Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses opens with chaos resolving into an ordered world and closes with the soul of Julius Caesar carried to the stars, and in between it moves without a break through the whole body of Greek and Roman myth. The organising device is transformation: Daphne into laurel, Actaeon into a stag, Arachne into a spider, Narcissus into a flower, Philomela into a bird, Pygmalion's statue into a woman. Roughly 250 such episodes are strung together, sometimes by chronology, sometimes by geography, sometimes by a character in one tale beginning to narrate the next, so that the poem runs continuously from first line to last with no separable units.

The arrangement is loosely historical: books one to two are cosmic and divine, the middle books largely heroic, Perseus, Medea, Theseus, the Calydonian boar, Hercules, and the last books move into the Trojan war, Aeneas, the Roman kings and finally Augustan Rome. The final book gives long space to Pythagoras expounding the transmigration of souls and the flux of all things, which supplies a philosophical gloss on everything preceding, though how seriously Ovid intends it is disputed.

Tone shifts constantly. The rapes are frequent and, read attentively, not comic; the divine punishments are disproportionate; the gods are vain and dangerous. Modern criticism has moved a long way from treating the poem as a charming anthology.

For much of Greek and Roman myth the Metamorphoses is not merely the best-known source but the only full one. Stories that existed in scattered Hellenistic poetry and local tradition survive as continuous narrative because Ovid retold them, and where he invented, elaborated or combined variants there is often nothing left to check him against. That makes the poem indispensable and, as evidence for what Greeks and Romans actually believed, unreliable in a specific way: it is a first-century literary reworking, not a record of cult.

Ovid wrote the poem in dactylic hexameter, the metre of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, having previously worked almost entirely in elegiac couplets on erotic subjects. The metre announces epic, and almost nothing else about the poem does: no single hero, no unified action, no national purpose, and a narrator who intrudes with jokes. It is best read as a deliberate provocation, an epic-scale work that declines the epic's job, produced in the decades when Virgil's poem had defined what Roman epic was for.

In 8 CE, with the Metamorphoses substantially complete, Augustus relegated Ovid to Tomis on the western coast of the Black Sea, a Greek-speaking outpost far from Rome, where he remained until his death around 17 CE. Ovid says in the Tristia that the cause was a poem and a mistake, carmen et error. The poem is generally taken to be the Ars Amatoria, his manual of seduction, which sat badly with Augustus' moral legislation, though it had been published years earlier. The error he never explains beyond saying he saw something he should not have; the endless guesses, from involvement in the disgrace of the emperor's granddaughter to knowledge of a conspiracy, remain guesses.

He also reports burning his own manuscript of the Metamorphoses in distress before departing, adding that copies were already in circulation. The poem survives; the gesture, like Virgil's, may be a literary posture as much as an act. He describes it in the same breath as unfinished, lacking a final revision, which is the standard explanation for the few rough edges editors have identified.

Relegation was the milder form of banishment: Ovid kept his property and his citizenship, and kept writing, producing the Tristia and the Letters from Pontus, five and four books of verse complaint addressed to Rome. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius recalled him.

No ancient reader treated the Metamorphoses as religious authority. Roman religion had no scripture and located its authority in inherited rites, priestly colleges and state observance, not in books about gods; a poem retelling myths was entertainment and education. Its enormous influence is a matter of transmission, not sanctity.

That transmission survived the end of paganism because medieval readers found a way to keep reading it. Ovid was copied through the monastic centuries and became so widely studied in the twelfth and thirteenth that the period is sometimes called the Ovidian age. The characteristic device was allegory: the Ovide moralise, an anonymous French verse work of the early fourteenth century running to some 72,000 lines, retold every story and then supplied a Christian moral for it, so that pagan transformations became figures of doctrine. Comparable Latin commentaries did the same. The readings look strained now, but they are the reason a poem of pagan myth stayed in circulation.

In English, Arthur Golding published a complete verse translation in 1567, in fourteen-syllable couplets, the first made directly from the Latin. This was the Ovid Shakespeare knew, and the borrowings are extensive: Venus and Adonis and the Pyramus and Thisbe farce in A Midsummer Night's Dream come straight from it, and Prospero's speech renouncing his art in The Tempest follows Medea's incantation closely enough to be traced line by line. Through Golding, and through painters from Titian to Bernini working from the same stories, the Metamorphoses became the default form in which classical myth is known.