Ovid
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Ovid
born March 20, 43 BC, Sulmo, Roman Empire [now Sulmona,
Italy]
died AD 17, , Tomis, Moesia [nowConstanţa, Rom.]
Latin in full Publius Ovidius Naso Roman poet noted
especially for his Ars amatoria and Metamorphoses. His verse
had immense influence both by its imaginative
interpretations of classical myth and as an example of
supreme technical accomplishment.
Life.
Publius Ovidius Naso was, like most Roman men of letters,
aprovincial. He was born at Sulmo, a small town about 90
miles (140 km) east of Rome. The main events of his life are
described in an autobiographical poem in the Tristia
(Sorrows). His family was old and respectable, and
sufficiently well-to-do for his father to be able to send
him and his elder brother to Rome to be educated. At Rome he
embarked, under the best teachers of the day, on the study
of rhetoric. Ovid was thought to have the makings of a good
orator, but in spite of his father's admonitions he
neglected his studies for the verse-writing that came so
naturally to him.
As a member of the Roman knightly class (whose rank lay
between the commons and the Senate) Ovid was marked by his
position, and intended by his father, for an official
career.First, however, he spent some time at Athens (then a
favourite finishing school for young men of the upper
classes) and traveled in Asia Minor and Sicily. Afterward he
dutifully held some minor judicial posts, the first steps on
the official ladder, but he soon decided that public life
did not suit him. From then on he abandoned his official
career tocultivate poetry and the society of poets.
Ovid's first work, the Amores (The Loves), had an immediate
success and was followed, in rapid succession, by the
Epistolae Heroidum, or Heroides (Epistles of the Heroines),
the Medicamina faciei (“Cosmetics”; Eng. trans. The Art of
Beauty), the Ars ama to ria (The Art of Love), and the
Remedia amoris (Remedies for Love), all reflecting the
brilliant, sophisticated, pleasure-seeking society in which
hemoved. The common theme of these early poems is love and
amorous intrigue, but it is unlikely that they mirror Ovid's
own life very closely. Of his three marriages the first two
were short-lived, but his third wife, of whom he speaks with
respect and affection, remained constant to him until his
death. At Rome Ovid enjoyed the friendship and encouragement
of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the patron of a circle which
included Tibullus, whom Ovid knew only for a short time
before his untimely death. Ovid's other friends included
Horace, Sextus Propertius, and the grammarian Hyginus.
Having won an assured position among the poets of the day,
Ovid turned to more ambitious projects, the Metamorphosesand
the Fasti (“Calendar”). The former was nearly complete, the
latter half finished, when his life was shattered by a
sudden and crushing blow. In AD 8 the emperor Augustus
banished him to Tomis (or Tomi; near modern Constanţa,
Romania) on the Black Sea. The reasons for Ovid's exile will
never be fully known. Ovid specifies two, his Ars amatoria
and an offense which he does not describe beyond insisting
that it was an indiscretion (error), not a crime (scelus).
Of the many explanations that have been offered of this
mysterious indiscretion, the most probable is that he had
become an involuntary accomplice in the adultery of
Augustus' granddaughter, the younger Julia, who also was
banished at the same time. In 2 BC her mother, the elder
Julia, had similarly been banished for immorality, and the
Ars amatoria had appeared while this scandal was still fresh
in the public mind. These coincidences, together with the
tone of Ovid's reference to his offense, suggest that he
behaved in some way that was damaging both to Augustus'
program of moral reform and to the honour of the imperial
family. Since his punishment, which was the milder form of
banishment called relegation, did not entail confiscation of
property or loss of citizenship, his wife, who was
well-connected, remained in Rome to protect his interests
and to intercede for him.
Exile at Tomis, a half-Greek, half-barbarian port on the
extreme confines of the Roman Empire, was a cruel punishment
for a man of Ovid's temperament and habits. Henever ceased
to hope, if not for pardon, at least for mitigation of
sentence, keeping up in the Tristia and the Epistulae ex
Ponto (“Letters from the Black Sea”) a ceaseless stream of
pathetic pleas, chiefly through his wife and friends, to the
emperor. But neither Augustus nor his successor Tiberius
relented, and there are hints in the later poems that Ovid
was even becoming reconciled to his fate when death released
him.
Works.
Ovid's extant poems are all written in elegiac couplets
except for the Metamorphoses. His first poems, the Amores
(The Loves ), were published at intervals, beginning about
20 BC, in five books. They form a series of short poems
depictingthe various phases of a love affair with a woman
called Corinna. Their keynote is not passion but the witty
and rhetorical exploitation of erotic commonplace; they
chronicle not a real relationship between Ovid and Corinna
(who is a literary construct rather than a real woman) but
all the vicissitudes of a typical affair with a woman of the
demimonde.
In the Heroides (Heroines) Ovid developed an idea already
used by Propertius into something like a new literary genre.
The first 15 of these letters are purportedly from legendary
ladies such as Penelope, Dido, and Ariadne to absent
husbands or lovers. The letters are really dramatic
monologues, in which the lessons of Ovid's rhetorical
education, particularly the exercises called ethopoiea
(“character drawing”), are brilliantly exploited. The
inherent monotony of subject and treatment, which all Ovid's
skill could not completely disguise, is adroitly transcended
in the six later epistles of the Heroides. These form three
pairs, the lover addressing and being answered by the lady.
In them, Ovid's treatment of his literary sources is
particularly ingenious; the correspondence of Paris and
Helen is one of antiquity's minor masterpieces.
Turning next to didactic poetry, Ovid composed the
Medicamina faciei, a witty exercise of which only 100 lines
survive. This frivolous but harmless poem was followed in 1
BC by the notorious Ars amatoria, a manual of seduction and
intrigue for the man about town. The lover's quarry, in this
work, is ostensibly to be sought in the demimonde (i.e.,
among women on the fringes of respectable society who are
supported by wealthy lovers), and Ovid explicitly disclaims
the intention of teaching adultery; but all of his teaching
could in fact be applied to the seduction of married women.
Such a work constituted a challenge, no less effective for
being flippant, to Augustus' cherished moral reforms, and it
included a number of references, in this context tactless if
not indeed provocative, to symbols of the emperor's personal
prestige. The first two books, addressed to men, were the
original extent of the work; a third, in response to popular
demand, was added for women. For many modern readers the Ars
amatoria is Ovid's masterpiece, a brilliant medley of social
and personal satire, vignettes of Roman life and manners,
and charming mythological digressions. It was followed by a
mock recantation, the Remedia amoris, also a burlesque of an
established genre, which can have done little to make amends
for the Ars. The possibilities for exploiting love-elegy
were now effectively exhausted, and Ovid turned to new types
of poetry in which he could use his supreme narrative and
descriptive gifts.
Ovid's Fasti (“Calendar”) is an account of the Roman year
and its religious festivals, consisting of 12 books, one to
each month, of which the first six survive. The various
festivals are described as they occur and are traced to
their legendary origins. The Fasti was a national poem,
intended to take its place in the Augustan literary program
and perhaps designed to rehabilitate its author in the eyes
of theruling dynasty. It contains a good deal of flattery of
the imperial family and much patriotism, for which the
undoubted brilliance of the narrative passages does not
altogether atone.
Ovid's next work, the Metamorphoses, must also be
interpreted against its contemporary literary background,
particularly in regard to Virgil's Aeneid . The unique
character of Virgil's poem, which had been canonized as the
national epic, posed a problem for his successors, since
afterthe Aeneid a straightforward historical or mythological
epic would represent an anticlimax. Ovid was warned against
this pitfall alike by his instincts and his intelligence; he
chose, as Virgil had done, to write an epic on a new plan,
unique and individual to himself.
The Metamorphoses is a long poem in 15 books written in
hexameter verse and totaling nearly 12,000 lines. It is a
collection of mythological and legendary stories in which
metamorphosis (transformation) plays some part, however
minor. The stories are told in chronological order from the
creation of the universe (the first metamorphosis, of chaos
into order) to the death and deification of Julius Caesar
(the culminating metamorphosis, again of chaos—that is, the
Civil Wars—into order—that is, the Augustan Peace). In
manyof the stories, mythical characters are used to
illustrate examples of obedience or disobedience toward the
gods, and for their actions are either rewarded or punished
by a final transformation into some animal, vegetable, or
astronomical form. The importance of metamorphosis is more
apparent than real, however; the essential theme of the poem
is passion (pathos), and this gives it more unity than all
the ingenious linking and framing devices the poet uses. The
erotic emphasis that had dominated Ovid's earlier poetry is
broadened and deepened into an exploration of nearly every
variety of human emotion—for his gods are nothing if not
human. This undertaking brought out, as his earlier work had
not, Ovid's full powers: his wit and rhetorical brilliance,
his mythological learning, and the peculiar qualities of his
fertile imagination. The vast quantities of verse in both
Greek and Latin that Ovid had read and assimilated are
transformed, through a process of creative adaptation, into
original and unforeseen guises. By his genius for narrative
and vivid description, Ovid gave to scores of Greek legends,
some of them little known before, their definitive form for
subsequent generations. No single work of literature has
done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to
posterity. By AD 8, the Metamorphoses was complete, if not
yet formally published; and it was at that moment, when Ovid
seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful
achievement, that he was banished toTomis by the emperor.
Ovid arrived at his place of exile in the spring of AD 9.
Tomis was a semi-Hellenized port exposed to periodic attacks
by the surrounding barbarian tribes. Books and civilized
society were lacking; little Latin was spoken; and the
climate was severe. In his solitude and depression, Ovid
turned again to poetry, now of a more personal and
introspective sort. The Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto were
written and sent to Romeat the rate of about a book a year
from AD 9 on; they consist of letters to the emperor and to
Ovid's wife and friends describing his miseries and
appealing for clemency. For all his depression and
self-pity, Ovid never retreats from the one position with
which his self-respect was identified—his status as a poet.
This is particularly evident in his ironical defense of the
Ars in Book ii of the Tristia.
That Ovid's poetical powers were not as yet seriously
impaired is shown by his poem Ibis. This, written not long
after his arrival at Tomis, is a long and elaborate curse
directed at an anonymous enemy. It is a tour de force of
abstruse mythological learning, composed largely without the
aid of books. But in the absence of any sign of
encouragement from home, Ovid lacked the heart to continue
to write the sort of poetry that had made him famous, and
the later Epistulae ex Ponto make melancholy reading.
The loss of Ovid's tragedy Medea, which he wrote while still
in Rome, is particularly to be deplored; it was praised by
the critic Quintilian and the historian Tacitus and can
hardly have failed to influence Seneca's play on the same
theme.
Assessment.
In classical antiquity, Ovid's influence on later Latin
poetry was primarily technical. He succeeded in the
difficult task of adapting the intractable Latin language to
dactylic Greek metres, and thereby perfected both the
elegiac couplet and the hexameter as all-purpose metres and
as instruments of fluent communication. Ovid's verse is
remarkable for its smoothness, fluency, and balance. The
elegance of his verse masks its extreme artificiality, and
the casual reader may overlook the quiet ruthlessness of
Ovid's linguistic innovations, particularly in vocabulary.
Ovid's hexameters in the Metamorphoses are a superb vehicle
for rapid narrative and description.
To this technical facility Ovid added an unrivaled power of
invention that enabled him to exploit ideas and situations
to the utmost, chiefly through the use of vivid and telling
details. His undoubted rhetorical gifts have caused him to
bedubbed insincere and even heartless, and he seems indeed
to have lacked the capacity for strong emotion or religious
feeling. Judged, however, by his gift for fantasy, Ovid is
one of the great poets of all time. In the Metamorphoses he
created a Nabokovian caricature of the actual world, the
setting for a cosmic comedy of manners in which the
endlessflux and reflux of the universe itself is reflected
in the often paradoxical and always arbitrary fate of the
characters, human and divine. Pathos, humour, beauty, and
cruelty are mingled in a unique individual vision. Ovid's
talent is not of that highest order which can pierce the
outward semblance of men and things and receive intimations
of a deeper reality; but what he could do, few if any poets
have ever done better.
Influence.
Ovid's immense popularity during his lifetime continued
after his death and was little affected by the action of
Augustus, who banned his works from the public libraries.
From about 1100 onward Ovid's fame, which during late
antiquity and the early Middle Ages had been to some extent
eclipsed, began to rival and even at times to surpass
Virgil's. The 12th and 13th centuries have with some justice
been called “the age of Ovid.” Indeed, he was esteemed in
this period not only as entertaining but also as
instructive, and his works were read in schools. His poetry
is full of epigrammatic maxims and sententious utterances
which, lifted from their contexts, made a respectable
appearance in the excerpts in which medieval readers often
studied their classics. Ovid's popularity was part, however,
of a general secularization and awakening to the beauties of
profane literature; he was the poet of the wandering
scholars as well as of the vernacular poets, the troubadours
and minnesingers; and when the concept of romantic love, in
its new chivalrous or “courtly” guise, was developed in
France, it was Ovid's influence that dominated the book in
which its philosophy was expounded, the Roman de la rose.
Ovid's popularity grew during the Renaissance, particularly
among humanists who were striving to re-create ancient modes
of thought and feeling, and printed editions of his works
followed each other in an unending stream from 1471. A
knowledge of his verse came to be taken for granted in an
educated man, and in the 15th–17th centuries it would be
difficult to name a poet or painter of note who was not in
some degree indebted to him. The Metamorphoses, in
particular, offered one of the most accessible and
attractive avenues to the riches of Greek mythology. But
Ovid's chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing:
its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and
sensuous quality. It is these things that have recommended
him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of
courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, J.W.
von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.
Edward John Kenney
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Ovid
"Metamorphoses" llustration
by F. Chauveau
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Metamorphoses
Ovid
b.43 BCE (ltaly),d.1 7 CE
Ovid's Metamorphoses, which assembles some two hundred and fifty
stories from classical antiquity into one continuous narrative,
is a mythological history of the world, beginning with the
Creation and ending with the foundation of Rome and the
apotheosis of Julius Caesar.The constant questioning of
tradition and power is something encountered in many of Ovid's
narratives: Arachne challenges the goddess Athene to a
tapestry-making contest; Phaethon insists on taking the reins of
the sun chariot from his father; Daphne escapes from Apollo's
clutches by praying to a river god, who changes her into a tree.
When Ovid retells stories of heroism, it is in a comic,deflating
way, reminiscent of mock-epic. Whenever Perseus kills his
enemies by turning them to stone with the head of the Medusa
which he carries in a bag, it is not the heroic that we see, but
the use of a disproportionate force not unlike employing nuclear
weapons in a pub brawl.
The Metamorphoses' incorporation of dialogue within a
narrative,along with its wit, playfulness,and sheer sense of
fun, exemplifies much of what we now associate with the novel.
Today Ovid's work continues to be metamorphosed, and has had an
impact on a dazzling array of contemporary novelists, from
Salman Rushdie and A.S. Byatt, to Cees Nooteboom and Marina
Warner.
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METAMORPHOSES
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Type of work: Poetry
Author: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.-A.D. 17)
First published: с AD. 8
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Ovid had published two books, the Ars amatoria (c. 2 B.C.; Art of
Love) and Remedia amoris (before A.D. 8; Cure for Love), which with
their erotic content flouted the gravity of Emperor Augustus' moral
reformation. The poet appears also to have been privy or accessory to
some morally questionable activity on the part of Augustus' grandaughter
Julia. It was possibly for either or both of these offenses, and
certainly for still another which no historian has been able to
identify, that Ovid was exiled in A.D. 8 to Tomis (modern Constanja), a
frontier town on the west coast of the Black Sea. At this time, whether
in spiteful resentment over his expulsion or from dissatisfaction with
the poem's compositional state, he commanded the destruction of his
Metamorphoses. If the directive was carried out, at least a single
available copy was preserved; thus one of the greatest literary
achievements of Roman antiquity remained extant.
It is difficult to believe that Ovid wanted the work destroyed by reason
of its imperfection. The faults that can be discerned in it are patently
venial and do not impair the fluidity and profundity that perennially
ingratiate it to readers. Questionable lines or troublesome cruces may
have owed more to the errors of copyists than to Ovid's hand. Questions
about contradictions—for example, the continuance of Lycaon's lineage
after Lycaon and everyone else except Deucalion and Pyrrha were drowned
in the Flood—are not material in the context of myth; and the context of
the Metamorphoses is myth. It is the mythological history of the world
from the Creation to the time of Augustus. It is written in fifteen
books, comprising 11,992 lines of dactylic hexameter, the meter of
classical epic. Each segment of each book includes an episode of myth,
and each mythic episode includes at least one metamorphosis. The music
of the metric, the unobtrusive transition from story to story, the
ingenious use of rhetorical and syntactical figures, and the resultant
compendium of Greek and Roman myth, interlaced with natural and human
history, all attest a literary master-work that a proven poet would be
unlikely to choose to destroy as a failure in artistry.
Its uniqueness among epics is variously evident. While it begins with
the epic conventions of statement and invocation of divine muse, it does
not leap in medias res, as epics by standard definition do. Moreover, it
does not center its narrative upon a contest of antagonists (like
Achilles and Hector in the Iliad), a hero (like Odysseus in the
Odyssey), or a bonded pair in mission (like Aeneas and Achates in
Vergil's Aeneid). It is closer in texture to the Aeneid than to the
Greek epics, not only because Vergil and Ovid wrote in Latin but also
because the two Roman poets both moved their episodic narratives toward
a grand terminus that was the city of Rome itself, a city that was for
both poets also an empire and a conceptual efflorescence of human
destiny. Where Vergil sees Rome as the culmination of human history,
however, Ovid views Rome as the manifestation of ameliorative change.
Ovid is true to his theme of change; and it is with this theme that he
differs from all ancient writers of epic except possibly Lucretius (c.
98-55 B.C.), if one accepts as an epic his poeticized scientific
treatise De rerum natura (c. 60 B.C.; On the Nature of Things),
Lucretius elucidates change, among other facts of physicality, in his
epitome of Epicurus' materialistic theory of atomism. Ovid illustrates
Pythagoras' theory of constant change: He assigns to Pythagoras the
words omnia mutantur nihil interit (everything changes, nothing dies)
and adopts the Pythagorean theory of number, by which the earth was
proved to be a sphere.
The theme of change is expressed and rhetorically exemplified in the
first four lines of the poem. Here Ovid speaks of forms materializing as
various bodies, not of bodies changing physical form, because his
abstract constant, like Plato's forms, is taken as the insubstantial
reality of all concretions. He uses the rhetorical device of chiasmus
(symmetrically balanced word order, such as abba), to intimate the
cyclic nature of change and that of anaphora (repetitively balanced word
order, such as abab) to intimate the linear continuity of change.
The episodes of the fifteen books are similarly balanced in both
symmetrical and repetitive sequences. In the first book, physical chaos
becomes order, God creates humankind, and humankind is destroyed and
restored; the symmetrical reverse appears in the last book, as
Pythagoras teaches that life is destroyed and restored, as a created
human (Julius Caesar) becomes a god, and as political disorder becomes
order. The first two books contain a notable repetitive sequence in
describing the destruction of the earth by the Flood, followed by its
restoration, and then the destruction of the earth by the descent of the
sun, again followed by the earth's restoration. Ovid incorporates the
excesses of change in this sequence, showing an earth that fails from
too much water and the same earth failing from not enough water, His
echo of the Greek concept of the golden mean reverberates in books 5 and
6, where humans hubristically challenge gods: In their excessive pride
the Pierides (challenging the Muses in song), Arachne (challenging
Minerva in weaving), and Niobe (challenging Latona in maternity) are all
appropriately transformed, the Pierides into magpies, Arachne into a
spider, and Niobe into a mountain whose melting snows constitute tears
shed for her slain children. The golden mean reverberates as well in
book 8, in the figure of Icarus, who is cautioned by his father,
Daedalus, not to fly too high or too low on the wings that Daedalus has
fashioned of feathers and wax. "Proceed in the middle path" is the
father's warning, but Icarus flies too high and is destroyed. The story
of Icarus is in thematic balance with the story of Phaeton in book 2:
Phaeton, assuming in his pride that he can do what in fact he has not
the skill to do, drives the chariot of the sun too low and brings about
the above-mentioned dehydration of the earth.
The moral content of the Metamorphoses, along with its currents of
history and science (or philosophy—the two were not differentiated in
classical antiquity) is overshadowed by the sensual character, a
carryover from his amatory works, of Ovid's mythography. Indeed, during
the Middle Ages dependence upon the text for mythological information
had to be justified by a specially contrived moralistic reading:
Compilations of Ovide moralise (moralized Ovid) were produced in poetry
and prose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France.
Actually, the moral fabric of Ovid's epic is more integumentary than
interstitial. Apart from the kind of allegorical inference that
justifies the inclusion of the Song of Songs in the Bible, Ovid's moral
underpinnings can be seen in his story of the Four Ages—Golden, Silver,
Bronze, and Iron—during which human life moved from golden bliss to
iron-hard travail, suffering duress in proportion to human moral
failings. Ovid adapted the story of the Five Ages, and indeed much else,
from the Greek didactic poet Hesiod (late eighth century B.C.),
eliminating the post-Bronze pre-Iron Heroic Age as well as Hesiod's
alternative account of the deterioration of human morals, the story of
Pandora's box. The story of the Flood is moralistic; likewise, there are
many stories of transformation in the context of morality, particularly
the series of episodes in books 9 through 11, in which models of
righteousness alternate with examples of immorality. The righteous
include Iolaus, Iphis, Ganymede, Hyacinthus, Pygmalion, and Atalanta.
Immorality is exemplified by Byblis, seeker of incestuous relations with
her brother the murderous Cerastae; horned women, transformed into
bulls; the profane Propoetides, who became the first prostitutes and
were changed into stone; Myrrha, who seduced her father; Orpheus, who
loses his wife, Euryd-ice, through his possessiveness and is slain by
Bacchantes in punishment for his subsequent misogyny; and Midas, the
prototype of material greed.
The morally oriented metamorphoses are not consistently matters of
reward and punishment. Some are retributive, particularly those by which
the wrongdoer is translated into her or his excess: Lycaon becomes his
rapacity in the body of a wolf; Ascalaphus becomes a screech owl, the
embodiment of his inability to maintain discreet silence; the Sibyl,
avid for long years of life, becomes those years as her body and all but
her voice disintegrate in time. Some are remunerative: Hercules, Aeneas,
Romulus, Hersilia, and Julius Caesar are all deified for their
achievements. Virtue is not, however, regularly rewarded, nor vice
regularly punished: Echo, who helps Jupiter to conceal his amours and
whose love is not requited by the insufferably vain Narcissus, becomes,
like the sibyl, a disembodied voice; Semele, beloved by Jupiter, is,
like the great Achilles, reduced to ashes. In the Metamorphoses,
morality, like time and physicality, is a symptom of change, not a
determinant of evaluative quality.
The moral current of Ovid's epic moves generally from an unregenerate
humankind punished by the Flood toward a gradually improving humankind
whose greatest representatives merit apotheosis. This current is
inseparable from the flow of the narrative. Books 1 and 2 move from the
Creation and the modes of control exercised by Jupiter and Apollo to the
Theban-centered myths of Greece in books 3 and 4 and the exploits of
Perseus in books 4 and 5; books 5 and 6 offer their studies in hubris;
books 7 through 9 focus on the figures of Jason, Theseus, and Hercules,
the last more exemplary than the second, the second more than the first.
After the specific examples of moral goodness and badness in books 10
and 11, the epic glides into the Trojan War (book 12) and the exploits
of Ulysses (book 13) and Aeneas (book 14) in the Ovidian rehearsal of
the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid. Book 15 resolves the direction of the
work with its highly moralistic Pythagorean peroration and its
conclusion in Roman history from Romulus to Augustus. The accolade to
Augustus at the end of the poem clearly had no effect upon the emperor's
decision to exile the poet, and this may account in part for Ovid's
order to destroy the manuscript.
The Pythagorean essay calls for vegetarianism and a respect for nature
in its cycles of change. The invocation of the epic, directed to di
(gods) as both inclusive of the Muses and productive of changes, is
iterated in Pythagoras' intimations that change is divinely ordained; it
is a universal force, the foremost representatives of which, throughout
the epic, are Jupiter and Apollo.
The temple to Jupiter on Rome's Capitoline Hill was balanced by the
temple to Apollo, constructed on the adjacent Palatine Hill by order of
Augustus, ostensibly in gratitude for the emperor's naval victory at
Actium in 30 В ,C. Ovid maintains an effective Jupiter-Apollo
equipollence in the Metamorphoses. In book 1 the series of episodes from
the Creation to the Flood center on Jupiter; the series is followed by
the stories of the postdiluvian Python, slain by Apollo, and Daphne,
pursued by Apollo; and book 1 concludes with a framing story of Jupiter
and Io. In book 2 the framing story of Apollo's impetuous son Phaeton is
followed by the episode in which Jupiter pursues Callisto, which in turn
is followed by Apollo's affair with Coronis and the birth of his son
Aesculapius, who will reappear in book 15 as the healer of Rome. The
Jupiter-Apollo-Jupiter and Apollo-Jupiter-Apollo sequences are the
initial means of emphasizing Rome's culminate gods; the second means of
emphasis is the constant reference to stones, symbolic of Jupiter, and
serpents, symbolic of Apollo. Each of the fifteen books includes
specific references to both stones and serpents; in book 15 Aesculapius,
the son of Apollo, glides in the body of a serpent over the stone steps
of his father's temple to travel to Rome and relieve the city of
suffering wrought by plague.
Ovid's beneficent Aesculapius ends his journey to Rome by residing on
Tiber Island, which in modern times became, suitably, the site of a
hospital. Like Aesculapius' journey from Delphi over the Ionian and
Mediterranean seas to the Tiber River and Rome, Ovid's Metamorphoses, in
winding its way through the ages to modern times, lavished its own
beneficence on literary traditions, from his contemporaries to the
medieval moralizers to enlightened neo-Augustans such as Alexander Pope.
T. S. Eliot's use of Ovid's Sophoclean Teresias theme for the focal
configuration of The Waste Land (1922) substantiates the claim that, in
its epical amalgamation of Greco-Roman lyric and didactic mythography,
the Metamorphoses required no moralizing apologists any more than it
ever needed critical apologists for its artistry.
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