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Ovid's Metamorphoses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Alan H. F. Griffin
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Extract

The amount of Ovid's surviving poetry is almost exactly equal to the sum total of poetry which has come down to us from Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius. Ovid wrote because he was a compulsive writer, ‘a poet utterly in love with poetry’ as Gilbert Murray aptly put it. He was the only classical poet to leave an autobiography, and in it he records that as a boy ‘I tried to write words freed from rhythm, yet all unbidden song would come upon befitting numbers and whatever I tried to write was verse.’ The quantity of Ovid's poetry, of course, cannot be made an excuse for lack of quality, but no indulgence need be begged and no allowances made for his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses. When the blow of exile fell on Ovid in a.d. 8 the Metamorphoses was substantially complete, much more so than the Aeneid had been when Virgil died in 19 b.c.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , April 1977 , pp. 57 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1977

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References

NOTES

1. Murray, Gilbert, Essays and Addresses (London, 1921), p. 116.Google Scholar

2. Tristia 4.10.24–6.Google Scholar

3. Wilkinson, L. P., Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955), p. 429.Google Scholar

4. The fullest treatment of this subject is Thibault's, J. C.The Mystery of Ovid's Exile (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964).Google Scholar

5. Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos (Berlin, 1924). i.241Google Scholar: ‘Nur ein unsterbliches episches Gedicht entstand noch unter Augustus, das sich an Kunstwert mit der Aeneis messen kann und an Wirkung auf die Nachwelt nicht sehr viel unter ihr bleibt, die Metamorphosen Ovids.’

6. Love's Labour's Lost Act IV, Scene ii.

7. Met. 10.252: ‘ars adeo latet arte sua.’

8. Luke 2:41 51.

9. See Amores 1.9 and Ars Amatoria 1.131–2.Google Scholar

10. Tristia 2.354: ‘vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea!’

11. Martial preserves a salacious epigram by Augustus (11.20).

12. ‘The prurient will read on with increasing disappointment’, Wilkinson, , op. cit., p. 121.Google Scholar

13. Met. 1.168–76.Google Scholar

14. Met. 2.731–4.Google Scholar

15. Met. 14.261–70.Google Scholar

16. The story of Phaëthon (Met. 2.1–332Google Scholar) has no metamorphosis.

17. Met. 3.339–510.Google Scholar

18. Fränkel, Hermann, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), p. 85.Google Scholar

19. Met. 3.407–17.Google Scholar J. W. Waterhouse depicts this scene in a painting dated 1903.

20. Met. 3.417Google Scholar: ‘spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse, quod umbra est.’ Umbra is a better reading in verse 417 than unda. It provides an expected contrast with corpus, which unda does not. It may be objected than umbra means ‘shadow’, not ‘reflection’, but this shift in meaning is very slight and justified by verse 434 (‘ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est’). A reflection is a kind of shadow. Umbra also has appropriate associations with the unsubstantial ghosts of the dead.

21. Wilkinson, 's translation, op. cit., p. 436.Google Scholar

22. Fränkel, , op. cit., p. 83.Google Scholar

23. Some sound effects are worth pointing out, though their precise impact is hard to define and assess: (a) the pleasing jingle at the end of 423 (candore ruborem), (b) the alliterative ps and the variety of active and passive verbs in 424–5.

24. Met. 10.238–94.Google Scholar

25. Niveum and mira are effectively juxtaposed.

26. Propertius 1.8A and 8B.

27. Philostephanus' Kypriaka (third century b.c.) seems the most likely source of the indecent version of the Pygmalion story. See Otis, Brooks, Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge, 1966), Appendix XIV: Pygmalion.Google Scholar

28. The description of Venus' festival (270–9) is an interval at the mid-point of the story. The first act (243–69) describes Pygmalion and his statue, the second act (280–97) describes Pygmalion and his girl. Tension relaxes during the interval and there is a touch of burlesque in Venus' favourable omen for Pygmalion (278–9); tongues of fire occur as omens in the Aeneid only at very important moments (e.g. Aen. 2.679–91 and 10.270–5).

29. Wilkinson, , op. cit., p. 212.Google Scholar

30. Wilkinson, 's expression, op. cit., p. 172.Google Scholar

31. Met. 9.450–665.Google Scholar

32. Met. 11.410–748.Google Scholar

33. Aeneid 5 (Oxford, 1960), p. xxiii.Google Scholar

34. Kinsley, J. (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford, 1958), i. 178–82.Google Scholar