Ovid's Metamorphosis
Lecture Notes
On Ovid's Metamorphoses
Paul Cantor · University of Virginia
The Metamorphoses' Enormous Influence
The Metamorphoses is one of the most important works in all of literary history, one of the most influential books ever written — the principal means by which classical mythology was actually transmitted to Europe, the place where later writers actually learned their Greek and Roman myths. It was widely read throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, at a time when Homer wasn't being read at all. You could almost call it the Bible of classical mythology. But it's a strange kind of Bible — it carried a genuinely shady reputation, prized in part for its prurient interest, a real Christian fascination with pagan pornography; it became something like recreational reading for monks, who eventually tried to justify the habit (there's a whole medieval French tradition of moralizing the poem, "Ovid Moralized," reading Christian lessons into its stories). Dante draws on it in the Inferno. It was one of Shakespeare's own favorite books — he read it in Arthur Golding's English translation, and used the story of Pyramus and Thisbe directly in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ovid helped make romantic love one of the central themes of European literature, and his influence remained just as important after the Renaissance — the Romantic poets, Keats and Shelley among them, drew on him heavily; even in the twentieth century, Eliot draws on him in The Waste Land, and Rilke picks up the whole theme of transformation directly in his Sonnets to Orpheus. It's genuinely hard to overestimate Ovid's influence on European literature as a whole.
Finding Unity in Disunity
The aim here is to try to understand the Metamorphoses both on its own terms and within its specific Roman context. It's a genuinely hard work to grasp — there are so many tales woven through it (and we're reading fewer than half of them) that it can seem to lack any real unity, just a loose collection of stories, however artfully strung together. But there is an underlying unity running beneath all this apparent disunity — or rather, disunity itself turns out to be the unifying theme. Ovid is portraying a world that has genuinely lost its own unity. Rome, in his telling, is falling apart, dissolving. The whole theme of the Metamorphoses is metamorphosis itself — nothing in the world stays constant; the world is perpetually changing, defined by pure mutability. The fundamental character of this world, right from the opening lines, is chaos. This is drawn from Greek myth, from Hesiod, but it clearly reflects Ovid's own particular emphasis: cosmic order, on his account, is at bottom chaotic.
Rome had traditionally been characterized by its discipline — the old Republican Rome, embodied in its army, where every soldier has his place in formation and never breaks ranks. The great Roman virtue was constancy, sticking to one's purpose no matter what — embodied in Aeneas, who cannot be diverted from his mission. Virgil celebrates exactly this Roman single-mindedness of purpose. Ovid, by contrast, offers something like a reply to Virgil — a very different take on the empire, one that sees the world falling apart rather than coming together (not unlike Yeats's much later "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"). Writing early in the imperial period, Ovid already sees Roman order and discipline beginning to break down — remarkably prophetic, looking ahead to figures like Caligula and Nero. The Metamorphoses is, in this sense, a reaction to the dissolution of the old polis into the cosmopolitan world of empire; the fundamental metamorphosis really taking place is in Roman politics itself — the regime change from Republic to Empire, from polis to cosmopolis. The poem conveys a real sense of how thoroughly Rome has changed, the all-embracing character of empire, taking in the whole known world, conveying a real sense of the vastly wider range of possibilities Rome now contains — the changed terms of Roman life itself. The world had simply grown too large to maintain the old discipline, offering too many options and opportunities all at once. The polis had been a small, tightly knit community, where everyone knew everyone else, able to bring real social force to bear, working to keep its citizens in line, to control their passions — that was Aeschylus's whole hope for the polis. But even the polis didn't fully succeed at this; it ended up generating a whole new passion of its own, a passion for empire, a desire for world conquest. The polis kept expanding until it lost its tightly knit character altogether — we already saw this happening in Athens, which had already become a fairly cosmopolitan city, full of foreign influence (exactly what Aristophanes shows us, the disorienting effect of imperialism even at that early stage) — and it happened far more dramatically in Rome, which actually went on to conquer the entire known world.
Virgil saw real cause for hope in all this — that empire would bring peace and harmony to the world, that Roman discipline could still be maintained. But even in Virgil you can already see real doubts creeping in, forces that threaten to undermine Roman virtue, foreign forces, seductive women from exotic countries — Aeneas does manage to overcome Dido's temptation, in the end. Ovid retells essentially the same story in the form of Jason and Medea (he actually wrote a full Medea play himself, now lost). In Virgil, the threat of the foreign and the barbaric remains contained; in Ovid, the exotic simply overwhelms, breaking out of every effort at containment. As the polis dissolves into the cosmopolitanism of empire, the old restraints on the passions dissolve right along with it, and new forces get let loose — above all, erotic power. Eros becomes the central theme of the Metamorphoses. In a world of pure mutability, one that has lost all its old stable reference points, eros acquires an entirely new kind of power. The Republic had kept eros contained; the Empire sets it free — even actively encourages it, as a way of diverting men's energy away from politics, a counterweight to thumos: chase after women instead of chasing after power.
Ovid's Life and the Politics Behind the Poem
Ovid is clearly reacting to imperial politics directly — we know he was personally involved with the Augustan court, and eventually became one of its victims. By the time we reach the Roman world, we simply know a great deal more about individual authors — they're no longer purely legendary figures the way Homer is; we have real biographical facts to work with. Homer was born sometime between 850 and 750 BC, roughly speaking. Ovid, by contrast, was born on March 20, 43 BC — it says so, in effect, on his birth certificate. He came from an aristocratic family who wanted him to become a lawyer; he studied rhetoric, eventually in Athens (in effect, going to law school in Athens, since Athens functioned as something like Rome's own graduate school). Ovid turned to poetry instead, especially erotic poetry — his Art of Love (Ars Amatoria). The single key fact of his later life is that Augustus banished him to the Black Sea coast, to Tomis, in modern Romania (near present-day Constața), in 8 AD — ostensibly over the licentiousness of his poetry. It remains a genuinely mysterious incident; it may have had something to do with Julia, Augustus's own granddaughter. The Metamorphoses was completed just before Ovid left Rome, and it still clearly reflects the coming banishment, even though the poem isn't purely personal — what happened to Ovid personally seems to encapsulate what he felt was happening to Rome more generally. He uses Greek myth as an oblique way of portraying the world of Roman politics. Some readers find very specific meanings buried in this — Jove's troubles with Juno, for instance, read as a reflection of Augustus's own troubles with his rather frigid wife, Livia. There's an explicit identification of Augustus with Jove at one point in the poem (Augustus's own palace stood on the Palatine Hill — our word "palace" itself comes from "Palatine"). On the surface this seems to flatter Augustus, making him look like Jove. But look closely at how Jove actually behaves throughout the poem — it could just as easily read as a genuinely negative comment on Augustus. You don't have to read it quite that narrowly. But imperial politics clearly provides the real background throughout, and there's something genuinely subversive about Ovid's whole project. Augustus certainly thought so — the Metamorphoses is another classic work that was actually banned in its own day; Augustus had Ovid's books removed from the public libraries of Rome.
The Metamorphoses as an "Unwriting" of the Aeneid
Perhaps the best way to understand the Metamorphoses is as a rewriting of the Aeneid — or really an unwriting of it. This becomes clearer in the later books, which deal with Aeneas directly, but you can already see it in the poem's structure — or rather its deliberate lack of structure. The Aeneid is a tightly focused work; the single-mindedness and straightforwardness of its narrative directly reflects the single-mindedness of Roman purpose itself. The twisting, wandering, meandering narrative of the Metamorphoses is itself an oblique comment on Virgil. Ovid simply doesn't see the same kind of order in the world. For Ovid, the world is chaos, not cosmos. Virgil had shaped a whole myth of Roman history in which history builds up to Augustus, a genuine civilizing process, history understood as progress — giving the Aeneid its clear underlying unity. Ovid begins by flatly denying Virgil's whole vision of history: for Ovid, history is decline, not progress. There's no single overarching story in Ovid at all. The Metamorphoses reflects the sheer diversity of the Roman Empire, rather than its unity — an almost encyclopedic work, taking in everything at once, much like the new Rome itself. Ovid returns, in this sense, to an older Greek view of history — the Ages of Man, going back to Hesiod, where history moves steadily downhill, from a Golden Age down to an Age of Iron. Ovid's Golden Age is explicitly anti-imperial in its implications, questioning both foreign travel and war. Notice, too, the direct comment on Virgil buried here: the city is not the best possible state for man. The Golden Age stands as a pointed contrast to contemporary Rome. For Virgil, his own era is effectively the Golden Age — Augustan Rome, as good as it gets. Aeneas loves cities; he never met a city he didn't like; he would have hated Ovid's Golden Age outright — "where's the theater?" For Ovid, it's exactly the opposite: the Golden Age is emphatically not urban; the city belongs instead to the Age of Iron, which sounds a great deal like Imperial Rome, especially its great landed estates. Ovid doesn't see his own age sitting at the top of history, but at the very bottom — considerably closer, in this respect, to Homer than to Virgil. Virgil had tried to reshape Homeric myth specifically to provide a founding myth for Imperial Rome (even moving away from Homer's own polytheism, which hardly suited a unified world empire). Ovid, by contrast, returns to Homer — not that he isn't critical of Homeric material in his own later books, but he's clearly working to undo Virgil's whole reshaping of Homer. He finds the Homeric view of the gods genuinely congenial.
Ovid's Skepticism and the Return to Homer's Gods
This is a genuinely complicated point. Ovid maintains a real skeptical attitude toward myth throughout — one real sign of his "modernity" (almost postmodernity, in a sense). He directly comments on the whole question of belief at various points — protesting a little too much at times, in a way that suggests a truly pious man wouldn't feel the need to raise such doubts in the first place. Ovid remains genuinely skeptical of inherited tradition throughout. He's a highly sophisticated writer, with a strong sense of arriving late within an already established tradition — which isn't to say he simply returned to some naive, literal belief in the old Homeric deities. By Ovid's own time, sophisticated Romans simply didn't believe in the Olympian gods in any literal sense. But Ovid, in effect, uses them as metaphors, as poetic devices. (He still observed the traditional religious rites, still performed the required sacrifices — remember that literal belief was never as central to ancient religion as it became for Christians; you didn't have to believe in the literal truth of the Homeric stories to be considered pious. But Ovid looked at the world Virgil portrays and the world Homer portrays, and in effect concluded that Homer's world felt closer to the way the world actually looked to him.) Virgil suggests a world that is genuinely ordered, almost morally ordered, where the virtuous ultimately triumph over the wicked — again, part of why Virgil proved so attractive to later Christian readers. Ovid suggests instead that things don't actually work out nearly so neatly in the real world. He's drawn back to the Homeric view of the gods for its real explanatory power — it seems to account better for the world as he actually sees it, where human excellence is sometimes rewarded, but is often punished or destroyed instead. The gods of the Aeneid are fairly dependable, standing firmly behind Aeneas, holding a constant purpose in mind throughout. The gods of the Metamorphoses are considerably less reliable than even Homer's own gods — utterly undependable, utterly changeable, constantly shifting their own shapes, freely lying to human beings (compare Plato's own critique of the pagan gods in the Republic). Book I shows the gods as utterly fickle — at any moment they might simply decide to destroy humanity outright. Jove sends a flood to wipe out the entire human race (Ovid may or may not have known the story of Noah — probably not; writers like Virgil and Ovid likely didn't know the Bible at all — but the comparison is still instructive: there's no covenant here the way there is in the Old Testament after Noah's flood, no promise that it won't happen again). There's a pervasive fear running throughout the poem that the whole world order might simply break down at any moment, that the gods might turn against humanity without warning — fields flooded, crops failing. The wrath of the gods is frightening enough on its own — but worse still is when they love you, fall in love with you; divine love proves equally destructive in this world, something human beings simply cannot bear. This becomes a recurring motif — Apollo and Daphne, Jove and Io, Jove and Semele — being singled out for divine favor looks, on the surface, like a blessing, but turns out, again and again, to be a curse instead. This is a world of arbitrary reversal, where you no longer know what you can depend on, no longer know what's actually good for you — you seek out divine favor, and it destroys you. The poem repeatedly invokes the image of being lost at sea — a powerful metaphor for the genuinely confusing world of empire, with all its old guideposts gone (Shakespeare later picks up this same sea imagery in Antony and Cleopatra; the Aeneid stands in relation to the Metamorphoses roughly the way Coriolanus stands in relation to Antony and Cleopatra).
Man Becoming God: The New Roman Context
Why all this renewed interest in divinity? It comes down to the new Roman political context. We've already seen how characteristic it was of the ancient world to entertain the possibility of a man becoming a god — a strange idea to us, but what actually matters is what the ancients themselves believed, and how that belief shaped their behavior. We've already talked about the Greeks trying, in various ways, to become gods. Now something genuinely new happens in Rome: Romans actually become gods, formally. Roman Emperors were literally deified. This begins with Julius Caesar — after his death, the Senate formally enrolled him among the Roman gods; you can still see the Temple of the Divine Julius standing in the Forum today. The same thing happened with Augustus — except that he was actually worshipped as a god throughout the empire during his own lifetime. You can see this on Roman coinage, where he's depicted with divine imagery; there were statues and temples to him scattered throughout the empire. This is exactly what the Jews and early Christians found so objectionable, and exactly why they seemed so subversive to Roman rulers in turn. Roman Emperors, in effect, got to live out the old Greek fantasy directly — to actually live as gods on earth. This sounds wonderful in principle, but it could be a genuinely unnerving experience in practice — some Emperors went mad under the strain, Caligula among them; it's honestly a bit surprising that any of the Emperors turned out to be decent rulers at all.
Ovid can relate so directly to Greek mythology precisely because the new Roman situation creates a real parallel to it. The chief characteristic of the world of the Metamorphoses is the fluidity of the boundary lines separating the divine, the human, and the bestial. That's the real mutability at work here, the real shape-changing — gods take on human or bestial form, humans become divine or bestial in turn, and so on. Remember how important binary oppositions were throughout Greek culture generally — we already saw them breaking down in Oedipus and in The Birds, generating enormous confusion and real threat wherever they did. In Ovid, the lines between these different categories simply begin to blur throughout. That's the real metamorphosis at the heart of the poem — and it takes on a new, very concrete meaning in the Roman world specifically. Man does become god, quite literally, in the person of the Roman Emperor — not yet fully developed as an institution in Ovid's own day, but he evidently saw exactly where things were heading. The way human beings are treated by the gods in Greek mythology becomes, in effect, the way Roman citizens are treated by the Emperor — this is really the underlying principle of the whole Metamorphoses. The Emperor holds total power in Rome, able to do essentially whatever he wants — Roman Emperors were perhaps the most powerful individual men who have ever lived (think of Nero's Golden House, or Hadrian's Villa). He can call down terrible punishment on anyone he chooses. But even worse, in a way, is being singled out for imperial favor: one day you're the Emperor's favorite, showered with rewards; but, like the gods, Emperors were notoriously fickle, and the very next day you could find yourself on the Emperor's own hit list — they turned on their favorites with real speed. Look at Ovid's own case: he enjoyed Augustus's patronage for years, and then was suddenly banished to the shores of the Black Sea. Ovid clearly found the sheer arbitrariness of the Greek gods a fitting image for what it actually felt like to live under the arbitrariness of the Roman Emperors. The theme of tyranny runs through the Metamorphoses from beginning to end. The Emperor works hard to look legitimate — but underneath it all, he's really just a tyrant. Augustus did everything he could to stress real continuity with the old Republican regime — he kept the Senate in place, had Virgil write the Aeneid, built monuments all over Rome to make himself look good. Ovid's implicit point: underneath the veneer, it's simply a new form of despotism.
Eros Replaces Thumos as Public Life Devalues
The mutability of this new world changes the very terms of human life. As the polis dissolves, political life itself becomes devalued. What we've seen throughout this course, up to now, is an enormous emphasis on public life within the ancient world — the heroes we've studied have consistently been public figures, great leaders, generals (with a few real exceptions, Socrates among them, though Plato has to work fairly hard to make Socrates into a hero, taking real care to show that he was also a good soldier). The polis places a real premium on political life, actively encouraging participation in the life of the community, insisting that public concerns take precedence over private ones — recall Creon's own argument in Antigone, that the city has to take precedence over private family concerns. This is part of why the polis places such emphasis on thumos — a powerful passion, one that can easily lead to tension with the community, since it's often too proud to accept ordinary limits, but it remains, at bottom, a fundamentally public passion: spiritedness that becomes public-spiritedness. Thumos lives for honor, and honor requires a public to actually confer it (this explains the whole tragedy of the thumotic hero: "the city — can't live with it, can't live without it"). Thumos attaches men firmly to public causes.
The Metamorphoses represents a massive switch of emphasis toward eros as its central subject instead — in a way, this is already foreshadowed in the Symposium, whose whole setting is a private party rather than a public occasion; for Plato, eros is closely connected to private life, which is part of why he links eros so closely to philosophy — the philosopher being the one genuinely private kind of hero we've encountered in this course, not attached to any particular city, able to see beyond it (a possibility already foreshadowed in Antigone). The philosopher doesn't really need the city at all; for Socrates, Athens becomes something he can take or leave. Thumos leads men to seek satisfaction out in public; eros is a source of fundamentally private satisfaction — you don't typically satisfy erotic desire out in the open, in public. What's really going on in the Metamorphoses reflects a real disgust with public life under the new imperial system. The old struggle for public honors is effectively dead; the aristocracy has been reduced in both power and prestige. Supreme honor now flows to a single man, the Emperor, leaving no real room for advancement for anyone else. The Republic had two consuls, changing every single year; now there's one man, ruling for life. To be sure, the old Republican offices technically survived into the Empire — a real effort to keep up appearances; Emperors had themselves formally elected consul, preserving the name while hollowing out the actual institution. There's a vast difference in the sheer rate of political turnover between Republic and Empire: over fifty years, you might see something like a hundred different consuls under the Republic, but under the Empire, perhaps only a single Emperor (to be fair, few Emperors actually ruled that long; many were assassinated after only a few years, sometimes only a few weeks — clearly some went too far). Still, this change takes something essential out of the old attraction of public life: there's not much realistic chance you'd ever become Emperor, and not much chance you'd last very long even if you did. Under the Republic, any patrician could reasonably hope to become consul eventually; under the Empire, not everyone could hope to become Emperor. This is part of why people increasingly turned to private satisfactions instead. The overall tendency in Ovid is that eros acquires a whole new importance precisely because of this changed political context — political life no longer offers real satisfaction, so men turn to eros instead, seeking happiness in the pleasures of private life: food, drink, and sex (exactly as in the Symposium). This is essentially what happened in Rome, and it's what we really mean by "Roman decadence."
We tend to carry two separate images of Rome in our heads — an austere, Spartan Rome, the discipline of an armed camp, soldiers able to march for miles without food or drink, wholly devoted to duty; and a decadent Rome, full of orgies, bread and circuses. These aren't actually contradictory images. The austere Rome is the Rome of the Republic; the decadent Rome is the Rome of the Empire (not an absolute contrast, but close enough — the late Republic was already becoming decadent, which is part of why it turned into an Empire in the first place; and the Empire did work hard to maintain discipline in its own right, surviving for four or five hundred years, with armies that remained the best in the world for a long time, and some genuinely decent Emperors along the way — Augustus himself, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius). But the overall contrast still holds up reasonably well: the Republic was austere, the Empire decadent — which is essentially what Ovid is suggesting throughout.
The New Importance of Bacchus
This gets reflected directly in the new importance Bacchus takes on within the poem — also called Liber, the Roman god of wine, closely associated with the Greek Dionysus, and closely linked to eros and to orgiastic ritual. He's a comparatively late god, not originally part of the core Olympian pantheon — he doesn't even appear in Homer. These were mystery cults imported from the East, and they spread through the classical world with remarkable speed and ease. The Roman Empire had become thoroughly interconnected — a good road network, extensive trade routes, Mediterranean shipping lanes — which meant ideas could travel fast and far. There's a strong sense throughout Ovid that Rome is being genuinely changed by an influx of new deities pouring in from the frontiers of the empire — the empire, in a real sense, striking back at its own center. Ovid portrays exactly this dynamic through the corruption of Thebes (in language that sounds a great deal like Virgil) — a strong, deliberate parallel to Rome itself. We hear the voice of old Rome, the Republican spirit that originally conquered the world for the empire, echoed directly in the Aeneid. In Ovid, the daughters of Minyas resist Bacchus in the name of domestic virtue, of chastity — a foreign god actively undermining traditional ways of life. Ovid isn't thinking of Christianity here, of course — and yet his whole vision proved remarkably prophetic: Rome would indeed eventually be conquered by a mystery religion out of the East. This is a good general example of how Rome simply couldn't remain the same as a direct result of its own conquests — encountering all these different religions inevitably undermined its own traditional religion in turn. Virgil had raised this same possibility, but hoped the Roman gods would ultimately triumph regardless — Apollo triumphing over Dionysus in the Aeneid, the god of restraint over the god of excess, the Western god over the Eastern one. Ovid suggests the opposite outcome instead — he's constantly answering Virgil, quietly correcting him throughout. There was, in fact, remarkable religious ferment in Rome during Ovid's own lifetime, with all sorts of new religions pouring into the city from every corner of the empire — a real vogue for Egyptian objects at one point, even a pyramid built in the middle of downtown Rome. It must have been a genuinely disorienting experience. Roman artists even began producing Egyptian-style artifacts for the local market, often doing a better job of it than actual Egyptian craftsmen — arguably the first real example of the globalization of culture. (Temples to Mithras, another eastern import, eventually turn up as far away as Roman London.)
Eros Without Peace
This new emphasis on eros doesn't mean thumos simply drops out of the picture. The Metamorphoses gives us a world of eros, but hardly a world of peace. Eros brings people together, certainly, but not necessarily in any real harmony. The erotic world of the Metamorphoses remains, throughout, a genuinely contentious one. Thumos essentially gets channeled into erotic life instead. Denied any real outlet in public life under the Empire — you're certainly not meant to compete with the Emperor himself for honors — erotic life itself becomes competitive instead. What Ovid shows us is a world thoroughly saturated with jealousy, envy, rivalry, erotic competition of every kind. This is another idea Ovid picks up directly from Homer: rivalry in the relations between gods and human beings. Humans are constantly imitating the gods, wanting to be like them, rivaling them outright. The gods, in turn, carry real mixed feelings about human beings — they love the humans who are most like themselves, but also genuinely fear their rivalry (exactly like Aphrodite and Helen in the Iliad). We see humans imitating gods directly in the story of Syrinx, and we see the gods growing jealous of humans in the story of Juno and Callisto.
Ovid gives this whole dynamic a particular new inflection, though: human-divine rivalry specifically in art. There are repeated stories of humans who try to actually surpass the gods in artistry. Arachne is the clearest example — a self-made woman, harking back to the old Greek sense of art itself as a form of competition, much like the dramatic contests in Athens. This leads directly to her conflict with Athena. Notice the different kinds of art the two of them actually create. Athena tells stories of humans who tried to become gods themselves — all of whom failed; genuine cautionary tales, with a real moderating effect: don't try to exceed your own human limits. Athena, the goddess, is teaching a lesson in piety here. Arachne's own tapestry reverses the whole direction of this — a downward motion instead, telling stories of gods who became humans, or beasts. This makes the gods look considerably less admirable, and actively undermines piety in the process. Notice, too, the real similarity between Arachne and Ovid himself — she tells many of the same stories Ovid himself tells, Jove and Europa among them; Ovid clearly identifies with Arachne here. Notably, Athena doesn't come across as superior in this contest. This points to two distinct kinds of stories running throughout the Metamorphoses: men trying to become gods, and gods becoming beasts — two opposite directions of movement. The Metamorphoses is, in one sense, a genuinely pious work, cautioning human beings against trying to exceed their own proper limits. In another sense, it's a work of real impiety — there's nothing especially admirable about these gods; they hardly set a good example for us, or at least not a morally good one. They teach human beings instead to lead a life of pure eros, to indulge in pleasure, since you never know what tomorrow will bring — so take your pleasure today, the old carpe diem motif. These two kinds of tales suit the imperial setting perfectly: men shouldn't try to become gods themselves — don't try to challenge the Emperor; the Emperor is now effectively a god, and you don't cross him. The only real option left is to live a life of eros instead. And gods becoming beasts amounts to a kind of descent into a life of pure bodily indulgence. You could put it this way: if men other than the Emperor no longer have any real option of becoming gods themselves, they'll descend into something like beasts instead — if they can't satisfy their public ambition for honor, they'll turn to sexual pleasure in its place.
The Muses and the Pierides: Poetry as Struggle
This rivalry between gods and human beings is really Ovid's central image for the whole new imperial world, and it's basic to the entire book. A very similar rivalry plays out between the Pierides and the Muses. The Pierides directly challenge the Muses to a contest; the Pierides go on to praise impiety in their song, while the Muses instead celebrate divine order in theirs. These represent two fundamentally different kinds of poetry — patriotic and subversive, poetry that celebrates the existing order and poetry that calls it into question. This is really the underlying contrast between Virgil and Ovid (though even Virgil carries some genuinely subversive elements of his own). There's a strong sense throughout Ovid of poetry itself as a real struggle — a struggle between impiety and piety, between unorthodox opinion and orthodox opinion. More fundamentally still, there's a real sense throughout the poem of speech itself as a site of struggle. There's a great deal of silencing that goes on throughout the Metamorphoses. In many of its myths, characters actually lose the ability to speak altogether — Io, for instance, once transformed, makes a desperate attempt to find some other way of conveying her message; the same happens to Callisto. This idea genuinely energizes Ovid's imagination throughout — he clearly cares about it deeply. There's a particularly powerful image of a tongue being physically destroyed at one point — the struggle here is now happening directly in words, and it's specifically applied to poets. Compare this to Phemius in the Odyssey, the court poet who isn't even considered important enough to be killed. Ovid's deepest criticism of Imperial Rome may be exactly this: poets being actively silenced, forced either to produce the official version of events, the way Virgil does, or else to remain silent altogether. Consider Ovid's own retelling of the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela — he places far more emphasis on the physical ripping-out of Philomela's tongue than on the rape itself; it's a genuinely horrifying scene, with a single line given to the rape and eight full lines given to the tearing out of the tongue. Her response is to find some entirely different way of communicating instead — she learns an alternative means of telling her story, using something like myth itself to convey the truth about barbaric tyranny. This is a real clue to what Ovid himself is doing throughout the poem, and it's exactly why the Metamorphoses counts as such a deeply subversive work. Elsewhere, a raven is banished specifically for speaking an unwelcome truth — a genuinely powerful image for Ovid's own situation. The hidden theme of the Metamorphoses — and you can see exactly why it has to remain hidden — is the struggle to speak the truth within a world of imperial tyranny, and the search for indirect ways of actually managing to do so.
Further Threads Worth Developing
A few additional threads are worth pursuing further, beyond what we've covered today: the poem's genuinely postmodern qualities, avant la lettre — its skepticism about fixed meaning, its delight in constant transformation for its own sake; the sheer imaginative riches unlocked by empire itself, the vast new range of material and setting Rome's expansion made available to a poet like Ovid; the burden of the past, and how Ovid negotiates his own belatedness within an already crowded literary tradition, not unlike Virgil's own anxiety about Homer; Ovid's own peculiar gift for fabulation, his restless, almost compulsive inventiveness; and, more playfully, a comparison between Ovid's own narrative technique — its fast cuts, its constant shifts of scene and voice, its appetite for the vivid, condensed image — and something like the quick-cut, fragmentary style of MTV-era visual storytelling.