Читать книгу A Student's Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 10 - Shawn O'Bryhim - Страница 10

With Metamorphoses, Ovid exchanges the elegiac couplets of his love poetry for the dactylic hexameter of epic. Superficially, this poem fits the broad definition of an epic: it is in the traditional meter of epic (dactylic hexameter), it is a long work (15 books), and its main characters are gods and heroes. But Ovid departs from this definition in fundamental ways. While Metamorphoses is a carmen perpetuum (“continuous poem,” 1.4) that begins with the creation of the earth and ends in Ovid’s time, it is not a long story on one topic, like the Iliad or the Aeneid. Instead, it is a collection of shorter stories, some of which occupy a fraction of a book, while others are so long that they are categorized as epyllia (“mini-epics”). These tales are bound together not so much by chronology as by devices such as family relationships or similarities between metamorphoses, and these provide a segue from one story to the next. Not all the myths are about heroes; the story of Arachne, for example, is about a talented woman of the lower class. Moreover, Ovid incorporates nearly every imaginable genre into this work: epyllion, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, hymn, erotic poetry, pastoral poetry, historical myth, and philosophy (Lafaye 1904: 141–159). Metamorphoses may be an epic poem, but it does not fit the traditional definition of an epic.

Ovid’s sources for the nearly two hundred and fifty stories that comprise his Metamorphoses span the history of Greek and Latin literature from Homer to his own time. Many date from the Hellenistic period, when mythological compendia such as Boios’ poem on bird metamorphoses and Nicander’s work on mythic transformations were popular. The poems of Callimachus provided inspiration as well. It is likely that Ovid used the lost work About Cyprus, by the geographer Philostephanus, for many of the myths in Book 10. He also used contemporary poems such as Vergil’s Aeneid and Cinna’s Myrrha, and perhaps two separate Metamorphoses, one by Parthenius and another by Theodorus. But Ovid was not a slavish copier of his sources. He created variants of myths that would allow his educated audience to make comparisons between traditional versions of these stories and his adaptations. Like Pygmalion, he fashioned raw material into something that was uniquely his.

Metamorphoses was completed shortly before Ovid’s exile. Although he burned his copy of the manuscript before departing for Tomis, he says that several others survived. Indeed, there were so many of them that Ovid asked that a preface be added that begged his audience’s pardon for the unpolished state of the poem (Tristia 1.7.13–40). The sheer number of times that Metamorphoses was copied in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (nearly four hundred manuscripts survive today) testifies to its popularity throughout the ages.