Ovid's Metamorphoses

Returning to the work begun in Amy Richlin's seminal essay on the unsettling topic of sexual violence in Ovid's work, "Reading Ovid's Rapes," this paper takes another look at the rich interpretive problems posed by the incessantly recurring theme of sexual violence in the "Metamorphoses." Though the perpetrators are almost exclusively divine, roughly a third of the myths recounted by the Roman poet features some form of sexual assault. When read in the context of conservative Augustan-era marriage legislation like the "Lex Julia de adulteriis," Ovid's insistence on the theme can be read as an indictment of Augustus himself, who after all insisted on likening himself in official imperial iconography to the cult of such gods as Apollo and Jupiter, two of the most egregious assailants throughout the long poem. However, each reiteration of the theme also reveals a series of other important concomitant concerns that arise from cases of sexual violence, including questions pertaining to illegitimate children and other unanticipated repercussions in the victim's family, that actually reveal Ovid to be more seriously engaged in thinking about the subject than he is commonly given credit for. Taking Ovid to task for the grave issues he tackles can actually provide fodder for productive discussion of topical issues effecting life on campus and in our country today. It is absolutely imperative that certain topics be addressed in productive and adult ways with our students if we expect to raise the level of our public discourse. Far from aestheticizing these topics as mere literary artifacts, Ovid's complex text demands to be read on a number of levels that are all pertinent to the world in which we live today.

BLOCH Jonathan, « Translatio Ovidii. De l’Ovide moralisé en vers à sa traduction (et impression ?) par William Caxton », dans Pérégrinations et métamorphoses. Actes de la journée d’études du 19 oct. 2017, Presses universitaires de l’ICES, La Roche sur Yon, 2019 (coll. Colloques), p. 41-66.

This paper deals with Ovid's Tristia 1.7 where the central theme is the fate of his Metamorphoses. By playing with the two sphragis-like pieces at the beginning of the poem, the poet shows the end of his own role and highlights that of the work's reception and of the reader's response. The poem closes with a third sphragis-like piece where the reader is authorised to re-organise the beginning of the Metamorphoses with three elegiac couplets, thus interfering with the epic form of the work. In these couplets the poem is declared parentless and it is the reader who undertakes to disseminate it among the people (in urbe). Tristia 1.7 then comes to complement the closural piece of the Metamorphoses: the work will survive because it is rude, that is, without lima, a non-finito work, which every reader, according to his interpretative possibilities, will always strive to give its final form. Eventually the poem proves to be a study on the topic of the reader's response.

«The tale of Niobe had a wide-ranging and long-lasting literary afterlife, but Ovid’s version in the sixth book of the ‘Metamorphoses’ (6, 146‑312) is perhaps the most celebrated example in Latin literature of an attempt to describe Niobe’s physiognomy: after a happy marriage, Niobe becomes a ‘mater dolorosa’ and a symbol of pain. My contribution focuses on a short and suggestive epigram from the Ausonian collection of ‘Epigrammata’ (‘Epigr.’, 57 Green) in which Niobe is the protagonist. I demonstrate how this case-study of Ovidian literary influence is associated with the poetic effects derived from the rhetorical practice of the προγυμνάσματα. In this epigram Niobe’s suffering illustrates perfectly how Ausonius changes a long literary tradition that was familiar to him, so as to display his literary skill, his linguistic dexterity and his ability to give the heroine a new meaning that is connected to the literary repertory of his erudite readers.» || "L’histoire de Niobé a connu une postérité vaste et durable, mais sa version ovidienne, dans le sixième livre des « Métamorphoses » (6, 146‑312), est peut-être l’exemple le plus célèbre de tentative d’un auteur latin pour décrire la physionomie de l’héroïne qui, après un marriage très heureux, devient ‘mater dolorosa’ et donc un symbole de douleur. Ma contribution se concentre sur une pièce courte mais significative de la collection ausonienne d’« Epigrammata » (‘Epigr.’, 57 Green), dont Niobé est la protagoniste. En particulier, je voudrais montrer comment cet exemple de l’influence littéraire ovidienne s’accompagne d’effets poétiques issus de la pratique rhétorique des προγυμνάσματα. Dans cette épigramme, la souffrance de Niobé illustre parfaitement comment Ausone transforme une longue tradition bien connue de lui, afin de manifester sa compétence littéraire, ses talents linguistiques et sa capacité à conférer à l’héroïne une signification nouvelle, qui s’inscrit dans le répertoire culturel de son lectorat d’érudits."

Lodovico Dolce e Giovanni Antonio Rusconi, due autori per un best seller del Cinquecento: le Trasformationi, ovvero una volgarizzazione illustrata delle Metamorfosi di Ovidio. Dolce traduce in volgare, Rusconi traspone in immagini. Affiatati colleghi nella prestigiosa stamperia veneziana di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, in questo comune progetto editoriale essi restituiscono due diversi sguardi su un medesimo e fluttuante Ovidio.

The second language acquisition research of Stephen Krashen known as Comprehensible Input is being put into practice in language classrooms across the world.  In recent years, it has found a fertile place in Latin classrooms.  This paper explores how CI both opens the Latin classroom to all kinds of learners and impels Latin teachers to consider why they do what they do.

Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is a remarkably creative piece of writing that came down to us from the middle ages. It has been considered a classic of medieval Islamic philosophy, and a classic of Arabic novels that had a great influence on the medieval and renaissance west.
The theme of East and West is given prominence in this paper. The first part of my argument concerns the ideological and cultural coloring of the context in which this novel was written. The second part deals with the point of intersection of contesting ideologies in the novel. It also deals with the astonishing variety of conclusions the novel has yielded.
In estimating the novel as both philosophical literature and literary philosophy, which as I argue, cannot be studied in isolation from the famous translation movement (from Greek into Arabic in the middle ages), I would not exclude another possibility that Ibn Tufayl benefited from stoicism. This presupposes Ibn Tufayl's acquaintance with the stoics.
There are also similarities between Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and the cosmogony of the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in relation to his account of the creation and early history of man, which was influenced by the Epicurean Roman poet Lucretius.
I would suggest that there might have been a common Greek source, read by Lucretius, Ovid and Ibn Tufayl (in translation in the last case).
Although, in a way, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan was a direct consequence of Greek thought translated into Arabic, Ibn Tufayl, however, pursued his own Islamic way of reconciling philosophy with religion.

Stundum koma fram listaverk sem eru smá að utan en risastór að innan og með ótal vistarverum. Svo er um verkið Skugga-Baldur eftir Sjón. Verkið er merkilegt fyrir margra hluta sakir, ekki síst fyrir samtalið sem það á við annað verk sem var ritað tvö þúsund árum fyrr, Ummyndanir, eftir skáldið Publius Ovidius Naso. Í þessari grein er farið yfir textatengsl þessara tveggja verka.

In this paper I suggest that at the beginning of the Metamorphoses through narrative techniques and the structure of the verses, in particular lines 1.10-14, the poet claims to be a fabricator mundi and that his text exists before the creation of the world, becoming the model for its formation. In the epilogue, the poet also declares his certainty that his work will be eternal; it will live, that is, sine fine as he states at Tristia 2.63-4. This reading of sine fine actually alludes to the prophecy of Jupiter in the first book of the Aeneid where the phrase meant the eternity of the Roman dominion. The perpetuum carmen, as the poet characterised the Metamorphoses at 1.4, refers not only to the time-span of the work through to the poet's own time but more importantly to the eternal character of his poetry. It is the poetic genius which cannot be trapped in a specific time frame. There is a consensus among Ovidian scholars that in writing the Metamorphoses Ovid had Virgil and his work firmly in mind. In striving for originality, he also had to emulate almost the entire Greek and Roman literary tradition. In his perpetuum carmen, therefore, he was confronted with the task of composing an all-inclusive work with regard to time, subject-matter and literary genre. The purpose of this paper is to show how Ovid exploited certain methods and techniques in order to imply, through the narrative, the omnipotence of the poetic genius through the creation of his text.

"Even though after the famous tragedy of Euripides literary and iconographic sources represent Medea mainly as an infanticide mother, the Medea of the Ovid’s Metamorphoses is above all a powerful sorceress: a wise expert of grasses, by which she prepares effective magic potions, and a skilled manipulator of prodigious recipes, that she activates thanks to the help of hellish divinities, invoked with vocal formulas in her nighttime rites. In the same way, in the woodcuts that decorate the Renaissance editions of the Metamorphoses, particularly in those by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi for the Lodovico Dolce’s Trasformationi, Medea is represented above all as a good-looking sorceress, that executes her sorceries for love or for revenge. Especially in the woodcut with The rejuvenation of Esone, Rusconi combines the features of a Renaissance sorceress with those of a Northern witch: Medea is still an attractive and young woman, but she carries out, by now, magic operations just like a witchcraft."

El objeto de este trabajo ha sido estudiar el motivo de la apoteosis con el fin de descubrir de qué manera se integra positivamente en la representación de las Metamorfosis. Se intenta trascender interpretaciones denigratorias o irónicas del motivo.
El estudio consta de dos partes. En el primer capítulo de la primera parte, “La apoteosis en la estructura de las Metamorfosis”, se demuestra con un análisis intratextual la importancia que tiene el relato de la creación del hombre como sanctius animal, considerada paradigmática, en el estudio del motivo de la apoteosis. El segundo capítulo insiste en la dimensión intertextual, recordando la influencia estructural de dos modelos poéticos de las Metamorfosis de Ovidio, Hesíodo y la Égloga 6 de Virgilio, para una representación que comienza en la creación del hombre y termina en la apoteosis del poeta.
La introducción a la segunda parte, “Valor semántico de la apoteosis,” pone el acento en tres aspectos esenciales para el estudio de la apoteosis. En primer lugar, la idea de “lectura”, i.e.,  la trascendencia latente del motivo de la apoteosis y de la idea de estirpe a lo largo de la obra. Se propone, en segundo lugar, el concepto de “mitologización” como una forma de examinar la apropiación que hace el poeta del mito historizado y del mito con alusión augustea. Esa apropiación tendrá como fin destacar el aspecto literario de las historias y ejercerá un papel fundamental en la construcción de una figura de poeta que, mediante la apoteosis por su obra, se eleva por sobre las figuras de filósofo y de político. Su tratamiento en este trabajo, pues, se debe al hecho de que está ligado, en último término, con el motivo de la apoteosis.
Dado que el estudio tiene como punto de partida la relación entre el sanctius animal, paradigma de la creación del hombre, y la apoteosis, se ha elegido examinar detalladamente aquellas apoteosis en que aparece una alusión explícita a la parte mortal o a la parte inmortal, i.e., las de Ino y Melicertes, Hércules, Eneas, Glauco, Rómulo, Hersilia, César, Augusto y Ovidio. Se incluyen, de todas maneras, otras referencias y apoteosis relevantes. La alusión a la imagen de la pars, siguiendo una de las denominaciones con más trascendencia formal en la obra, remite a la creación del hombre divino semine y a partir de semina caeli, aspecto que se estudia en el primer capítulo de la primera parte y se retoma en el análisis de cada apoteosis.
La conclusión del trabajo es que el motivo de la apoteosis sólo puede inteligirse a la luz del final, en el que se representa la apoteosis del poeta. Al margen de la mitologización que opera en las historias con valor histórico y augusteo, Ovidio se ha preocupado por mantener, aunque sólo sea en forma referencial, el sentido de las apoteosis con el fin de desplegar toda su significación en la apoteosis final. Inversamente, el valor completo del motivo en el cierre de la obra exige aceptar su significación a lo largo de la obra. En el final, el poeta, un poeta Romanus en la medida en que su obra será leída donde se extienda la Romana potentia, se revela como el auténtico sanctius animal referido en la creación.

يناقش هذا البحث عدة نقاط، تبدأ بخلفية تاريخية موجزة عن علاقة روما بأثيوبيا في العصر الإمبراطوري، ثم أثيوبيا في بعض الأساطير الرومانية، والأوصاف العرقية للأثيوبيين، كما يتناول العبيد الأثيوبيين في روما، وهذا من خلال نصوص أدبية لاتينية مع مقارنتها بمصادر يونانية ولاتينية أخرى كلما دعت الضرورة

What are myths? Are there ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ versions? And where do they come from? These and many other related questions are addressed in Writing Down the Myths, a collection of critical studies of the contents of some of the most famous mythographic works from ancient, classical, medieval, and modern times, and of the methods, motivations, and ideological implications underlying these literary records of myth.

While there are many works on myth and mythology, and on the study of this genre of traditional narrative, there is little scholarship to date on the venerable activity of actually writing down the myths (mythography), attested throughout history, from the cultures of the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean to those of the modern world. By assembling studies of the major literary traditions and texts through a variety of critical approaches, this collection poses - and seeks to answer - key questions such as these: how do the composers of mythographic texts choose their material and present them; what are the diverse reasons for preserving stories of mythological import and creating these mythographic vessels; how do the agenda and criteria of pre-modern writers still affect our popular and scholarly understanding of myth; and do mythographic texts (in which myths are, so to speak, captured by being written down) signal the rebirth, or the death, of mythology?

L’articolo esamina l’incompiuta Fabula di Narciso di Giovanni Muzzarelli (1522), episodio finora poco studiato della riappropriazione dei classici in chiave rinascimentale. Il testo è una parafrasi fedele dell’originale ovidiano, che ne ricalca precise espressioni, ma al tempo stesso una riscrittura emulativa, che prevede importanti contaminazioni con le Stanze di Angelo Poliziano. Le modalità degli interventi di Muzzarelli lo qualificano come interpres, in elegante equilibrio fra imitazione e libertà, autore esemplare della produzione cortigiana cinquecentesca nell’Italia settentrionale.

Legata spesso, nei testi antichi, al discorso sulle passioni (e sull’ira in particolare), la “vendetta” illustra anche nel teatro di Seneca il comportamento di chi perde il controllo sulla ragione, sulla spinta della collera. A molti secoli di distanza, il teatro rinascimentale riproporrà il tema della vendetta in forme che dipendono da principi come la conservazione dell’onore. Questa concezione funziona come filtro anche nella ricezione dei testi del teatro classico, che pure esercitano un’influenza di carattere paradigmatico. Il caso del Revenge Tragedy elisabettiano, da questo punto di vista, offre molti spunti interessanti per osservare il riadattamento culturale cui i testi antichi vanno incontro nel processo della loro tradizione.

Translation in modern Greek of Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 7, made in 1994, containing the following mythological episodes: Medea & Jason, Medea & Aeson, Medea & Pelias, Medea & Theseus, Minos threatens war, Aegina's plague and the Myrmidons, Cephalus & Procris, Cephalus' dog Laelaps.

The review concerns the edition "Commentaire Vulgate des Métamorphoses d’Ovide. Livres I–V", edited by Frank T. Coulson and Piero Andrea Martina, with a French translation of the commentary by Piero Andrea Nartina and Clara Wille. The edition was published as the first volume of three planned volumes in Paris by Classiques Garnier in 2021 in the serie Textes littéraires du Moyen Âge no. 62, Ovidiana texts no. 2.), 820 pp. ISBN 978-2-406-10727-9

An Ovidian Diptych: Numa, Augustus, and the Poet in the Fasti in the Light of the Metamorphoses The article proposes to analyze the Fasti's Numa in relation to that of the Metamorphoses, considering: (1) the Ovidian representation of the monarchy; (2) the link between Numa and Augustus as a peacemaker; (3) the link between Numa and the poet. The conclusion to be reached is that, although Ovid, through Numa, represents in the Fasti a sort of contrafactual Augustus post Actium, in the light of the Metamorphoses, where the Numa's association with Augustus through the motif of pax leads to the poet, the image of the contrafactual Augustus cannot be understood as the end of the representation, but it is resolved in the image of an Augustus-Numa that, added to that of the Metamorphoses, constitutes a diptych, a double and complementary contemporary representation, which also in Fasti, though in a different way, leads to the poet, showing the primacy of poetry over politics in Ovidian writing.

In the famous passage devoted to the myth of Marsyas (Met. VI, 399-400), Ovid creates a ambiguity about the river derived from the tears of the friends of the satyr. This article discusses the relationship between the elements of the physical  geography and the elaboration of a poetic  and metaliterary space.

This article aims to show the close link between the representation of Trajan’s deeds in Pliny the Younger’s Panegyric and those of Augustus as described in the Res gestae. The analysis, developed through an in-depth reading of the most relevant passages, defines Trajan’s twofold attitude towards his model: on the one hand a singular effort to broaden Augustus’ successes, on the other the tendency to manifest his own self-restraint in contrast to the predecessor’s behaviour. The final section of the article is devoted to Pliny’s treatment of the word saeculum, which powerfully invokes the presence of another Augustan theme: the return of the Golden Age.

Modernization of Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte and the army began in 1798 with the invasion. Gaspard Monge at the beginning of the occupation of Egypt, starting with 168 academics and a crowded army, The cultures of the Middle East are gradually being transformed into a destiny. Now the destiny of Egypt is the fate of the Middle East, the destiny of the Middle East is the destiny of the Ottoman Empire..

The Cipus episode must be understood in literary terms as a mythologization of Julius Caesar previous to his apotheosis, just as the Aesculapius episode constitutes a mythologization of Augustus. The purpose is to allude in a mythologized way to two episodes of Caesar’s political life: the rejection of the royal emblems fi rst from the Senate and then from Antonius in the Lupercalia (Suet. Iul. 79.2). But, although the most central aspect of this representation of history is the device per se, it is possible to see also a reflection on monarchy in the history of Rome, which functions as a significant interpretation of the recent history: the
monarchic legacy, which evokes not only Tarquinus but also Numa, should not be understood as a mistake and Cipus and Caesar, unlike Augustus, failed to assume it, even though Ovidian (Numan) conception of monarchy is problematically applied to Augustus.

The literary framework of Naevius’ Bellum Punicum and the construction of the Caesar-Augustus figure in the Jupiter-Venus dialogue of Aeneid 1 are seen as the preliminary phase for the transformation operated in Metamorphoses 15 by Ovid, who inserts the dialogue, now concerning Julius Caesar, in a mythologized universal history, and displays a fictional representation based on the use or transformation of two Virgilian passages (Aen. 1, 223 ff.; Georg, 1, 474 ff.). This higher level of construction is closely linked to the degree of poet’s self-celebration: while only indirect references to immortality (Aen 9, 446-7; Aen 1, 379) appear in Virgil, Ovid announces his own rise super alta ... / astra (15, 875-6), putting himself over the matter of the literary representation.

A dantei Orpheus: egy makrotextuális modell Források és értelmezés My paper focuses on the influence of an important descent-into-hell narratives of classical literature, the catabasis of Orpheus on Dante's journey through the other world. Dante, in his own confession, is familiar with the Ovidian myth of the Thraci-an poet, but he is undoubtedly influenced also by other elaborations and interpretations of the myth. One of the aims of this work is to present and explore these sources. The special feature of Orpheus is that he is both poet and traveller of the underworld , and in this quality he turns out an unique Greek-Roman mythological antecedent of Dante. The other purpose of my analysis is to examine Dante's attitude with the comparison of Dante's texts and their possible sources, while taking into consideration the 14th century commentaries to Dante which shed light to the intellectual horizon of the contemporary reader.