Metamorphoses (poem)

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“Metamorphoses” redirects here. For other uses, see Metamorphoses (disambiguation).

1 Content
2 Inspirations and adaptations
3 Manuscript tradition
4 Notes
5 See also
6 External links

Cover of George Sandys's 1632 edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished

The Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid is a poem in fifteen books that describes the creation and history of the world in terms according to Greek and Roman points of view. Probably written in 8 BCE, it has remained one of the most popular works of mythology, being the Classical work best known to medieval writers and thus having a great deal of influence on medieval poetry.

[edit] Content

[Warning, ending spoiler]

Ovid emphasizes tales of transformation often found in myths, in which a person or lesser deity is permanently transformed into an animal or plant. The poem begins with the transformations of creation and Prometheus metamorphizing earth into Man and ends with the transformation of the spirit of Julius Caesar into a star. Ovid goes from one to the other by working his way through mythology, often in apparently arbitrary fashion, jumping from one transformation tale to another, sometimes retelling what had come to be seen as central events in the world of Greek myth and sometimes straying in odd directions. There is perhaps little depth in most of Ovid's portrayals. However, if others have written far more deeply, few have written more colorfully. The poem is often called a mock-epic. The entire poem is written in dactylic hexameter, the form of the great heroic and nationalistic epic poems both of the ancient tradition (the Iliad and Odyssey) and of Ovid's own day (the Aeneid). It begins with the ritual "invocation of the muse", and makes use of traditional epithets and circumlocutions. But instead of following and extolling the deeds of a human hero, it leaps from story to story with little connection, with little more than token attention to the epic themes of great deeds, national glory and religious observance.

Titian's Danaë, one of innumerable paintings inspired by the Metamorphoses.

Instead, the recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is that of love—personal love or love personified as Amor (Cupid). Indeed, the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated, and made ridiculous by Amor, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon who is the closest thing this mock-epic has to an epic hero. Apollo comes in for particular ridicule as Ovid shows how irrational love can confound the god of pure reason. While few individual stories are outright sacrilegious, the work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.

[edit] Inspirations and adaptations

The Arthur Golding translation of 1567 influenced William Shakespeare (it is believed that the famous play Romeo and Juliet was greatly influenced by the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, Metamorphoses), and was characterized as "The most beautiful book in the English language" by the poet Ezra Pound. Composer Benjamin Britten wrote a 1951 piece for solo Oboe incorporating six of Ovid's mythical characters. In 2002, Author Mary Zimmerman adapted some of Ovid's myths into a play by the same title, and the open-air-theatre group London Bubble also adapted it in 2006. Naomi Iizuka's "Polaroid Stories" also bases its format off of Metamorphoses, setting the classic play in a modern time with drug-addicted, teenage versions of many of the characters from the original play.

[edit] Manuscript tradition

Collaborative editorial effort has been investigating the various manuscripts of Metamorphoses, some forty-five complete texts or substantial fragments,^[1] since the High Middle Ages; though early emendations made by readers based on comparisons of this popular text has resulted in contamination, so that there are no isolated manuscript traditions, the result of several centuries of critical reading is that the poet's meaning is firmly established on the basis of the manuscript tradition or restored by conjecture where the tradition is deficient. The modern critical editions are two: W. S. Anderson's, first published in 1977 in the Teubner series, and R. J. Tarrant's, published in 2004 by the Oxford Clarendon Press.