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.

"Ovid's successful ape"

Mussy points us to a nice online version of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The epithet of the poem might be of interest:

vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua,

The lines appear in one of Ovid's Amores (1.15) -- the whole poem, concerned with poetic immortality and the ephemeral effect of envy, is here. The lines Shakespeare chose are in bold in their immediate context below:

So although the boulders with the tooth of the patient plough
Perish with time, poetry is absent from death:
Let kings and the triumphs of kings yield to poetry,
Let the bountiful banks of gold-bearing Tagus yield.
Let the common people admire common things; to me may golden-haired Apollo
Serve cups filled with Castalian water,
And may I wear myrtle on my hair that fears the frost
And be much read by anxious lovers.
Envy feasts on the living; after death it is silent,
When each man’s fame protects him as he deserves:
So, even when the final flame has consumed me,
I shall live, and a considerable part of me will survive.

In tracking down the epithet, I came across a brief but thoughtful talk about Shakespeare and Ovid by Jeremy McNamara entitled "OVIDIUS NASO WAS THE MAN." Here's one snippet:

Shakespeare certainly had a love affair with the classics, particularly Ovid. The connection between the two writers has been noticed from almost the beginning of Shakespeare's career. In 1598 Francis Meres in Palladis Tamiawrote: "the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred sonnets among his private friends, etc." The early 20th century delineator of classical mythology, R. K. Root, says that the whole character of Shakespeare's mythology is essentially Ovidian and that "Shakespeare himself has shown that he was proud to be Ovid's successful ape."

Apollo and Hyacinthus