Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid, is, along with Virgil and Horace, one of the three “canonical poets” of Latin literature. He is, no doubt, best known today for his epic poem Metamorphoses, which is an extraordinarily beautiful telling of the tales of classical mythology. I first became intimately acquainted with Metamorphoses in summer 1987 and have revisited it on multiple occasions ever since, never ceasing to be refreshed and delighted by the visit.
Several years ago, I purchased and read Charle Martin’s translation of Metamorphoses and do not hesitate to recommend this particular translation to you for its elegance, flow, and brilliance as demonstrated in the following excerpt.
The Creation
Before the seas and lands had been created,
before the sky that covers everything,
Nature displayed a single aspect only
throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name,
a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk
and nothing more, with the discordant seeds
of disconnected elements all heaped
together in anarchic disarray.
The sun as yet did not light up the earth,
nor did the crescent moon renew her horns,
nor was the earth suspended in midair,
balanced by her own weight, nor did the ocean
extend her arms to the margins of the land.
Although the land and sea and air were present,
land was unstable, the sea unfit for swimming,
and air lacked light; shapes shifted constantly,
and all things were at odds with one another,
for in a single mass cold strove with warm,
wet was opposed to dry and soft to hard,
and weightlessness to matter having weight.
Some god (or kinder nature) settled this
dispute by separating earth from heaven,
and then by separating sea from earth
and fluid aether from denser air;
and after these were separated out
and liberated from the primal heap,
he bound the disentangled elements
each in its place and all in harmony.
The fiery and weightless aether leapt
to heaven’s vault and claimed its citadel;
the next in lightness to be placed was air;
the denser earth drew down gross elements
and was compressed by its own gravity;
encircling water lastly found its place,
encompassing the solid earth entire.
Now when that god (whichever one it was)
had given Chaos form, dividing it
in parts which he arranged, he molded earth
into the shape of an enormous globe,
so that it should be uniform throughout.
And afterward he sent the waters streaming
in all directions, ordered waves to swell
under the sweeping winds, and sent the flood
to form new shores on the surrounded earth;
he added springs, great standing swamps and lakes,
as well as sloping rivers fixed between
their narrow banks, whose plunging waters (all
in varied places, each in its own channel)
are partly taken back into the earth
and in part flow until they reach the sea,
when they – received into larger field
of a freer flood – beat against shores, not banks.
He ordered open plains to spread themselves,
valleys to sink, the stony peaks to rise,
and forests to put on their coats of green.
And as the vault of heaven is divided
by two zones on the right and two on the left,
with a central zone, much hotter, in between,
so, by the care of this creator god,
the mass that was enclosed now by the sky
was zoned in the same way, with the same lines
inscribed upon the surface of the earth.
Heat makes the middle zone unlivable,
and the two outer zones are deep in snow;
between these two extremes, he placed two others
of temperate climate, blending cold and warmth.
Air was suspended over all of this,
proportionately heavier than aether,
as earth is heavier than water is.
He ordered mists and clouds into position,
and thunder, to make test of our resolve,
and winds creating thunderbolts and lighting.
Nor did that world-creating god permit
the winds to roam ungoverned through the air;
for even now, with each of them in charge
of his own kingdom, and their blasts controlled,
they scarcely can be kept from shattering
the world, such is the discord between brothers.
Eurus went eastward, to the lands of Dawn,
the kingdoms of Arabia and Persia,
and to the mountain peaks that lie below
the morning’s rays; and Zephyr took his place
on the western shores warmed by the setting sun.
The frozen north and Scythia were seized
by bristling Boreas; the lands opposite,
continually drenched by fog and rain,
are where the south wind, known as Auster, dwells.
Above these winds, he set the weightless aether,
a liquid free of every earthly toxin.
No sooner had he separated all
within defining limits, when the stars,
which formerly had been concealed in darkness,
began to blaze up all throughout the heavens;
and so that every region of the world
should have its own distinctive forms of life,
the constellations and the shapes of gods
occupied the lower part of heaven;
the seas gave shelter to the shining fishes,
earth received beasts, and flighty air, the birds.
An animal more like the gods than these,
more intellectually capable
and able to control the other beasts,
had not as yet appeared: now man was born,
either because the framer of all things,
the fabricator of this better world,
created man out of his own divine
substance – or else because Prometheus
took up a clod (so lately broken off
from lofty aether that it still contained
some elements in common with its kin),
and mixing it with water, molded it
into the shape of gods, who govern all.
And even though all other animals
lean forward and look down toward the ground,
he gave to man a face that is uplifted,
and ordered him to stand erect and look
directly up into the vaulted heavens
and turn his countenance to meet the stars;
the earth, that was lately rude and formless,
was changed by taking on the shapes of men.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 6-125 (trans. Charles Martin)
Ovid’s tale of creation is both moving and striking, to say the least. And if one is at all like me in intellectual temperament, one cannot help but wonder where Ovid found the inspirational well for his striking poetic imagery and design. Fear not, my friends, Stephen M. Wheeler explored this issue in “Imago Mundi: Another View of the Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses” (The American Journal of Philology, vol. 116, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 95–121, https://doi.org/10.2307/295504), an article recommended as worth your time to read.
Among other things, Wheeler argues that Ovid uses the Shield of Achilles (the Homeric Shield), from Homer’s Illiad, as “a model for his own version of the divinely created universe.” Wheeler does so by presenting evidence showing Ovid’s “allusive engagement with the Homeric shield” in his account of chaos, showing that Ovid’s description of the universe resembled the ecphrasis [i.e., the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device] of a work of art in the tradition of the Homeric shield, and that it prefigured other divine works of art in Metamorphoses, and by explaining why Ovid began the Metamorphoses with a reference to the Homeric shield as well as how the work should be read in “light of obvious allusions to Hesiod’s Theogony and the Apollonian song of Orpheus.”
Towards the conclusion of his article, Wheeler states the following: “Ovid’s choice to begin Metamorphoses with an epic ecphrasis also highlights his own-self-consciousness as a poet. It is well-known that the device of ecphrasis offers the poet an opportunity to reflect upon his own art while describing the art of another. The deus et melior natura may therefore be read as a figure for the poet, and the ordering of the universe as a metaphor for creation of the poem; thus the “real” subject of Ovid’s cosmogony may be the literary creation of Metamorphoses, just as the shield of Achilles is emblematic of the creation of the Iliad” (p. 117).
