Some new essays on Ovid

In honor of Ovid's Bimillennium, a group of essays has been posted by In Medias Res, a magazine published by the Paideia Institute. They include readings of the Amores, the Heroides, the Medicamina faciei femineae (his work on make-up), and the Metamorphoses.

An intro with links to them by John Byron Kushner is here.

From Kusher's essay on Metamorphoses:

Ovid seems to be arguing against responsibility, and for sympathy. All of these desires — licit and illicit — come into our lives through our bodies, and it is not clear that we are to be held responsible for our bodies, or that we are our bodies, a theme Ovid plays with continually. Adonis coming into manhood is described as iam se formosior ipso est — more beautiful than himself (10.523). Marriage for Atalanta is described — quite powerfully, knowing how difficult marriage can be for us all — as teque ipsa viva carebis (“you will no longer have yourself, though you will be alive,” 10.566). 

In Latin our lives begin and end with passive verbs: nascimur and morimur (we are born, we die). And much of the in-between fits into the verb patimur, we suffer, which is the main material of the Metamorphoses, in its varied forms . . . 

After a helpful discussion of the long speech of Pythagoras, he notes:

For Ovid, to use E.J. Kenney’s phrase used by Feeney, “the Augustan settlement was not, as it had been for Vergil, the start of a new world, novus ordo saeclorum, but another sandbank in the shifting stream of eternity.”

Of course, Ovid being nothing if not Ovid, one thing will remain, through some unidentified agency, unchanged beyond that shifting stream -- his name:

parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis

astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum

Still in my better part far beyond the lofty stars

I shall be borne immortal; my name will be indelible.