according to ovid, what existed before the earth and the sea?
Ovid's Metamorphoses (Advertizing three-eight) was non originally as controversial equally his other poetic works. Only as centuries have passed, its notoriety has increased. Recent calls to provide trigger-warnings to university students before they study the work tell us every bit much virtually modern Western attitudes towards sex, violence and censorship as the Metamorphoses tells u.s. about the gender politics of ancient Rome.
Ovid's xv-book epic, written in exquisite Latin hexameter, is a rollercoaster of a read. Get-go with the cosmos of the world, and ending with Rome in his ain lifetime, the Metamorphoses drags the reader through time and space, from ancestry to endings, from life to decease, from moments of delicious joy to episodes of depravity and abjection.
Such is life, Ovid would say.
The madness and chaos of some 250 stories, spanning effectually 700 lines of poetry per book, are woven together by the theme of metamorphosis or transformation. The artistic dexterity involved in pulling off this literary feat is testimony to Ovid'due south skill and ambition as a poet. This accomplishment also goes a long style in explaining the rightful identify the Metamorphoses holds inside the canon of classical literature, placed as it is beside other nifty epics of Mediterranean antiquity such as the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid.
Kicking against the pricks
But for some, the Metamorphoses sits uneasily alongside its more morally and patriotically sound predecessors. Similar a troublesome younger brother, an embarrassment to the family unit, Ovid'southward ballsy "kicks confronting the pricks," to paraphrase the paraphrase of Nick Cave.
The Homeric Iliad (c. 850 BC) soars to the literary heights of the sublime, and shows the states how to alive and dice, to meditate on mortality, to embrace sorrow, to grip and and so release hate, to truly love.
The Odyssey (c. 800 BC) takes united states of america on an ballsy voyage forever leading towards home, sometimes making us express mirth, and occasionally letting down its high-brow hair with some sex and infidelity. Yet, appropriate to the gravitas of epic poetry, the Odyssey is too about the journeying of a man determined to maintain his heroic stature equally he navigates all sorts of dangers in strange lands.
Some 700 years after, when the Homeric verses were yet regarded as the benchmark for epic poetry, Virgil composed the Aeneid (19 BC). This Latin epic casts a patriotic spell over its audience in its evocation of the foundation of Rome from the ashes of Troy to the glory of the Augustan Age. Dissimilar his poetic successor, all the same, Virgil is warning to literary censorship nether the reign of Augustus (63 BC-Advertizement xiv), Rome's first emperor, and advisedly navigates its perilous terrain.
Rome is great according to Virgil. Information technology e'er has been. It always will be. Merely Ovid is non convinced, and he seeks to capture an epic earth of doubtfulness and destabilisation instead of "drinking the Kool-Help" that flows from Augustus' fountains.
Ovid'due south graphic tales of metamorphosis begin with the story of Cardinal Anarchy; a messy lump of discordant atoms, and shapeless prototypes of land, sea and air. This unruly form floated about in pettiness until some unnamed being disentangled it. Voilà! The globe is fashioned in the class of a perfectly circular ball. Oceans take shape and rise in waves spurred on by winds. Springs, pools and lakes appear and above the valleys and plains and mountains is the sky.
Lastly, humankind is made and so begins the mythical Ages of Man. And, as each Age progresses – from Gilded, to Silver, to Bronze and finally to Iron – humankind becomes increasingly corrupt.
Ovid's gods and humans never really escape the Age of Iron in the Metamorphoses. Throughout the ballsy, the setting that emerges in Book I functions equally a brilliantly appropriate dystopic stage on which the poet-cum-puppeteer orchestrates his spectacles.
Drawing on the Greek mythology inherited by the Romans, Ovid directs his dramas one subsequently another, relentlessly bombarding his readers with beautiful metrics and awe-inspiring imagery as that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, Arachne, Daphne and Apollo, Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan.
Hundreds of hapless mortals, heroes, heroines, gods and goddesses ascension victorious, feel defeat, suffer rape, and inevitably metamorphose into something other than their original forms. Chaos begins the world, and so into Chaos we are born, alive and die. As the offspring of the Age of Atomic number 26, we must suffer and struggle against corruption, brutality and injustice.
A poem and a mistake
Ovid experienced a world of chaos and iron immediate when, in AD 8, he was banished by Augustus. His wrongdoings were, in his own words, carmen et mistake ("a poem and a mistake").
The poem was the Ars Amatoria (The Fine art of Dearest), a 3-book lovers' handbook that explains the dos and don'ts of personal grooming, how to organise trysts with married women (go her maid "on side"), repairing a broken centre (surprise your "ex" while she'south in the middle of her beauty routine – yuk!), names the best places for "hooking-up" (try the races or the theatre), and offers advice on keeping your daughter (exist circumspect when she'southward unwell). Interestingly, the third volume was written for women – quite a revolutionary move in view of the gender inequality in the twilight years of the 1st century BC.
What irritated Augustus sufficiently enough to relegate the poet to the heart of nowhere was his perception that the Ars Amatoria made a mockery of his moral reforms. Not 1 for frolic, Augustus had spearheaded and implemented a series of legislative campaigns that raised the moral bar for the goodly citizens of Rome. Infidelity, while e'er illegal in Rome, was made particularly so nether the watchful middle of the emperor and legal ramifications were more actively enforced than in previous decades.
The mistake that Ovid mentions is more difficult to identify – with scholarly opinions differing on what it was Ovid actually did to offend Augustus. Theories range from Ovid engaging in an affair with one of the imperial women – maybe Augustus' daughter (Julia the Elderberry) or granddaughter (Julia the Younger) – to his accidentally witnessing an imperial scandal.
Whatever the mistake, combined with the sick-themed Ars Amatoria, it was sufficiently serious to issue in Ovid'southward banishment to Tomis (Constanța in modern-day Romania). Tomis, at the very edges of the Roman Empire, was regarded as a barbarian, frightening and uncivilised place. Ovid certainly painted it this style in his poetic epistles, the Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae Ex Ponto (Letters from the Pontus).
Forced to be in a place where his native Latin was scarcely heard, Ovid's despair is evoked in one of his well-nigh memorable couplets: "writing a poem you tin read to no one / is like dancing in the dark."
For the optimal punishment of Ovid, Augustus chose his location well, and he never reneged on his conclusion. Nor did his successor, Tiberius (42 BC-AD 37).
Ovid died in Tomis in AD 17.
An epic virtually silencing
In ane of the definitive pieces of scholarship on the Metamorphoses, Reading Ovid's Rapes (1992) by classicist Amy Richlin, it is argued that the epic was completed during Ovid's time in Tomis. This may not initially appear to have any begetting on its content or intent, nevertheless Richlin suggests a profound relevance:
The silenced victims, the artists horribly punished by legalistic gods for assuming expression … read like allegories of Ovid's experience …
Accordingly, Tomis not only gave Ovid time to augment the poem in view of his ain experiences but, as equally important, its composition was being finalised during the emperor's inquisition into the carmen et error.
Indeed, Ovid's own silencing past Augustus may be seen to exist enacted over and over again in the Metamorphoses in the most grotesque of ways. Ovid's tales describe tongues existence wrenched out, humans barking out their sorrows instead of crying, women transformed into mute creatures by jealous gods, and desperate victims bearing witness to their corruption through non-verbal means.
The Metamorphoses is an epic about the act of silencing.
Jealousy, spite, lust and punishment are besides consistently nowadays in Ovid's chaotic globe.
So is rape.
Rape is undoubtedly the most controversial and confronting theme of the Metamorphoses. Information technology is the ultimate manifestation of male power in the poem and the hundreds of transformations that occur are often the means of escaping it.
An early tale of attempted rape is narrated in Volume I, involving the nymph, Daphne and the god, Apollo. Intent on raping Daphne, Apollo chases her through the forest until, utterly exhausted, she calls out to her male parent, the river god Peneus to rescue her:
"Help, father!" she called. "If your streams have divine powers!
Destroy the shape, which pleases too well, with transformation!
Peneus answers his daughter's entreaty, and Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree:
… a heavy torpor seizes her limbs,
her soft breasts are encircled with thin bark,
her pilus changes into leaves, her artillery alter into branches,
her feet once so swift become stuck with stubborn roots,
her face has a leafy embrace; only her elegance remains.
The tale of Daphne and Apollo, like so many stories in the Metamorphoses, is classified as an aetiological myth; that is, a narrative that explains an origin. Simply, as the extract above testifies, it is then much more than that.
Reading Ovid now
Where does a modern audience begin with a story such as Daphne and Apollo?
How practice we begin to unravel the hundreds of other such tales that follow it?
During the last few years, the Metamorphoses has been challenged every bit a legitimate text for third Humanities students. Defying the hundreds of years of pedagogical tradition that has seen the poem ready for both Latin students and, more recently, literary students who written report it in translation, the Metamorphoses has non only been interrogated past scholars such as Richlin, merely has also been the subject of increased educatee complaints and calls for trigger-warnings.
In response to the growing number of objections to the piece of work, academic and university executives accept been called on to take a position – not only in relation to the Metamorphoses, but in response to other materials that are perceived to return the tertiary experience unsafe.
The Chancellor at Oxford, Chris Patten, has been quoted every bit saying that history cannot be rewritten to adapt gimmicky western morals. At the opposite stop of this argue, are students such equally the members of Columbia University'due south Multicultural Affairs Advisory Council, who have challenged the inclusion of the Metamorphoses without an explicit trigger-warning in one of the cadre curriculum courses in the Humanities.
How close such responses to the Metamorphoses verge on literary censorship or, in the words of one journalist, Literature Fascism, does not but depend on 1's philosophical or educational viewpoint. Equally equally important to the debate, and the decisions that may ultimately result from it, is the life-feel of every private in the classroom. Among a form of students taking notes from a lecture on the Metamorphoses, for example, may be a rape survivor.
Current statistics from the United states in item advise that the likelihood of this is exceptionally high. Emerging statistics from across Australia are painting a similar pic.
Such a situation requires alertness and sensitivity when handling texts such every bit the Metamorphoses. But should the work of Ovid be banned or placed among the shelves marked "Warning: Wicked Books"? What would such measures ultimately accomplish? Would information technology broaden safe spaces? Or, would it conscience discussions around rape and shut downwards interrogations of sexual activity, violence and female exploitation? Would it silence one of the means of opposition to the societal sickness of rape?
The Metamorphoses of Ovid has had a long and fascinating history. Its presence amidst the literary canon of the West has functioned as a strange but valuable mirror that has, for over ii millennia, reflected social, moral and artistic community.
From the fourth dimension that Shakespeare read Arthur Golding's 1567 translation and incorporated and so many of the stories into his plays, to the thousands of artworks that have been inspired by the poem, to Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright's 2006 extravaganza, The Lost Echo, to the product in the 2016 Sydney Fringe, to the student protests and the calls for trigger-warnings, the Metamorphoses – much like Ovid himself – simply refuses to go away.
Much like the self-portrait by Albrecht Durer, Olympia past Edouard Manet, the works of modernist painters that enraged European Fascists, Tracey Emin's My Bed, the installations at MONA, Joyce's Ulysses, and a host of films and photomedia, Ovid'due south Metamorphoses testifies to the fact that great art is not necessarily created to please.
Recommended reading: Metamorphoses: A New Translation Paperback by Ovid, translated by Charles Martin (2005).
Montague Basement'due south Metamorphoses is currently showing as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival.
Source: https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-ovids-metamorphoses-and-reading-rape-65316
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