Ovid Redux

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY seemed on parade this past summer. The Olympic Games in the shadow of the Parthenon were almost enough to erase the unpleasant spectacle of Wolfgang Petersen’s movie Troy–in which the wrath of Achilles came across as Brad is mad, and this time it’s personal. And Hollywood isn’t done with the ancient world yet. Within a few months, we’re promised two big-screen Alexanders the Great, with Colin Farrell starring in Oliver Stone’s version and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Baz Luhrmann vehicle.

Hollywood probably won’t be taking a crack at Ovid anytime soon. The Metamorphoses would not make a good epic movie. For that matter, Ovid’s classic treasury of classical mythology doesn’t make a particularly good epic poem. Surfing through time and place, constantly shifting genre and tone, it is a maddeningly episodic work.

But, as the recent verse translation of the Metamorphoses by David Raeburn reminds us, the episodes are nearly all brilliantly memorable. Midas and the Golden Touch. Arachne turned into a spider. Europa seduced by Jupiter in the form of a bull. Orpheus turning around to see his wife. Swift Atalanta losing a race as she stoops for a golden apple. . . . Chances are, if you think of a Greek myth, it’s actually Ovid’s Latin version that comes to mind. The Metamorphoses is a rollicking work, suffused with a sensibility both comic and erotic, though it has a tendency to get overheated. As Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan, “Ovid’s a rake, as half his verses show him”–and to be thought rakish by Byron is something, indeed.

The Roman poet proved too rakish for many in his own day as well. Ovid–Publius Ovidius Naso, to give his full Roman name–was born a little more than a year after Julius Caesar had been killed on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., and so grew up during the bloody Civil War between Mark Antony and Octavian. Once Octavian won, he took the name Augustus Caesar and became, among other things, the patron to the poets of Rome’s Golden Age. The older luminaries of this set, particularly Virgil and Horace, embraced the necessary evil of Augustus’ absolutism. Ovid, however, was younger and less favorably disposed to the emperor, who would end up exiling him to a remote village on the Black Sea. Ovid later made the cryptic claim that his crime had been carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake.” What the mistake was is anybody’s guess, but the poem was probably The Art of Love, a handbook of seduction which could very well have been subtitled, “How to Pick Up Chicks in Ancient Rome.” It’s not so much that the content of the book ran counter to the morality which Augustus had hoped to impose upon Roman society. The real problem was that, as an exercise in going from “bed to verse,” it was very, very funny–and nothing provokes an autocrat more than a giggle. Ovid paid dearly for his wit: This most urbane of poets spent the rest of his life composing sophisticated poetry among a savage people who knew no Latin.

The Art of Love may have gotten Ovid in hot water, but it is his Metamorphoses that established his reputation. The British poet laureate Ted Hughes, just before he died in 1998, released his Tales from Ovid, a loose translation of the epic, which has since become a Broadway play. An excellent prose version by classicist Michael Simpson came out last year in paperback from the University of Massachusetts Press, and Norton released a translation into verse by poet Charles Martin this past winter.

NOW PENGUIN has added another version. Where Charles Martin translated the Latin poetry into a good old iambic pentameter, David Raeburn has more daringly opted to render Ovid into English hexameter, a six-beat line that unfolds with a graceful though at times awkward grandeur. The hexameter is a long line, and often in this translation the verse runs over clumsily to the next line. Still, Raeburn’s English suits the sound of Ovid, and throughout the epic, the translation captures the variable moods of the original. The Metamorphoses dashes from tale to tale, it is true, but it is also an epic of the emotions, ranging from the sublime to the repugnant and touching on every feeling in between.

Among the more repugnant episodes is the story of the Thracian king Tereus. At the urging of his wife, Procne, the king makes a long journey to recover her sister, Philomela, whom he rapes on the trip home. Fearing she might expose him to his wife, he tears out her tongue, a brutal moment Ovid describes thus (in Raeburn’s translation):

From the initial horror, the poetry snakes its way to an utterly preposterous literary conceit. To be sure, Philomela’s wriggling tongue is a memorable image, but one cannot help but feel that Ovid has had just a little too much fun writing these lines. Even in antiquity, his poetry was criticized as self-indulgent, too often crossing the boundaries of good taste. The passage above is nothing less than an act of artistic cruelty.

Yet there is a singular charm to Ovid. There are few tales more poignant, for instance, than that of the old couple, Baucis and Philemon, who were tested by Jupiter and Mercury in disguise. Because the elderly pair alone had shown any hospitality to the gods, only their home was spared from the punitive flood which followed. When asked to name their reward, Baucis and Philemon responded that, since neither wanted to outlive the other, their only desire was to die at the same time. And so, at the final moment, it came to pass (Raeburn again):

It had never occurred to me just how sweet that story was until I taught it one time at a local Senior Center. At the end of class, a woman took her husband’s frail hand in her own, and as their fingers interlocked like spindly branches, she whispered, “That’s what I would have wished for, too.”

IT IS MARVELOUS to think that, across the ages, the rakish old Roman could speak so directly to an old woman’s deepest wish. Through the centuries, the Metamorphoses has exercised a continuous influence upon artists as scattered in time and space as Bernini, Dante, Shakespeare, and Kafka. When we look with wonder on Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, when we laugh at the follies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when we recoil at the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, we also pay tribute to Ovid’s genius.

And no wonder: Ovid’s vision of a world in flux permeates Western culture, and not just its literature. The Metamorphoses may be a storehouse of myth, but there was never a book more true to life. Moments of glory, Homeric or Olympic, are few and far between for most of us. Shuttling between identities and duties, we live our lives like figures from Ovid, in oddly juxtaposed episodes, certain of nothing and subject ever to change.

Christopher McDonough is an assistant professor of classical languages and director of the humanities program at Sewanee University.