Is Ovid Still Worth Reading?

“Such politicized readings of the last fifty years miss the profundity of Ovid’s inclusion of the story in his grander poetic agenda of love being the constant star in the midst of a world of violence and transformation.”

In the annals of Roman poets, Ovid occupies a unique place. He is generally regarded as inferior to Virgil, Rome’s grandest and grandiose poet whose Aeneid still stands as Rome’s mythopoetic masterpiece and whose Eclogues set the stage for the development of the pastoral idyll in Western literature. Yet Ovid’s language and picturesque scenes strike one as occasionally more remarkable and energetic than Virgil; Edward Gibbon, for instance, said he derived more pleasure reading Ovid than the other Latin poets. Ovid, however, strikes moderns as dangerous and out of date. His poems on sexual violence, often tinged with toxic masculinity, do not necessarily fit the sensibilities of our post-#MeToo age. But such readings of Ovid fail to see the grander portrait, even the dark wisdom, found in the Metamorphoses.

The Metamorphoses is an epic of transformation, of change. Like Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a collection of the grandstanding myths of Antique culture, especially as inherited in the Latin-Roman tradition. It opens with the birth of the cosmos, its wrestling into order from chaos which provided the basis for life and all the subsequent stories that the poem sings of. It concludes with a summary of the great stories that moved pagan consciousness, finishing with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, the expansion of the walls of Rome and Roman civilization with it (echoing Virgil), and Ovid’s own declaration that his fame will live on for all eternity because of the “truth” “stablished by poetic prophecy” that he himself is the avatar of. We will return to this point later.

Yet Ovid does not celebrate, upon closer inspection, the mighty walls of Rome as do his contemporaries. Ovid pays his due respect to Rome, but Rome must submit to the winds and cosmos of change; time changes all things, and Rome is no exception. This is why Ovid leads up to his conclusion by including the speeches of Pythagoras, the great Greek philosopher who argued that in the cosmos of time that changes all things only one thing remains the same in the midst of this torrential sea of change: the soul. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, then, is an inspection into the soul that never changes; and, in that inspection, Ovid finds the tension between love and lust, beauty and ugliness, death and redemption, sorrow and happiness. The soul may experience changes wrought by its burdening enslavement to the oceans of time, but what the soul seeks is the same: constancy through love, the eternity which never changes because love never changes.