Today, in the spirit of tales told through the ages, I’m highlighting a work of nearly endless variety that tells of events from Creation all the way to the reign of Caesar Augustus. It’s a book you know even if you’ve never read it—because it has served as the fertile soil for so many stories that we know and love.
It is Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
This single Latin poem of startling length tells tales of transformations. It is an anthology of stories within stories, all connected seamlessly from beginning to end. Ovid’s seamless poem weaves tales of gods and humans transforming and being transformed, and in its variety and vibrancy feels akin to reading a rainbow. This one work influenced so many stories from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and even the present day. The list of great authors who knew and borrowed from Ovid to nourish their own works is stacked: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Spenser, and on. Romeo & Juliet was not a work of pure invention; it was a reworking of the tale of Pyramus & Thisbe in Metamorphoses. Many Renaissance paintings also are of scenes from Metamorphoses.
Ian Johnston, a professor and author who has written a translation of the poem, has said, “No work from classical antiquity, either Greek or Roman, has exerted such a continuing and decisive influence on European literature as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The emergence of French, English, and Italian national literatures in the late Middle Ages simply cannot be fully understood without taking into account the effect of this extraordinary poem. … The only rival we have in our tradition which we can find to match the pervasiveness of the literary influence of the Metamorphoses is perhaps (and I stress perhaps) the Old Testament and the works of Shakespeare.” (Read more.)
You will recognize many of the tales that Ovid imparts to us: Perseus & Andromeda, Narcissus (from whom we get the concept of “narcissism”), the Minotaur, the musician Orpheus and his journey to the underworld to save Eurydice, the Sirens, Icarus who flew too close to the sun, Midas with the golden touch, the Trojan War, Achilles, Hercules, and on and on. There is even a version of the Flood story, found throughout every culture’s myths.
There is the tale of Arachne, who spun tapestry that rivaled Minerva’s, whom the goddess transformed into a web-weaving spider. A personal favorite of mine is the story of Phaethon, a bastard son of the Sun who takes the chariot of the Sun across the sky and loses control of the reins, scorching the skies and the earth.
Throughout the poem there is a pervasive sense of “freshness, immediacy, and mystery,” in the words of translator Allen Mandelbaum. While reading this Latin poet who lived at the same time as Jesus of Nazareth, one sees echoes of Genesis in his creation account, when some god unknown to Ovid but greater than all he knows by name (as in Paul’s address to the Athenians in Acts 17) separates the sky from the earth, and the earth from the waves, creating all things and finally Man after the image of the gods to rule over creation.
And while other animals bend down,
their gaze upon the earth,
To Man he gave a face to look on high,
To stand erect and gaze upon the stars.
This poem has inspired me in much of my own writing, and I am sure that it can be fertile ground for your work as well! I recommend the verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum. It is light and quick and potent.
You can find it here!
JACK CLARIE is lead editor at Verse & Vine and the writer of mythopoeic fantasy and poetry. He lives on the Gulf Coast US with his wife and two children. He is currently working on his début novel, a faerie tale.