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- Herausgeber: Studium Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
This part of Ovid's 'Theban History' recounts the confrontation of Pentheus, king of Thebes, with his divine cousin, Bacchus, the god of wine. Notwithstanding the warnings of the seer Tiresias and the cautionary tale of a character Acoetes (perhaps Bacchus in disguise), who tells of how the god once transformed a group of blasphemous sailors into dolphins, Pentheus refuses to acknowledge the divinity of Bacchus or allow his worship at Thebes. Enraged, yet curious to witness the orgiastic rites of the nascent cult, Pentheus conceals himself in a grove on Mt. Cithaeron near the locus of the ceremonies. But in the course of the rites he is spotted by the female participants who rush upon him in a delusional frenzy, his mother and sisters in the vanguard, and tear him limb from limb. This course book offers a wide-ranging introduction, the original Latin text, study aids with vocabulary, and an extensive commentary. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Gildenhard and Zissos's incisive commentary will be of particular interest to students of Latin at AS and undergraduate level. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Ovid's poetry and discussion of the most recent scholarly thought.
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Ovid, Metamorphoses (3.511–733)
Acknowledgements
The present volume joins other commentaries in the OBP Classics Textbook Series, which is designed to offer support and stimulation to student-readers. We would like to express our gratitude to Alessandra Tosi for her patience throughout a longer gestation period than she must have initially hoped for and Inge Gildenhard for supplying the illustrations. A special thanks goes to John Henderson, who twice, virtually overnight, supplied us per litteras with copious notes of nonpareil insight. We have incorporated a number of his notes into the Introduction and the Commentary, attributing these simply to ‘John Henderson’ (to be distinguished from A. A. R. Henderson, whose commentary on Metamorphoses 3 we occasionally cite as ‘Henderson 1979’). He tried his best to inject the project with an appropriate dose of Dionysiac spirit, and if readers don’t find the final product as tipsy as it ought to be, the blame’s on us.
* * *
Note on translations : unless indicated otherwise, translations of Greek and Latin texts are from the Loeb Classical Library, often somewhat modified.
Abbreviations
Symbols and Terms
§
Indicates a section (e.g. of the Introduction or of a reference work).
*
Indicates a term defined in either Appendix 1 (Versification) or Appendix 2 (Glossary of Rhetorical and Syntactic Figures).
⌣
Indicates a syllable that scans short (for details of scansion, see Appendix 1).
—
Indicates a syllable that scans long (for details of scansion, see Appendix 1).
CE/BCE
Common Era/Before Common Era (a designation for the calendar year, equivalent to AD/BC). In this volume CE should be assumed when no indication is provided.
Comm.
Refers to the Commentary in this volume.
Intro.
Refers to the Introduction (normally with following section specification).
n.
Refers to an entry in the Commentary (normally with preceding line specification).
Reference Works
AG
Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges
, edited by J. B. Greenough, G. L. Kitteredge, A. A. Howard, and B. L. D’Ooge (Boston, 1903).
CIL
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
(Berlin, 1862).
L-S
A Latin Dictionary
, edited by C. T. Lewis and C. Short (Oxford, 1879).
LSJ
A Greek-English Lexicon
, 9th edition, with Supplement, edited by H. J. Liddle and R. Scott, revised by H. S. Jones (Oxford, 1968)
OLD
Oxford Latin Dictionary
, edited by P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1968–82).
TLL
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
(Leipzig, 1900).
Grammatical Terms
Ancient Literature
Apollod.
Apollodorus,
Bibliotheca (Library)
Ap. Rhod.
Apollonius Rhodius,
Argonautica
Apul.
Apuleius
Met.
Metamophoses (or Golden Ass)
Arat.
Aratus
Phaen.
Phaenomena
Cat.
Catullus,
Carmina (Poems)
Cic.
Cicero
Fam.
Epistulae ad Familiares (Letters to his Friends)
Leg.
De Legibus (On the Law)
Nat. D.
De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods)
Enn.
Ennius
Ann.
Annales (Annals)
Eur.
Euripides
Bacch.
Bacchae
Hdt.
Herodotus,
Histories
Hes.
Hesiod
Op.
Opera et Dies (Works and Days)
Hom.
Homer
Il.
Iliad
Od.
Odyssey
Hor.
Horace
Carm.
Carmina (Odes)
Epod.
Epodes
Hyg.
Hyginus
Fab.
Fabulae
Hymn. Hom.
Homeric Hymns
Liv.
Livy,
Ab urbe condita
Luc.
Lucan,
Bellum Civile (Civil War)
Lucr.
Lucretius,
De Rerum Natura
Mart.
Martial
Ep.
Epigrams
Ov.
Ovid
Am.
Amores
Ars
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)
Fast.
Fasti
Her.
Heroides
Met.
Metamorphoses
Trist.
Tristia
Plaut.
Plautus
Cas.
Casina
Merc.
Mercator
Plin.
Pliny (the Elder)
NH
Naturalis Historia (Natural History)
Plut.
Plutarch
Caes.
Caesar
Prop.
Propertius,
Carmina (Poems)
Sen.
Seneca (the Younger)
Oed.
Oedipus
Serv.
Statius
Ach.
Achilleid
Silv.
Silvae
Theb.
Thebaid
Suet.
Suetonis
Aug.
Divus Augustus (Life of Augustus)
Theoc.
Theocritus
Id.
Idylls
Val. Max.
Valerius Maximus
Val. Flacc.
Valerius Flaccus,
Argonautica
Varr.
Varro
Ling.
De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language)
Virg.
Virgil
Aen.
Aeneid
Ecl.
Eclogues
G.
Georgics
INTRODUCTION
1. Ovid and His Times
Ovid, or (to give him his full Roman name) Publius Ovidius Naso, was born in 43 BCE to a prominent equestrian family in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), a small town about 140 km east of Rome. He died in banishment, a resident of Tomi on the Black Sea, in 17 CE. Ovid was one of the most prolific authors of his day, as well as one of the most controversial.1 He had always been constitutionally unable to write anything in prose — or so he claims in his autobiography (composed, of course, in verse). Whatever flowed from his pen was in metre, even after his father had told him to put an end to such nonsense:
saepe pater dixit ‘studium quid inutile temptas?Maeonides2 nullas ipse reliquit opes’. motus eram dictis, totoque Helicone3 relictoscribere temptabam verba soluta modis. sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,et quod temptabam dicere versus erat. (Trist. 4.10.21–26) My father often said, ‘Why try a uselessVocation? Even Homer left no wealth’. So I obeyed, all Helicon abandoned,And tried to write in prose that did not scan. But poetry in metre came unbidden,And what I tried to write in verses ran. (tr. Melville)
Students of Latin may well be familiar with Naso senior’s banausic attitude: classics graduates, some wrongly assume, have similarly dismal career prospects. But eventually Ovid would shrug off paternal disapproval in pursuit of his passion. After dutifully filling certain minor offices, he chose not to go on to the quaestorship, thereby definitively renouncing all ambition for a senatorial career. In his case, the outcome was an oeuvre for the ages. For quick orientation, here is a time-line with the basics:4
Battle of Actium
Secular Games; Augustus adopts Gaius and LuciusAugustus dies; Tiberius accedes
Time-line
Historical Events
Ovid's Biography
Literary History
50s BCE
Catullus, Lucretius
44
Julius Caesar murdered
43
Cicero murdered
Ovid born
30s
[Gallus
Amores
1-4 (lost)], Horace
Epodes
35
Virgil
Eclogues
Horace
Satires
1
31
29
Virgil
Georgics
27
Octavian becomes 'Augustus'
Early 20s
Livy 1-10
20s
Propertius 1-3, Tibullus, 1, Horace
Odes
1-3,
Epistles
1
19
Virgil
Aeneid,
Tibullus 1-2
18
Leges Iuliae
(initial Augustan marriage legislation)
17
Horace
Carmen Saeculare
16
Propertius 4
10s-0s
Amores
1-3,
Heroides, Medicamina faciei femineae, Medea
(a lost tragedy)
Horace
Ars Poetica, Epistles
2,
Odes
4
2 BCE
Ars Amatoria
1-2
1 CE
Birth of Jesus
2
Ars Amatoria
3 and
Remedia Amoris
4
Augustus adopts Tiberius
8
Scandal at court; Augustus relegates Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea
Finished just before the relegation (?):
Metamorphoses
1-15,
Fasti
1-6
8-17
Tristia
1-5,
Epistulae ex Ponto
1-4,
Ibis, Double Heroides
14
Manilius
Astronomica
Ovid dies
Livy dies
Ovid was born when the Republic, the oligarchic system of government that had ruled Rome for centuries, was in its death throes. He was a teenager at the time of the Battle of Actium, the final showdown between Mark Antony and Octavian that saw the latter emerge victorious, become the first princeps, and eventually take the honorific title ‘Augustus’ by which he is better known to posterity. Unlike other major poets of the so-called ‘Augustan Age’ — Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus — Ovid never experienced a fully functional form of republican government, the libera res publica in whose cause figures like Cato and even Cicero ultimately died. There is another important difference between Ovid and most of the other major Augustan poets: he did not have a ‘patronfriend’, such as Maecenas (a close adviser of the princeps who, in the 30s, ‘befriended’ Virgil, Horace and Propertius) or Messalla, the amateur poet and power-politician to whom Tibullus dedicates his poetry. Ovid came from a prominent family and was financially self-sufficient: this left him free — or so he must have thought — to let rip his insouciant imagination.
A consummate urbanite, Ovid enjoyed himself and was an immensely popular figure in the fashionable society of Augustan Rome. He was more than happy to endorse the myth that the founding hero Aeneas and thus the city itself had Venus in their DNA (just spell Roma backwards!). For him Rome was first and foremost the city of Love and Sex and his (early) verse reads like an ancient version of ‘Sex and the City’.
Eventually, though, Ovid ran afoul of the regime. In 8 CE, when he was fifty years old, Ovid was implicated in a lurid court scandal that also involved Augustus’ niece Julia and was relegated by the emperor to Tomi, a town on the Black Sea (the sea-port Constanța in present-day Romania).5 The reasons, so Ovid himself tells us, were a ‘poem and a mistake’ (‘carmen et error’, Trist. 2.207). He goes on to identify the poem as the Ars Amatoria — which had, however, been published a full ten years earlier — but declines to elaborate on the ‘mistake’, on the grounds that it would be too painful for Augustus. He maintained this reticent pose for the rest of his life, so what the error was is now anybody’s guess (and many have been made). In any event, despite Ovid’s pleas the hoped-for recall never came, even after the death of Augustus, and he was forced to pine away the rest of his life far from his beloved Rome. He characterizes Tomi as a primitive and dreary town, located in the middle of nowhere, even though archaeological evidence suggests that it was a pleasant seaside resort. And while his poetry continued to flow, it did so in a very different vein from the light-hearted exuberance that characterizes his earlier ‘Roman’ output; the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto explore the potential of the elegiac distich (a verse-form consisting of a six-foot hexameter and a five-foot pentameter in alternation: the metre of mourning as well as love) to articulate grief. But on his career trajectory from eros to exile, Ovid made forays into non-elegiac genres: tragedy (his lost play Medea) and, of course, epic. In the following section we will explore Ovid’s playful encoding, in a range of texts, of his longstanding epic ambition and its final realization in the Metamorphoses.
1 Introductions to Ovid abound. See e.g. Mack (1988), Holzberg (2002), Fantham (2004), Volk (2010), Liveley (2011). There are also three recent ‘companions’ to Ovid, i.e. collections of papers designed to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the poet and his works. See Hardie (2002b) (by far the best and most affordable), Weiden Boyd (2000) and Knox (2009).
4 A good way to get a sense of his life and career is to read his highly spun autobiography Trist. 4.10, which begins with a charming couplet addressed to you: Ille ego qui fuerim, tenerorum lusor amorum, | quem legis, ut noris, accipe posteritas … (‘That you may know who I was, I that playful poet of tender love whom you read, hear my words, you of times to come …’)
5 Technically speaking, Ovid suffered the punishment of relegatio (‘deportation’) rather than the more severe penalty of exilium (‘exile’) — the poet himself stresses the distinction at Trist. 2.137. This meant that Ovid retained citizenship and many of the rights that went with it, and his property was not confiscated. His (third) wife Fabia did not accompany him to Tomi, but seems to have remained faithful to him.
2. Ovid’s Literary Progression: Elegy to Epic
When the first edition of the Metamorphoses hit the shelves in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city.6 His official debut, the Amores (‘Love Affairs’) lured his tickled readers into a freewheeling world of elegiac love, slaphappy hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery.7 His subsequent Heroides (‘Letters written by Heroines to their absent Hero-Lovers’) were also designed to appeal to connoisseurs of elegiac poetry, who could here share vicariously in stirring emotional turmoil with abandoned women of history and myth: Ovid, well attuned to female plight, provided the traditional heroes’ other (better?) halves with a literary forum for voicing feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing resentment for the epic way of life. Of more practical application for the Roman lady of the world were his verses on toiletry, the Medicamina Faciei (‘Ointments of the Face, or, How to Apply Make-up’). Once Ovid had discovered his talent for didactic exposition, he blithely continued in that vein. In perusing the urbane and sophisticated lessons on love which the self-proclaimed erotodidaskalos (‘teacher of love’) presented in his Ars Amatoria (‘A — Z of Love’) his male (and female) audience could hone their own amatory skills, while at the same time experiencing true ‘jouissance’ (the French term for orgasmic bliss, for the sophisticates among you) in the act of reading a work, which is, as one critic put it, ‘a poem about poetry, and sex, and poetry as sex’.8
After these extensive sessions in poetic philandering, Ovid’s ancient readers, by then all hopeless and desperate eros-addicts, surely welcomed the thoughtful antidote he offers in the form of the therapeutic Remedia Amoris (‘Cures for Love’), a poem written with the expressed purpose of freeing the wretched lover from the baneful shackles of Cupid. To cut a long story short: by the time the Metamorphoses were published, Ovid’s devotees had had ample opportunity to revel in the variety of his literary output about the workings of Eros, and each time, the so-called elegiac distich provided the metrical form. Publius Ovidius Naso had become, apart from a brief flirtation with the genre of tragedy (the lost Medea, written in Latin iambic trimeters), a virtual synonym for the composition of erotic-elegiac verse. But picking up and un-scrolling any one of the fifteen books that contained the Metamorphoses, a reader familiar with Ovid’s literary career is in for a shock. Here are the first four lines of the work, which make up its proem:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illa) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen. (Met. 1.1–4)
My mind compels me to sing of shapes changed into new bodies: gods, on my endeavours (for you have changed them too) breathe your inspiration, and from the very beginning of the world to my own times bring down this continuous song.
A mere glance at the layout (no indentations in alternate lines!) suffices to confirm that Ovid has definitively changed poetic metiers (as the ‘change’ of verse between formas and corpora makes a ‘new’ syntactical role for the opening phrase In nova).9 In his newest work the foreshortened pentameters, which until now had been a defining characteristic of his poetry, have disappeared. Instead, row upon steady row of sturdy and well-proportioned hexameters confront the incredulous reader. Ovid, the celebrated master of the distich, the notorious tenerorum lusor amorum (‘the playboy of light-hearted love-poetry’ as he calls himself), the unrivalled champion of erotic-elegiac poetry, has produced a work written in ‘heroic verse’ — as the epic metre is portentously called.
But once the initial shock has worn off, readers familiar with Ovid’s earlier output are bound to experience a sense of déjà vu (as the French say of what they have seen before). Ovid, while devoting his previous career to versifying things erotic, had always shown an inclination towards epic poetry. Already in the introductory elegy to the first book of the Amores, the neophyte announced that he was writing elegies merely by default. His true ambition lay elsewhere; he had actually meant to write an epic:
Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabamedere, materia conveniente modis. par erat inferior versus — risisse Cupidodicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem. (Am. 1.1.1–4)
About arms and violent wars I was getting ready to compose in the weighty hexameter. The material matched the metrical form: the second verse was of equal length to the first — but Cupid (they say) smiled and snatched away one of the feet.10
As can be gathered from pointed allusions to the Aeneid (which begins Arma virumque cano: ‘I sing of arms and the man’) at the opening, the poem Ovid set out to write before Cupid intervened would have been no routine piece of work, but rather an epic of such martial grandeur as to challenge Virgil’s masterpiece. Ovid’s choice of the hexameter for the Metamorphoses signals that he has finally realized his long-standing ambition to compose an epic. But already the witty features of the proem (starting with its minuscule length: four meagre lines for a work of fifteen books!) indicate that his embrace of the genre is to be distinctly double-edged. And, indeed, his take on epic is as unconventional as his efforts in elegiac and didactic poetry had been. Just as the Amores spoofed the more serious output of his elegiac predecessors Propertius and Tibullus and his string of didactic works (the Ars Amatoria, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei) spoofed more serious ventures in the genre such as Virgil’s Georgics (a poem on farming), so the Metamorphoses has mischievous fun with, while at the same time also outperforming, the Greco-Roman epic tradition from Homer to Virgil. It is arguably the most unusual epic to have come down to us from antiquity — as well as one of the most influential.
6 The following is adapted from Gildenhard and Zissos (2000b).
7 You can read the first book of the Amores on-line in another OBP edition. See http:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/348
8 Sharrock (1994) vii.
9 Initially, the reader might be inclined to take the first four words (In nova fert animus: ‘my mind carries me on to new things’, with the adjective nova used as a noun) as a self-standing syntactic unit; only after reaching the opening of line 2 do we realise that nova in fact modifies corpora and the phrase goes with the participle mutatas (‘forms changed into new bodies’).
10 By removing one of the feet from the second verse, Cupid in effect changed the genre of the poem Ovid was composing from epic (in which all verses are hexametric — i.e. contain six feet) to elegy (in which every second verse contains five feet).
3. The Metamorphoses: A Literary Monstrum
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid parades a truly dazzling array of mythological and (as the epic progresses) historical matter before his audience. Aristotelian principles of narrative unity and ‘classical’ plotting have clearly fallen by the wayside. In breathtaking succession, the fast-paced narrative takes his readers from the initial creation myths to the gardens of Pomona, from the wilful intrusion of Amor into his epic narrative in the Apollo and Daphne episode to the ill-starred marriage feast of Pirithous and Hippodame (ending in an all out brawl, mass-slaughter, and a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ scene between two centaurs), from the Argonauts’ voyage to Colchis to Orpheus’ underworld descent (to win back his beloved Eurydice from the realms of the dead), from the charming rustic couple Philemon and Baucis to the philosopher Pythagoras expounding on nature and history, from the creative destruction of Greek cultural centres such as Thebes in the early books to the rise of Rome and the apotheosis of the Caesars at the end. As Ovid proceeds through this remarkable assortment of material, the reader traverses the entire cosmos, from the top of Mount Olympus where Jupiter presides over the council of the gods to the pits of Tartarus where the dreadful Furies hold sway, from far East where, at dawn, Sol mounts his fiery chariot to far West where his son Phaethon, struck by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, plunges headlong into the Eridanus river. Within the capacious geographical boundaries of his fictional world, Ovid’s narrative focus switches rapidly from the divine elegiac lover Apollo to the resolute virgin Diana, from the blasphemer Lycaon to the boar slaying Meleager, from the polymorphic sexual exploits of Pater Omnipotens to the counterattacks of his vengeful wife Juno. At one point the poet flaunts blameless Philomela’s severed tongue waggling disconcertingly on the ground, at another he recounts the dismemberment of the Thessalian tyrant Pelias at the hands of his devoted daughters. On a first encounter the centrifugal diversity of the narrative material which Ovid presents in his carmen perpetuum (‘continuous song’) is bound to have a disorienting, even unsettling effect on the reader. How is anyone to come to critical terms with the astonishing variety of narrative configurations that Ovid displays in this ever-shifting poetic kaleidoscope?11
11 On varietas (‘variety’) in Latin literature more generally see now Fitzgerald (2016).
3a. Genre Matters
The hexametric form, the cosmic scope and the sheer scale of the Metamorphoses all attest to its epic affiliations. As just discussed, the poem’s opening verses seem to affirm that Ovid realized his longstanding aspiration to match himself against Virgil in the most lofty of poetic genres. But as soon as one scratches the surface, myriad difficulties emerge. Even if we choose to assign the Metamorphoses to the category of epic poetry, idiosyncrasies abound. A tabular comparison with other well-known instances of the genre brings out a few of its fundamental oddities:
Author
Title
Length
Main Theme
Protagonist
Homer
Iliad
24 Books
Wrath and War
Achilles
Homer
Odyssey
24 Books
Return/Civil War
Odysseus
Apollonius Rhodius
Argonautica
4 Books
Travel and Adventure
Jason
Ennius
Annals
15/18 Books
Men and their deeds
Roman nobles
Virgil
Aeneid
12 Books
Arms and the Man
Aeneas
Ovid
Metamorphoses
15 Books
Transformation
The tally of fifteen books, while deviating from the ‘multiple-of-four-or-six’ principle canonized by Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and Virgil, at least has a precedent in Ennius’ Annals.12 But Ovid’s main theme and his choice of protagonist are decidedly peculiar (as will be discussed in the following sections). And then there is the playfulness of the narrative, its pervasive reflexivity, and its often arch or insouciant tone — elements largely absent from earlier instantiations of the genre. ‘The Metamorphoses is perhaps Ovid’s most innovative work, an epic on a majestic scale that refuses to take epic seriously’.13 Indeed, the heated and ultimately inconclusive debate that has flared up around the question of whether the Metamorphoses is an epic, an eroticization of epic, a parody of epic, a conglomeration of genres granted equal rights, an epic sui generis or simply a poem sui generis might seem to indicate that Ovid has achieved a total breakdown of generic conventions, voiding the validity of generic analysis altogether. Karl Galinsky once cautioned that ‘it would be misguided to pin the label of any genre on the Metamorphoses’.14 But does Ovid, in this poem, really dance outside genre altogether? Recent scholarship on the Metamorphoses suggests that the answer is ‘no’. Stephen Hinds articulates the issue at stake very well; in reconsidering the classic distinction between Ovidian epic and elegy, he remarks that
… in the opening lines [of the Metamorphoses], the epic criterion is immediately established as relevant, even if only as a point of reference for generic conflict … Boundaries are crossed and recrossed as in no poem before. Elements characteristic of elegy, bucolic, didactic, tragedy, comedy and oratory mingle with elements variously characteristic of the grand epic tradition and with each other … However, wherever its shifts may take it, the metre, bulk and scope of the poem ensures that the question implied in that opening paradox will never be completely eclipsed: namely in what sense is the Metamorphoses an epic?15
In other words, denying the Metamorphoses the status of epic (or at least epic aspiration) means depriving the text of one of its most intriguing constitutive tensions. Ovid needs the seriousness, the ideology and the reputation of epic as medium for his frivolous poetics, as the ultimate sublime for his exercise in generic deconstruction and as the conceptual matrix for the savvy of his metageneric artistry (i.e. artistry that self-consciously, if often implicitly, reflects on generic matters). Within this epic undertaking, most other genres find their place as well — not least in the set text where elements of epic, oratory, hymnic poetry, tragedy, and bucolic all register (and intermingle).
Scholars are again divided on how best to handle the multiplicity of generic voices that Ovid has included in the Metamorphoses. Are we perhaps dealing with ‘epic pastiche’? One critic answers in the affirmative: ‘For my purposes … the long poem in hexameters is a pastiche epic whose formal qualities are shaped by an invented genre that is at once ad hoc and sui generis, one with no real ancestors but with many and various offspring’.16 But another objects that ‘it is a mistake often made to identify one section of the Metamorphoses as “elegiac”, another as “epic”, another as “comic”, another as “tragic”, as if Ovid put together a pastiche of genres. Actually, elements of all these genres, and others as well, are as likely as not to appear together in any given story’.17 Arguably a more promising way to think critically about the generic presences in Ovid’s poem is to see the genres in dialogue with one another in ways that are mutually enriching.18 All genres have their own distinctive emphasis and outlook, and to have several of them at work at the same time challenges us, the readers, to negotiate sudden changes in register and perspective, keeping us on our toes.
13 Mack (1988) 27.
14 Galinsky (1975) 41.
15 Hinds (1987) 121.
16 Johnson (1996) 9.
17 Tissol (1996) 151–52.
18 For generic dialogue see Farrell (1992); for ‘generic enrichment’ Harrison (2007).
3b. A Collection of Metamorphic Tales
Its hexametric form aside, the most striking formal feature of the Metamorphoses is that, as its title announces, it strings together a vast number of more or less distinct tales, each of which features a metamorphosis — that is, a magical or supernatural transformation of some kind. In composing a poem of this type, Ovid was working within a tradition of metamorphic literature that had blossomed a few centuries earlier in Hellenistic culture. In terms of his apparent generic aspirations, Ovid’s main theme (and hence his title) is unequivocally — and shockingly — unorthodox: before him, ‘transformative change’ was a subject principally cultivated in Hellenistic catalogue poetry, which is about as un-epic in scope and conception as literature can get.19
