Literature and history

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Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 63, all is in flux.

This is the third of three programs on the metamorphosis, a long poem that the Roman writer

Ovid completed around 8 CE.

If you want to hear the metamorphosis from the beginning, the story starts in episode 61.

In this episode, we will cover the five final books of Ovid's most famous work, books in which

Ovid increasingly turns to the subject of Rome and the contemporary history around him.

As we move into the final third of the metamorphoses,

I think one thing we need to remember is that even in the closing books of his collection,

Ovid never slows down. Book 14, for instance, contains 16 embedded tales with references

to other stories to boot.

As the action in the poem moves closer and closer to Rome and the poem's conclusion,

often begins to season his collection with native Italian stories.

But he never really stops island hopping around the Mediterranean, peopleing his stories with

a hodgepodge of Greeks, Romans, and others.

in the 15th and final book of the epic often gives us something like a conclusion, a syncretic

philosophical speech made by a fictional version of the philosopher Pythagoras, and then an assurance that with

the ascension of Augustus at least something permanent has been installed amidst the

unending flux of the universe.

But Ovid remains a crafty impresario up until the end,

...