Poet Ovid (43 BCE- CE 17/18) lived during the reign of Roman emperor Augustus.
John Williams imagines in his great novel Augustus thinking about poets thus :
“…The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the
confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility —which is
to say the world in which we all so intimately live that few of us take the
trouble to examine it. The fruits ofthat contemplation are the discovery, or
the invention, of some small principle of harmony and order that may be
isolated from that disorder which obscures it, and the subjection ofthat
discovery to those poetic laws which at last make it possible. No general ever more
carefully exercises his troops in their intricate formations than does the poet
dispose his words to the rigorous necessity of meter; no consul more shrewdly
aligns this faction against that in order to achieve his end than the poet who
balances one line with another in order to display his truth; and no Emperor
ever so carefully organizes the disparate parts of the world that he rules so
that they will constitute a whole than does the poet dispose the details of his
poem so that another world, perhaps more real than the one that we so
precariously inhabit, will spin in the universe of men's minds.
It was my destiny to change the world, I said earlier.
Perhaps I should have said that the world was my poem, that I undertook the
task of ordering its parts into a whole, subordinating this faction to that,
and adorning it with those graces appropriate to its worth. And yet if it is a
poem that I have fashioned, it is one that will not for very long outlive its
time…”
('August 10', "Augustus", 1972)
Gail Trimble writes in TLS June 21 2024:
“…The Metamorphoses of Ovid is both a universal epic and a
product of its time. Its fifteen lengthy books of Latin narrative poetry tell a
single story of world history, but also fragment into some 250 episodes about
nymphs turning into bears, boys into flowers. The autonomy of the human body is
always under threat, not least from sexual violence, but at the same time a
bird or a tree may have sentience and memory. The poem is a repository of Greek
mythology, but it culminates in Rome under the emperor Augustus and with the
point of view of its own virtuosic author. That author is a deeply
self-conscious one who lets unreliable narrators seize the microphone and who
tells of great artists punished for competing with the gods, while constantly
wrongfooting his readers with irony, horror and jokes…”
“Iphis
transformed into a man” by Cornelis van Dalen II, after Nicolaes Pietersz
Berchem, 1677 "Iphis changed into a young man: in response to Iphis'
prayer, Isis changes her into a young man to enable her to marry Ianthe (Ovid,
Metamorphoses IX 785)
This story, from Book IX, begins with Iphis’s father
informing her mother that they do not have the means to produce a dowry for a
daughter. Thus if her pregnancy produces a daughter they will have to kill the
child. Her mother, distraught at this, prays to the gods to help her. She is
answered by Isis who tells her not to fear as she will help protect the child.
Iphis’s mother successfully raises her as a boy until her
teenage years, when Iphis is betrothed to Ianthe. Deeply in love with Ianthe,
but knowing that the wedding night will reveal her physical body, Iphis
despairs. On the eve of her wedding night Iphis and her mother pray to Isis to
help them. Isis descends and physically transforms him into a man.
The episode ends with Iphis and Ianthe’s wedding being
witnessed by the gods of marriage and love."
That cow in the picture looks so Indian! Is she cow or someone else?
