Metamorphoses

From Robert Squillace's Introduction toThe Metamorphoses From today's perspective, Ovid stands almost precisely at the midpoint of literary history; the preservation of language in Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform began about as many centuries before his lifetime as he himself lived before the era of e-texts and digital printing. While the dating of past history was certainly less precise in Roman times than it is now, from his own vantage point Ovid could see that centuries of written tradition preceded him; indeed, an allusive engagement with previous poetry already marked his Hellenistic forebears. More than any of his other works, theMetamorphosesexpresses Ovid's acute sense of the massive accumulation of history and legend, attempting as it does to "bring down [its] song in unbroken strains from the world's very beginning even unto the present time." Moreover, the poem is shaped to induce in its readers an experience of peering down vertiginous historical depths. Just as modern works on the history of Earth often note that the arrival of humanity on the planet would correspond, on a twenty-four-hour clock, to just a minute or two before midnight, so Ovid's poem sets foot on the mainland of Italy only in the fourteenth of its fifteen books; further, this epic of universal history reaches the events of Ovid's own lifetime just sixty lines before the end of its final book. Indeed, the poet's consciousness of time would be impossible had centuries of written records not been available to him. When, again in book XV, Ovid has the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras base his perception of the eternal flux of existence on a myriad of such facts as the changing courses of rivers, the erosion of peninsulas into islands, and the gradual decline of once-mighty cities into barren plains, the poet assumes a world in which the permanence of writing makes it possible to know intimately the enormous distance between past and present by the comparison of what is to what texts say had once been. In singing the tale of ceaseless change, of course, Ovid implicitly raises the question of his own relevance to readers of a later time. Over the nearly 2,000 years since the appearance of theMetamorphoses, the plan of the poem itself inspires one to ask whether the ceaseless flow of cultural change has left Ovid's magnum opus a bare and sterile field, fit only to furnish material for a kind of archaeological study of what poetry no longer is, to serve as a morgue of dead men's tales? Can a readership so distant from Augustan Rome embrace a work so dependent on its reader's intimacy with Greco-Roman mythwith the life of Hercules, the travels of the Argonauts, the course of the Trojan War, the adulteries of Jupiter, and many other stories far less familiar than these to a modern audiencethat it often alludes only by the slightest gesture, the verbal equivalent of a raised eyebrow, to the main features of these tales, concentrating instead on the microscopic details of what even for Romans were generally their lesser-known episodes? While theMetamorphosesmay demand more work from a modern reader and more annotation from an editor than a self-contained narrative like theOdyssey, in other wayscompared to, say, Homer or HesiodOvid stands almost in our midst. The authors of the Greek epics, like the anonymous creators of the EgyptianBook of the Deador the ancient Near Eastern epicGilgamesh, lived in a world where the transmission of stories occurred primarily by word of mouth, and such written texts as did exist primarily served the needs of public performance. Even for the playwrights and philosophers of the Athenian "golden age" of the fifth century B.C.Ovid is the author of 'Metamorphoses ' with ISBN 9781593082765 and ISBN 1593082762.