by Ovid
METAMORPHOSES
OVID
METAMORPHOSES
TRANSLATED AND WITH NOTES BY
CHARLES MARTIN
INTRODUCTION BY
BERNARD KNOX
W.W.NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
The Introduction by Bernard Knox previously appeared in The New York Review of
Books, with the exception of the final paragraph. Reprinted with kind permission of
The New York Review of Books.
Copyright © 2004 by Charles Martin
Detail of Grecian vase depicting the kidnapping of Europa by Jupiter disguised as a bull, ca. 470 A.D. © Christel Gerstenberg/CORBIS.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.
[Metamorphoses. English]
Metamorphoses / Ovid; translated by Charles Martin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07243-3
1. Fables, Latin—Translations into English. 2. Metamorphosis—Mythology—Poetry.
3. Mythology, Classical—Poetry. I. Martin, Charles, 1942–II. Title.
PA6522.M2M44 2004
873'.01—dc22
2003014491
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
TO JOHANNA
CONTENTS
Introduction by Bernard Knox
Acknowledgments
A Note on This Translation
BOOK I
THE SHAPING OF CHANGES
BOOK II
OF MORTAL CHILDREN AND IMMORTAL LUSTS
BOOK III
THE WRATH OF JUNO
BOOK IV
SPINNING YARNS AND WEAVING TALES
BOOK V
CONTESTS OF ARMS AND SONG
BOOK VI
OF PRAISE AND PUNISHMENT
BOOK VII
OF THE TIES THAT BIND
BOOK VIII
IMPIOUS ACTS AND EXEMPLARY LIVES
BOOK IX
DESIRE, DECEIT, AND DIFFICULT DELIVERIES
BOOK X
THE SONGS OF ORPHEUS
BOOK XI
ROME BEGINS AT TROY
BOOK XII
AROUND AND ABOUT THE ILIAD
BOOK XIII
SPOILS OF WAR AND PANGS OF LOVE
BOOK XIV
AROUND AND ABOUT WITH AENEAS
BOOK XV
PROPHETIC ACTS AND VISIONARY DREAMS
Notes
Persons, Places, and Personifications in the Metamorphoses
INTRODUCTION
Bernard Knox
Publius Ovidius Naso1 (the last name, “Nose,” was a family inheritance from an ancestor who presumably had a big one), though admired by Shakespeare,2 was distrusted in the nineteenth century as an immoralist and dismissed for most of the twentieth as a lightweight, but is now back in favor. He was all the fashion in his own time, too, and that time has some intriguing resemblances to our own. It was an age of peace that succeeded generations of war and also one that saw the obsolescence of the stern moral code that had made the early Roman republic a nation of dedicated farmer-soldiers and faithful, fertile wives.
In Ovid’s day divorce had become commonplace in upper-class Roman circles, abortion not infrequent, families small, and adultery generally condoned. Ovid, who proclaimed himself “the well-known recorder of his own amorous follies,” justified that title by devoting well over two thousand lines of elegiac couplets (the standard meter of Latin love poetry) to a witty chronicle of the ups and downs of his long affair with a married woman, including her abortion and his seduction of her maid. Not content with this he went on to write The Art of Love, an instruction book for young men on where in Rome to find women and how to seduce them, in which at one point he announced his satisfaction with the age in which he lived. “Let others delight in the good old days; I am delighted to be alive right now, This age is suited to my way of life.”3
The word here roughly translated as “way of life”—moribus—is, as so often in Ovid, a significant allusion. It is an unmistakable and mocking echo of a famous line of Ennius, the epic poet who, two centuries earlier, had celebrated the great days of the early republic, the wars against Carthage, and the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean: Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque—“By its ancient way of life and its men the Roman state stands firm.” Ovid goes on to make perfectly clear why he is so happy to be living now. It is not because of “the stubborn gold we mine, or the rare shells gathered/For our delight from foreign shores,/…but for/Refinement and culture, which have banished the tasteless/Crudities of our ancestors.”4One important aspect of “refinement and culture,” Ovid took it for granted, was sexual license. “In the old days,” he had remarked in his earlier poem, the Amores, “it was different. Those Sabine women stuck to/One husband apiece. But then they didn’t wash.”5
UNFORTUNATELY FOR OVID, Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, who in 30 B.C., after the defeat and death of Antony and Cleopatra, had become the master of the Roman world, was intent on turning the clock back. Using powers granted him by a subservient Senate, he established a whole legislative program designed to restore the old Roman family values. Octavian himself, before he assumed the titles of Augustus and pater patriae, had been no plaster saint. He had divorced his wife, Scribonia, to marry Livia while she was still pregnant by her divorced husband, and, according to Suetonius, he had even before that had a remarkable career as a libertine. He was also the author of a six-line epigram abusing Antony and his wife Fulvia so explicitly obscene that Martial (who quotes it in full)6cites Augustus as his precedent for his own “witty little books” stuffed with epigrams that Byron labeled “nauseous.” But there is no moral reformer more fanatical than a reformed rake, and these severe laws, though not always strictly enforced, were there on the books to be used if needed. One of them made adultery a crime punishable by expulsion from Rome; another restricted advancement on the administrative-military ladder to high office, the cursus honorum, to married men with three children.
Augustus must have been infuriated by the popularity of poems that, as Peter Green puts it, “presented adultery as a high-class social game,”7but it was not until 8 A.D. that he took action, not just expelling Ovid from Rome but sending him all the way to Tomi on the Black Sea, a Fort Apache of the Roman frontier, where, according to Ovid, showers of poisoned arrows could come over the walls at any moment. One of the two reasons for this harsh sentence, Ovid informs us in one of the many poems written in exile, was a poem—presumably The Art of Love—which, however, he defends in a long letter addressed to Augustus as no worse than the love elegies written by Tibullus and Propertius or for that matter than Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneas, the ancestor of Rome’s founder, joins in illicit union with Dido. The other reason he gives for his punishment is an error, a word with a semantic range stretching from “mistake” to “madness” whatever he did (or failed to do) probably had some connection with the many court intrigues sparked by the vexed problem of the succession to Augustus or with the sexual scandal that resulted in the exile of Augustus’ daughter Julia.
The Art of Love had been in circulation for some eight years when Ovid was forced to leave Rome. In those years he worked on two long poems. One of them was the Fasti, a celebration of the recurring religious fesitvals of the Ro
man calendar and the myths connected with them.
But this was not the only poem Ovid worked at in the years before the imperial edict consigned this playboy of the Roman World to the outer darkness of the frontier. He also produced a major work which, he announced in its closing lines, was his warrant for eternal fame: “Wherever Roman power rules over conquered lands I shall be read, and through all centuries, if poets’ prophecies speak truth, I shall live.” The poem was known by the title Metamorphoses,8a Greek word meaning “changes of shape” its opening lines proclaim its theme—“My mind is intent on singing of shapes changed into new bodies.” In the Metamorphoses, by far the most ambitious of his poems (and also the longest—over 12,000 lines divided into fifteen books), he abandoned the elegiac couplet, the metrical form used in all his other extant work. For the Metamorphoses he chose the hexameter, the line in which Homer sang of the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Odysseus, which Ennius adapted for the Latin language in his celebration of the great wars of the early republic, and Virgil shaped to majestic music for his tale of Aeneas and the origins of Rome.
It was a meter Ovid had once publicly rejected. The opening couplet of his first collection, the Amores, presents a comic apology for not celebrating the wars of Augustus in hexameter verse. He was about to do so—“Arms and the violence of war were to be my theme, in solemn meter, the subject suited to the verse. My second line was as long as the first.” But he was thwarted—“Cupid, they tell me, burst out laughing, and slyly docked it of one foot.” The first word of the poem—arma—a deliberate echo of Virgil’s Arma virumque, makes even more pointed Ovid’s expression of his disinclination to celebrate the glories of the Augustan age in epic verse. And now that he has abandoned the verse form of which he had made himself the supreme master, the theme he chooses for his new medium has little to do with heroic action or the Roman national tradition.
Initially, it seems much broader; he begins with the original great metamorphosis, the emergence of our universe from primeval chaos, a magnificent account of the Creation based on the writings of the Stoic philosophers, which suggests perhaps that his model is neither Ennius nor Virgil but Lucretius, whose great poem De Rerum Natura expounds in epic verse the doctrines of Epicurus. The next metamorphoses, however—the passage of the human race through the changes from Golden through Silver and Bronze Ages to the Age of Iron, suggest Hesiod as the model. But at this point Ovid charts his own path with the story of Lycaon, the tyrant whose savagery and contempt for the gods so enrages Jupiter that he changes him into a howling wolf.
THIS IS THE FIRST of a long and dazzling succession of transformations, over 250 of them. People are changed into animals, birds, fish, insects, flowers, plants, trees, rivers, fountains, rocks, mountains, islands, and stones; stones are turned into people as are ants; men are changed into women and vice versa; and, in one famous case, a statue is changed into a woman. The stories are told with such graceful charm and wit, and sometimes with a terribilità worthy of Dante at his most infernal, that they have been appropriated by poets and artists ever since. Shakespeare plundered Medea’s appeal to Night and Hecate for the great speech in which Prospero abjures his “rough magic” and burlesqued one of Ovid’s most famous tales as “the most lamentable comedy and cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” Bernini, in a miraculous metamorphosis of his own, transformed into marble the limbs of Ovid’s Daphne as they become trunk, twig, and leaf of the laurel.
In the first six books the transformations are for the most part the result of divine action. Daphne becomes a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s pursuit and Syrinx a reed to escape Pan. Io is changed into a cow in an attempt on Jupiter’s part to conceal his coupling with her from Juno. Callisto is changed into a bear by Diana because she has been made pregnant by Jupiter. Coronis becomes a crow to escape rape by Neptune. Arachne is changed into a spider for challenging Minerva to a spinning contest—and so on. In the next six books, though the actual transformation has to be the work of a god, it is the result of human passion and crime.
So far, the myths Ovid has been using, and often radically recasting, are Greek, but toward the end of Book XIV Roman myth takes over as Aeneas starts on his long journey to Italy, though his progress is often interrupted by more Greek stories—Galatea, Polyphemus, Glaucus—before he reaches his destination and, his mission accomplished, is changed into a god. But before the final metamorphosis—the spirit of Julius Caesar changed into a star—Numa, the Roman lawgiver king who succeeded Romulus (also changed into a star), goes to visit the Greek mystic and philosopher Pythagoras, who, in a 400-line speech, explains to him the nature of the universe and our lives. It is a majestic sermon on the instability not only of the universe but also of our own identities, for, according to Pythagoras, the individual spirit does not perish, but after the death of the body enters some other shape. This transition from metamorphosis to metempsychosis, together with Pythagoras’ eloquent diatribe against eating animal flesh, casts an intriguing backward light on the transformations of human beings into animals in the poem, suggesting perhaps that when we see a cow, instead of thinking of meat we should see the animal as an Io transformed, just as we should see a stag as Actaeon, a bear as Callisto, and that when we instinctively move to crush a spider we should remember Arachne.
There is a further resonance to Pythagoras’ great speech. Though toward the end of his long litany of impermanence he foresees Rome’s dominance of the world and the deification of Augustus, he does not promise permanence. There is no exception to the rule Nihil est quod perstet in orbe—There is nothing in the world that does not change. There are other passages, too, that remind us of Ovid’s incurable habit of writing poems “with double or even triple meanings.” When Jupiter, after changing Lycaon into a wolf, decides to annihilate the whole human race, he calls a council of the gods to announce his decision. Though they were all worried about the consequences (“Who would bring incense to their altars?”), they approved, “some with speeches that sharpened Jupiter’s anger, some in silence.”
Ovid’s epic model is of course the divine councils in the Iliad and Odyssey, where, however, disagreement is often expressed and the will of Zeus sometimes (though never openly) opposed. Here, as William S. Anderson points out in his illuminating commentary, “it becomes clear that Jupiter plays the role of Augustus and that the gods are the obsequious senators for whom, a century later, Tacitus expressed such contempt. This poetic Council and its mythical subject suddenly have contemporary repercussions, which generates a mixture of tone that is provocatively elusive.”9Ovid makes sure that his readers will not miss the point by his description of the council’s location: “This is the place which, if such audacity be permitted, I would not hesitate to call the Palatine Hill of the wide heaven”—the area where the Roman aristocracy, including Augustus, maintained their stately homes. Just to make everything perfectly clear Ovid adds that the lower-class gods (he actually calls them the plebs) live somewhere else.
BUT IN THE main body of the poem, framed by the account of Creation and Flood at the beginning and the discourse of Pythagoras toward the end, Ovid avoids such “contemporary repercussions” he is the master storyteller who enchants the reader by the variety and strangeness of his tales of passion, violence, and young love as he makes his swift and often surprising transitions from one to another. Many of them speak directly to the concerns of the modern reader; they have, to quote the editors’ introduction to After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, “direct, obvious and powerful affinities with contemporary reality. They offer a mythical key to most of the more extreme forms of human behavior and suffering, especially ones we think of as especially modern: holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, hetero-and homosexual love, torture, war, child-battering, depression and intoxication form the bulk of the themes.” Noting that “Ovid is again enjoying a boom,” they invited a number of poets to translate an episode, ending up with forty-two contributions from Br
itain, Ireland, America, Australia, and New Zealand.
The result is a surprising and fascinating anthology of modern variations on Ovidian themes, some faithful (after their fashion), some ranging from eccentric to outrageous, all of them impressive. Seamus Heaney offers a moving version, in subtly rhymed couplets, of Orpheus’ quest for Eurydice and his death at the hands of the Maenads. C. K. Williams, in his trademark long Whitmanesque lines, gives us a version of the death of Hercules which owes more to Sophocles’ Trachiniae (which he translated) than to Ovid. The late (and much lamented) Amy Clampitt contributed a graceful adaptation of the tale of Medea’s transformation from love-struck girl to betrayed and vengeful wife. Michael Longley tackles no less than seven of Ovid’s episodes, among them the rustic idyll of Philemon and Baucis, in which he stays close to the original, and a wild but charming Irish adaptation of the story of Phoenix, which begins: “I’ll hand to you six duck eggs Orla Murphy gave me….”
Alice Fulton’s contribution is a thirty-one-page extravaganza based on the 113 lines Ovid devoted to the story of Apollo and Daphne, featuring an Apollo who “favored snapbrim hats, alligator shoes/and sharkskin/suits from Sy Devine’s Hollywood mens’ store….” Kenneth Koch serves up a rollicking ballad of Jove and Io—“Her youthful beauty caused in Jove such ache that ‘Me, oh! my, oh!’/He cried, ‘she must be mine!’…” Simon Armitage’s short version of Jove’s affair with Europa will send American readers to their dictionaries looking (sometimes in vain) for the meaning of such Northern English dialect words as stirk and stot, bezzle and plodge. There is a short poem by our own former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, which is not so much a translation of Ovid as an intriguing poem about Ovid and poetic creation. And there are four excerpts by England’s poet laureate, Ted Hughes: a fine version of the first 300 lines—Creation, Four Ages, Flood, Lycaon—together with the long episodes of the deaths of Pentheus and Adonis and a shorter tale, that of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.