Love and Transformation: An Ovid Reader

by Richard A. LaFleur

English, Latin

Genres: Classics

150 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1994

About the author

Richard A. LaFleur is Franklin Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Georgia, where he taught from 1972 to 2012 and served for 21 years as head of one of the largest Classics and Latin programs in North America.

Reviews

[max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Various moldy old Latin schoolbooks from the late nineteenth century crowd my bookshelves. Each time I open one up I am filled with a keen nostalgia for a lost age. Did this age actually exist, or is it rather a fanciful mirage arising out of my dismay with the dumbed down state of modern education? Perhaps a little of both. Latin was rammed into the head of many an unwilling student, and there were surely as many dunces in the schoolrooms of yesteryear as there are today. I console myself with the knowledge that while far fewer students study this language today, many are very happily engaged with it as an elective subject.

In addition to Caesar and Cicero and Vergil -- the great triumvirate of high school authors -- Ovid held a place of major importance in the school curriculum of yesteryear, although the high water mark of interest in his works occurred in the Renaissance. Walk through any museum in any big city in the world and you will be confronted with grand paintings on themes that trace their inspiration directly to Ovid's Metamorphoses. The great painters went wild with Ovid, because he is the most painterly of Roman authors. His stories are vivid sketches with alternating tragic and comic tones, shifting narrative perspectives, and a richly ironic palette.

Some scenes are written in such a self-consciously artistic way that they actually summon up in the mind's eye a painting -- for example, the nymphs who attend Diana in the story of Actaeon in Book III. Ovid sets the scene at a cave in the woods where, as he puts it, "nature by her own native talent had imitated art." As Ovid adds one charming brush stroke after another, one can easily envision a classical painting from the Renaissance or later. Here a train of nymphs busily attends the goddess at the clear spring where she is preparing to bathe after a morning hunt: to one she hands over her hunting spear and bow and quiver; another assists in disrobing her; one unties her sandal, Crocale binds her hair, others take up water for her, to wit, Niphele (wash), Hyale (transparent), Rhanis (sprinkle), Psecas (dewdrop), and Phiale (cup). In this brilliant episode, Ovid's artistry transcends the literary mode altogether and becomes in effect a word painting.

And there is more, equally famous. Apollo chasing down Daphne as she turns into a tree; Orpheus turning around (you knew this would happen, didn't you, rulers of Hades?) to watch Eurydice vanish back into the murky gloom of Hades; Thisbe taking her life at the tomb of Ninus after discovering her dead lover Pyramus; Icarus dropping out of the sky after the sun's heat melts the wax that bound his wings together .... and on and on.

Midas, Phaethon, Arethusa, Arachne, epic set pieces like the quest for the golden fleece or the head of Medusa -- they are all in Ovid, and they are the very bedrock of what E.D. Hirsch likes to call "cultural literacy." It is well nigh impossible to think of a single author who is more delightfully entertaining, more brilliant and more talented than Ovid. After food and sex, his delightful poetry is number three among life's top sensual pleasures.

I have used this book several times in the past few years in an upper level h.s. Latin class. It is, in my view, the best book currently available for the study of Ovid by h.s. students. It has an attractively sized font, running vocabulary, and many individual notes that point out important features of Ovid's poetry: word arrangements, sound, meter, and figurative devices.

It has an excellent introduction, a complete vocabulary at the back of the volume, and a list of rhetorical terms and figures of speech that students must be familiar with to appreciate Ovid's style. And it contains Ovid's greatest hits: Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Daedalus and Icarus, Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Baucis and Philemon. Amores 1.1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12 and 3.15 are also included. These poems in particular are remarkably witty and sophisticated reflections on love and poetry and their interrelationships.

Ovid is one of the most important Roman authors, one whose influence on the major English writers (Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare) was clearly greater even than that of Vergil. By the nineteenth century he had fallen into disfavor, due to a perception that he was too rhetorical, too insincere, too superficial for Romantic tastes. These are criticisms that were already suggested by Quintilian, who concluded that Ovid was "too much a lover of his own native talent." And yet, while there is some truth to these judgments (see one of my own below), The Metamorphoses reveals an extraordinary depth of literary sophistication, psychological insight and narrative inventiveness.

Ovid is strikingly modern, protean, innovative, and subversive. He is at his best when he is probing the full spectrum of human love and sexuality, from insane, mind-warping lust (Apollo's pursuit of Daphne and many other stories) to the deep and tender devotion shared by such characters as Baucis and Philemon and Deucalion and Pyrrha.

He is an outrageous egoist, as when, for example, he writes (in one of the Amores not in the text under review) with remorse about striking his girlfriend: "Diomedes was the first to wound a goddess, I am the second." Or when he compares the night of his exile from Rome to the fall of Troy.

In the end, Ovid is a poet -- a classical poet whose dazzling literary art has earned him a place among the very top authors in Western literature. It really is a pity that more readers are not acquainted with him, even if only by way of translation. Perhaps one day all the silliness will end. The folks who are in charge of what young people read will shelve once and for all the silly and superficial books written by second rate authors, and those age old poets whose works are worthy of deep and intimate study will be restored. Alas, if the day ever comes, it will be long after I am quite dead and very much gone.

[Jeff Netting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought these were very good selections and that the notes, overall, were helpful. I have a few complaints. Too many of the notes were dedicated to praising Ovid or explaining how great a particular line is. I didn’t need that, and would’ve appreciated more help with the grammar. I also thought there was a decided lack of materials in the back. The dictionary is a bit light, and doesn’t include every word that appears in the text. Also, if a word is glossed in the notes on the text, it doesn’t appear in the dictionary. That doesn’t make much sense to me. I also think some supplementary material on grammar and scansion couldn’t have hurt, although the gloss of key poetry terms at the front of the book was helpful.

So, all in all, the volume is a little light, but it features good selections and the notes were helpful overall.

[Debi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teaching Ovid again this summer.

[Annu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rereading Metamorphoses for my Classics book club, fun to revisit this as well

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of helpful footnotes and commentary for my sore Latin muscles. Loved this reader!