The Roman poet Ovid, whose full name, Publius Ovidius Naso, sounds rather like an unfortunate respiratory condition, is to his countryman Virgil rather as The Odyssey is to The Iliad: he comes soon after, he knew he was nowhere near as good (but had plenty of interesting stuff), he makes up for in variety what he doesn’t have in depth, he is consistently lively, and he has remained popular for over two millennia. Epochal little-brother syndrome can sting rather acutely (as anyone who’s tried to write a novel since One Hundred Years of Solitude can tell you), so you have to feel a little bad for all those Romans versifying in the generation that followed The Aeneid. But maybe because the Virgilian mini-me Ovid did write in that generation he has always been mentioned in the same breath as Virgil, and that might be a principal reason that he’s still read. Literary history is a big fan of twos: The Iliad and Odyssey, Old and New Testaments, Dante and Boccaccio, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—if two books or two countrymen can be linked, it seems they are. Ovid might well have snuck into literary history inside Virgil’s Trojan horse.
I’m speculating on the reasons behind Ovid’s popularity in part because most of Metamorphoses’ tales aren’t that compelling in themselves. Of the classics I’ve covered so far, this is the first one that might disappoint you if you were just to pick it up and give it a try. Yes, his characters have become part of our basic cultural vocabulary (Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection, Adonis the beauty, Icarus who flew too close to the sun, etc.), and yes they influenced some of the great writers of the Middle Ages (notably Chaucer and Boccaccio), but to my mind the rewards of the Metamorphoses are minimal compared to most other books of equal notoriety. The key to enjoying it is to read the few really good tales and a few of the famous ones and to skip the rest. Don’t worry; you can do it in good conscience.
But why then has Ovid been so popular for so long? I think the answer might be a little scandalous. You know the unifying theme of all the stories is transformation, but it turns out that the driving motivation behind a considerable chunk of the stories is rape. We’re not talking rape in the Jodie Foster in The Accused sense—thankfully—but more in the superficially more palatable river-god-envelopes-the-comely-bather kind of way. Still. Just as I always suspected that nudity in classical sculpture and painting has had a lot more erotic piquancy to viewers than people want to admit (am I the only one who gets turned on by Titian’s Venus of Urbino?), my guess is that the gods’ perpetual desire to seduce or ravish human females and nymphs in the Metamorphoses had a similar effect on its readership. By my tally, the Metamorphoses recounts well over a dozen rapes plus a dozen or so attempts. Somebody was clearly enjoying the idea of being a god and getting to have your way with mortals—or being mortal and the gods having their way with you.
I have to confess that my own fantasies of sneaking up on women as a shower of golden rain wore out when I started going on actual dates, and even my afternoon daydreams about seeing the mythic Diana bathing must have faded sometime in my thirties. So hearing about Jupiter (Zeus to the Greeks) turning into this or that or the other to get with some sylvan hottie—all the while trying to keep his wife Juno from finding out—seems more yawn-than tingle-inducing (though I will admit that it’s not often that the king of gods is represented as a bumbling philanderer). And Juno (Hera) forever getting angry and punishing the innocent girls comes off as both lame and wrong. So unless you’re reading the Metamorphoses under the strict supervision of some parochial school nuns, I doubt you’ll get much from the book on the arousal front.
Instead, the intriguing part of the sex in the Metamorphoses is its resemblance to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century classic encyclopedia of sexual deviance, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Seen as a whole, the Metamorphoses can appear to be Ovid’s attempt to catalog the aberrations of his day, including bestiality, fetishism, lesbianism, Elektra-complex incest, brother/sister incest, Pygmalionism, hermaphroditism, and mutilation. It’s admirably thorough, but, like any inventory of sexual proclivities, its joys will be sporadic. The stories might strike us because we wouldn’t expect them in a Lit 101 text, but in terms of actual pleasure to read—not so much. The best ones (coincidentally all in Books IX and X) detail Byblis and her passion for her brother, Iphis’ same-sex love for Icanthe, Pygmalion’s falling for his statue, and Myrrha’s love for her father; each of these is psychologically deep and somewhat emotionally moving. But apart from these and the select tales listed below, the Metamorphoses isn’t likely to be much more gratifying than an encyclopedia of Greek and Roman mythology. Considering how short, easy, and racy most of its stories are, however, if you do happen to have an interest in classical lore (or a pronounced enthusiasm for divine/mortal couplings), you might find Ovid’s chef d’oeuvre a perfect highbrow addition to your bathroom literature.
The Buzz: Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a compendium of myths, many of which remain iconic to this day. The best tales I’ll list below in “What to Skip,” the most famous—though not the most compelling—ones are (in alphabetical order): Arachne who challenged Pallas (Athena) to a weaving contest (never a good idea to compete with the higher-ups), Medea and her tragic love for Jason of the Golden Fleece, Midas and his disastrous wish, Niobe and her tears, the hero Perseus and his triumphs, Proserpine’s seduction by Pluto, and Venus falling for Adonis.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): How about the prevalence of rape in the tales, as noted above? And they give this book to kids?
Best Line: Yes, there’s a lot of dross in the Metamorphoses, but there are also a lot of great lines. Procne, seeking words to describe her sister Philomena’s rape and mutilation “could find none bitter enough;” the rapist Tereus, having unknowingly dined on his offspring, calling himself “the wretched tomb of my son;” Medea confessing, “I see clearly what I am doing: love, not ignorance of the truth, will lead me astray;” the king Aeacus’ stately “Men of Athens, ask not my help, but take it;” and, my favorite, the lovelorn Iphis’ incredible “I shall thirst in the midst of waters.” Sounds like something from the Bible, no?
What’s Sexy: If you’re looking for consensual sex, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any; the lovers tend to meet their maker before they meet their partners. But as to the less-savory kind, see above.
Quirky Fact: Despite being a celibate, Ovid wrote a sex and seduction manual called The Art of Love that was banned in Rome during his lifetime.
What to Skip: Skip lots. The best tales are, in order of appearance (and indexed in most volumes): Daphne and Apollo, Phaeton, Apollo and Coronis, Battus, Cadmus and the serpent, Actaeton and Diana, Juno and Semele, Tiresias, Echo and Narcissus (who doesn’t drown in this telling), Pyramus and Thisbe, Venus and Vulcan, Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, Cadmus (again), Arachne, Philomela (very gruesome), Atalanta and the boar, Athena and Meleager, Philomenon and Baucis, Byblis and her brother, Iphis and Icanthe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Phoebus and Hyancinthus, Pygmalion, Cinyrus and Myrrha, Alcyone and Ceyx, Ajax’s speech at the beginning of Book XIII, Polyxena, Pythagoras and his blistering argument for vegetarianism, Cipers who sacrifices all for the republic, and, if you can handle it, Ovid’s full-face suck-up to the emperor Augustus in the last few pages of Book XV (apparently it didn’t work, as he was exiled in A.D. 8). Apart from those, I really don’t think you’ll miss a thing if you forgo the rest. But if you do read everything, be prepared for a couple dozen people to turn into birds and a few dozen more to turn into trees. Egads.