Literature and

history come.

Hello and Welcome. Hello and welcome to literature in history.

Episode 62, a curious passion.

This is the second of three episodes on the metamorphosis, an enormous collection of ancient

Mediterranean myths dealing with transformation, completed by the Roman poet Ovid sometime around

8 CE. More than any other work, Ovid's metamorphosis

served as a window into antiquity for readers during the Middle Ages and early modern period. A constellation of famous writers

relished Ovid's versions of ancient myths in part simply due to the massiveness of

Ovid's poem. With 12,000 lines and more than 250 seamlessly interconnected

tales, the metamorphoses is the omnibus of ancient Mediterranean literature

and the summit of golden age Latin poetry.

The collection embodies much of what characterized Roman literature up to Ovid's time,

a thoroughgoing familiarity with Greek poetry, a penchant for showy displays of erudition, an affection

for careful craftsmanship, and an ambivalence toward long narrative epic.

Virgil's Aniad is certainly Rome's most famous story,

but the metamorphoses is a far more Roman work,

with its emphasis on synthesis, inclusiveness, appropriation, and

rearrangement rather than sheer originality.

Ovid and the generation of poets that preceded him expected poets to double as scholars.

And as scholars they sought to collect and process centuries of texts that had come before them.

Last time we heard dozens of myths from the first five books of the metamorphoses, myths that

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