modern crimes ancient goddesses artistic licence

Modern crimes ancient goddesses artistic licence how to#

Oceans take shape and rise in waves spurred on by winds. Voilà! The earth is fashioned in the form of a perfectly round ball. This unruly form floated about in nothingness until some unnamed being disentangled it. Ovid’s graphic tales of metamorphosis begin with the story of Primal Chaos a messy lump of discordant atoms, and shapeless prototypes of land, sea and air. But Ovid is not convinced, and he seeks to capture an epic world of uncertainty and destabilisation instead of “ drinking the Kool-Aid” that flows from Augustus’ fountains.

Unlike his poetic successor, however, Virgil is alert to literary censorship under the reign of Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), Rome’s first emperor, and carefully navigates its perilous terrain. This Latin epic casts a patriotic spell over its audience in its evocation of the foundation of Rome from the ashes of Troy to the glory of the Augustan Age. Some 700 years later, when the Homeric verses were still regarded as the benchmark for epic poetry, Virgil composed the Aeneid (19 BC). Yet, appropriate to the gravitas of epic poetry, the Odyssey is also about the journey of a man determined to maintain his heroic stature as he navigates all sorts of dangers in strange lands. 800 BC) takes us on an epic voyage forever leading towards home, sometimes making us laugh, and occasionally letting down its high-brow hair with some sex and infidelity.

Modern crimes ancient goddesses artistic licence how to#

850 BC) soars to the literary heights of the sublime, and shows us how to live and die, to meditate on mortality, to embrace sorrow, to grip and then release hate, to truly love. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translation David Raeburn (2004). This accomplishment also goes a long way in explaining the rightful place the Metamorphoses holds within the canon of classical literature, placed as it is beside other great epics of Mediterranean antiquity such as the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. The artistic dexterity involved in pulling off this literary feat is testimony to Ovid’s skill and ambition as a poet. The madness and chaos of some 250 stories, spanning around 700 lines of poetry per book, are woven together by the theme of metamorphosis or transformation.

Beginning with the creation of the world, and ending with Rome in his own lifetime, the Metamorphoses drags the reader through time and space, from beginnings to endings, from life to death, from moments of delicious joy to episodes of depravity and abjection. Ovid’s 15-book epic, written in exquisite Latin hexameter, is a rollercoaster of a read. Recent calls to provide trigger-warnings to university students before they study the work tell us as much about modern Western attitudes towards sex, violence and censorship as the Metamorphoses tells us about the gender politics of ancient Rome. But as centuries have passed, its notoriety has increased. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (AD 3-8) was not originally as controversial as his other poetic works.