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Episode 61 Changes of Shape

This is the first of three shows we'll do on Ovid's metamorphosis, a 15 book long epic that

Ovid finished around 8 CE.

In this program, we'll cover the first five books of Ovid's poem.

Ovid's most famous work has been one of the most influential texts in world history.

During the late medieval and early modern periods, the metamorphoses seems to have been on the desk of every major writer at some point.

Allusions to Ovid's masterpiece show up in Dante's divine comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury

Tales and Book of the Duchess, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus and Venus and Adonis, and Milton's Paradise Lost, to name just a few.

To many generations of readers, authors, and artists, the Metamorphoses served as a card

catalog for classical literature,

encompassing a thousand years of ancient Mediterranean stories in a single volume,

stories which moved loosely from the moment of creation up to Ovid's world of contemporary Rome.

The 12,000 lines and over 250 stories of Ovid's metamorphoses

focus on a single theme.

This theme is not only in the epics Latin title,

Metamorphosaon Libri, or or books of transformations, but also in its very first line.

Quote,

Changes of Shape, writes Ovid.

New forms are the theme which my spirit impels me now to recite.'"

"'Twose-quote.

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