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Delahoyde & Hughes
Orpheus
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Ovid's Metamorphoses is a treasury of classical myths, a
seriocomic reference book almost. Ovid is also interested in the
feelings, idiosyncrasies, sometimes even pathologies, of people in love.
Ovid abandoned his usual couplet, adopting the six-foot dactyllic line of
the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. Thus he
self-consciously places the work in this epic tradition, but notice as
you read through how the narrative serves to fill in the gaps left by
these great earlier works and skims through the events related in them,
or renders them from a quirky perspective (e.g., we get a drunken brawl
of centaurs in a tavern right where the Trojan War should appear).
Attempts are made towards "Ovid Moralisee" later -- that is, forcing a
moral onto each of the seemingly very amoral tales. This can be taken as
evidence of the problems readers had with the work from the start. (The
famous Elizabethan translation into English, credited to the otherwise
moralistic and puritanical Arthur Golding, probably was done by his
nephew, Edward de Vere, the foremost proposed candidate as the man who
wrote the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's works are saturated with
allusions to Metamorphoses.)
"Metamorphoses" are changes of form; note the root word "morph." The
first questions about Metamorphoses may be predictable: why is
change such a compelling theme? What kind of changes are there? How do
you perceive change?
The so-called "problem of change" is an age-old Philosophy 101, Chapter
1, textbook issue indeed the key early philosophical issue among the
Greeks who invented philosophy. The first among them, the rather
eastern-sounding Heraclitus "the Obscure" (540-470 bce) said, "We step
and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not" (Fragment #81).
Ovid inherits this concern, but treats change as a universal principle,
offering endless variety. Still, this is a theme, not a message, like a
paper with a topic but no thesis. So we still need to understand Ovid's
purpose.
As you read, look for: