5 - Inconsistency and authority in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Summary

Ovid wanted his readers to have a wrenching experience from his violations of decorum. He wanted the Metamorphoses to be disturbing, and regarded the violation of his readers' sensibilities as a valuable experience for them. Indeed, if there is a didactic purpose to the Metamorphoses, it is not so much in the inculcation of positive moral values as in the exposure of the audience to revealing – though sometimes unpleasant – experiences. Ovid makes his readers recognize the power of language to control and manipulate their responses, and exposes to them their susceptibility or willingness – or even craving – to be deceived by comforting and pleasant fictions.

Garth Tissol, The Face of Nature

Ovid's hexameter Metamorphoses follows an extensive body of work in elegy, and shares many features with both his own work in elegy and that of his Roman and Alexandrian predecessors, particularly Callimachus. These elegiac features include what is on some level a looser principle of organization like that of Callimachus' Aetia. Ovid's elegiac Fasti, on which he was working while writing the Metamorphoses, comes even closer to the Callimachean model, with disquisitions about the Roman calendar linked by the persona of the pseudo-scholar-poet interacting with his sources. Recent work on the Fasti stresses that poem's rich variety and multiplicity of voices, and the possibility of “combinatory” effects resulting from the juxtaposition of incongruities. So too for the Metamorphoses, much recent work has focused on discontinuity, polyphony, and the poem's apparently “post-modern” features.