94 pages • 3 hours read
OvidMetamorphoses
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 8A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Historical Context
When Ovid completed the Metamorphoses around 8 CE, Rome was a new empire under its first emperor Augustus. In 31 BCE, Augustus (previously called Octavian) won the Battle of Actium, and in 27 BCE, he became the sole ruler and emperor of Rome. This ended the Roman Republic, which had begun centuries earlier in around 509 BCE but had been undergoing a period of widespread violence and civil war prior to Augustus’ ascension. He brought the first era of relative peace in approximately a century. Although Ovid and many others of his time were technically born into the Republic, by the time he completed his Metamorphoses, much of Rome had little personal experience with Rome’s prior political system.
Ovid was born in 43 BCE, just after the assassination of Julius Caesar. He was a contemporary of the poets Virgil and Horace, and the three together are considered canonical Latin authors and emblematic of early imperial Roman literature. Ovid was born into an middle class family outside of Rome, and he was later educated in rhetoric in Rome. Ovid had a brief political career, as many wealthy Roman men of his period did, but for much of his life he pursued writing. In 8 CE, after the Metamorphoses was concluded, the emperor Augustus banished Ovid to the Black Sea region. The reasons for Ovid’s exile are unclear, but some suspect it is somehow associated with scandal in the imperial family. Although Ovid desperately wanted to return to Rome, he never returned and died near the Black Sea around 17 or 18 CE.
Literary Context
Ovid wrote a considerable quantity of poetry during his life. In addition to the Metamorphoses, he also composed many elegiac poems (poems in elegiac meter, often concerning love). These include the Heroides, poetic letters from famous mythological women, the Amores, which are three books of love elegy, the Remedia Amoris on how to cure love, the Fasti, which concerns the Roman calendar of festivals, the Ibis, which is an aggressive collection of myths, and the Tristia, which are five books of poetry in which Ovid bemoans his exile. Ovid also wrote didactic (educational) poems, including the Medicamina Faciei Femineae on cosmetics and the Ars Amatoria on the art of love and seduction. In addition to his poetry, Ovid wrote a collection of poetic letters from exile called the Epistulae ex Ponto.
The Metamorphoses, Ovid’s longest work, is written in dactylic hexameter—the meter of epic poetry—although the topics that Ovid covers in the poem range from epic to elegiac to tragic, pastoral, and scientific. Ovid owes much to both his Greek and his Roman predecessors. In particular, the Metamorphoses covers topics and myths central to Homer’s Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Virgil’s Latin epic the Aeneid. Many of the myths that Ovid retells appear in famous Greco-Roman literature surviving today, including other epic poems such as Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, which covers the story of Jason and Medea, as well as tragic plays, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy. By the end of the Metamorphoses, when Ovid tells tales of early Rome, he covers many of the same topics as his contemporary Livy does in his Roman history Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome) which was written at roughly the same time as the Metamorphoses.
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By Ovid
