My first reaction to Ovid's Metamorphoses was mystification. This was one of the great books of Western culture. Ovid was said to be wickedly delightful to read compared to other ancients. And I was reading an acclaimed translation into modern English.

So why did I find it deadly dry, repetitive and boring?

Again and again I'd have to look up the mythological figures in footnotes or other sources to figure what was going on. Over and over, whenever one of these characters stirred some interest, he or she would turn into a tree or fish or bird or star...and then it would be on to the next character. The overarching story was impossible to follow, as it kept jumping around to fit in as many of these subplots of metamorphoses (changes of body) as possible.

Then, halfway through, I checked out some other translations and found one that suddenly made Ovid's stories jump off the page.

I no longer needed to check every reference as this translation made the identities of the people and places apparent. I read the second half of Metamorphoses much more quickly. I could see why the ancients might have thought this was hot stuff and why so many other great writers, old and modern, have been influenced by Ovid's writing.

Sharing the telling

The version I enjoyed, by David R. Slavitt, was called a "free translation", which is to say it was not a strict rendering of what Ovid wrote but an imaginative reworking of it, something that is often frowned upon by serious scholars. Checking it against other translations and what others have said about Metamorphoses in Latin, I had to conclude that some of what had been added in this free translation may not have been exactly what the original poet had in mind.

But whether it was in the spirit of Ovid is another matter. In any case, it revived my interest in the work and led me into other editions. And that's good, isn't it? (More about this in the commentary on Metamorphoses translations.)

The ancients had a body of mythology, built on Greek legends starting before Homer and extended by the Romans, legends everyone knew and in which the artists could share in the telling of. I can't think of a similar set of stories common to our age that every author similarly dips into. The closest we can come to it may be folk tales, or The Hebrew Bible and other influential religious mythologies.

But even in that environment, Ovid was a maverick. When he told each of the beloved tales, it was with a twist—several twists actually. Like many writers he changed the details of the stories he plagiarized for his own dramatic purposes, putting characters together who hadn't met in previous legends and contriving new outcomes for them.

He also parodied the grand epic styles of the serious writers who had told the stories before him. He added sly innuendos, ridiculing the pompous and righteous, all the while maintaining an innocent demeanor.

The big picture

Most importantly in Metamorphoses, he fitted everything that had ever happened in the world into his own grand scheme. The only constant, he proclaimed, was change—echoing ancient philosophers Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Lucretius. It's significant that Metamorphoses starts with an account of creation, the story of the greatest changes ever, wrought upon chaos by gods to bring into existence our world and all creatures, including humanity. He is likely drawing on the same ancient sources as the Bible draws on. Even more so when he goes on to describe the great flood that Jupiter wreaks upon the world to punish human wickedness.

Continual change take us up to the founding of Rome and beyond, as Ovid poetically tells or retells the bizarre stories of people turning into lower forms (stone, water) or higher forms (stars, gods).

Among the well-known tales that have won Metamorphoses the reputation of being the source book for Western art and literature, are the stories of Pygmalion, Echo and Narcissus, Daedalus and Icarus, King Midas, Medusa, Orpheus, and Venus and Adonis.

In the last of the fifteen books of Metamorphoses, he makes this "everything is change" claim explicitly, citing Pythagoras, along with appeals for reincarnation and vegetarianism—although it may be argued that he misrepresents the views of Pythagoras, cherry-picking the ideas that fit his own thesis and ignoring those that contradict it.

In the end, he does some obvious kowtowing to the emperor Augustus, extolling his adoptive father Julius Caesar and predicting their empire would last a long, long time. You have to wonder how successful this appeal to the status quo could have been though, given that the bulk of the work argues that change is inherent in everything.

I still find the overall work too choppy. Ovid uses any excuse to string his scores of metamorphosing examples together. You can easily get lost in the stories within stories and then suddenly get jerked to another part of the ancient world with all new characters and a new set of stories within stories.

Perhaps you're not meant to binge-read through all the tales. Perhaps, as with a collection of fairy tales or a biblical text, you're supposed to read a story and put it aside for a while, then pick up another episode a day or two later. Next time I'll try it that way.

— Eric

Critique • Quotes • Translations