Metamorphoses (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  Translation, Translator’s Note, Glossary, and Index of names

  © A. D. Melville 1986

  Introduction, Historical Sketch, and Explanatory Notes

  © E. J. Kenney 1986

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  Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published 1986 by Oxford University Press

  First issued as a World’s Classics paperback 1987

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Ovid, 43–17 or 18 B.C.

  Metamorphoses.

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  I. Title.

  PA6522.M2M45 1986 873′.01 85–15479

  ISBN 0–19–283472–X

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

  The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  OVID

  Metamorphoses

  Translated by

  A. D. MELVILLE

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  E. J. KENNEY

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  METAMORPHOSES

  A. D. MELVILLE was a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, where he gained a double First in Classics and won a Craven Studentship. His love of the Classics was kindled at Charterhouse and he discovered the seductive charms of Ovid at King’s. After a long career as a solicitor in London, interrupted by distinguished service in the Second World War, he returned to Ovid, and his translations of the Metamorphoses, the Love Poems, and Sorrows of an Exile (Tristia) are all available in World’s Classics.

  E. J. KENNEY is a Fellow of Peterhouse and Emeritus Kennedy Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge. His previous publications include a critical edition of Ovid’s amatory poems (Oxford Classical Texts, 1961), an edition with commentary of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III (1971), The Classical Text. Aspects of editing in the age of the printed book (1974), The Ploughman’s Lunch. Moretum: a poem ascribed to Virgil (1984); and he is Editor of and a contributor to The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, Vol. II, Latin Literature (1982).

  ‘This ought to become the standard modern complete verse translation.’

  Greece & Rome

  ‘Melville’s new translation enables us to understand this unique and witty poetic narrative with a fresh approach. His use of modern idiom and of occasional rhyming couplets for added special effect are a great bonus and a delight to readers. The text … is highly recommended to both students and readers who have a special interest in the subject.’

  Greek Review

  ‘Melville has produced a fluent and readable version which conveys a sense both of Ovid’s wit and of his elegance.’

  Classical Review

  ‘Melville has chosen blank verse, pleasantly varied by rhymed couplets to round off each sequence. His narrative is taut, his vocabulary vivid and flexible, his speeches pungent or powerful, and his command of wit a delight.’

  Classical World

  CONTENTS

  Historical Sketch

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Select Bibliography

  METAMORPHOSES

  BOOK I

  The Creation—The Ages of Mankind—The Flood—Deucalion and Pyrrha—Apollo and Daphne—Io—Phaethon

  BOOK II

  Phaethon (cont.)—Callisto—The Raven and the Crow—Ocyrhoe—Mercury and Battus—The Envy of Aglauros—Jupiter and Europa

  BOOK III

  Cadmus—Diana and Actaeon—Semele and the Birth of Bacchus—Tiresias—Narcissus and Echo—Pentheus and Bacchus

  BOOK IV

  The Daughters of Minyas—Pyramus and Thisbe—The Sun in Love—Salmacis and Hermaphroditus—The Daughters of Minyas Transformed—Athamas and Ino—The Transformation of Cadmus—Perseus and Andromeda

  BOOK V

  Perseus’ Fight in the Palace of Cepheus—Minerva Meets the Muses on Helicon—The Rape of Proserpine—Arethusa—Triptolemus

  BOOK VI

  Arachne—Niobe—The Lycian Peasants—Marsyas—Pelops—Tereus, Procne, and Philomela—Boreas and Orithyia

  BOOK VII

  Medea and Jason—Medea and Aeson—Medea and Pelias: her Flight—Theseus—Minos, Aeacus, the Plague at Aegina, the Myrmidons—Cephalus and Procris

  BOOK VIII

  Scylla and Minos—The Minotaur—Daedalus and Icarus—Perdix—Meleager and the Calydonian Boar—Althaea and Meleager—Achelous and the Nymphs—Philemon and Baucis—Erysichthon and his Daughter

  BOOK IX

  Achelous and Hercules—Hercules, Nessus, and Deianira—The Death and Apotheosis of Hercules—The Birth of Hercules—Dryope—Iolaus and the Sons of Callirhoe—Byblis—Iphis and Ianthe

  BOOK X

  Orpheus and Eurydice—Cyparissus—Ganymede—Hyacinth—Pygmalion—Myrrha—Venus and Adonis—Atalanta

  BOOK XI

  The Death of Orpheus—Midas—First Foundation and Destruction of Troy—Peleus and Thetis—Daedalion—The Cattle of Peleus—Ceyx and Alcyone—Aesacus

  BOOK XII

  The Expedition against Troy—Achilles and Cycnus—Caenis—The Battle of the Lapiths and C
entaurs—Nestor and Hercules—The Death of Achilles

  BOOK XIII

  Ajax and Ulysses and the Arms of Achilles—The Fall of Troy—Hecuba, Polyxena, and Polydorus—Memnon—The Pilgrimage of Aeneas—Acis and Galatea—Scylla and Glaucus

  BOOK XIV

  Scylla and Glaucus (cont.)—The Pilgrimage of Aeneas (cont.)—The Island of Circe—Picus and Canens—The Triumph and Apotheosis of Aeneas—Pomona and Vertumnus—Legends of Early Rome; The Apotheosis of Romulus

  BOOK XV

  Numa and the Foundation of Crotona—The Doctrines of Pythagoras—The Death of Numa—Hippolytus—Cipus—Aesculapius—The Apotheosis of Julius Caesar—Epilogue

  Explanatory Notes

  Glossary and Index of Names

  UXORI NATISQUE CARISSIMIS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  Dr S. E. Hinds has kindly read the Introduction and the Explanatory Notes in draft, and I am indebted to him for many helpful criticisms and acute suggestions, the majority of which I have gratefully adopted.

  E.J.K.

  HISTORICAL SKETCH

  OVID (Publius Ovidius Naso) was born on 20 March 43 BC at Sulmo (now Sulmona) in the Abruzzi. The year of his birth was long remembered as that in which both consuls fell fighting Antony at Mutina, leaving Octavian (the future Augustus) in a position of strength which he exploited to become Triumvir and eventually sole ruler of the Roman world. In view of Ovid’s fate at his hands it is not surprising that in the poem which is our chief source for his life (Tristia iv. 10) he lays some stress on these circumstances—more especially as there was a contemporary report that the deaths of both consuls had in fact been compassed by Octavian (Tacitus, Annals i. 10. 2, Suetonius, Augustus 11). By the time that Ovid came to manhood the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra had been routed at Actium (31 BC) and the Roman Republic had been transformed into an (ostensibly) benevolent despotism.

  Ovid’s family was prosperous, and he was sent to Rome to study under the leading teachers of the day. For Roman boys education then and for centuries to come was verbal, literary and rhetorical, its principal aim the production of fluent and convincing extempore speakers. The reminiscences of the elder Seneca (Controversies ii. 2. 8–12, ix. 5. 17) illustrate vividly the effects of this kind of training on Ovid, in whom it encouraged and developed an obviously innate delight in words, their metrical arrangement and artistic manipulation. Possibly the encouragement went too far: Quintilian thought that he would have been a better poet ‘if he had controlled his genius rather than letting it control him’ (Institutio Oratoria x. I. 98). His education was rounded off in the manner usual for the governing class, by the then equivalent of the Grand Tour through Greek lands. There followed on his return to Rome some minor judicial posts, but he soon decided (in spite of his father’s discouragement) that his true vocation was poetry and abandoned his official career to dedicate himself to literature.

  His earliest work, the Amores (Loves) appeared in its original (five-book) form when he was a very young man, perhaps as early as c.25 BC. There followed a second edition in three books; the Heroides (Letters of Heroines); the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) i–ii and (later) iii; the Remedia Amoris (Remedies of Love), all extant; and the lost tragedy Medea. There is great uncertainty as to the chronology and sequence of these works, but even supposing a more even spread of activity than has been generally assumed, extending possibly from c.15 BC to AD 2, the terminus post quern non of the Remedia, this is an extraordinary feat of literary productivity.

  From about AD 1 onwards Ovid was simultaneously working on the Metamorphoses and the Fasti (Calendar), a long elegiac poem in twelve books on Roman festivals and cults, an aetiological work inspired by Callimachus’ Aetia (see Introduction, p. xxii). This was half completed and the Metamorphoses (so, in spite of Ovid’s disclaimers, we must believe) substantially ready for publication, when disaster struck. In AD 8 Ovid, who was by then, since the deaths of Virgil and Horace, indisputably the premier poet of Rome, was suddenly sent into exile at Tomis (now Constanta in Romania) on the Black Sea. The sentence was decided and pronounced personally by Augustus, the two causes of offence being carmen, a poem, the Ars Amatoria, and error, an unspecified indiscretion. The mystery surrounding this episode has never been cleared up; though Ovid in his exile poetry is sometimes surprisingly bold in pleading his case, and many of his contemporaries must have been in the secret, he nowhere allows a clear inference as to the nature of the error. The picture that emerges from such hints as he does give is that of involuntary complicity in some scandal, in which politics and morals were interlocked, affecting the Imperial house and Augustus in particular.

  Of the poetry written by Ovid at Tomis the five books of Tristia (Sorrows) and the four of Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from Pontus) were devoted to pleading his case, ostensibly before the Emperor, really before the bar of public opinion, to which he can be seen repeatedly appealing over Augustus’ head. Tone and theme are constantly varied, but central to the whole campaign is Ovid’s consciousness of his poetic vocation and his confidence in his identity as a poet. The second book of the Tristia, a single long elegy, is a witty and at times astonishingly outspoken defence of himself and his poetry. Standing apart from these works is the Ibis, a curse invoking many dire fates culled from Greek myth on an unidentified (and probably fictitious) enemy; its purpose was in all likelihood to uphold his reputation as a learned poet and so his claims to special consideration by the public and by posterity. Public and private pleading alike proved powerless to appease Augustus or Tiberius, who succeeded him in AD 14, and Ovid spent the rest of his life at Tomis, dying there in AD 17.

  He was three times married, and had one daughter.

  INTRODUCTION

  The elation of comedy is saying hooray for life in its own terms, however incongruous and absurd. Donald Davie

  I

  WHEN the present writer was at school, the proposition that Ovid was a better poet than Virgil, or even that the Metamorphoses was fit to stand alongside the Aeneid, would not have been generally entertained. It had not always been so. In 1873 James Henry, the great commentator, who devoted his life (to say nothing of the life of his daughter Katharine) to the explication of the Aeneid, could write of Ovid that he was ‘a more natural, more genial, more cordial, more imaginative, more playful poet … than [Virgil] or any other Latin poet’. Few more comprehensive tributes have come his way. In 1799 Gilbert Wakefield, writing to Charles James Fox from Dorchester gaol (where he was undergoing imprisonment for seditious libel), called Ovid ‘to my fancy, the first Poet of all Antiquity’; and half a century earlier than that the young Edward Gibbon had ‘derived more pleasure from Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ than from the Aeneid. The word ‘pleasure’, of course, gives the game away: in Gibbon’s day and for long afterwards English boys were not sent to school to enjoy themselves, and the Metamorphoses is not in any obvious sense edifying literature. It is only in recent years that critics, having conceded that the poem is, after all, entertaining, have also turned to enquire seriously what, if anything, it is about. Some of the obstacles encountered by such an enquiry are of Ovid’s making, for his love of teasing is almost Nabokovian.

  The quality in which Wakefield thought that ‘no poet of antiquity seems capable of supporting the contest with Ovid’ was invention. This is a technical term of classical rhetoric meaning, not the faculty of making things up, but that of finding them: the art of discovering and combining the materials from which an argument could most effectively be constructed. This faculty Wakefield bracketed with ‘copiousness of thought’ as the ‘first endowment’ of a poet, in which he judged Ovid pre-eminent. The resources of material at Ovid’s disposal for this undertaking were immense—the whole field of Greek and (what there was of it) Roman myth and legend, so far as it was available in written form—and he exploited them with a combination, truly professional, of profusion and economy. Economy is apparent from the beginning in the apportionment of material, where it might suit either poem, be
tween the Metamorphoses and the Fasti;1 profusion in the repeated ‘throw-away’ references to stories or variant versions which for one reason or another he did not choose to include or to tell in full.2 A hint of how much Ovid must have read only to discard for the purposes immediately in hand is offered by his Ibis. This poem, his swan-song as a learned poet, was written in the early years of his exile, we may guess in order to demonstrate to his enemies and detractors that his powers were not exhausted. Tomis had no libraries, and Ovid had brought few books with him into exile. The mythological learning of Ibis, as extensive as it is obscure, is a sample of what was surplus in his reading to the requirements of the two long poems, material which at the time of his sudden banishment was in his notebooks or his head. A lesser artist might have been overwhelmed by this embarras de richesses. Ovid’s ‘copiousness of thought’ was equal to the copiousness of his materials and to the scale of his undertaking. The Metamorphoses is without doubt the most witty and ingenious book that has come down to us from the ancient world.

  II

  In one sense there is no mystery as to what the Metamorphoses is ‘about’, because the author tells us: it is about metamorphosis, transformation, change. So much emerges from the brief Proem (i. 1–4). Yet the very brevity and allusiveness of that introduction should put us on our guard. There is one striking ambiguity in Ovid’s Latin with which no translator can be expected to cope. The first four words of the poem, In noua fert animus, can and indeed must be read as an autonomous statement as well as part of the whole sentence: ‘My inspiration carries (me) on to new things’. The fourth verse underlines this pronouncement by declaring a paradox: ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen, ‘Bring down to my own times a continuous song’. This is to be a ‘continuous’ poem in the innocuous chronological sense, but perpetuum, in this context, must also be read in the technical literary sense as connoting orthodox epic.3 That, however, contradicts the further implication of deducite, that the poem, when ‘brought down’, that is finished, will be a deductum carmen in another sense, the ‘fine-spun’, unpretending—in a word, unepic—kind of poetry written by Callimachus, the Alexandrian scholar-poet to whom Catullus and subsequent Latin poets had, with varying degrees of explicitness, pledged allegiance. What sort of a poem is this which thus, obliquely and by way of verbal paradox, apparently subscribes to two incompatible poetics, will remain to be seen. At least the lines serve as a warning not to take the poet too literally;4 and after all it was Callimachus himself who had remarked that it is the poet’s métier to deceive.