Week 08, Ovid's Metamorphoses

Notes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Publius Ovidius Naso: born at Sulmo , NE of Rome , in 43 B.C. into an equestrian (wealthy, landed) family. He was probably intended by his parents for an honorable political career, but he wanted from youth to become a poet. Ovid wrote during the “Augustan” period, 31 B.C.-14 A.D. During this period Octavian or Augustus Caesar, the grandnephew of the murdered general Gaius Julius Caesar (44 B.C.), ruled and attempted to revitalize Rome . The city had been ravaged by decades of civil war, and its moral and political climate were awful when Augustus took power. You’ll recall that he had defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., but much “rebuilding” was needed to make Rome stable enough to maintain the empire it had already amassed. Augustus wanted to revive the old Republican virtues, even if there couldn’t be a quick return to that form of government. So Augustus, logically enough, saw the arts as a vehicle for his morality campaign, and had little patience with satirical and sly writers such as Ovid, who must have seemed to Augustus to be part and parcel of everything that was wrong with Rome – its lax morals and emphasis on style, word play, and wit at the expense of heroic substance. What was needed, of course, were poets like Vergil, whose Aeneid, while a sophisticated work of art, nonetheless suited Augustus’ rather pedestrian and purely ideological reasons for favoring the arts: the Aeneid promotes a teleological (linear and purposive) view of Roman history in which everything from the fall of Troy onward had to happen so that Augustus could become Emperor and inaugurate a new Golden Age of Roman Virtue and Glory, one in which imperial conquests would be governed by men who lived up to the ancient Republican virtues – piety to family and State, military valor, and moral courage. Family and State are almost inseparable in Roman life: the dynastic imperative is the ground of key institutions such as marriage and statecraft.

So in 8 A.D., just as Ovid had completed his great “epic” poem, the Metamorphoses, and it was circulating among his friends in manuscript, the sentence of exile came down upon him from Augustus. It’s not quite certain what Ovid had done, but Augustus didn’t like the Ars Amatoria, a handbook on seduction, and perhaps the poet may have been privy to some scandal involving the Emperor’s daughter Julia or some other member of the imperial household. In any case, Ovid was to go and live in a paltry colony along the Black Sea , where the winters were bitter and almost nobody spoke Latin. This was nothing less than hell for a cultured, social individual like Ovid, who, for all his lighthearted verse, was a serious writer concerned with his reputation among his peers. Ovid was never recalled to Rome , either by Augustus or his successor Tiberius, and he died in exile in A.D. 17.

If we consider the “task” perspective I have mentioned concerning Homer and Plato, it’s easy to see that it might be applied to Ovid, though in a negative or reverse fashion: namely, even before his exile, Ovid writes as an “outsider,” at least from the heroic Augustan perspective: he simply doesn’t support the values that the Emperor believes necessary for the good of the State and the Empire. The effect of Ovid’s mellifluous Latin is that of an acid corroding every pretension and hope that Augustus held dear: Ovid’s gods are fickle and downright immoral or amoral; and the humans in the text, heroic or otherwise, don’t exactly win any medals for moral uprightness, either. Social and political violence are dealt with frankly and yet with a certain levity; the teleology of Vergil’s Aeneid is shot to splinters in all sorts of ways to expose what Ovid must have thought the ridiculous hypocrisy of Augustus and his literary propagandists. When Ovid uses Vergil’s subject matter in Metamorphoses, it “metamorphoses” into something entirely opposite of what the Emperor wanted it to be. I don’t think Ovid is out to effect profound or direct transformation in Roman life, but one of his own “tasks,” if indirectly, is to labor within an opposition camp and deflate the reigning pretensions of his age. And that lends a social or political dimension to his art, even if he is no Plato out to set up the Ideal form of government. Another way to discuss the social value in Ovid’s art, we shall see, is to think of his poetry in terms of a certain alliance with the Greek and Roman woman, an exploration of ideas about love and sexuality with an eye towards the plight and limitations of women in a patriarchal State and familial order.

Ovid’s poetics is infinitely playful; the Ovid-like narrator himself constantly intervenes to deflate his heroes and gods, almost like Lord Byron in the mock epic Don Juan; and his epic is completely non-linear, delightful to the patient reader in on the joke, but infuriating to moralists like Augustus. Stories play upon and echo one another throughout the Metamorphoses; it seems that not only are the book’s tales about the transformation of one shape into another, but Ovid’s very handling of his subject matter, even his genre of epic, undergo a rich and strange “sea-change” at his hands. He changes our perceptions of the Greek and Roman myths about which he writes; determined as he is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to see everything from as many sides as possible. Matthew Arnold had a word for the threat facing the conflicted and confusing Victorian period in which he lived and wrote: multitudinousness. All sorts of new ideas, new ways of perceiving the old gods, state, and humankind were in play in Ovid’s day, and he seems to cast a sly, steady gaze at all of the multitudinous developments of his age, with no desire to reduce them to harmony or order. “Make it new” might well have been his watchword: above all, he seems interested in exploring the sheer power of the poetic word to make us see the past in new ways. In that, he is strikingly modern-seeming, and thus the renaissance in his reputation.

On to the stories themselves. As a poet Ovid he seems almost to identify with the ravaged heroines of his tales: he is a writer who has been badly treated by the most powerful man in Rome, and so there’s an appropriateness about his concern with the ordeals of the Daphnes, Io’s, and Philomelas who thread his epic. These females never actually escape the clutches of their male pursuers – they can do nothing more than pray to be transformed into objects; but Ovid is clearly concerned to include them in ways that mock the gods of the Augustan order. The potential for female violence is one that Ovid explores insistently; he does not flee this Bacchic subject with dread, but rather invites us to explore its power and its implications. Remember that the Roman State was founded upon violence committed against a female (Lucretia, wife of Collatinus).

I will add notes on the tales if time permits....