Metamorphoses (Book II, lines 150–154)

I. About the Poet  

Publius Ovidius Naso was born to an aristocratic family in Sulmo, a mountain town a few days’ ride from Rome, on March 20 in the year 710 since the foundation of Rome (43 BCE). Publius was exactly a year younger than his brother Lucius and as boys they did everything together. When the lads were 12 and 13, they were sent to Rome to study rhetoric and oratory, as their father wanted them to become lawyers. Lucius was an excellent student, but Publius was distracted and dreamy. When Lucius unexpectedly passed away, Publius braved his father’s disapproval and gave up his legal studies to become a poet.

As a poet, he called himself Ovid, because his full name wouldn’t fit in the Latin hexameter meter. Ovid began to meet older poets and participated in poetry workshops. He gave his first poetry reading at the age of 18, and his first book, a collection of imaginary letters from mythological heroines to their absent lovers, was published when he was 24. Ovid’s most famous work, the Metamorphoses, is an epic poem nearly 12,000 lines long narrating the history of the universe in terms of many traditional stories in which humans are transformed into animals, birds, rocks, trees and stars. For instance, he tells the story of Daphne, who escaped from the lust of the sun-god Apollo by turning into a bay laurel tree.

At the height of Ovid’s fame and success, in the Roman year 761 (8 CE), the emperor Augustus Caesar, ruler of the entire known world, exiled the poet, sending him away to live in the distant town of Tomis (present-day Constanta, Romania) on the shores of the Black Sea. The reason for this punishment is still a mystery. Ovid said only that it was because of “a poem and an error.” He wrote many letters and poems addressed to friends back in Rome complaining about the cold winters and primitive living conditions and hoping to be forgiven. However, these efforts were not successful, and Ovid died and was buried in Tomis in Roman year 771 (17 or 18 CE).

II. History

The great Roman general Julius Caesar, who conquered Gaul (present-day France), invaded Britain, and made himself dictator of Rome, was assassinated on the Ides of March (March 15), in Roman year 760 (44 BC), a year before Ovid was born. A series of civil wars dominated the years of the poet’s childhood, resulting in the triumph of Julius Caesar’s nephew Octavius, who took the title of Augustus, and ruled with absolute power for more than forty years. During the lifetime of Augustus, the Roman Empire extended its rule over present-day Spain, much of Germany, the Balkans, Turkey, Syria, Egypt and North Africa. The Romans were only indirectly aware of the other great empire at the eastern end of the Eurasian landmass: Han China. Roman glassware and Chinese silk made their way via intermediate traders along the Silk Road across Central Asia to arrive at their destinations greatly inflated in price.

III. Culture

Ovid’s Metamorphoses were highly influential in the European Renaissance as an ideal of humanism replaced earlier dogmas dominated by the Church. Ovid directly influenced the first great poem in Italian, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (Dante places Ovid in Limbo along with other great pre-Christian poets), and the first great poem in English, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Several of William Shakespeare’s plays, including Romeo and Juliet, retell stories from Ovid. Miguel de Cervantes was inspired by Ovid when he wrote Don Quixote. Russian poet Alexander Pushkin compared himself to Ovid when he too was exiled, and Osip Mandelshtam titled his second book after Ovid’s poems from exile.

IV. About this poem

Contemporary scientists investigating the behavior of dynamic, complex systems are developing a field of study called chaos theory. It is thought that entities as various as languages, poems, living creatures and the universe itself, evolve along the fuzzy frontier between order and chaos. Too much order, and things are rigidly frozen and change is impossible. Too much chaos, and everything is slippery, nothing can be accomplished.

These three majestic lines from the opening of Ovid’s 2000-year-old epic poem Metamorphoses describe the chaotic condition of the primitive universe. This description has much in common with the opening lines of Genesis in Hebrew: the earth was without form and void, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep. These images are also quite similar to the way cosmology describes the early moments of the expanding universe after the Big Bang.

Ovid wrote “Metamorphoses”  in a structured Latin meter known as dactylic hexameter. There are six (think hexagon) feet in each line. A foot consists of either two or three syllables, which may be LONG or short. Feet can be organized either as a dactyl (LONG-short-short) or a spondee (LONG–LONG). The last two feet in each line are always dactyl followed by spondee (OM ni a CAE LUM). It’s easier to figure out the meter of the line by working backward from these two last feet.

Learning from translation: English meaning is primarily derived from word order. Latin meaning is derived from case endings. After you translate word for word you will need to rearrange to make sense. In line 1, caelum (sky) is what covers everything (quod tegit omnia). In line 2, naturae goes with vultus (face of nature), while toto goes with in orbe (everything in the world). In line 3, the -que suffix at the end of indigesta means “and.”

An epic is a long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person, or group of persons. Elements that typically distinguish epics include superhuman deeds, fabulous adventures, highly stylized language, and a blending of lyrical and dramatic tradition. Many of the world’s oldest written narratives are in epic form, including the Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Sanskrit Mahabharata, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. Both of Homer’s epics arc composed in dactylic hexameter, which became the standard for Greek and Latin oral poetry. Homeric verse is characterized by the use of extended similes and formulaic phrases, such as epithets, to fill out the verse form. Greek and Latin epics frequently open with an invocation to the muse, as is shown in the opening lines of the Odyssey.

V. Suggested activities

Before consulting the Glossary, working in pairs, find words you think may be cognate to words in English or Spanish. Guess their meanings. Which language has more cognates in Ovid, Spanish or English? Why?

Assign one line to each group. Starting from the dactyl and spondee at the end, map out the other four feet. Write out your line, putting the LONG syllables in CAPITAL letters and putting a slash line between each foot. Read the line out loud according to your metrical analysis, drawing out the LONG syllables.

Research other origin myths. What do they have in common with Ovid and Genesis, and how are they different? For instance, the Ohlone Indians tell the story that in the beginning the world was covered with water except for the summit of Mount Diablo, where Coyote, Eagle and Hummingbird acted as heroes to bring order out of chaos.

VI. Original Poetry  

Write your own version of the origin of the universe in an 11-line poem with five words in each line.

Write a free-form poem about a situation in real life that you perceive as chaotic. Borrow some vocabulary words from Ovid. See if you can arrive at some kind of order at the end of the poem.

Write a poem that alternates between order and chaos. Begin with chaos: write a line using all real English words that has no meaning (it’s harder than you think!) Then take off from the last word and writer a line making some kind of sense. When the sensible line loses interest, go nack to no meaning, then back to sense. End with a line that makes sense. Reread your poem. Do the no-meaning parts make a different kind of sense?