attempt something at once seriously Callimachean and patriotic: the calendar offered ample pegs on which to hang praise of
Rome and praise of Augustus. Irrepressible irreverence periodically mars or improves the poem, depending on one's point of
view. It was never finished. Disinclination seems to have moved Ovid to abandon it, after six, instead of twelve, books. There
were external factors to support or cause disinclination. The year A.D. 4 saw the adoption of Tiberius and therefore another
set of laudatory allusions to include; and, on the calendar, the month of August loomed, a daunting prospect for a subject of
Augustus. Ovid gave up.
But he did not give up poetry, nor even Callimachean poetry. Subsequent to the Fasti is the Metamorphoses, Ovid's great
hexameter poem in fifteen books. Here he assembles dozens of attractive stories from myth, stories which end in the
metamorphosis of characters into animals, plants, and other forms. The stories are linked together with ingenious transitions,
so ingenious that progress can seem bewildering. The opening of the poem seems sequential (from the creation of the world,
through Jupiter's punishment of sinful man, to Deucalion and Pyrrha), but soon we find ourselves conducted through the
stories of Daphne, Io, Phaethon, and so on-all the way through to the metamorphosis of Julius Caesar into a god in Book 15.
What is this poem? By a judicious choice of words at the beginning Ovid surprisingly advertises it as something that
Callimachus eschewed: a traditional epic. We expect, therefore, an epic in which the plot is serious and a single, unified,
action unfolds objectively, an epic in which the consequences of actions follow; hence, a moral poem. It very soon transpires
that the Metamorphoses is nothing of the sort. The advertisement was a spoof. The action of the poem is neither single nor
serious, but a mass of disparate stories ingeniously, artificially linked and subjectively told-told with Ovidian wit, humour,
and grotesqueness. And the consequences of actions do not follow. They end in the fantasy of metamorphosis. The poem is a
gloriously amoral Callimachean collection got up in epic dress, an affront to the traditional epic genre.
As always, Ovid affronts. Here, in particular, there is irreverence towards Virgil's genre-and Virgil's material: in various ways
the material of the Aeneid gets mauled. Another sitting and solemn target. There is, too, irreverence towards the house of
Augustus, despite overt but unconvincing flattery. Jupiter compared to Augustus in one context is, within a few hundred
lines, chasing a girl in another. Nor does the company in which Julius Caesar's 'metamorphosis' finds itself dignify it. And
there is irreverence, in a sense, towards life: it is simply the material for amusing, amoral literature.
There is a great risk of assessing Ovid too negatively: he is, we say, parodic, irreverent, unserious, unAugustan, amoral, even
immoral, merely rhetorical or ingenious. This can, and should be, rephrased. Ovid is funny. His immorality serves humour,
and his parodies are the sort which direct laughter on to themselves, not the parodied original (see the example quoted above,
p. 611). Ovid is a poet of 'art for art's sake': Ovid reveres technique, reveres art; and amorality is indispensable to the
construction of a self-contained artistic experience. UnAugustan? In a sense Ovid is the Augustan poet par excellence,
particularly of the second period. Augustus' actions and legislations were designed to stem a tide, to combat a prevailing
spirit. Ovid represents that spirit, pleasure-loving, sophisticated, and, it must be admitted, cynical. Horace, twenty-two years
older than Ovid and belonging to a different generation, may draw a veil of silence over him. But Ovid's contemporaries did
not. They praised him to the skies. For them he was the true Augustan poet.
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