From the Bookshelf of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Further Metamorphoses…

Metamorphoses: Books 1-8

Ovid,

Frank Justus Miller (Translator)

Why we're reading this: Dual Latin-English on facing pages
[close] Dual Latin-English on facing pages

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Jun 08, 2016 Roman Clodia rated it it was amazing

Complex, subversive and sophisticated

Ovid was ignored by classical scholars for a long time as being frivolous and just not serious enough. He has now been rehabilitated and Metamorphoses is recognised as being one of the most complex, sophisticated and problematic poems of the age of Augustus - as well as one of the wittiest and most accessible.

Too often regarded as a compendium of Greek and Roman myths, Metamorphoses should be read as a continuous poem telling the story of the world from the c Complex, subversive and sophisticated

Ovid was ignored by classical scholars for a long time as being frivolous and just not serious enough. He has now been rehabilitated and Metamorphoses is recognised as being one of the most complex, sophisticated and problematic poems of the age of Augustus - as well as one of the wittiest and most accessible.

Too often regarded as a compendium of Greek and Roman myths, Metamorphoses should be read as a continuous poem telling the story of the world from the creation to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar - but in Ovid's own inimitable and often funny and scurrilous fashion. Along the way, he takes in almost every story ever told in the ancient world: Narcissus and Echo, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion, Medea, Venus and Adonis, the Trojan war, the foundation of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

His style is witty, urbane and sophisticated, and he plays games with every genre of literature: love poetry, epic, philosophy, Greek science.

The ostensible theme of the poem that unifies the 12 books is change, but modern scholars recognise that this too is part of the game Ovid is playing with his readers, and the debate continues over what Ovid is 'about'.

More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which he plays with our preconceptions of gender, power, status and authority - but all with the lightest of touches that never reduce the brilliant story-telling to mere polemic.

Writing after Vergil, on one level Metamorphoses is a response to and a dialogue with the Aeneid, and has sometime been read as an antidote to the supposedly pro-Augustan sympathies of Vergil. Certainly Ovid was banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus just after the poem was published though the true reason cannot be known due to the loss of all sources relating to the the incident. However, many scholars now recognise the other subversive voices within the Aeneid itself, questioning the imperial mission of Rome and Augustus, so maybe Ovid and Vergil are not so far apart at all...

In any case, the Metamorphoses remains one of the most brilliant examples of the pure power of superb story-telling, and has inspired artists from Shakespeare to Bernini to Ted Hughes. ...more

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Nov 21, 2018 Jim Puskas rated it it was ok

Shelves: classics, lemmed-it

After completing Book III, I abandoned the rest of this translation since I'm reading the Golding Translation and the Mandelbaum at the same time, story by story; I found that this prose version by Miller adds nothing for me other than that it includes the Latin text along with the translation. Not being a serious scholar and having long since lost track of practically all of my High School Latin, the two versions I'm already reading in detail are more than sufficient. ...more

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Jul 24, 2011 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: greek-roman

A man gets turned into a donkey and suffers all sorts of outrages in first century Rome.

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Nov 02, 2016 Joe marked it as to-read

Shelves: ancient-rome, poetry, mythology

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