An Ovid For Our Times
With the best sellers lists being dominated by dubious celebrity biographies and anguished ’real life'stories of no literary merit, then we need, more than ever, the classics. I’m not just talking about the modern classics by people such as Dickens, the Brontes and Dostoevsky to name but a few, although of course these all have their merit. No, I’m talking much further back in time to the very earliest classics of western literature. Ah, ’Homer'I hear you cry, well, actually you’ve gone a bit too far back there, but I believe that more than ever in our hard nosed, matrialisti society we can take great pleasure in the escapism offered by Publius Ovidius Naso - better known as Ovid.
Ovid was at the height of his powers at the start of the first century AD, having given up a promising political career to concentrate on his true love - poetry. He is often overshadowed by his Roman contemporary Virgil, famous writer of the Aeneid, but to my mind, and in the opinion of an increasing number of other literary critics, Ovid was the towering talent of his day. While Virgil is all grandiose pomposity, Ovid displays a subtle wit and a constant readiness to mock society and its beliefs. Indeed this refusal to accept the literary norms of the day, along with his attacks on the great and the good of society, eventually saw Ovid exiled from Rome by the emporer Augustus.
The great gift that Ovid left future generations is ’Metamorphoses’. A collection of varied myths, legends and ancient fairytales is collected by Ovid and moulded into chronological order so that he takes us from the very beginning of creation, through the Roman’s very own flood myth and up to the moment where Julius Caesar himself becomes a god.
The unifying theme, as the title suggests, is metamorphosis, change - and each in the sprawling collection of stories involves change of some sorts. Typically the irreverent stories chronicle the gods changing their form to seduce mortals: such famous stories as Jupiter changing into a bull to ravish Europa, the story of Leda and the swan, and Jupiter becoming a shower of gold to ravish Danae all survive principally thanks to Ovid.
An exemplary recent translation by A.D.Melville captures the sheer joy of Ovid’s words. Translated into blank verse with a smattering of rhymong couplets this wonderful translation brings Ovid triumphantly into the modern pantheon of literature where he belongs.
Metamorphoses deals with sex, lust, violence, triumph, defeat, the great and the little men and the constant struggle against fate; it is a book that more than any other shows how wonderful these early classics were and, above all other Romano-Greek classics, it is supremely entertaining. There is more salacious fun in a beautifully composed chapter of Ovid than there is in a hundred Katie Price books (this seemingly being her average yearly output, why do we want to know about her appointments at laser hair removal slough anyway?) and this more than anything else is why we need Ovid more than ever today.
Comments are closed!