In the closing parts of Ovid's treatment 
of the Trojan War, we see the sufferings of Hecuba and her children. 
These are famous threads in the yarn around Troy, and it's not as though the 
tradition ignores them, but Ovid seems to pay special attention to embrace them. 
we've seen him take the pieces of the narrative story of Troy where great 
heroic grandeur is traditionally displayed, and recast them as moments of 
kind of nastiness, so the heroism gets drained out of them. 
And now in the parts of the tradition where the nastiness is acknowledged Ovid 
almost embraces them greedily and spends time concentrating on them. 
the figure of Hecuba, we see her suffering and she has a kind of 
matriarchal sense to her [SOUND] that on a great loss, she maintains her dignity 
with a decimated family and we jump in from here, pretty seamlessly into a story 
of the Aeneid. you recall our Aeneas here, our grand 
figure. we're going to meet his story, too. 
we get him out of Troy. that, that, that happens, we're off we 
go, and we go through Delos and Crete and as far as Scylla and Charybdis. 
That moves very quickly. Notice how quickly Ovid treats all these 
things. Then, once we get to that point, there's 
a long digression. It goes on for almost ten pages in your 
translation. Well, we hear about Galatea and Acis, who 
are happy lovers, but guess what? 
The cyclops loves Galatea. So, all of a sudden what is Ovid giving 
us? a long digression after only a very short 
treatment of what's happening with our grand hero, Aeneas. 
A long digression on the softer side of the Cyclops. 
Remember this guy from from Homer? I mean, he is just nasty. 
Well, Ovid starts to think about him as having romantic feelings for this you 
know, young, young beautiful tender woman. 
and, and, but the Cyclops gets all mushy inside. 
I mean, it's just absurdly, I mean, it's quite funny. 
I'm sorry. Explaining a joke is never a funny thing. 
So if I, if I, feel like I'm, doing that, that's it goes with the territory I 
guess. then, so we have a this long digression 
on that and then we hear about the Scylla and how she got that way. 
Again, it makes us kind of feel tender to the Scylla.1 there's a love that's goes 
wrong and now she's turned into a monster. 
So, there's this soft side of these monsters. 
And then there's a monstrous side of, of the people that we admire. 
we hear about Dido and the sibyl. That's another few pages that we jump 
back into our story and then another long digression. 
We hear Greek tales of Achaemenides and there's some more story that talks about 
Polyphemus, and Aeolus, and Circe. and then some love stories of people that 
you're not sure who they are. Remember, we're supposed to be talking 
about Aeneid now, and the story of Aeneas and the founding of Rome. 
I mean, it seems as though Ovid would have just done that as opposed to 
launching off into whatever digression he felt, 
but he's going off on all digressions. Then we get a founding of a Roman 
settlement. There is a war with the locals that were 
Rutulians. Five pages of that, 
so some kind of more grand epic kind of heroic warrior stuff that happens as 
Aeneas is clobbering the local Rutulians that happened in 7 trough 12 of the 
Aeneid that we did not read for our class. 
but there are more digressions that pepper this story. 
he avoids direct confrontation with Virgil but there are strong contrasts 
that are pretty, pretty obvious on first look. 
there is a lack of theological thrust in Ovid. 
It's not as though things are all moving toward a purposeful end, 
instead it seems the opposite. Things are whenever they start towards 
some purposeful end, they get pushed off into a digression. we got a predictable 
emphasis in history on the source for Circe and the prophetess Sibyl. 
He likes these figures, they're shapeshifters. 
There is a lack of prophecy, we don't have lots of pronouncements. I mean yes, 
you have to go do this, here's the future, fate is leading you forward. 
instead there's a prophecy at the very end of the story what, that shows, Ovid's 
story that shows up parts of the epic that we're not reading, but it doesn't 
figure in to these heroic kind of battles. 
He's got this strong quickness to follow digression. 
And, it makes us wonder in the end what kind of Rome or Romanesque is Ovid 
imagining. we've got order on the one hand these 
are, are beautiful ruins over here have fallen down, 
but imagine them up and straight and beautiful and, disorder on the other of 
things just and falling apart. In Ovid, the world is kind of struggling 
between these two potential strong forces, order on the one hand, disorder 
on the other. disorder in the end kind of seems 
stronger doesn't it? Anything that seems stable is always 
about to change. Disorder upends it. 
there's internal conflict passion versus duty. 
Passion almost always wins out. Not to be known as exonerated for that. 
It's not embraced, but yet oftly punished. 
but it just shows that things don't quite work out the way humans would want them 
to. We have a closing look at everyday life, 
small people in the middle of grand circumstances. 
and we've got this kind of fumbling march toward some kind of an endpoint. 
Who knows what it is? Well, in the end, Ovid tells us at the 
end of his metamorphoses, it is indeed Rome and it is indeed 
Augustus, and he doesn't seem have his tongue in 
his cheek while he's talking about that. it seems to be quite, 
[INAUDIBLE] what, what he means, the grandeur of Rome and the grandeur of 
Augustus, but at the, as a closing a tale on an epic that is built on change and, 
and, and instability the idea of Roman permanence and stability at least 
somewhat subtly is a bit undercut by the way Ovid has told this story up till now. 
So, this is a poet that's really interested in how this grand vision of a 
monumental Rome may have some creaky pieces to it and stability for all time 
as is imagined by political leaders, who knows is probably not something that I 
would as ready to say is going to happen forever, and ever, and ever, and ever. 
After all things, all change. that this, may, be connected somehow with 
the reasons why Ovid was exiled, but as I said at the beginning of our 
treatment of Ovid, we just don't know. We not sure why he had to spend all that 
time out there, but he did not he did something to displease Augustus and, 
that's never wise.