2 - Ovid’s Metamorphoses Are Read Everywhere!?: Historical Remarks on a Classical Text in Latin Teaching in Germany

Summary

Abstract

Ovid's Metamorphoses are not only part of world literature, but have also been the subject of long and intensive pedagogical efforts in European schools. To this day, this text is an indispensable part of teaching Latin in Germany. It is a canonical text, a true school classic. Surprisingly, we are poorly informed about how Metamorphoses were able to achieve this position. The aim of this study is to provide a historical overview of the conditions under which this Latin text was able to become canonical from the eighteenth century onwards and to lose this position briefly in the first half of the twentieth century.

Keywords: canon; general education; ‘Gymnasium’; Humanism; Latin teaching; Metamorphoses; mythology; Neo-humanism; Ovid; Prussia

Ovid and Latin Instruction in Germany and Europe

Ovid and Latin instruction in Germany and Europe have been closely intertwined since the Middle Ages. Since the Middle Ages, most of Ovid's works have been the subject of many scientific, artistic, and educational efforts in schools. Metamorphoses played a very special role here. This epic poem can justifiably be called the “Grundbuch der Mythen” (basic book of myths), an epic in which the Roman poet Ovid made transformation myths the central theme in approximately 12,000 verses and approximately 250 individual stories. Ovid created a literary treasure with figures such as Daedalus and Icarus, Orpheus and Eurydice, or Pygmalion, from which creative work is still generated today. This applies not only to literature, music, or the visual arts, but also to schools: Ovid's Metamorphoses represent an indispensable and exemplarily significant part of Latin teaching in Germany in the twenty-first century, so that Metamorphoses can be described as a classic of school practice that is unquestioned in Germany. This is in stark contrast to the controversial me too debates at American universities, in which Metamorphoses were classified as inappropriate reading, especially for female students, because of its depictions of violence against women. How and under what historical conditions could this text achieve such a central position in the teaching of Latin in German schools? Is it a teleological selection process that almost inevitably made Metamorphoses a school classic because of its special humanistic, that is, linguistic and pedagogical qualities?