Often the wood-nymphs tried to cradle her
In their soft arms and often sought to salve
The fever of her love, and comforted
With soothing words her heart that heard no more.
She lay in silence, clutching the small sedge,
And watering the greensward with her tears.
And these, men say, the Naiads made a rill,
For ever flowing — what could they give more?
At once, as resin drips from damaged bark,
Or asphalt oozes from the earth’s dark womb,
Or, when the west wind breathes its balm, the sun
Unlocks the water that the frost has bound,
So, wasting by her weeping all away,
Byblis became a spring.
— Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IX, translated by A.D. Melville
“Omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (Everything changes, but nothing is lost.)
— Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XIV (my translation)
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE — c. 18 CE) was born to a good family in the year after Julius Caesar’s assassination. Growing up in the embryonic empire, Ovid would have studied rhetoric, the classics, and all of the necessary requirements to make a good politician or lawyer. To the surprise of his family, he chose neither. By the time he was 18, Ovid had committed himself to poetry — not exactly a full-time profession in those days (although, being wealthy, we perhaps shouldn’t fall over ourselves to congratulate him as too much of a risk-taker). If we could use one word to describe Ovid’s poems, it would be pleasure. Not in a Catullan way, dripping with a maudlin or aggressive tone, but in a sincerely enjoyable way. And while he may have been striving for eternal greatness like Virgil (of course we don’t know), his authorial persona chooses not to show it. Peter Jones, in his fantastic textbook Reading Ovid, calls him “an entertainer, the performing flea of Roman poetry, but that should not be taken to mean that he is lightweight”. Ovid is always having fun with his audience, and one assumes having fun writing his works too. It is perhaps for this reason that he’s my desert island ancient.
Seneca the Elder tells us that schoolboy Ovid was a superstar at suasoria, rhetorical training where students had to craft an answer to a hypothesis: what would a particularly great general have done had a famous moment in history turned the other way, or what would a figure from myth have said if we could hear them in one of their most well-known anecdotes? (One example I’ve seen is “What would Love say if he were in love?”) In light of this, it’s telling that his first major work — Heroides (Heroines), published before the poet was 25 — takes such speculation as its starting point. Told in 21 poems, Ovid imagines himself inside the mind of famous figures from myth, writing letters to one another. They are primarily poems of separation and loneliness; okay, perhaps that’s not the pleasure I spoke of (we’ll get to that), but these poems are also laced with a palpable sense of character, the poet attempting to disappear into his figures. And if you want to talk about a “golden thread” that links the eras of Western literature, you’ll find it here. To name but a few figures who appear, and examples of where they’ll appear elsewhere on this list (or in high culture in general: Dido and Aeneas (Virgil, Purcell, Berlioz), Penelope and Odysseus (Homer and Joyce), Paris and Helen (Homer and Shakespeare), Jason and Medea (Euripides), Orestes (Aeschylus), Hero and Leander (Marlowe), Phaedra and Hippolytus (Racine and Shakespeare), Achilles (Homer and Shakespeare), Pygmalion (Shaw), Tiresias (Sophocles), Scylla and Circe (Homer and Joyce), and Ariadne and Theseus, from Catullus’ 64th poem. (I will direct you to a good starting point, Helen’s letter to Paris, which scholar W.M. Spackman argued contained “in embryo everything that has, since, developed into the novel of dissected motivations” that is such a glory of a literary style, citing Proust, Stendhal, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses among them.)
By 16 BCE, Ovid (now 27) was already divorcing his second wife, and moving on to his third, and found the time to write his Amores (Loves), erotic elegies with a good deal of humour. Here, the story tells of Ovid — or rather “Ovid”; much like Woody Allen, the poet takes on a persona for his work that isn’t necessarily he himself — engaged in an affair with a woman, Corinna, who is wealthier and of higher status than he. (A neat starting point here is poem 14, on Corinna ruining her hair through abundant use of dye.) This was followed by his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a practical guide book to both men and women on how to seduce.
In the year 8 CE, Ovid completed The Metamorphoses, the work for which he is best known. Across fifteen books, and some 12,000 lines, Ovid weaves together a couple of hundred myths, tied together under the theme of transformation. The hunter Actaeon accidentally spies the goddess Diana naked while bathing; she turns him into a stag, and he is killed by his own hunting dogs. Narcissus, after rejecting the nymph Echo (and everyone else), falls in love with his own image in a pool, turning into a flower. Perseus uses the head of Medusa to turn his enemies to stone. Ceres scours the Earth for her missing daughter, Proserpina. In her sorrow, Ceres (the goddess of the harvest) causes crops around the world to fail, and has to make a deal with the god of the Underworld that he can keep her daughter half of the year (the cold months) and Proserpina will return to the surface for half of the year (the fertile months). A beautiful maiden named Caenis is raped by the god Neptune before granting her one wish. Traumatised by the experience, Caenis wishes to become a man, so it will never happen again. Apollo falls desperately in love with Hyacinthus, an exquisite young man, but one day as they are playing discus (no, that’s not a euphemism), Hyacinthus is struck and killed. In his grief, Apollo turns him into the hyacinth flower in memory. And so on.
Ovid moves from the ancient legends of the gods to popular stories about heroes and the mythic past, such as Daedalus and Icarus, Hercules, and Orpheus (Pyramis and Thisbe, made infamous by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, also get their moment) to the more tangible (if still largely fictionalised) history: the Trojan Wars, the founding of Rome by Aeneas and Romulus, and the great philosophers. By choosing the art of transformation, or metamorphosis, as his guiding light, Ovid attempts to create a sort of “universal history” out of these myths, while also reminding us of how essential and everyday was the pagan view of the world in these times. People become flowers! Or rivers! Or entire constellations! People change colour, and species, and gender! At one point, mushrooms become humans! I often think about the ancient myths that have come down to us, of people condemned to fill a jug that will never fill up, or to push a boulder up a hill eternally. To us, these punishments can often seem baroque or obscure but of course, to an ancient Roman, collecting water from a well or pushing boulders to complete construction projects were very real situations. So too a belief in animism. The world of Metamorphoses is almost entirely of the forest and the plain, not urbane. Humans may exist in the world, but mythology never claims them to be the world. Despite the great scientific minds of the day, the cultural leaning was toward a mythological understanding of the world, and I find it exciting to read Ovid’s work in that context. These aren’t just fairy stories; they’re origin stories too.
Ovid is a dazzling writer, and it’s no wonder that writers as diverse as Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare made liberal use of his texts. The stories range from romantic to tragic, hilarious to moralistic. Sometimes the transformations are punishments, sometimes they are rewards (after a long and moral life, the elderly couple Baucis and Philemon are joined in death, two trees intertwined, to be together forever), and sometimes they are simply grace notes to the tale (the sublimely beautiful Adonis, after a lengthy experience with Venus that ends in his death, is turned into an anemone, but there’s perhaps no reason other than a need to wrap up the story). The stories can be heartrending, as when Daphne, after being stalked by Apollo, prays for her beauty to be obliterated as it has caused her suffering, and is turned into a tree. Rather than just detailing these stories in an anthology, Ovid loosely weaves them into a conversational narrative. The narrator’s voice has pathos and pity, often irony, sometimes wry amusement at the situations. Cupid weaves through the stories too, and the combination of love and the poet cut some of the stories down to size. The gods don’t always get off lightly. These aren’t Ovid’s stories of course — all of them existed in the popular consciousness — but his method of telling them is part of the charm. We don’t always know if it’s Ovid or “the narrator” who is making his moral pronouncements, and that’s just how he wants it.
And yet it was just this overt brilliance that cut Ovid down in a number of ways. Critically, his lack of seriousness put Ovid at a disadvantage with his contemporaries, like Virgil. In the centuries after he lived, scholars did not want to read “frivolous” writers. Especially as Christianity came to the fore, stories about transfiguration in non-Jesus related ways were simply unforgivable. We know that, until the 14th century, Ovid was very rarely read. Thankfully his ubiquity in antiquity — and the fact that his stories were ultimately mythological, and thus underpinned culture even if serious people didn’t like his particular telling of them — meant that his work survived the long, dark centuries.
Ovid engages with other authors, but he seems to deliberately avoid overlaps with Homer and Virgil. Instead he writes interstitial narratives, seeping into the gaps and lacunae in their stories, fleshing out what we already know rather than covering exactly the same ground. He metamorphoses these stories and perhaps he is famous in part because he has metamorphosed into art, into literature, into the web of stories that make up western civilisation. More modern examples of authors engaging, in turn, with Ovid include David Malouf in An Imaginary Life, a novella in which Ovid, exiled to Tomis, develops a close relationship with a boy found living in the forest, and through attempting to teach him language is himself gradually freed from his Roman way of thinking -it’s an exquisite investigation of colonialism. There’s also Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, and the 1990s work After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun) featuring retellings by 42 poets including Seamus Heaney, Alice Fulton, and Ted Hughes. Not to mention the countless cultural resonances in the world of art.
We can’t talk seriously about Metamorphoses without talking about the subject of rape. There are two questions that speak to each other: 1) why does rape sit at the heart of so many of these tales, and 2) does this invalidate the work for a 21st century audience? The answer to the first question is fairly easy. Power, patriarchy, and the period. As mentioned above, these stories drew much of their effectiveness from being — in a strange way — relateable for the average Roman. In a historical context, we should be thinking about what sex meant to Roman men and women, in a culture where marriage was a contract to further wealth and cement tribal alliances, and in which the conquering Roman empire routinely killed rebel men and sexually enslaved their women. It may be easy for readers of my generation to blast a straight white man for writing about sexual assault so abstractly now, but I don’t think they were written abstractly then. That is not to say Ovid would have had sympathy to our modern point of view, but of course while rape may be a matter-of-fact element of the stories, it’s often treated as traumatic for the victim. Female consent in Rome may not have existed as it does today, but it’s worth noting that all but one of the rapists are gods, even though many of the victims are human. In her work Reading Ovid’s Rapes (1992), Amy Richlin suggests that the act of silencing — an act of male power — may have had a parallel for many in the silencing of the state. As we will see, the Emperor and Ovid would go from friendly to enemies very quickly.
Of course, Ovid didn’t invent the assaults in the Metamorphoses any more than he invented the slavery, the war, the revenge killings, or the cruelty to animals. There are issues of historical understanding here as well as literary ones. Which brings us to the second question: can we still read Ovid after having come through half a century of feminism, equal rights, and having our (that is, men’s) eyes opened to the deeply troubling undercurrents of misogyny and toxic masculinity that have pervaded our politics, our mass media, our legal system, and our social customs? Well, unsurprisingly, I’m going to say yes, although for a more complex view check out this article at The Conversation. I’m not philosophically a big fan of “trigger warnings”, especially in an academic context, nor do I think we should rewrite literature, or censor it to better suit our morals. The argument on the other side would be that while, yes, mature adults can discuss works from other cultures without having to “agree”, this leaves aside two troubling facts: that a) other people, less educated than we, might not grasp the nuance — neo-Nazis having access to unannotated editions of Mein Kampf, children watching a satire about environmentalism and thinking it’s a serious case to abandon the cause, etc — and b) that people who have genuinely suffered trauma shouldn’t have to choose between reliving that trauma or having to leave class to avoid a discussion that bandies about the word “rape”. I don’t have the answers to how we make every single piece of literature “inclusive” — although as a gay man whose entire social class are omitted from the majority of the western canon, I don’t expect everything to be easy for me. Ultimately, this is a fraught issue for which there is no answer to satisfy everyone. But for me, if we can’t read a 2,000-year old work in its historical context, engage with that context, and savour the complexity of that experience, I don’t think we should be discussing literature. If we’re going to censor one thing, let’s just censor it all and start from scratch, shall we? One or the other; I see no middle ground here.
“Phoebus himself was charmed by Hyacinthus,
And if the Fates had given him more time,
And space as well, Apollo would have placed him
Where stars break out in heaven…The lovers, naked, sleeked themselves with oil,
And stood at discus-throw. Phoebus came first,
And like a shot he whirled the disk midair
To cut a cloud in two…
It glanced a rock and struck the boy full face.
As pale as Death itself, the god rushed toward him,
To fold the shrinking creature in his arms,
To bind his broken features with sweet grasses,
To cure his ragged lips and sightless eyes.
But all of Phoebus’ healing arts were useless:
As in a garden, if one breaks a flower,
Crisp violet or poppy or straight lilly
Erect with yellow stamens pointed high,
The flower wilts, head toppled into earth,
So bent the dying face of Hyacinthus,
Staring at nothingness toward breast and shoulder…
The blood that filled the grasses at his feet
Turned to brighter dye than Tyrian purple.
And from its lips there came a lily flower.
And yet, unlike the silver-white of lilies,
Its colour was a tinted, pinkish blue.
–Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X (Horace Gregory translation)
Despite being mythological for the most part, Books 14 and 15 bring the story into Rome’s past, chronicling stories from the founding of the city. This includes an unexpected segue into a lecture from Pythagoras, arguing in favour of vegetarianism, which is part of an excellent broader argument the philosopher is making as to why the entire world should be treated as one interconnected whole. This is all leading up to Julius Caesar ascending to heaven in the aftermath of his death, thus strongly implying that the Emperor Augustus is a god-given leader, and one of a long line to come. Much as we saw with Virgil, pleasing the emperor was a surefire way to give your poem longevity, and to line your own purse, and Ovid seems to have been happy to please… until things took a turn. Sometime around the publication of Metamorphoses, Ovid was banished by the emperor, who bypassed the Senate and the legal system to do so. Why was he banished? We will likely never know. Ovid alludes to it cryptically, claiming (in Tristia) that it wasn’t a crime, just a mistake caused by stupidity. Later, he refers to the cause as “carmen et error”: a poem and a mistake. And then as something “worse than murder and more harmful than poetry”. Was it active conspiracy against the emperor? Making friends with the wrong people? Committing a grievous act, or discovering something scandalous about Augustus himself? Many scholars believe that it was Ovid’s verse, the filthiness of his Ars Amatoria and such, that aroused the emperor’s ire. Possibly the poet was collateral damage in an imperial purge. Augustus made the later years of his reign a crusade against immorality, and perhaps he had no choice politically but to exile one of the national poets to make a point. Getting on in years, having lost his more useful children, and with a hesitant air, perhaps the emperor felt the sword of Damocles.
(We have no proof of any of this. Aside from a handful of mournful references in his own work, there are no contemporary accounts of Ovid’s exile, or his later life, at all. In the 1930s, a theory arose that Ovid invented his punishment as part of a written persona, much as he had earlier invented the cocky narrator of Amores. This theory, taken up from time to time, argue that he was creating a figure of exile, crafting a narrative about distance and isolation. This theory is appealing, and perhaps even makes sense within the rarefied rooms of academe, but I think it crumbles fairly quickly when exposed to sunlight. Sure, the author Pliny seems to have written letters to people (and perhaps even the emperor Trajan) solely to publish them and puff up his posthumous status. But this is a very different affair. We can now study Ovid’s works synoptically, and dig out these references, but contemporary readers weren’t approaching it in the same way, nor did they have access to all of his works online. Sometimes modern literary theory fails to account for how earlier generations of readers consumed their media. I’m not convinced by an argument that there is some great authorial thesis at work here. It would be an engaging piece of concept art in the 21st century, but I don’t think it’s right for the 1st century.)
Ovid’s work during his final decade is often a plea for return from the remote corner of the empire — Tomis, in modern-day Romania — where he found himself apparently without fellow speakers of Latin, and with no culture of any kind. His final work, Fasti, was designed to be an epic overview of the Roman festival life. Each book would correspond to one month, and detail things that happened in that month, their origins, and tangents from there. Sadly, it appears he only completed January — June, or at the very least only those months survived from antiquity, and so we are deprived of the second half of a hugely important piece of work both for historic understanding of the empire, and for the late period of a magnificent artist.
I can’t get over the Metamorphoses. Fate and envy and treachery and unexpected alliances. Love running amok, not conquering all but often creating a mess instead. Transformations literal, emotional, philosophical. Is it an allegory? The deities are the rulers, after all, and their impulsiveness and brutal power could reflect the flesh-and-blood people at the top of the Roman social hierarchy. Or perhaps not. Still, for me, Ovid’s versatility wins out over the heights of Homer and Virgil, for all of their talk of war and remembrance. Reader beware: this is not a catalogue, nor is it an introduction to mythology. Ovid expects you will know these stories, and thus Wikipedia or a useful guide text to the mythology of the ancients will come in handy. But this is a work of mythology in a way that Homer, for example, is not: it is constructed. My preferred translation is David Raeburns, for Penguin in 2004. As I have said before, vintage translations can be found for free online, but your enjoyment will be amplified twentyfold if you fork out the small amount for a modern version. The work is more enjoyable in Latin (I’m sorry to be that guy, but it’s true: translation is part of the joy, another level of puzzle to intellectualise the reading experience) but if you don’t have Latin, you shouldn’t expect the stories to translate themselves online. No industry was ever perpetuated by everyone choosing the easy way.
Augustus died, an old man, in the year 14. His last words were “have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit”. Politically his death kicked off 1,500 years of empire as his wife’s son, the gloomy Tiberius, ascended to the throne hesitantly, but continued the aggressive expansionism that dominated the Romans’ manifest destiny. Culturally, the Golden Age of ancient literature had perhaps already passed. The high style and rhetoric of the republican years had given way to the neoterics, with their sophisticated, self-conscious, allusive and inter-connected (post-modern?) works. But, within a century or so, the diffuse nature of the empire would be reflected in its poetry. The same diffuseness that would cripple Rome crippled its literary styles, as political and social tastes change, new modes were constantly invented but rarely gained a hold on the public imagination for long. With the rise of conflicting religions and social groups, less was deemed worth copying, and thus less was copied. Darkness set in. And Tiberius did not see fit to call Ovid home. The poet died a few years later, leaving the Fasti unfinished, and no doubt assuming his legacy would disappear within a couple of generations. It almost did, but this delightfully immoral poet managed to survive as the counter-culture often does — somewhere, if quietly, even if buried. In December 2017, the Roman City Council formally revoked Ovid’s banishment. He can come home at last.
“Now stands my task accomplished, such a work
As not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword
Nor the devouring ages can destroy.”
— ending of Metamorphoses, Book XV (Arthur Golding translation)
Next time: we finish up our tour of the ancient west, with that old gossipy queen, Suetonius.
