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37588 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1711 of 1880

  • Introduction

  • Peter Jones
  • Book:
    Reading Ovid
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    08 March 2007, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    Metamorphōsēs and this selection

    Ovid's roughly twelve-thousand-line, fifteen-book Metamorphōsēs (‘Changes of shape’) is classed as an epic (like all epics it was composed in hexameters). It offers a supposedly temporal sequence of myths that starts with the formation of the world and ends with Ovid's contemporary, the emperor Augustus. Its title derives from the fact that almost all the stories involve transformations of one sort or another, about two hundred and fifty in all, mostly of humans. Ovid treats each one with inimitable brilliance, turning Metamorphōsēs into (if nothing else) a treasure-house of wonderful stories. But since these stories of transformation are all self-contained narratives, often without any obvious connection with each other, Ovid has to employ a range of ingenious devices in order to weave them together into a continuous narrative. As a result, Metamorphōsēs is quite unlike any other epic, and rather difficult to summarise. One (among many) ways of doing so is to divide it into three sections. In books 1–6 it recounts stories mainly of gods (e.g. Apollo and Daphne, Jupiter and Io, Jupiter's rape of Europa, Dionysus and Pentheus, Mars and Venus); books 7–10 concentrate on the heroes of myth (e.g. Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, the Minotaur, the Calydonian boar, Hercules, Orpheus and Eurydice); and in books 11–15 Ovid turns to ‘history’ (the siege of Troy, the stories of Aeneas, Romulus and early Roman kings like Numa), before unfolding some lengthy ‘philosophical’ speculations on vegetarianism and the nature of change by the sixth-century bc Greek philosopher Pythagoras.

Page 1711 of 1880