Ovids Metamorphoses A Readers Guide Book PDF
Ovids Metamorphoses A Readers Guide Book PDF
Ovids Metamorphoses A Readers Guide Book PDF
GENEVIEVE LIVELEY
www.continuumbooks.com
Acknowledgements vi
A Note on Translations vii
1. Contexts 1
2. Overview of Themes 7
3. Textual Readings 16
3.1 Books One to Five 16
3.2 Books Six to Ten 69
3.3 Books Eleven to Fifteen 111
4. Reception and Influence 155
5. Further Reading 167
Notes 169
Bibliography 182
Index 191
vi
vii
CONTEXTS
As Ovid himself tells us, his own life story reads much like
one of the tales of transformation narrated in his book of
Metamorphoses. Born on March 20th 43 BC, a year after the
assassination of Julius Caesar, Publius Ovidius Naso grew up in
the small mountain town of Sulmo (Sulmona), part of a wealthy
Roman family. His family intended him to follow a suitable
career in the courts or the senate, sending him with his older
brother to Rome to further his education – just as a young
Octavian was about to receive the official title of ‘Augustus’
and Rome was about to enter its own new phase of radical
transformation under his rule as ‘Princeps’ or ‘First Citizen’.
After studying law and rhetoric with one of Rome’s most illustri-
ous tutors, Arellius Fuscus, Ovid embarked on a short-lived
political career, serving briefly on the ‘Committee of Three’,
before stepping down from this first rung on the cursus honorem
or political ladder and turning to poetry. In an autobiographical
poem written towards the end of his life (Tristia 4.10.19–26),
he tells us that:
The poems of the Tristia turn again and again to reflect characters,
motifs and images familiar from the Metamorphoses. So, in the
opening poem of the collection (Tristia 1.1.71–4, 79–82), Ovid
identifies himself with Phaethon who, like the poet, is represented
in the Metamorphoses as the unfortunate and innocent victim
of a thunderbolt ‘unjustly launched’ (2.377f) by a punitive deity.
This motif, in which Augustus is aligned with thunderbolt-
wielding Jupiter, is repeated again and again in the Tristia, each
repetition reinforcing the idea that Ovid’s own fate mirrors the
tragic transformations described in his Metamorphoses. Indeed,
so strongly is this impression stamped in the Tristia that it is
tempting to see in the text of the Metamorphoses itself signs of
revision and rewriting by Ovid while in exile.5
Ovid certainly claims that the Metamorphoses remained
unfinished at the time of his banishment; he even asserts that he
had tried to burn the manuscript before leaving Rome. But,
he confesses with tongue in cheek, other copies were already in
circulation, so the poem survived (Tristia 1.7.13–34). He even
goes so far as to write a short preface for the allegedly unfinished
text already circulating privately in Rome, protesting that he
would have liked to have corrected its defects, if only he had
been allowed. However, while it is likely that Ovid did indeed
take both the Fasti and the Metamorphoses into exile with him,
the book burning story is too close to the legend of Virgil’s
deathbed instructions that his own unfinished Aeneid be burned
to deserve too much credit. We can only speculate whether or
not the text of the Metamorphoses that we possess today was
revised by Ovid in exile, and whether or not the features that
seem to foreshadow his fate were added or enhanced during
that revision.
In either case, Augustus’ influence can clearly be felt through-
out the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses. Unlike his poetic
predecessors, who had experienced at first hand the bloody
breakdown of Rome’s democratic government and its chaotic
transition from Republic to de facto monarchy under Augustus,
Ovid entered adult life at a point of relative order and stability in
Rome’s troubled history. Unlike Virgil, who had lost his family’s
estate to pay off war veterans, or Horace, who had actually
fought against Octavian during the civil war, or Propertius, who
lost his brother to the conflict, Ovid had no personal experience
of the civil strife that had dominated life for the generation
before him, and knew no other political authority before the
Augustan regime. Critics have tended to see this important
difference as offering an explanation for the comparative
irreverence and playful disrespect for all things political – and
particularly Augustan – that Ovid displays throughout his
poetry. But while it is certainly significant that Ovid lived and
wrote under the social and political calm afforded by the
Augustan peace, the unbroken continuity of this pax would and
could not have been taken for granted by any of Rome’s citizens
(includingits princeps) at the time. The threat that chaos might
return to devastate the order of the Augustan cosmos remained.
And this threat is articulated both in Augustus’ experimental
efforts after his victory in civil war to also ‘win the peace’ by
stamping his authority on every facet of Roman life, and in
Ovid’s own experimental Metamorphoses.
OVERVIEW OF THEMES
10
present day (ad mea tempora) – or, at least, from creation right
up, until the death and apotheosis of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE
and Augustus’ accession to power.This chronology appears to
lend the poem an obvious narrative framework – a timeline
along which Ovid can string his tales of transformation in order
of occurrence, from pre-history through to the Augustan Age.
But in practice this timeline offers only a rough guide to the
sequence of events as they are narrated in the poem, and there
are numerous flashbacks (analepses), flash forwards (prolepses),
and chronological slippages, allowing – even encouraging – each
one of the 250 individual stories narrated in the Metamorphoses
to be read as an independent unit.5
A more significant aspect of Ovid’s claim to bring his material
‘up to date’, perhaps, is the way in which he provocatively draws
parallels between mythic and modern characters and events.
Early in book 1 he sketches such a parallel between the gods of
Olympus and the Roman Senate, establishing an unambiguous
correspondence between Jupiter and Augustus in a direct
address to the Emperor himself (1.199–205). The effect of such
‘anachronism’ is deliberately unsettling for Ovid’s readers, as
Jupiter’s behaviour in the Metamorphoses (his sexual behaviour
and violent authoritarianism, in particular) reflects an especially
unflattering light upon his Augustan counterpart.6 Indeed,
critical opinion diverges widely upon whether or not Ovid and
his epic are to be read as ‘anti’ or ‘pro’ Augustus, and upon the
extent to which the mythical world of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
caricatures or comments upon life in the contemporary world of
Augustus’ Rome. We can only speculate upon the nature of
Ovid’s ‘Augustanism’, given the contradictory character of his
treatment both of Augustan motifs and of Augustus himself
who is sometimes the subject of (ironic?) praise and at others the
object of (ironic?) blame. It is frequently difficult to distinguish
satire from sincerity, compliment from criticism, and perhaps
too easy to suggest that such political ambiguity and ideological
changeability is exactly what we should expect from a protean
poem such as the Metamorphoses.7 Yet, it is worth bearing in
mind that the Metamorphoses does not straightforwardly relate
to the Age of Augustus but to Ovid’s own distinctly personal
vision and version of that Age: the poem, after all, leads us into
‘my own lifetime’ (mea tempora).8
11
12
13
14
15
TEXTUAL READINGS
16
17
18
19
Lycaon (1.163–252)
The story of Lycaon ostensibly offers us a dramatic case-study
exemplifying the vicious blood-lust and impiety that was
characteristic of humanity in the Iron Age. But it also serves
as a dramatic model typifying the characteristics of human
metamorphosis on which Ovid will go on to base all such trans-
formations in his poem and so bears particular significance as
both a moral and narrative exemplum.4
The story begins with a council of the gods – a typical feature
of traditional epic – in which the gods discuss their particular
concerns for a hero or his people, and consider how best to help.
Here Ovid transforms the convention and has Jupiter summon a
council meeting in order to discuss the particular case of Lycaon
and to consider how best to exterminate the entire human race.
The fact that, as part of his transformation of this epic topos,
Ovid represents the council as a meeting of the Roman senate,
with Jupiter as Augustus, adds a provocative political dimension
to the entire episode. So, with playful, even satirical anachron-
ism, he explicitly assimilates the homes of the gods on Mount
Olympus to Augustus’ marble residences on Rome’s Palatine
Hill (1.176), he describes the lesser gods as plebs (1.173), and
ranks the major deities as the equivalents of Roman aristocrats
20
21
22
23
24
Python (1.416–51)
The story of Deucalion and Pyrrha accounts for the human
repopulation of the earth after the flood, but the earth is still
lacking animal life. This, with a quasi-scientific explanation
reminiscent of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of
Things), Ovid attributes to spontaneous regeneration from the
‘seeds of things,’ (semina rerum – 1.419) buried in the fertile
earth after the flood. With echoes of the primordial chaos from
which the cosmos itself was first generated, the mixture of mois-
ture from the floodwater and heat from the sun produces a state
which is naturally suited to the creation of new things. Thus, a
new era of metamorphosis is born as innumerable species
of creatures emerge from the ooze, some familiar from the old
antediluvian days, others novel and strange. Among these new
monsters is the Python, a terrible snake-like creature, which
terrorizes the newly-formed race of men until Apollo steps in
with his bow and kills it with a thousand arrows, instituting the
25
26
conveys her inner conflict – but also darkly hints that part of
Daphne herself is actively complicit in her own attempted rape.11
Indeed, the emphasis here upon Daphne’s beauty or forma
actively mitigating against her own wishes adds a disturbing
tone to this tale: it is as if Daphne’s beauty makes her ‘fair game’
for Apollo – a trope that will reappear in Ovid’s other rape
stories. Ovid, however, playfully revels in the comedy of this
situation: Apollo sees Daphne with her long hair flowing
lose and wonders what it would look like put up (that is, he
immediately desires to change her); he admires her fingers,
hands, wrists, her arms and bare shoulders and he imagines
how much more beautiful the rest of her must be (that is, he
immediately imagines her breasts); and fearing that she may
scratch her bare legs as he chases her through rough scrub,
he begs her to slow down, promising that if she does, he himself
will run more slowly too! The uneven syntax of the Latin
further adds to the comedy of this chase scene, ingeniously
reproducing the effect of Apollo’s breathless panting speech as
he tries to run and talk at the same time, puffing ‘nympha, precor,
Penei, mane!’ (1.504).
Apollo tries in vain to persuade Daphne to stop running,
boasting about his godly attributes, but eventually gives up any
attempt at persuasion and puts all of his energy into the chase.
Here too Ovid changes to a more serious tone and introduces
an epic-style simile, likening Apollo to a hound and Daphne to a
fleeing hare, only inches away from the dog’s muzzle as it closes
in behind her (1.533–9). This striking simile prepares us for the
inevitable end of the chase, as Daphne’s strength and speed fade
and Apollo gains ground. Praying to her father, the river-god
Peneus, in desperation she pleads: ‘If rivers have power over
nature/mar the beauty which made me admired too well, by
changing/my form’ (1.546f). Metamorphosis comes swiftly and
almost before she has finished praying her transformation into
a laurel tree has begun, her feet turning into roots, her arms
into branches and her hair into leaves (1.548–52). Ovid’s Latin
conveys subtle effects here that an English translation cannot
capture: the suddenness of Daphne’s transformation is caught
neatly by the description of her swift feet, abruptly changed into
sluggish roots (pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret –
1.551), where the juxtaposition of velox (swift) and pigris
27
Io (1.568–746)13
The Io story, narrated in flashback, offers a stylistic variation
upon the type of rape narrative in which Apollo and Daphne
28
29
itself, offering only the detail that even as a cow Io was still
beautiful (formosa – 1.612). Undeceived by the transformation,
Juno asks Jupiter to give her the cow as a present. Swayed on
one side by shame/guilt and on the other by love/lust, Jupiter’s
battle with his conscience is represented as an absurd moral
dilemma, the irony underscored by Ovid’s use of the same term
(pudor) to describe both Io’s virginity and Jupiter’s shame at its
violation: Jupiter gives no thought to the sufferings of Io here.
This ludicrous ethical conflict is finally resolved by Jupiter
giving the cow to Juno, who is, after all, both his wife and his
sister, as Ovid wryly observes (1.620). Still jealous of her rival,
Juno sets the hundred-eyes of Argus to guard over the bovine Io
and it is here that Ovid explores the misery and the comedy of
Io’s dual identity as both cow and girl more fully. As the details
of her transformation were not narrated in any detail, Ovid’s
account of Io’s life imprisoned inside the body of a cow offers
him the opportunity to exploit the psychological impact and the
comic potential of the metamorphosis. So, she is forced to wear
a halter around her neck, to eat grass and leaves, to sleep on the
ground, and to drink water from a muddy stream (1.631–4). In a
gesture that will become a familiar feature of human to animal
metamorphoses in the poem, she tries to stretch out her arms in
supplication but finds that she has no arms to stretch;15 she tries
to speak, but is frightened by the mooing sound that she finds
herself making; she looks at herself reflected in the waters of her
own father’s clear stream and is horrified by the horned creature
she sees looking back at herself, and in terror she tries to run
away from herself (1.635–41).
Ovid goes on to describe Io’s tragicomic reunion with her
father Inachus, whom she follows and offers herself as a pet.
She eats the grass he holds out for her, giving cow kisses to his
outstretched palm, and unable to speak, scratches out her name
and her story in the dirt (1.649f), for Io’s blessedly short name
means ‘woe’ and ‘alas’ in Greek. Thus, tracing IO in the dirt
simultaneously reveals both her true identity and the sad fate
that has befallen her. As if reading and translating (or perhaps
transforming) her ‘IO’ from Greek into Latin, Inachus responds
to his daughter with the Latin equivalent of ‘woe’ and ‘alas’ (me
miserum – 1.651, 653), before launching upon an extended
lament for his own sad loss: it would have been easier for him if
30
Io had never been found; he had high hopes for her marriage
and a future dynasty; and, since he is an immortal river god,
he cannot even hope to end his sorrows in death (1.651–63).
Although he is Io’s own father, this immortal shows little com-
passion for mortal suffering, and it almost comes as relief when
Argus finally leads Io away and Inachus’ orgy of self-pity is
brought to an end.
Finally, Jupiter can bear Io’s torment no more and orders
Mercury to kill Argus. Disguised as a shepherd, Mercury lulls
Argus to sleep with his pastoral pipe music and begins to tell
Argus the story of how the reed pipe came to be invented
(1.687f).16 And so, in the guise of a pastoral interlude, with one
of the easy metamorphoses of genre achieved by Ovid through-
out the poem, we hear the aetiology of the Pan-pipe, and the
story-within-a-story of Pan and Syrinx.
31
Phaethon (1.747–79)
Returning briefly to the story of Io, Ovid describes her reverse
metamorphosis from cow into girl, an innovation that encour-
ages him to linger on the details that were passed-over in the
narrative of her first transformation (1.738–46). Ovid then
allows Io to lead us into his next story: now, he tells us (bringing
the tale into his own time), Io is known as Isis, mother to a son
32
Book Two
Phaethon (2.1–400)20
Continued across books 1 and 2, the story of Phaethon is
the longest single episode in the poem, taking us on an intricate
narrative journey through time and space. We left Phaethon
hurrying impetuously to find his father at the end of book 1 but
as he reaches the Palace of the Sun, Ovid effectively stops the
boy – and the poem’s reader – in his tracks. He opens book 2
with an epic ecphrasis or extended description of the Palace
of the Sun, focusing aptly enough upon the closed doors of
the entrance that will eventually lead us and Phaethon into
the Palace and into book 2.21 The elaborately decorated doors,
whose workmanship is even more wonderful than the silver
material from which they are made (2.5), depict the ordered
33
34
35
Callisto (2.401–530)
As omnipotent Jupiter checks and repairs the state of the earth
after the great fire, returning life and order after disorder and
destruction, he spies a beautiful nymph – and so returns the
poem to one of its familiar themes interrupted by the long
interlude of Phaethon’s fiery drama. How Callisto, daughter
of Lycaon, survived the flood that followed her father’s meta-
morphosis in book 1 is not clear, although it has been suggested
that Phaethon’s misadventure with the chariot of the Sun
disrupted the fabric of time itself and that the timeline of
Ovid’s narrative has therefore been reset somehow to a period
before the flood.24 Certainly we seem to have returned again
to the type of rape narrative (or divine amor) that dominated
book 1 of the poem: Jupiter is inflamed with desire at the very
first sight of this unnamed nymph (2.410); she is a modest virgin
and a hunter, devoted to the service of Diana (2.411–416);
the sun is high in the sky when the girl seeks the shade of the
(aptly) virgin forest (2.417–21); and, though apparently mindful
of his recent trouble over Io, Jupiter decides that sex with this
girl is worth the risk.
But here the familiar pattern changes and Ovid introduces a
new variation on the rape motif, as Jupiter first metamorphoses
into Diana, ‘putting on’ her identity and her gender as easily as
putting on her dress (induitur faciem cultumque Dianae – 2.425).
Callisto hails this false Diana as ‘greater than Jove’ (2.429), to
the great amusement of the disguised god, who unexpectedly
begins to kiss her on the lips.25 There follows one of the most
empathetic and psychologically perceptive accounts of the trau-
matic aftermath of rape in any work of literature, ancient or
modern – made all the more remarkable by its inclusion in a
36
37
the sight of bears, again forgetting that she herself is one, and
she trembles at the sight of wolves, even though her own father
Lycaon now runs with the pack (2.489–95).
However, Callisto’s multiple metamorphoses – virgin to mother,
favourite to outcast, human to animal, hunter to hunted – are
not over yet. Her story takes a final cruel turn when her grown-
up and unknown son is on the verge of killing her before Jupiter
reappears and turns them both into stars (2.507). Jealous Juno,
her anger not yet assuaged, interprets this as another personal
insult, persuading the gods of the sea to refuse ‘that harlot’ (as
she still calls Callisto) to ever set into their waters (2.530). The
cruelty and anger of the gods once aroused, it seems, know
no bounds – as the banished Ovid himself would one day
experience at first hand.
38
narratives from book 1), and the even shorter tale of Nyctimene
who has sex with her father and turns into an owl (2.549–95). The
raven ignores the crow’s stories – with predictably tragic con-
sequences. Hearing of Coronis’ betrayal Apollo kills his unfaithful
lover in a jealous rage, repents his rashness but is unable to heal
her, gives her an elaborate funeral (snatching his unborn child
from the pyre just in the nick of time), and then punishes the
raven who had brought him the bad news (2.596–632).
The effect of so many stories, albeit echoing motifs with which
we are already familiar (the transformation of a bird’s plumage,
the attempted rape avoided by metamorphosis, the impetuous
god who brings death to a loved-one) is disorientating. There is
an obvious bird-theme (with an underlying erotic sub-theme)
tying the stories together into a semblance of unity, but what
these tales also share is a common caveat about the dangers of
careless talk, and the restrictions set upon freedom of speech by
those in authority. Whether or not Ovid did later edit his poem
while in exile, this section of the Metamorphoses certainly offers
a suggestive commentary upon the hazards of seeing and saying
that which one should not.
Ocyrhoe (2.633–75)
This same highly-charged motif is repeated in the next story.
The infant that Apollo rescues from Coronis’ funeral pyre is the
unnamed baby Aesculapius, like his father a healer, who Apollo
now sends to be fostered with the centaur Chiron. The narrative
follows Aesculapius into Chiron’s home, where we meet his
daughter Ocyrhoe and learn of her metamorphosis into a
mare. Ocyrhoe is a gifted seer who foretells the future of both
Aesculapius and her father before the Fates forbid her to speak
further, curtailing her powers and transforming her (appropri-
ately, given her father’s identity) into a horse. Ovid’s description
of Ocyrhoe’s metamorphosis typically focuses upon her loss
of human speech as she is transformed alike in both voice
and appearance, stressing continuity through change as her
fingernails become hooves and her flowing hair a horse’s
mane. However, this description is lent particular poignancy
by the background of Ovid’s own story of ‘metamorphosis’
and punishment by the Fates (or rather, their agent Augustus).
39
Battus (2.676–707)
With an elegant transition – Chiron weeps for his lost daughter
and calls upon Apollo for help, but Apollo is busy elsewhere –
we move on to a new story, and a new twist on the same freedom
of speech theme. Apollo cannot help Chiron or Ocyrhoe because
Ovid has temporarily transformed him into a typical pastoral
lover, dressed in a shepherd’s cloak, playing the pan pipes,
neglecting his herd, and thinking only of his new love (2.676–85).
Meanwhile the wily Mercury steals the herd from under Apollo’s
distracted nose, and an old man named Battus witnesses the
crime.29 When Mercury tries to buy the old man’s silence about
what he has seen, Battus promises that ‘This stone will inform on
you sooner than I’ (2.696). But when he is tricked by Mercury
into betraying his secret, the god twists the old man’s own words
against him and turns him into a stone, silencing him forever.
Aglauros (2.708–832)
An elaboration of this same motif continues into the next story,
where the narrative picks up a loose thread previously dropped
by the crow: the story of the daughters of Cecrops – Herse and
Aglauros. Flying over Athens, Mercury sees the beautiful Herse
and is inflamed with desire for her (2.708–36). Without delay
or disguise he heads straight for her bedroom, but is spied by
her sister Aglauros, who demands a hefty bribe as the price of
her silence – envious of her sister’s luck. In turn the goddess
Minerva, spying from above, seems to be envious of Aglauros’
profiteering, allowing Ovid to embark upon an elaborate
allegorical description of the House of Envy (2.760–86) – the
40
Europa (2.833–75)
After the horrific tale of Aglauros, the tone of the poem lightens
as we again follow Mercury (who has provided a suitably mercurial
bond between the previous two narratives) into the final story of
book 2 and the well-known tale of Europa: so well-known, in
fact, that Ovid does not need to name her here. Reprising his role
as cattle-man, Mercury follows Jove’s instructions to drive a herd
of Tyrian cattle down to the sea shore where the young princess
Europa and her friends like to play (2.833–45). The scene is duly
set for another rape narrative, but Ovid quickly makes it clear
41
42
Book Three
Cadmus (3.1–137)32
As we arrive at book 3 and the shores of Crete, we expect Ovid
to continue the story of Europa. Certainly the opening words of
the book, ‘And now the god . . .’ – Iamque deus (3.1), suggest as
much. But as quickly as Jupiter ‘confesses’ his true identity to
Europa, rapes her, and leaves her, Ovid too leaves Europa behind,
and reveals his true intentions, turning his attention towards
Europa’s brother Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes.33
As a bridging character to link the two stories, Ovid briefly
introduces the father of Europa and Cadmus, Agenor, who,
like the fathers of Daphne and Io, is ignorant of what has
happened to his daughter and so sends his son to look for her,
threatening the boy with exile if he does not find her. Agenor is
a wholly unsympathetic character. His concern for his daughter
makes him behave cruelly towards his son, making him – in
Ovid’s eyes – both pious and sinful in the same act (pius et
sceleratus – 3.5). Indeed, it is a favourite Ovidian paradox that
piety and devotion can sometimes be wrong.34
Having searched unsuccessfully for Europa across the whole
world, Cadmus becomes an exile, unfairly banished from his
home by Agenor’s unreasonable anger. In Ovid’s narrative, he
also becomes an epic hero in the style of Virgil’s Aeneas, an
exile wandering the earth in search of a new home, guided by
oracles towards the site of a new city. So, with a direct if some-
what sardonic echo of Virgil’s Aeneid 1.276–7 where Jupiter
prophesies the founding of Rome, here Cadmus seeks advice
from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The oracle is unusually
helpful and tells him to follow a cow until it lies down to rest
and upon that spot to site his new city – to be named Boeotia
(in Greek ‘cow land’). Although Ovid’s astute readers may
suspect that, in the aftermath of another one of Jupiter’s bovine-
themed rapes, this cow may perhaps turn out to be the girl
Europa transformed – particularly as she is described lifting
her beautiful head to the heavens and filling the air with her
43
44
in the veracity of this tale – or, indeed, of any tale in the Meta-
morphoses – but simply to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the
spectacle. Indeed, as these soldier ‘brothers’ (fratribus – 3.118)
begin to fight among themselves, driven by a fratricidal mad-
ness, Ovid uses the story as a parallel to contemporary Roman
politics, describing the fight between the soldiers explicitly as a
civil war (civilibus . . . bellis – 3.117). Cadmus takes no part in
the conflict, remaining an Augustan model for peace and recon-
ciliation, but recruits the five survivors of this miniature civil
war to aid him in founding Thebes and establishing his new
dynasty (3.129–35). But Ovid reminds us that however happy
and blessed a man’s life may appear, no man can be counted
happy until after his death (3.135–37). Given that Cadmus will
not die but will be turned into a snake at the end of his life, this
homily hardly seems appropriate here. But, as Ovid turns to
narrate the numerous troubles that afflict Cadmus’ descendents
and destroy his dynasty, we are reminded of the particular
relevance of this cautionary tale for Augustus himself, whose
own attempts to establish a secure line of imperial succession
were no less fraught than Cadmus’ own. As it was in Thebes, so
it is – or will be – in Rome.35
Actaeon (3.138–255)
Having mentioned Cadmus’ sons and grandsons in passing
(3.135f), Ovid now segues neatly into the first of what promises
to be a series of stories detailing their troubles (each a subtle
variation or metamorphosis of the Cadmus story itself), begin-
ning first with Actaeon. Somewhat unusually, Ovid opens this
story with a short précis and an authorial commentary, signal-
ling clearly from the outset of the narrative that this tale bears
particular – and perhaps even personal – significance for him.
Indeed, it is tempting to see in Ovid’s spirited defence of
Actaeon’s mistake or error here a veiled defence of his own
error in the mysterious offence he caused Augustus (Tristia
2.103ff), making it possible that Ovid added or otherwise revised
these lines of the poem after his banishment (3.138–42).
The mistake or error that Actaeon commits (echoing that
of Cadmus) is to stumble across the naked goddess Diana while
she is bathing, and so accidentally to see something that he
should not. This unwitting transgression is played out against
45
46
47
Semele (3.256–315)
That we (and Diana) are quite justified in making such con-
nections between ostensibly different stories in Ovid’s carmen
perpetuum is reinforced by the next tale in Ovid’s Theban cycle:
the story of Semele who, like Actaeon and Cadmus before her,
pays a heavy price for seeing something which she should not –
in this case Jupiter’s true sexual self. Juno has now transferred
her jealous rage from Europa, whose story was told in book 2,
towards Europa’s family in general and to Semele (who is
pregnant by Jupiter) in particular. So Semele, like Io and
Callisto before her, although a willing sexual partner in this
case and not a victim of rape, becomes the latest victim of
Juno’s misplaced wrath and Jupiter’s misplaced amor.41
Juno swears that she will give Semele cause to regret her beauty
(in Latin, her forma – 3.270) and, disguising herself as an old
woman – Semele’s trusted nurse Beroe – she sets out first to
‘transform’ (formarat – 3.288) Semele psychologically, under-
mining her trust in her divine lover, and – with comically bad
taste – encouraging her to test Jupiter’s true identity by asking
him to make love to her exactly as he does to his wife.42 Repeat-
ing the same mistake made by Sol in book 2 in swearing
an unbreakable oath and in attempting a relationship with
a mortal, Jupiter is tricked into becoming the agent of Juno’s
revenge. And although he tries (ridiculously) to lessen the force
of his sexual potency by firing off a few thunderbolts before
entering Semele’s bed, her mortal body cannot withstand such
intimate contact with an immortal and he destroys her.
A brief postscript to this story then describes how Jupiter
saved Semele’s unborn child from its mother’s fate, using his
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Tiresias (3.316–38)
This tale is presented as a light-hearted interlude, introducing
Tiresias into the narrative and preparing us for the key role
he will play as prophet and seer in the longer stories of Pentheus
and Narcissus that follow.43 For, having lived as both a man
and a woman, Tiresias has unique insights into the sex lives
of both men and women – his sex change(s) resulting from his
seeing and striking two mating snakes with his staff in a violent
act that is significantly described in the Latin as a religious and
sexual violation (violaverat – 3.325). When the gods disagree
over who enjoys sex more (Jupiter claims that women do; Juno
disagrees) Tiresias is called in to arbitrate, but when he agrees
with Jupiter, Juno blinds him – in punishment for violating
her divine authority, and for intruding upon the sacred mystery
of sex, perhaps. His blindness is ostensibly ameliorated by the
compensatory prophetic sight that Jupiter bestows upon him,
yet this powers of foresight turn out to bring no benefit either to
Tiresias or anyone else – as we see in the next story.
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50
instead she waits for Narcissus to make the first move in their
one-sided courtship, and then mirrors back to him his words –
transforming their original meaning into her own. Here it is
worth looking at the original Latin to see how Ovid produces
this ingenious echoing effect – Narcissus’ words are in bold and
Echo’s echoes are underlined (3.379–92):
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pools of the river Styx (3.505) and Echo again echoing the
sad laments of the mourners at Narcissus’ funeral – a fitting
conclusion that figures both continuity and change for these
characters.
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Book Four
The Daughters of Minyas (4.1–415)
Having focused in the last book upon the tragic consequences of
gazing upon a sacred mystery, or simply of seeing something
which one should not, Ovid now picks up a motif introduced in
the story of Pentheus, to examine the tragic consequences of
failing to show due honour and respect to the god Bacchus. Ovid
shifts his focus to the daughters of Minyas, who refuse to take
part in the local holiday honouring Bacchus boasting instead
of their pious devotion to the goddess Minerva – weaving and
telling each other stories as they work. This allows Ovid to
introduce the sisters as internal narrators, each telling a tale
within a tale in a sophisticated meta-narrative that incorporates
some of Ovid’s best-known love stories: Pyramus and Thisbe
(4.55–166); Venus and Mars (4.167–89); Leucothoe and Clytie
(4.190–273); and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (4.274–388).
We might expect Ovid – the famous love poet – to identify
and perhaps empathize with these story-tellers who weave their
tapestry just as the poet weaves his text, but it seems obvious
from the start of the book that he shares little sympathy with their
impious lack of respect for the god. In fact, he explicitly identifies
himself against these women and with the followers of Bacchus,
adding his own song of praise to those of the locals, calling
upon the god by his familiar cult names (4.13–17) and offering a
hymn celebrating the powers of Liber (4.17–30). He presents
the Minyeides, in contrast, as kill-joys who spoil the party, thinly
disguising their disrespect for Bacchus in a show of respect for
Minerva. What is more, although the first sister to take up the
role of narrator is represented as an experienced and erudite
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that which we have just heard, moving deftly between the stories
of Venus’ and Mars’ adulterous affair, the Sun’s infatuation with
and rape of Leuconoe, who becomes a frankincense shrub, and
his rejection of a former lover Clytie, whose grief transforms her
into a sunflower. The neat transitions between these three stories
are worthy of Ovid: Venus blames the Sun for revealing her affair
and so punishes him with an uncontrollable desire for Leuconoe;
a jealous Clytie informs Leuconoe’s father, who reacts to the
Sun’s rape of his daughter with Juno-like insensitivity and buries
her alive; the remorseful Sun then spurns Clytie who becomes a
heliotrope. What is more, the unifying motif of passion thwarted,
that runs between this collection of stories concerning ‘divine
amor’ would not have seemed out of place in the earlier books
of the Metamorphoses. Only minor hints suggest that here
too Ovid may be mocking his internal narrator for her ‘spinster’
sensibilities: the excessively poor taste shown by the Sun in
disguising himself as Leuconoe’s mother in order to rape her
(4.219, compare Jupiter’s rape of Callisto at 2.425); the senti-
mental description of Leuconoe’s welcome submission of the
Sun as he rapes her (4.232f); and the incidental setting for
Leuconoe’s rape (4.220f) as she sits weaving and spinning at
home. As Elaine Fantham suggests: ‘is the poet perhaps imply-
ing that the spinning Minyeides enjoy the thought of ubiquitous
seduction?’54
After a brief interruption while the Minyeides discuss the
plausibility of the tales they have just heard, the third sister
begins the final tale in this sequence. Considering and then
rejecting a number of stories as ‘too well-known’ (vulgatos –
4.276), she selects from her impressively broad narrative
repertoire a determinedly Callimachean story that, she claims,
will delight her audience because of its novelty: the strange story
of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.55 Pressing her Callimachean
credentials perhaps a little too far, she signals further that this
will be an aetiological tale, telling how the famous spring of
Salmacis originally gained its reputation for emasculating those
who swim in its waters (4.285–7).
Enjoying the same literary conceit that we saw in book 1,
where a river can be an anthropomorphized god and the waters
of his own river, Ovid’s internal narrator represents the man-
eating nymph Salmacis as both pool and as predatory female,
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in an eagle’s talons, forming knots round the head and the feet
of the royal bird and entangling the flapping wings in its tail;
or like the ivy which weaves its way round the length of a
tree-trunk,
or else an octopus shooting all its tentacles out
to pounce on its prey and maintain its grip in the depths
of the sea.
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Perseus (4.604–803)
But, of course, Ovid’s carmen perpetuum continues and the
narrative moves on – albeit somewhat awkwardly – to introduce
the unrelated epic hero Perseus and his adventures; although,
the motif of looking at dangerous things arguably continues
here too. The transition is not one of Ovid’s best: Cadmus and
Harmonia continue to be proud of their divine grandson, but
one man, Acrisius, denies that Bacchus is the true son of Jupiter,
just as he denies that Perseus is Jupiter’s son. . . . (4.604–14). The
abrupt transition does at least allow Ovid to begin his tale
of Perseus in true epic fashion in medias res – in the middle of
things – with Perseus flying over the earth with Medusa’s already
severed head, bloody drops transforming into deadly serpents
as they land in the desert sand below (4.614–20). But it
soon becomes clear that Ovid has already transformed the
character of Perseus: this familiar epic hero has been ‘softened’
and will here be concerned less with weapons (arma) than with
love (amor).
Perseus is the perfect hero for Ovid’s ‘cinematic’ narrative
style, his magic winged shoes allowing Ovid to give his readers a
long aerial ‘tracking shot’ focalized through the flying hero’s
point of view as he arrives now at the edge of the world and the
lands ruled by Atlas (4.621–30). After a brief and somewhat
unsatisfying encounter with Atlas, who Perseus turns into stone
using the magic powers of the gorgon’s head, we move on.
Flying over Ethiopia with Perseus we see a maiden in distress:
Andromeda, tied to a rock as a sacrifice (and a meal) for a sea
monster. At the first sight of her statue-like beauty Perseus
falls in love, and with a brilliant flash of Ovidian humour, almost
out of the sky, as – dumbstruck by this vision of helpless,
modest, loveliness – he forgets to flap his wings (4.671–7). This
comedic and distinctly un-heroic tone continues as Ovid gives
an account of Perseus’ daring rescue. With the sea monster fast
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Book Five
Perseus (continued) (5.1–249)
While Perseus is telling his wedding guests the story of Medusa’s
transformation, trouble is brewing and the start of book 5
quickly moves the focus of the poem from amor back to arma.
Before her marriage to Perseus, Andromeda had already been
betrothed to her uncle Phineas, it turns out, and he now arrives
to avenge his loss, bringing a small army with him. The stage is
thus set for an epic battle, reminiscent both of the fight between
Odysseus and the suitors in Homer’s Odyssey and of the conflict
between Aeneas and Turnus in Virgil’s Aeneid – both of which
famous clashes were occasioned, of course, by rivalry for the
hand of a woman. In the bloody battle described in vivid detail
here, Ovid allows Perseus to take part in an aristeia or set-piece
fight-scene involving the brutal slaying of Phineas’ many men.
So, with gruesome description, spears strike men full in the face,
splattering tables with blood (5.38–40); two best friends, both
comrades and lovers (Ovid’s substitutes for Virgil’s Nisus
and Euryalus), are dispatched in swift succession – one with a
bone-splintering blow to the face from a wedding torch, and
the other with a disembowelling hook from Perseus’ famous
curved sword (5.47–73); men slip and fall on the blood-drenched
floor (5.74–8); they are forced to tread on the bodies of the
dying as they fight (5.88); fatal wounds to the face, throat, and
groin abound as Perseus heroically takes on a thousand men
single-handedly; and through all of this bloody carnage, Perseus
remains unscathed, protected like any epic hero worth the
name by the divine aid of his sister Pallas Minerva (both have
Jupiter as a father). What is more, nobly unwilling to use his
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secret weapon, Perseus waits until the enemy army are at the
point of overwhelming his strength (virtutem – 5.177) before
picking up the gorgon’s head and turning the last 200 of the
enemy into stone statues – including Phineas himself, who is
frozen forever in the cringing act of supplication (5.210–35).
Ovid’s representation of this epic blood-bath, however, is
hard to read – in several ways. He uses the language and martial
tropes familiar from Homeric and Virgilian epic to present
an exciting, if repellent, battle scene in which one man single-
handedly defeats an entire army without suffering so much as
a scratch. Is this scene unambiguous evidence, then, that Ovid
can write epic poetry? That he can take on Homer and Virgil
at their own epic game and come out on top? Or has he simply
presented us here with a parody of epic conventions and epic
characters, transforming, Perseus into Aeneas, Phineas into
Turnus and Andromache into Lavinia? For, in describing the
massacre in such gory detail, and in stacking the odds against his
hero so highly, he renders the whole epic enterprise incredible
and ridiculous.58
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god of the underworld, and her mother’s frantic search for her
lost daughter, incorporating a variety of secondary stories of
metamorphosis along the way: the nymph Cyane into a pool
(5.409–37); a cheeky boy into a gecko (5.451–61); the tattle-
tale Ascalaphus into a screech owl (5.538–50); the Sirens into
birds (5.331–563); the nymph Arethusa into a sacred spring
(5.572–641); and the savage king Lyncus into a lynx (5.642–61).
Critics of Calliope’s song claim that the Muse is a second-rate
story-teller, who cannot control her material and is too easily
sidetracked by all the irrelevant sub-stories which distract her –
and us – from the main narrative concerning Ceres and her
daughter. Certainly, Calliope’s narrative is convoluted and
multifaceted, but so too is the Metamorphoses itself. Certainly,
we have been primed to see Ovid’s internal narrators as flawed
story-tellers, vying with Ovid the artist in a metapoetic ‘battle
of voices’ (proelia voce), but as the Muse of poetry Calliope
is a worthy opponent, not only of the Pierides but of Ovid
himself.61
Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of Calliope’s
song is the way in which her story-telling also serves as a kind
of critical commentary upon Ovid’s own Metamorphoses. So,
she opens her narrative, after a short invocation to the Earth
goddess Ceres, by correcting the blasphemous Pierides’ version
of the gigantomachy that we have just heard: whereas the Pierid
sister had emphasized the heroism of the giant Typhoeus, whose
might had forced the gods themselves into flight; Calliope ‘sets
the story straight’ by telling of Typhoeus’ subsequent defeat by
the gods and his imprisonment under the mountains of Sicily –
where his continued fury accounts for Sicily’s volcanic, earthquake
prone landscape (5.346–58). This establishes Calliope’s role as a
poet who, like Ovid, sees and tells things differently – who offers
alternative perspectives and new readings of familiar narratives,
including those (like the gigantomachy) that we have heard told
(and re-told) in the Metamorphoses. Like Ovid, the Muse also
seems to favour aetiological – Callimachean-style – poetry,
and her opening aetiological account of Sicily’s unstable geology,
provides a neat transition in her mini-epic carmen perpetuum
into an appropriately novel retelling of the well-known story of
Pluto’s rape of Proserpina as the cause for Ceres’ neglect of her
nurturing duties on earth for six months of each year.62
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68
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70
Niobe (6.146–312)
Where Arachne was justifiably proud of her art, her friend
Niobe boasts merely of her fertility – swiftly earning the gods’
displeasure. Niobe was well-known to Ovid’s Augustan audi-
ence as the epitome of grieving mother, and her story would
have been familiar to them from its retelling in numerous Greek
tragedies. Yet Ovid appears to take care to present his Niobe
in a new light, stressing her extraordinary arrogance (even
when Latona has savagely slaughtered her seven sons, Niobe
continues to brag that she still has more children than the
goddess – 6.285), and allowing us to feel little real sympathy
for her. Indeed, as she sits amidst the lifeless bodies of her dead
children and husband in stony silence, it is not Niobe (soon
to be transformed into rock) but they – innocents punished
for the blasphemous impiety of their mother – who really
command our sympathies here.
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Marsyas (6.382–400)
The next story presents us with a similar challenge and again
returns to the theme of a contest between two artists – although
here, as if bored with the contest motif already, Ovid leaves out
the details and framing context of the competition and focuses
instead upon the grisly punishment that ensues.4 In this grue-
some tale, the satyr Marsyas is skinned alive for challenging
Apollo in a musical competition and losing: another artist in the
Metamorphoses who is punished for his art.
Readers and critics are virtually unanimous in their negative
responses to this short episode: Kenney’s description of the
episode as ‘(t)he ultimate in gruesome wit’5 is typical, and
reflects a tendency amongst readers and critics of this brief
tale to focus upon the surface detail of the narrative and not to
look beneath its superficial horror and ugliness. Karl Galinsky
claims that:6
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Book Seven
Medea and Jason (7.1–403)
And now (iamque – 7.1) we find ourselves sailing straight into
book 7 and the heroic adventures of Jason and his Argonauts as
Ovid’s carmen perpetuum continues without a narrative break
into the next book. But both Jason and the Argo quickly turn
out to be merely the vehicles by which Ovid brings us his most
memorable heroine – the witch Medea – whose story takes up
almost half of this book. Medea’s story would have been only
too well-known by Ovid’s Augustan audience. They would have
been familiar with the adventures of this notorious femme fatale
from Euripides’ famous tragedy, from Apollonius’ Argonautica,
and – most recently – from Ovid’s own pen: he had written a
tragedy of his own entitled Medea (now lost), and had included
her as a character in two of his Heroides (12 and 6). In the
Metamorphoses, then, Ovid faces the challenge of making new
(nova) his favourite mythical figure, of magically rejuvenating
and transforming both her and her story.13
Ovid’s key magical ingredient in effecting this transformation
is amor. Thus, our first encounter with Medea (signposting the
linear chronological treatment of her story that Ovid follows
here) is her own first meeting with Jason, with whom she falls in
love at first sight.14 In the first dramatic soliloquy of the poem,
Ovid allows Medea to reflect upon her feelings for this stranger,
exploring for the first time in the Metamorphoses the psychology
and pathology of human love (7.11–21) as Medea battles with
her reason and conscience. 15 She finally decides to turn her back
on love and to embrace instead duty, piety and chastity (7.72),
but upon seeing Jason again her passion is reignited and her
resolve broken. Indeed, Jason is so good looking, Ovid tells us,
that we can hardly blame her for this (7.85) – or for using her
magic to help Jason complete the impossible tasks that her father
has set him (7.100–58: note Ovid’s sarcastic authorial aside at
this sign of Jason’s ‘bravery’ (7.115–19), protected as he is by
Medea’s powerful herbs).16
Ovid has so far represented Medea as a complex, moral char-
acter, deserving of our sympathy. But our empathy abruptly
ceases in the next phase of her narrative, as she undergoes a new
metamorphosis and the sympathetic and innocent young girl in
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Book Eight
Scylla (8.1–151)
The start of book 8 sees the start of a new day in a narrative
break that signals both continuity and change, as our attention
turns from Cephalus and his allies back to Minos and his war
against Athens. While Aeacus and Cephalus have been sharing
their stories, Minos has been laying siege to Megara, a city ruled
by king Nisus, famous for the magic lock of purple hair that
grows upon his head and which guarantees the safe preservation
of his power so long as it stays there. His daughter Scylla has
fallen in love with Minos after watching him from the palace
tower and we first encounter her in the throes of a passion that
is described by Ovid as a kind of madness (8.35f) as she envies
the javelin and reins that Minos holds – fantasizing that her body
might take their place in his hands (8.36), imagining herself in
the enemy camp, suggestively willing to open up both the city
gates and herself to Minos (8.42). Indeed, the intensity of her
desire is such that it comes as no surprise when, having consid-
ered the rights and wrongs of her passion (8.44–80) Scylla
decides to sacrifice her father’s magic lock of hair, her city, and
herself to Minos – all in the name of amor.21
Scylla’s situation and soliloquy clearly echoes that of Medea
(7.1–403): both girls fall in love with an enemy, both commit
an act of betrayal in helping their lovers to obtain a magical
talisman (the purple lock and the golden fleece respectively),
and both are ultimately themselves betrayed and deserted by
the lovers for whom they have sacrificed so much. But whereas
Ovid’s Medea loses our sympathies as her story unfolds and
an innocent girl becomes a murdering witch, Scylla’s story
follows a reverse pattern, transformed in the course of Ovid’s
narrative from a foul disgrace (o nostri infamia saecli – 8.97), and
treacherous monster (monstrum – 8.100) into a sympathetic
victim.22 Ovid is clear that Scylla is guilty of an awful crime
(facinus – 8.85); an enemy within her own walls, she has despoiled
(spoliat – 8.86) her own father of an unspeakable war-trophy
(praeda . . . nefanda – 8.86); and, having symbolically executed
her father in cutting off his magic lock, betraying both her
pater (father) and her patria (fatherland), she carries her gift to
Minos in sinful hands (scelerata – 8.94). But although Scylla’s
betrayal is heinous, she herself is soon betrayed. It is, of course,
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the cutting rather than the possession of the magic lock that
ensures Nisus’ downfall and Minos has no need to reward
Scylla for her help in effecting the fall of Megara: he con-
demns Scylla for her aid but takes advantage of it nonetheless,
swiftly establishing his rule over the island and then sailing off
without her.
Having lost everything, Scylla reacts to Minos’ rejection just
like one of the deserted women (deserta – 8.113) betrayed and
abandoned by the men they have loved and helped in Ovid’s
elegiac Heroides. Now a naive victim of amor with whom we
cannot help but sympathize, Scylla has undergone what Carole
Newlands describes as a ‘typological metamorphosis’, a trans-
formation of type – preparing us for the physical metamorphosis
of form that will bring Scylla’s story to a morally satisfying
close.23 Leaping into the sea to swim after Minos’ ship, Scylla
clings pathetically to the prow as she is transformed into a bird,
the Ciris (from the Greek keiro, I cut) – identified forever by her
act of betrayal – while her father, metamorphosed into an osprey,
follows her in vengeful pursuit. Unlike Medea, the sky offers no
hope of escape for Scylla.24
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where it seems to have little place’, this tale also draws our
attention back to Ovid’s own inventiveness and the complex
twists and turns of his own ingenious narrative creation.30
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88
Erysichthon (8.725–884)
As Theseus and his companions call for more miraculous stories
(8.726f), the river-god Achelous takes over the narrative with the
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ending his story – and this book – with a groan as he recalls the
loss: an apt response to this ‘corny’ conclusion, it seems. For, just
as at the end of book 2 where the reader found herself along
with Europa physically and figuratively holding on to Jupiter’s
cornum (2.874) as well as to the horn book rods (also known as
cornua) around which books were rolled in antiquity, we again
find ourselves faced with the end of another book, and another
cornua. Indeed, as Achelous points to the horn missing from
his forehead (frontis – 8.885) and complains that part of him is
lacking, he indicates that a part of his story is also missing from
this book roll. And so, we must look to book 9, where the river-
god’s narrative flows on uninterrupted, for the missing part of
the story of Achelous’ missing horn.
Book Nine
Achelous and Hercules (9.1–97)
The start of book 9 continues this ‘corny’ joke as Theseus
asks Achelous to explain the cause of his ‘mutilated forehead’
(truncae . . . frontis – 9.1f), punning upon the fact that the river-
god’s forehead and his narrative have both been mutilated or
truncated by Ovid’s division of books here. Achelous then
obliges Theseus by telling the unflattering story of his fight with
the mighty Hercules for the hand of Deianira. Achelous peppers
his story with military vocabulary, but his account of the brawl
proves to be as unheroic as Ovid’s account of the Calydonian
Boar hunt in book 8, with which it shares the same comedic,
anti-epic tone and the same canonic pedigree. Achelous initially
goads Hercules into a fight by taunting him about his heroic
credentials, challenging him to admit to being either a bastard
or a liar (9.24). He then engages him in a wrestling match which
Achelous faithfully describes (or so he says: 9.5, 29, 53, 55), blow
by blow and hold by hold – the river-god streaming now not
with river water but with sweat (9.57f). Realising that Hercules
is by far the stronger man, Achelous decides to make use of his
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brought about the death of Nessus and will soon bring death
to Hercules.
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hair and turns her into a weasel (9.320f) in one of the many
incidental, insignificant transformations with which the poem
is patterned.
Dryope (9.324–93)
Bringing the Hercules cycle of stories to a close, Iole responds
with a story of her own, telling of another mother and son and
another strange metamorphosis. Echoing the stories of rape and
transformation in book 1 of the poem, she tells how the nymph
Lotis had once escaped the attentions of the lecherous god
Priapus by metamorphosing into a lotus flower (9.345–48).
Not knowing this story (told at greater length by Ovid in his
Fasti 1.391–440), Dryope attempts to pick some of the lotus
flowers, and is horrified when blood drips from the severed
stems. She finds herself rooted to the spot, bark covering her
flesh, and her hair turning to leaves, as she is herself transformed
into the lotus tree: a familiar metamorphosis lent new pathos
here by the description of her baby attempting to nuzzle and
feed from his mother’s breast, now hard and covered in bark
(9.356–8). As her distraught family prostrate themselves at
her feet/roots, Dryope begs them to protect her branches from
the pruning knife and to teach her infant son never to pick
or harm any plant or tree lest he hurt a nymph transformed
within. Indeed, the world of the Metamorphoses is now so full
of such metamorphic hybrids, that her plea is as sensible as it
is pathetic.
Dryope’s metamorphosis is but one of several tree transforma-
tions in the poem (among them Daphne (1.452–567), the Heliades
(2.358–63), Baucis and Philemon (8.611–724), Cyparissus 10.86–
142) and Myrrha (10.481–502)) and reminds us once more that
human bodies are peculiarly tree-like. As Robin Nisbet, echoing
Pliny, observes of the symbolism of trees in classical literature:40
Trees are like people. They have a head (vertex), a trunk (trun-
cus), arms (bracchia). They stand tall like a soldier, or look
as slender as a bridegroom (Sappho, 115 L-P). Their life
moves in human rhythms, which in their case may be repeated:
sap rises and falls, hair (coma) luxuriates, withers, drops off.
Sometimes they are superior and aloof, sometimes they go in
pairs, whether as comrades-in-arms (Hom. Il. 12.132ff., Virg.
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Branching out from these two tales (poems, like people, are also
like trees it seems) Ovid tells a second pair of stories similarly
concerning parents and children. First Iolaus appears, rejuvenated
and primed to help Hercules’ sons defend themselves against
their father’s longstanding enemy Eurystheus. This prompts an
allusion to the tale of Callirhoe’s infant sons who will one day be
prematurely aged by the gods so that they may avenge their
father’s murder. This material provides Ovid with a (twisted and
somewhat tenuous) bridge into his next sequence: the gods each
demand the right to rejuvenate their own favourite mortals.
Jupiter assures them that only the Fates control this gift, citing
his own ageing favourites Rhadamanthus, Aeacus and Minos as
examples that he too is subject to this rule; for even at that
moment, infirm with old age, Minos lives in fear of an uprising
led by Miletus – who has already established a rival city on the
shores of Asia and there fathered twins, Caunus and Byblis.
Byblis (9.454–665)
In the following story of Byblis and Caunus we see another side
to family relations, as Ovid introduces the first in a sequence
of tales concerning forbidden or ‘unnatural’ love that will con-
tinue well into book 10. The shameful and shocking character of
Byblis and the passion she feels for her twin brother is signposted
by the Ovidian narrator from the outset, presenting Byblis as an
exemplum – an example and a warning, but also a template for
the other girls in this series of tales who, like her, do not ‘love
lawfully’ (9.454).
Byblis finds her chaste, legitimate affection for her twin brother
slowly transformed into an immoral, illegal, and incestuous
desire. Echoing other women in the poem who are similarly torn
by competing forms of familial and erotic love, 41 Byblis first
explores her feelings in a soliloquy (9.474–516) before deciding to
write Caunus a letter (9.517–63) like one of the epistles collected
in Ovid’s own elegiac Heroides. Caunus responds with disgusted
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So, just like Ovid’s love-struck Phaedra, Byblis sees the inces-
tuous relationships of the gods as validating her own incestuous
desires (9.497–9) and, like Canace in her letter to her brother/
lover Macareus (Heroides 11), she cites the Homeric Aeolidae
(9.507) who notoriously married their sisters, as a mythical
precedent for her fantasy. She wonders how and why she knows
about these exempla (9.508). Clearly, she knows Ovid’s elegiac
corpus only too well.
The bookish Byblis also demonstrates a perverse faith in the
power of words, the power of letters and names to shape and
reshape reality according to her own desires. Ovid himself alerts
us to this in the opening lines of the story, where Byblis’ name
is repeated three times in as many lines (Byblida . . . Byblis . . .
Byblis – 9.453–5), highlighting the key role that names will play
in this narrative. In fact, Byblis sees language rather than law or
morality as posing the main obstacle to her incestuous desires
here. In her letter to Caunus, she begins with but then erases the
word that identifies her as his ‘sister’ (soror – 9.528f), identifying
herself instead as a ‘lover’ (amans – 9.531) who is ashamed to
reveal her name, and when she hands the letter to a servant she
hesitates for a long time before telling him to take it to her
‘brother’ (fratri – 9.570). Byblis hates to name her brother as
such, preferring to call him her ‘master’ (dominum – 9.466) as she
linguistically transforms Caunus into the male equivalent of a
beloved elegiac ‘mistress’ or domina. In turn, she wishes he would
call her ‘Byblis’ rather than ‘sister’ (9.467) and longs to be able to
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Iphis (9.666–797)
Ovid further exploits the idea that language has its own meta-
morphic powers in the next story, where once more we see names
play a determining factor in shaping character(s) and role(s)
in the world of the Metamorphoses. We have already seen the
‘Wolf-man’ Lycaon become a wolf (1.163–252), Narcissus a
flower (3.339–510) and Arachne a spider (6.1–145) and in the
story of Iphis we again see Ovid play with the idea that (as
Stephen Wheeler puts it) ‘a nomen is an omen’ – names predict
a character’s fate and narrative.44
In this tale, an impoverished couple are expecting a baby
and, in line with ancient Greek custom, reluctantly agree that if
the infant is a girl they will have to put her to death. But when a
baby girl is born the mother pretends that the child is a boy
and rejoices when the father names her ‘Iphis’ – a suitable name
for a girl, a boy, or a girl pretending to be a boy. The female
Iphis is raised as a male (9.712) alongside the beautiful girl
Ianthe, to whom, at the age of thirteen, she becomes engaged.
Ovid carefully stresses the many similarities that the two girls
share, enhancing the pathos of their seemingly impossible union
(9.718–21), but at the same time reminding us of the parallels
between the stories of Iphis (in love with another girl just like
her) and Byblis (in love with her own twin). Yet, whereas Byblis
had indulged in self-delusion and erotic fantasy, looking for
mythical and literary exemplars to help rationalize and legitim-
ize her strange passion, Iphis simply accepts the hopelessness of
her own strange love (9.727f), concluding that nothing can be
done about it. Taking her examples from the world of nature,
she reasons that cows do not mate with cows, nor mares with
mares, and that her love is therefore unnatural (9.731–4): her
desires are worse even than those of Pasiphae, her fellow Cretan,
she concludes – those at least were ‘normal’ in that they were
heterosexual in orientation (9.735–40).
Ovid’s sympathy for Iphis here, then, should not necessarily
be assumed to demonstrate the poet’s approval of same sex
female relationships: the maxim repeated again and again in
Iphis’ soliloquy is that lesbianism is ‘unnatural’ (9.758). Indeed,
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rather than allowing Iphis and Ianthe to live happily ever after in
a mutually loving same sex relationship, it is significant that it
takes a miracle and a sex-change to ensure this couple’s married
bliss. So, as the day of the wedding approaches and excuses
for delay grow increasingly tenuous, Iphis and her mother
pray desperately to Isis for help. And lo – Iphis undergoes a
miraculous transformation: her stride and her limbs lengthen,
her complexion grows darker, her facial features grow sharper,
and even her hair shortens as she increases in strength (vigoris –
9.790) and turns into a man (9.786–91). As we saw in the
transformations of Tiresias (3.316–38), the physical differences
between men and women are minor indeed – their essential
similarities more striking than their dissimilarities. But here,
Iphis’ miraculous transformation also reminds us that in
Latin, a girl (puella) is etymologically the diminutive form of a
boy (puer).45 Iphis the puer, then, is simply a puella with a little
more vigor.
Book Ten
Orpheus and Eurydice (10.1–85)
From the happy wedding of Iphis and Ianthe, Ovid segues cine-
matically into the next book by following the god of conjugal
union, Hymen, tracking the god as he flies on to his next
‘booking’ at the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice. But Hymen
fails to bring lucky omens or happy faces to this couple (10.4f).
In direct contrast to the joyous wedding of Iphis and Ianthe, the
union between Orpheus and Eurydice is not a happy occasion,
and the spluttering of the wedding torch as it refuses to catch
fire (10.6f) adds an unlucky omen to the marriage. After this
dark foreshadowing of future disaster for bride and groom
it hardly comes as a surprise when Eurydice is bitten by a
snake and falls down dead. Sara Mack succinctly highlights the
prosaic character of Ovid’s description of Eurydice’s death: 46
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Cyparissus (10.86–142)
Orpheus’ grief at the double loss of his Eurydice also prompts a
psychological metamorphosis of sorts as the poet rejects the
company of women and turns instead to pederasty and the love
of boys (10.83f), setting an example to the people of Thrace –
and setting both tone and theme for the sequence of tales that
follow. It is important to remember here that same-sex sexual
relationships – including those between older men and adoles-
cent boys – were not viewed negatively in ancient Greece or Rome.
But it is also worth recalling that Ovid’s own view on ‘the love
of boys’ was not wholly positive. In keeping with the literary
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101
102
103
Pygmalion (10.243–97)
The artist Pygmalion, however, confuses both the sequence and
the agency of the Propoetides’ metamorphoses and misreads
their story. He sees the obscenae Propoetides as always already
prostitutes, turned into stone in punishment for their immodest
and immoral sexual behaviour: a warning to himself and others
to avoid the ‘vices with which the female sex has been so richly
endowed’ (10.244f). Disgusted by the lifestyle of the Propoetides,
Pygmalion himself turns to celibacy, rejecting women in much
the same way, albeit for very different reasons, as Orpheus –
whose voice and viewpoint continue to colour the narration of
this next story.
Spurning women of flesh and blood, Pygmalion sculpts an
ivory statue, ‘an image of perfect feminine beauty’ so realistic
that it appears to be alive (10.247f) – so life-like in fact that
Pygmalion falls in love with it, the artist himself deceived by his
own artistry (ars adeo latet arte sua – 10.252).54 Foolishly, he
treats the statue as if it were a real woman, caressing and kissing
it, believing that his kisses are returned. Treating her exactly as
if she were a hard-hearted elegiac mistress or dura puella
Pygmalion himself adopts the pose of an elegiac lover, gently
attempting to win her affections. He shows concern that his
caresses may be too rough (10.258), he gives her expensive
gifts (10.260–5), flatters her (and himself, perhaps) that she is
beautiful dressed but even more beautiful undressed (10.266),
and he lays her down upon rich coverlets and soft pillows
(10.267–9). Indeed, all these behaviours suggest that the artist
Pygmalion practises the ‘art of love’ as prescribed in Ovid’s own
Ars Amatoria. Here, the art of love is taught to the prospective
lover according to a series of guidelines in which he is taught
‘to woo his mistress with indulgence, compliments, persistent
compliance, service, gifts, calculated flattery, and solicitude
(Ars 2.145–336)’.55 Pygmalion follows this guide to the letter in
his attempts to woo his own dura puella – who, as a statue, is
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105
106
Myrrha (10.298–502)
Having strained his audience’s credulity with the tale of Pygmalion
and his living statue, Ovid (speaking through Orpheus) now
explicitly warns us not to believe in the horrible story of Myrrha
and her incestuous relationship with her father (10.301) that
he is about to narrate – the only one of Orpheus tales that
properly fits his theme of girls punished for their lusts. Mirroring
Pygmalion’s disgust at the behaviour of the Propoetides, Orpheus
now emphasizes the vileness of Myrrha’s behaviour, as if to
further validate his own rejection of women and their vices – a
rejection that increasingly seems misogynistic in its foundation.
Indeed, there are plenty of clues in this narrative that suggest
Orpheus is a biased narrator – and that Ovid’s sympathies may
not necessarily lie in the same direction. The fact that Ovid
has himself, in his own voice (in propria persona), only recently
told a very similar story of incest – that of Byblis in book 9 –
suggests that here he is explicitly inviting us to draw comparisons
between his own treatment of the theme and that of his char-
acter Orpheus.60
At the outset, Orpheus stresses that there are no extenuating
or mitigating circumstances in this tale, and that Myrrha’s ‘crime
of passion’ has nothing to do with Cupid or amor; rather, one of
the hellish Furies must have fanned the flames of her unspeakable
passion. In contrast to Ovid’s own sympathetic characterisation
of Byblis and her incestuous love for her brother, Orpheus offers
no analysis of Myrrha’s incipient desire for her father, but pres-
ents her already fully conscious of her ‘vile passion’ (10.319),
launching directly into a soliloquy in which she considers her
invidious position (10.319–55). Unlike Ovid’s Byblis and Iphis,
who look to the laws of religion, of nature, and society to prove
the impossibility and impiety of their unnatural desires, Orpheus’
Myrrha finds a precedent and a model for incest both among the
animal world (10.324–9) and among other cultures (10.331–3):
both nature and culture endorse her ‘unnatural’ love it seems.61
Like Byblis, Myrrha is troubled by the linguistic confusion and
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‘Don’t you see you’re confusing all names and natural ties?
Will you play the role of your mother’s supplanter and father’s
mistress?
Will you be known as your own son’s sister and brother’s
mother?’
“All right,” said the nurse, “you must live and shall have
your . . . ” – she stopped as she couldn’t say “father” . . .
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take her, she’s yours” (10.464); and with a final perverse linguistic
twist, we learn that ‘because of her age, he even called her “my
daughter” and she said “father”, to put the finishing touch to
their incest’ (10.467f). In this and in the nights of incest that
follow, Cinyras (according to Orpheus) ‘acted innocently’, the
crime (crimina – 10.470) Myrrha’s alone.62 But if we read the
nuances of this narrative closely it is impossible not to see
Cinyras as sharing his daughter’s sin, as acting out his own incest
fantasy as Myrrha enacts hers. So when, after numerous nights,
Cinyras finally brings in a lamp ‘to see his daughter and his
crime’ (et scelus et natam – 10.474) before grabbing his sword to
kill her, our sympathies are easily redirected towards Myrrha.
It seems as though Orpheus too has softened towards her,
perhaps because, in his eager desire to see his lover, Cinyras
inevitably reminds Orpheus of himself: Cinyras is ‘eager to
know’ the identity of his young lover (avidus cognoscere – 10.472)
just as Orpheus was ‘desperate to see’ (avidus videndi – 10.56)
his beloved Eurydice. In both cases, the resulting look marks
a fatal turning point in the narrative. So, Myrrha, now trans-
formed from villain into victim, flees her home in terror, the
dark night that earlier symbolized nature’s abhorrence at her
unnatural desire (10.446–51) now sympathetically aiding her
in her flight (10.476). Orpheus and his treatment of Myrrha has
undergone a complete transformation, it seems, and we are
invited to pity her as she wanders for nine months, until advanced
pregnancy and exhaustion prompt her to pray to the gods
for release her from her mental and physical agony. Some god –
we are not told which one – takes pity on her and turns her
into a tree, her tears ever after trickling from the bark as myrrh,
preserving her name and her honour for all eternity (10.500–2).
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110
111
112
Midas (11.85–193)
This ‘light touch’ also establishes the tone and link into the
next story, in which Ovid offers his audience a gentle narrative
interlude before returning again to the theme of married love
and loss. Offering little in the way of context or back-story,
Ovid launches straight into the well-known tale of Midas
and his foolish request to the gods to grant that whatever he
might touch should turn to gold. The plot-line in which a mortal
comes to regret asking for a gift from the gods had already been
developed by Ovid in the stories of Phaethon (2.1–400) and
Semele (3.256–315), but in Midas’ suffering in the midst of
riches, we may also hear echoes of Narcissus (3.339–510), of
Byblis (9.454–665), Iphis (9.666–797), Myrrha (10.298–502),
and perhaps of Pygmalion (10.243–97) too – who all experience
psychological torment because they possess the object of their
desire but cannot enjoy it. As Midas prays to give up the gift that
has become a curse, the gods show uncharacteristic kindness
(11.134) and relieve him of his golden touch, instructing him
to wash it away in the river Pactolus – thereby establishing the
aetiology of its legendary gold-bearing silt, for which it was still
famed in Ovid’s day.
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115
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plea begging him to stay with her, the style and content of her
entreaty familiar from the world of elegiac love poetry where
such appeals (querellas – 11.420) from a lover are a literary
commonplace.12 Alcyone’s words fail to persuade Ceyx to stay,
however, and while she weeps a storm of tears in her bedroom, a
storm of epic proportions descends upon him, wrecking his ship
and drowning Ceyx.
Pitying Alcyone, Juno arranges to inform her of Ceyx’ death
through a dream – allowing Ovid to actualize of the abstract
concept of ‘sleep’ in a novel form of metamorphosis:13 the cave
of Sleep (Somnus) is silent except for the sound of trickling
waters (11.600–9) and Ovid enhances the drowsy effect of his
description (further enhanced in the long vowels and dipthongs
of the Latin) with witty detail; as Iris enters the cave, she has
to brush aside the dreams that block her way like cobwebs;
Somnus repeatedly nods off as Juno’s messenger, Iris, delivers
her request; and she has to hurry to leave the cave before its
sleepiness takes hold of her too.14 Somnus duly sends the shape-
shifting Morpheus (the perfect agent both for Juno’s and for
Ovid’s metamorphic business), here transformed into a perfect
likeness of Ceyx, to appear in a dream to Alcyone. And as she
wakes and the dream-ghost of her beloved husband disappears,
she reaches out to embrace him in vain (just like Orpheus reach-
ing out to hold the ghost of Eurydice at 10.58f) and she begs
him to stay or to take her with him – just as she had begged him
when he first set out on his voyage. Her moving elegiac lament
(11.701–7), echoes both her earlier speech and the elegiac
tradition in which such lovers’ laments are a common literary
topos, as she swears that she will join her beloved husband in
death: ‘We shall be united, if not in an urn, in the letters/engraved
on our tomb – not dust touching dust, but name touching name’.15
Returning to the same spot on the shore from which she had
watched Ceyx sail away (repetition and return are recurring
motifs in this extended narrative, as throughout the Metamorpho-
ses as a whole), Alcyone catches sight of Ceyx’s corpse washed
up in the surf. She leaps into the sea to embrace it – only to find
herself transformed into a sea-bird and Ceyx himself brought
back to life as her mate. So, through the pity (miserantibus –
11.741) of the gods (a miracle in itself in the cruel world of the
Metamorphoses), the two lovers are reunited for eternity, raising
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their children together on the calm sea waters during the calm
‘halcyon’ days of each winter.
This story invites comparison with other tales of tragedy and
married love in the poem and critics have noted the similarities
that this narrative shares with that of Pyramus and Thisbe
(4.55–166) and Cephalus and Procris (7.661–865) in particular.16
Indeed, like the story of Cephalus and Procris, which is set
against the backdrop of preparations for war, this story too
offers a ‘halcyon’ interlude of relative calm before the storm of
the Trojan War breaks at the start of the next book. Yet the
married couple with whom Ovid most obviously suggests that
we compare the peace-loving Ceyx and Alcyone is Peleus
and Thetis. Indeed, the contrast between the two couples is
striking: Ovid deliberately draws attention to the murderer
Peleus’ blood-stained hands (fraterno sanguine sontem – 11.268)
as he is welcomed to Trachin by the peace-loving Ceyx, who
rules without force or bloodshed (sine vi, sine caede – 11.270);
Peleus lies about the reason for his exile, namely the murder of
his brother (11.280f), Ceyx accepts him with compassionate
words (11.282) while grieving for the loss of his own brother
(11.273); and (above all) placid Ceyx and Alcyone bring peace
to the world and the stormy seas as they raise their children, in
stark contrast to Peleus and Thetis, whose marriage brings
mighty Achilles into the world and (albeit unintentionally)
brings war to Troy – to the story of which we now (re)turn.17
Aesacus (11.749–95)
An old man is inspired by the sight of the Alcyonae – the sea
birds into which Ceyx and Alcyone have been transformed – to
tell the story of a similar metamorphosis concerning Aesacus,
grandson of Laomedon, son of Priam, and brother of illustri-
ous Hector. With unmistakable echoes of the tales of Apollo
and Daphne (1.452–567), Eurydice and Orpheus (10.1–85), Ceyx
and Alcyone (11.410–748), the old man narrates how Aesacus
once fell in love with the nymph Hesperia. Like Daphne, she ran
away from him, and like Apollo, he chased after her (11.771f;
cf. 1.533–9). But, as at the wedding of Eurydice, a snake hidden
in the grass sinks its fangs into the girl’s foot and kills her
(11.775f; cf. 10.10). Holding the dead girl in his arms, (echoing
Alcyone holding Ceyx) Aesacus laments: ‘I would be worse than
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the snake that killed you if I did not send you solace in death
with my own death’ (11.781f; cf. 11.701–5). But the goddess
Tethys pities the tragic lover (11.784; cf. 11.741) and, as he throws
himself from a cliff-top, hoping to die, she turns him into a
diving sea bird. And so book 11 draws to a close with the
metamorphosis of a Trojan prince – unmentioned in either
Homer or the traditional epic cycle, but who, Ovid tells us, had
he not met such a strange fate, might have been as famous as
Hector (11.760).
Book Twelve
The Greeks at Aulis (12.1–38)18
After a series of false leads telling of the misadventures and
metamorphoses of unsung epic heroes and lovers, Ovid finally
turns his attention to the Trojan War itself – his transformation
of this well-known story (often referred to as Ovid’s ‘little Iliad’)
beginning at the start of book 12 and continuing into the middle
of book 13 (where Ovid’s ‘little Aeneid’ begins). The introduct-
ory stories of married love in book 11, however, have prepared
us to look for the continuation of this amatory motif in Ovid’s
elegiac metamorphosis of this epic subject, so it comes as little
surprise when he opens book 12 with Paris and his stolen wife
(rapta . . . coniuge – 12.5) Helen. Indeed, following the pattern
associated with his earlier stories of stolen or raped (rapta)
women, he joins the abduction of Helen to the story of Aesacus
by an ingenious narrative link. Like Inachus, who mourns for a
lost daughter not knowing that she has been turned into a cow
(1.566–85), Priam holds funeral rites for his son Aesacus, not
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Rumour (12.39–63)20
Having boldly taken on the Greek epic poet Homer in the
opening lines of the book, Ovid now challenges a second oppon-
ent, his Roman rival Virgil – effectively restaging his telling
of the Trojan War as a metapoetic battle of literary rather than
military prowess.21 As the Greek fleet sets sail, reports of the
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Cycnus (12.64–145)
Rumour sees to it that the Trojans are ready to fight when
the Greeks finally arrive, allowing Ovid too to move straight
into battle, and to zoom in upon one warrior in particular –
Neptune’s son Cycnus, who has already killed a thousand men
when he meets Achilles.22 Achilles has been looking for Hector
but Ovid here offers him (and us) Cycnus as a substitute (12.75).
We are prepared for a conventional aristeia (a display of an epic
hero’s ‘excellence’ in combat) but instead we are given a display
of Ovid’s prowess in transforming traditional epic characters
and tropes: a poetological aristeia. Achilles, son of Thetis and
Peleus, and mighty hero of Homer’s epic Iliad, finds himself
unable to wound his opponent – even when Cycnus takes off
his armour to taunt Achilles with his magical invulnerability.
A furious Achilles, raging, (in a suitably Homeric-sounding
simile) like a bull against a red rag (12.102–4), failing with
both spear and sword to so much as scratch Cycnus, loses his
temper – and his dignity. Jumping down from his chariot, he
beats Cycnus around the head with his shield and sword-
hilt, finally strangling his opponent with the straps of his own
helmet: an inglorious death and an inglorious victory. What
is more, as Achilles prepares to take Cycnus’ armour as his
trophy, he finds it empty: Cycnus has been transformed into the
white swan that shares his name (12.143–5). Achilles’ victory,
like Cycnus’ armour, is hollow, and his famous anger – the
stated theme of Homer’s Iliad – is transformed here into a
temper tantrum.
After this ignominious conflict, a truce ensues (presumably
the same one described by Homer in Iliad 3) and the Greeks
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Caeneus (12.146–209)
Nestor seizes the attention of his audience by comparing Cycnus
and his strange powers to another hero he had known long ago,
who he had seen with his own eyes rebuff a thousand blows
without a scratch, and who – incidentally – had been born a
woman (12.175). Even Achilles shows a prurient interest in hear-
ing such a bizarre story, so Nestor narrates the curious tale of
Caeneus – although he distances himself from the strangeness of
the tale by stressing twice that he is only ‘reporting’ a story
known to him by hearsay or fama (12.197, 200). According to
these fama, Caeneus/Caenis, born a girl, was famed for her
beauty and (inevitably, in the world of the Metamorphoses)
raped by a god – Neptune. Offered a gift by him, she asked to
be transformed into a man so that she might never suffer such
trauma again. And so Caenis became Caeneus – impenetrable
and invulnerable, if not wholly invincible, unmanning and
emasculating those heroes who cannot penetrate him with their
swords and spears but who can only kill him – in much the
same way as Achilles killed Cycnus – by suffocation.23 As Nestor
reveals in his next tale.
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Book Thirteen
The Debate over the Arms of Achilles (13.1–398)
In keeping with its epic subject, book 13 is the longest of the
poem, embracing in its ridiculously comprehensive scope the
central characters and events of the Iliad (postponed from book
12 and narrated now in flashback), the Odyssey, the Aithiopis,
Cypria and Little Iliad from the (now lost) Epic Cycle, as well as
the Aeneid. Callimachus would, no doubt, have been appalled by
such a torrent of epic material. In addition to this ‘epic’ range of
epic intertexts, numerous tragedies inspired by the Epic Cycle
are also touched upon along the way (including Aeschylus’ lost
drama the Judgement of Arms, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and
Euripides’ Hecuba) as Ovid continues to explore the variety
of different forms into which familiar narratives can be meta-
morphosed, and the transformations that inevitably reshape a
story through the act of its retelling.
Aptly enough, given the chronological and narratological
compass of his own epic carmen perpetuum, Ovid is also par-
ticularly interested here in the minor episodes that occur before,
after, or in-between the principal happenings featured in the
Greek and Roman epic tradition – prompting him to summarize
(or simply ignore) well-known details and events and to elab-
orate upon less celebrated aspects of familiar tales. In fact, this
practice of variation (known to the classical schools of rhetoric
as variatio) was a technique widely employed in the standard
oratorical debates of Ovid’s own time – debates, moreover,
in which the argument or controversia between Ajax and Ulysses
(Odysseus) over who should inherit the arms of Achilles had
become a well-rehearsed commonplace.27 Ovid’s challenge in
this debate, then, is to make his own variation of that argument
persuasive and to turn it successfully to his own ends as an
innovative new form of epic storytelling.
He achieves this by using the debate as an ingenious means of
compressing the extended narrative of the Trojan War into a
few lines, summarising key episodes both in and leading up
to the conflict, as first Ajax and then Ulysses offer their own
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128
129
130
Memnon (13.576–622)
So sad is the story of Hecuba that it moves not only her fellow
Trojans, but her Greek enemies and all the gods as well. All, that
is, but Aurora, who has sorrows of her own. In a neat transition
through absence or exception, Ovid thus moves from the tale
of one mother’s grief to another’s, to remember the story of
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Book Fourteen
Glaucus and Scylla (14.1–74)
Best known for her transforming role in Homer’s Odyssey, where
she uses her magic to turn Odysseus’ men into pigs, Circe is an
obvious candidate for inclusion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses –
although it is noteworthy that here her place in the narrative of
Ovid’s ‘little Aeneid’ (like that of the Cyclops) chronologically
precedes her famous encounter with Odysseus. It is as if Ovid’s
retelling of these well-known tales places Homer and Virgil as
Ovid’s epic successors rather than his poetic predecessors – an
ingenious move on the part of this ‘belated’ poet.36 In her encoun-
ter with Glaucus and Scylla, Circe herself is now transformed –
turned by Ovid into a jealous lover who instantly falls in love
with Glaucus when he asks her for a love potion or spell to win
Scylla’s affections. When he refuses her Circe is enraged and, like
Polyphemus in book 13, turns her spiteful anger towards her
rival in love. She poisons one of Scylla’s favourite pools with
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magic herbs so that when Scylla wades waist-deep into the pool
to bathe, she finds her lower body horrifically transformed
into a mass of monstrous, barking dogs’ heads (14.59–67).
This partial transformation – mirroring that of the merman
Glaucus – is a novelty in the world of the Metamorphoses and
allows Ovid to reclaim some of the shocking psychological
impact that metamorphosis held both for its victims and for the
poem’s readers in earlier books as Scylla attempts to run away
from the monstrous creatures that snarl around her waist, only
to take them with her as she flees (14.61–6).
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137
138
139
140
of the story, its emphasis upon consensual love rather than rape,
and upon words rather than violence as a means of achieving an
object of desire.41
This story and its tale-within-a-tale are more complex
than this, however. Certainly, Vertumnus’ attempt to seduce the
confirmed virgin Pomona using words rather than force looks
at first blush very different to the violent attempts of Apollo,
Jupiter, Pan, et al to rape wood and water nymphs in the first
books of the poem (1.452–746). But if we look again at these
rape narratives we notice that here too the gods initially attempt
to use verbal persuasion to seduce their nymphs into consensual
sex, only resorting to violence and rape when words fail them.
This is the case in the story of Vertumnus and Pomona too,
where Vertumnus tries various narrative and metamorphic
strategies to seduce the nymph, including disguising himself
as a woman (who, like Jupiter in book 2.430f, kisses Pomona
inappropriately – 14.658f) before dropping his disguise and
preparing to rape her (14.770). But rape proves unnecessary
when Pomona experiences a last-minute change of heart upon
seeing just how handsome the god is in his authentic form. The
motifs of deception, violence and violation, the objectification
and silencing of a female victim, are present in this tale as in
many of Ovid’s earlier rape narratives and, although a vein of
humour runs through Vertumnus’ various transformations into
a hay mower, a cattle herder, a vine pruner, an apple-picker, a
soldier, a fisherman, and an old woman in his attempts to gain
admittance into Pomona’s garden (and into her ‘lady garden’?),
his many disguises do not hide the fact that underneath lies a
lustful god whose intention is to have sex with Pomona either
with or without her consent.
In his concerted attempts to seduce Pomona, and in his
willingness to use force when all else fails, Vertumnus reveals
himself to be another apt pupil of Ovid’s own elegiac Ars
Amatoria, applying several of the same techniques and argu-
ments employed by the poem’s ‘love doctor’ or praeceptor amoris
as he tries to persuade Pomona to give sex and marriage a try
(14.659–68). Similarly, his Iphis and Anaxarete story which,
in contrast to the rural Roman context of its external frame
narrative is both Greek and urban in its setting, draws heavily
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Romulus (14.772–851)
After this romantic digression, Ovid returns to the history of
Rome’s early kings, outlining briefly some of the stories told
at much greater length by Rome’s Augustan historian Livy, in a
narrative summary which swiftly covers the conflict between
Proca’s sons, Romulus’ rise to power, the rape of the Sabine
women, Tarpeia’s infamous betrayal of the citadel, and the ‘civil
war’ between Romans and Sabines (14.801f) – an obvious
allusion to Rome’s more recent civil war. He pauses only to
elaborate upon Romulus’ apotheosis in a detailed account
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Book Fifteen
Myscelus (15.1–59)
With the death and deification of Romulus and his wife, Ovid’s
narrative moves one step closer to the history of his own time,
where men are turned into gods, political chaos transformed
into imperial order, and war into peace. Any reader who has
followed the twisted thread of Ovid’s epic narrative from the
beginning up to this final chapter of his carmen perpetuum
might, at this point, have reached the same dangerous boredom
threshold that proved so fatal for Argus back in book 1
(1.713–20). But Argus’ exemplum warns us to stay awake and
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pay close attention until our storyteller reaches the very end
of his story.
Yet, having promised us in his opening lines that his Metamor-
phoses would offer a continuous narrative from the world’s
beginning down to his own lifetime (1.3–4), he now appears to
avoid following the chronological march of history towards
his own Augustan age, and instead temporarily suspends the for-
ward momentum of his narrative to follow Romulus’ successor
Numa as he seeks enlightenment from the exiled philosopher
Pythagoras on ‘the nature of things’ (rerum natura – 15.6). A
chronologically contorted and backward looking narrative
follows, in which Ovid seems determined to avoid following his
own poetic programme, and on his way to meet Pythagoras,
Numa is told the story of Myscelus and Hercules. In a dream,
Myscelus had seen a vision of Hercules, telling him to leave his
native city – something forbidden by penalty of death. As he
prepared to do the demi-god’s bidding, he was captured and
tried for his attempted crime but a miraculous transformation
of the jury’s voting pebbles from black (denoting a guilty
verdict) to white (for innocence) assured Myscelus’ acquittal and
so he survived to leave his homeland and build his new city.
In the world of the Metamorphoses, it seems, even when a crime
(in Latin, scelus) has clearly been committed (as in the case of
Myscelus), we can be persuaded that black is white, the guilty
innocent.
Pythagoras (15.60–478)44
In Myscelus’ city (and in possibly the most tenuous link between
stories in the whole poem), lived Pythagoras who explained to
Numa ‘how the universe first began/discoursed at length upon
causes, [and] defined what Nature and God were’ (15.67–9). Like
Mercury, Ovid seems determined to send his audience to sleep
here. There are, however, distinct parallels between Pythagoras’
themes and those of Ovid’s poem – particularly in their shared
concern with origins and causes – and Pythagoras’ interest in
the nature of divinity reflects one of the primary motifs of
Ovid’s final books, where we have already seen Hercules, Aeneas,
Romulus and Hersilia transcend their physical mortality to
become gods. In many respects then, Pythagoras’ sermon can be
read as summarising and commenting upon the themes of Ovid’s
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145
146
147
The prophecy looks forward not merely to the rise of Rome but
to the ascendancy and apotheosis of Augustus – the highpoint
of Rome’s destiny and the endpoint of Ovid’s poem. Yet, implicit
in Pythagoras’ account of this stellar rise is the spectre of Rome’s
fall: like Troy, Thebes and Athens (cities whose rise and fall we
have seen charted in the course of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) is
Rome too destined to one day fall? If, as Pythagoras contends,
everything changes (15.165) and nothing stays the same forever
(15.259), then this is the only coherent conclusion we may draw.
Indeed, it is significant that although Ovid claims that Rome will
be greater than any city ‘that is or has been or shall rise hereafter’
(15.445) he does not claim that her power will be eternal or
unchanging. In contrast to Virgil, who famously claimed
that Rome had been granted by the gods ‘an empire without
end’ in either time or space (Aeneid 1.257–96), Ovid makes no
such claim for Rome’s power to resist the power of time and
transformation.
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Cipus (15.547–621)50
Like so many of the other stories in the Metamorphoses that are
told by an internal narrator to some purpose, the sorrows of
Hippolytus do not make Egeria feel any better about her own
and she continues to weep until she dissolves into her own tears
(15.551). Hippolytus and Diana’s nymphs are amazed at Egeria’s
transformation, and Ovid uses this topos to jump – somewhat
clumsily – first to the story of the country ploughman who was
just as amazed when he saw the Etruscan prophet Tages emerge
as a fully grown man from a clod of earth (15.553–9), then to
Romulus’ equal amazement at seeing his spear turn into a tree
(15.560–4), and finally to Cipus who was amazed one day to see
horns growing out of his head. This is hardly the most elegant of
transitions into a retelling of the myth of Cipus, and its clumsy
introduction here only serves to draw attention to the incongru-
ity of its inclusion at this point in Ovid’s history of early Rome:
we too are ‘amazed’ to see this odd thing emerging from the
caput (meaning both ‘head’ and ‘end’) of Ovid’s poem.51
Ignoring the succession of Roman kings after Romulus and
Numa, the expulsion of Rome’s last king, and the creation of the
Roman republic, the narrative jumps unexpectedly to a much
later period in Rome’s republican history to tell the bizarre tale
of a legendary Roman general who refused to accept the title of
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Aesculapius (15.622–744)
A clear narrative break – the first of its kind in Ovid’s carmen
perpetuum – prefaced by a new invocation to the Muses
(15.622–5), introduces the final phase of the poem and the story
of the man-made-god Aesculapius, famed in Rome for once
healing the Latin people of a deadly disease that threatened to
destroy the race. The god (in the symbolic form of a golden
serpent) is welcomed into Rome with all the pomp and ceremony
associated with a Roman general returning from an overseas
military campaign to receive an official ‘triumph’ – just like those
famously celebrated by Julius Caesar. The entire population,
including Rome’s Vestal Virgins, throng to meet their saviour,
filling the city with the smell and smoke of burning incense and
sacrifice as the god puts off his snaky form and heals the city of
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151
152
Epilogue (15.871–9)
But, just as Pythagoras taught us, the end is not really the end.
Ovid adds a brief epilogue to his epic, in which he describes the
poem’s final metamorphosis. And, like the final transformations
of Aeneas, Caesar and Augustus, this too is an apotheosis – of
Ovid himself. He proclaims that because of his poetry – because
of his Metamorphoses – his death will not be his end, but that
‘the finer part’ of himself (15.875) will be raised above the stars
where his name will last forever in its immortal fame. It is signi-
ficant that he sees here his transformation into his own words,
the metamorphosis of poet into poetry: ‘Wherever the might
of Rome extends in the lands she has conquered,/the people
shall read and recite my words’ (quaque patet domitis Romana
potentia terris,/ore legar populi) – or, more literally, ‘I will be
recited on the lips of the people’ (15.877f), the people will read
and recite Ovid. The poet will become his own poetry then,
and this transformation, like so many others in the poem, will
offer him not only immortality but protection from harm, from
Jupiter’s anger, from fire, sword, and devouring time’ (15.871f).58
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FURTHER READING
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CHAPTER 1: CONTEXTS
1 On the theme of amor in the Metamorphoses see Anderson (1995).
2 According to Holzberg (1999) 60, ‘It is actually possible to read
Ovid’s works from the Heroides through to his exile poetry as a
series of “metamorphoses” of the elegiac discourse found in the
Amores.’
3 On parallels between the two poems see Hinds (1987).
4 On the mystery of Ovid’s exile see Thibault (1964) and Williams
(1994).
5 Kenney (1982) 444n.1, suggests that ‘It is possible that our text of
the Metamorphoses goes back to a copy revised (like the Fasti) by
Ovid in exile, and that one or two apparently “prophetic” touches . . .
were introduced by him during revision’.
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8 See Barchiesi (1991) 6–7, and Feeney (1999). Feeney (1999) 13, links
Ovid’s reference to ‘my times’ here with the Fasti, composed at the
same time as the Metamorphoses, which opens with the word ‘Tem-
pora’ (The Times) – the alternative name by which it was known in
antiquity.
9 On Ovid’s Callimachean influences see Graf (2002).
10 On Ovid’s carmen perpetuum see Hofmann (1985). On Ovid’s use of
lost Hellenistic sources – notably Callimachus’ Aetia (Causes),
Nicander’s Heteroioumena (Transformations), and Boios’ Orni-
thogonia (Origins of Birds) – see Forbes-Irving (1990) 7–37.
11 Otis (1970).
12 Ludwig (1965).
13 See Anderson (1997) 13 and Feeney (2004) xxi.
14 See Wheeler (1999) 207–10 for a complete catalogue of all forty
internal narrators and narratives in the poem.
15 See Wheeler (2000) 93 and Brown (2005) 36f.
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171
172
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174
the ‘graphic detail’ of the torture; Leach (1974) 118 and 127
who refers to the ‘grotesque horror’ of this ‘brutal tale’; and Tissol
(1997) 125–29 who labels Marsyas’ representation as ‘harrowing
and repulsive’.
6 Galinsky (1975) 134
7 See Feldherr and James (2004).
8 Anderson (1972) 204.
9 Compare the paradox of Tereus’ ‘criminal piety’ with that of Agenor
(3.5), Philomela (6.635), Aeetes’ daughters (7.339f), Althaea (8.477),
and Myrrha (10.366f).
10 See Richlin (1992) and Curran (1978). For a persuasive feminist
re-reading of this story – and of Philomela’s web – see Joplin
(1984).
11 Compare the paradox of Philomela’s ‘criminal piety’ with that of
Agenor (3.5), Tereus (6.473f), Aeetes’ daughters (7.339f), Althaea
(8.477), and Myrrha (10.366f).
12 On the violence of this narrative – and the voyeuristic role played by
the reader in witnessing it – see Segal (1994).
13 On Medea as an intertextual heroine see Hinds (1993) and
Newlands (1997).
14 Medea’s passion is portentously described by Ovid as a kind
of madness (furorem – 7.10). Love is similarly described in the
stories of Narcissus (3.350, 479), Scylla (8.35f), Byblis (9.512,
541, 583, 602.), Myrrha (10.355, 397), Glaucus (14.16), and Iphis
(14.701, 716).
15 On the interwoven themes of amor, metamorphosis and magic in
this story see Rosner-Siegel (1982).
16 Like the gods in books 1–5 of the poem, Medea’s desire is inflamed
by the sight of Jason. On the importance of the gaze in the
Metamorphoses see Salzman-Mitchell (2005).
17 Newlands (1997) 189.
18 Ovid even puts into Medea’s mouth an elaboration of his own words
(Amores 2.1.23–6) celebrating the magical power of poetry.
19 On Cephalus’ narrative technique here see Tarrant (1995).
20 See Davis (1983).
21 Compare Scylla with Propertius’ elegiac heroine Tarpeia (4.4) who
also betrayed her city for love.
22 This reference to Scylla as ‘monstrum’ suggests that Ovid also has
Scylla, the monstrous figure of books 13 and 14, in mind here.
He also conflates the two Scyllas in his Ars Amatoria 1.331f.
23 Newlands (1997) 197.
24 Compare the bird transformations of Scylla and Nisus with that of
Tereus, Procne and Philomela (6. 667–74).
25 For similar creative artists in the poem see the tales relating to
the divine creator of the cosmos (1.5–88), Prometheus (1.76–88),
Deucalion and Pyrrha (1.313–415), Arachne (6.1–145), and
Pygmalion (10.243–97).
26 See Wise (1977).
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