Imagine that, after the Civil War, an American poet had written a great work purporting to embrace the history of the world—not a history exactly but a compilation of the myths and stories that have shaped the American soul—culminating with the triumphant Presidency of the great General Grant, who has ushered in a period of peace and prosperity after decades of strife and war. Then suppose that in reading the poem, you discovered that most of it was a recounting of the legends about King Arthur and his knights, with a few stanzas dealing perhaps with Richard the Lionhearted or Robin Hood. Then some chapters about the American founding, focused on the Mayflower, a long digression about Isaac Newton, a bit of concluding praise for Lincoln and Grant, and voila.
If this sounds a bit odd, then you can share my disorientation after spending several weeks with the Latin poet Ovid’s (Publius Ovidius Naso) masterpiece, the Metamorphoses. This involved reading the whole work (which is very long, over 600 pages in the Penguin translation by David Raeburn[1]) then re-reading it in stages for a week-long seminar at St John’s College, where students and tutors (none of us experts on Ovid) met every day for 5 days and discussed the text.
Ovid flourished, and wrote Metamorphoses, during the reign of Caesar Augustus. Rome was recovering from a century of civil strife and Augustus was creating what would become an imperial system of one-man rule, while pretending to preserve Rome’s republican institutions. Ovid had achieved fame with earlier poems, in particular the Ars Amatoria, a sequence of lyric poems about love and more particularly about seduction, including rather detailed instructions for seducing married women (he also discussed how women might seduce men, a sign of his flexibility with regard to Roman norms). You can get a taste of his approach from these lines in Ars Amatoria Book I:
But hunt for them, especially, at the tiered theatre:
that place is the most fruitful for your needs.
There you’ll find one to love, or one you can play with,
one to be with just once, or one you might wish to keep.[2]
Just as he was finishing his poem, Ovid was exiled in AD 8 by Augustus to a remote village on the Black Sea in what is today Romania; he spent the last 10 years of his life there. Despite desperate pleas for clemency, neither Augustus or his successor Tiberius allowed Ovid to return to Rome. Scholars are not sure exactly why Augustus had it in for Ovid, with some speculating he was involved in anti-Augustan plotting and others arguing that Augustus disliked Ovid’s morality, or lack of it, especially with regard to sex. (A fine modern novel about Ovid’s exile is An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf, which I highly recommend. We’ll come back to it later).
Metamorphoses is written in epic verse, like Homer and Virgil, signaling a different and presumably loftier intent. But it is unlike these other epics; it lacks a central hero or a recognizable story. Instead, Ovid tells us he intends to explore a particular theme, metamorphosis or transformation.
The stories in Metamorphoses are loosely (very loosely) linked by this theme of ‘change’ or transformation. ‘Transformation’ is not a metaphor or some internal psychological realignment, it is literal transforming, with people turning regularly into trees or birds or streams. This happens commonly in the myths that compose much of Metamorphoses. Typically a god, maybe Jupiter or Apollo, lusts after a pretty nymph or human girl, seduces and rapes her, then he (or some other deity) turns her into an oak tree or a seagull or a lion—sometimes as a kind of redemption, sometimes as punishment. There are poignant descriptions of people losing their ability to speak and move as the transformation occurs, while remaining human on the inside. These transformations are at first surprising but, repeated in hundreds of short vignettes, also repetitive.
The stories of Metamorphoses (a Greek, not a Latin word) are almost entirely, for the first 80-90 percent of the book, Greek stories. Ovid has sources lost to us but for the most part they are familiar from Homer, Hesiod, the Greek playwrights and other writings. The settings are Greek, the cities where they occur are Greek, the gods and kings and queens and heroes are familiar Greeks though sometimes with Latin names: Jupiter and Hera, Apollo and Bacchus, Jason, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, Medea, etc. Ovid to be sure puts his own spin on them, carefully describing some particularly outlandish changes, drawing out aspects of character, occasionally dwelling on the internal struggle a character faces when trying to decide what to do. But the stories are part of the tradition, not invented by Ovid.
It is difficult to convey the often bewildering experience of reading Metamorphoses, especially for a modern reader not steeped in these old tales. Many of the stories are short, while some go on for 10-15 pages; sometimes different stories are linked together by their narrator (Orpheus has a long string of tales), or nested confusingly (a primary story, then a character digresses with another story, which reminds someone of yet another, and so on). Ovid is a master of many moods and styles. He can be lyrical, terse, playful, earthy, or grand; he can imitate the goriest battle scenes of the Iliad; he can appear pious or irreverent.
There is a sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying stream of consciousness as you read, enjoying the variety but then asking yourself ‘what is the point here; why am I reading about Venus seducing Adonis one minute, and the flaying of Marsyas the next?’ The book is a kind of labryinth in which it is almost impossible not to get lost.
Two Key Themes: Sex and Honor
However, some themes do reoccur. One of them is sex. We are not for the most part talking about love here: when a guy—often a god (sometimes a goddess)—sees a girl he is often inflamed with desire which can’t be resisted, pursues/seduces/rapes her, then for the most part takes off while the lady lives with the consequences: maybe a baby, maybe disgrace, maybe revenge from the guys wife (Hera is a particularly nasty revenge-seeker) or an outraged parent. In any case, for the most part eros causes people/gods to damage one another, with the excuse being that they couldn’t help themselves.
Ovid’s landscape is littered with the offspring of these liaisons, to the point that most characters have some deity or other as a parent or grandparent or uncle. There is a quite literal intermingling of human and divine.
Another theme is lack of respect—the gods are endlessly upset when humans don’t acknowledge them properly or forget to offer sacrifices or trespass on their domains. This leads to horrible payback, like when Actaeon accidentally spies Diana bathing and the outraged goddess turns him into a stag who is torn apart by his own dogs. Ovid blithely notes afterwards that “Comments varied: some felt the goddess had overdone her violent revenge; while others commended it—worthy they said of her strict virginity.” [3]But outside judgment seems beside the point. Gods are gonna do what gods are gonna do.
The transformations that Ovid delights in are often enjoyable for their own sake, but also can be seen as attempts to repair or restore cracks in the order of things. When terrible rapes or violent vengeance occurs, the perpetrators are not usually punished—there is no moral reckoning—but there is recognition that the fabric of the world has been torn and should somehow be set right. When the gods change victims into trees or flowers or birds or springs, some kind of harmony has been restored.
Jupiter in particular is both a constant source of disorder, and the one who keeps the world within certain bounds. It’s Jupiter who has to take down Phaeton with a thunderbolt when he carries the sun too close to the world and threatens to burn it to ashes, and who periodically drowns mankind, like a basket of unwanted kittens, when we get overly nasty and disrespectful—taking care however to preserve a select few to carry on the race.
Poetic Troublemakers
Within this dizzying merry-go-round, Ovid draws our attention to a few characters who stand out for their independence and creative powers; people who rival the gods and who we can arguably identify with Ovid himself. One is the woman-weaver Arachne, who claims to be the equal of Minerva and is challenged by the goddess to prove it. People who challenge the gods do not generally come out well in Ovid, and Arachne is no exception, but she claims our respect. Unlike most of Ovid’s protagonists, Arachne is not high-born: “Arachne’s distinction lay not in her birth or the place that she hailed from, but solely her art.”[4] She doesn’t back down when Minerva warns her, and her work is fully the equal of the goddess’s: “Not Pallas, not even the goddess of Envy could criticize weaving like that.”[5] But while Minerva weaves pictures showing the gods and goddesses at their most majestic and benevolent, Arachne details all the crimes against women of Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo and the rest, all the rapes and deceptions and abandonments.
Typically, the goddess when thwarted decides to overturn the board: “The fair-haired warrior goddess resented Arachne’s success and ripped up the picture portraying the god’s misdemeanours.”[6] Then she turns Arachne into a spider. But Arachne/Ovid is the real winner. The tapestry is destroyed but Ovid preserves for us the image of this strong young woman using her artistic talent to tell truth to power. Ovid—who himself came from a well-off but not particularly prominent family—is in the midst of raining down on us thousands of carefully-crafted words showing in detail the lusts, jealousies, and multiple shortcomings of the gods. It doesn’t take a great deal of extrapolation to see the gods as stand-ins for the rich and powerful of Rome (and elsewhere), who do as they please and punish anyone who takes exception.
Another independent craftsman is Daedalus, the famous inventor responsible for the Labryinth that imprisons the Minotaur; the wings that allow him to escape from Crete; and other marvels. When Daedalus begins to work on his wings, Ovid says he “put his mind to techniques unexplored before and altered the laws of nature.”[7] He has no help from the gods. Of course his marvelous work proves fatal to his son, Icarus, who flies too high. Challenging established ways is risky and possibly impious; the observers of the flying Daedalus and Icarus say “They certainly must be gods to fly through the air!”[8] Ovid is perhaps another Daedalus, using his fabulous technique to create a new kind of epic poetry but with the risk of coming too close to the sun, endangering those he loves and affronting the powerful.
A third heroic artist is Orpheus, the extraordinary musician who famously travels to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, succeeds in charming even grim Pluto with his song, then loses Eurydice again when he looks around on their way back to the upper world. Orpheus’s power extends to nature as much as the gods; he is described as able to charm even the rocks and trees and animals to come to him when he plays.
After losing Eurydice, Ovid says that Orpheus would “have nothing to do with the love of women” and instead turns to young boys: “Orpheus even started the practice among the Thracian tribes of turning for love to immature males.”[9] Ovid’s Orpheus becomes in fact a celebrator of strange and unnatural loves; after praising Jupiter, he says “Now there is call for a lighter note. Let my song be of boys whom the gods have loved and of girls who have been inspired to a frenzy of lawless passion and paid the price for their lustful desires.”[10] This is followed by a series of stories, told by Orpheus, that include Jupiter’s infatuation with the beautiful boy Ganymede; Apollo’s similar love for the young Hyacinthus; the origin of prostitution; Pygmalion’s twisted desire for his own statue; a long and detailed account of the young girl Myrrha who pursues her own father; and the doomed love of Venus for Adonis.
Orpheus ends up being torn to pieces by wild Thracian ‘bacchanals’, who resent his disdain for women. Orpheus’s music deflects their attacks for a while, but finally Ovid says “cacophony won. The hideous screech of the Phrygian pipe…the clapping of hands and the bacchanals shrieking drowned the sound of the lyre…”.[11] All of nature mourns his passing, the birds and beasts, rocks and rivers and trees.
Although the ‘bacchanals’ seem to act along typical Bacchic lines, Ovid tells us that the god Bacchus takes revenge on them because Orpheus has been a ‘priest of his mysteries’. Bacchus is prominent throughout the Metamorphoses—he is a ‘new god,’ a celebrator of disorder and female empowerment, who has to win his place against the opposition of the Olympians. Ovid likewise loves to tell stories about the breakdown of good order, with a number of them highlighting strong women who succeed in enacting vengeance or getting their man: Medea the powerful witch who revenges herself on Jason; Arachne; Salmacis the abnormal nymph (“The only naiad not to belong to the train of Diana”) who desires, attacks, and is joined permanently with young Hermaphroditus; Procne, wife of the evil Tereus, who plots successfully to have him torn apart in Bacchic ritual after he brutally rapes her sister and cuts out her tongue.
Ovid as a great poet I think identifies with Orpheus, and with Bacchus, who reverses the rules and turns the world topsy-turvy. Augustus is busy building a conservative movement to “Make Rome Great Again,” restoring religious practices, building temples, and, controversially, trying to clamp down on adultery. He makes an example of his own daughter Julia, who he sends into exile for playing around. These efforts to restore ‘traditional’ morality are controversial. The Roman historian Suetonius writes in The Twelve Caesars that the new laws Augustus introduced “dealt, among other matters, with extravagance, adultery, unchastity, bribery, and the encouragement of marriage in the Senatorial and Equestrian orders. His marriage law being more rigorously framed than the others, he found himself unable to make it effective because of an open revolt against several of its clauses.”[12]
The Ovid who in earlier works described at length how to commit adultery, and in Metamorphoses is often preoccupied with sexual misconduct and out-of-control desires, is not likely to have found Augustus’s reforms congenial. At the end of the poem, after comparing Augustus explicitly to Jupiter, Ovid throws down his own challenge to the gods: “Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy—not Jupiter’s wrath, nor fire or sword, nor devouring time…My name shall never be forgotten.”[13]
Bringing Greece and Rome Together
Those are some themes I think one can make out in the often bewildering labryinth of Metamorphoses. But what about the work as a whole? Can one stand back and make out an overarching theme or story?
Here is where the question of Metamorphoses’s “Greekness” is worth pursuing. We take it for granted that the Greek and Roman worlds are one, that Zeus equals Jupiter, that Rome is the natural extension and follow-on to Greece. When Ovid calls on the gods at the beginning to “spin me a thread from the world’s beginning down to my own lifetime,” and at once launches on an account of creation borrowed from Homer and Hesiod, it takes an effort to ask whether this is just how it has to be, or whether the interweaving of these two cultures is something problematic.
Ovid like many generations of educated Romans before him was steeped in Greek poetry and philosophy. He studied in Athens for a year. Rome had interacted with Greek colonies in southern Italy for centuries, conquered Greece in the 2nd century BC, and then gone on by Ovid’s time to rule all of the Eastern Mediterranean, a world that had previously been conquered and Hellenized by Alexander the Great. The Greek language, Greek literature and philosophy, and Greek institutions were the norm from Egypt (where Alexander was buried, in the great Greek city of Alexandria) through the Levant and Asia Minor. This had a profound effect on many Romans, who were putting together an Empire on the back of an invincible military, but had little to offer of what we today call ‘soft power.’ They were awed by Greek accomplishments and quickly adopted them for themselves.
Many, but not all. Plenty of Romans thought of the Greeks as effete chatterboxes, and sources of decadence and decline. Tough, virtuous Romans are sent off to rule Egypt and Syria and Macedon, and end up like Marc Antony; corrupted by the riches and temptations of the East, they lose themselves and forget their duty to Rome. (There are parallels here to the way Thucydides tells us Spartans, similar to Romans in their single-minded focus on martial virtues, are prone to fall prey to greed when they leave Sparta to rule other parts of Greece during the Peloponnesian Wars).
Cato the Elder in the early 2nd century is strongly opposed to growing Greek influence, as is the later Augustan-era historian Livy. Livy is particularly critical of the cult of Bacchus, which he describes as a Greek import, for encouraging the unregulated mixing of sexes and classes. (The Roman analogue to Bacchus is Liber Pater, identified with freedom and the rights of the plebeian class, according to modern scholars[14]; Ovid often refers to Bacchus as Liber). Livy, a conservative who sees Rome as threatened by moral decline, was close to Augustus. He is suspicious of all so-called ‘mystery religions,’ such as the worship of Bacchus, and describes approvingly how in the early 2nd century the authorities violently suppressed the growing Bacchus cult. Rome’s expansion has allowed all manner of foreign customs and gods to infiltrate Rome itself, weakening the state.
In this back and forth one can say that ultimately, Greece wins. Under Constantine the Empire is divided, with the center of gravity moving to the new Eastern Capital at Byzantium. Its language is Greek, not Latin. The Empire in the West eventually collapses and Rome itself falls to barbarians, but the Greek, Christian version of Rome in the East carries on for another thousand years. (Whether the Greek East, in the form of another new cult, Christianity, was the cause of Rome’s downfall has been debated for 2000 years).
This is far in the future for Ovid. What he sees in his time is a challenge to this more sophisticated, more open-minded Greek-Roman future. Augustus is trying to restore the old Roman morality, arguably to make his radical usurpation of power look like a return to tradition. Ovid’s poem asserts the oneness of the two cultures. In this he follows Virgil, who in the Aeneid ties Rome’s founding directly to the fall of Troy. Rome’s story comes straight out of the Iliad. It doesn’t get any more Greek than that.
Ovid’s view of what is at stake may perhaps be hinted at towards the end of Metamorphoses, where he describes at length the views of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Pythagoras comes to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, fleeing from political oppression on his home island of Samos. Ovid’s Pythagoras, (who seems to be a composite of Greek thinkers rather than the real Pythagoras) teaches that all things are permanently changing and in flux, always metamorphosing, coming and going—including great kings and cities. Recognizing and embracing this is the key to wisdom.
Ovid tells us that at one point Numa, one of Rome’s first kings who takes the throne after Romulus, travels to Croton to meet Pythagoras. Ovid singles out Numa as “a capable thinker…His restless, ambitious mind led him on to explore the mysteries of nature itself.”[15] After being taught by Pythagoras, Numa returns to Rome, where he “converted a nation practiced in brutal war to follow the arts of peace.”[16] Ovid may be suggesting that Augustus, who promises Romans peace after over a century of civil war, should also learn from the Greeks; he should embrace a changing world rather than resist it. Here is Ovid’s own point of view, from Part III of Ars Amatoria:
Others may delight in ancient times: I congratulate myself
on having been born just now: this age suits my nature.
Not because stubborn gold’s mined now from the earth,
or choice shells come to us from farthest shores…
but because civilisation’s here, and no crudity remains,
in our age, that survives from our ancient ancestors.[17]
Whatever Ovid’s intent, Augustus does not appreciate it. Just as Ovid was finishing Metamorphoses, Augustus banishes him.
Ovid In Exile
David Malouf’s 1978 novel, An Imaginary Life, invents a trajectory for Ovid in his exile.[18] It is told as though written by Ovid himself (though Malouf acknowledges his story is based on almost no evidence). After an initial period of extreme disorientation, Ovid comes to terms with his fate; he learns the local language, and starts to appreciate the beauty of the bleak landscape. He plants a garden of flowers, something that surprises and confuses the locals, who do nothing that is not entirely practical: “My little flowerpots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome.”
He has an epiphany about the meaning of metamorphosis: “I have stopped trying to find fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends…This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree…”
Malouf’s Ovid becomes fascinated with a local ‘wild child’, a young boy who roams the woods with the wolves and is eventually caught. Ovid takes it on himself to teach him to speak. The boy for his part shows Ovid what it means to genuinely transform into another being: “In imitating the birds…He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man.” Through speech, especially perhaps poetic speech, we enable ourselves to become another person, perhaps the person we imagine ourselves to be. Exercising this power, which is a kind of love, cracks us open, softens us. Ovid dies happily in communion with the natural world.
America and Rome
I started by imagining an American version of Ovid. The Romans cultivated an image as a practical and pious people. Many Americans too think of themselves as especially pragmatic and God-fearing; a people who should beware an ‘Old World’ seen as a den of corruption and godlessness. But others have thought our character needed deepening and widening via engagement with the arts and traditions of Europe and the West. Waves of American poets and thinkers made pilgrimages abroad in the late 19th and 20th centuries, exiling themselves from what they saw as American narrow-mindedness. Many are among the first rank of American writers: Henry James, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin. It would be hard to imagine today’s America without them.
In 2017 the City Council of Rome officially revoked Ovid’s banishment.[19]
[1] Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. David Raeburn, Penguin Books, 2004.
[2] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkI.php#anchor_Toc521049262, Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001
[3] Metamorphoses, Book III, lines 253-255.
[4] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 7-8.
[5] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 128-129.
[6] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 130-132.
[7] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 186-187.
[8] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 218-219.
[9] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 79-85.
[10] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 152-155.
[11] Metamorphoses, Book XI, lines 15-17.
[12] Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, pp. 73-74.
[13] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 871-876.
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber
[15] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 3-6.
[16] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 483-484.
[17] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkIII.php, The Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001
[18] David Malouf, An Imaginary Life, Vintage Books, 1978.
[19] The Guardian, “Ovid’s Exile to the Remotest Margins of the Roman Empire Revoked,” Dec. 16 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/16/ovids-exile-to-the-remotest-margins-of-the-roman-empire-revoked
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