Metamorphoses

It's been fascinating to immerse myself in these myths and see how Ovid, having taken Greek myths as his source, has influenced so many other writers later on.

I'm already quite familiar with Greek mythology, and yet! It doesn't seem to matter how many times you re-read them, by which author, whether they are a direct translation of the original or a retelling. There are so many characters, so many relationships, and so much depth, that there's always something new to find.

There's been a recent resurgence of retellings in which these myths are framed from a modern perspective, and I find that too many of them try to make these characters into people, when they are, overwhelmingly, stories to explain how the world worked. Why do some birds mate for life? Why is there winter? Why does the sun travel across the sky? These are not stories about people, and trying to make the myth of Hades and Persephone into a romance is kind of missing the point (on top of making me a little worried for the author's idea of what constitutes romance).

A story of change and transformation
14 March 2014

tThe first thing that came into my mind as I was reading this book is a concept that was developed by the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus: matter is never created or destroyed, it only ever changes form. Then there is the idea Ovid explores: the universe in which we live is in a constant state of flux. Granted, this is the second time that I have read this book (and in fact this particular translation, and I do plan on reading it again) and I must say that while it is an absolutely beautiful piece of literature – one that rightly deserves the term classic – it is a very hard slog. However, the influence that Ovid has had on poetry throughout the ages, stemming from what one could consider his Magnus Opus is outstanding. In fact, another literary epic poem that comes to mind is The Divine Comedy (as well as Paradise Lost), though I must admit that it is nowhere near as saucy as Ovid (not that Metamorphoses is his worst, in fact compared to the  The Art of Love – not that I have read it – yet – Metamorphoses is tame).

tMetamorphoses could be seen as an epic journey through Greek and Roman mythology ending with the assassination of Julius Ceaser and the ascension of Augustus Ceaser to become Princeps of Rome, and with Rome transitioning from a Republic to an Imperium (though I suspect that if you were a foreigner or a slave, little had changed). I suspect that is the is whole reason behind the poem: the Roman state itself have just undergone a huge transition, a metamorphosis if you like, in that the nature of the government had changed, a change that was incredibly violent. However, as I have suggested, this change no doubt only affected the upper classes (of which Ovid was a member) in that the political and oratorical careers of the Republic had suddenly up and vanished. No longer could people aim to become Censors or Consuls because the Princeps had taken that role, and no longer could they form policy and shape the direction of the empire, because the Princeps was doing that as well, and the Princeps was not going anywhere, at all.

tWhat Ovid does in this poem is that he tells the story of the universe from its founding (if it indeed had one because many of the philosophers at the time believed that it had always been in existence and that it would have no end - rather it would simply keep on changing form, as it does in the Metamorphoses) and through many of the myths that had come out from the Greeks. Upon reaching the Trojan War, Ovid begins to follow Aeneas (leaving the stories of the Greek conquerors of Troy behind) through Carthage and to the founding of the colony at Alba Longa. It is clear that all of these myths (with the exception of Aeneas, and it is debatable – incredibly debatable – whether Aeneas was ever actually the ancestor of Romulus and Remus, but rather a creation of the Roman ruling class to set them apart from the Greeks, just as the story of Aeneas and Dido was a creation to set them against the Cartheginians and to give them a reason as to why they went to war – not that they were two superpowers fighting over the same lake being reason enough, but then again as most governments know, to send the population to war you have to have a really good reason) have been taken from their Greek origins and effectively Romanised (though Ovid was most likely working on what had developed before him, rather that doing something new

tThe first change, or transformation, that we see in this story is the story of the flood. Now many Christians would like to use this as an excuse to justify a world wide flood, but while it is true that the Grecian flood story is quite old, no doubt it could have been picked up from other sources and Helenised (as many of these tales have been). However, my purpose here is to identify it as one of the first changes, in that what we have is an older world transforming into a new world through the flood (as is the case with the biblical account). The next change come about with the four ages (gold, silver, bronze, and lead), which have been lifted out of Hesiod (and note that Hesiod makes no mention of a flood). Once again we have a constant change as the nature of the ages change, as well as the occupants: as one age comes to an end and another age begins. In a sense, what Ovid is demonstrating is that nothing lasts forever and that change is inevitable.

tWhile one could look through the characters that change, such as Io shifting from a woman to a bull and back again, and Daphne with her transformation into a laurel tree, I would rather jump through to the Trojan War, which once again shows another transformation, and that is a transformation of societies and empires. Here we have one dominant empire coming to an end through war, but it is not completely destroyed because from the destruction wrought by the enemy, an seed is sent forth – Aeneas - to create a new empire that eventually rises up and overthrows the conquers of the fatherland. However, as things change, Ovid wants to show his readers (and remember his readers were most likely middle to upper class Roman citizens) that the flux is ongoing and that the current state of affairs will no doubt not last forever.

reading this book made me feel like i was chained to ovid in the saw trap bathroom. now i’ve gnawed off my leg and am finally free

I never quite finished this and will need to start again now. The problem was reading it before bed at night - there are so many stories and so many characters that keeping track of them all in that twillight between awake and asleep proved too much for me. But this is the Classical World's Bible, although much more interesting in that the stories are clearly meant to be taken as metaphor and there isn't endless boring bits where all that happens is praise for the jealous god.

The Greeks and Romans had a much better sense of irony than the Jews or Christians, I think. If you read this you might get that odd sense of having heard many of the stories before - and that might be one of the main reasons for reading this book at all - it has been the source of so much else in our literary tradition, that alone is reason enough to read it.

Quase três meses depois cheguei ao fim da caminhada por este mundo único e maravilhoso.
Não foi uma leitura fácil. Primeiro lia; depois decifrava; a seguir pesquisava e finalmente resumia. Fui feliz em todas as fases. Os meus amigos e a minha família não dirão o mesmo pois, sempre que os apanhei a jeito, "torturei-os" contando-lhes algumas destas histórias trágicas de deuses e humanos; das suas paixões, ódios, ciúmes, vinganças, desgostos, guerras,... e tudo o que, dois mil anos depois, ainda move o mundo. Histórias que inspiraram outros escritores (e pintores e músicos) ao longo dos séculos (por exemplo, Romeu e Julieta, de Shakespeare, não é mais do que o romance de amor entre Píramo e Tisbe).

Júpiter, Mercúrio, Narciso, Hermafrodito, Medeia, Medusa, Filomela, Dédalo, Ícaro, Minotauro, Ariadne, Hércules, Orfeu, Eurídice, Pigmalião, Vénus, Adónis, Apólo, Dafne, Midas, Aquiles, Ájax, Sibila, Ulisses, Pitágoras,... são apenas alguns dos heróis desta "epopeia" que eu pensava que conhecia. Pensava mal...

Podia ficar aqui, por tempo indeterminado, a "massacrar-vos" sobre Metamorfoses (e do quanto bem me fez). Mas vou calar-me e guardá-lo na "mala dos sete para a ilha deserta"...

Para quem tiver paciência, deixo os meus rascunhos... http://ovidiometamorfoses.tumblr.com/

Second reading completed Nov 17, 2023. This time I read the new Stephanie McCarter translation. I liked it. She uses a flexible blank verse, which moves along nicely. She also worked hard to keep the text concise, to echo Latin's compactness, and to employ Ovid's poetic devices where compatible. As others have noted, she has a strong commitment to name rape and violence as such. Reading the text with that in mind, it seems clear that Ovid too was calling on the reader to see it for what it was. This decision on the part of both poet and translator is not intrusive, just present when appropriate.

I've compared a selection from her version to the same lines from three other translators just below, if you're trying to decide which one to read. There are others, but these are on my shelf. I would take McCarter, although my 2013 review (below) of Gregory's translation was also enthusiastic.

This time around I was struck by the poetry of Jove’s seduction of Europa, Orpheus’s charming the trees, and Pythagoras’s tirade against eating meat. I found that my just finished read of Bren Smith’s Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer, with its graphic and material reasons for a mostly plant based diet, and Pythagoras’s argument that what’s on your plate was likely reincarnated before you slaughtered it, reinforced my mostly successful growing commitment to vegetarianism. ;-)

I’ve selected a passage to illustrate McCarter’s choice to use the word ‘rape’ for Ovid’s rapio (not ravishment or any other euphemism)

[Context: Cyane, the nymph of a spring, has attempted to stop Pluto on his way to rape Proserpina, daughter of Ceres, but the god forced his way by her. (Cyane has said that at least her lover Anapis had not forced her to become his bride; he asked her.)]

McCarter:
But Cyane laments for the raped goddess
and for her spring’s scorned rights. Her silenced mind
now bears a wound that’s inconsolable.
She melts completely into tears, dissolving
into the spring she just had ruled, a mighty
spirit. You could have seen her limbs turn soft,
her bones contort, the hardness leave her nails.
Her thinnest parts were first to liquefy:
her sea-blue hair, her fingers, legs, and feet—
for thin limbs quickly change to icy streams.
Next shoulders, back, flank, chest—all disappear.
At last, her ruined veins flow not with blood
but water. Nothing’s left that you could grasp.

Rolf Humphries:
Cyane
Grieved for both violation, girl and fountain,
And in her silent spirit kept the wound
Incurable, and, all in tears, she melted,
Dissolving, queen no longer, of those waters.
Her limbs were seen to soften, and her bones
Became more flexible, and the nails’ hardness
Was Gone: the slenderest parts went first, the hair,
The fingers, legs, and feet: it is no great distance
From slimness to cool water. Back and shoulders,
The breasts, the sides, were watery streams, and water
Went through her veins, not blood, till there was nothing
For anyone to hold.

Allen Mandelbaum
“’But Cyane nursed an inconsolable—
a silent—wound that was incurable;
a sadness for the rape of Cere’ daughter
and for the violation of the waters
of her own pool—for Pluto’s scorn and anger.
She gave herself to tears and then dissolved
into the very pool of which she had—
till now—been the presiding deity.
You could have seen the softening of her limbs,
the bones and nails that lost solidity.
Her slender hairs, her fingers, legs, and feet—
these were the first to join the waves. In fact,
the slenderest parts can sooner turn into
cool waters. Shoulders, back, and sides, and breasts
were next to vanish in thin streams. At last,
clear water flows through Cyane’s weakened veins,
and there is nothing left that anyone can grasp.

Arthur Golding (Shakesspeare’s Ovid)

Dame Cyan taking sore to heart as well the ravishment
Of Proserpine against hir will, as also the contempt
Against hir fountains priviledge, did shrowde in secret hart
An inward corsie comfortlesse, which never did depart
Until she melting into teares consumde away with smart.
The selfe same waters of the which she was but late ago
The mighty Goddesse, now she pines and wastes hirselfe into.
Ye might have seene hir limmes were lithe, ye might have bent hir bones:
Hir nayles wext soft: and first of all did melt the smallest ones:
As haire and fingars, legges, and feete: for those same slender parts
Doe quickly into water turne, and afterward converts
To water, shoulder, backe, brest, side: and finally in stead
Of lively bloud, within hir veynes corrupted there was spred
Thinne water: so that nothing now remained whereeeupon
Ye might take holde, to water now consumed was anon.


Original 2013 review:

Fantastic. This is powerful stuff. I especially liked the speeches by Ajax and Ulysses when they compete for dead Achilles armor, even if it is a spot where Ovid strays from the metamorphoses theme. Also, the descriptions of nature and emotion throughout are vivid. No argument that it sags a bit at times, but overall the intensity is compelling.

I actually listened to the Horace Gregory translation, but am citing the print edition because otherwise the pages don't get calculated into one's annual reading total. After reading some reviews, I decided that I need to get ahold of the Melville translation to see how much difference there is and which one I prefer. I found Gregory plenty gripping.

Metamorphosis is fundamental to existence. As children, we are fascinated by the transformation of caterpillar to buttefly, or of tadpole to frog; it is the same individual creature, with the same life-force motivating it, but at the same time its physical nature is fundamentally changed. And it was the brilliant conceit of the Roman poet Ovid to center his collection of stories from classical mythology around the theme of metamorphosis. In doing so, Ovid made his Metamorphoses the most complete and comprehensive collection of Greek and Roman mythological tales ever set down.

Publius Ovidius Naso stands with Virgil among the greatest poets that Rome ever produced – though his father wanted him to be a lawyer. He had a gift for exposing human frailty, and wrote with a certain indulgent tolerance for human imperfection, particularly with regard to sins of the flesh; his most famous work before The Metamorphoses was Ars Amatoria or The Art of Love (2 A.D.) – an unblushingly frank guide to love, sex, and relationships, and a work that is said to have offended no less a reader than the emperor Augustus Caesar. But an undaunted Ovid carried on, and published The Metamorphoses in 8 A.D. It remains the book for which this great poet is best remembered.

An account of creation is followed by a series of stories that flow into and out of one another – many of them centering around themes and events of metamorphosis. Often, these stories show the Olympian gods as cruel and fickle, as when the hunter Actaeon unfortunately, and unintentionally, surprises the virgin goddess Diana at her bath. Diana spitefully tells Actaeon, “Now you may tell the story of seeing Diana naked – if storytelling is in your power!” and then sprinkles him with drops of her bathwater. At once,

The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag;
The neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips;
She changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender
Forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin;
Last, she injected panic. The son of Autonoë bolted,
Surprising himself with his speed as he bounded away from the clearing.
But when he came to a pool and set eyes on his head and antlers,
“Oh, dear god!” he was going to say; but no words followed.
All the sound he produced was a moan, as the tears streamed over
His strange new face. It was only his feelings that stayed unchanged. (p. 102)

Note the extra touch of horror – that Actaeon retains his human consciousness once he has been transformed into a stag, looking just like the deer that he once hunted, but unable to express himself in human language. And that is before Actaeon suffers the horrible fate of being torn to pieces by his own hounds!

I took this copy of The Metamorphoses with me on a trip to Crete; and when I saw Knossos Palace, the site whose winding subterranean passages and dedication to a bull cult are thought to have inspired the mythological tales of the Labyrinth in which the half-man, half-bull Minotaur was hidden, I thought at once of Ovid’s description of the Labyrinth:

The labyrinth…was built by an eminent master-craftsman,
Daedalus, who had obscured all guiding marks and designed it
To cheat the eye with bewildering patterns of tortuous alleys.
Just as the Phrygian river Maeander sports and plays…
So Daedalus’ warren of passages
Wandered this way and that. In such a treacherous maze
Its very designer could scarcely retrace his steps to the entrance. (pp. 301-02)

Imprisoned with his son Icarus inside the Labyrinth that he had himself designed, Daedalus famously plans to escape via wings made of wax covered in feathers – itself a sort of temporary metamorphosis from human into bird. But once the two have made their escape, and have flown all the way to the Aegean island of Samos, Icarus, caught up in the exaltation of the moment, forgets his father’s advice to steer a rational middle course between sea and sky:

[A]ll this adventurous flying went to Icarus’ head.
He ceased to follow his leader; he’d fallen in love with the sky,
And soared up higher and higher. The scorching rays of the sun
Grew closer and softened the fragrant wax which fastened his plumage.
The wax dissolved; and as Icarus flapped his naked arms,
Deprived of the wings which had caught the air that was buoying them upwards,
“Father!” he shouted, again and again. But the boy and his shouting
Were drowned in the blue-green main which is called the Icarian Sea. (p. 305)

Icarus’ folly brings about a most unwelcome metamorphosis; his temporary birds’ wings are lost, and, restored to fully human status, he falls to his doom.

A reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses also does much to show that the classical myths that modern readers might experience in isolation were in fact interrelated – as when, in a series of poems sung by the great poet and musician Orpheus, the not-so-well-known story of Myrrha leads into the very well-known story of Venus and Adonis.

As Ovid’s Orpheus tells it, Myrrha, a princess of Cyprus, harbours incestuous feelings toward her father Cinyras, the Cypriot king. This situation at once brings up a paradox: since feelings of love are caused by Venus and her son Cupid, cannot these deities be blamed for Myrrha’s unhealthy obsession? Ovid tries to clear the gods of culpability for Myrrha’s incestuous longings – “Cupid himself denies that his arrows/Were Myrrha’s downfall and clears his torches of such an indictment” (p. 397) – but his denials hold little force. Who, in the Olympian religious system, causes human beings to feel desire – or other emotions, right or wrong – if not the Olympian gods?

That philosophical conundrum is never unresolved. Myrrha eventually becomes the mother of Adonis, and the handsome young man attracts the notice of Venus just as, in a fateful moment, Cupid “unwittingly grazed her breast with the tip of an arrow” (p. 408). Venus falls immediately and completely in love with Adonis. Sometime later, Adonis, an avid hunter, prepares to go out on a hunt, and a worried Venus desperately asks Adonis to “Take no risks, dear lover, at my expense, or allow yourself to provoke what is well provided with weapons by nature” (p. 409). The reader at once senses that Adonis’ day on the hunt will not end well. Ovid, through Orpheus, sums up the whole sad situation by writing that Adonis’ good looks were “enough to attract even Venus and so to avenge the passionate/Love which had ruined Myrrha” (p. 408). Even the gods, it seems, are subject to the dictates of fate.

At other times, The Metamorphoses provides a valuable window into Roman culture. Once Ovid is finished chronicling the story of the Trojan War – from the Trojan point of view, since the Romans regarded themselves as the descendants and heirs of Troy and its traditions – Book 13 begins with a depiction of “The Judgement of Arms,” when Ajax and Ulysses both put forward their respective claims for the armour of the slain Achilles. Both Ajax and Ulysses, as they set forth their arguments, sound very much as though they could be opposing attorneys, holding forth in a Roman courtroom.

Ajax’s arguments are straightforward and forceful, befitting his personality. He states that when Hector and his Trojans tried to burn the Greek ships at the seaside, “I, with my manly body, protected the thousand ships,/your hopes of return”, and rhetorically asks, “Where now was the brilliant speaker, Ulysses?” (p. 501). Ulysses’ argument, unsurprisingly, is more subtle; he points out that when Agamemnon, deceived by a dream, called for the Greeks to abandon the siege of Troy, it was Ulysses who prevented the Greeks from giving up the battle: “I saw you, Ajax, to my great shame, when you ran for your life/And issued those shameful orders to spread the sails of your ship” (p. 507).

As mentioned above, the exchange has a decided courtroom quality to it; and other readers might be reminded of the freestyle rap battles between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton (2015). Either way, no one should be surprised when Ulysses wins the verbal contest over Achilles’ arms, or when an angry Ajax is propelled along the path toward his own ignominious self-destruction.

Toward the end of The Metamorphoses, Ovid invokes the theories of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras to set forth his idea that life itself always and inevitably involves metamorphosis, suggesting that “Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting” (p. 602), and adding that “Nothing retains its original form, but Nature, the goddess/Of all renewal, keeps altering one shape into another” (p. 606). The progression of the seasons, the course of a day, and the cycle of human life all proclaim, for Ovid, that existence itself is metamorphosis.

The year 8 A.D. saw both triumph and tragedy for Ovid. On the one hand, The Metamorphoses was published, adding to his already considerable fame and renown as a poet; on the other hand, in the same year he was exiled, by personal order of the emperor Augustus Caesar – for reasons that remain unknown – to the remote city-state of Tomis, on the Black Sea in the province of Dacia. There, in what he would no doubt have regarded as a “barbarian” backwater (but is now the perfectly lovely seaside city of Constanța in Romania), Ovid continued writing his poetry, and sought desperately to have his exile recalled, so that he could rejoin his beloved wife and daughter and return to his city of Rome. That permission was never granted, even after the death of Augustus, and Ovid died a lonely death in a faraway place in 17 or 18 A.D.

Yet notwithstanding the unhappy changes of fortune that characterized his last years. Ovid left us the most complete, and most perfectly interrelated, collection of Olympian mythology that any classical writer ever produced. To read The Metamorphoses is to be plunged into a world of capricious deities, heroic men and women, and hideous creatures. The tales move seamlessly back and forth between the humorous and the horrific, and their power to ensnare and fascinate is just as great now as it was 2,000 years ago. Read The Metamorphoses, and you will be changed by it.

"Throughout all ages,
If poets have vision to prophesy truth, I shall live in my
Fame."

Thus the closing lines of Ovid's "Metamorphoses". He was certainly right in his statement, but it feels like an appropriate irony that his work has been transformed, metamorphosed, over the millennia since he wrote his compilation of Roman and Greek literature. I have known most of the collected stories since my early days at university, but only now finished reading the "Metamorphoses" as a whole, from cover to cover, and my impression is that Ovid's fame is mostly due to the brilliant interpretation of his text by European visual artists over the centuries.

Through the metamorphosis from text to visual art, Ovid has stayed famous. Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne" symbolises it more accurately than any other myth retold in the collection: a god chasing a young nymph, who slowly transforms into a laurel tree to avoid sexual assault, only to find herself the eternal symbol of Apollo's high status, and the honorable prize for literary or artistic fame. Ovid is resting on those laurels, wearing his Apollonian laurel wreath - as is Bernini, who can proudly compete with Pygmalion in the skill with which he made the marble leaves come alive, transforming hard stone into delicate art.



I knew I would be going on a tour through art history when I embarked on the Ovid journey, and I enjoyed every minute of it, often reading with a pile of art books next to me. As a pleasant extra surprise, I found myself revisiting several favourite Greek plays from a different narrative perspective, focusing on the transforming powers of dramatic storytelling rather than on unity of time, place and action. Hercules' story unfolded from a new angle, as did many of the Trojan and Minoan adventures.

After finishing Virgil's The Aeneid a couple of months ago, the short summary of Aeneas' adventures was welcome as well. Generally speaking, the "Metamorphoses" can be viewed as a Who's Who in the Ancient Roman and Greek cosmos, with a clear bias in favour of the Roman empire and its virtues. There are fewer long fight scenes than in the Iliad or the Aeneid, which makes it a more pleasant, less repetitive narrative, once the Centaurs and Lapiths are done with their violent duties.

After decades of immersing myself in the world of ancient mythology, I found the "Metamorphoses" to be an easy and lighthearted reading experience. When I read excerpts from it during my early university years, I struggled to recognise and place all those famous characters. It is a matter of being able to see the context, and background knowledge is a clear advantage.

I just wish my Latin was strong enough- it must be a special pleasure to read it in original!

Claude opus!