I. Metamorphoses as Unsettling

I.1 Narrative Disunity

I.2 Bodily Change and the Limits of the Human

I.3 Excessive Violence

II. Aesthetics as Ethics and Politics

II.1 Ovid as Tiresias

II.2 Ovid as Imperial Rome, A Silver Poet of a Silver Age

II.3 Two Questions for the Silver Age Narrative

II.4 Postscript: Ovid as Liberating

Daphne and Apollo, Met I.550-67
Tiresias, Met III.324-331
Niobe, Met VI.301-12
Philomela, Procne, Tereus & Itys, Met VI.553-62, VI.650-60

1. Ovid wrote a book of love poems without being in love; a mythological poem without understanding mythology; a poem on national themes without the inspiration of a Roman spirit; and a collection of elegiac plaints without the impulse of genuine feeling. His sole attachment is to smart society. It is this which he celebrates in the poems of his youth. On this he models his pictures of Greek or Roman antiquity in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti; and his removal from that society is the cause of his grief in the Poems of Exile.

from a 19th century History of Latin Literature, quoted by Higham, 106

2. Some people think a plot can be said to be a unified one if it merely centers about one person. But this is not true; for countless things happen to that one person, some of which in no way constitute a unit. In just the same way there are many actions of a single individual which in no way constitute a single action. Therefore, those poets who write a Heracleid, a Thesiad, and poems of that kind appear to be following a wrong principle; for they think that since Heracles was s single individual any plot dealing with him must of necessity have unity.

Aristotle, Poetics 8 (tr, P. Epps)

3. At a touch of the whip the two teams sprang forward in opposite directions, carrying with them the fragments of the mangled body still held by the ropes. All eyes were averted from the disgusting spectacle -- never, in all our history, repeated. That was the first and last time that fellow-countrymen of ours inflicted a punishment so utterly without regard to the laws of humanity. Save for that one instance we can fairly claim to have been content with more humane forms of punishment than any other nation.

Livy I.28

4. He used language by no means over-freely except in his poetry, where he was well aware of his faults, and enjoyed them. What can make this clear is that once, when he was asked by his friends to suppress three of his lines, he asked in return to be able to make an exception of three over which they should have no rights. This seemed a fair condition. They wrote in private the lines they wanted removed, while he wrote in the ones he wanted saved, and the sheets of both contained the same verses. ...It is clear from this that the great man lacked not the judgement but the will to restrain the licence of his poetry.

Elder Seneca, Controversiae II.2.12

5. Everything that Roman oratory has to set alongside the haughty Greeks reached its peak in Cicero's day: all the geniuses who have brought brilliance to our subject were born then. Since then, things have got worse daily. ...Look at our young men: they are lazy, their intellects asleep; no one can stay awake to take pains over a single honest pursuit. Sleep, torpor and a perseverance in evil that is more shameful than either have seized hold of their minds. Libidinous delight in song and dance transfixes these effeminates. Braiding the hair, refining the voice until it is as caressing as a woman's, competing in bodily softness with women, beautifying themselves with filthy fineries -- this is the pattern our youths set themselves. Which of your contemporaries, quite apart from his talent and diligence, is sufficiently a man? Born feeble and spineless, they stay that way throughout their lives: taking others' chastity by storm, they are careless of their own. ... "An orator, [as Cato the elder said], is a good man skilled in speaking." Well, go and look for orators among the smooth and hairless of today, men only in their lusts.

Elder Seneca, Controversiae I.pref.6-10

6. Republican ideals were the only genuine spiritual force in the early empire, and they finally lost what little power remained in them with the new accord between emperor and senate.

Williams, Change and Decline, 293

7. Writers adapted themselves and their values not only to fear, but also to the desire to impress, to a sense of the superiority of the Greeks no less than to that of great Roman predecessors, to irrationality and sensationalism, and to a wistful romantic escapism. ... Some made adaptations with success; but in general the proportion of decline involved in the adjustment of values steadily increased until the sense of belonging to a living tradition was completely lost, and Roman writers, vainly imitating Greek predecessors, groped back into the most remote past to find, at any price, some shred of novelty. That is not just change: that is decline.

Williams, Change and Decline, 5

8.
Two more -- twin brothers, Thymber and Larides,
the sons of Daucus -- fell on Latin fields;
so like each other, indistinguishable,
that even their own parents made sweet errors.
But Pallas drew a cruel difference
between them: he lopped off the head of Thymber;
from you, Larides, he chopped off the hand;
now severed, it seeks out its master, and
its dying fingers twitch and try again,
again to clutch the sword. Vergil, Aeneid 10.390-96

9.
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling, from If

10. Doesn't the truth sometimes go beyond all imaginary conceptions, however exaggerated they may be? Have the Metamorphoses of Ovid gone further? Herculine Barbin, Memoirs, 87

Michel Foucault, ed., Herculine Barbin : Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite , tr. Richard McDougall (Brighton, 1980)

Karl Galinsky, Ovid's Metamorphoses (Cal, 1975)

Judith Hallett, "Feminist Theory, Historical Periods, Literary Canons, and the Study of Greco-Roman Antiquity," Feminist Theory and the Classics, eds N. Rabinowitz & A. Richlin (Routledge, 1993)

T. F. Higham, "Ovid: Some Aspects of his Character and Aims," CR 48 (1934), 105-116

Penelope Murray, "Bodies in Flux: Ovid's Metamorphoses," Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings, ed. D. Montserrat (Routledge, 1998), 80-96

L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955)

Gordon Williams, Change and decline: Roman literature in the early Empire (Cal, 1978)