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Delahoyde & Hughes
Orpheus
OVID:
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Reading through story after story of people's miserable lives and
miserable transformations as the only escape from misery and
victimization by gods in what certainly seems like a completely amoral
world, one has to wonder what the point of Ovid's Metamorphoses
is.
The environmental theme has been easy enough to see perhaps. Earth was
given a voice and considered our "mother"; hunters typically fared badly;
and Erysichthon's story came closest to revealing Ovid's apparent
attitude about respect for Nature.
But the wide side-step to Pythagoras in the final book ought to be the
key. The Romans go back to killing animals in the remainder of Book 15,
but the long section on Pythagoras serves as Ovid's commentary on the
natural world: Metamorphoses tells us that it is filled with
souls. It's not necessarily that we need to subscribe wholeheartedly to
Pythagoras' philosophy and way of life, although it's a good idea for a
myriad of reasons -- it's not that we should respect a tree or a bird
because it might be the reincarnation of Aunt Millie; rather, we should
respect that tree or bird because it too has a life story.
Some extreme English teachers claim that we are our stories, that
all we have is our stories. This sounds a bit batty, and a literal
reception of Metamorphoses, even in this respect, is suffocatingly
anthropocentric. But understood on these human terms, and granted some
tolerance for the dramatic nature of them, the stories of
Metamorphoses are the stories behind various flora and fauna --
the things on earth that do indeed have life and with which perhaps we
can occasionally empathize.
So, "the problem of change"? No, the joy of change! And the joy of being
able to connect with life.