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Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Age of History (Lecture on Books XI-XV) (Patreon)

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2025-02-23 21:31:17
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Content

'The better part of me will be borne forever beyond the high stars, and my name will never die. I will be on men's lips, and if a sacred poet has any power to prophecy the truth, throughout the ages I will live on in fame.'

Today we enter the Age of History, which draws us to the close of the Metamorphoses. And we may have reached the climax of this comic epic, but this is certainly not the end of our deep friendship with Ovid.

We are enjoying another curation of marvellous mythological stories, pristine poetry, and powerful life advice. And we're discussing comedians as truth-tellers, the moral value of metaphor, history vs myth, Ovid's response to Homer and Virgil, tragic love, living forever, reading as a great conversation, and much more.

Please do feel free to enjoy the discussion even if you haven't read up to these books yet or dip in as best suits your personal reading journey.

Timestamps:

0:00 welcome to the Age of History

2:00 message at the heart of the epic

4:00 on the death of Orpheus

8:00 comedians are truth-tellers

9:00 the story of King Midas

12:00 moral value of metaphor

16:00 founding of the city of Troy

18:00 conception & birth of Achilles 

20:00 story of King Ceyx & Alcyone

24:00 watery death & prophetic sleep

27:00 the power of dreams & love

30:00 the world at large is healing

31:00 visiting the house of Rumour

34:00 blurring of history & myth

35:00 the history of the Trojan War

37:00 how Ovid responds to Homer

39:00 battle of Cygnus vs Achilles

43:00 was Achilles a real person?

45:00 Ovid’s sympathy for women

46:00 on Nestor’s story of Caenis

48:00 battle of Lapiths & Centaurs

50:00 when narrators erase history

53:00 on the death of Achilles

55:00 dispute of Ajax vs Ulysses

57:00 individuals vs the collective

59:00 Ovid on the Fall of Troy

1:00:00 ghost of Achilles returns

1:02:00 the wanderings of Aeneas

1:04:00 on Scylla & Charybdis

1:06:00 reading as great conversation

1:07:00 the Cyclops & Galatea 

1:09:00 the love of Circe is rejected

1:10:00 tragic love of Aeneas & Dido

1:13:00 battle of Aeneas vs Turnus

1:15:00 myth of Romulus & Remus

1:16:00 the teachings of Pythagoras

1:19:00 why we need not fear death

1:22:00 the idea of metempsychosis

1:23:00 deification of Julius Caesar

1:24:00 ending of the Metamorphoses

1:25:00 why Ovid will live forever

1:26:00 be proud of your reading

1:27:00 what have we learnt? 

1:28:00 my personal top ten stories

1:31:00 common traits in my favourites

1:33:00 what did you make of this work?

1:34:00 discussing our next big read

Resources to Explore:

  • Music Appreciation: Ovid's greatest influences when it comes to the events of this part of the Metamorphoses are Homer and Virgil. We will be diving into the former together this year, but in the meantime you may like to enjoy a curation of musical works inspired by their stories. We have Berlioz' Les Troyens, Michael Tippet's King Priam, Max Bruch's Odysseus, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. And, for fun, there are quite a few enterprising artists who have put together cool rocks operas based on Homer's epics here and here that deserve more love (I think that Odyssey rock opera is perfect gym music).

  • Film & Documentary: Whilst not aiming to be super faithful to the Iliad, the 2004 film Troy has great entertainment factor and is well worth a screening to appreciate how these great writers still continue to exert their influence today. There is also the Netflix series The Fall of Troy. For documentaries, Real History explores the findings from archeological digs here, and there is also the fantastic six-part BBC documentary with Michael Wood called In Search of the Trojan War. For an upcoming film to look forward to, it is exciting to have Christopher Nolan's Odyssey on the horizon.

  • Ovid Expansion: If you have enjoyed your reading of the Metamorphoses, you may like to make a plan to break into some of the poet's other works too. I think it's a great stretch reading goal to explore further works of at least one new writer every year. If Ovid is that special writer for you, then treat yourself to a collection of his love poems. This volume contains his Amores, Cosmetics for Ladies, The Art of Love, and The Cures for Love. Or you may enjoy his Heroides, which is a collection of fictional letters written by mythological heroines to their absent lovers. There's also his unfinished Fasti, in which deities explain the origins of ancient festivals and customs. If you would like to enjoy a modern poet's take on the Roman poet's stories, then check out Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid.

  • Your Top Ten: The moment is finally here. It's time for us to share our personal favourite stories from this sweeping epic saga. As one reader said, the most joyful thing about comparing our favourites is the fact that there is no strong commonality. All of our favourite stories are going to be unique to us. You will identify patterns in your favourites that speak volumes about who you are as an individual, what you love, what you fear, what you desire for your life, and the wise lessons that are most applicable to your life right now. You can hear my favourites at the end of the above discussion, but I would now love to know which ones resonated with you. Why these stories specifically? Does identifying your favourites bring any wisdom that can aid you on your hero's journey?

  • Our Next Great Story: Congratulations on bringing yourself so powerfully to Ovid's Metamorphoses. You should feel intensely proud of your achievement. As you continue to journey through great literature, you will realise just how robust your knowledge of ancient literature and mythological stories is becoming. You'll have a lot of satisfying insights and click moments when you come across classical allusions in the great books and you'll see how great literature is a grand conversation between the modern and the ancient world. This weekend coming, we will be moving into the nineteenth century with our 'how to read' introductory video for Flaubert's Madame Bovary. We'll be talking about our approach, translation, pacing, themes, author background, realism, controversy, and much more. You don't need to read anything for this work just yet, but make sure you secure your copy. And if you want to dive in, I have an optional reading exercise for you, along with details about this read, discussed at the end of our previous lecture here. We'll run through translation options together, but I'll personally be working with the Steegmuller translation. I am so excited to conduct a deep appreciation of this masterpiece with you because an intimate acquaintance with Flaubert is intensely informative when it comes to so many great books in the literary tradition and contains powerful truths about the human condition. A huge well done again for living through Ovid's masterpiece. I am so grateful that you have made our first read-throughs of the year such special experiences.

Questions for You:

1) What were your personal top ten favourite stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses?

2) What did you make of this work? Did it live up to its reputation?

3) What will you remember most from your journeying through this work?

4) What area connected with Ovid, classical literature, or mythology are you now most keen to explore?

5) How would you persuade another to read the Metamorphoses? And what advice would you give to facilitate a meaningful reading experience?

And please do share with us your impressions and favourite passages from the end of the Metamorphoses.

Congratulations on reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, everybody!

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Comments

Yvonne Finnegan

I am finally caught up! I thoroughly enjoyed the Metamorphoses once I received the Golding book. A translation in prose that I first started with was impossibly dull to me. Golding’s quirky mix of 16th Century English and Latin expressions and the effervescence and musicality of his “fourteeners” verse make this translation truly a classic in itself. I don’t like to rank, but the stories I found most compelling were Arachne, Jason and Medea, Cephalus and Procris, Orpheus and Euridice, King Midas (especially the Ears and the Barber’s stratagem), Ceyx and Alcyone (House of Slumbers), the House of Rumor, the Cyclops, Glaucus and Scylla. I gathered a number of excellent Commonplace Book entries from this work. Added to Ovid’s work was Golding’s Epistle explaining the “dark Philosophie of turned shape,” which is delectable in itself. Thank you, Ben, for leading us “through his woorke the wonderfull exchaunge/Of Goddes, men, beasts, and elements, to sundry shapes right straunge” (lines 13-14 of the epistle). 😍

Richard

A favourite for me is Pythagoras. Not a story at all, but a chapter where I really felt Ovid's voice coming through and laying out his stall and foundational thoughts at last using Pythagoras as a means to an end. The rest of the work illustrating this through the constant descriptions of flux and transformation. This is one spot I'll go back to when there is a lot going on in my own life as a reminder that it's normal and relax into it. Static and fixed is the more unusual state of the world!

maria elena gonzalez

The themes I would like to pull from my wider reading into Madame Bovary are the themes of the impact of government, economics (capitalism, socialism, marxism), literature/arts, religion, tradition, on the lives of women and the working class.

Nick Senger

I share a love of sea narratives with you, Ben. Sea stories are such primal journey stories. (Have you ever the Aubrey/Maturin stories by Patrick O'Brian?) The ocean is just so vast, dark, and dangerous, while at the same time so beautifully deep and moving. Truly sublime and to my mind one of the three great depths of creation: ocean, sky, and soul. As Victor Hugo put it in Les Misérables, “There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.” I ended up with a list of 24 favorite stories from Ovid that I had to whittle down to 10. The Epoch of the Gods was definitely my favorite. Of my 24 favorite stories, 13 came from the Epoch of the Gods, 8 from the Age of Heroes, and 3 from History. It was very hard to narrow down my list, but here are my ten favorite stories in the order in which they occurred: 1. Deucalion and Pyrrha 2. Daphne and Apollo 3. Phaethon 4. Auglauros 5. Actaeon 6. Narcissus and Echo 7. Arachne 8. Medea and Jason 9. Daedalus and Icarus 10. Pythagoras

Greg
>>167208551

That is an excellent article. So many of the author's observations resonate with truth, for my life, my marriage. Thank you for posting here! ps. You don't need to be in the military or married to a service member to find insight(s) in this article.

Imogen Thurbon

I can really recommend the new Stephanie McCarter translation. It’s stunnning. I really enjoyed the Melville but this is just wonderful.

MariaPapira

Hello everyone! It's been a while since I asked if you would like to see some special books from our antiquarian bookshop. The thing is, I wanted to wait for Benjamin's approval, but I haven't heard from him yet. I'm pretty sure he's just very busy producing new lectures (the quality and quantity of his postings is almost beyond belief). 🤯 I've thought about it and will give you some insights anyway - he probably won't mind... So I've created an account on Flickr that should be visible to everyone. There it's easy to create different folders for different works and I can add something from time to time: https://www.flickr.com/photos/maria-papira/ I tell you, we have far too many books! Our Ovid editions alone have completely overwhelmed me. 😳 And as it is - understandably - one of the most richly illustrated works, you could take hundreds of pictures. So for now, just a few impressions. If you feel like it, you can tell me a few myths that you would particularly like to see illustrated! Just this afternoon we found a Latin-English edition from the 18th century - I'll take some photos of it this week! I hope this will give you pleasure and spark your imagination! 😊

Marina

Baucis and Philemon, Daphne and Apollo, Origin of the World. But, most and foremost, your lectures Ben, I am AN old ill Italian woman and you have been a Godsend.

Ole

Thank you Ben for a fantasitc lecture series! I came late to this, just reading it now in december. After reading Homer with the book club, and it was really fun to see some of the charcters again, and how Ovid used the battle of troy to tell other stories. Like Nestors story about Caeneus and the battle was a highlight. It really took me back to when I was in the army, and we just sat and swaped stories at the end of the day, when we where out in the field. The story that effected me most was Procne and Philomela, it started out dark early on and just got worse, it had me crying by the end. The ones I liked the most was Phaëthon & Phoebus, Midas, The Contest of Arachne and Minerva, Jason & Medea, Caeneus, Icarus, narcissus and the teachings of Pythagoras. If i was to choose just one it would be Phaëthon and Phobus. The most visual sceane for me was the storm in Ceyx & Alcyone.