Homeros'un "İlyada" ve "Odysseia" ve Virgilius'un "Aeneis" destanlarının izinden giderek dünyanın yaradılışından Julius Caesar'ın evlatlık oğlu Agustus zamanına kadar olan neredeyse tüm önemli mitolojik olayları okuyucuya sunan "Metamorphoses / Dönüşümler", Ovidius'un edebiyat tarihine kazandırdığı mükemmel bir başyapıt. Kitabı okumak için Antik Yunan edebiyatına çokça hakim olmak gerekiyor. O yüzden eserin benim gibi Antik Yunan ve Roma edebiyatını bitirmek üzere olan okuyucuların son durağı olması gerektiğini düşünüyorum. Aksi takdirde okuyucunun zorlanma ihtimali oldukça yüksek. Buna ek olarak, kitabı okurken Remzi Kitabevi yayınlarından Azra Erhat'ın "Mitoloji Sözlüğü"nü de kenarda bulundurmakta fayda var. Her bölümün birbirinden harika ve sürükleyici olduğu kitapta edebiyat tarihine (Shakespeare'in "Romeo ve Juliet"i vb.) daha doğrusu sanat tarihine yön vermiş bir sürü olayı okuma şansı buluyorsunuz. Euripides, Sophokles ve Aiskhylos'un oyunlarına düzenli bir şekilde atıfta bulunan Ovidius'un tabii ki en büyük referans aldığı kaynaklar destanlarla beraber Hesiodos'un "İşler ve Güçler" eseriyle Herodot'un "Tarih"i. Kitapta ayrıca tüm kutsal kitaplara referans olmuş tufan ve Adem ile Havva gibi birçok olayı mitolojik şekilde okuyabilirsiniz ki bence kitabın en önemli özelliği de bu. Ovidius'un akıcı dili ve olayları bağlayış biçimiyle hayran kalarak okuyacağınız eserin odak noktası ise tabii ki defne ağacı gibi bitkilerin, karga, kuzgun ve örümcek gibi hayvanların, Ege Denizi ve Etna Yanardağı gibi doğal kaynakların dönüşümlerle beraber nası ortaya çıktığı. Sonuç olarak Ovidius'un insanlığa armağanı olarak nitelendirebileceğim "Dönüşümler", kesinlikle herkes tarafından okunması gereken gerçek bir başyapıt.

17.07.2016
İstanbul, Türkiye

Alp Turgut

http://www.filmdoktoru.com/kitap-labo...

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.

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.

The great thing about Ovid's “Metamorphoses” is that it doesn't force you to take it so seriously. It’s still remarkably vivid, considering its age, and there is hardly a dull moment in it. You can actually read it just for pure pleasure. Its wild stories about transformations from one shape to another can be so entertaining, that your first reaction in reading it probably won't be to ask yourself weighty questions like "Hmm, I wonder what insights this ancient book offers into the structure of the cosmos, or the essence of existence, or the development of the human imagination?" Well… it just so happens that Ovid's poem does offer insights into all of these things -- but you can think of the deeper levels as an added bonus!

Basically, the poem's answer lies in its central theme of "change". For Ovid, the physical world is constantly changing, and so is human life (through birth and death, love, hatred, achievement, and failure). Most important, however, is his portrayal of the human imagination – not so much because of anything he says about it, but because of how he puts it into action. You'd be hard-pressed to find any other author, ancient or modern, who is so bursting with ideas about how to tell a story.

“Metamorphoses” is a wide-ranging account of Greek and Roman mythology, and this epic of transformations is itself -- one continuous transformation. One moment you’re reading one story, and then realize with a start, that you’re in the middle of the next one. By the slightest of hand, Ovid has used one character,or location, or detail in the first tale to segue into the next. Like the stones rising into men and women, or Arachne’s shrinking into a spider, the poem is in a constant state of flux. It is a technique that, irony of ironies --gives the work its permanence and coherence.

Being familiar with most of the stories, I have noticed that Ovid isn't giving a straightforward retelling of the myths. Instead, he is constantly twisting them around to his own purposes, making them look ridiculous, or fixating on details that are strange or grotesque. I think he pulled this off quite well with a witty and humorous tone. By keeping things light, he lets the reader in on the joke. At the same time, however, Ovid also deals with some pretty heavy stuff, and sometimes he does seem to take a strange amount of pleasure in his characters' suffering. I rarely witness comedy and tragedy work so well together as in this book.

I think this is one of the books you need to read in your lifetime. Don’t let its heft intimidate you, you don't even have to read it all the way through. If you want a taste of what it's about, you can pretty much start anywhere you want, or just look in the index to find your favorite myths, and go straight to those. In this way, it's sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet -- with the difference that, once you get hooked, you're likely to go ahead and eat the whole thing.

What a long process. I prefer novels rather than short snippets. I think this loses much in translation. I wouldn’t have bought the Raeburn as I found out during discussion with others than some of the translation is lost and it changes the meaning of some of the poems. I prefer the Lombardo but Good Reads wouldn’t allow me to state I was reading both.
It essential reading as Greek and Rome myths are still a strong part of our culture especially in the world of academia. Ovid was definitely an influence on Shakespeare and Chaucer. When reading through these poem the reader can definitely see themes developing. Some of fun, some deeply depressing and others full of gore, violence and sexual assault. I don’t believe books should be censored - very Fahrenheit 451 to do so.
You don’t need a degree to read this ancient Roman text. Read out loud to enjoy musicality but not around young children.

Превращения начинаются из Хаоса в мир, из камней в людей и идут бесконечной чередой. Есть ли мифы без волшебства, как наказующей или мстящей силы, властного приговора? Есть ли жизнь без превращений вещества? Есть ли что-нибудь в природе, не испытывающего метаморфоз? Нет ничего вечного, есть череда преобразований, есть власть природы. Мифы тоже продукт преобразования. Верования превращаются в мифы, когда люди перестают в них верить.

Quite labouring to get through at times, but I do intend on buying the Penguin edition and rereading this at some point in my own time - I definitely would have enjoyed it more had I the option of reading it in my own time, rather than a one week time scale (it was a uni read). So yeah! I liked it, but often couldn't follow, especially when the longer stories dragged a bit. However I think under different circumstances, it might've been a higher rating because I'd love to spend time really taking in the stories.

Third and fourth year Latin class. These were my favorites of our translation assignments. Lovely tales of transfigurations. Ovid rocks!

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.

Hurrah, I finally finished this marvelous book. Unless you are specifically studying the classics, I would recommend reading this in your thirties or forties. The reason being, is that this book is very immersive and sometimes the knowledge that comes with age can help with reading stories like this.

For those of you who don't like gore, skip the Centaurs battle. This battle would make a great George A. Romero film.

Take the time with this book and be pleasantly surprised.

Ovidio è un fiume in piena, i miti raccontati sono tantissimi. Nel caos apparente ci sono un paio di fili conduttori: gli amori e i tradimenti; il tipo di metamorfosi; lo scorrere ineluttabile del tempo, scandito da Lucifero, da Aurora, da Febo e dalla Luna; le stagioni nate dal rapimento di Persefone; i sentimenti degli dei, uguali anche se forse più intensi di quelli degli uomini; la vendetta, spesso cruenta; la violenza delle armi e delle guerre, spesso scatenate per un nonnulla e alle quali gli dei non sono mai estranei. Anzi assistono, parteggiano, proteggono e distruggono.
Metamorfosi è un fatto che riguarda tutto il creato, cielo, terra, dei, uomini, oggetti inanimati. Nulla resta uguale a se stesso. Nemmeno il mare, che separa terre come Zancle (la nostra Messina), un tempo attaccata all’Italia, dalla penisola. Le acque dei fiumi possono improvvisamente diventare salmastre; le pianure sparire, le città inabissarsi. La morte stessa trasforma gli esseri riportandoli all’origine e il ciclo ricomincia, insieme alle stagioni, al giorno e alla notte.
Dalla creazione all’avvento di Augusto è un continuo susseguirsi di immagini e storie, di azioni e conseguenze anche tragiche. I volti si accavallano, le vite si compiono sotto gli occhi di dei che amano confondersi con gli uomini, assumendo le forme più diverse per ingannare giovani donne o giovani uomini la cui bellezza li ha stregati. Sono amori che non durano. Sono tante le donne abbandonate e la vendetta è spesso tremenda. Medea, Circe, Giunone, Diana non hanno pietà e nemmeno rimorsi.
Nascono fiori dalla morte di Adone e Narciso; nascono città sulle ossa di persone ospitali; nascono guerrieri dai denti di drago; nascono amori incestuosi, a lungo repressi, ma poi senza possibilità di controllo. È di notte che i desideri si fanno insistenti; il giorno porta il pentimento e la vergogna.
Il Sonno manda in giro i suoi figli, in grado anch’essi di trasformarsi, a influenzare i sogni degli uomini. L’Invidia avvelena gli animi; la Fame conduce alla pazzia. E le Parche tessono e tagliano il filo della vita.
Quindici capitoli, circa 250 miti per raccontare e cantare le età dell’uomo e della storia fino alla morte di Cesare e all’avvento di Augusto in un’opera che, Ovidio ne è certo, varrà al poeta la Fama che trionfa sulla morte.

My kind of bible.