he creates a vivid picture of people or actions. Particularly vital moments include that when Myrrha, in “Cinyras and Myrrha,” flings herself, face down, to cry into her pillow; when Pygmalion lavishes gifts of pet birds, seashells, lilies, and lumps of precious amber on his beloved statue; and when Dorylas, in “The Battle of the Centaurs,” is wounded by Peleus and dies trailing his entrails, treading and tangling them with his centaur’s hoofs. These details are a reminder that Ovid’s Rome was a culture that included not only greatness in art but also the grim and bloody scenes of death by violence.

Bibliography

Brown, Sarah Annes. Ovid: Myth and Metamorphosis. London: Bristol Classical, 2005. Print.

Hardie, Philip. The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

Innes, Mary M, trans. Metamorphoses of Ovid. 1955. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1975. Print.

Johnson, Patricia J. Ovid before Exile: Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2008. Print.

Knox, Peter E., ed. Oxford Readings in Ovid. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Loos, Jaap. "How Ovid Remythologizes Greek Astronomy in Metamorphoses." Mnemosyne 61.2 (2008): 257–89. Print.

Lowe, Dunstan M. "Personification Allegory in the Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses." Mnemosyne 61.3 (2008): 414–35. Print.

Mack, Sara. “Metamorphoses.” Ovid. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. Print.

McNamara, Joanne. "The Frustration of Pentheus: Narrative Momentum in Ovid's Metamorphoses." Classical Quarterly 60.1 (2010): 173–93. Print.

Otis, Brooks. Ovid as an Epic Poet. New York: Cambridge UP, 1966. Print.

Rand, Edward Kennard. “Poet of Transformations.” Ovid and His Influence. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. Print.