The Chaos of Experience, the Confusion of Accident, and the Incomprehensible Realms of Possibility : Ovid's Metamorphoses

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?