This book should be an absolute delight to anyone interested in European literature or art. Written in the first century AD it represents the first effort to anthologize Greek mythology and integrate the whole into the history of the Roman empire. I only regret that as undergraduate I never took a course with this work on the program.

Having read the Metamorphoses without the benefit a classics professor to guide me I am quite glad that it was not the first collection of Greek myths that I read. I had earlier read Thomas Bullfinch's and Edith Hamilton's anthologies both of which were written for individual reading without the benefit of academic supervision. My advice would be read either Bullfinch or Hamilton first and then at a later point in time when in the mood to return to Hellenistic culture read Ovid's work.

I confess that reading Ovid's Metamorphoses has left me a changed man. His focus on transformation parables of ancient myths taught me quite a bit about change. I was intrigued by how often unwanted change was unwillingly created by life-denying action that angers one of the gods. All the great figures of ancient times are here: Daedalus, Achilles, Paris, Perseus, Hector, Pygmalion, Midas, Helen and Aeneas to name but a few. The origins of common fables must have had their ancient roots in Ovid. So much of art, especially painting, music and literature, owes its transformation from the tales articulated with wit and charm by Ovid. This is an important window into ancient times and the stories must have been intriguing to hear in engaging oratory. This is genuinely a great work of literature and the pages really fly by rapidly. These tales of Ovid on change helped me understand better the constant role of change in my own personal transformation. And, thus, the tales of Ovid transformed me in the reading and in the writing transformed Ovid into immortality.

Now since the sea's great surges sweep me on,
All canvas spread, hear me! In all creation
Nothing endures, all is in endless flux,
Each wandering shape a pilgrim passing up
And time itself glides on in ceaseless flow,
A rolling stream- and streams can never stay,
nor lightfoot hours, as wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies and follows,
Always, for ever new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed (p.357)

The Melville translation was recommended to me. I have not read any others and have no idea how varied the field is. In this epic around the theme of metamorphoses Ovid weaves a continuing narrative of classical myth, each one transforming into the next, it could be a good book to read for an introduction to the ancient myths of classical Greece, but really maybe more as a companion to European renaissance art, or occasional operas like Handel's Acis and Galatea

It is an impetuous, non-stop rush from creation - here an act of division and separation - from adventure to adventure and narratives nesting inside each other down to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and the triumph of his (adopted) son Augustus.

In places as Ovid rushes through time and space he alludes through people and places to other stories, not included in Metamorphoses giving a sense of a universe of narrative that Ovid's poem is relentlessly driving through.

The unifying theme is of change - people becoming trees, or rocks, women becoming monsters (or men), people becoming birds and other animals, frequently as a result of contact with gods or semi or demi divine beings, often as a result of the lust of said divine persons, repeating the subversive message of Ovid's love poems that desire is the driving force of history.

It is often violent - retelling sections of the Trojan war for instance and the centre of the poem is the hunt for an epic boar in Scilly when Nestor was a young man and helpfully for him still capable of vaulting into a tree, toward the end of the poem is the really grisly and horrifying battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs which I hope was not based too much on Ovid's personal experience of weddings. And yet in the final of the poem's fifteen books we have the figure of Pythagoras, not telling us about triangles, but promoting vegetarianism - because of, as he also taught, the transmigration of souls which feeds back to the poem's theme of change, it is not just that arbitrary gods may turn us from ants into unusually hard working men, or from men and women into snakes, but that changes is part of the nature of existence in a fundamental way, in this life we may be humans, in the next life we may be chickens or sheep.
Although the poem ends with the triumph of Roman power and the deification of Rome's rulers, the poem has a subversive energy. Earlier great powers had fallen, even gods have been toppled, while new gods and new great powers rise and have their day too, why then will Roma and its Caesars be any different?

Jupiter decries disorder and sin, but he overthrew his father and pursues girls and boys insatiably  but not I think women or men. The victims are blamed, persecuted and then left voiceless - but here Ovid memorialises them in to a fabric as complex as Ariadne wove, or now might still weave in her transformed state.

What will become of me, gripped as I am
by this queer longing for a kind of lovemaking that no one understands?

Did not connect fully to this, but mostly had a lovely time reading this very old epic poem.

I learned about Ovid many many years ago (my Romanian teacher would probably be happy that I read this), because he was exiled in Pontus Euxinus, aka The Black Sea, in the city of Tomis, now Constanța. There's actually a town that bears his name (Ovidiu), that you pass through on the way to the seaside.

The book has some interesting themes, like the powerlessness of humans against gods, women in the face of men who want them (so many chapters are titled 'X rapes Y', like a huge amount of them, so read with care), but also quite a lot of queerness, gender type of metamorphoses and some sweet gay love. A lot of the characters (too many, I have to confess I couldn't always remember who we were talking about, because there are many many names of characters and complex relationships between them) are turned into plants, trees, birds and so on - and it seems to me like they're objectified further, after the transgressions against them, by becoming only a reminder of what was done to them. Well. In some cases it's what they've done.

Actaeon, transformed into a stag by Diana, goddess of the hunt, asks: 'For how is error crime?' and yeah, the gods are cruel.

Love and Hymen shake their wedding torches.

Oh yeah, Hymen's the god of marriage.

Even if the injustices done to women in this book are many and rendered compassionately, there's still a bit of a sexist bent to these stories, like the witchy Medea and Circe and their stories. There's also a... checks notes... woman rapist? (Aurora) Enjoyed the story of Iphis, who becomes a man in order to be a husband to his beloved, Ianthe. It was an interesting gender-transitioning sort of story, but also Iphis did not know how to satisfy Ianthe without a penis so... can he find the clit though?

Also enjoyed quite a few stories I knew already from Greek myths, like Orpheus and Eurydice, some bits of the Illiad, and so on. Also, catching a lot of characters and places with names used by Tamsyn Muir in The Locked Tomb, lol. (Cytherea, Ada, Protesilaus, Ianthe, Palamedes, Sarpedon etc). Oh and the lengthy bit about Pythagoras and metempsychosis (the soul moving from one body to another), which is also an interesting plea for vegetarianism, but also describes a lot of beautiful transformations / metamorphoses that take place in nature - including the transness of hyenas!

Another thing that was nice was all the places mentioned here that I've been, like Mount Hymettus, the island of Euboea, driving past the coast of Corinth and others.

4/10

Don't get this rating wrong, I'm glad that I read this, it's one of my greatest literary accomplishments thus far with War and Peace, but damn, what a drag. I get it, I respect it, but the amount of eye roll I had while reading this is absurd. I don't think even twilight compares.

I think that for a book that's well over 700 hundred pages (in my edition,) it lacked depth and was very repetitive. Oh, you have ambition? Dare to have dreams? To not conform? To love? How about... no longer being human!

Not to go all fanfics here but, can we all agree that Ovid wrote this because he was heartbroken and needed to keep busy? Because the whole 'oh I'm sad I'm going to live in my poems from now on' screams Red Era Taylor Swift.

(personal highlights include:
- Narcissus and the nymphe Echo
- Scylla & Minos
-Medea & Jason
-Orpheus' songs
-the founding of Rome)

I think I'll read this again from time to time because it seems like that kind of book you revisit and get something new every time, but I don't think I'll ever do a full readthrough again.

Sex, violence, and humor are often painted as low and primitive: the signs of a failing culture. Yet it is only in cultures with a strong economy and a substantial underclass that such practices can rise from duty to pastime. As Knox's introduction reminds us, Ovid's time was one of pervasive divorce, permissive laws, and open adultery, and our humble author participated in all of them.

Eventually, the grand tyrant closed his fist over the upper classes, exerting social controls and invoking the moral standard of an imagined 'golden age' in order to snatch power and discredit his rivals. Though already a popular and influential author and speaker, Ovid was exiled for being wanton and clever--either one he could have gotten away with, but both was too much.

Both he and Virgil were sent to the extremities of the empire by Augustus, and both wrote epics to equal Homer's. While Virgil's was a capitulation to the emperor, honoring his fictitious lineage and equating heroism with duty, Ovid's was a sly, labyrinthine re-imagining of classic tales, drawing equally on the gold of Olympus' brow and the muck between a harlot's toes.

Ovid remained more coy about his dirt than Apuleius or Seneca, maintaining plausible deniability with irony and entendre throughout the complex work. Every view, vision, and opinion is put forth at some point, and very rarely are they played straight. Ovid's characters are remarkable creations, each one a subversion of the familiar legend that surrounds them. Of course, by this point many of us are more familiar with Ovid's versions than the ones he was making light of.

Virgil inspired the proud, righteous men of words: Dante, Tasso, Milton. Ovid created a style for the tricksters and the conflicted: Petrarch, Donne, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Rabelais. Each of Ovid's myths was a discrete vision, not only by plot, but by theme. His tales were not simply presentations of ideas, but explorations that turned back on themselves over and over.

The metaphysical poets would come to adopt this style, creating short works that explored themes, even ritualizing the idea's reversal in the sonnet's volta. The active, visual nature of Ovid was a progression from the extended metaphors of the philosophers to what could be called a true conceit: a symbolic representation at once supportive of and in conflict with the idea it bears.

Each of Ovid's tales flows, one into the next, building meaning by relations, counterpoints, repetition, and structure. Each small part builds into a grander whole. Just as all the sundry stories become a mythology, the many symbolic arguments become a philosophy.

Instead of the Virgilian heroic mode, where one man wins, thereby vindicating his philosophy, Ovid shows a hundred victories and losses, creating an aggregate meaning. Virgil was writing of what he thought one man should be: loyal, pious, righteous, strong, noble. Ovid was more interested in asking what it is possible for a man to be--what are the limits of the mind?

The Greek myths are an attempt to understand the mind, to observe what we do and create types, to develop a system for understanding man. In collecting these various tales, Ovid was creating the first psychological diagnostic manual, of which the DSM is the modern child. The Greeks invented everything, after all, and here, a few thousand years before Freud, is a remarkably coherent and accurate picture of the mind and its disorders.

Freud did little more than reintroduce the Greek system, which is why his theories--the Psyche, the Oedipus Conflict, Narcissism--are drawn directly from that source. Of course, to any student of literature, it's clear that this is how the terms have always been used. All the great works alluded to these Greek ideas because this was the central collection of knowledge about the mind, a set of terms, phrases, and examples which formed the basis of any discussion of the mind.

Indeed, the Greeks were much better at it than Freud was--he even screwed up the Oedipal Theory, the thing he's best known for, despite the fact that the Greeks had it right from the very beginning.

Freud's patients, being middle-class Europeans, were raised by nannies and nursemaids until they were of age, and had fairly little interaction with their parents. Human beings imprint on people who we are around a great deal before about age six as 'family', and therefore, out of bounds sexually. Since his patients were not around their parents much before this age, they did not imprint correctly. Now: what's the first thing that happens to Oedipus in the story? That's right, he's taken away from his parents and raised elsewhere. Cause, disorder, symptom--it was all right there, and Freud still missed it.

So, Ovid was indeed tackling a grand theme in his tales: the mapping of the human mind as it was known to Greece and Rome. That isn't to say that there isn't depth and conflict between characters and ideas in Virgil, but his centralized, political theme deprived him of the freedom to move from one idea to the next, as Ovid did.

This lack of freedom is a boon for most authors: structure gives tangible boundaries and tools with which to create. With no boundaries, the author has no place to start, and no markers to guide his path.

Imagine a man is given all the parts to a lawnmower. His chances of building a lawnmower are pretty high--but that's all he can do. Now give the same man all the uncut materials and tools in a shop. He could build a lawnmower, or nearly any other machine, but it's going to take a lot of doing. That kind of freedom--real freedom--tends to paralyze most people.

Likewise, it's easier to write good poetry when the rhyme scheme, scansion, and meter are pre-determined than to create a beauty and flow in blank verse. Yet Ovid deconstructed his stories, starting and stopping them between books and moving always back and forth. He provided himself with absolute freedom, but maintained his flow and progression, even without the crutches of tradition.

While his irony and satire are the clearest signs of his remarkable mind, the most impressive is probably this: that he flaunted tradition, style, and form, but never faltered in his grand work.

Virgil knew what he did when he attached himself to Augustus' train; likewise Ovid recognized how his simultaneous praise and subversion of Augustus' legacy would play: none could openly accuse him of treason, but anyone with a solid mind would see the dangerous game Ovid played with his king and patron.

He did not shy from critiquing Augustus even as he wrote for him, for his nation, and for history. Ovid's parting shot is the famous assertion that as long as Rome's name is spoken aloud, so will be Ovid's. This has been echoed since by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, so that what Ovid realized we would never doubt today.

Even banished to the wilderness, out of favor, the only way to silence the artist is to kill him, and this must be done long before he has an audience. Augustus got his month, but his empire fell. Ovid's empire grows by books and minds each year, and its capital is still The Metamorphoses.

I researched long trying to decide on a translation. Though there are many competent versions out there, I chose Martin's. I recall seeing the cover and coveting it, but distrusting the unknown translation. Imagine my surprise when my research turned up my whim.

I enjoyed Martin's translation for the same reason I appreciate Fagles': the vibrancy, wit, and drive of the language. Both are poetic, exciting, risk-taking--but also knowledgeable and deliberate. Every translation is a new work of art, all its own, and I respect translators who don't pretend otherwise.

The translators of the fifties were more staunchly academic, capturing meaning and precision, but in enshrining the classics, they fail to take the sorts of risks that make a work bold and artful. Contrarily, the early translators, like Pope, recreated the work in their own vernacular--not merely as a translation, but as a completely new vision, as Shakespeare's plays are to Plutarch's Lives.

Martin (and Fagles) take the more modern approach, championed by the literary style of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose works are solidly grounded in their tradition, deliberately and knowledgeably drawn, but with the verve and novelty of the iconoclast. There is something particularly fitting in this, since Ovid himself was an iconoclast who mixed formalized tradition with subversion and irony.

Martin proved himself utterly fearless in the altercation between the Pierides and the Muses: he styles their competing songs as a poetry jam, drawing on the vocal forms of rap music. I must admit I was shocked at first, and unable to reconcile, but as I kept reading, I came to realize that it was not my place to question.

Translation is the adaptation of one style to another, one word or phrase or invocation to something more familiar. In his desire to capture the competition and skill of song in these early contests, he drew on what may be the only recognizable parallel to modern man. What is remarkable is not how different the two styles are, but how similar.

It is comical, it is a bit absurd, but so was the original--and in any case, he is altering the original purpose less than Pope, who translated all of the poetry into anachronism. I never thought I would prefer a translation of Ovid which contained the word 'homie', but if Martin can be true enough to the poetry to write it, I must be brave enough to laud it.

I still laugh, but only because Martin has revealed to me something of the impossibility and oddity inherent to translation. This certainly isn't your grandfather's Ovid, but then, your grandfather's Ovid wasn't the real one, either.

I also appreciated Knox's introduction in both Martin's and Fagle's work, though Knox's Homeric background is stronger. I found the end-notes insightful and useful, though they are never quite numerous enough to suit me--but such is the nature of reading a work in translation.

“Ma con la parte migliore di me io volerò in eterno più in alto delle stelle, e il nome mio rimarrà, indelebile. E ovunque si estende, sulle terre domate, la potenza romana, le labbra del popolo mi leggeranno, e per tutti i secoli, grazie alla fama, se qualcosa di vero c'è nelle predizioni dei poeti, vivrò.”

Classico tra i classici greci, Le metamorfosi è una raccolta di alcuni dei miti più famosi e conosciuti, ma non solo. Partendo dalla nascita del cosmo, Ovidio ci conduce alla scoperta di dei e dee, eroi, semplici esseri umani. Storie di amore e odio, di vendetta e dolore, di riscoperta e rinascita, di vita e morte.

Le metamorfosi mi ha tenuto compagnia per settimane, l'ho centellinato perchè non volevo finirlo, ho preferito assaporarlo a poco a poco. La ricchezza della prosa, i tanti racconti uniti da un sottile filo rosso, creano un mosaico di storie che esplorano, come spesso accade quando si leggono i miti, la nostra stessa umanità.
In scena, al centro di ogni racconto, c'è proprio la metamorfosi, l'evoluzione, il cambiamento. La metamorfosi del mondo, ma sopratutto di chi lo abita che viene catturato nel continuo evolversi, nel continuo cambiare per diventare qualcosa di diverso. Un ciclo senza fine che ben rappresenta la nostra vita e l'essenza della nostra umanità.

Attraverso le parole di Ovidio assistiamo alle terribili vendette degli dei, ai loro amori, a volte crudeli a volte insensati. Siamo lì con Orfeo quando cerca di riprendersi la sua Euridice, siamo lì quando Dafne fugge disperatamente da Apollo e preferisce mutarsi in alloro piuttosto che cedere al dio di tutte le cose belle. E ancora il rapimento di Persefone, la triste sorte di Medusa, la vendetta di Medea, le maledizioni delle Furie, Arianna e Teseo, Narciso e Atalanta.

La scrittura diventa vertigine e ci trascina in un mondo quasi irreale che però somiglia pericolosamente a tutto quello che conosciamo e ci è familiare. I miti hanno sempre parlato di noi e continuano a farlo mutando esattamente come facciamo noi.

I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

The Golden Age: Ovids Metamorphoses is a beautiful illustrated book for children giving short 3 paged retelling of a handful of Ovids Metamorphoses. The book is written at a lovely children's can understand and would make a great short story literary resource for a KS2 classroom. The only thing I found difficult to get my head around at first was why the names of the famous Greek Gods was changed to the Roman counterpart - children will be more familiar with the Greek versions than the Roman names. I guess this is because Ovid was a Roman writer? Apart from that I enjoyed these short retelling and found they're perfect for a quick read or story to discuss with your child after reading.

700+ pages of ovid gossiping about every roman creature to ever exist

I have intended to read this translation for a long time and finally got around to it (been on my shelves for years). It is the version read by Shakespeare; Ezra Pound called it "the most beautiful book in the language." Ez was opinionated and some of his literary judgements erratic; certainly this one was.

This is not a modernized version. While Nims has provided a lot of very helpful notes on obsolete terms, it can still be slow going. Golding is wordy and the translation is significantly longer than the Latin text. His verse can also become a bit sing-songy, whether you read it aloud or just hear it echoing in your mind.

Ovid's stories are good in any case, and not always the versions most commonly encountered elsewhere. His versions tend to be prettied up and literary, lacking the raw power of Hesiod, Homer, and the tragedians. Not surprising, since Augustan poets were more in tune with the Alexandrians, who tend to be to precious for my taste.

Isto foi uma grande empreitada, concluída com sucesso.

As Metamorfoses são um poema composto por quinze livros que reúne mais de 250 episódios (gregos e romanos), uns mitológicos outros não.
Ao longo destes 7 meses li, pesquisei, estudei e reli a maioria dos episódios desta obra, e adorei todos os minutos que passei com os heróis destas histórias, mas no meu coração ficaram:

Apolo e Dafne
Píramo e Tisbe
Perseu e Andrómeda
Medusa
Báucis e Filémon
Pigmalião
Mirra
Vénus e Adónis

Este vai directo para a prateleira dos favoritos.

What a master piece. This is a great comglomeration of the old Greek myths along with the Roman myths of this time period. It is very sharp and whitty.
This translation is so good and easy to understand. I recommend this to all.