OVID
THE METAMORPHOSES
WORKS OF OVID
• Amores- love poems, often shorter, focus on a particular mistress
• Heroides- letters from epic and mythic women to their husbands
• Medicamina Faciei Feminae- a comedic book about women’s cosmetics and
beauty tips
• Ars Amatoria- poems about how to make love (to people that you are not
married to)
• Remedia Amoris- the sequel to Ars Amatoria, about how to end relationships
• Fasti- poems about feasts and festivals and the myths behind them
• Metamorphoses- poem of epic length, compilation of different myths
• Tristia- sorrowful poems about life in exile
• Epistolae ex Ponto- letters written by Ovid to family in friends in Rome seeking
to end his exile
Fountain of Diana and Actaeon, Royal Palace at Caserta, Naples (Persico,
Burnelli, Solari), late 18th century
• Oral traditions mentioned by Homer
• Theogony (Birth of the Gods) by Hesiod
• Tragedy- Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
• Earlier and Later Greet poets: Pindar,
Bacchylides, Apollonius of Rhodes,
Callimachus
• Roman model of combining myth and history:
Livy, Catullus, Virgil
• Ovid picks, alters and twists the original
myths into non-canonical “modern” versions
• For many myths, only Ovid’s version survives
while the “real” version is lost
Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys, Rubens, 1638
Thisbe- John Waterhouse, 1909
Narcissus- Caravaggio, 1599
INFLUENCE- LATER POETS
Tales of lovers and wonders inspire courtly
poets and Arthurian legends
Influence style, themes of English poets
Spenser, Milton
Oscar Wilde- references to Metamorphoses and
Fasti
Apollo and Daphne- Bernini, 1625
Apollo and Daphne, Antonio del Pollaiolo, 1470.
PYGMALION
Made into play by George Bernard Shaw 1914
Film adaptation- 1938
Transformed into My Fair Lady starring Audrey
Hepburn 1964
Transformed (again) into Pretty Woman starring
Julia Roberts, 1990
Inspired Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1958
ORPHEUS
Black Orpheus (1959) –set at Carnaval in
Rio De Janeiro
Orpheus Descending- play by Tennessee
Williams, set in 1940s Mississippi
made into film The Fugitive Kind in 1959
starring Marlon Brando
Orphic Trilogy directed by Jean Cocteau
The Blood of a Poet (1930)
Orpheus (1950)
Testament of Orpheus (1960)