Ovid's Metamorphoses: Genre

metamorphosis is formally speaking I suppose an epic poem it's in it's a long poem it's written in hexameter verse and it deals with heroes and myths the kind of subject matter which an epic poem doesn't absolutely have to deal with but generally darts on the other hand it doesn't have an overarching plot in a way that the Iliad does which is part of the story of the Trojan War or the Aeneid does which is the story of Aeneas leaving Troy going to Italy having lots of fights and ultimately leading to the foundation of Rome the overarching plot if this is what you can call it if the meta morphosis is the entire history of the world explicitly starts from the creation of the universe and goes down to what Ovid calls his own time actually strictly speaking a little bit beyond that because he talks about how he is going to live forever so he's predicting a bit into the future after his death as well and there's a sense in which you can kind of view this in two ways on the one hand that might be something which which makes this an impossible kind of genre it's not it's not quite epic because it doesn't have enough of a story it doesn't have a sense of you know purpose to it if you like and on the other hand you could say this makes it the most epic epic that's ever been because it does have a story it's going from the start of the universe to the present day and if epic is also supposed to be about something ground and something ambitious you couldn't really get much grander and more ambitious than an entire history of the universe if it starts off the metamorphosis as I said with the creation of the the universe and there's a sense in which we kind of feel well okay this is a suitably hello ground an elevated topic and but as he goes through but one way we end up with the story of Apollo and Daphne where Apollo has just engaged in this again nice epic activity of killing a giant snake which is sort of thing we like in epic and but suddenly along comes Cupid he and Apollo have a little argument about who has the greater right to to have to use bows and arrows cupid shoots apollo with an arrow he falls in love with daphne cupid shoots daphne was another arrow which makes damn sure she's not going to feel the same about apollo and we start this whole sequence which lasts for in a way for the whole of the rest of the poem and certainly it's very marked sequence towards the beginning there's in the first kind of few books of the metamorphosis of gods running about falling in love with with girls generally speaking the girls on interested and they're running away and this is very much you know obviously privileged in the ideas ideas of love and attempts at seduction quite often actually stories of rape as well which aren't at all what we expect of epic in the sort of broadest terms and which are also at the same time referring back to of its earlier work where he's been a love poet and has very much kind of prided himself on being a love poet and defined himself as a love poet before so on there's a sense in which there's a there's a slight tension emerging here or as a slight quite a large tension emerging between the this sort of attempt to write stories in a slightly grander more traditionally epic style and the kind of compulsion Ovid feels to stick loving wherever he can on the other hand as offered himself later later on in his exile poetry points out and it's not the case that love shouldn't exist in epic at all you get a lot of very famous love stories in epic Dido and Aeneas perhaps obviously springing to mind so there's a way in which you know if all food were kind of attacked you say well what do you think you're doing this is supposed to be epic and you've got all these love stories in he could turn around and say well you know love is so on their picker theme but of course the way it being offered he doesn't just have a bit of it he has a lot of it so he he kind of takes this idea of there being an excuse for writing love stories within epic but really milks it and make sure that he can get an awful lot of the erotic into the metamorphoses

Channel: Tom Mackenzie

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Id: wd4JO7Sko9A

Length: 4min 52sec (292 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 11 2014