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Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD, known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus banished him to a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained a decade until his death.
- Wikipedia
- Wikipedia
Ovid's Metamorphoses:
Perpetual Perishing, Continuous Change
A literary journey through the changing world of Roman and Greek mythology, Ovid's Metamorphoses consists of 250 myths and 15 books, most of which present a metamorphosis of one kind or another: human to divine. divine to human, human to tree, human to animal, and more:
The nymph Daphne, desperately fleeing the god Apollo, calls on her river-god father for help and is turned into a laurel tree; the lovelorn artist Pygmalion’s ivory statue becomes a flesh-and-blood woman, Galatea; the nymph Echo, pining for the self-absorbed Narcissus, fades away until all that remains of her is her voice. [1]
Its overall effect, says the novelist AS Byatt in the In Our Time podcast below, is to give readers a sense of:
"The shiftiness of things, the way the whole world is constantly in flux, the way one thing changes into food for another thing, the way a thing changes shape, and he was relating this to human passions. A man possessed by rage or a man by hunger or man possessed by lust becomes a different kind of animal from a man quietly worshipping a god in a tree-lined sanctuary. Above all things he was interested in the fact that nothing rests, nothing stays, everything moves, everything changes."
In addition, adds Catherine Bates in the podcast, there is "no straight moral line....The morality itself is metamorphosed."
In these ways The Metamorphoses illustrates the notion of process in Whitehead's philosophy. In Whitehead's thought process does not mean progress; it means the process of experiencing the world and the objective transition from one state of affairs to another: concrescence and transition. This change is constant and continuous. It never ends. Part of the process is imaginative and emotional; part of it is in the world we see around us. The two intersect. Along the way things both inner and outer can and do change shapes. Darwin shows that even species change shaped, evolving from one into others.
In the spiritual alphabet of humanity, T is for transformation. Most of us will distinguish between healthy transformation and unhealthy transformation, transformation that gives rise to beauty and relief, and transformation that gives rise to pain and suffering. The proposal of Ovid, however, is that it is all transformation. All is perishing, all is change. In the spiritual alphabet, A is for attention.
[1] - The New Yorker, Should Ovid's Metamorphoses Have a Trigger Warning?
"The shiftiness of things, the way the whole world is constantly in flux, the way one thing changes into food for another thing, the way a thing changes shape, and he was relating this to human passions. A man possessed by rage or a man by hunger or man possessed by lust becomes a different kind of animal from a man quietly worshipping a god in a tree-lined sanctuary. Above all things he was interested in the fact that nothing rests, nothing stays, everything moves, everything changes."
In addition, adds Catherine Bates in the podcast, there is "no straight moral line....The morality itself is metamorphosed."
In these ways The Metamorphoses illustrates the notion of process in Whitehead's philosophy. In Whitehead's thought process does not mean progress; it means the process of experiencing the world and the objective transition from one state of affairs to another: concrescence and transition. This change is constant and continuous. It never ends. Part of the process is imaginative and emotional; part of it is in the world we see around us. The two intersect. Along the way things both inner and outer can and do change shapes. Darwin shows that even species change shaped, evolving from one into others.
In the spiritual alphabet of humanity, T is for transformation. Most of us will distinguish between healthy transformation and unhealthy transformation, transformation that gives rise to beauty and relief, and transformation that gives rise to pain and suffering. The proposal of Ovid, however, is that it is all transformation. All is perishing, all is change. In the spiritual alphabet, A is for attention.
[1] - The New Yorker, Should Ovid's Metamorphoses Have a Trigger Warning?
A Scholarly Discussion
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet Ovid and explore the theme of metamorphosis from the transformation of Narcissus to the bug of Kafka’s story, and beyond.
Ovid wrote at the beginning of The Metamorphoses - in Ted Hughes’ wonderful version - “now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/Into different bodies/I summon the supernatural beings/who first contrived/The transmogrifications/In the stuff of life./You did it for your own amusement./Descend again, be pleased to reanimate/this revival of those marvels.”
And descend they did: The metamorphoses is an extraordinarily wide sweep through the teeming, changing world of Roman and Greek mythology.The tales were immensely popular in their own day, they were an inspiration to Chaucer, Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite poet, and two thousand years after they were written the stories of shape changing still seem relevant: Ted Hughes won the Whitbread Book of the Year with his translation of Tales from Ovid in 1997, and a new collection called Ovid Metamorphosed has garnered versions of the tales from authors and poets from all over the world.
With A S Byatt, novelist and one of the contributors to Ovid Metamorphosed; Dr Catherine Bates, critic and Research Fellow, University of Warwick.
Varieties of Metamorphosis
The transformation of such a wide variety of sources contributes to the larger metamorphic project the poem represents.
Ovid includes over 250 myths in the poem, most (but not all) containing a metamorphosis, some central to the story, others incidental.
Human transformations into gods (apotheoses), animals, plants, and features of land, sea, and sky (catasterisms) offer etiologies for a wide array of natural and cultural phenomena and populate the poem with new and, paradoxically, enduring forms.
Divine transformations, however, are reversible: thus Jupiter, who presides in book 1 over an epic Council of the Gods, assumes in book 2 the form first of the goddess Diana (to rape Callisto) and then of a bull (to rape Europa), while in book 3 he appears to Semele as a thunderbolt. As this sketch of Jupiter’s activities early in the poem implies, the Ovidian gods do not necessarily act from lofty motives: ‘majesty and love are not well suited nor stay long in the same place’ (2.846-7), Ovid says of Jupiter’s transformation into a bull.
The subjects of Arachne’s tapestry (a series of divine rapes, 6.103-28) bear witness to the gods’ caprice, as does her transformation into a spider at Minerva’s hands; by contrast, Minerva’s tapestry (her contest with Neptune for patronage of Athens, 6.70-102) self-servingly testifies to divine justice (theodicy) and authority. Human metamorphoses in the poem occur not only in punishment (e.g., Juno’s transformation of Callisto into a bear) but also in reward (e.g., Jupiter’s transformation of the bear-Callisto into the constellation ursa maior), as Ovid repeatedly explores the problematic disjunction between divine justice and divine authority.
- Alison Keith, University of Toronto, in World Epics, Columbia University
Ovid includes over 250 myths in the poem, most (but not all) containing a metamorphosis, some central to the story, others incidental.
Human transformations into gods (apotheoses), animals, plants, and features of land, sea, and sky (catasterisms) offer etiologies for a wide array of natural and cultural phenomena and populate the poem with new and, paradoxically, enduring forms.
Divine transformations, however, are reversible: thus Jupiter, who presides in book 1 over an epic Council of the Gods, assumes in book 2 the form first of the goddess Diana (to rape Callisto) and then of a bull (to rape Europa), while in book 3 he appears to Semele as a thunderbolt. As this sketch of Jupiter’s activities early in the poem implies, the Ovidian gods do not necessarily act from lofty motives: ‘majesty and love are not well suited nor stay long in the same place’ (2.846-7), Ovid says of Jupiter’s transformation into a bull.
The subjects of Arachne’s tapestry (a series of divine rapes, 6.103-28) bear witness to the gods’ caprice, as does her transformation into a spider at Minerva’s hands; by contrast, Minerva’s tapestry (her contest with Neptune for patronage of Athens, 6.70-102) self-servingly testifies to divine justice (theodicy) and authority. Human metamorphoses in the poem occur not only in punishment (e.g., Juno’s transformation of Callisto into a bear) but also in reward (e.g., Jupiter’s transformation of the bear-Callisto into the constellation ursa maior), as Ovid repeatedly explores the problematic disjunction between divine justice and divine authority.
- Alison Keith, University of Toronto, in World Epics, Columbia University
Arachne
"Arachne, (Greek: “Spider”) in Greek mythology, the daughter of Idmon of Colophon in Lydia, a dyer in purple.
Arachne was a weaver who acquired such skill in her art that she ventured to challenge Athena, goddess of war, handicraft, and practical reason. Athena wove a tapestry depicting the gods in majesty, while that of Arachne showed their amorous adventures. Enraged at the perfection of her rival’s work (or, alternatively, offended by its subject matter), Athena tore it to pieces, and in despair Arachne hanged herself. But the goddess out of pity loosened the rope, which became a cobweb; Arachne herself was changed into a spider, whence the name of the zoological class to which spiders belong, Arachnida. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the chief source of the story."
Arachne was a weaver who acquired such skill in her art that she ventured to challenge Athena, goddess of war, handicraft, and practical reason. Athena wove a tapestry depicting the gods in majesty, while that of Arachne showed their amorous adventures. Enraged at the perfection of her rival’s work (or, alternatively, offended by its subject matter), Athena tore it to pieces, and in despair Arachne hanged herself. But the goddess out of pity loosened the rope, which became a cobweb; Arachne herself was changed into a spider, whence the name of the zoological class to which spiders belong, Arachnida. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the chief source of the story."
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Bruce Conner, Arachne, 1959, mixed media: nylon stockings, collage, cardboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Edith S. and Arthur J. Levin, 2005.5.12
Violence and decay appear to lurk beneath suffocating webs of nylon in Bruce Conner’s Arachne. This assemblage of found objects reflects the junk art and beat culture of Northern California in the 1950s. Conner’s use of throwaway objects as art materials contrasts with the sunny, consumerist ethos of pop art. Titled after a character from Greek mythology, Arachne hints at, rather than illustrates, the narrative of a proud girl who wove stories of the gods’ misbehavior into her cloth, boasting that she could outperform Athena, her teacher and goddess of spinners and weavers. Out of spite, Athena transformed Arachne into a spider, condemning her to weave webs in the darkness until the end of time." - Smithsonian American Art Museum |
The Fluent World:
Whitehead on Concrescence and Transition
At this point the group of seventeenth- and eighteenth century philosophers practically made a discovery, which, although it lies on the surface of their writings, they only half-realized. The discovery is that there are two kinds of fluency. One kind is the concrescence† which, in Locke's language, is ‘the real internal constitution of a particular existent.’ The other kind is the transition from particular existent to particular existent. This transition, again in Locke's language, is the ‘perpetually perishing’ which is one aspect of the notion of time; and in another aspect the transition is the origination of the present in conformity with the ‘power’ of the past. The phrase ‘the real internal constitution of a particular existent,’ the description of the human understanding as a process of reflection upon data, the phrase ‘perpetually perishing,’ and the word ‘power’ together with its elucidation are all to be found in Locke's Essay. Yet owing to the limited scope of his investigation Locke did not generalize or put his scattered ideas together. This implicit notion of the two kinds of flux finds further unconscious illustration in Hume. It is all but explicit in Kant, though— as I think— misdescribed. Finally, it is lost in the evolutionary monism of Hegel and of his derivative schools.
With all his inconsistencies, Locke is the philosopher to whom it is most useful to recur, when we desire to make explicit the discovery of the two kinds of fluency, required for the description of the fluent world. One kind is the fluency inherent in the constitution of the particular existent. This kind I have called ‘concrescence.’ The other kind is the fluency whereby the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes that existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process. This kind I have called ‘transition.’ Concrescence moves towards its final cause, which is its subjective aim; transition is the vehicle of the efficient cause, which is the immortal past.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 210). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
With all his inconsistencies, Locke is the philosopher to whom it is most useful to recur, when we desire to make explicit the discovery of the two kinds of fluency, required for the description of the fluent world. One kind is the fluency inherent in the constitution of the particular existent. This kind I have called ‘concrescence.’ The other kind is the fluency whereby the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes that existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process. This kind I have called ‘transition.’ Concrescence moves towards its final cause, which is its subjective aim; transition is the vehicle of the efficient cause, which is the immortal past.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 210). Free Press. Kindle Edition.