Review: The Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses by Ovid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 15 books and more than 200 stories, with transformation as his unifying theme, Ovid chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the time of Julius Caesar. I have read some of these before, in Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses by Ted Hughes.

I read the Horace Gregory translation. From the translator's introduction:

It can be said that The Metamorphoses, written at the beginning of the Christian era, was the last long-sustained major work of a great age in Latin poetry -- and it was also evidence of a peculiarly Italian genius which places it at a middle distance away from the Aeneid, since it was not a true and heroic epic, toward the novellas of Bandello and the lyricism of Petrarch. In English literature, The Metamorphoses held sustained appeal for Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman (whose famous version of Homer shows debts to Ovid), Dryden, Swift...

The nineteenth century, even among its poets, lost contact with The Metamorphoses, or rather, The Metamorphoses showed aspects of mythology as well as of human conduct that the age did not care to advertise. An extremely un-Italian Victorian Olympus came into view... the Metamorphoses was read as the work of a capricious poet, one who was irreverent, decidedly un-Olympian, and at times immoral. He was no longer the poet's poet, but belonged to readers who were looking for a collection of naughty stories. As studies in classical literature declined, it had become easier to discard Ovid in favor of Horace and Virgil; had lost the prestige he had held for so many hundreds of years.

The translator goes on to say that Ovid was newly appreciated in the 20th century due to interest frm anthropologists and psychologists.

It is in the play of emotional extremes, the forces of illogical & conflicting impulses that Ovid offers the richness of psychological detail to the reader. His many heroines are set before us in dramatic moments of their indecision. Actually they do not meditate; they waver between extremes of right and wrong. They live & act within a world of irrational desires which are as vivid to them as things that happen in a dream. they are in heat and caught up in disaster. One might complain that their motives, however complex and contradictory, are not subtle. ...We are asked not to forgive them but to see them. It is by their dreams (desires) and their actions -- that we know them.

My favorite stories were probably:
Arachne (Bk VI) -- The woman who challenged Athena to a weaving contest.
They took delight in speed and craftsmanship
And there upon the looms Tyrian purple
Shaded to lavender and violet-rose
As though one saw the sun strike passing rain
Its arrow like a ribbon across the sky,
A thousand colors streaming light within it,
Each melting into each where no eye sees
One fade into the other, yet both far ends
Colors of distant hue -- gold thread to bind them,
To weave the story of long years ago.

Orpheus & Eurydice (Bk X-XI) -- This is probably the most famous story in Ovid, but still worth reading even if you already know how it goes. 

O king and queen of this vast darkness where
All who are born of Earth at last return,
I cannot speak half-flattery, half-lies;
I have not come, a curious, willing guest,
To see the streets of Tartarus wind in Hell.
Nor have I come to tame Medusas children,
Three-throated beasts with wild snakes in their hair.
My mission is to find Eurydice... 

Ceyx & Alcyone (Bk XI) -- They were king and queen of the city of Trachis. Ceyx undertook a sea voyage to visit an oracle and was shipwrecked. The goddess Juno arranged for an apparition of Ceyx to appear to Alcyone and tell her of his fate, and the gods turned both of them into kingfishers.

There are some wonderful descriptive passages in this one; here is the description of a shipwreck:
 ... Like a siege engines ram in iron against a fort,
So the waves struck port and starboard of the ship,
Or as great lions charge at hunters shields,
So waves that rode the winds crashed the ship's sides,
And mounted at their will. Then decks began
To crack, pitch, wax, and ropes gave way, boards broken,
Sides gaping, while Death's sea poured in the hold.
Rain fell in curtains from black clouds; you'd think
The very heavens had joined the sea, or that
The sails hung like pale sheets of sea and rain;
The starless night above them closed in darkness,
And from that dark came ragged lightning flashing
Red fires that danced across the waves; then sea
Poured, rippling over each foot of deck and hull.

I had not heard of this one before reading The Metamorphoses, but it was a great discovery.

View all my reviews

Metamorphoses Books X-XII

Two great tales in these chapters: Orpheus & Eurydice and the less famous Ceyx & Alcyone.

Book X

Orpheus & Eurydice 

Edward Poynter, Orpheus and Eurydice. 1862.

This story starts with the Hymen, god of marriage, arriving at the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice. Already there is a bad sign:
Though Hymen came to help him at the feast
And waved his torch, its fires guttered out 
In coiling smoke that filled the eyes with tears.

The morning after the wedding, Eurydice trips on a deadly snake and is bitten. Orpheus sings of his loss so that everyone on earth can hear, and goes to the underworld through the gates of Taenarus. (Taenarus was a real town in the southeastern part of the Peloponnese; a nearby cave was the legendary entrance to the underworld.) Charon, the boatman who transports the souls of the dead, takes him across the Styx, the river that separates Earth from the underworld, and sings before Hades and Persephone.

However much I took her loss serenely,  
A god called Love had greater strength than I; 
I do not know how well he's known down here, 
but up on Earth his name's on every tongue,
And if I'm to believe an ancient rumor, 
A dark king took a princess to his bed,
A child more beautiful than any queen;
They had been joined by Love.

That is a much more romanticized description than the way it came across in Book V. I can see how Orpheus would want to stay on Hades’s good side, though. 😏

... Since these pathetic words were sung to music,
Even the blood drained ghosts of hell fell weeping:
Tantalus no longer reached toward vanished waves 
And Ixion's wheel  stopped short, charmed by the spell; 
Vultures gave up their feast on Tityus's liver
And cocked their heads to stare; fifty Belides 
Stood gazing while their half-filled pitchers emptied,
And Sisyphus sat down upon his stone. 

Ixion was king of the Lapiths, the most ancient tribe of Thessaly. He murdered his father in law and was shunned as an outlaw. When Zeus had pity on him and brought him to Olympus, but while there he lusted after Hera, so he was expelled from Olympus.  Zeus ordered Hermes to bind Ixion to a fiery wheel, in some stories a solar wheel in the sky, but in Ovid transferred to the underworld.

Tityus: According to Wikipedia: "Tityos was the son of Elara; his father was Zeus. Zeus hid Elara from his wife, Hera, by placing her deep beneath the earth. Tityos grew so large that he split his mother's womb, and he was carried to term by Gaia, the Earth. Once grown, Tityos attempted to rape Leto at the behest of Hera. He was slain by Leto's protective children Artemis and Apollo. As punishment, he was stretched out in Tartarus and tortured by two vultures who fed on his liver, which grew back every night. This punishment is comparable to that of the Titan Prometheus."

The fifty Belides are also known as the Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaus. According to Wikipedia: "Ovid refers to them as the Belides after their grandfather Belus. They were to marry the 50 sons of Danaus' twin brother Aegyptus, a mythical king of Egypt. In the most common version of the myth, all but one of them killed their husbands on their wedding night, and are condemned to spend eternity carrying water in a sieve or perforated device. In the classical tradition, they came to represent the futility of a repetitive task that can never be completed (see also Sisyphus)."

Eurydice is allowed to return from the underworld as long as Orpheus does not look at her until they are back in the upper world. He cannot resist the temptation to look at her, and she fades away into the underworld. He tries to cross the Styx again but cannot. He sits in rags and mud for a week, not eating or drinking. Then he goes to Thrace, where he will not sleep with women but teaches the men of Thrace the art of making love to boys. One day he tells a series of stories: the tales that make up the rest of Book X.

Book XI

The Death of Orpheus 

Orpheus is attacked by a crowd of raging women. I think these are meant to be the followers of Bacchus (the Bacchae, aka Bacchante or Maenads) who appeared in the story of Pentheus (Book III). They are attacking him because he has rejected the company of women: "Look at the pretty boy who will not have us!" 

The saddened birds sobbed loud for Orpheus;
All wept: the multitude of beasts, 
Stones, and trees, all those who came to hear 
The songs he sang, yes, even the charmed trees
Dropped all their leaves as if they shaved their hair. 

Orpheus's head lands in the River Hebrus, along with his lyre. His head continues to sing and the lyre continues to play until both are washed up on the island of Lesbos.

The poet's shade stepped down from earth to Hades;
To stroll again the places that it knew,
It felt its way toward fair Elysium.  
There Orpheus took his Eurydice, put arms around her 
Folding her to rest. Today they walk together,
side by side-- or if they so wish, he follows her, she, him, 
But as they move, however they may go, 
Orpheus may not turn a backward look at her.

Hadestown, a musical based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, won a Tony Award for Best Musical this year. I listened to the recording, and I recommend it if you can find it. (I checked it out from the library.)

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice inspired a Middle English version which I read last year (in translation.)

Ceyx & Alcyone

Ceyx is the son of Lucifer (the morning star) and a friend of Peleus (the father of Achilles). He plans a voyage to Delphi. It is a dangerous journey, and his wife Alcyone pleads with him not to go, or to take her with him. His ship is destroyed in a storm.

Like a siege engines ram in iron against a fort, 
So the waves struck port and starboard of the ship,  
Or as great lions charge at hunters shields, 
So waves that rode the winds crashed the ship's sides,
And mounted at their will. Then decks began
To crack, pitch, wax, and ropes gave way, boards broken,
Sides gaping, while Death's sea poured in the hold.

Rain fell in curtains from black clouds; you'd think 

The very heavens had joined the sea, or that

The sails hung like pale sheets of sea and rain;

The starless night above them closed in darkness,

And from that dark came ragged lightning flashing

Red fires that danced across the waves; then sea 

Poured, rippling over each foot of deck and hull. 

Juno intervenes to help Alcyone and speaks to the god of Sleep for help. Sleep sends Ceyx's apparition to Alcyone in a dream. In the morning, Alcyone decides to take a walk on the beach, where she sees a man floating on the waves and recognizes him as her husband. She runs into the waves and turns into a bird. Then the gods turn both of them into birds. According to Wikipedia, the birds were kingfishers, called halcyon birds after Alcyone (Halcyon being another version of her name).     

Herbert James Draper, Halcyone. 1915.

She stripped herself, then ran upon a breaker

That caught the waves, and leapt as if broad wings

Took her to sea; even her cries were birdlike;

And as she neared the floating man beneath her,

She thrust her growing beak between his lips. 
The story is: he raised his face to hers, 

And I half think Ceyx did--if he had life.

The gods changed both to birds, and both were one, 
Though love had given them a strange mutation. 

I had never heard of this tale before, but I'm guessing that Alcyone was an inspiration for Tolkien's Elwing.

This is definitely one of the highlights for me, maybe because of the vivid descriptions. 

Book XII

the death of Achilles

Book XII includes several stories from the Trojan War and ends with the death of Achilles. The sea god Neptune, whose son Cygnus was killed by Achilles, speaks to his nephew Apollo:

O darling nephew of my heart, 

Best of my nephews and my brother's sons,

Who joined me as we built the walls of Troy, 

(A labor that is now too soon undone)

What of Troy fallen with many thousand dead?

Neptune goes on to say that it is beyond his power to face Achilles and asks Apollo to arrange Achilles's death. Apollo agrees and guides one of Paris's arrows to shoot Achilles. Ovid calls it  a dishonorable death, as Achilles had fallen prey to one whose best performance, timid at the best, was stealing wives of Greeks! 

Book XII concludes by introducing the dispute between Ajax and Ulysses (Odysseus) over Achilles's armor.
Agamemnon called all the Greek leaders together to decide between them. 

His splendor lives; it fills the rounded world,

And that is how the man should be remembered; 

The splendor is himself, son of Peleus, 
And Tartarus is not the place for him. 

His shield still goes to war against the world, 

And in his name all weapons go to war. 

my previous recaps for Metamorphoses:
Books I-III

Books IV-VI

Books VII-IX

Metamorphoses Book VII-IX

Book VII

Jason & Medea

Jason & Medea - John William Waterhouse, 1907

Jason and his Argonauts meet King Aeëtes to claim the Golden Fleece, which Ovid says he had stolen. Aeëtes will not give it up unless Jason meets his terms, performing great tasks for him. The king's daughter, Medea, falls in love with Jason. She decides to help him fulfill the tasks that Aeëtes has demanded in exchange for the Golden Fleece, if he will marry her, and Jason agrees. First, he tames dangerous bulls with herbs given to him by Medea, and the bulls draw a plow for him. Second, he sows serpent's teeth in the newly plowed land, and the teeth become mighty warriors. Medea sees Jason facing the warriors and works magic to give him good luck, and Jason throws a rock into the center of the assembled army, so that the warriors turn on each other, leaving Jason alone. Third, Jason must face the dragon who guards the Golden Fleece. Jason puts the dragon to sleep with juices from herbs, and sails home with his bride Medea and his crew. At home, he finds his father growing old and close to death, and asks Medea to use her arts to prolong his father's life. On the night of the the full moon, Medea goes into the forest to pray to Hecate.

O Hecate, who answered my last prayer 

To still the smoking breath of fiery bulls,

And tamed the beasts who never ploughed a field,

And spurred wild warriors of the serpent's teeth

To fall in their own blood, who charmed the Sleepless

Guardian of the Golden Treasures when Jason took

That famous shield to Greece, now, I need more,

A magic, potent drink that dissipates

Old age and fills old veins with manly blood --

Nor shall you fail me; even the distant stars

Have bowed their shining heads at my command, 

And here's my chariot with its winged dragons.

For nine days and nights Medea collects magic herbs, including mosses that will later change Glaucus the fisherman into a sea god. Foreshadowing! I can tell from the table of contents that this refers to a story in Book XIV. Medea makes two altars out of mounds of earth, one for Hecate and one for Youth. She sacrifices a black sheep to Hades and Dis (Persephone) to extend the life of Jason's dying father, Aeson. She purifies his body with fire, water, and sulfur, three times each. She boils herbs, precious stones, animal parts and other nameless things together in a pot. Then she cuts the old man's throat to pour the brew into him, and he is restored to youth.

She pretends to quarrel with Jason and offers her services to another king, Pelias. She tricks him by sacrificing an old, sick sheep as part of the ritual, and using herbs that have no power. The daughters of Pelias, who were supposed to assist her, close their eyes when they are supposed to cut their father's throat, and strike blindly at him instead. Medea slits the old man's throat and throws his remains into the boiling pot. She flees, finding Jason in Corinth, where he has remarried. She kills his new wife, sets fire to his halls and kills their children. Before Jason can take revenge on her, Medea escapes and is welcomed by King Aegeus of Athens. She marries him. Theseus, the son of Aegeus, arrives in disguise. She attempts to poison him, but his father dashes the cup from his son's lips. Medea vanishes in a cloud. 

The Myrmidons

I could not find a good picture for this tale (maybe I will add one later) but I included it because it tells of the ancestors of Achilles. Ovid relates how Jove fell in love with a nymph and named the island of Aegina after her. In revenge, Juno sends a plague to the island, killing many people, and King Aeacus of Aegina prays to Jove to ask him to repopulate Aegina. Jove answers by sending thunder and lightning, which Aeacus takes as a sign from the gods. He sees a colony of ants on the trunk of a great oak tree and asks for as many people to fill his cities as there are ants. That night, Aeacus has a dream in which the oak tree shudders and the ants turn into humans, who settle in the deserted parts of the island. He calls them Myrmidons, and says that they are hardworking, thrifty, and honest, just like the creatures they were before.

Book VIII

Erysichthon
This is probably my favorite story in Book VIII. I had expected to like Dedalus and Icarus more because I was previously familiar with it. But no, the highlight has to be this one: Erysichthon,  king of Thessaly, chops down the sacred oak tree of the goddess Ceres in order to build himself a feast hall. The angry goddess curses him with insatiable hunger, which drives him to exhaust all his wealth to satisfy his hunger, up to and including selling his daughter for food.

But when her father learned she had the gift
Of being anything she wished to be
He set her up for sale to many a man
And sold her as a mare, a cow, a bird,

 Over at the GoodReads group I am reading along with, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Further Metamorphoses, commenter Desirae has posted an analysis of how hunger is a driving force in the other stories in book 8, which provides a common thread throughout the stories that I had not noticed.

I am reminded of the legend of Midas and the golden touch, which also appears in Metamorphoses, but it must be later on because I haven't read it yet. I shouldn't get too far ahead of myself.

Book IX: 

Achelous & Hercules

Achelous, a god of rivers, tells Theseus the story of how he lost his horn in a fight with Hercules. He and Hercules both had asked the father of Deianera for the girl's hand in marriage. Achelous attempted to persuade the father that he was a better choice, provoking Hercules to challenge him to a fight: My hands make better speeches than my tongue. Go try to win a battle with your talk!

Achelous turned himself into a serpent, but Hercules nearly strangled him, so he turned into a bull. Heracles tore off one of his horns and forced the god to surrender. The Naiads fund it and filled it with fruits and flowers, and it became a sacred cornucopia for a goddess.

I wasn't a big fan of book IX, but Orpheus & Eurydice is the next story! Looking forward to it.

Previous posts:
Metamorphoses, Books I-III

Metamorphoses, Books IV-VI

Metamorphoses, Books IV-VI

Two tales from Book IV, one from Book V and two from Book VI, this time.

Book IV:

Pyramus & Thisbe

Everyone welcomes Bacchus except for the daughters of the king Minyas, who stay indoors weaving, spinning and telling stories. One of them decides to recount a story of the mulberry tree:

... how a tree, famous for snow-white berries, took on a blood-red taint.

Wikipedia

Pyramus and Thisbe were young lovers in a city that was said to have built by Queen Semiramis, the legendary queen of Babylon. They lived next door to each other but they were not allowed to meet due to a rivalry between their families. They could only converse through a crack in the walls. The two of them plan to meet by the site of Ninus's tomb, beneath a mulberry tree. When Thisbe shows up, a lioness, with bloody jaws from devouring her prey, appears, and Thisbe flees into a cave. She leaves her cloak behind and the lioness picks it up in her jaws, staining it with blood. Pyramus arrives, finds the bloodstained cloak, and thrusts his dagger into his side. His blood stains the white fruits of the mulberry tree, turning them red. Thisbe returns to find Pyramus dying, and resolves to kill herself, praying that the two of them will share the same tomb and that the red berries of the tree will be the memorial of their deaths. Her prayer is granted and, when their bodies are cremated, their ashes are kept in a single urn.

It was hard to take this one completely seriously because I kept thinking of the jokes about it in A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, it is also thought to have been an inspiration for the earliest (Italian) versions of the story of Romeo and Juliet, which inspired the English poet Arthur Brooke in his poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," which was the main source for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Andromeda as depicted in Urania's Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c. 1825 (Wikipedia)

Perseus & Andromeda

Perseus, the son of Danae and Jove, flies above the world holding the head of the Gorgon Medusa, whose hair was made of deadly snakes, as a trophy of his victory over her. As Perseus flies over the Libyan desert, the Gorgons blood streams down to earth and generates snakes, "and that is why the desert swarmed with serpents." He goes to Hesperides, where Atlas lives, and asks for Atlas's hospitality. Atlas refuses him because of a rumor that a son of Jove will steal his golden apples. Perseus wrestles with Atlas but soon realizes that he is outmatched, so he uses the head of Medusa to turn Atlas into a mountain.

Perseus discovers the maiden Andromeda, who has been chained to a rock to punish her mother's vanity. Andromeda's mother boasted of her daughter's beauty, and so Andromeda was chained up as a sacrifice to a sea monster (a dragon, in fact). The dragon comes after her but Perseus intervenes to defeat it, rescuing Andromeda after asking Andromeda's parents for her hand in marriage as a reward. (Her parents, Cepheus & Cassiope (also known as Cassiopeia) rule the kingdom of Aethiopia (Ethiopia). At the wedding celebration, Perseus tells the story of his defeat of Medusa.  He used the single eye shared by the Graeae, holding it in his hand for sight. He cut her head off and the winged horse Pegasus sprang up from her blood, along with the boy Chrysador. 

One of the wedding guests asks why Medusa had snakes for hair. Perseus says that she was beautiful once, with glorious hair. When Neptune raped her in Minerva's temple, Minerva punished her for her carelessness (!) by turning her hair into snakes.

As if to warn the girl of carelessness
She turned her hair to snakes. Today Minerva
To keep bold strangers at a proper distance
Wears snakes across the gold shield on her breast.

Book V

ancient statue of Persephone/Proserpina, also called Kore, the Maiden (Wikipedia)

Death & Proserpina

Venus tells her son Cupid to shoot his arrows of love towards Pluto in order to make him fall in love with Proserpina, the daughter of Jove and Ceres. She says that if they do not intervene,   
Proserpina will remain     

... A virgin til she dies, for even now
her models are the moonlit deities.

Huh? Proserpina is (presumably) immortal. Anyway, Cupid's arrow pierces Pluto's heart. Pluto goes to a lake in Sicily, where he comes upon Proserpina picking flowers in the woods and abducts her. The nymph Cyane protests to Pluto and tries to stop him, but he ignores her. Cyane grieves at Proserpina's fate, weeping until she becomes a pool of tears.

Demeter searches for her until she comes to Sicily and finds the pool of Cyane, where the girdle that her daughter had worn when she was abducted. Demeter becomes angry and curses the earth, especially Sicily, giving orders to the fields to make the harvest fail. There she finds the nymph Arethusa, who tells her that Proserpina was taken to the underworld. Demeter goes to find Jove and ask him to help her get their daughter back from Hades. Jove's response is rather disturbing:

She is our daughter, 
The token of our love and ours to cherish,
But we should give proper names to facts:
She has received the gift of love, unhurt, 
Nor will he harm us as a son-in-law.
And if he has no other merits, then
Its no disgrace to marry Jove's own brother.
For all he needs is your good will, my dear...

(My emphasis. It is hard to tell what Ovid thinks of this -- does he expect readers to agree with Jove or Demeter??) He goes on to say that if Demeter insists on ending the marriage, Proserpina must not eat any food in the underworld. As it turns out, she has already eaten seven seeds from a pomegranate. Jove arranges for her to be with Pluto half of the year and spend the other half on earth. The half of the year when Proserpina dwells in the underworld is fall/winter, while the half of the year when she dwells on earth is spring/summer. 

Edit: I read the Wikipedia page for Persephone (Proserpina in Latin) which adds some important context: " The epithets of Persephone reveal her double function as chthonic and vegetation goddess. The surnames given to her by the poets refer to her character as Queen of the lower world and the dead, or her symbolic meaning of the power that shoots forth and withdraws into the earth."  

As Queen of the Underworld, she was given euphemistic names (that is, substitutes for her real name, which was dangerous to invoke). These include: 
Despoina: "the mistress of the house") in Arcadia
Hagne: "pure", originally a goddess of the springs in Messenia.
Aristi cthonia: "the best chthonic" (the chthonics were the various deities of the underworld)

As a goddess of vegetation, she was called: 
Kore: "the maiden".
Kore Soteira: "the savior maiden," in Megalopolis.
Neotera: "the younger", in Eleusis. (Eleusis was the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret rites which revolved around the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The Eleusinian Mysteries were observed as early as 600 BC and attracted initiates until their decline in the 4th century AD.

Book VI

Arachne

Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) by Diego Velázquez, c. 1657

The translator (Horace Gregory) writes of this tale: "the stories of Arachne and of Niobe are among Ovid's commentaries on the workings of Divine envy. His story of Arachne may be read as a parable of the craftsman (or woman) who attempts to rival divinely inspired artists. But Ovid's way of telling the parable is important; the reader's sympathy veers in Arachne's direction. Her stubborn pride is foolish enough... yet Pallas Athena's punishment of her is deadly cold. Ovid's Italian attitude toward her is not without interests; as Athens' patron goddess, she might well represent cold-blooded Greek intellectual passion. As Ovid shows [see book IV], her prudish virginal fury transformed Medusa's hair into a nest of snakes. Envy is among her servants. She is attractive only on her visit to the Muses [book V]. Can we say that Ovid had a deep-seated distrust of highly formulated intellectual conduct? Perhaps. He loved wit, but kept a shrewd, half-doubting eye on deliberated wisdom."

Arachne of Maeonia is a famous weaver. She lives in Lydia, part of western Asia Minor. She boasts that her art owes nothing to Athena, the patron goddess of the arts, and proposes to compete with the goddess in a weaving contest. Athena adopts the disguise of an old woman and warns Arachne that she should take back her proud words, but Arachne ignores her advice. (Note: Athena/Minerva is one of the few characters who is called by both a Greek and Roman name in this translation.)

They took delight in speed and craftsmanship
And there upon the looms Tyrian purple
Shaded to lavender and violet-rose
As though one saw the sun strike passing rain 
Its arrow like a ribbon across the sky,
A thousand colors streaming light within it,
Each melting into each where no eye sees
One fade into the other, yet both far ends
Colors of distant hue -- gold thread to bind them,
To weave the story of long years ago. 

Athena weaves four different scenes into the four corners of her cloth so that the girl will see the consequences of pride. The scenes are: Rhodope and Haemon of Thrace, mortals who took the names of gods and were turned into mountains for their presumption; the queen of Pygmy who was turned into a crane and sent to war against her people; Antigone daughter of Laomedon, the king of Troy, changed into a bird by Juno; and Cinyras, who boasted of his daughters' beauty, for which they were turned into the marble steps of Juno's temple. Around all of these Athena wove the olive leaf, a sign of peace, her tree.

Arachne begins her weaving with tales of Jove, including the tale of Europa (Book II), the tale of Asteria (not in Ovid), the tale of Jove impregnating Danae (mother of Perseus) in the form of a shower of gold, and several others. She moves on to stories of the other gods, all of which show them as wrathful or manipulative. She finishes by weaving the edges of the cloth in a pattern of flowers and ivy. Arachne's work is flawless, and Athena strikes her with the shuttle of her loom in anger. Arachne says that she would rather hang herself than take such punishment, and puts a noose around her neck, but before she can kill herself, Athena intervenes to turn her into a spider.

Tereus, Procne, & Philomela

When Tereus and his troops came to the aid of Athens against barbarians, the king of Athens, Pandion, rewarded him with the hand of his eldest daughter, Procne. Procne's personal patron Juno was not there, nor Hymen the god of marriage, nor the three Graces. The Furies attended the wedding instead, carrying torches stolen from a funeral pyre. A screech owl howled from the rafters of the wedding room as an omen. The couple conceives a son, Itys. Five years later, Procne asks her husband to bring her sister Philomela to visit.

 Bernard Salomon, woodcut: Tereus, Procne & the Furies 1557 (http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu)

Tereus sets out to fetch Philomela from Athens in his ship. One look at her sparks a passionate obsession. He takes her with him to the shores of Thrace, where he leads her to a small stone cottage. There he rapes her and cuts her tongue out so that she cannot tell anyone. He returns to Procne and tells her that Philomela is dead. He keeps Philomela captive in the stone cottage, where she weaves a tapestry of her story. She gives it to her servant, indicating that it should be given to Procne. Procne sees the tapestry and plans to find her sister. She slips away on a night of festival dedicated to Bacchus, finds the cottage and smashes the bars of the cottage door. She takes Philomela to her own apartments and ponders how to exact revenge on Tereus. The boy Itys wanders into her apartments, and the two sisters decide to kill him and dismember him. They prepare his flesh in order to serve it to Tereus. Procne attends Tereus while he eats.

Philomela & Procne, Elizabeth Jane Gardner

Philomela arrives. She tosses the boys head at him, and he draws his sword to kill the two women, but they are transformed into birds: Philomela into a nightingale and Procne into a swallow. (This translation, oddly, does not say what kind of birds, so I am going with Wikipedia here.) Tereus, in turn, was turned into a  hoopoe. 

This is one of the darkest stories so far. Wow. 

Metamorphoses, Books I-III

Cleo at Classical Carousel  read Metamorphoses in 2016, and wrote synopses for each book. I probably won't do that, but I will pick at least one story from each book (of 15) to write about.

Some quotes I want to keep in mind from the Introduction by the translator, Horace Gregory:

"It is in the play of emotional extremes, the forces of illogical and conflicting impulses that Ovid offers the richness of psychological detail to the modern reader. His many heroines (and there are over fifty stories in The Metamorphoses) are set before us in dramatic moments of their indecision. Actually they do not meditate; they waver between extremes of right and wrong. They live and act within a world of irrational desires that are as vivid to them as things that happen in a dream...

To the reader of Ovid's Heroides a Euripidean heritage was clear, and all the more charming because the situations of women were presented in new dress, in the form of letters written by women to their lovers. Beyond Euripides and for another age, Ovid had become the authority, the teacher, the guide on the behavior of women, their dilemmas, their weaknesses, their powers of attraction.

The subject of women, however wittily, however seriously Ovid treated it, was not unimportant in the transition from Republican to Imperial Rome. For among the changes that marked the new society that Augustus in his later years attempted to reform was the increasing prominence of women in public affairs. The change had begun in Cato's day with the coming of Hellenic luxury into Rome. Women were given property rights, and Cato remarked that they had begun to rule the rulers of the world. Within a hundred years following Cato's observation the elder austerities of  Roman family life had been swept away. In high circles women were no longer the custodians of domestic sexual morality. They became patronesses of the arts as well as of business and politics..."

I am not sure if I've heard of Ovid's Heroides before. It is not as famous as Metamorphoses, but it sounds interesting!

Gregory describes the monologues of Ovid's characters:
"The technique was both new and attractive, and through it one can see foreshadowings of the melodramatic monologues of Seneca's tragedies, and through them, the soliloquies of Shakespeare. One can almost say that Ovid invented the passionate aside, the internal monologue of drama and fiction. Ovid, being the kind of poet he was, and concerned as he was with contradictory avowals and denials, seldom employed his internal monologues to advance philosophies. His purpose (and for this one need go no further than the many internal monologues of The Metamorphoses) was to reveal the conflicts of emotional situations."

Book I

Invocation
Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old, since you, O Gods, created 
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice 
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.

In Chaos and Creation, Ovid tells how the world was created out of Chaos.

Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze & Iron

The first millennium was the age of gold;
Then living creatures trusted one another;
People did well without the thought of ill;
nothing forbidden in a book of laws...

The Golden Age by Benjamin West

During the next age, the age of silver, the year is split up into the four seasons.

... shifty Autumn, wild winter, and short Spring,
Summer that glared with heat; the winter wind
Gleamed white with ice that streamed on field and river.

People start to build houses and plant crops.

Then came the age of bronze, less soft than silver,
And men in bronze were quick with sword and spear, 
Yet all feared Jove. Then came the age of iron
And from it poured the very blood of evil:
Piety, Faith, Love, and Truth changed to Deceit,
Violence, the Tricks of Trade, Usury, Profit...

People started to mine metals, and became corrupted by their new wealth:

All that drives men to avarice and murder
Shone in the dark; the loot was dragged to light
And War, inspired by the curse of iron and gold,
Lifted blood-clotted hands and marched the earth.

Later, in the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, there is a great flood and life begins again. 

Book II

Mercury and Herse

The god Mercury wants to marry Herse, daughter of Crecrops (the mythical founder of Athens) and goes to her house to ask for her hand. He meets her sister Aglauros first, and Aglauros agrees to give Herse his message in exchange for gold. Minerva sees this conversation and goes to the cave where the goddess Envy resides. Minerva orders Envy to poison Aglauros. She wants revenge for Aglauros's defiance of her in an earlier tale (see "The Raven," which tells the story of Erichthonius). I selected this story because of the vivid personification of Envy:

Wars virgin stood aside, nor would she enter
That fouled dwelling, but clanged her  spear against
its sagging doors, which, swaying inward, showed
Envy at feast, eating great snakes and vipers, 
A perfect diet for increase of venom... 

... for Envy never 
smiles unless she sees another's misery;
Envy is sleepless, her heart anxiety,
And at the sight of any man's success
She withers, is bitten, eats herself away. 

Envy poisons Aglauros, placing a nest of thorns in her heart and giving her envious dreams of Mercury's marriage to Herse. Aglauros decides to sit in the doorway to Herse's room and refuses to move when Mercury arrives. Mercury turns her into a statue made of black rock.

Book III

Echo & Narcissus

Narcissus flowers, a.k.a. daffodils

Narcissus is the son of the river nymph Liriope. Liriope asks the prophet Tiresias whether her son will live a long life. Tiresias says: only if he never comes to know himself. When he is sixteen, both boys and girls are attracted to his good looks, but he proudly ignored them all, including the nymph Echo. Echo has been cursed by Juno, because Echo used to keep her in long conversations to distract her from catching Jove in his affairs with women. As a result of Juno's curse, Echo can say nothing but the last few words that she heard from others. She keeps calling to Narcissus until only her voice is left. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in a pool of water, and dies pining away for his own image. His body turns into the flower that becomes known as the Narcissus.

Echo & Narcissus by John William Waterhouse, 1903 (Wikimedia)

Pentheus & Bacchus

Pentheus, the king of Thebes, scorns the gods and does not believe Tiresias's prophecies. Tiresias warns him that a day will come when the god Bacchus, the son of Jove and Semele, will rule the earth, and if Pentheus does not honor him he will be torn to pieces. When Bacchus (also called Liber) arrives, people all over the countryside and from the cities come to hold revels on Mount Cithaeron in his honor. Pentheus mocks the god and says it would be better to die fighting Bacchus than to honor him:

"It may be Thebes's fate not to live  too long; 
For my part I would see War and its armies
destroy her walls, encircle her with flames. 
We would be miserable, but honor would be held; 
we'd cry aloud our bitterness, our fate.
But now Thebes is taken by a child, a boy
who does not care to know the arts of war,
Lancers or fighting men, but rather wreaths 
of flowers, perfumed hair, purple and gold
stitched dressing gowns."

Pentheus's servants capture a priest of Bacchus named Acoetes, who tells him how his crew at sea encountered the child Bacchus. Bacchus demanded to be taken to his home island, Naxos. When the crew refused, Bacchus made grapevines grow around the oars and fill the ship. The men were turned into sea creatures and jumped into the sea, except for Acoetes, who agreed to take the child god to Naxos and entered his service as a priest. (Wikipedia says that they were turned into dolphins, but the translation I have is unclear about that. I wonder what that part is like in other translations.) 

Pentheus, after hearing the story, orders Acoetes to be crucified, but the priest escapes. Pentheus goes to Naxos to interrupt the Bacchanalian revels. His mother Agave and his aunt Ino do not recognize him, thinking that he is a boar, and Agave rips his head off. And that's the end of book III. 

Roman fresco, 60–79 CE. Pomepeii, House of the Vettii.