Lombardo Stanley - Metamorphoses

OVID

METAMORPHOSES

OVID

METAMORPHOSES

Translated by Stanley Lombardo

Introduction by W. R. Johnson

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Indianapolis/Cambridge

Copyright 2010 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

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Cover art: They Snaked Together (Cadmus and Harmonia) by Micheline Klagsbrun.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ovid, 43 B.C.17 or 18 A.D.

[Metamorphoses. English]

Metamorphoses / Ovid ; translated by Stanley Lombardo ; introduction

by W. R. Johnson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60384-307-2 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-60384-308-9 (cloth)

1. Fables, LatinTranslations into English. 2. MetamorphosisMythologyPoetry. 3. Mythology, ClassicalPoetry. I. Lombardo, Stanley, 1943II. Title.

PA6522.M2L66 2010

873'.01dc22

2010019307

epub ISBN: 978-1-60384-539-7

PRC ISBN: 978-1-60384-540-3

Contents

Tales and episodes related in the poem are indicated below. Tales told by a character (as well as epitaphs and descriptions of works of fine art) are indicated by indentation. Unless otherwise indicated, narration is given directly by the poet.

The History of Everything

Who among Ovids first readers could have predicted that this master of numerous short comic poems, just at the midpoint of his poetic career, would undertake and complete a long and complex poem that would come to rival the Aeneid (and perhaps outdo it) in its influence on the literature of Western Europe? He had begun with publishing five volumes of lighthearted love elegies (later harshly winnowed and reduced to three volumes). He had then turned to witty, sometimes poignant representations of legendary ladies writing letters to the men who had absented themselves from their felicity (the Heroides). After this splendid compilation, he had written a poem in three volumes, giving cynical and shamelessly sexist (and hilarious) advice to men who needed help in obtaining the consent of the women they lusted after, the Ars Amatoria, a sort of seducers manual. This poem (which may have earned him the intense displeasure of Emperor Augustus and his permanent exile to the Black Sea) was followed by the Metamorphoses, an immense poem in fifteen volumes, which took as its chief theme a paradox to which Heraclitus had given its essential form: all things flow, you never step into the same river twice,in short, it is changing realities that constitute the only real permanence in the universe.

Ovid may have been drawn to this particular theme because it gave him warrant to retell stories that he happened to like, stories drawn from Greek myths that focused on (and explained) how given entities came into existence, in particular how certain beings, both semidivine and human, were transformed into animals, vegetables, and minerals. This seemingly limitless source, a narratological paradise, offered the storyteller all the material he needed to construct vivid characters, dramatic conflicts, and surprising outcomes. The major problem facing the poet who found this treasure house irresistible was how to impose on this delicious welter some semblance of intelligible order. (One of Ovids masters, the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, had found a solution to this problem, but his