The Metamorphoses of Ovid

The Metamorphoses of Ovid | Overview

The Life and Work of Ovid
The title, Metamorphoses, is Greek and means “transformations” or “changes.” The author, Ovid, used ancient Greek myths as his principal subject matter and used the idea of changes as his leading motif—connecting the individual episodes within the poem.

Ovid was born as Publius Ovidius Naso in 43 B.C. in what is now central Italy. He died in Tomi, now Constanta, in A.D. 18.

His father, a landowner of some means, spared no expense in educating him; Ovid studied in Rome, and traveled over much of the Roman Empire to acquire knowledge. However, he refused to go along with his father’s ambitions to make him into a public official. Instead, the young man devoted all his energies to the writing of poetry and became both rich and famous. He had a happy, amorous disposition and was for a while very popular with the “smart set” of Roman society. He married three times and became the father of a daughter.

Unfortunately for him, the mores of Roman society swung back to the puritanical ideals of an earlier age, frowning upon moral licentiousness both in public life and in literature. The Emperor, Augustus, spearheaded this change. At the very peak of his popularity and fame, Ovid invoked official censure and was sentenced to be banished to a desolate, faraway shore. The official charges against him were based on the supposed immorality of some of his poems, but public opinion held that there were other, unnamed reasons for the extreme severity of the sentence—perhaps a personal grievance of the Emperor. Ovid’s third wife, who remained in Rome, championed his case loyally, but to no avail. He had to live out his life in Tomi, and die there, far from his beloved home, friends, and family.

His extant works—all but the Metamorphoses are written in elegiac couplets—fall into three principal groups. The Amores (Loves) traces a fictitious romance between the poet and a woman named Corinna—perhaps a composite of several of Ovid’s lovers. The Heroides consists of imaginary letters written by famous women in literature and history, treating the female sex with sympathy and understanding, which was unusual in that age and culture. It also contains three pairs of correspondences between lovers. A book on makeup (a relevant aspect of the art of love) was followed by the notorious Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love, 1 B.C.) a handbook on seduction in three volumes, two for men and one for women.

From 1 B.C. onward, Ovid worked concurrently on his two masterpieces: the Metamorphoses and the Fasti (Roman religious holidays). The latter was planned to take the reader through the Roman calendar year, but he finished only the first six months at the time of his banishment. The work on which he hoped to base his claim to immortality, in any case, was the Metamorphoses, one of the world’s supreme literary masterpieces.

After A.D. 9, the time of his exile, his main works were Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). To this day, they are the most consummate expressions of homesickness and pleading.

Historical Background
When Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 B.C., he had designated his adopted son and nephew, Gaius Octavius, his heir. The 18-year-old youth accepted the dangerous legacy and performed so well that his rule is generally considered one of the most glorious in Roman history and, perhaps, in all European history. Popularly known as Caesar Augustus, or “august Caesar,” he was not only a great military leader but a superb administrator and a patron of the arts as well. During his reign, Roman literature came into its own, never to be surpassed in later ages. Among the authors who flourished in this, the Augustan Age, were Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.

Augustus was disturbed by the great moral laxity that had preceded his rule, and he was determined to put an end to it. It was this policy that destroyed Ovid’s flourishing career in the capital, for, as he complained, “a poem and an error.” Caesar, Augustus died in A.D. 14, but his successor, Tiberius, did not relent and Ovid was never permitted to return to Rome. With his death, the Golden Age of Roman literature came to an end.

Beginning with the two great poems attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic has flourished in Western literature. Its main characteristics include an invocation to the Muse; a lofty subject matter; a dignified tone; a hero with a generally admirable character; a traditional subject matter; supernatural elements, and; so-called epic conventions, such as epic similes, catalogs of armies, etc. The traditional meter has been either the iambic hexameter (six scanning feet with one short syllable followed by a long one) or the distich (one hexameter line alternating with one iambic pentameter consisting of five iambic feet). The Metamorphoses follows some, but by no means all, of these conventions.

Metamorphoses is Ovid’s only poem written in dactylic hexameters. It contains an Invocation of sorts: expressing a hope that the gods will help him. Its subject matter is traditional. It deals with ancient Greek myths and Roman traditions, but with a twist—the emphasis is on change. The idea that “everything always changes” was deeply imbedded in Greek thought starting with the philosopher Heraclitus, but Ovid transformed this dry philosophical tenet into dazzling poetry. He demonstrates that change is eternal and god-ordained, and that all life is interconnected.

The poem is full of supernatural elements; in fact, practically all of it concerns Greco-Roman divinities and their doings. However, unlike most other epic poems, it has no central hero—it ranges over the whole field of mythology, and its tone is, by turns, lofty or light, even flippant. Its main characters—depending on the interpretation the reader puts on the work—are either worthy of adoration (being gods and goddesses) or downright despicable, revealing their most un-godlike characteristics: jealousy, pride, envy, cruelty, petty rivalries. It is this tension, created by the contrast between the ostensibly divine characters and their less than admirable deeds, that gives the book its central momentum. This tension, together with Ovid’s unsurpassable poetic gifts, has made the Metamorphoses a book universally admired in the poet’s own age as well as through the centuries. The artists of the Renaissance used it as a veritable handbook for artistic themes. Among the innumerable poets who have read and enjoyed it, and borrowed copiously from it, are Chaucer and Shakespeare.

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