Metamorphosis

by Ovid

Metamorphosis (Penguin Classics)

300 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horatius, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
Ovid is most famous for the Metamorphoses, a continuous mythological narrative in fifteen books written in dactylic hexameters. He is also known for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") and Fasti. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.

Reviews

[Cory Primm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Ovid because I wondered who inspired Shakespeare the most, to which the Google gods agreed Ovid. I had watched a youtube on The Metamorphosis that described the possible meanings inside...
The translation I read was from the Thousand Oaks library.

Ovid's Metamorphosis- from creation myths to cultural explanations to courtships to what appear to be his reframing of other myths- it is hard to sum it up as if there was one meaning- where Dostoevsky brings his divergent voices together, the myths are just wild separate tales of transformation, in a way it is even more polyphonic- the storyteller a kind of Morpheus invoking different masks. It escapes category of like or dislike and has to be treated as something great and with hidden meanings. For me personally I prefer to remember what struck me strongest- Medea's soliloquy where she wrestles her duty to her country against her passion for Jason, Ceyx and Alcyone's tragedy- specifically the shipwreck, the myth of Atalantis...

Escaping all this is the style, which depends on the translator, but is maddening with the wonder or glee or horror it can create in so few words. Ovid dwells and leaps, his language teases and asserts. He is not afraid of the holiest or the most profane, all subjects he gives voice in short intervals.

The only problem in reading it is Ovid jumps so fast between characters and tales that I need to reread it to remember again what I liked. But, in relation to other works, we find it prior, though it reads like a poet's dream- take the story of Narcissus- which has now been declared by psychology to be a factual phenomenon. Sure Ovid's Metamorphosis might be the lie that tells a truth, but its an entirely fantastical account- that so-called psychologists will steal from later to argue for their own ideas.

And compare it with Kafka's Metamorphosis- there is a metamorphosis too in Ovid's- the Metamorphoseses change over time... Maybe there are 4 types? Maybe more. The first are creation stories- which themselves are a kind of account for how something came from nothing. The next are moral warning stories, or other kind of phenomena explanation stories where either a person wrongs a god and is punished or a person suffers a tragedy and the god feels bad and transforms them to something immortal. Specifically the myths of Venus&Adonis where she rushes down to the Fates and tells them she will win in the end, by immortalizing Adonis as a flower. And the story of Arachne who challenges Minerva to a tapestry contest, and ties with the goddess and is punished for being an equal to the goddess' craft. Amidst these types, there is the introduction of the war with self inner narrative- a process that Shakespeare and others employ often. Hamlet's speech is of this type, an inner turmoil which maybe unites all thought. It could be the same as Plato's "Leonitus"- the torn character with two different goals fighting eachother in themself.

Then there are the more historical transformations near the end that explain the rise of Rome, and a plea by Pythagoras to not eat meat because since we all are transformed we may be eating an ancestor. Pythagoras' account also seems to be the exit argument of metamorphoses- that things are always changing- that the nature of the world is and will always be a change. Taken together they show a Greek and Roman way of understanding the world- 1) that there was some event which separated our current world from chaos, 2) that when society began there were these moral stories 3) after the simple cause and effect of laws and explanation of the external world, man began questioning his own self 4) that there was some kind of movement from ancient Greece to modern Rome 5) An appeal to change morals based on the concept of metamorphosis itself - to see that a pig may be your sister punished by some god. 6) A totality of metamorphosis when considering all the stories together- that big and small, everything is a story, that all things are changing, coming and going out of existence, that the future types of metamorphosis may be different with their stories as all the metamorphoses were different- but a metamorphosis necessarily

*When comparing Kafka's Metamorphosis, it relates and does not to this story. Kafka's Gregor is like Ovid's Medea in its introspection. But Gregor is like Arachne without the justification in his physical transformation. We can only propose reasons for his transformation in Kafka, wheras the narrator tells us why the transformation took place in Ovid. Of note is also that the whole story takes place inside, Gregor is as much imprisoned in his house as he is in his room, as he is in the new form of an insect. Stanley Corngold argued convincingly that Kafka's Metamorphosis was 'the metamorphosis of the metaphor'- or a kind of antimetaphor, a metaphor who suffers since he cannot survive.

**I have not had enough coffee at this moment to vivisect the cockroach of Gregor, since he is mysteriously opaque in Ovid's terms, but, I do not think Kafka opposes Ovid, but fits within his system- since Ovid's merely told many stories linked by their metamorphosis- he is silent on metaphors and their actuality or imaginary nature... The only telling difference is the metamorphosis without explanation- In Greek and Rome maybe this would have been a double jump that was too laughable for those people? In those terms, they explained why the spider came to be- and Kafka's account just posits: there is this impossible creature, who necessarily dies since he is so inconsistent with his setting. Kafka's metamorphosis makes more sense told backwards.

***But maybe Kafka's story allows one to be directly opposed to Ovid. It's a demonstration that we don't retain identities when we are changed. And in Kafka one interpretation is that it is a story of ostracization based off societal or filial associations- hence why Gregor passes immediately once his family no longer recognizes him as himself. Translated into Ovid- when Arachne becomes a spider, she dies- there is no more Arachne just as there was no more Gregor in the word of Grete. Metaphors are impossible the way metamorphosis is impossible. A self if it is equal to itself necessarily isn't different.