We're switching gears now. 
We're moving from the poetry of Virgil, which is stately and grand and kind of 
long form into the poetry of Ovid, which is more playful and intimate and is prone 
to digression. You'll notice as you're reading Ovid that 
is episodic in nature. Ovid can't quite keep his focus on any 
specific thing. He likes to move from one piece of the 
story to, to a totally different story, back to the story he was telling. 
It is strongly digressive in his approach to things. 
It makes for a, a, a, a more playful kind of a poetry and as you'll see, 
a very different form of entertainment that we see with Virgil. 
in the case of Ovid, his dates are here 43 to seventeen of the common era. 
43 from BCE to seventeen of the common era. 
in the, in the case of Ovid, what we see are people caught in internal conflicts. 
a lot of what we see is going to be that kind of conflict. 
People are torn between two courses of action. 
Usually, passion on the one hand and duty on the other hand. 
And as we saw in Virgil. duty is supposed to win. 
Well, in Ovid, it's the other way around. Passion almost always wins over duty. 
We're going to see lots of small details. Regular people involved in great events. 
they will be kind of people on the sidelines who get focused on as some 
monumental historical thing happens in front of them. 
Or we'll zoom into people who are main characters in the action. 
But a lot of the time he spends is on the periphery of things. 
Watching the things from the edges, zooming in, zooming out as he likes. 
we'll see hints in him of a philosophical outlook of a world based on change. 
the idea of a kind of fumbling, roiling conglomeration of atoms that comes 
together in one shape, and then falls apart and comes together in another shape 
is a kind of world view that we'll see Ovid working within. 
Ovid was from a prosperous family. He had the best education money could 
buy, which at the time, meant a training in the verbal arts. 
Ovid was being trained up to be a great lawyer, and he made a phone call home at 
some point, Mom, Dad, I've got great news, I want to be a poet. 
well back in those days there was still money and fame to be gained if a person 
was involved in poetry. but the normal course of events would 
have been to go off and use that education, the training, and the verbal 
arts, that he had been trained up, in to, in such a high degree. It's fine pitch of 
educational perfection would have been for him to go off and become a wealthy 
senator a provincial governor, or, something like that but Ovid have other 
plans for himself. He was indisputably, the greatest poet of his day, in the 
generation after Virgil. the Ancients had interestingly mixed 
feeling about him. He was clearly a genius. 
And no one thought otherwise of him. And as I say, he was definitely the 
greatest poet of his day. But we have this wonderful preserved 
quotation from Quintilian. a literary critic who read, reading Ovid, 
said, he could have been better if he had 
controlled his genius rather than letting it control him. 
It sounds a little bit actually, if you've seen that depiction of the life of 
Mozart in the film Amadeus. it has a little bit of a ring to it 
there. there's a, a man in the grip of a 
tremendous talent that allows him to do just about anything. 
And he allows the talent, his kind of virtuoustic talent let get the better of 
him and take him off in directions that may or may not be exactly what one should 
do with epic poetry. he got himself into trouble with the 
authorities. We're not exactly sure how. 
Augustus himself was angry with Ovid and that resulted in Ovid being banished. 
He went away for some unknown error. here's his birthplace of 
Sulmo as shown here. Rome, right nearby. 
and then, Ovid gets tossed all the way over to the other side on the coast the 
Black Sea and has to live in this place, Tomis. 
Poor guy he's a, a very sophisticated or vain person. 
He's living out there in the sticks at a time when the, 
you know, maybe the greatest city of all time was just waiting for his talents and 
his excitement to, to engage with it. he has to spend his time out on the Black 
Sea. So, because of this error, he has to live 
his live out there in exile. near the beginning of the course, we 
defined myth as a traditional tale with secondary partial reference to something 
of collective importance told by someone for some reason. 
And that was the definition that we're using in the course, that's our tried and 
true definition. Walter Burkhardt the great scholar of 
Greek myth, came up with it. And the com, after the comma is the 
struck edition told by someone for some reason. 
With Ovid, we get a different definition of mythology and I'll just go ahead and 
toss this one out. Ovid thinks of myth as a clump of 
stories, probably, untrue about ancient characters that may or may not have 
actually existed with some deeper trues in them or not. 
But they're surely fun to hear. In other words, Ovid's definition of myth 
is a little bit like what we see the definition of mythology that is worked 
out today. In Hollywood, in TV spectacular shows, in 
comic books of all kinds. who knows exactly what the relationship 
is between these stories and some anchoring insight into the grand 
structure of the universe. However, boy, they're really fun to hear. 
Ovid jumps right into the pool of myths. And tells and retells just about 
everything. His metamorphoses stands in a in, in, 
you know, a unique position in the sources that we've looked at in our, in 
our class. Ovid tries to doing synoptic view of mythology from beginning to end. 
He tries to look at the whole thing and well, all the way up to historical times 
to Roman times, if you've got time on your own, we're 
only reading bits and pieces of the metamorphosis, I highly recommend the 
rest of it for those of you who are able to. 
and the, the idea of a his idea or his take on any particular myths we're going 
to study is usually the one that wins out over time. 
So, if you've seen a myth retold whether that's on Wikipedia or an Edith Hamilton 
or any of the standard contemporary resources that people go to, to learn 
about Greek myth. If you see a myth being retold, chances 
are, you're seeing Ovid's version of the myth. 
he becomes so authoritative because of his encyclopedic nature and his 
incredibly playful spirit and well, wonderful skill and virtuosity in his 
poetic technique. he becomes the main goto source for the 
usual try to get the usual understanding of what myth is about. 
this is interesting because as we'll see Ovid has his own spin on things. 
He does things in his own way. Just as any of the authors we've seen 
already do. so, his shaping of the tradition I think 
can't really be underestimated. He has an incredibly powerful place. 
[COUGH] Ovid will present us in his sewing 
together of all these traditions with a coherent group of old tales. 
And coherent needs to be put in there's a little footnote there. 
It's coherent and so far, it all holds together but Ovid will make it jump and 
move and bounce about. The seams that are used to sew together 
the different traditions move in zig zag patterns. 
You'll see Ovid can't follow a straight line for the life of him. 
he's, he's bored by that. It seems as though he would just not find 
that interesting. So, instead he zigs and zags in always 
fascinating and interesting ways. Now, this sewing together of all these 
traditions present something slightly different than zeroing in on specific 
episodes within the mythic tradition that we've seen, 
you know, whether that's the founding of Rome, or the story of Aenea, or whether 
that's the tale of Orestes and all the nasty things that happened to him or 
Odysseus. it's trying to do the whole thing, 
everything all together. So, with him, we start to see something 
more than just myths, we see mythology as a kind of a study in and of itself. 
This large corporate collection of things. 
Now, in Ovid's story, we'll see lots of themes. 
number one, the theme of change and transformation. 
remember those Spartoi that grew up out of the ground? 
We saw, saw those in our last slide. 
The Spartoi that grow up out of the ground, 
that's just the kind of thing Ovid is going to love to talk about. 
we've got a dragon that gets slayed. Its teeth get pulled out from, they get 
tossed into the ground and up from those seed teeth, grow up plants that turned 
into human heroes. He loves that kind of thing. 
transformations is going to be our really central theme here and definitely one of 
the most important of them. they're going to be a line between human 
and animal, it's going to be an important one that he looks at and you recall as 
this slide depicts our tale of Agave and how she mistakes her son for a 
sacrificial animal, slices off his head. the line between humans and animals is 
going to be one of the pivotal moments of trans of transformation and change that 
Ovid's going to be interested in. And just as we've seen in the past, when 
that line gets crossed, these strange things are likely to happen. 
violence is just around the corner, always, in Ovid's tale. 
it's not much as he's an elegant and playful storyteller, the 
materials that he's dealing with usually are deadly serious and usually someone 
dies. violence galore in those stories. 
theme two that we're going to see lots of examples of illicit love and passion. 
love is sometimes a euphemism. We're going to see lots of rape as in 
here, the depiction of the rape, [UNKNOWN] by the women. 
the idea of rape in Ovid's tale is not something that he is he's going to 
present it in a way that shows a certain kind of titillation, 
excitement a transgression that happens. They're the violent outcome, 
the, the, the results from these transgressions is going to be exhibited 
as well. but I think we'll feel, in some cases, 
we'll see a human turn into a flower and that will seem like a charming story. 
In other cases, we'll see a rape that results in a, a human woman turn into an 
animal. In both cases, I think violence violence 
is closeby the surface. And Ovid means to pull it out and, and, 
and set it up for us. so don't be lulled into a sense of the 
charm of these stories as the violence is occurring and that's definitely happening 
going to happen with, when we see these scenes of elicit erotic passion turning 
into rapes. another theme that we'll see is a strong 
sense of links between the divine and the human world. 
but there are dangers as well, when these kind of linkages happen. 
we're going to see when the human and divine worlds get close as here when 
Diana is spotted. watch out, you don't, if you're a human 
being and you spot a goddess, run the other way even if you try to run, 
you are still going to get caught. the bad things are going to happen. 
So, when the human and, and divine dividing line is crossed or come close 
to, it's like you are approaching a kind of third rail. 
danger is waiting and we see it visited on those that did get too close to the 
divine world. Ovid is maybe a little bit like 
Prometheus. He's stealing fire from the gods and when 
he does, there's punishment that happens in each of these cases. 
we're going to see a final theme that I'll just point to is the theme of 
bodies. Ovid is very much interested in the 
physical, corporeal nature of you and I as human beings. 
bodies are something that he focuses on in a very close up way and we see them 
enter into we see their fragility, we see their changeability we see human beings 
as they anchor to them, sadly. and we see them as in a way that humans 
tend to resist. We see them as all the things that the 
wider natural world sees them. for example, when animals look at one 
predatory animals look at you and I, they don't probably think of, oh, look at 
that nice human being, I might like to get to know them. 
Instead, you and I look a little bit more like you know, a carved out piece of meat 
ready to eat. the in Ovid's world, our bodily nature is 
run through a whole template of the different dimensions that it has and he 
is nowhere about to hide the fact that you and I are flesh and that flesh is 
fragile, it may be predit, it may be a prey for some other animal and it's 
changeable and it's very temporary. Ovid's poem I'm not going to lay out the 
whole beginning here, we didn't assign that part of the reading for class but I 
thought we could be, set it in useful contrast to some of the things we have 
seen in the other stories that we have looked at. 
The heroic epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid focusing on that 
first word on a pivotal important theme of what the epic is all about. 
For the Illiad, it was a war rage. that's, that's something we read for the 
class, we made reference to it. For the Odyssey, 
the opening word is man. What is it to be a male-gendered human 
being? That is what the epic was going to be 
about. For the Aeneid, it's the arms and a man. 
Virgil tells us he is going to sing about both of these main Homeric themes. 
For Ovid, he jumps in in a way that slightly bends the traditional 
formulation. his first word is new things in Noah. 
actually, it is a preposition. A prepositional phrase begins his epic, 
not a concrete noun that you can jump onto. 
And the thing that you are going to jump into is this prepositional link to 
Noah, new stuff. That's the beginning of what the epic is 
all about. translations of it vary. 
the typical one that is latched onto is the, the, the, looking at its first 
worthy idea of forms changed into new and different bodies. 
This is what I was going to focus on, not some single thing that's just sitting 
there, waiting for us to discover it like a, a, a specimen that we are going to put 
under microscope for the whole epic. Instead, what he's going to look at is 
changing things in and of themselves, as they change. 
That's what he wants to do and that's what he is going to dig into. 
Now the metamorphosis is going to focus on moments of destruction. 
yeah, change is going to happen, but these moments of change are not going to 
be gentle and sweet. they're going to be violent. 
and when they do happen there's, there's always pain and suffering of individuals. 
the metamorphosis any individual change that's talked about could be a 
punishment. It could be a form of justice that's 
delivered out. more often, it's a kind of random 
visitation on someone just, that just happened to step into some situation that 
was precarious and before you know it, they're changed into something else. 
and the judgement that's visited on that person may be deserved, may not be 
deserved. It is not a world that, that is ruled by 
some over arching theme of justice. we're not going to see that happen. 
Yeah. More often instead, what we see them 
metamorphoses are bodies that are victims. 
These are bodies that are [COUGH] porous, they are wounded, they're dismembered, 
they're dissolved, they're turned into a thing instead of a 
human being. in the case of stories that we've already 
seen, like Actaeon and Pentheus, we're going to, Ovid is going to focus on 
these. He likes to talk about these traditional 
tales of humans getting ripped up. they're going to be dismembered. 
In the case of Narcissius, a story that you all might already know, 
you'll see how this version of it, it's probably puts different spins on it than 
ones you've seen before. we are going to see a body just kind of 
wastes away, just disappears. in the case of sometimes we'll have he 
was change into animals or plants or animals. 
But, but always, that change is, is accompanied by some kind of destructive 
possibility. Now, trying to focus understand this 
focus that Ovid has on bodies some have pointed to the historical climate of his 
time. he's dealing in an imperial age, in a way 
that Virgil has one foot back in an earlier age and then also looks forward 
to this imperial age. Ovid is dealing in fully in an imperial 
age, and this is an age of high spectacle. 
The Colosseum is up and running. We got human bodies that are put on 
display and being ripped up before our very eyes by other animals. 
We're seeing the, the porous fragile nature of human bodies exhibited to us in 
the form of entertainment you and I as classical Romans. 
Ovid is putting us inside that world and it may well be that his own approach to 
this stuff is influenced by certain carelessness to the human form that is 
exhibited in the world around him, in the high empire of Rome from here on, we'll 
start to look at specific points in Ovid's story and these themes 
we'll see pulled out over and over again.