Metamorphoses

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This article is about the poem. For other uses, see Metamorphoses (disambiguation).

Cover of George Sandys's 1632 edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished

The Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid is a narrative poem in fifteen books that describes the creation and history of the world. Completed in 8 AD, it has remained one of the most popular works of mythology, being the Classical work best known to medieval writers and thus having a great deal of influence on medieval poetry.

1 Content
2 Main episodes
3 Inspirations and adaptations
4 Manuscript tradition
5 Notes
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Content

Ovid works his way through his subject matter, often in an apparently arbitrary fashion, by jumping from one transformation tale to another, sometimes retelling what had come to be seen as central events in the world of Greek myth and sometimes straying in odd directions. The poem is often called a mock-epic. It is written in dactylic hexameter, the form of the great heroic and nationalistic epic poems; both those of the ancient tradition (the Iliad and Odyssey) and of Ovid's own day (the Aeneid). It begins with the ritual "invocation of the muse", and makes use of traditional epithets and circumlocutions. But instead of following and extolling the deeds of a human hero, it leaps from story to story with little connection.

Titian's Danaë, one of innumerable paintings inspired by the Metamorphoses.

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, an iconic sculpture based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. Daphne (I.452-567) is a dryad who is transformed into a laurel tree to protect her from rape by Apollo.

The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is that of love — be that personal love or love personified in the figure of Amor (Cupid). Indeed, the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated, and made ridiculous by Amor, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon who is the closest thing this mock-epic has to a hero. Apollo comes in for particular ridicule as Ovid shows how irrational love can confound the god of pure reason. While few individual stories are outright sacrilegious^[who?], the work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.

Apollo and Daphne by Antonio Pollaiuolo, one tale of transformation in the Metamorphoses—he lusts after her and she escapes him by turning into a bay laurel.

[edit] Main episodes

Book I: Cosmogony, Ages of Man, Gigantes, Daphne, Io;
Book II: Phaëton, Callisto, Jupiter and Europa;
Book III: Cadmus, Actaeon, Echo et Pentheus;
Book IV: Pyramus and Thisbe, Perseus and Andromeda.
Book V: Phineas, the Rape of Proserpina;
Book VI: Arachne, Niobe, Philomela and Procne;
Book VII: Medea, Cephalus and Procris;
Book VIII: Nisos and Scylla, Daedalus and Icarus, Baucis and Philemon;
Book IX: Heracles, Byblis;
Book X: Eurydice, Hyacinth, Pygmalion, Adonis, Atalanta, Cyparissus;
Book XI: Orpheus, Midas, Alcyone and Ceyx;
Book XII: Iphigeneia, Centaurs, Achilles;
Book XIII: the Sack of Troy, Aeneas;
Book XIV: Scylla, Aeneas, Romulus;
Book XV: Pythagoras, Hippolytus, Aesculapius, Caesar.

[edit] Inspirations and adaptations

The story of Coronis and Phoebus Apollo was adapted by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, where it forms the basis for the Manciple's tale.

The Metamorphoses was a considerable influence on English playwright William Shakespeare; however, claims that the 1567 Arthur Golding translation of the Metamorphoses greatly influenced Shakespeare are flimsily evidenced. Shakespeare incorporates several details from the Metamorphoses into his work that weren't in Golding's translation, so it can be safely assumed that Shakespeare did read the Latin Metamorphoses himself, as opposed to completely relying on Golding's translation^{[citation needed]}. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is a clear adaptation of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (Metamorphoses Book 4), and, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a band of amateur actors performs a play about Pyramus and Thisbe. In Titus Andronicus the story of Lavinia's rape is drawn from Tereus' rape of Philomela, and the text of Metamorphoses is used within the play to enable Titus to interpret his daughter's story.

In 1613, Spanish poet Luis de Góngora wrote an illustrious poem titled La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea that retells the story of Polyphemus, Galatea and Acis found in Book XIII of the Metamorphoses.
In 1625, sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini finished his piece entitled Apollo and Daphne, taken from the episode in Book 1 in which Apollo, pierced by a love-inducing arrow from Cupid, pursues the fleeing nymph Daphne. This episode furthermore has been treated repeatedly in opera, notably by Jacopo Peri (Dafne) in 1597 and Richard Strauss (Daphne, with a libretto that deviates significantly from Ovid's account) in 1938.
In 1783, Austrian composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf wrote twelve symphonies on selected stories of the Metamorphoses; only six survive, corresponding to stories from the first six books.^[1]
In 1951, British composer Benjamin Britten wrote a piece for solo Oboe incorporating six of Ovid's mythical characters.
In 2002, Author Mary Zimmerman adapted some of Ovid's myths into a play by the same title, and the open-air-theatre group London Bubble also adapted it in 2006.
Naomi Iizuka's Polaroid Stories also bases its format on Metamorphoses, setting the classic play in a modern time with drug-addicted, teenage versions of many of the characters from the original play.

[edit] Manuscript tradition

Collaborative editorial effort has been investigating the various manuscripts of Metamorphoses, some forty-five complete texts or substantial fragments,^[2] since the High Middle Ages; though early emendations made by readers based on comparisons of this popular text has resulted in contamination, so that there are no isolated manuscript traditions, the result of several centuries of critical reading is that the poet's meaning is firmly established on the basis of the manuscript tradition or restored by conjecture where the tradition is deficient. The modern critical editions are two: W. S. Anderson's, first published in 1977 in the Teubner series, and R. J. Tarrant's, published in 2004 by the Oxford Clarendon Press.