Transcript of the Best Lecture on Ovid's Metamorphosis Ever!

You will need to read this information by Friday and know it by Monday if you are to survive what I will be throwing at you. It's time to strap in if we are to make it to Shakespeare by May!!!

[The following is the text of a lecture delivered in LBST 301 in November 1997 by Ian Johnston. This text is in the public domain, released November 1997]


Introduction

The text for next week is Ovid's Metamorphosis, the only work we study from Latin Literature. And that might strike you as rather curious. Most of us are aware that Latin has played a far more vital influence on our language than Greek or Hebrew and that the influence of Roman civilization on the development of Western Culture has been absolutely decisive. So you might well wonder why Roman civilization gets such a short treatment in Liberal Studies, in comparison, say, to the treatment of the Greeks.

I don't intend to answer that question in any detail, but, before turning our attention to Ovid, I would like to say some things about Roman culture and history by way of filling in some of the wide gap between Aristotle and Ovid, a leap of a little over three hundred years. I don't pretend that this is by any means an adequate survey, but it may help to remind us of some reasons why Ovid's text, while very familiar in some respects, is decisively different from the texts we have been reading.

An Historical Interlude

At the time of Aristotle, Rome existed as a small, relatively insignificant city state (but growing in power) in mid-Italy. By legend the city had been founded about four hundred years previously (in 753 BC). But the city was certainly not yet significant enough to attract the attention of the important states to the east.

During the life of Aristotle, the growing power in Greece was Macedon (where Aristotle came from). It exerted military control over Greece with a garrison in the major cities during his lifetime, the latter part of which coincided with Alexander's expedition against Persia. With the death of Alexander the Great (who died the year before Aristotle), his great empire was divided up among his successors, and the history of the next hundred years or so is marked by bitter fighting throughout the Near East among the various rivals (called the Successors).

Meanwhile the Romans in the third century BC were growing in power. With their defeat of the Carthaginians (a civilization based in North Africa) in three consecutive wars, Rome had established itself as the major power in the Western Mediterranean. The inevitable collision between Rome and the various remaining Macedonian imperial territories resulted in Rome's gaining control of Greece (to simplify a long and complicated story). Bit by bit throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, Roman military force demonstrated its efficiency at bringing territories under Roman control, so that before the birth of Christ, Roman influence extended from the English Channel to Egypt.

The establishment of an empire was no new achievement. What the Romans demonstrated, in a way that no one has ever been able to match, is the ability to hang onto in an empire, to administer it efficiently and (for most of the time) peacefully, and thus to create sustained periods of prosperity and harmony in areas traditionally decimated by various rivalries. In short, the Romans were the greatest imperial culture the West has ever seen.

How were the Romans able to do this where others, like Alexander, the Athenians, the Hittites, and so on had failed? The answer lies in the particular emphasis the Romans placed on public service. And this may help to explain why we read relatively little of their literature. The Romans, unlike the Athenians, made as their first and only really important order of business the preservation of public order, and they dedicated themselves to those virtues of character and those public institutions and cultural expressions which would best contribute to it.

Thus, the Romans, unlike the Greeks, did not encourage competition in all things and were not all that interested in speculation for its own sake. While they clearly admired the Greeks excessively and sent their children to Athens for an education, they were so intensely practical in their view of life, that they saw no reason to devote the time to the arts and sciences that the Athenians had. For them, the only really important business of life was defending and advancing the Roman way of life in intensely practical ways.

That is the reason that so many of Rome's greatest figures were those marked by the public careers and why so many of their contributions to our cultural history were very down-to-earth and practical: roads, aqueducts, a legal system, concrete, and, most important of all, the finest administrative language the world has ever seen, Latin, which, as we all know, exerted a decisive influence on the development of European languages and literatures.

In setting these priorities, the Romans were very conscious of their cultural inferiority to the Greeks in some respects. But the Romans saw themselves as a people destined to carry out the art of government rather than to advance the frontiers of artistic or scientific excellence. The most famous statement of this view is contained in the great epic poem The Aeneid by Vergil, written shortly before Ovid's time (and an important shaping influence on parts of the Metamorphoses). In the Aeneid, the hero, like Odysseus, visits the underworld and there receives from the shade of his father the following visionary statement of the destiny of Rome (which has yet to be founded):

Others, for so I can well believe, shall hammer forth more delicately a breathing likeness out of bronze, coax living faces from the marble, plead causes with more skill, plot with their gauge the movements in the sky, and tell the rising of the constellations. But you, Roman, must remember that you have to guide the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to graft tradition onto peace, to show mercy to the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low. (trans. W. F. Jackson Knight, p. 172)

The Romans thus in extending their empire were, in many respects, the most tolerant of imperial powers (although they could be extraordinary ruthless when they felt the political situation demanded such action). They had no religious or ideological agenda, beyond extending the influence of Rome and keeping the peace. And they demonstrated a continuing genius for administration at the local level of infrastructure projects (many of which are still in use) and at the international level, for which they developed a system of law which laid the basis for much modern jurisprudence. The extraordinary efficiency of this imperial system managed to maintain the empire in spite of frequently bloody and confusing squabbles about who should sit in the Imperial chair at the heart of it.

Rome's very success led ultimately to the city's downfall. As the barbarians from the east exerted increasing pressure on the tribes of the eastern steppes, more and more people sought to enter the Roman sphere of influence. Eventually the inner dynamics of the empire failed to sustain itself and, after about one thousand years of successful imperial rule, the Roman empire collapsed in the fifth century AD, Rome was overthrown, and the northern Germanic tribes, once Christianized, moved in to establish medieval Europe out of the remnants.

Ovid

Today we are considering Ovid's Metamorphosis, one of the last works of the great classical age of Roman poetry--which took place roughly half way through that narrative I have just briefly sketched. In many respects, Ovid does not fit the picture I have just outlined, for of all the great Roman poets he was the least interested in celebrating and sustaining the Roman ideal. He preferred to write about love or to dedicate his art to witty entertaining poetry. That trend may have been what got him into trouble with the Emperor. That he did get into trouble is clear from the fact that in AD 8, at the age of 50, he was exiled by the Emperor Augustus to a remote and inhospitable part of the Empire, about as far from the urban sophistication of Rome as it was possible to get. There he spent the rest of his life until his death in AD 17.

In dealing with Ovid's most famous poem, we might as well start by acknowledging that no work from classical antiquity, neither Greek nor Roman, has exerted such a continuing and decisive influence on European literature. This poem has not only always been popular; but it has also been extraordinary influential on other writers and visual artists. The emergence of French, English, and Italian national literatures in the late Middle Ages simply cannot be fully understood without taking into account the effect of this extraordinary poem. And the development of a great deal of modern poetry draws no less heavily on Ovid's masterpiece. The only rival we have in our tradition which we can find to match the pervasiveness of the literary influence of this poem is perhaps (and I stress perhaps) the Old Testament and the works of Shakespeare.

So today I want to see if I can, if not account for exactly, at least suggest a number of reasons why this poem, more than any other, should have exerted such a vitally shaping influence. This question is particularly curious, of course, because one could hardly find a classical work that is less obviously Christian than this one--it is thoroughly pagan in spirit, without any apparent trace of a vision of life compatible with Christian doctrine (of the sort we can find in Vergil, for example, or in the work of the successors of Plato). And yet in the most Christian of ages, the popularity of Ovid remained extremely high. In fact, as I shall mention, Christian writers and commentators went to enormous lengths to make this poem acceptable to a culture which had no room for paganism. And the decline of Christian values as a criterion of literary styles and values (starting in the Renaissance) did nothing to reduce the popularity of the poem.

The Popularity of Ovid: The Short Explanation

In seeking to account for the remarkable and enduring popularity of the Metamorphoses, we have recourse to an obvious answer. One of the main reasons is obviously that no other book (except possibly the Old Testament) contains such a wealth of fascinating stories. The Metamorphoses is, first and foremost, an extraordinarily fecund resource for narratives, especially stories of human personalities in conflict.

It's true that most of these stories obviously do not originate in Ovid. He has culled them from all sorts of sources, and many of them we have seen already in Hesiod, Homer, and elsewhere. But here they all exist together, rather like an encyclopedia of mythology, giving direct access to a magical world of fiction which provides all those interested in art a resource without equal.

In some cases, Ovid's account is the only source for a particular story, one which has been picked up and embellished and re-embellished throughout European literature. The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, for example (76-79), is one of the first to enter European literature. In the Middle Ages this was turned into a 900 line French poem. Chaucer then takes the story and uses it in his long poem The Legend of Good Women; the English poet Gower uses it in his poem the Confessio Amantis; the story reappears in L'Amorosa Fiammetta by Boccaccio, and it is used again in another Italian Renaissance poet Tasso. Shakespeare uses the tale as the basis for Romeo and Juliet and, in a comic version of the same narrative, in Midsummer Night's Dream. That's a very brief indication of the fecundity of just one of the stories over a few centuries.

This business of narrative richness may seem like an inadequate reason for the success of the book (and by itself it is); after all, there were other such encyclopedias of classical mythology. But we need to stress it here, because for a great deal of European literature, Ovid is the source, not only of the story but also of a great deal of standard figurative language. Anyone needing a plot for a play or a classical allusion to spice up a pentameter could go immediately to Ovid's poem and find there more than enough to meet the need.

We have to look no further than Shakespeare (who read Ovid in Golding's translation) to confirm this point. Shakespeare, quite literally, plundered Ovid for stories and moved them directly into his plays--in Titus Andronicus or A Midsummer Night's Dream for example, and, like so many of his contemporaries used Ovid as a sort of handbook for classical allusions and similes (as sad as Niobe, as crafty as Ulysses, as vain as Narcissus, as impetuous as Phaethon, as foolish as Icarus, and so on).

Shakespeare lifts whole speeches from Ovid and adapts them to his purposes (so, for example, Prospero's famous invocation of the spirits in the Tempest is adapted directly from Medea's similar speech in Metamorphoses, a speech Shakespeare had used before, in Macbeth). In Shakespeare's early work, something like three quarters of the classical imagery is derived directly from Ovid's poem. And if we want to see modern poets doing the same thing, we have only to look at, say, Eliot's Waste Land, in which images and references to Ovid are just as frequent. In fact, if one wants to have any sort of historical appreciation for the development of English poetry, understanding the influence of and the reference to Ovid is essential.

Some Elements of Ovid's Narrative Style

But, of course, that explanation for the success of this poem is hardly adequate, for the Metamorphoses is far more than simply a dry compendium of interesting stories, and its popularity rests also, and more importantly, on the delight people experience in reading the poem. So if we want to address why this poem should have enjoyed such a long and vital life, we need to explore some features of the style.
Ovid's poem is self-consciously epic in its scope. He is seeking to recount the history of the world and of human civilization in it, starting at the very beginning and ending with the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC (about 50 years before the poem was written). In the course of that story, he, like Homer and Hesiod, establishes the nature of the god and goddesses, the creation of the human race, the interactions of gods and human beings, and some major legendary historical events, like the Trojan War and the founding of Rome. In the course of this narrative, he is also incorporating many of the most famous narratives from the classical tradition--like Homer's account of Odysseus (now renamed Ulysses) and Vergil's account of Aeneas. Like many epic writers, Ovid is simultaneously reminding us of his great poetic ancestors, drawing on them, and demonstrating (he hopes) his parity with or superiority over them.

One important attribute of this poem is its apparently casual unity. These very disparate elements are joined together in a seamless narrative, so that we move easily from one story into the next, and often we, as readers, are drawn into some new tale before we fully realize that the old one is over. This provides a constant sense of movement. None of the stories is very long, but Ovid avoids any erratic sense of stopping and starting all the time by the skill of his narrative links. What emerges is something far more than just a catalogue of ancient stories but a genuine narrative with a logic of its own.

That logic is supported by a number of other things. The poem moves, generally speaking, through some distinct sections: starting with the gods and the creation myth, we move to the fabulous divine or semi-divine heroic characters (Cadmus, Pentheus, Bacchus, Perseus) and then closer to recognizable (but still legendary) human beings, like Medea, Daedalus, Icarus, and Orpheus; from there the narrative moves into the great historical sagas of Troy, the wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas, and finally comes to a close in recent modern history. This gentle, unannounced, and consistent series of transitions enables Ovid to fit into his narrative a number of different literary genres (from mythology to legend to recent history) without offending our sense of what we are dealing with.

Finally, the poem's many episodes share a common theme--the idea of metamorphosis or transformation, usually accompanied by violence. This gives to virtually all the stories an inherently dramatic quality, since the violence frequently involves a helpless and protesting victim, the evidence for whose change often remains forever in the landscape, the heavens, or in the natural life around us. This theme enables Ovid to transform whatever story he seizes upon into a situation potentially full of human pathos, something which transforms a beautiful setting or person into a symbol of suffering. In fact, in Ovid, as E. J. Kenney remarks in the introduction to Melville's translation, the description of an idyllic pastoral setting or a happy harmonious life is almost always the prelude to some brutality or other.

And the subject matter of these transformations in almost every case involves violence, sex, and suffering, topics which, then as now, are of great interest. The victims are often innocent females, pursued by divine or human rapists, and the narrative repeated calls attention to the dramatic pathos of the moment of transformation, when the enormously suffering victim, like Niobe or Daphne, metamorphoses into something else, almost as if the pressure of her suffering had become too much for human capabilities.

Ovid's Vision of Life

Now, there's an important debate about how we are to deal with this business of metamorphosis, the central organizing image of the poem. What does this repeated insistence on transformation, usually through some brutality or other, add up to as a vision of human experience? Is Ovid here saying something about the nature of human life, of the sort that, say, Hesiod or Homer are insisting upon in their poems? Does the lasting influence of this poem depend at all on any understanding of life, any vision of experience, which people have found of value?

An exploration of this question, I think, leads to the curious but very interesting point that the strength of this poem may very well rest on the fact that it does not appear to attempt to do what all the other works we have read have been striving for, namely, it offers no particular vision of life and has no particular interest in such a high ambition. It is, by contrast, a celebration of the literary genius of the writer, a self-conscious demonstration of the pure pleasures of fiction without recourse to any high moral seriousness.

Consider for a moment the following apparent paradox. Much of this poem concerns very brutal events. If we were tempted to see these events as the very stuff of life, what should emerge from the poem would surely be a bleak picture of human actions and possibilities, something much closer perhaps to the dour pessimism of Hesiod or the cosmic fatalism of Sophocles. But the really curious feature of this poem, for which it is really famous, is that no such despairing vision of life emerges. For all the brutality and transformation, this poem comes across as delightful, a good read, a supremely comic masterpiece. And that quality, it seems to me, is really worth exploring, because it may well be the most important indication of the long-lasting appeal of the poem.

Kenney (a really bright chap and someone to know if you intend to study the classics later on)in his introduction puts the matter as follows:

The true Midas is the poet, the true golden touch his transforming art. Ovid's achievement in the Metamorphosis is to transmute what ought to be a profoundly depressing vision of existence into a cosmic comedy of manners. (xix)
Ovid, in other words, takes the most potentially horrific material and turns it into the stuff of comedy. We witness the suffering, but we are not moved by it as suffering (certainly not in the same way we are by, say, the sufferings of Oedipus or Pentheus)--we are kept a secure distance from it and invited to look at it from a very different perspective. We do not, in other words, take the depicted fiction seriously.

The Metamorphoses always keeps us on the surface of the details and does not invite us to see that this sequence of disasters says anything significant about the world. It is there for us to enjoy as an example of a story for its own sake, something we can read and enjoy for the moment, without being led to some system of belief about the world or some cosmic understanding.

The quest for a deeper underlying meaning, if it exists, Ovid left to others. It was enough to for him to illustrate and explore the reflection on the psychological plane of that universal physical turbulence. (Kenney xix)

Now, I want to dwell on this point for a moment, because it is important, and it marks a significant departure from the styles of works we have been dealing with. We have read works which featured a good deal of violence (e.g., The Old Testament, Hesiod, Homer, The Oresteia), and part of interpretation of the work has required us to take into account what that violence reveals about the nature of the cosmos, particularly about the nature of the gods. Whatever the story of, say, the sacrifice of Isaac, the overthrow of Pharaoh's troops, or the destruction of suitors or Dionysus's treatment of Thebes is finally about, those dramatic moments are intended to be taken seriously. When we try to justify or criticize the moments we have to explore some wider understanding of the world. For example, however we read Hesiod or Homer or the Old Testament or Sophocles, we are most unlikely to say that the nature of the divine is not all that important; the process of reading the works reveals to us that the nature of the divine is an essential (perhaps the essential) thing the work is seeking to communicate.

But this does not seem to be the case with Ovid. The rape of Proserpine or the deadly anger of Medea or the deceitfulness of Ulysses or the nature of the Olympian deities and so on do not appear to reveal anything serious about the nature of the world. They are just good stories, entertaining because of the way Ovid tells them and because they add variety to the sequence. They are, if you like, merely literary. What I mean by that phrase is not necessarily something demeaning, but rather that these stories exist to display the literary inventiveness of the poet, his narrative, dramatic, and poetic skill, and to provide for us the delight which comes from reading good fiction, without forcing upon us any wider understanding of the world: the style is privileging the aesthetic experience over any moral insight.
Now, it's interesting to ask why this should be so. Why should we take one story seriously and another as simply literary showmanship, a delightful exhibition of literary skill? I think the short answer to this is that we take our cue from the narrator of the poem. We treat what Hesiod and Homer have to say about the gods seriously or as something we need to account for in a wider vision of the world, because the narrator of the poem and the characters in it take them seriously. The narrator may tell stories in which the gods sometimes look foolish, as Homer does, but he never invites us the see the very description he is putting forth as something which might, after all, be only his invention.

With Ovid things are different. To begin with, the narrator of the poem often teases us about the reliability of what he is saying. Again and again, the narrator injects sly comments, calling into question his own veracity:

The man was made, perhaps from seed divine
Formed by the great Creator, so to found
A better world, perhaps the new-made earth,
So lately parted from the ethereal heavens,
Kept still some essence of the kindred sky--(3)
Those stones (who would believe did ancient lore
Note testify the truth?) gave up their hardness; (13)
That was the end; the miracle had held
them fascinated; one denies such things
Could happen; others say true gods can do
All things--but Bacchus is not one of them. (81)

This habit of commenting on his own stories, calling into question whether people do or should believe them repeatedly injects a sophisticated slyness into the narrative tone, almost inviting the reader to share an in-joke; this is a style that treads a very narrow (and dangerous line) between the pathetic and the comic.

We can see this in many examples. One of the best is the early story of Daphne and Apollo. There's more than enough dramatic tension here to sustain interest, and yet the celebrated story does not lead to any illumination or exploration of anything beyond the famous incident.

More he had tried to say, but she in fear
Fled on an left him and his words unfinished.
Enchanting still she looked--her slender limbs
Bare in the breeze, her fluttering dress blown back,
Her hair behind her streaming as she ran;
And flight enhanced her grace. But the young god,
Could bear no more to waste his blandishments,
And (love was driving him) pressed his pursuit.
And as a beagle sees across the stubble
A hare and runs to kill and she for life--
He almost has her; now, yes, how, he's sure
She's his; his straining muzzle scrapes her heels;
And she half thinks she's caught and, as he bites,
Snatches away; his teeth touch--but she's gone.
So ran the god and girl, he sped by hope
And she by fear. But he, borne on the wings
Of love, ran faster, gave her no respite,
Hot on her flying heels and breathing close
Upon her shoulders and her tumbling hair.
Her strength was gone; the travail of her flight
Vanquished her, and her face was deathly pale.
And then she saw the river, swift Peneus,
And called: 'Help, father, help! If mystic power
Dwells in your waters, change me and destroy
My baleful beauty that has pleased too well.'
Scare had she made her prayer when through her limbs
A dragging languor spread, her tender bosom
Was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms
Were changed to branches and her hair to leaves;
Her feet but now so swift were anchored fast
In numb stiff roots, her face and head became
The crown of a green tree; all that remained
Of Daphne was her shining loveliness.
And still Apollo loved her; on the trunk
He placed his hand and felt beneath the bark
her heart still beating, held in his embrace
her branches, pressed his kisses on the wood;
Yet from his kisses still the wood recoiled.
'My bride', he said, 'since you can never be,
At least, sweet laurel, you shall be my tree.
My lyre, my locks, my quiver you shall wreathe;
You shall attend the conquering lords of Rome
When joy shouts triumph at the Capitol
Welcomes the long procession; you shall stand
Beside Augustus' gates, sure sentinel
On either side, guarding the oak between.
My brow is ever young, my locks unshorn;
So keep your leaves' proud glory ever green.'
thus spoke the god; the laurel in assent
Inclined her new-made branches and bent down,
Or seemed to bend, her head, her leafy crown. (17-18)

The first part of the story is potentially brutal enough. What Ovid highlights in his description is the erotic beauty of the fleeing girl--with precise references to her legs, hair, and skin--combined with her terror. Ovid holds this moment suspended before us in the long metaphor of the hound chasing the hare, again bringing the image into sharp relief with the references to biting. The sexual brutality is in the image, certainly, but the emphasis is mainly on the girl in a very cozy and teasingly erotic way (one can immediately understand the way the narrative inspired visual artists).

And the incident is closed off by the transformation, described in such a manner that the scene seems almost comic--the mighty god of the sun pouring out his heart to a tree which he is covering with kisses. It's hard to know how to take this picture, since it moves us beyond the brutality of the god's intentions to a scene of utter incongruity (with the tree nodding its assent). And, significantly, the story ends with a poetic tribute to Apollo, an image of how what really matters in this story is the immortality of the memory, something which the woody maiden seems to agree with--the uncertainty of the final gesture is typically Ovidian. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. Still, it's a great story.

I don't want to suggest that it is easy to write this way. It isn't. This coyly erotic tone, half serious, half comic, with the frisson of violence and the pathos of the loss of a life, is extremely sophisticated. It relies upon a certain sophistication in the reader, too, since it requires the reader to be sufficiently interested to be caught up in the drama and responsive to the complex poetry and yet sufficiently alert to the tone not to take the story as a serious insight into anything.

Some readers, for example, might be tempted to want to see in the story of Daphne and Apollo some exploration of something important, say, the relationship of the gods to nature or the immoral bestiality and cruelty of the divinities or something similar. This is surely an overreaction to Ovid's tale. He builds on it no moral, other than the notion of the lasting immortality of the story, and immediately moves on to another very similar tale. We are not invited to linger or think about what the wider implications of the story might be (as we are, for example, in the Odyssey, with the story of the revenge of Orestes or the incident with Polyphemos).
One interpreter puts the matter this way:

[In the world of the Metamorphoses the] world is permeated by a sense of the flux, disorder, and chaos of experience. The hints of order thrown out are numerous, but they all prove unreliable and inadequate. A sequence of events rarely is related as cause and effect. The point of view on what happens is ever shifting. No firm patterns emerge. The emphasis is laid upon the diversity, even the uniqueness, of the individual's experience--indeed sometimes upon the indeterminacy of the individual's self, of his very identity. No meanings or moralities can be read in this universe. The manner of narration is itself an obstacle. The relations between stories and between parts of stories establish no sense of what is important. They mythological tales are presented in versions which tend to deny them significance. And even metamorphosis itself, the central phenomenon in the world of the poem, imparts no meaning. (Solodow 197)

What we remember from the poem is the clarity of particular episodes memorably delivered, rather than any consistent illumination of what one might call a vision of life. Even the metaphysical organizing principle of metamorphosis is not explored for what it might reveal about the nature of the world (either as a moral judgment or a physical principle). The lasting impression is that the metamorphoses provide a wonderful basis for telling stories effectively, nothing more.

[Parenthetically, one might observe that if one is tempted to view this vision of the world as a seriously intended illumination of reality, then that view would register, I think, as uncompromisingly grim, something quite at odds with the tone of the stories.]

One can sum up this point with a criticism which commentators who demand a high moral seriousness from works of art have made about Ovid: in his poem "the artist's virtuosity seems to have outrun his human sympathy" (Martindale 5), a stance which many find an inadequate basis for art. The lasting success of Ovid's poem, however, would seem to suggest a basic flaw with this interpretative judgment.

I should mention that not everyone shares this view of Ovid. There are those who claim, for example, that the principle of metamorphosis is what we might call a philosophic position and that this poem, rather than just being a collection of delightfully amusing stories, also presents what so many find lacking, a coherent vision of experience. The chief evidence for this position is the section near the end on Pythagoras, where Ovid takes the time to lay out a world view, which he attributes to Pythagoras:

Everything changes; nothing dies; the soul
Roams to and fro, now here, now there, and takes
What frame it will, passing from beast to man,
From our own form to beast and never dies. (357)

The emphasis in this part of the poem, especially near the end of the passage, is the invincible destructiveness of time, and by the end the political implications of this view are made clear:

Times are upset, we see, and nations rise
To strength and greatness, others fail and fall.
Troy once was great in wealth and men and gave
For ten long years her lifeblood; humbled now
She shows her ancient ruins, for her riches
Only the broken tombs of ancestors. (364)

Much of this section is quite platitudinous, repeating, in delightful verse, a very old view of the world. Whether that qualifies as a vision of experience or not, I'm not sure (the stress on vegetarianism throughout as the way to avoid much trouble seems like a comic undercutting of any potential solemnity). If it does it would seem quite at odds with the general tone of the poem, for the sense that the only permanent thing is the lack of any permanence leads to gloomy reflections.
I think the function of this passage is, however, somewhat different. Ovid is leading into the conclusion of his poem. The clear implication in the above quote is that Rome, for all her imperial greatness at the time, will inevitably fail and fall (the reference to the Troy, the legendary source of the Roman people is clear enough). So under the final tributes to Caesar and Augustus there is a firmly established irony: whatever else the achievements of these great political men, their work will not last.

What will last, of course, is Ovid's poem. The epilogue makes it clear that if transformation is the rule of life, the only thing that can escape it through all eternity is the work of art. There is no stability of truth in life or politics. The only eternity granted to us comes from great literature, like Ovid's poem.

Ovid's Transformation of Mythology

Before I conclude this lecture, I would like to say a word or two about this poem in relation to earlier works we have studied which use similar material from ancient mythologies. If what I have been saying has any validity, then in this poem we are seeing a transformation of the traditional myths. When we read Hesiod and Homer and Aeschylus, the myths are seriously meant. They symbolize and illuminate vital aspects about the nature of life itself. The destructiveness of the gods, their erratic moods, their loves and hates operate as explanatory principles which define the nature of our experience. The events may be often irrational, sometimes funny, dramatic, and eventful, but they are offered as serious insights into the nature of things. And there is thus a certain mystery about them, and they earn our respect, because they deal with things at the very centre of our desire to understand or connect with essential forces outside ourselves. The mythology serves to link our familiar world with the sense of mystery we experience when we ponder things beyond our immediate control and understanding.

In Ovid, this serious intention changes. Here the mythology acts, first and foremost, as an extraordinary basis for mere stories, which we are invited to enjoy precisely because they are not serious offered as an insight into anything. The myths, in other words, have become, not the organizing principle for understanding life, but rather pure literature, to be enjoyed for their fictive nature. A wedge is being driven between the traditional stories and their wider meaning.

Hence, when we celebrate Ovid's great skill as a poet, we celebrate, above all, his poetic inventiveness, rather than his insight. He is a story teller's storyteller, a poet's poet, a master of transforming serious matters into light entertainment, perhaps the wittiest poet we have (if we remember that wit means, among other things, technical ingenuity). What we are learning, as we read this poem, is not how to understand the world but how to use language and the resources of fiction delightfully. In that sense, it is not at all difficult to understand Ovid's enduring popularity among writers and other artists, even those who bring to the poem a much more coherent and complete world vision.

In a sense, that removal of moral significance emerges as the most important metamorphosis of all--the change in our attitude to these old stories. If we see them through the verse of Ovid, then we do have good reason for seeing this amazingly rich collection of events as simply an invention of the poets, created as entertainment, with no wider religious, cosmic, or cultural significance. And it may well be the case that the enduring popularity of Ovid is a major reason why it has taken us until this century to begin to deal with the gods and goddesses in Homer as something a good deal more important than merely literary inventions designed to show off the poet's skill in dreaming up pleasant stories for the audience.
There are many places where one might further develop this point. Let me just mention one, since it bears upon something we have already read and discussed. The story of Acis and Galatea (which begins on page 318) reintroduces us to Polyphemos the Cyclops (before the incident with Ulysses). But in this incident Polyphemos has been transformed into a comic lover, deliberately satirized in order to give the reader a good laugh, as he sings the praises of his ugly appearance and his single eye. As usual, Ovid focuses upon the psychology of suffering and resolves the story with a brutal transformation. But there is nothing in this story of what we might find in the Odyssey--some insight into the nature of the semi-divine in the wilderness or in the heroic character of Odysseus or the hostility of a powerful god like Poseidon. The monster here works so well as a pathetically comic figure precisely because we do not have to take him seriously.

Another way of saying this is to claim that Ovid takes the gods off Olympos and puts them into our drawing rooms and literary salons:

Mythology so handled is brought and kept firmly within the realm of the familiar. . . . [B]y giving life to the inanimate and rendering the divine human, Ovid makes mythology the everyday, flesh-and-blood world of his reader. Humor is one of the consequences. And at the same time, it works to confine the meaning of mythology. The injection of humor inoculates mythology against excessive solemnity; it shuts out interpretations which tend to reduce man to a figure within some abstract scheme, whether moral or historical, political or theological. Ovid's version of mythology intimates that the past was not larger than life: it was like the present. There were no heroes: mankind was made up of men like ourselves. No gods preside over the course of events or represent a principle like justice. (Solodow 108).

We might want to sum this up by claiming that if there is some coordinating vision that we take away from Ovid's poem, it is that there is no vision be had, other than the deliberately fictional world created by the poem. There is no mysterious universe to celebrate, worship, or be fearful about. There is only the pleasure to be derived from the poem, which exists independent of any frame of meaning beyond the links it establishes with other works of literature.

In a sense, especially in comparison with what we have read, we might like to call this tendency an indication of literary decadence. By that I mean that in this poem to a large degree the style has taken over from the substance, and we have moved to a new form of literary expression (for us), one in which the art is celebrated for its own sake, for the wit, inventiveness, skill, and scholarship of the poet, rather than for some illuminating insight.

I mention this in passing in order to mention that we should be familiar with this decadence, for our own artistic age is full of it. We celebrate style in theatre, the visual arts, and film (to name only three areas) by our preoccupation with style, especially with originality, special effects, and sensation, and pay relatively less attention to the sense, that is, to the content. Even much of our most serious fiction, like the English Patient, for example, is deliberately written to celebrate its own achievement as art. So in a sense we are well equipped to understand and appreciate Ovid's techniques, his humor, and his general debunking of any attempts to explore anything beyond the complexities of the fiction itself.

Postscript on Ovid's Popularity

Now, while it may seem paradoxical, it may be that this quality of Ovid's poem is one great reason for its lasting popularity. Since it puts no pressure on us to enter into a comprehensive and coherent world vision different from our own, we can easily adapt it to our own purposes without tension, without, that is, a sense that we are violating the essential basis of the poem.

Hence, we can draw on Ovid for all sorts of poetic resources or else interpret the poem in such a way as to fit our own visions. The extraordinary tendency of the Middle Ages to moralize Ovid, to force onto the poem very didactic interpretations entirely consistent with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, becomes easier to understand. This habit is indeed putting something into the poem that is not there, but it is not displacing or violating some central vision of things. Thus, we do not have to be afraid of it or ban it; we simply need to adapt it, retaining the inherently interesting style of the narratives and imposing upon it the best construction which suits our fancy.

Bibliography

Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957.

Martindale, Charles, ed. Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Solodow, Joseph B. The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. W. F. Jackson Knight. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970