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.

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.