When we get to Ovid's treatment of the 
Trojan War, we're moving into a different kind of genre. 
we're moving in from an epic treatment of the Trojan War that we've seen in seen in 
Homer and we've seen in Virgil, into something that we might call a mock epic. 
There's something different happening in Ovid's treatment of this. 
And he's having fun with us all the way through this story. 
If as you're reading, you find yourself on this long digression that seems to 
indenture and you're not sure what, how in the world that's related to the 
main action in the Trojan War. You're on to it, you've got it right. 
Ovid is bringing us all off into parts of the, the story that don't really seem 
quite to fit. we'll talk about what his message is in 
closing, but let's take, try to get a grip on what's happening in Ovid's 
version of the Trojan War. first of all, let's just do a thought 
experiment. Imagine a documentary covering World War 
II from the middle last century. And if in, imagine in that documentary 
that there's no mention at all of D-Day, there's also hardly any battle scenes at 
all. In fact, it's there's one though long bloody kind 
of battle-ish scene when you've got general George Patton, who fights someone 
you never heard of. He's got a really, he has a really hard 
time of it, and then he eventually pushes a guy over and then just strangles him 
and smashes him with his club. there's an older colonel who goes off on 
a long digression and starts prattling on and on and on, about a time when he was a 
young guy, and there was a pack of bears that came along, and they had to have 
long fight to fight off the pack of bears. 
And the story takes up nearly a third of the documentary that treats World War II, 
some old guy talking about when he was young and they fought off a pack of 
bears. That's like a third of the coverage of 
World War II. then on the Allied side, two top officers 
argue over who gets to keep General George Patton's pearl-handled pistols. 
Let's just say for sake of argument, Patton gets killed in the middle of the 
action and he's got these pearl-handled pistols, and the two great officers from 
the Allied side fight over who gets to keep them. 
the documentary, documentary mentions that the Axis countries fall, 
and then, we take a long look at the plight of the Japanese Emperor's family 
and all the suffering that happens, and we talk about how the Allies savagely 
firebombed Tokyo. And that will be the end of the treatment 
of World War II. You might say to yourself, well, that's 
weird, and it's focusing on certain pieces and making them seem really 
important. What's with that whole digression about 
the pack of bears? And why is that in there? 
that's the same kind of reaction you probably should have to Ovid's treatment 
of the Trojan War. Let's see a look at an outline of the 
main action as it happens, and then, we will try to figure out what he is up to. 
We've got a departure for Troy and in that departure we hear about Iphigenia, 
but, in Ovid's version, she is saved at the last minute. 
Diana substitutes a deer instead of her, there's a, change that happens. 
and then, we jump off and we hear about Achilles. 
The great Greek warrior, Achilles, he's a killing machine in Homer. 
He's extraordinarily good at it. He carries a tough eh, carries it in a 
way that makes it clear it's a tough burden for him to shoulder, but he's he 
knows what he's doing. He's kind of an elegant killer. 
in, in the scene that Ovid chooses to pull out is Achilles against Cygnus. 
And if you haven't heard of Cygnus as a famous warrior, well, it's because Cygnus 
is not a famous warrior. It's a small end battle. 
and we've got Achilles compared to a bull. 
There's that rich simile that talks about him as a bull. 
how does that make him look? And then we've got in the end, he just 
takes Cygnus and beats his face in with a shield, 
then finally he chokes him to death. Well, this is not elegant killing. 
It's not the kind of thing that Homer talks about. 
Achilles is able to use you know, sharp, [COUGH] bronze weapons to take the life 
of other people in dramatically efficient ways. 
I mean, here is an inefficient, cloddish, cumbersome, bull-like overwhelming brute 
force, using brute force of one guy against the not very famous guy. That 
doesn't seem very glorious, glorious or heroic. 
Then we get the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs. This is that thing that 
takes like, about a third of Ovid's recounting of the war at Troy focuses in 
on this. How do we get on to this topic? 
And if you don't remember that's probably just about fine. 
you are catching that Ovid has only a very tangential relation between this 
whole thing and and the Trojan War. In fact, it comes out of Nestor's mouth. 
And Nestor is traditionally a guy who likes to talk. 
He's an old man and he likes to hear his own voice as old people do. 
As I get older, I'm finding that that's true. 
My voice sounds more and more mellifluous as the years go by. 
How does Nestor get on the topic of telling everyone who, oh, you know, gory 
detail about the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs? 
Well, he just decides he's, wants to talk about Phineas. 
and this Phineas was once a woman and he wished he could be turned into a man to 
avoid being raped again and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. 
And then all of a sudden, we start hearing about him as a Lapith and how 
they fought off the Centaurs. Otherwise, there's really no connection. 
Nestor's just kind of prattling. and all of a sudden we jump on into this 
long battle-like scene where Lapiths, who we don't necessarily care that much 
about, are killing Centaurs who we care nothing about. 
what we've got in the way he frames things, 
the way Ovid frames things is a kind of triumph of gruesomeness and gore for 
gore's sake over heroism. he focuses in on these nasty beasts 
getting ripped apart and there's gory detail after gory detail. 
Homer himself spends a lot of time with gory detail, but, 
and by contrast, in most of the cases that Homer does that, we care about the 
person that's getting ripped up. Here, the Centaurs, they play a role 
that's kind of like the role that zombies play in contemporary horror movies. 
Zombies are there in order to just get ripped up and you watch their green gooey 
gore blood splatter everywhere. the Centaurs are a little bit like that, 
you're just going to watch them get sort of sliced to bits and you say, oh, well, 
look at that, that's sort of exciting. so a famous case of old they're debauched 
creatures, these Centaurs, the men, they're man and beast together. 
We don't really admire them. What we've got instead of a grand, heroic scene with 
people on one side and people on another fighting over a great cause, 
we've got gore for gore's sake. It's just gruesomeness. 
and then, we jump back and all of a sudden get back to our digressive moment 
of [INAUDIBLE] and oh, yeah, he was there too. 
We hear about that. Oh, okay. 
All of a sudden Ovid has brought us through this long gory detail that 
doesn't really have much at all to do with the Trojan War, 
then we hear about the death of Achilles. Yes indeed, we just hear about it, he 
dies. And the, the way he dies is, is by a cheap shot from a peanut gallery. 
[COUGH] you've got Paris who is not very, of all of the Trojan princes, Paris is 
not the greatest of warriors and he fights with bow and arrow, that's never 
coded as being a very brave thing. Bow and arrow fighters fight from far 
away and they kind of ping and then they run off. 
well, so this arrow flies and it hits Achilles and poor Achilles who's depicted 
here on this vase dead Achilles being dragged along, he gets pushed aside. But 
it's just a small, tiny mention. It's not as though there's anything, 
grand and grandiose that has happened. in our next lecture, we'll look at 
another piece of how this Trojan war is framed. 
After Achilles is dead, there's going to be an argument over who gets to keep his 
arms.