Metamorphoses

Overview

The Metamorphoses is fifteen books and about twelve thousand lines, finished around 8 CE, and it contains roughly two hundred and fifty stories. It is written in hexameters, the metre of epic, and it is not an epic: there is no hero, no single action, and no war. What it has instead is a subject, bodies changed into new forms, and a running order, from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus.

Ovid’s problem was how to get from one story to the next, and his solutions are the most entertaining formal thing in Latin poetry. Sometimes a character tells the next tale. Sometimes two stories share a place, or a family, or an object. Sometimes the link is a pun. He will interrupt a story to have a character begin another, nest a third inside that, and come back four hundred lines later. The joins are always visible and often the joke.

The tone shifts constantly, which unsettles readers expecting a consistent register. The same poem contains genuine horror, broad comedy, tenderness, erotic set pieces and long passages of technical wit about rhetoric and physics. Ovid is never entirely serious and rarely entirely flippant.

The date matters. In 8 CE, the year the poem was completed, Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea, for reasons Ovid describes only as a poem and a mistake. He died there.

What happens

Books I to II: the cosmos and the gods. Chaos resolved into the world, the four ages of man declining from gold to iron, the flood, and Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulating the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders. Then the sequence that sets the poem’s characteristic pattern: Apollo, mocked by Cupid, pursues Daphne, who prays to be rid of her body and becomes a laurel as he catches her. Io turned into a cow. Phaethon taking his father’s sun-chariot and scorching the earth.

Books III to IV: Thebes. Cadmus and the founding. Actaeon, who sees Diana bathing by accident and is turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. Narcissus and Echo, one unable to speak first and the other unable to love anything but himself. Pentheus destroyed by his own mother for refusing Bacchus. Pyramus and Thisbe, told by a woman at a loom, which Shakespeare turned into a play within a play and also, in another mood, into Romeo and Juliet.

Books V to VII: singers and witches. The rape of Proserpina. Arachne, who challenges Minerva to a weaving contest, weaves the gods’ rapes and deceptions into her web, works better than the goddess, and is beaten and turned into a spider; her subject matter is a fair description of the poem she is in. Philomela, raped by her sister’s husband and mutilated so she cannot tell, who weaves the story instead. Medea, given a long central sequence.

Books VIII to X: art and love. Daedalus and Icarus. Baucis and Philemon, the old couple who entertain the gods unawares and ask only to die together, and become two trees. Then Orpheus, who brings Eurydice back from the dead on one condition and turns round, and afterwards sits on a hillside singing the whole of Book X, which contains Pygmalion, whose ivory statue warms under his hand, and Venus and Adonis.

Books XI to XIV: toward Rome. Midas and the golden touch. The Trojan war treated obliquely, with the contest between Ajax and Ulysses over Achilles’ armour staged as a pair of courtroom speeches. Aeneas’ voyage, compressed and partly retold by minor characters, which is a deliberate impertinence to Virgil.

Book XV: Pythagoras and the epilogue. The philosopher speaks for four hundred lines, arguing vegetarianism, the transmigration of souls, and above all that nothing perishes and everything changes, that the elements pass into one another and cities rise and fall. It reads as a theory of the poem itself. Then Julius Caesar is assassinated and turned into a star, Augustus is praised, and Ovid signs off by claiming that his work will outlast Jupiter’s anger, fire, sword and time, and that he will be read wherever Rome’s power extends.

How to read it

Do not read it straight through the first time. It is a collection and it survives being sampled. Read Book I for the frame, then Daphne, Actaeon, Narcissus, Arachne, Philomela, Daedalus, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Pygmalion, and Pythagoras at the end.

Pick a translation by what you want. Charles Martin and Stanley Lombardo are quick and modern. Golding’s 1567 fourteeners are what Shakespeare read and are strange and wonderful. Allen Mandelbaum and A. D. Melville sit in between.

Notice the transitions. Half the artistry is in how Ovid gets from one story to the next, and a reader who skips between famous episodes misses it entirely.

Read the rapes as the poem presents them rather than as decorative mythology. Ovid gives the victims interiority, dwells on their fear, and repeatedly shows the gods as powerful figures who cannot be refused and are never punished. What he is doing with that material is genuinely contested, and it is the most interesting question in current criticism of the poem.

Then read what came out of it. Titian’s paintings, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dante’s use of Ovidian transformation in the circle of thieves, and Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid all begin here.

Questions it raises

• Is the poem an epic, an anti-epic, or something the category does not cover?
• Ovid tells story after story of gods raping women who are then punished, silenced or transformed. Is he complicit in the material, critical of it, or simply interested?
• Arachne weaves the gods’ crimes and is destroyed for weaving better than a goddess. Is that Ovid’s account of his own position?
• Pythagoras says nothing perishes and everything changes. Does that philosophy fit the poem, or is it one more voice among many?
• The last lines claim permanence for a poem about nothing being permanent. Is that a contradiction or the point?
• The work ends by praising Augustus and its author was exiled by Augustus the same year. How should that be read?