Ovid's birthday celebrated in Sarasota

David Raeburn of Oxford and New College being introduced by Georgia of Bookstore 1. The reading from his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses proved most enjoyable, as he's a terrific reader.

Afterward, our group celebrated Ovid's 2055th with a toast, composed and delivered by our own incomparable Lola Laubheim:

Let's have a toast 

To Ovid's ghost 

He's MMLV 

And now he's only history. 

But not to you 

And not to me. 

So meet us at 

Gulf Gate Library.

[Add:] David Raeburn is a wonderful reader, and his rendering of Ovid lends itself to a sonorous and dramatic fullness of tale and telling. From book 1, he read Ovid's story of the beginning of things, and then his fine version of Apollo and Daphne. He next turned to the powerful description of the plague on Aegina, then to Narcissus and Echo, and last to Pygmalion. What a wonderful Audiobook he could make!

"The third is Ovid"

And then my righteous master said to me: 

     “Take note of him who bears that sword held fast
     And, as their lord, precedes the other three.
That is Homer, sovereign poet, unsurpassed.
     Horace the satirist is next in sight.
     The third is Ovid; Lucan is the last.

From a fine translation of Inferno 4 by Peter D'Epiro.

Vagaries of transmission

We tend to think that literate women and men of Western Europe have had continuous, consistent and unimpeded access to the major, formative texts of the Greeks and Romans, but the case is far otherwise. Indeed, had Ovid not collected so many stories in his Metamorphoses, we would have fewer, less rich renderings of many great tales.

The same holds true for scientific and philosophical works of the Greeks, which for centuries (the "dark ages") virtually disappeared from the libraries and the philological skills of Western minds.

Thanks to Muslim centers of learning, those texts were never entirely lost. In today's New York Times, John Noble Wilford reviews The House of Wisdom, How Arabic Science Saved Ancient knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, by Jim al-Khalili.

As the subtitle suggests, the West owes a great deal to the enlightened Muslim world that flourished during the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman empire.

If "tradition" means a handing down, this moment marks the survival of a vast portion of Greek philosophy, science and literature thanks to its preservation by Middle Eastern scholars in the 9th through the 11th Centuries, with particular early help from Baghdad:

bu Jafar Abdullah ­al-­Mamun, caliph of Baghdad in the early 9th century, was indispensable to this intellectual flowering. The city was only four decades old but had already become the largest in the world. In this vibrant setting, al-Mamun established an institute, the House of Wisdom, the likes of which had not been seen since the great library at Alexandria. The author compares Baghdad in those days to Renaissance Florence or Athens in the age of Pericles.

At first, the caliph followed his great-grandfather’s practice of pushing his savants for Arabic translations of Greek books in the country’s possession, a legacy of Hellenistic rule for several centuries after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Over the next two centuries, more works of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates, as well as Persian and Indian thinkers, were rendered into Arabic.. . .

The upshot was, while the Greek works in particular were disappearing in Europe, they were being preserved in Arabic to be retranslated later into Latin for a rebirth of “lost” knowledge. (More.)

If you're interested in what happened after this detour -- how the Greek works made their way back to Italy and then throughout the rest of Europe, have a look at my essay about Leonizio Pilato, Boccaccio's first Greek tutor, in Peter D'Epiro's The Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar Augustus to the Internet.

Edward Gibbon described Pilato in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

His countenance was hideous; his face was overshadowed with black hair; his beard long and uncombed; his deportment rustic; his temper gloomy and inconstant; nor could he grace his discourse with the ornaments or even the perspicuity of Latin elocution. But his mind was stored with a treasure of Greek learning.

A copy of the Pilato essay is available here.

The face of nature

It was great to find that nearly everyone at our first session has had the benefit of some exposure to Latin -- even if it was a more than a year or two ago.

We began to see that there's no substitute for the words of the author. Fortunately thanks to the Net, we have free access to them. The Perseus site can help, as you can have the hyperlinked Latin text on one side, and an English translation (Golding or More) on the other.

One quick observation of Ovid's opening account of the making of the world. It begins with these lines:

Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum
unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe,
quem dixere chaos: (Bk. 1. 5-7)

Before the Sea and Lande were made, and Heaven that all doth hide,
In all the worlde one onely face of nature did abide,
Which Chaos hight, (Golding)

And it ends with these:

Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram,
85os homini sublime dedit, caelumque videre
iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. (84-86)

He gave to Man a stately looke replete with majestie.
And willde him to behold the Heaven wyth countnance cast on hie,
To marke and understand what things were in the starrie skie.

What Golding misses here (and others too - check your translation) is that Ovid took care to use vultus (face) at the start and end of this large-scale tale of metamorphosis. At the beginning, the face of nature is really no face at all - there are no distinguishing features of Chaos, as he notes in some detail. At the end, as a culmination of this development of the world, we have the (presumably intelligent and intelligible) face of man looking up at the stars. (Golding might have used "countenance" for his meter.)

The universe indeed has metamorphosed in this passage from a faceless chaos to a face that turns and looks upon itself, intelligently. Small touches such as these suggest Ovid's delicate care.

Invocation: A few versions of Metamorphoses 1.1-4

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
-- Meta. I.1-4


My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed
to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods
inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves
and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song
in smooth and measured strains, from olden days
when earth began to this completed time!
-- Brookes More 1922


My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.
-- Allen Mandelbaum 1995


Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.
-- Arthur Golding 1567


My intention is to tell of bodies changed
To different forms; the gods, who made the changes,
Will help me - or so I hope - with a poem
That runs from the world's beginning to our own days.
-- Rolfe Humphries 1955

OF bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
'Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc'd from Nature's birth, to Caesar's times.
-- John Dryden, 1717

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms. Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world's very beginning even unto the present time.
-- Frank Justus Miller (Loeb Library 1984)


My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies. Ye Gods, (for you it was who changed them,) favor my attempts, and bring down the lengthened narrative from the very beginning of the world, even to my own times.
-- Henry T. Riley


I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world's first origins to my own time.
-- A.S. Kline

Times, Dates, Translations

The Ovid's Metamorphoses group meets on Wednesdays at the Gulf Gate Library, 10:15 to 12:15. Upcoming dates are:

• February 16th
• March 2nd and 16th and 30th
• April 6th and 20th

If you have a translation you like, bring it. A number of people will be using Rolfe Humphries, others Allen Mandelbaum. We'll have the Loeb Latin on hand as well -- more on translations below. A few online resources are linked on the right.

We'll be starting with Book 1. As usual, we'll read aloud and comment as we go.

Humphries - small glossary at back of text.


Mandelbaum - no glossary or other notes.


Loeb Library:


For those interested in Ovid's influence on English Renaissance poetry, the Arthur Golding translation of 1567 is widely available, but probably not ideal as one's only translation: