Why I like Ovid — Part 3
After exploring a wide range of Ovid’s love adventures, we now continue our journey by delving into his claim to greatness: the epic Metamorphoses.
This article is part of a series on Ovid that consists of 4 parts:
Part 1 — Ovid: Introduction and his first love poetry.
Part 2 — More love poetry by Ovid.
Part 3 — Striving for greatness: the Metamorphoses.
Part 4 — Ovid’s exile and his demise.
Metamorphoses
Having built his reputation as a love poet, Ovid had already secured a place among Rome’s literary elite. Alongside the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, which I’ve mentioned earlier, he also published the Heroides, a collection of fictional letters in which great women from Greek and Roman mythology address their significant others — e.g. Dido writing to Aeneas or Penelope to Odysseus. He even wrote a manual on how women should apply makeup — a work that is sadly lost to us today.
However, in order to rise to the ranks of the very greatest poets, you really had to publish an epic as well — and that’s exactly what he did. Vergil was widely considered the greatest Roman poet after writing the Aeneid, the story of the Trojan refugees led by the prince Aeneas, who made it to the shores of Italy and became the ancestor of the Roman people. There was no real way of surpassing that achievement, but Ovid found his own way of leaving us a piece of timeless literature.
He compiled a vast collection of ancient Greek and Roman myths, spanning from the emergence of the world out of chaos (along with two alternative origin stories of mankind, so you can choose your favourite) to his very own era, culminating in the apotheosis of Iulius Caesar — that is, Caesar’s ascension to godhood. After all, that’s what you do when you’re a Roman emperor and die; and it’s only fair after the massive steel-poisoning Caesar had suffered.
True to its title, every tale in the Metamorphoses revolves around some kind of transformation, and Ovid recounts these stories with his signature flair. But what truly sets the Metamorphoses apart is Ovid’s unique narrative style.
A typical narration technique of epics is to have your hero retell to others what he has experienced. For example, we’re hardly told any of Odysseus’ adventures directly; we find out about them after he managed to escape from Calypso’s island, where he had to serve as a slave for, uhm, amorous activities, and when he finally lands on the shores of the Phaeacians. He is well received as a guest and shares his story there at a banquet before he returns home and spends 12 more books on murdering the suitors of his wife. The same happens in the Aeneid, where we learn about the fall of Troy and the flight of the Trojans from Aeneas being stranded on the Carthaginian shores and recounting the fate that befell them to Dido.
Ovid essentially takes this idea a step further and lets his entire work consist of narrations, sometimes to the extent that you have a narration within a narration of a narration. These stories can be deeply interwoven. For example, in the fifth book, Athene visits Mount Helicon, the home of Apollo and the Muses. Urania, one of the Muses, recounts how her sister Calliope entered a singing contest with the daughters of Pierus (which is why the Muses are sometimes called Pierides). In this contest, Calliope sings about the abduction of Persephone (or Proserpina in Latin) and how her mother Demeter (Ceres in Latin) sets the entire world in motion to search for her daughter. Within that narration, Demeter meets a sacred spring, Arethusa, who had once been a nymph and tells her own story of transformation. In other words, Urania tells Athene about Calliope singing about Ceres hearing a story told by Arethusa. That’s Ovid’s narrative style for you.
As I may have mentioned earlier, Ovid found it hard to pass up a joke. Don’t get me wrong, the Metamorphoses are a rather seriously-written piece overall, but they made me chuckle every now and then. Just to name a few examples:
Zeus and Io
In book 1, Zeus (Iuppiter) has yet another episode of betraying his wife and sister Hera (Iuno) with a Greek princess called Io. As his wife is about to find out about his affairs, he just does the most obvious thing: He turns her into a cow.
coniugis adventum praesenserat inque nitentem
Inachidos vultus mutaverat ille iuvencam;
bos quoque formosa est. (Ov. met. 1,610–612)
He sensed the arrival of his wife and Turned
That face of Inachus’ daughter into a shining cow;
Even as a cow, she still managed to look fabulous.
If you‘re a connoisseur of the bovine, you may empathise. It just got a chuckle out of me.
Perseus’ wedding
In book 5, Perseus — after having saved Andromeda, having slain Medusa and taking her head along — takes Andromeda as his wife … which disgruntles Phineus, who had been previously engaged with her … long story short, a big brawl breaks out between Perseus’ men and the henchmen of Phineus until Perseus gets too annoyed with all the fighting, takes out the Gorgon’s head and turns about 200 of his enemies into stone. Upon realising that Perseus is a madman, Phineus surrenders, lays down his arms and asks Perseus for mercy. However, that’s the reply he receives:
‘non cessisse piget; nihil, o fortissime, praeter
hanc animam concede mihi, tua cetera sunto!’
talia dicenti neque eum, quem voce rogabat,
respicere audenti ‘quod’ ait, ‘timidissime Phineu,
et possum tribuisse et magnum est munus inerti,
pone metum! tribuam: nullo violabere ferro.
quin etiam mansura dabo monimenta per aevum,
inque domo soceri semper spectabere nostri,
ut mea se sponsi soletur imagine coniunx.’
(Ov. met. 5,221–229)
Phineus: “I regret not yielding. Give me, o strongest one,
Nothing but my life; all else shall be yours!”
To the one who said this and who did not dare to look
At him, whom he was begging with his voice, Perseus said:
“Most cowardly Phineus! Fear not — I will give you what I can give and
What is a great gift to such a loser! You won’t be harmed by any steel.
Rather, I will gift you with becoming a long-lasting monument
Through the ages, and you will always be seen in the house of my father-in-law,
So my wife may find solace in the image of her fromer fiancé.”
Then he turns him into stone. And uses him as a statue to decorate his atrium …
I can’t help but laugh at this scene. Actually, the entire fighting sequence is written in a similarly jocular way; I just don’t have the space to address all 250 lines here.
Icarus and Daedalus
Another example of Ovid’s dry humour appears in the story of Icarus. You likely know this tale: He was held captive with his father, Daedalus, on Crete until his father devised a plan to escape by constructing wings made of wax. However, Icarus flew too close to the sun, causing the wax to melt, and he fell into the sea (hence the name, the Icarian Sea). Daedalus desperately searched for his son, but couldn’t see him anywhere:
at pater infelix, nec iam pater, ‘Icare,’ dixit,
‘Icare,’ dixit ‘ubi es? qua te regione requiram?’
(Ov. met. 8,231f.)
But the unfortunate father — whoops, not a father anymore — said:
“Icarus, Icarus! Where are you? Where can I find you?”
That’s about the time he finds out that there is no Icarus, anymore. It’s pretty dark humour, I know — but then again, Ovid understood that he could push the boundaries a bit further when it is just a myth …
The Lycian peasants
Ovid’s humour ranges from such sarcastic or even cynical comments to a playful use of poetic diction. One of his well-known stories in the Metamorphoses is about the Lycian peasants. The goddess Leto (or Latona in Latin) had just given birth to Artemis and Apollo on Delos and was then chased off to Lycia by Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera (or Iuno in Latin — unsurprisingly, Zeus had had one of his affairs, again). There, she sought to quench her thirst at a spring but happened to come across some unfriendly peasants who vehemently objected to her drinking from their water. She politely asked for just a few sips, but they took their hostility even further by insulting her and stomping their feet in the pond to stir up mud and make the water undrinkable.
Finally, Leto (Latona) had enough. She lifted her hands and cursed them to live in that spring forever. The peasants soon began to feel an odd joy in living in the water, even as they kept trying to swear at her:
quamvis sint sub aqua, sub aqua maledicere temptant.
Although they are under water, they still tried to insult her.
If you read this line to pupils or students as it is meant to be pronounced — with the qua occurring thrice, pronounced as /kwa/ — they will immediately catch on, even without understanding the words: Leto (Latona) turned them into frogs. Ovid saves this revelation for the end of their metamorphosis, but the humorous onomatopoeia gives it away right there already.
Poking fun at the metre
One last peeve that I noticed Ovid develop when he wrote the Metamorphoses was to add completely pointless insertions into his hexameters using enim, which is a demonstrative particle meaning “because” or “indeed”, and which he uses to just reinforce what he just said. For example, as Io tries to flee from Iuppiter, he shouts:
‘ne fuge me!’ fugiebat enim. (Ov. met. 1,597)
“Don’t run from me!” — because, of course, she was aleady running from him.
In book 2, the sun god is mad at his horses which he blames for the loss of his son Paethon:
Phoebus equos stimuloque dolens et verbere saevit,
saevit enim, natumque obiectat et inputat illis. (Ov. met. 2,400f.)
Phoebus, in pain, rages against his horses with goad and whip —
Because, well, he rages — and reproaches and blames them for his (dead) son.
You find these little insertions every now and then, and I honestly have no idea why Ovid included them. Vergil left a few unfinished half-lines in his epic, presumably intending to revise them later — sadly, his untimely death prevented him from doing so. Perhaps Ovid simply couldn’t be bothered with such half-measures and decided to throw these phrases in to satisfy the demands of the hexameter.
Another assumption I have is that Ovid’s actual bread-and-butter metre was the elegiac couplet, consisting of alternating hexameter and pentameter lines. However, epics had to be written in hexameters, and Ovid may have occasionally hinted at his preference for the pentameter by slipping in these odd little insertions to round out the sixth foot. Of course, this is just a vague guess, and I have no way of knowing his true reasoning. That said, it would align with the fact that this habit only appears in the Metamorphoses and not in his earlier works.
Whatever the reason, it remains a rather whimsical and characteristic quirk of his writing style.
Read on in the 4th and final part of our series!