Study guide

Metamorphoses

by Ovid

Overview

Author: Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), 43 BC – AD 17 or 18, born at Sulmo in central Italy, died in exile at Tomis on the Black Sea
Composed: Roughly AD 2–8, at Rome; finished in draft when Ovid was banished in AD 8, and, by his own account, never given its final revision
Genre: A mythological narrative poem in the epic metre, which mixes epic with elegy, tragedy, pastoral, hymn, comedy and philosophical discourse
Metre: Dactylic hexameter, the metre of Homer and Virgil
Length: Fifteen books, about 12,000 lines, containing some 250 myths of transformation
Scope: From the creation of the world out of Chaos to the deification of Julius Caesar and Ovid's own day
Organising idea: A 'continuous song' (carmen perpetuum) in which each story leads into the next, linked by family, place, theme or a narrator who tells a tale within a tale
Translations on this site: Brookes More's blank verse (1922, quoted here); Arthur Golding's fourteeners (1567), the version Shakespeare read; Henry T. Riley's prose (1851); J. J. Howard's verse (1807)
Influence: The chief source of classical myth for medieval and Renaissance Europe: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Titian, Bernini and, in our time, Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (1997)

Context

Ovid was born in 43 BC at Sulmo, in the Apennines east of Rome, into an old equestrian family. He was trained for a public career in law and politics, held some minor offices, and then abandoned them for poetry. His first works were love elegies: the Amores, a sequence of witty poems about a mistress called Corinna; the Heroides, verse letters from abandoned heroines of myth to the men who left them; and the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love), a mock-didactic handbook on seduction set in the streets, theatres and porticoes of Augustan Rome. By the turn of the era he was the most fashionable poet of the city (Fränkel 1945) (Syme 1978).

That success had a political edge. Augustus had passed laws to restore marriage and punish adultery, and a playful manual on how to pick up women, some of them married, sat badly with the moral programme of the regime. In AD 8, when the Metamorphoses was all but complete, Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis (modern Constanța in Romania), a frontier town at the edge of the empire. Ovid himself says that he was ruined by 'two charges, a poem and a mistake' (carmen et error, Tristia 2.207): the poem was the Ars Amatoria; the mistake he never names, and it remains one of the great unsolved puzzles of Roman literary history. He was never recalled, and died at Tomis, probably in AD 17 (Syme 1978).

In the Tristia, the poems of exile, Ovid tells us that in despair at his banishment he burned his own manuscript of the Metamorphoses, but that copies were already circulating among his friends, and he asks readers to forgive a work that never received its author's last revision. Whether or not the burning happened, the gesture recalls Virgil's wish that the unfinished Aeneid be destroyed, and it frames the poem as a work torn from its maker. The text was nonetheless copied throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages; the standard modern edition is Tarrant's Oxford text (Tarrant 2004).

The Metamorphoses is Ovid's only poem in hexameters, the metre of Homer and Virgil, and in that sense his bid to be counted an epic poet. Yet it has no single hero, no single action and no single tone. Its four opening lines promise a 'continuous song' (perpetuum carmen) running from the first origin of the world to Ovid's own time, and the fifteen books duly move, in loosely chronological order, from creation and flood through the loves of the gods and the sagas of the heroic families to the Trojan War, the wanderings of Aeneas, the early history of Rome and the transformation of Julius Caesar into a star. Within that frame, some 250 stories are joined by every kind of link: a common place, a common family, a common theme, a moment of contrast, or a character who stops to tell a story of his or her own (Otis 1970) (Solodow 1988).

The common thread is change of shape. Human beings become trees, birds, beasts, stones, springs and stars, usually at a moment of extreme emotion, and the new form often preserves, fixes or comments on what the person was. Ovid treats this subject with an extraordinary mixture of wit, pathos, cruelty and visual precision, and the poem became, for over a millennium, Europe's main handbook of classical myth. Medieval readers allegorised it in the Ovide moralisé; Renaissance poets and painters plundered it; Shakespeare read it in Arthur Golding's translation of 1567, which is also on this site (Barkan 1986) (Bate 1993) (Lyne 2001).

Plot overview

Books 1 and 2 tell of the beginning of things: the ordering of Chaos into a cosmos, the creation of man, the decline through the ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron, the war of the Giants and the sins of Lycaon, and the flood from which only Deucalion and Pyrrha survive to repopulate the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders. Thereafter the gods dominate the stage. Apollo pursues Daphne, Jupiter seduces Io and Callisto and carries off Europa, and Phaethon, son of the Sun, sets the world on fire when he drives his father's chariot.

Books 3 to 6 turn to the royal house of Thebes and to the anger of the gods against those who offend them. Cadmus founds Thebes; his grandson Actaeon is torn apart by his own hounds for seeing Diana bathe; Semele is burned by Jupiter's glory; Narcissus falls in love with his reflection; Pentheus is torn apart by the worshippers of Bacchus. The daughters of Minyas tell stories such as Pyramus and Thisbe while they refuse the god's festival. Perseus kills Medusa and rescues Andromeda; the Muses defeat the daughters of Pierus in a singing contest, and Calliope sings the rape of Proserpina. Minerva punishes Arachne, Latona destroys Niobe's children, and Tereus' rape of Philomela leads to a terrible revenge.

Books 6 to 11 move into the age of heroes and the passions of mortal lovers: Jason and Medea, Minos and Scylla, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian boar hunt and the death of Meleager, the hospitality of Baucis and Philemon, the labours, death and deification of Hercules, the incestuous loves of Byblis, and the change of sex of Iphis. Orpheus loses Eurydice twice and sings a cycle of stories of forbidden love, including Pygmalion, Myrrha and Venus and Adonis, before he is torn apart by Maenads. Midas wins and regrets his golden touch, and Ceyx and Alcyone become kingfishers.

Books 12 to 15 retell the Trojan War and its aftermath with deliberate eccentricity: the great Homeric moments are skipped or compressed, while Nestor recounts the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, Ajax and Ulysses debate who should have the arms of Akhilleus, and Hecuba is changed into a dog. Aeneas then sails west, and the poem follows him through stories of Polyphemus, Circe and the Sibyl to Italy, his own deification and that of Romulus. In Book 15 the philosopher Pythagoras expounds a universe in which everything changes and nothing dies; Aesculapius comes to Rome as a serpent; Julius Caesar is murdered and becomes a star; and Ovid closes by declaring that his poem, and his name, will outlast Jupiter's anger and time itself.

Book by book

Book 1: Creation, Flood and the First Loves of the Gods

Summary

After a four-line invocation, Ovid describes the shaping of the universe from Chaos by 'a god, or kindlier nature', the separation of the elements and the creation of man, who alone stands upright to look at the stars. The ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron follow in a steady moral decline. The Giants assault heaven, and Jupiter, outraged by the cannibal king Lycaon, whom he turns into a wolf, resolves to destroy mankind by flood. Only the pious couple Deucalion and Pyrrha survive; on the advice of an oracle they throw stones behind them, which become a new race of men and women.

The earth, warmed by the sun, produces new creatures, including the monstrous Python, which Apollo kills with his arrows. Proud of his victory, Apollo mocks Cupid's little bow; Cupid shoots him with a golden arrow of love and the nymph Daphne with a leaden arrow that repels it. Apollo chases her until, exhausted, she prays to her father, the river Peneus, and is turned into a laurel, which Apollo claims as his tree.

Jupiter then rapes Io and, to hide her from Juno, turns her into a white heifer. Juno asks for the cow as a gift and sets the hundred-eyed Argus to guard her. Mercury lulls Argus to sleep with the tale of Pan and Syrinx (the nymph who became the reeds of the pan-pipe) and kills him; Juno sets his eyes in the peacock's tail. Io wanders to Egypt, where she is restored to human form. The book ends with her son Epaphus taunting Phaethon about his parentage.

Analysis

The proem announces a poem of 'forms changed into new bodies' and asks the gods, who 'changed those things too', to spin it out continuously from the beginning of the world to Ovid's own time. The phrase deductum carmen, 'a finely drawn-out song', is a term of Callimachean poetics, the aesthetic of the small and polished poem, set against the length and sweep of epic. The tension between the two, a long poem made of short, exquisite episodes, runs through the whole work (Hinds 1987) (Hardie 2002). The cosmogony is serious, almost philosophical, and anticipates Pythagoras in Book 15; but within a few hundred lines Ovid is showing the gods in council like the Roman senate, with a 'Palatine' of heaven, and the reader learns that Ovidian solemnity is never quite secure (Feeney 1991) (Anderson 1997).

Daphne is the first story of erotic pursuit and transformation, and it sets the pattern for many to come. The god of poetry speaks like an elegiac lover, praising the hair he would like to see combed and assuring the fleeing girl that he is no shepherd; the chase is compared to a hound pursuing a hare. Daphne escapes rape only by losing her human body, and Apollo, undeterred, makes the laurel the emblem of his victory, of Roman triumphs and of the gate of Augustus' house on the Palatine. The episode thus combines comedy, violence and political compliment in a way that has kept critics arguing ever since (Curran 1978) (Solodow 1988).

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed!

Met. 1.1–4

The proem defines the subject (changed forms) and the scale (from the beginning of the world to now). In Ovid's Latin the gods are asked to inspire the work because they changed 'those things too', which may also mean that they changed the poet's own work, from elegy into epic.

Before her prayer was ended, torpor seized on all her body, and a thin bark closed around her gentle bosom, and her hair became as moving leaves;

Met. 1.548–52

A typical Ovidian transformation, described step by step and part by part, so that the reader watches the human body pass into the new form. Daphne's beauty survives in the tree; her voice and will do not.

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Book 2: Phaethon and the Loves of Jupiter

Summary

Phaethon travels to the palace of the Sun to have his parentage confirmed. The Sun swears by the Styx to grant whatever he asks, and Phaethon asks to drive the chariot of the sun for one day. His father tries in vain to dissuade him. The horses bolt, the earth is scorched, rivers boil, and Earth herself begs Jupiter for help; he strikes Phaethon dead with a thunderbolt and he falls into the river Eridanus. His sisters, the Heliades, weeping at his tomb, become poplars whose tears are amber, and his kinsman Cycnus becomes a swan.

Inspecting the damage, Jupiter sees the nymph Callisto, a companion of Diana, and rapes her in the form of Diana herself. When her pregnancy is discovered, Diana expels her; Juno turns her into a bear, and Jupiter later sets her and her son Arcas among the stars. A chain of stories about tale-bearing birds follows: the raven, turned black for reporting the infidelity of Coronis to Apollo, and the crow, who tells how she lost Minerva's favour. Ocyroe, who prophesies the destiny of Aesculapius, becomes a mare; Battus, who betrays Mercury's cattle-theft, becomes a stone.

Mercury falls in love with Herse, and her sister Aglauros, poisoned by the goddess Envy at Minerva's command, blocks his way and is turned to stone. Finally Jupiter, disguised as a white bull, carries off Europa across the sea to Crete.

Analysis

The Phaethon episode is the first great set piece of the poem, a miniature epic with an ekphrasis (the doors of the Sun's palace), a catalogue of burning mountains and rivers, and a speech by a suffering Earth. It is also a story about overreaching: a boy who demands a power he cannot use, and a father who cannot refuse a promise. The Sun's warning, that Phaethon's lot is mortal but what he asks is not, states one of the poem's recurrent lines between human and divine, a line usually crossed with disaster (Otis 1970).

The second half of the book shows the gods at their least dignified. Jupiter plots seductions while repairing the world, disguises himself as a goddess or a bull, and leaves others to bear the cost; the birds are punished for telling the truth. The figure of Envy, an allegorical personification living in a filthy cave, is one of several in the poem (Hunger and Sleep come later) that later poets such as Spenser adapted. Ovid's gods are powerful and memorable but rarely just, and their behaviour invites the reader to wonder what kind of order presides over the world (Feeney 1991).

for thou art mortal, and thou hast aspired to things immortal.

Met. 2.56

The Latin is a famous epigram: 'your lot is mortal; not mortal is what you desire'. The line sums up Phaethon's tragedy and anticipates other mortals, such as Icarus, who aim too high.

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Book 3: The House of Cadmus

Summary

Searching for his sister Europa, Cadmus is told by Apollo's oracle to found a city where a cow lies down. He kills a serpent sacred to Mars, sows its teeth, and from the earth springs a crop of armed men who kill one another until five are left to help him build Thebes. His happiness is short. His grandson Actaeon, out hunting, stumbles on Diana bathing in a grotto; the goddess splashes him and turns him into a stag, and his own hounds, named in a long catalogue, tear him to pieces.

Juno takes revenge on Cadmus' daughter Semele, Jupiter's lover, by persuading her to ask him to come to her in his full divine glory; she is burned to ashes, and the unborn Bacchus is sewn into Jupiter's thigh. Tiresias, who has lived as both man and woman, settles a dispute between Jupiter and Juno about which sex takes more pleasure in love; Juno blinds him, and Jupiter gives him prophecy in compensation.

Tiresias' first prophecy concerns Narcissus, who will live long 'if he never knows himself'. The nymph Echo, punished by Juno so that she can only repeat the last words of others, loves Narcissus and is rejected; she wastes away to a voice. Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in a pool, realises too late what he loves, and dies, leaving a flower in his place. Pentheus, king of Thebes, scorns the new god Bacchus and hears the story of the Tyrrhenian sailors who were turned into dolphins for mistreating him; he is torn apart by his own mother and aunts in their Bacchic frenzy.

Analysis

Book 3 shows how Ovid organises a stretch of the poem around a family and a city. The Theban stories form a dark sequence of divine anger, in which guilt is often doubtful: Actaeon, Ovid insists, made a mistake, not a crime, a phrase that readers have connected with Ovid's own later 'error'. The repeated pattern of seeing what should not be seen, from Actaeon to Pentheus, gives the book its unity. Charles Segal showed how the setting itself, a secluded pool or grotto in a landscape of seeming innocence, repeatedly becomes the scene of violation (Otis 1970) (Hardie 2002) (Segal 1969).

Echo and Narcissus is one of the poem's most brilliant pieces of writing. Echo's broken repetitions turn the boy's words into her own declarations of love, and Narcissus' speech at the pool plays on the paradox that what he desires is already his and therefore out of reach. The story is about illusion and the mind that is caught by images; Philip Hardie has made it central to his account of the poem as a meditation on presence and absence, and the myth has had a long afterlife in literature, painting and psychoanalysis (Hardie 2002).

He would have cried, “Behold your master!—It is I—Actaeon!” Words refused his will.

Met. 3.229–31

Actaeon keeps his human mind in a stag's body, and the horror lies in the gap between the two. He cannot speak his own name to the dogs who once obeyed him.

'Tis I in thee—I love myself—the flame arises in my breast and burns my heart—

Met. 3.463–64

Narcissus' moment of recognition ('iste ego sum', 'I am he'). Knowledge does not cure his love, it makes it hopeless; a few lines later comes the paradox 'inopem me copia fecit', 'abundance makes me poor'.

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Book 4: The Daughters of Minyas; Perseus

Summary

While the women of Thebes celebrate Bacchus, the three daughters of Minyas stay at home weaving and pass the time by telling stories. The first tells of Pyramus and Thisbe, young Babylonians whose parents forbid their love, who whisper through a crack in the wall between their houses and arrange to meet at the tomb of Ninus. Thisbe, frightened by a lioness, drops her veil and flees; Pyramus finds it bloodstained, believes her dead and kills himself under a mulberry tree, whose fruit is darkened by his blood. Thisbe returns and kills herself with his sword.

The second sister tells how the Sun exposed the adultery of Mars and Venus and was punished by Venus with love for Leucothoe, whom her father buried alive; her jealous rival Clytie wasted away into the heliotrope, which turns to follow the sun. The third tells of the nymph Salmacis, who merged with the youth Hermaphroditus into a single body of both sexes. For their impiety the sisters are changed into bats. Juno, still hounding Thebes, drives Athamas and Ino mad; Cadmus and Harmonia, in sorrow, become serpents.

Perseus, flying home with the Gorgon's head, turns the giant Atlas into a mountain, rescues Andromeda from a sea-monster, and at the wedding feast tells how he killed Medusa, whose snaky hair was Minerva's punishment for being raped by Neptune in the goddess's temple.

Analysis

The Minyeides introduce a technique that Ovid develops throughout the poem: internal narrators whose choice of stories and manner of telling reveal their character and situation. The sisters' tales of love and its disasters are told by women who refuse the god of release and ecstasy, and their weaving looks forward to Arachne and Philomela, other women whose art becomes a form of resistance. Ovid also chooses rare or exotic versions; Pyramus and Thisbe seems to have been a little-known Near Eastern tale before he made it famous (Wheeler 1999) (Barchiesi 2002).

Pyramus and Thisbe is a tragedy of errors told with deliberate touches of the absurd, such as the simile comparing Pyramus' spurting blood to a burst water-pipe. That combination of pathos and grotesque has divided critics, but it made the story ideal material for Shakespeare, who staged it twice: as the solemn model for Romeo and Juliet, and as the mechanicals' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a speaking Wall (Bate 1993). Perseus' adventures, by contrast, are told as a parody of heroic epic, all rescue and slaughter.

a partition built between their houses, many years ago, was made defective with a little chink;

Met. 4.65–66

The crack in the wall is the most famous detail of the story. Love finds the one flaw in the barrier: 'what is hid from love?' asks the narrator. Shakespeare's Bottom and his friends make Wall a character.

By that dark tide the berries on the tree assumed a deeper tint, for as the roots soaked up the blood the pendent mulberries were dyed a purple tint.

Met. 4.125–27

The metamorphosis here belongs to the tree, not the lovers: a natural fact (the dark fruit of the mulberry) is explained by a human story, an aetiology typical of the poem.

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Book 5: The Fight at the Wedding; the Contest of the Muses

Summary

Perseus' wedding feast is interrupted by Phineus, Andromeda's former betrothed, and an epic brawl follows, full of grotesque deaths, until Perseus turns Phineus and his followers to stone with the Gorgon's head. Minerva then visits the Muses on Mount Helicon to see the spring Hippocrene, created by the hoof of Pegasus. The Muses tell her how the king Pyreneus tried to imprison them, and how the nine daughters of Pierus challenged them to a singing contest.

The Pierides sang of the Giants' war on the gods; Calliope replied for the Muses with the story of Proserpina. Venus, wanting to extend her empire to the underworld, has Cupid shoot Pluto, who carries off Proserpina as she gathers flowers in Sicily. Ceres searches the whole earth for her daughter, cursing the land with famine, until the nymph Arethusa tells her where Proserpina is. Jupiter rules that the girl may return if she has eaten nothing below; because she ate seven pomegranate seeds, she must spend half of each year with her husband.

Calliope's song includes Arethusa's own story of flight from the river Alpheus and Ceres' gift of agriculture through Triptolemus, whose host Lyncus is turned into a lynx. The nymphs judge the Muses victors, and the Pierides, insulting them, become magpies.

Analysis

The battle in the hall is Ovid's comic version of the slaughter of the suitors in the Odyssey, and it shows his tendency to treat heroic violence as spectacle, sometimes absurd. The real centre of the book, however, is a story told by a Muse to a goddess about a contest of songs, a tale within a tale within a tale. Ovid thus places at the middle of his first half a meditation on poetry itself, on what kind of song wins approval and who judges (Hinds 1987) (Wheeler 1999).

Stephen Hinds has shown that Calliope's Proserpina is a deliberate reworking of the version Ovid told in elegiac couplets in the Fasti, and that the two accounts play off epic and elegiac conventions against one another. The epic narrator gives cosmic causes (Venus' imperialism) and grand speeches; the subject is a rape and a mother's grief. The episode has become the classic case for arguments about genre in the poem (Hinds 1987).

she was seen, beloved, and carried off by Pluto—such the haste of sudden love.

Met. 5.395–96

Ovid's Latin compresses the whole event into a single line ('almost at once she was seen, loved and carried off by Dis'), followed by a dry comment on the speed of love. The rape is narrated with breathtaking economy, and the innocence of the flower-gathering girl is kept in view.

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Book 6: Arachne, Niobe, Philomela

Summary

Arachne, a humble girl from Lydia, is so skilled in weaving that she denies she was taught by Minerva and challenges the goddess to a contest. Minerva weaves the gods in majesty, her own victory over Neptune for Athens, and in the corners the punishments of mortals who defied the gods. Arachne weaves the deceptions and rapes of the gods: Jupiter as bull, swan, satyr and shower of gold, Neptune, Apollo and Bacchus in their disguises. Unable to find a fault, Minerva tears the tapestry and strikes Arachne, who hangs herself; the goddess turns her into a spider.

Niobe, queen of Thebes, boasts that her fourteen children make her greater than Latona, mother of only two. Apollo and Diana shoot all her sons and daughters, and Niobe, frozen by grief, becomes a weeping rock. Other tales of divine punishment follow: the Lycian peasants turned into frogs for refusing Latona water, and the satyr Marsyas, flayed alive by Apollo after a musical contest.

The book closes with the story of Tereus, the Thracian king, who rapes Philomela, the sister of his wife Procne, cuts out her tongue and imprisons her. Philomela weaves the story into a tapestry and sends it to Procne, who rescues her during the rites of Bacchus. In revenge the sisters kill Procne's son Itys and serve him to his father. As Tereus pursues them, all three are turned into birds. The book ends with Boreas carrying off Orithyia.

Analysis

Arachne's tapestry is perhaps the poem's most pointed image of itself. Like the Metamorphoses, it is a crowded catalogue of divine metamorphoses and erotic deceptions, without a central frame; Minerva's design is ordered, symmetrical and didactic, a celebration of divine power. The goddess cannot fault the work, only punish the worker. Critics have read the contest as a parable of art and authority, and often of Ovid's own fate, though the story ends ambiguously: Arachne goes on weaving for ever (Feeney 1991) (Barkan 1986) (Feldherr 2010).

The Philomela story is the most violent episode in the poem and one of the most discussed in recent criticism. Ovid presents rape as a crime against speech: Tereus silences his victim, and she answers with a woven text, the 'speaking web' that later writers took up (Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus explicitly recalls it). The sisters' revenge, framed by the rites of Bacchus, turns the victims into agents of horror, and Ovid refuses any comfortable moral (Richlin 1992) (Curran 1978).

Minerva could not find a fleck or flaw— even Envy can not censure perfect art—

Met. 6.129–30

The goddess concedes the quality of Arachne's work in the very act of destroying it. Ovid uses Livor (Envy), the traditional enemy of poets, so the line also speaks of the fate of poems.

the grief-distracted Philomela wove in a warp with purple marks and white, a story of the crime;

Met. 6.576–78

Deprived of her tongue, Philomela becomes an artist; her tapestry is a substitute for speech and a model of art as testimony.

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Book 7: Medea

Summary

Jason and the Argonauts arrive at Colchis to claim the Golden Fleece. Medea, daughter of King Aeetes, falls in love with him at first sight and argues with herself in a long monologue about whether to betray her father. She gives Jason magic herbs with which he yokes the fire-breathing bulls, defeats the earth-born warriors and puts the dragon to sleep, and she sails away with him to Greece.

In Iolcus Medea uses her magic to rejuvenate Jason's aged father Aeson. In a night-long ritual she invokes the night, the stars, Hecate and the powers of nature, gathers herbs from across the world, and drains and refills the old man's veins. She then tricks the daughters of Pelias, Jason's enemy, into killing their father in the hope of renewing him. After fleeing in a dragon-drawn chariot and, in a few lines, killing her own children when Jason abandons her, she reaches Athens, where she tries to poison Theseus and escapes again.

Minos prepares war against Athens to avenge his son Androgeos. Aeacus, king of Aegina, refuses to join him and tells of the plague that destroyed his people and of the ants that Jupiter turned into a new race, the Myrmidons. Cephalus, Athens' envoy, tells the story of his marriage to Procris, of his test of her fidelity, and of her death when he accidentally kills her with his own magic javelin.

Analysis

Ovid's Medea is a composite of earlier Medeas: the girl in love of Apollonius' Argonautica, the witch of popular tradition, and the child-killer of Euripides' tragedy, which Ovid himself had treated in his lost play Medea. Here he compresses the most famous part, the murder of the children, into a handful of lines and expands what others had passed over, her monologue of love and her magic. The opening speech, which contains the famous admission that she sees and approves the better course and follows the worse, makes her an emblem of the divided will for later moralists (Otis 1970) (Anderson 1972).

The incantation before the rejuvenation of Aeson is the most important single passage in the history of Ovid's reception in English. Shakespeare took Prospero's farewell to his magic in The Tempest ('Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves') from Golding's version of these lines, which begin 'Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles'. Giving a benign magician the words of a dangerous witch is one of the boldest pieces of Renaissance borrowing (Bate 1993) (Nims 1965).

I see a better course and I approve, but follow its defeat.

Met. 7.20–21

Medea's line ('video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor') became a proverb for weakness of will, quoted by moralists and theologians from antiquity onward.

O gentle Breezes and destructive Winds! You Mountains, Rivers, Lakes and sacred Groves, and every dreaded god of silent Night!

Met. 7.197–98

The heart of Medea's invocation (auraeque et venti montesque amnesque lacusque). Through Golding, these words became Prospero's renunciation of his 'rough magic' in The Tempest.

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Book 8: Minos, Daedalus, Meleager, Baucis and Philemon

Summary

Besieging Megara, Minos is seen from the walls by Scylla, daughter of King Nisus, who falls in love with him and cuts off her father's purple lock of hair, on which the city's safety depends. Minos, horrified, rejects her, and she becomes a sea-bird pursued by her father, now an eagle. In Crete Minos hides the Minotaur, his wife's monstrous offspring, in the Labyrinth built by Daedalus; Theseus kills it with Ariadne's help and abandons her on Naxos, where Bacchus sets her crown among the stars.

Daedalus, longing to escape Crete, makes wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus, who flies too close to the sun and falls into the sea. The partridge, once Daedalus' nephew Perdix, whom he had murdered out of jealousy for his inventions, rejoices at his grief. The heroes of Greece then hunt the Calydonian boar; Meleager gives the spoils to Atalanta and kills his uncles when they object, and his mother Althaea, torn between sister and mother, burns the log on which his life depends.

Returning from the hunt, Theseus shelters with the river-god Achelous, where the guests exchange stories. Lelex tells how Jupiter and Mercury, wandering in disguise, were turned away from every house in Phrygia except the hut of the poor old couple Baucis and Philemon; the gods flood the valley, turn the hut into a temple, and grant the couple's wish to die together, as an oak and a linden. Achelous tells of the shape-shifter Proteus and of Erysichthon, who cut down Ceres' sacred oak, was cursed with insatiable Hunger and finally devoured himself.

Analysis

Daedalus is the poem's great figure of the inventor whose art is both marvellous and dangerous: the Labyrinth that hides a monster, the wings that kill his son. His instruction to fly the middle way, and the image of fisherman, shepherd and ploughman looking up in amazement at the two figures they take for gods, are among the most famous moments in the poem. Ovid had told the story in the Ars Amatoria too, and the version here pointedly ends with the father cursing his own art (Anderson 1972) (Solodow 1988).

Baucis and Philemon offers a rare idyll of piety and married love in a poem full of violent desire, and Ovid lavishes detail on the poor meal and the cottage furniture. It is also a story told to test belief: Lelex tells it to rebuke a guest who has sneered that the gods cannot change shapes. The quiet tale of hospitality is thus embedded in an argument about whether stories of metamorphosis are true, a question the poem keeps asking about itself (Feeney 1991) (Wheeler 1999).

“My son, I caution you to keep the middle way, for if your pinions dip too low the waters may impede your flight; and if they soar too high the sun may scorch them.

Met. 8.203–06

The advice of the middle course, a classic ethical idea, is given by a father whose own art carries his son beyond safety. Icarus' fall became a lasting emblem of youthful daring and its price.

let us depart this life together— Let the same hour take us both—I would not see the tomb of my dear wife;

Met. 8.708–10

Philemon's prayer: in a poem of predatory love, the old couple ask only not to outlive each other. Their metamorphosis into intertwined trees is a reward, not a punishment.

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Book 9: Hercules and Forbidden Loves

Summary

Achelous tells Theseus how he lost one of his horns wrestling Hercules for the hand of Deianira, changing himself into a serpent and a bull in vain. Later the centaur Nessus tries to carry off Deianira and is shot by Hercules; dying, he gives her his blood-soaked tunic as a love-charm. When she hears that Hercules loves Iole, she sends him the tunic, which burns his flesh. Hercules builds his own pyre on Mount Oeta, and Jupiter announces to the gods that the hero's immortal part will join them; his mortal body burns away and he is taken up to the stars.

Alcmena, his mother, tells how Juno tried to prevent his birth, and how the servant Galanthis tricked the goddess of childbirth and was turned into a weasel. Iole tells of her sister Dryope, turned into a lotus tree for plucking its flowers. Hebe restores the youth of Iolaus, which leads to a quarrel among the gods about who else should be made young.

Byblis falls in love with her twin brother Caunus, debates with herself, writes him a letter that he rejects in horror, and pursues him until she dissolves into a spring. In Crete, Ligdus orders his wife to expose her child if it is a girl; the goddess Isis tells her to raise the girl Iphis as a boy. Iphis, betrothed to the girl Ianthe, laments a love she thinks impossible, until Isis transforms her into a man on the eve of the wedding.

Analysis

Hercules' apotheosis, his passage from mortal to god, is a model for the deifications of Aeneas, Romulus and Julius Caesar at the end of the poem, and so part of the large chronological and political design that Brooks Otis traced. Ovid describes it with an image of a snake shedding its skin, and frames it with a comic scene in which Jupiter reassures the anxious gods and glances at Juno (Otis 1970) (Galinsky 1975).

Byblis and Iphis are two stories of desire that society forbids, one incestuous, one between two women, and they belong to a sequence of studies of transgressive passion that culminates in Myrrha in Book 10. Byblis' letter recalls Ovid's own Heroides, and her self-deceiving monologue is a brilliant piece of psychological writing. Iphis ends happily, but only through a change of sex, and modern critics have read the episode as a revealing statement of Roman assumptions about gender and desire (Curran 1978) (Hardie 2002).

the mortal part of Hercules was burnt by Mulciber; but yet an outline of a spirit-form remained.

Met. 9.262–65

Fire (Mulciber is Vulcan) removes what is mortal in Hercules and leaves the likeness of his divine father. Divinity here is itself a form of metamorphosis, a pattern repeated in the poem's last books.

and Iphis, a new man, gained his Ianthe.

Met. 9.797

The last line of Book 9 (potiturque sua puer Iphis Ianthe) ends a story of impossible love with a marriage, achieved by the poem's characteristic device of bodily change.

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Book 10: The Song of Orpheus

Summary

On the wedding day of Orpheus and Eurydice, the bride is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus descends to the underworld and sings so movingly to Pluto and Proserpina that the ghosts weep and the punishments of the damned stop. Eurydice is allowed to return on condition that he does not look back until they reach the upper world; near the threshold he turns, and she slips away for ever. Orpheus mourns, rejects women, and sits on a hill where the trees gather to hear his music, among them the cypress, once the boy Cyparissus.

The rest of the book is Orpheus' song, introduced as a song about boys loved by the gods and girls punished for forbidden passion. He sings of Ganymede, carried off by Jupiter's eagle, and of Hyacinthus, accidentally killed by Apollo's discus and turned into a flower. The Cerastae become bulls and the Propoetides, the first prostitutes, become stones. Disgusted by them, the sculptor Pygmalion carves an ivory woman, falls in love with her, and prays to Venus, who brings the statue to life.

Pygmalion's great-granddaughter Myrrha conceives a passion for her father Cinyras, consummates it in the dark with the help of her nurse, flees when discovered, and is turned into the myrrh tree, from which Adonis is born. Venus loves Adonis and, warning him against hunting dangerous beasts, tells him the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, the race won with golden apples, and the lovers' transformation into lions. Adonis is killed by a boar, and Venus turns his blood into the anemone.

Analysis

Orpheus is the poet as hero: his song moves the underworld and the trees, and the whole of the book is given to his voice. He is therefore an image of Ovid himself, and the pattern of his song, love stories of gods and boys and of women punished for forbidden passion, mirrors the poem's own concerns in concentrated form. Yet Orpheus is also an unreliable narrator, a grieving misogynist whose choice of tales colours what we hear, and he fails exactly where he is meant to triumph (Solodow 1988) (Barchiesi 2002).

Pygmalion is the most influential of the stories about art. The phrase 'art hides by its art' praises a craft so complete that it looks like nature, and the statue that becomes a woman fulfils the dream of art that comes alive. But the story is also about a man who makes the woman he desires, and feminist readers have stressed that the ivory girl has no name and no voice. It is followed at once by Myrrha, whose love for her father is a dark counterpart to the creator's love for his creation (Hardie 2002) (Barkan 1986).

he turned his eyes so he could gaze upon her. Instantly she slipped away. He stretched out to her his despairing arms,

Met. 10.56–58

The moment of looking back (flexit amans oculos, 'the lover turned his eyes'). Ovid stresses that the cause was love, and the next lines add that Eurydice could not complain of being loved too much.

and so his art concealed his art.

Met. 10.252

Ovid's 'ars adeo latet arte sua' became a classic phrase of aesthetics: the highest art conceals the effort of its making. Here it describes a sculpture so lifelike that its maker forgets it is a statue.

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Book 11: The Death of Orpheus; Midas; Ceyx and Alcyone

Summary

The Maenads of Thrace, enraged by Orpheus' rejection of women, attack him; at first his music turns their weapons aside, but their shrieks drown it out and they tear him to pieces. His head and lyre float down the river Hebrus to Lesbos, still singing, and his shade is reunited with Eurydice in the underworld. Bacchus turns the Maenads into trees.

Bacchus grants King Midas a wish for returning his old teacher Silenus, and Midas asks that whatever he touches should turn to gold. He soon finds he cannot eat or drink, and is cured by bathing in the river Pactolus, whose sands become golden. Later, as judge of a musical contest between Pan and Apollo, he prefers Pan's pipe, and Apollo gives him the ears of an ass; his barber, unable to keep the secret, whispers it into a hole, and the reeds that grow there repeat it. Apollo and Neptune build the walls of Troy for Laomedon, who cheats them; Peleus wins the shape-shifting sea-goddess Thetis, who will be the mother of Akhilleus.

Ceyx, king of Trachis, tells Peleus how his brother Daedalion became a hawk, and then sets out on a sea voyage despite the pleading of his wife Alcyone. He drowns in a storm. Juno sends Iris to the House of Sleep, where Morpheus takes the form of the dead Ceyx and appears to Alcyone in a dream. She finds his body on the shore and both are turned into kingfishers, whose 'halcyon days' of calm sea come each winter. The book ends with Aesacus, son of Priam, who becomes a diving bird.

Analysis

Book 11 is a bridge: it closes the long Orpheus sequence, ends the age of the earlier heroes with the marriage that will produce Akhilleus, and leads, through Aesacus, into the Trojan War. The death of Orpheus reverses the power of song: the poet who charmed rocks and beasts is destroyed when noise drowns out music, an image some critics have related to Ovid's own silencing (Otis 1970) (Hardie 2002).

Ceyx and Alcyone is one of the most beautiful and most varied episodes, combining a full-scale epic storm, an allegorical House of Sleep and a tender story of married love. Chaucer retold it at the opening of The Book of the Duchess, where the grieving queen and the dream sent by Morpheus provide the frame for an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster. Midas, meanwhile, became the proverbial fool of greed and bad taste, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath tells her own version of the story of his ears.

but when he touched the gift of Ceres with his right hand, instantly the gift of Ceres stiffened to gold;

Met. 11.121–23

The golden touch turns into a curse at the moment of eating. More imitates Ovid's repetition of 'Cerealia dona', which mimics the hardening of the bread.

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Book 12: The Trojan War: Fame, Cycnus and the Centaurs

Summary

The Greek fleet is held at Aulis by contrary winds until Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia, whom Diana, according to some, replaces with a deer. Ovid then describes the House of Fame (Rumour), a tower of echoing brass at the centre of the world where all reports, true and false, gather and grow. The Greeks land at Troy, and Akhilleus fights Cycnus, a son of Neptune whose body cannot be wounded; he finally strangles him, and Neptune turns him into a swan.

At the victory feast, the aged Nestor tells the story of Caeneus, born a girl named Caenis, who was raped by Neptune and asked to become a man who could not be wounded. Nestor then narrates at length the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous, a festival of grotesque deaths in which Caeneus, invulnerable, is finally buried under a mountain of trees and becomes a bird. Tlepolemus complains that Nestor has left out Hercules, and Nestor explains his grudge: Hercules killed his eleven brothers, among them the shape-shifting Periclymenus.

Neptune, still angry at Akhilleus for the death of Cycnus, persuades Apollo to guide the arrow of Paris, and Akhilleus is killed. His body is burned; his arms provoke the quarrel that opens the next book.

Analysis

Ovid's Trojan War is a calculated swerve away from Homer. The death of Hector, the embassy and the funeral games are missing; the duels Ovid narrates are obscure or invented, and the longest episode is an old man's after-dinner story about Centaurs. The House of Fame, where 'each new teller adds something to what he has heard', is a self-conscious emblem of the tradition through which the war is known: epic, Ovid suggests, is a form of rumour (Hardie 2002) (Wheeler 1999).

Chaucer took the House of Fame as the starting point for his own dream poem of that name, and the personification passed into Renaissance allegory. The story of Caeneus, meanwhile, adds to the poem's interest in bodies that cross the boundary between the sexes, and shows again how a story of rape can be narrated by an indifferent or self-interested speaker (Richlin 1992).

and myriad rumors—false tales mixed with true— are circulated in confusing words.

Met. 12.54–55

The House of Fame mixes truth and fiction indiscriminately, and Ovid places it just before his version of the most famous story in ancient literature.

The volume of wild fiction grows apace, and each narrator adds to what he hears.

Met. 12.57–58

A sly description of the way myths grow, and of the poet's own practice, since every teller in the Metamorphoses changes the stories he inherits.

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Book 13: The Arms of Akhilleus; Hecuba; Galatea

Summary

Before the assembled Greeks, Ajax and Ulysses compete in speeches for the arms of Akhilleus. Ajax, a blunt soldier, cites his deeds and his descent and sneers at Ulysses' cunning; Ulysses, an orator of genius, argues that intelligence matters more than strength and that his advice won the war. The judges award him the arms, and Ajax kills himself; from his blood springs the hyacinth, whose petals bear the letters AI.

Troy falls in a few lines. Hecuba, now a slave, sees her daughter Polyxena sacrificed on Akhilleus' tomb and finds the body of her son Polydorus, murdered by the Thracian king Polymestor. She tears out the murderer's eyes and, pelted with stones, is turned into a dog. Aurora mourns her son Memnon, from whose pyre birds arise. Aeneas leaves Troy with his father and son, and the king Anius tells how his daughters were turned into doves.

In Sicily the sea-nymph Galatea tells Scylla how the Cyclops Polyphemus courted her with a grotesque love-song and, when he found her with the young Acis, crushed him under a rock; Acis became a river. The sea-god Glaucus, once a fisherman changed by a magic herb, then woos Scylla, who flees from him.

Analysis

The debate between Ajax and Ulysses is a masterpiece of rhetoric, the kind of speech Roman schoolboys composed on mythological themes, and it shows Ovid's training in declamation. The victory of the more eloquent speaker raises questions about the power of words that the poem, itself a work of brilliant persuasion, does not answer: Ulysses wins by argument what Ajax claims by deeds (Solodow 1988) (Galinsky 1975).

Hecuba's fate brings tragedy into the epic, drawing on Euripides' Hecuba and Trojan Women, while the Cyclops' love-song is a comic pastoral derived from Theocritus. The juxtaposition shows Ovid's characteristic movement between genres. With Aeneas the poem begins its long passage toward Rome, but it follows Virgil's route only to step aside into other stories; critics have nicknamed the sequence Ovid's 'little Aeneid' (Hinds 1987) (Otis 1970).

'Tis safer then to fight with lying words than with his hands.

Met. 13.9–10

Ajax's contempt for his rival sets the terms of the debate: words against deeds. The irony is that Ajax must use words to make his case, and Ulysses uses them better.

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Book 14: Aeneas and the Road to Rome

Summary

Glaucus asks Circe for a love-charm to win Scylla; Circe, who wants him herself, poisons the pool where Scylla bathes, and the nymph's lower body becomes a ring of barking dogs; later she is turned into a rock. Aeneas sails past Carthage, where Dido's death is mentioned in two lines, and on to Cumae, where the Sibyl guides him through the underworld and tells how Apollo granted her as many years as grains of sand, but not lasting youth.

At Caieta, Achaemenides, a Greek left behind on Sicily, tells how he escaped Polyphemus, and Macareus, one of Ulysses' men, tells how Circe turned his companions into pigs, and how she changed Picus, who rejected her, into a woodpecker; his wife Canens wasted away to nothing but song. Aeneas fights the war in Latium; the ships of the Trojans become sea-nymphs, and the city of Ardea is reborn as a heron. Aeneas dies and, at Venus' request, is made a god.

The poem passes through the Alban kings to Pomona, the goddess of orchards, whom the god Vertumnus woos in a series of disguises; as an old woman he tells her the story of Anaxarete, who scorned her lover Iphis and was turned to stone. Romulus founds Rome, the Sabine war is ended, and Romulus and his wife Hersilia become gods.

Analysis

Book 14 tells the story of the Aeneid in a radically altered order of emphasis. Dido and the underworld, the emotional centres of Virgil's poem, are reduced to a few lines, while Ovid expands the Odyssean stories of Circe and the Cyclops that Virgil had skirted. This 'Ovidian Aeneid' is a reading of Virgil as much as a retelling, and it shows the younger poet claiming his place in the tradition by rearranging it (Hinds 1987) (Otis 1970).

The book also shows the poem moving from myth toward history, with the deifications of Aeneas and Romulus preparing for those of Caesar and, prospectively, Augustus. Vertumnus and Pomona, a light-hearted courtship between a shape-shifting god and a garden goddess, is a pleasant reminder that metamorphosis can be play, a contrast to the Sibyl, who will dwindle until only her voice remains (Galinsky 1975).

But, though I change till eye would never know me, my voice shall live, the fates will leave my voice.”

Met. 14.152–53

The Sibyl's prophecy of her own end ('voce tamen noscar; vocem mihi fata relinquent'). Like Echo and the poet of the epilogue, she will survive only as a voice, a figure for the afterlife of poetry.

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Book 15: Pythagoras and the Star of Caesar

Summary

Numa, Romulus' successor, travels to Croton in southern Italy, whose founding by Myscelus is told, and there hears the teaching of the philosopher Pythagoras. In a speech of about four hundred lines, Pythagoras urges men to abstain from eating animals, since souls pass from body to body, and expounds a universe in perpetual change: the elements turn into one another, the ages of man pass like seasons, rivers and mountains move, cities rise and fall, and nothing perishes but only changes its form.

Numa returns to Rome and rules in peace. After his death, his wife Egeria weeps herself into a spring, and Hippolytus, reborn as the minor god Virbius, consoles her with his own story. Further wonders follow: the clod that became the prophet Tages, the spear of Romulus that turned into a tree, and Cipus, who grew horns and refused to become king. The healing god Aesculapius comes from Epidaurus to Rome in the form of a serpent to end a plague.

Aesculapius was a foreign god; Caesar, says Ovid, is a god in his own city. Venus tries to save Julius Caesar from the conspirators, but the Fates cannot be changed. Jupiter tells her that Caesar's greatest achievement was to be the father of Augustus, and Venus carries his soul to heaven, where it becomes a comet. The poet prays that Augustus' own ascent may be long delayed, and ends with an epilogue claiming immortality for his work.

Analysis

Pythagoras' speech gives the poem's subject a philosophical explanation: everything changes, and so metamorphosis is the law of the universe rather than a series of marvels. Critics divide over how seriously to take it. Some see it as the poem's intellectual climax; others note that Pythagoras is long-winded, that his doctrine of transmigration differs from the poem's actual transformations, and that his insistence on universal change sits oddly beside the eternal city and the eternal ruler celebrated a few hundred lines later (Galinsky 1975) (Myers 1994) (Hardie 2002).

The final episodes bring the poem to Augustus, and the panegyric is open to two readings. On one, Ovid pays the expected tribute to the ruler; on another, the logic by which Caesar's chief glory is to have fathered Augustus, and Augustus is told he need not hurry to heaven, has an undertone of irony. The epilogue then sets the poet's achievement against all power: his work will outlast the anger of Jupiter, a name that Ovid elsewhere uses for Augustus, and he will be read wherever Rome rules (Feeney 1991) (Galinsky 1975) (Otis 1970).

nothing in all the world remains unchanged. All things are in a state of flux, all shapes receive a changing nature.

Met. 15.177–79

Pythagoras' doctrine (cuncta fluunt, 'all things flow') echoes Heraclitus and states the poem's principle in philosophical form.

And now, I have completed a great work, which not Jove's anger, and not fire nor steel, nor fast-consuming time can sweep away.

Met. 15.871–72

The epilogue (iamque opus exegi) recalls Horace's Odes 3.30 and claims for poetry a permanence denied to everything else in a world of change. 'Jove's anger' was soon to be read as the emperor's.

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Characters

Gods

Jupiter: King of the gods and the poem's most persistent seducer and rapist, he appears as a bull, a shower of gold, a swan, a goddess and an eagle. He is also the ruler of a heavenly senate modelled on Rome, and Ovid repeatedly hints at a parallel between Jupiter and Augustus, which makes the god's mixture of majesty and caprice politically suggestive (Feeney 1991).
Juno: Jupiter's wife and sister, whose jealousy pursues his lovers and their offspring: Io, Callisto, Semele and the whole house of Cadmus, and later Hercules. She is the poem's most consistent agent of punishment, almost never against her husband himself.
Apollo (Phoebus): God of light, poetry, prophecy and healing. His pursuit of Daphne opens the poem's love stories, and he is also the flayer of Marsyas, the destroyer of Niobe's children and the lover who accidentally kills Hyacinthus. The god of poetry is thus also a figure of violence and loss.
Minerva (Pallas): Virgin goddess of wisdom and crafts. She visits the Muses in Book 5 and punishes Arachne in Book 6, and stands for an art bound to divine order and authority.
Venus and Cupid: The powers of desire, which drive most of the poem's stories. Cupid's arrows start the Daphne episode, Venus's imperial ambition causes the rape of Proserpina, and Venus mourns Adonis and carries Caesar, her descendant, to the stars.
Bacchus: The god of wine and ecstasy, whose arrival in Thebes destroys Pentheus and turns the Minyeides into bats. His rites provide the setting for the revenge of Procne and Philomela and for the death of Orpheus.

Mortal lovers

Daphne: A nymph, daughter of the river Peneus, who refuses marriage and flees Apollo; she is turned into the laurel. The first of many women in the poem who escape rape only by losing their human shape (Curran 1978).
Narcissus and Echo: A beautiful youth who rejects all lovers and dies in love with his own reflection, and the nymph who loves him and can only repeat others' words. Their story is the poem's subtlest meditation on illusion, self-knowledge and voice (Hardie 2002).
Pyramus and Thisbe: Young Babylonian lovers separated by their parents, whose tragic misunderstanding at the tomb of Ninus darkens the mulberry. Through Shakespeare they became the archetype of star-crossed love, and its parody.
Baucis and Philemon: A poor old couple of Phrygia who welcome the disguised gods and are rewarded with a temple and with death together as two trees. They are the poem's image of piety and faithful marriage.
Orpheus and Eurydice: The poet-singer who goes down to the underworld for his dead wife and loses her by looking back. Orpheus then becomes the narrator of Book 10 and is killed by Maenads in Book 11; his art can move nature but not death (Barchiesi 2002).

Artists and rivals

Arachne: A Lydian weaver who challenges Minerva and depicts the crimes of the gods in a flawless tapestry; she is turned into a spider. She is often read as a figure for Ovid himself (Feeney 1991).
Daedalus: The Athenian master craftsman who builds the Labyrinth and the wings that carry him and Icarus out of Crete. His art is marvellous and catastrophic, and his jealousy of his nephew Perdix shows the darker side of artistic rivalry.
Pygmalion: The Cypriot sculptor who carves an ivory woman so lifelike that he falls in love with her; Venus brings her to life. The poem's most famous fable of art and desire, and a long-lived model of the creative imagination.
The Muses and the Pierides: The nine goddesses of song and the nine mortal sisters who challenge them, judged in Book 5. Calliope's victorious song of Proserpina is a poem within the poem about poetic authority (Hinds 1987).

Heroes

Medea: The Colchian princess and witch who helps Jason win the Golden Fleece, rejuvenates his father, destroys Pelias and kills her own children. Her monologue of divided will and her invocation of the powers of night are among the most influential passages in the poem.
Hercules: The greatest of Greek heroes, whose death by Nessus' poisoned tunic and deification in Book 9 anticipate the apotheoses of Aeneas, Romulus and Caesar. Ovid shows his labours only in passing.
Ajax and Ulysses: The rival claimants to the arms of Akhilleus in Book 13: the warrior who trusts in his deeds and the orator who wins with words. Their debate is a showpiece of rhetoric and a comment on the poem's own art.
Aeneas: Virgil's hero, who passes through Books 13 and 14 on his way from Troy to Italy and is made a god. Ovid deliberately minimises the episodes that Virgil made central (Hinds 1987).
Pythagoras: The Greek philosopher who addresses Numa in Book 15 on vegetarianism, the transmigration of souls and the law of universal change. His speech offers a philosophical frame for the whole poem (Myers 1994).
Julius Caesar and Augustus: The dictator who is murdered and transformed into a star, and his adopted son, whose future ascent to heaven the poet prays may be delayed. The poem's chronological end point and the political horizon of its final book (Feeney 1991).

Themes

Change and identity

Metamorphosis in Ovid is rarely random. A transformation often makes visible what a character already was: the savage Lycaon becomes a wolf, the weeping Niobe a weeping rock, the proud Arachne a perpetual weaver. At other times it preserves a person's beauty while destroying her will, as with Daphne. The poem constantly asks what survives a change of form: mind, voice, name, memory, or nothing at all (Solodow 1988) (Barkan 1986).

Book 15 universalises the theme. Pythagoras teaches that nothing in nature keeps its shape and that death is only change; Ovid, in the epilogue, claims that his own 'better part' will escape this law through his poem. Identity, in the end, is located in voice and reputation rather than in the body.

Desire and violence

Erotic desire is the motor of most of the poem's stories, and it is overwhelmingly the desire of the powerful for the powerless. Gods pursue nymphs and mortal women, often with comic self-importance on the part of the pursuer and terror on the part of the pursued. Ovid gives unusual attention to the victims' perspective, but he also makes these stories elegant, witty and visually seductive, and the relation between his sympathy and his artistry is one of the poem's central problems (Curran 1978) (Richlin 1992).

Alongside the stories of rape run stories of transgressive passion felt by women themselves (Medea, Scylla, Byblis, Myrrha), whose monologues explore the mind divided between desire and shame. These portraits made the poem a quarry for later tragedy and psychological fiction.

Art and the artist

Many of the poem's most memorable figures are artists: Arachne and Minerva, Philomela at her loom, Daedalus, Pygmalion, Orpheus, the Muses and their rivals. Their stories examine the power of art to deceive, to bear witness, to come alive and to provoke the anger of those in power. Because these stories so often mirror Ovid's own poem, the Metamorphoses is among the most self-conscious works of ancient literature (Hardie 2002) (Feldherr 2010).

Gods, power and justice

Ovid's gods are vividly anthropomorphic: jealous, vain, lustful and quick to punish. They rarely act justly, and their punishments often fall on the innocent or the unlucky. Denis Feeney has argued that the poem's treatment of divinity is not simply irreverent but explores what it means to represent gods at all in a culture that was turning a living ruler into one. Read against Augustan Rome, the arbitrary authority of Jupiter acquires a political dimension (Feeney 1991).

Storytelling and belief

The poem is full of narrators who tell stories to persuade, to console, to entertain or to warn, and of audiences who believe or doubt them. Ovid draws attention to the incredible nature of his material, sometimes with mock assurances that 'the ancients' vouch for it. The question of whether such stories are true, and what kind of truth fiction can claim, is woven into the poem's design (Wheeler 1999) (Feeney 1991).

Motifs

Pursuit and flight

From Daphne to Arethusa to Galatea, the pattern of a god or lover pursuing a fleeing nymph recurs throughout the poem, often ending in transformation. Ovid varies it endlessly, with similes of hounds and hares, wolves and lambs, but its repetition makes the violence it contains impossible to overlook (Curran 1978).

Contests

Mortals challenge gods and lose: Arachne against Minerva, the Pierides against the Muses, Marsyas against Apollo, Pan against Apollo with Midas as judge. Other contests set mortals against each other, as in the debate of Ajax and Ulysses. These scenes allow Ovid to stage questions of artistic value and authority.

Seeing and looking

Forbidden or fatal looking is everywhere: Actaeon sees Diana, Narcissus his own face, Orpheus turns back to Eurydice, Medusa turns her viewers to stone. Ovid's own descriptions are intensely visual, and the poem makes the reader's gaze part of its subject (Hardie 2002).

Tales within tales

Stories are told by characters inside stories, sometimes to three or four levels: Calliope's song as reported by a Muse to Minerva, Venus' tale of Atalanta within Orpheus' song. The device creates the 'continuous song' and keeps raising the question of who is speaking and why (Barchiesi 2002) (Wheeler 1999).

Symbols

The laurel

Daphne's tree becomes Apollo's emblem, the crown of poets and of Roman generals, and the tree that guarded the doors of Augustus' house. In the first love story of the poem, a symbol of victory is made from a woman's escape.

The web

Arachne's tapestry and Philomela's woven message are images of the poem itself: crowded, many-coloured narratives that tell what the powerful would prefer to hide. Weaving is also a traditional figure for composing a text.

The reflection and the echo

Narcissus' image in the pool and Echo's disembodied voice are paired images of a self that cannot reach what it loves. They make visible the poem's interest in illusion and in what remains when the body fades.

Stars

Callisto, Ariadne's crown, Hercules and finally Julius Caesar are set among the stars. Catasterism, transformation into a constellation, is the highest metamorphosis, and in Book 15 it becomes an instrument of Roman imperial ideology, which the poet then answers with his own claim to rise 'above the stars'.

Critical debates

Epic or anti-epic?

The Metamorphoses is written in the metre of epic and covers the whole of mythical history, but it has no single hero, no single action and an unstable tone. Brooks Otis, in Ovid as an Epic Poet (1966), argued that beneath the variety lay a careful architecture of four large sections and that Ovid had written a deliberately unheroic epic, a reply to the Augustan seriousness of Virgil (Otis 1970).

Later critics have questioned the search for a single structure and have stressed instead the poem's play with genre. Stephen Hinds, comparing the two Ovidian versions of Persephone in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, showed how Ovid sets epic and elegiac conventions against one another within individual episodes, so that genre becomes a subject of the poem rather than a fixed category. Joseph Solodow and Karl Galinsky emphasise Ovid's narrative manner over any epic design (Hinds 1987) (Solodow 1988) (Galinsky 1975).

Ovid and Augustus: subversion or flattery?

The poem ends with a panegyric of Julius Caesar and Augustus, and earlier passages compare Jupiter's palace to the Palatine and Jupiter himself to Augustus. Read straightforwardly, this is the conventional praise expected from a poet of the regime. But Ovid's gods are capricious and cruel, his compliments are often hyperbolic to the point of comedy, and the epilogue's defiance of 'Jove's anger' was soon read, after the exile, as a statement of the poet's independence (Otis 1970) (Syme 1978).

Otis, in his first edition, saw the final books as a failure of conviction; Galinsky reads Ovid as broadly in harmony with the Augustan age; others, including Feeney, prefer to see the poem as exploring the very process by which rulers are made into gods, without either simple flattery or simple subversion. The debate mirrors the one over the Aeneid, and is complicated by the fact that Ovid revised nothing after his banishment (Galinsky 1975) (Feeney 1991).

Violence, rape and gender

Dozens of stories in the poem involve rape or attempted rape. Leo Curran's 1978 article in Arethusa was among the first to treat these episodes as a subject in their own right, arguing that Ovid shows unusual awareness of the victim's terror and suffering. Amy Richlin's 'Reading Ovid's Rapes' (1992) took a more critical view, asking what pleasures the poem offers its readers in the aestheticised spectacle of violence, and how far its wit makes it complicit (Curran 1978) (Richlin 1992).

The question has since become central to the teaching of the poem, with discussions of whether the episodes can or should be taught without warning, and of the poem's representations of gender change (Tiresias, Caenis, Iphis, Hermaphroditus). Many readers now see the poem as both deeply implicated in Roman attitudes and exceptionally alert to the experience of those who suffer them (Hardie 2002).

Art and the artist

The stories of Arachne, Pygmalion and Orpheus are regularly read as reflections on Ovid's own art. Arachne's tapestry of divine crimes seems a miniature of the Metamorphoses and her punishment a prophecy of Ovid's; Pygmalion's statue embodies the illusion of life that the poet's vivid descriptions create; Orpheus is the poet whose song conquers death and fails. Leonard Barkan traced how these figures shaped the Renaissance idea of the artist (Barkan 1986) (Feeney 1991).

Philip Hardie's Ovid's Poetics of Illusion argues that the poem is fundamentally concerned with the power of images and words to make absent things present, and that Narcissus and Pygmalion are its central emblems. Andrew Feldherr has connected Ovid's interest in illusion to the political uses of spectacle in Augustan Rome (Hardie 2002) (Feldherr 2010).

The narrators within the poem

A large part of the poem is spoken by characters rather than by the main narrator: the Minyeides, Calliope, Achelous and Lelex, Orpheus, Nestor, Ulysses and Ajax, Macareus, Vertumnus, Pythagoras. Recent narratological criticism has examined how these speakers shape their stories to their own purposes and audiences, and how the poem uses them to multiply perspectives and undermine any single authority (Barchiesi 2002).

Stephen Wheeler, in A Discourse of Wonders, studies the relation between narrators and audiences, including the reader, whom the poem repeatedly addresses and tests. The question of who is speaking, and whether we should believe them, becomes a key to reading the Metamorphoses as a whole (Wheeler 1999).

Pythagoras and change as philosophy

Is Pythagoras' speech in Book 15 the key to the poem, or a parody of philosophy? Some readers see it as Ovid's serious statement of the principle behind metamorphosis, a cosmic law of flux that gives meaning to the transformations that precede it. Others point out that Pythagorean metempsychosis, in which souls migrate between bodies, does not match the poem's actual transformations, and that the speech's long-windedness and dietary preaching may be comic (Galinsky 1975) (Solodow 1988).

K. Sara Myers has placed the speech within the poem's continuous interest in causes and origins (aetiology) and in natural philosophy, from the cosmogony of Book 1 to the didactic tradition of Lucretius. The tension between universal change and the eternity claimed for Rome and its rulers in the following lines has been read as deliberate (Myers 1994) (Hardie 2002).

Reception: Golding, Shakespeare and after

Medieval readers treated the poem as an encyclopaedia of myth and allegorised it; Chaucer drew on it for The Book of the Duchess (Ceyx and Alcyone), The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women (Thisbe) and the Wife of Bath's version of Midas. Arthur Golding's translation of 1567, in rolling fourteeners, made the whole poem available in English, and Shakespeare used it throughout his career. Bottom and the mechanicals perform 'Pyramus and Thisbe' in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Prospero's renunciation of magic in The Tempest is adapted from Golding's version of Medea's incantation in Book 7: 'Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone, Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone.' (Nims 1965) (Bate 1993) (Lyne 2001).

Painters and sculptors took up the poem with equal enthusiasm. Titian's series of mythological 'poesie' for Philip II of Spain includes Diana and Actaeon, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Europa, and Bernini's Apollo and Daphne captures the moment of transformation in marble. In the late twentieth century Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (1997), free versions of twenty-four episodes, renewed the poem's reputation in English, stressing its violence and passion (Barkan 1986) (Hughes 1997).

Key passages

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange!

The narrator · Met. 1.1–4

The poem's opening statement of its subject. Everything that follows is a variation on this theme of changed forms, and the epic scale is announced in the very first breath.

Before her prayer was ended, torpor seized on all her body, and a thin bark closed around her gentle bosom,

The narrator · Met. 1.548–50

Daphne's transformation into the laurel, the model for the poem's many descriptions of a body passing into a new form, step by step. Her escape from Apollo comes at the cost of her humanity.

cries loudly, “Who is here?” and Echo, “Here!” Replies.

Narcissus and Echo · Met. 3.380–82

Echo can only repeat, but by choosing which words to echo she turns Narcissus' questions into answers and declarations of love. Ovid's wordplay makes her curse a form of expression.

The thing that I desire is mine—abundance makes me poor.

Narcissus · Met. 3.466

Narcissus' paradox: what he loves is himself, and therefore he can never possess it. The Latin, 'inopem me copia fecit', is one of the poem's most quoted phrases.

Minerva could not find a fleck or flaw— even Envy can not censure perfect art—

The narrator · Met. 6.129–30

Arachne's tapestry is perfect, and the goddess's only answer is violence. The line is often read as a statement about the vulnerability of art before power, and as a prophecy of Ovid's own fate.

I see a better course and I approve, but follow its defeat.

Medea · Met. 7.20–21

Medea's famous confession of the divided will: reason sees the better way, desire follows the worse. The line became a proverb in Latin and was quoted by moralists and theologians.

The unlucky father, not a father, called, “Where are you, Icarus?”

Daedalus · Met. 8.231–32

Ovid's 'pater nec iam pater' captures in a phrase the moment at which Daedalus loses his son and with him the name of father. His art has destroyed what he loved.

and so his art concealed his art.

The narrator · Met. 10.252

Pygmalion's statue is so lifelike that it hides the art that made it. The phrase became a maxim of classical and Renaissance aesthetics.

All things are in a state of flux, all shapes receive a changing nature.

Pythagoras · Met. 15.178–79

The philosophical statement of the poem's theme. In Pythagoras' teaching, change is not an exception in nature but its rule.

If Poets' prophecies have any truth, through all the coming years of future ages, I shall live in fame.

The narrator · Met. 15.878–79

The last words of the poem (vivam, 'I shall live'). Ovid claims for himself the immortality that the poem has just granted to Caesar, but by the power of poetry rather than of the gods.

Questions for study

What is the relation between a character and his or her new form? Choose three transformations and consider whether each is a punishment, a reward, an escape or simply a fixing of what the character already was.
Compare Lycaon (Book 1), Daphne (Book 1), Niobe (Book 6), Arachne (Book 6) and Baucis and Philemon (Book 8). What survives of the human being in each case?
Is the Metamorphoses an epic? What does Ovid take from Homer and Virgil, and what does he refuse?
Think about the metre, the scale and the proem, but also about the absence of a single hero and the way Books 12–14 handle the Trojan War and the story of Aeneas.
How does Ovid connect his stories into a 'continuous song'? Analyse the transitions in one book.
Look for links of family (the house of Cadmus), place, theme, contrast and internal narrators. Book 4 (the daughters of Minyas) and Book 8 (the guests of Achelous) are good examples.
How does Ovid represent the experience of the victims of divine desire? Is his artistry a form of sympathy or of complicity?
Compare Daphne, Io, Callisto, Proserpina and Philomela, and consider the arguments of Curran and Richlin. Pay attention to whose point of view the narrative adopts.
What does the contest between Arachne and Minerva suggest about art and power?
Compare the two tapestries in detail. Which resembles the Metamorphoses itself? Why can Minerva find no flaw, and why is that not enough to save Arachne?
Compare Pygmalion and Orpheus as images of the artist.
One creates a living body from ivory, the other nearly brings a dead woman back from the underworld. What role does looking play in each story? What do they suggest about Ovid's view of his own art?
What is the function of internal narrators in the poem? Choose one and analyse how the teller shapes the tale.
Consider Calliope (Book 5), Lelex (Book 8), Orpheus (Book 10) or Nestor (Book 12). Who is listening, and what does the narrator want from them?
How should we read Pythagoras' speech in Book 15? Is it the key to the poem?
Compare his account of universal change with the actual transformations in earlier books, and with the eternity claimed for Rome, Augustus and the poet in the following lines.
Does the ending of the poem praise Augustus or undermine him?
Look at the deification of Julius Caesar, the prayer that Augustus' ascent be delayed and the epilogue's reference to 'Jove's anger'. Remember that Ovid was exiled by Augustus just as the poem was completed.
Why has the Metamorphoses been so influential on later writers and artists? Take one example and compare it with Ovid's original.
Possible examples: Shakespeare's Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Prospero's speech in The Tempest (compare Golding's version of Medea), Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, Titian's Diana and Actaeon, or Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid.