A New Epic?

HUM 2051: Civilization IFall 2009

Dr. PerdigaoOctober 26, 2009

Contexts• Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE), unlike Virgil, did not live through civil

war—themes instead “sophisticated and somewhat racy life of the urban elite in Rome, love in its manifold social and psychological guises, Greco-Roman myth and local Italian legend” (1023)

• Heroides “purported to have been written by heroines of legend, such as Helen” (1024)

• Power of art, Psychopathology of love

• Art of Love as handbook of seduction; Remedies of Love on how to end an affair: – “First of all, be quite sure that there isn’t a woman who cannot be won,

and make up your mind that you will win her. Only you must prepare the ground. . . Women are things of many moods. You must adapt your treatment to the special case” (qtd. in Perry 152).

Ovid-esque

Really!

– http://www.amazon.com/reader/0312360118?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib%5Fdp%5Fpt#reader_0312360118

– http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/ilovetowatch/2007/09/a-mystery-to-me.html

Scandal!• 8 CE banished by imperial decree to Tomi (now Romania),

asking for pardon but never granted

• No reason known for banishment—rumors of scandal involving Augustus’ daughter Julia but more likely perhaps is that his love poetry contradicted Augustus’ reemphasis on morality, read poem “as political critique, a mode or resistance to the authoritarian imposition of moral reform” (1024)

• Metamorphoses with similar agenda, unfinished at time of exile (1024)

Structure and Design of Metamorphoses• Dactylic hexameter—only one he wrote it in

• Rather than single hero, unified, here is a “critical response to Virgil” (1024)

• epyllion (“miniature epic”) in fifteen books with no narrative unity, no single hero

• All involve changes of shape (1024)

• Fluidity

• Transformation

Frames• “Virgil also told of a transformation, the new (Roman) order

arising from the ruins of the old (Troy). But once the transformation was completed by the Augustan order, there was to be stability, permanence. Ovid tells of a world ceaselessly coming to be in a process that never ends. To Virgil’s story of national origins he opposes creation itself, which sets the pattern of instability, the fleetingness of form, and constant transformation. Ambivalence and ambiguity there may be in the Aeneid—but within a set of Roman values summed up in Aeneas himself. Ovid’s epic without a hero presents shifting perspectives and offers the reader no single point of view or end point from which to judge his very complex narratives. Virgil responded to the chaos of civil war with a vision of political stability; Ovid responds in turn to the new order. To the forced imposition of political and moral unity he opposes fluidity itself.” (1025)

Re-creation• Rape at the “heart of Rome’s foundation legend” (1025)

• Gender and sexuality—more postmodernist sense of social constructionism

• Book I: New creation story (like Book VI of the Aeneid?)

• Invocation of the muse

• Chaos

• “god (whichever one it was)” (1028)

• Apollo and Daphne• Peneus (father)• Gold/lead arrows• “Although Peneus yielded to you, Daphne . . .” (speaking to

the characters now)• Her call for transformation (1032)• Laurel as symbol, “my own tree”

• Jove and Io• Inachus (father)• Stories of daughters• Juno’s intervention—cloaked in night• Metamorphosed into a “gleaming heifer” (1034)• Argus—as watchman• No voice: “letters of the words she could not speak / told the

sad story of her transformation” (1035)• Mercury’s intervention; death of Argus—peacock as symbol

• Book X—Pygmalion• creation• Orpheus• “I sing of dire events” (1054)• Paphos• Cinyras• Myrrha• “forbidden desires”• Falls in love with her creator• Myrtle tree• Adonis

• Venus and Adonis• Cupid’s arrow• Atalanta and Hippomenes• Fates preventing marriage• “I forced her / to get it and add on its weight to the burden

she carried” (1063)• “My grief for Adonis will be remembered / forever, and every

year will see, reenacted in ritual form, his death and my lamentation” (1064)

http://www.backtotheeighties.net/images/mannequin-poster1.jpg

Pygmalion?

http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/M/Erika.D.Mitchell-Deluca-1/daphne1-0836.jpg

http://www.uvm.edu/~classics/slides/a43.jpeg

http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/M/Erika.D.Mitchell-Deluca-1/daphne1-0836.jpg

http://www.uvm.edu/~classics/slides/a43.jpeg

•Jove and Io •Apollo and Daphne

• Jove and Europa

• http://www.uvm.edu/~classics/slides/a33.jpeg

• Venus and Adonis

• http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~pasupathi/309k04/texts.html