Ovid: Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – 17 AD). Known to English speakers as “Ovid”, and others as “Naso”. Roman poet who wrote in Latin.
Huge Influence:
Although we seldom read Ovid these days, he had a massive, profound influence on both Medieval and Renaissance artists and authors, including Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as sculptors such as Bernini.
What the Western world knows of traditional Greek mythology largely comse from Ovid’s Metamorphosis (or the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey - but like most Classical Greek literature, Homer seems to have been lost to Christianized Medieval Europe).
Ovid’s Amores (c. 20 AD) serve as the literary foundation for much of the Courtly Love obsessed Medieval Romances (stories of knights and ladies) we will read later in the semester.
Remember that Latin became the lingua franca of the educated classes until the late Renaissance, and Latin, especially Ovid and Virgil, continued to be taught in public schools throughout the West (including the US) until the 1950s (even my father, who grew up in redneck rural America, grew up reading Ovid in Latin).
Ovid also reminds us that the Romans impacted European culture like no other nation. See: The Roman Crucible
Ovid's Metamorphosis As Literature:
There is no central hero – or even character – amid the roughly 250 myths; what binds them together is the common theme of change (“metamorphosis”, from the Greek “transformation”):
“Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's form or structure through cell growth and differentiation. Some insects, amphibians, mollusks, crustaceans, cnidarians, echinoderms and tunicates undergo metamorphosis, which is usually (but not always) accompanied by a change of habitat or behavior.” -- Wikipedia “metamorphosis”
What we inherit
from Ovid’s Metamorphosis:
In addition to Greek mythology, Ovid's legacy is his emphasis on poetic or artistic form
and beauty, which are perhaps lost to us in the translation. The poems are largely driven by
a drive toward poetry itself: the depth of detail in imagery and language
itself.
Ovid also continues the legacy of
Greek Humanism; although the characters
are often divine, the poet and reader are asked to sympathize and appreciate the
beauty and value human experience in all its dimensions: love, death, joy,
grief, sexuality…. Consider how we associate these traits with Shakespeare’s
sonnets and drama and then realize Shakespeare drew his inspiration from Ovid
(and those who had earlier been inspired by Ovid).
Ceres and Proserpina:
At a human level, this is a story about the corrosively destructive effects of rape or perhaps the death of a child. Ovid's insertion of the Arethusa/Alpheus myth emphasizes the theme of rape.
At a mythological level, this story explains the origin of the seasons.
At a cosmological, spiritual level, this story centers the human experiences of birth (through Ceres/Demeter, goddess of motherhood-fertility) and death (through Pluto/Hades and the underworld), in the ancient theme of rebirth, regeneration, or resurrection. As we discussed with Classical tragedy, the story takes our inherent human experience of birth, love, suffering, death and grief and gives it universal significance: elevating our small lives to the level of gods and/or nature itself.
This is a, if not the, common drive and purpose of all religious
mythology: to give the chaos and seemingly meaninglessness of our suffering a
divine and logical order.
In relationship
to other texts we have or will read, compare:
Sumerian/Babylonian Connections and Origins:
Like Dionysus/Bacchus, Demeter/Ceres (Demeter is the Greek name) is an ancient, ancient goddess believed to predate the Greeks themselves. As a fertility goddess, Demeter/Ceres is related to Inanna/Ishtar, the fertility goddess that Gilgamesh refuses to sleep with. (The Greek Aphrodite, Roman Venus seems to represent the more sexual elements of Ishtar, while Demeter/Ceres represents the birth/motherhood elements of fertility).
In other Sumerian myths Ishtar, like Perseophone, descends into the underworld, where, in order to enter. she is slowly forced to strip naked. Angered at this mistreatment, she attacks the Queen of the Underworld (Ereshkigal). The Queen in turn plagues Ishtar with 60 diseases, and Ishtar is forced to remain in the land of the dead. This causes all sexual activity (ie. birth, regeneration: spring) to cease on earth. Other gods intervene to rescue earth and Ishtar is cured and returns. She must, however, send someone back to Hades in her place, and eventually she settles on her husband, Tammuz. Like Proserpina, Ishtar is associated with the pomegranate. In some cultures, Eve does not eat an apple; she eats a pomegranate, the first fruit domesticated in the Near East and often associated with fertility. In other stories, like Eve, Ishtar is associated with a sacred tree of life and apples.
Not just like Eve, but also like Gilgamesh visiting the underworld, Persephone/Proserpina's denial of immortality revolves around eating or food: in Gilgamesh's case, the loaves of bread.
Christianity:
Finally and
obviously, this story reminds us that death and rebirth -- in the Spring -- was
one of the oldest and most common religious myths and center of celebration for
all Asian/Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and European cultures. When
the Romans accept and then spread the Christ story, it will be against this
2-3,000 or more year-long history of celebrating death and resurrection.
Consider then that all the cultures we have studied have told the story of a partially divine god/human descending to the underworld. Consider also how this particular story frames the tale around a parent's love and her child's death and resurrection in the spring; Persephone/Proserpina is the daughter of God (Jove, Jupiter, Zeus) and a mother's who's iconography represents the miracle of birth.