Ovid’s metamorphosis stands out from the literary works of its time
Introduction
Ovid’s metamorphosis stands out from the literary works of his time for being a long poem that addresses ancient myths narrated through history between history, thus possessing a large number of first -person narrators. The poem is counted by the same characters. This extensive poem highlights questions that even society asks such as the creation of the world, stations, the creation of man, the description of how feelings are born and as described. Also in the one we find the explanation of the stories that hide the names of constellations, love and marital faith, and the presence of the involuntary victim.
The poem begins with the creation of the world, Ovid explains in an original and detailed way as planet Earth is born:
The earth denser than the previous ones, absorbed the thickest elements and was compressed by its own weight;Water, flowing around, occupy the last places and surrounded the solid part of the world … that God, whoever, first agglomerated the earth in the form of a great globe, to be the same everywhere ..
Again we see its descriptive originality by populating the world of land bones:
Abandon the temple, cover the heads and solve the tight clothes, and throw the bones of the great mother on your back … Prometheus reassured with soft words the daughter of Epimeteo telling her: or I am wrong, or the oracle is fair and whatIt orders us is no impiety. THE GREAT MOTHER IS THE EARTH. I think what calls bones are the stones that are in the body of the earth
Developing
Another relevant issue that expresses us in various stories of canonical work is divine justice, who commit bad acts are punished. Such is for example the case of Licon, who was turned into a wolf for committing sacrileges, eating people and doubting the divinity of the Jupiter god. It would be too long to enumerate the amount of crimes I found everywhere … it would be said that there is a conspiracy of the crime: that it received all, then, to the point the punishment they deserve! That is my sentence. The same goes for in the third book, where the gods punish almost all the main characters for a crime, regardless of whether the crime was committed to know or not. And we can see how each character is grief according to sin committed;So ironically acteon who was a hunter becomes a deer and is destroyed by his own dogs. The same happens with the sele who committed the sin of having sex with a God and it is this same act that leads to death, are Jupiter’s rays that will kill her by having sex with him.
Narcissus that has rejected all suitors for vanity, he dies for being rejected by himself, for his reflection of the lake. The extensive knowledge of tiresias causes its blindness. We will also see this character as a character that appears in Dante’s hell and will be in the fourth enclosure of the eighth circle where all fortune tellers and prophets are located, which we will analyze later. Ovid himself makes us clear in his third book that: but without a doubt we must always wait until the last day of a man’s life, and no one should be called happy before death and funerals) this phrase leads us to penaltythat in effect for ovid, life could suddenly change.
In the second book we find Calisto who as an involuntary victim cannot fight against the divine will of the gods, in this case she wantsYou can do a woman (if you could see her, Saturnia Juno, you would be more condescending, and fight; but what girl, how mortal could overcome the great Jupiter?. As in Oedipus the king we can see how Ovid indicates that we cannot escape the will of the gods, since they have the power. Perhaps this particular issue may be more dejected by agnostics, but even in 2020 we can question whether or not we have that freedom about divine will, there will be religions that allow you to believe that you have a freedom to decide on your actions, but there will beothers that are stricter and that believe that your destiny is already determined by the superior being.
Later in the poem, we will come back with the character of Calisto and we can see how she is converted by Jupiter into the constellation of the Osa Mayor and her son in the constellation of the Minor Osa, to the simple reading we could believe that this act arisesFor the love that Jupiter had to Calisto so that she always stayed in the constellations and could be with her son, but it can also be considered as an act of revenge against his wife Juno, since Jupiter now will have her lover and son inThe constellations for eternity. These feelings and reactions that Ovid gives to the gods humanizes them, thus creating a union with the reader. At times it seems that it is the gods that have more characteristics and human elements because of the way Ovid describes them in their actions, causing the reader to have a proximity to them and that it can be seen reflected in them. Juno, for example, exemplifies her as the wife who remains winged of her husband even and when she has been unfaithful, and Jupiter as the infidel husband who fears the wife because she knows that her jealousy just takes her to do actsof revenge against their love affairs.
Another aspect that highlights this work of others and that perhaps is also part of why it makes it a canonical work is that in most of its stories it refers to the importance of speaking to be able to save themselves. Thus, characters like Callisto and Actteon are susceptible to disasters that could have been avoided by speech. Callisto cannot pray to the gods asking for help, Acteon cannot call his hunting dogs. Unlike the story for example of Siringe, who asks to transform it to prevent bread from having it and becoming cane:
… There, seeing that the waters closed his way, begged his sisters, the nymphs of the river to transform it, so that bread, when he already believed to strengthen Siringe, had in his arms instead of the body of the nymph aKill Palustres reeds;By sighing the god on them, the air produced by crossing them a soft sound, similar to a lament. Captivated by this new invention and the sweetness of sound, the God had said: This will be my way of speaking with you!
In this story, although with metamorphosis she will stop having a way of speaking to ask for help against the god Pan, this if you can communicate with it. Perhaps at a metaphorical level, speech loss deletes identity so that these characters can be saved and makes their death inevitable. As a writer, it is clear that for Ovid, freedom of expression is an elementary theme in his poem, since his profession as a poet was his freedom of expression and perhaps that is why, when his characters stop talking to him tooIf there is in the world which results in only the characters that find an alternative way of communicating have some hope of survival such as Siringe. The same goes for a writer, a poet and an artist, who, if they are forbidden to write or express themselves on a certain topic, they can only survive under their profession if they learn to communicate other topics.
A peculiar characteristic of this work is that most of their characters are either these people, gods or things suffer a metamorphosis, but despite such metamorphosis they will retain something of their essence that continues to recognize them as such. This situation leads us to consider that Ovid knew the evolution of man well and knew that despite the change in a person it is due to the evolution of his age that would lead to a physical or psychological change, he would continue to keep some of his essence. Thus, in the case of Io who is turned into a novilla and then he returns to be nymph nothing remains in it of his bovine shape except the candor … of his being there is only the whiteness he had when he was a cow. Another example is the original story of the birth of forests and caves. In the history of Narciso and Eco in the third book, Ovid, explains how the nymph stopped having body when turning its bones into stone, and the only thing that remains of it is the essence of its voice that repeats the last word of whatthat people say.
However, love remains nailed to it, and the pain for rejection continues to grow: the anguish that does not abandon it is consumed by its emaciated members, the thinness wrinkles its skin, and the vital moods of its body are lost in the air;There is only her voice and bones. The voice remained, but they say that their bones became stones. Since then it is hidden in the forests, but it is not seen in any mountain, although everyone hears them: it is the sound, which lives in it.
This particular story and metamorphosis can represent us as people when they die can cease to exist physically but their words and what people say of them will still remain.
It could be considered that due to the immense amount of Ovid stories it provides more interest in the methods of the narration than in the plot, but the author in one way or another is ligating every story and character and we can see how everything gets to intertwine, andThis is how we see characters that appear in the first books then appear in subsequent books either in their natural essence or in their metamorphosis state. The metamorphosis of Ovid as well as Oedipus The King of Sophocles and Dante’s divine comedy express us how every action has a reaction and as everything is linked and religious, since we are all part of a whole.
In the tenth book in the history of Orpheus and Eurídice, Ovid tells us as Eurídice was bitten in a heel by a snake which takes her to death on her wedding day. It was so much the love of Orpheus, that this went to the hell, and captivated the infernal divinities with his lyre and songs, so that they granted him he could take to Eurídice, on the condition that he had not to look at it untilleft the hell. But it was so much the love that Orpheus had for her and her fear of not having her and that the gods of hell would have cheated him that he is tempted to turn to see if she really went with him, Euríde was taken again to hell and in thisOrpheus occasion could no longer do anything about it. In this story Ovid represents two fundamental themes that have remained in the story the love of a couple and the conjugal faith. If Orpheus had trusted his love and promise, perhaps he could have enjoyed his wife more time, but sometimes love is so much that makes us doubt and this can lead us to end up losing everything. This topic will also be analyzed by another canonical author, Geoffrey Chaucer in the Bath comadre of Canterbury stories. Likewise, this story has inspired musical composers such as Jacques Offenbach who in 1858 composes the music of the Orpheus opera in hell, which represents the importance of Ovid’s stories in other great artists of different apoca and nationality, reaffirming once again why metamorphosis should be part of the western canon list.
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