Ovid’s Metamorphoses was completed during the reign of Divi Filius, the Son of a God, bringer of the good news of peace, the one whose name is above every name. That name is Caesar Augustus, born Gaius Octavius, adopted son of Julius Caesar. It is AD 8.
Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, an Aramaic-speaking, Jewish boy, is working in a carpenter’s shop on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In 300 years’ time, another Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, will officially acknowledge this boy as King of Kings. The little boy’s name is Yeshua, born 11 years earlier in an obscure Judean town. Bethlehem.
Taking its inspiration from over 250 Greco-Roman myths, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a remarkable work of poetic imagination that traces the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. And, in its closing lines, Ovid anticipates the assumption of Caesar Augustus into divinity. He had just finished Metamorphoses when he was banished for life by this same Augustus. Ovid died alone, in exile, on the shores of the Black Sea in 17 AD.
Ovid’s influence on Western culture is unquantifiable. The poems I have written reference only a fraction of his work: The Creation, Narcissus and Echo, Actaeon, Daedalus and Icarus, Persephone/Proserpina, Orpheus, and Odysseus/Ulysses.
As vivid and psychologically rich as these tales are, sometimes the world in which they are set feels incomprehensibly remote. Sometimes eerily contemporary. Ted Hughes’ Introduction to his Tales from Ovid(AD 1997) puts it like this:
‘The Greek/Roman pantheon had fallen in on men’s heads…For all its Augustan stability, [the Empire] was at sea in hysteria and despair, at one extreme wallowing in the bottomless appetites and sufferings of the gladiatorial arena, and at the other searching higher and higher for a spiritual transcendence- which eventually did take form, on the crucifix. The tension between these extremes, and occasionally their collision, can be felt in these tales. They establish a rough register of what it feels like to live in the psychological gulf that opens at the end of an era.’
Does this sound familiar?
The poems that follow were written to be performed along with paintings by Mike Newton on 30 December 2023 in the St Ives School of Painting.