Example: Rape of Sabine Women

Narratives of Livy, Plutarch
and Ovid begin with abduction, but
end with legitimage marriage.

After reporting women's abduction
Ovid continues (F 3.201-2):
The (people of) Cures swelled
[with rage] , as did the others who
experienced the same grief.
Then for the first time father-in-law
bore arms against son-in-law.

All versions agree that abduction
was necessary:
1. propagation of offspring

2. contraction of alliances

3. acknowledgement of Roman worth

Just as Ovid's narrative emphasizes
male appropriation of story; it
minimizes role of the Sabine women
Abrupt transition from plans for abduction
to the outbreak of war

Already the abducted women had the name
"mother"; the wars between relatives had
been protracted by long delay.

Ovid's narrative is subversive:
Suggests connection between
precarioiusness of socio-political order
and brutality that sustains it.

Metamorphoses

Ovid, started as an epic poet. Amores 1, 1 I was getting ready to publicize ARMS and VIOLENT WARS in heroic rhythms (for matter must fit meter), making my odd and even numbered verses equal, but Cupid sniggered (so they tell me) and stole a foot from every couplet.

Ovid begins his Metamorphoses with a reversal of demotion from epic to elegiac.

Metamorphosis is subject and essence of the poem, which transforms everything it touches, both its content and its structure.

Metamorphoses is like no poem written before, though virtually everything in it can be found elsewhere.

Tend to think of wonderful stories, Pyramus and Thisbe, Narcissus, Medea, Pygmalion, Orpheus, that linger in memory after we have read them.

All through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, Ovid's Metamorphoses was generally read as a collection of fables, though the sixteenth century poet Ariosto recognized its principles of organization and incorporated them in his Orlando Furioso.

All of the major stories can be read by themselves. The stories are readable in Latin or English and many have been made available. But what about the structure and transitions between stories and less appealing tales.

Let us start with gem of story that serves as transition from tales of divine love and rape that make up Book 2 to stories connected with house of Cadmus that make up Book 3.

Story of Europa

At end of 2 (836-75) we find the story of Europa and Jupiter. Only forty lines long, but it expresses Ovidian artistry. Subject, female mortal pursued by lustful male god, one of favorite subjects in first books. The story of Europa is the fifth of its kind, coming after tales of Apollo and Daphne, Jupiter and Io, Pan and Syrinx, in Book 1, and Jupiter and Callisto in 2. Ovid slips the episode's subject, love, and its location, Phoenicia, into his first sentence. Jupiter, without telling him why, sends Mercury to Sidon to drive the king's cattle down to the seashore. Mercury obeys, then vanishes from the poem. A slight change of grammar, however, gives a new piece of information. In the command, Jupiter refers to the royal herd: Drive to the shore the royal herd you see feeding at a distance on mountain grass. (2. 841-2)

When the command is carried out, the royal herd has become herd of bullocks (masc. plural rather than collectivive neuter sing) and they arrive at the shore in a line that introduces the king's daughter.

Syntax illustrates scene: bullocks and princess sharing a line and a place.

Scene setting begins the narrataive with editorial comment: majesty and love do not go well together, and points up contrast between power of Jupiter and undignified nature of the posture he adopts.

(846-51). Every detail contributes to the absurdity of Jupiter and proves the point.

One detail points to future, adjective formosus. (beautiful). Because he is beautiful, the god is dangerous.

This is comedy, but his power is real and mortals are weak and terror lurks just out of sight. The next few lines describe the Jupiter-bull in detail. He is a fine animal with those characteristics that an ancient farmer would look for in a bull. Because it is Jupiter in a bull suit, attention to details of taurine perfection is comical.

Allusions to Vergil add dimension to story (parody of Vergil's prize winning brood cow in Gergics III).

Europa marveled because the bull seemed so beautiful and unthreatening. At first she feared to touch him but then held out flowers to the snowy lips. Ovid shifts back into Jupiter's mind: the lover exulted.

Ovid has Europa on back of the bull and uses one of Vergil's favorite adjectives, ignorant, inscius, in near quotation of Aeneid 1 when Dido recieves in her lap the god Cupid, thinking he is Aeneas' son, as Venus plotted she should, so she would fall in love with Aeneas.

Vergil says, "She cuddles him, ignorant of how powerful a god was settling into her unlucky lap" (718-19).

Ovid echoes this moving moment with changes necessary for his heroine, who unwittingly settles herself on back of Jupter thinking him only a friendly bull. Thus there is a picture of ruthless divinity's tricking of a mortal.

Now Ovid calls Jupiter deus as bull slips away with Europa, first off the beach, then among the waves and finally over the sea.

This is Ovid's version of the story of Europa except for two lines that open Book 3 and dispose of her: "And already the god having put off the false likeness of the bull, had revealed himself and was in Crete, when her father sent Cadmus to look for her."

So begins the story of the house of Cadmus, Europa's brother. What Ovid has done with Europa, in fact, is to turn preliminaries of her story into the story and leave the central action to be inferred. Ovid does not tell us what happened when Jupiter and Europa got to Crete.

We know from the primary mythical tradition that she was the mother by Jupiter of Minos and Rhadamanthus and, in some accounts of Sarpedon.

Ovid says nothing of this. Thus his tale of Europa illustrates one of Ovid's typical approaches to material: he never tells a story the way it has been told before.

He moulds his material into something uniquely his own, sometimes as here by developing just a piece of story.

Why did Ovid choose to incorprate into an outline of Roman history a terribly long lecture by the philosopher Pythagoras? Why did he include a version of the Aeneid that is less unified and less satisfying than Vergil's masterful reading? Otis argued that he had to have an Augustan conclusion even though it was against his nature. Is it as Rolfe Humprhies says, 'Ovid is bored...writings becomes perfunctory...?"

When Ovid decided to write the Metamorphoses, there were two models:

one full scale mythological epic;

the other was collective narrative, a loose framework of discrete tales held together by the personality of the narrator.

A second type is exempilified in Callimachus' Aetia and in Hesiod.

Vergil had given new life to full scale epic using on grander scale artistic principles developed for the epyllion by Catullus and friends. The collective form would allow Ovid opportunity to work with narratives of different types while staying within a genre approved by poets and did not invite unfavorable comparison.

Ovid being Ovid and ever ready for a challenge, chose otherwise.

He made no attempt to avoid comparison with Vergil but went out of his way to insure that readers would compare by treating much of same material.

At the same time he set out to excel Vergil.

He would do what no one had ever tried to do before, write Homeric Vergilian Epic and Callimachean collective narrative all at once.

Metamorphosis contains some 250 myths and stories that frequently run into each other so that it is hard to say exactly where one begins or ends.

No character is in evidence throughout the poem or even a major portion of it.

The poem seems to fall naturally into segments.

One of the main differences from the Aeneid is the detachable nature of the episodes.

Instead of integrating separable episodes into a unified whole, as Vergil does, Ovid took pains to emphasize the separateness of stories.

Events of poem occur geographically all over world and though there is basically an east west direction, with episodes mainly in Greece in first books and in Italy in last, locations move about.

Temporal setting is equally varied.

Though there is a vague sense of chronological progress in the poem, from creation of world to Augustus, Ovid seems to go out of way to disrupt continuity.

Take Heracles for instance.

The poem presents a number of events from life of Heracles, birth, labors, death and apotheosis.

Much of his story is told in Book 9 but he reappears in Books 12, 13, 15.

Still worse even in Book 9 his death precedes his birth.

Similarly in the story of Daedalus (8 159ff) he first tells well known part, how Daedalus devised wings for himself and his son, Icaraus, in order to escape from Crete, how Icarus ignored his father's instructions, flew too close to the sun, and fell into Icarian Sea.

Only at end, almost as afterthought, does Ovid tack on an event that took place long before and makes us reassess what we have just heard about Daedalus.

As a young man he threw his nephew Perdix off a wall in a jealous rage because Perdix had invented the saw and compass.

Perdix would have been killed if he had not been changed into a partridge by Athena, patroness of craftsmen.

We now see what we could not see before, that Icarus's death is not an accident.

Daedalus is paying for his crime with his son's life, and the punishment neatly fits the crime.

The poem has too many major characters for continuity.

We find all the gods of the Roman pantheon, scores of minor divinities.

Nearly every hero anyone ever heard of has his story, whether associated with Troy or Thebes or other tales.

Nearly every genre of poetry is represented somewhere.

No ancient epic has such varied subject matter as the Metamorphses. Tales about love and hate, piety and impiety, divine venegeance, divine justice and malevolence abound.