Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Revisited.
This title echoes the last post in my blog, ‘Sex and Gender in Shakespeare’s England.’ This one will relate to Greek mythology from preliterate times through classical Greece to Rome, when Ovid wrote his compendium of stories in Latin in the first century, CE.
Not only does Ovid’s works preserve stories but plays with them inventively and imaginatively. In the Iliad andOdyssey, Homer refers to the gods as if everyone knows about them. They would have, since he wrote his epics after some 400 years after the Trojan war. Until his works, descriptions of its gods and heroes were passed along orally. Hesiod, roughly Homer’s contemporary, added his versions.
Greek playwrights of fifth century Athens draw on stories not found in Homer or Hesiod and give different versions of the same tale. For example, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife, hangs herself when she realizes she married her son. In Euripides’ Phoenician Women, Jocasta lives on after that discovery.
No doubt Ovid knew many early fragments and plays lost later, but he gives short shrift to any depicting the Great Mother Goddess. In general, from Homer onward the gods prevail. Hera, once powerful in her own right, becomes vengeful and angry, punishing women abducted by her husband Zeus. The ancient Goddess has little part—nor do local nature goddesses, dryads, or naidids of earlier eras. Stories of goddesses, with the exception of Athena, come to us distorted at best.
Readers today have a shelf of translations of Ovid’s works to choose from. The most recent, by Stephanie McCarter, uses straightforward English to describe the rapes in the Metamorphoses. My favorite recent translation of the Metamorphoses, however, is by Charles Martin, cover illustration above.
Ovid collected these stories almost too late. The Earth Goddess had pretty much vanished, and in the Christian era, much evidence from pagan days was destroyed. We owe a debt to those who valued the classical Greek tradition and the monks who carefully copied and translated works as Rome was falling and into medieval times, a fascinating process of cultural protection. To get a glimpse of preliterate times, we depend on excavations and interpretations offered by the archeologists at the time. Many of these have been revisited in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, birthing a wealth of new understanding. Archeological finds reflect the ubiquity of goddess worship in early cultures throughout the western world and beyond. Clearly, She was a major force in early religions, suppressed in the Judeo-Christian traditions from Eve onward.
My next novel, Serpent Visions, A Novel of Teiresias, focuses on one of Ovid’s tales of metamorphosis so short and powerful that I’ve puzzled over it for years. To quote Jonathan Bate in Shakespeare and Ovid, the Roman poet’s stories ‘initiate the reader into a world of unorthodox swervings of gender and generation.’ These move in a different direction from Shakespeare’s plays of disguise and gender fluidity, hence this new blog.
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