Kevin's Classics

Ovid’s take on Orpheus  From the translations of book 10 and 11 , we can read a heart-breaking story of the hero Orpheus whose poetic prowess, though impressive enough to persuade deities and shades, cannot bring back his beloved wife. His sequential abjection of womanly love is suggested to be his downfall. Reading Orpheus’s story in this manner is a subtle implication of Ovid's own poetical superiority over Orpheus. No transformation of Orpheus & Eurydice A key point of Ovid’s work is its theme of describing transformations, i.e.  metamorphoses in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora,   my soul brings me to speak of figures changed into new bodies (Ovid. Met.I.1-2) This aspect of changing forms into new bodies seems completely absent from the characters Orpheus and Eurydice . It is only the surrounding characters that undergo metamorphoses. The first of them is the transformation of Cyparissus into a tree when Ovid narrates how Orpheus creates a ...

Some verses in dactylic hexameter (I hope) summarizing the story of Orpheus it's still work in progress:  Orpheu, cur lyram pulsas vocis dulcis cantu? Qui potes frustra Eurydicen occurrere sero, quae periit morsu non matura anguis acerbi?  Ora videnda uxoris numquam non patitur, ut Appetat infernum regnum et conturbet manes. Hic adventus  The death of Eurydice (1637)  by Peter Paul Rubens at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam

Lekythos (oil flask) depicting Orpheus being killed, at Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Introduction  In the last part, we left Ovid's story with Orpheus being unable to rescue his wife and went back to Thrace (to  Rhodopen and Haemus). Hereafter, we saw that he eschewed women but was interested in the love of boys (here, Orpheus is seen as an originator of the Greek practice of philopaideia). To illustrate this, Ovid continues book 10 with a bunch of myths about boys and men that were loved by the Gods: Ganymedes, Hyacinthus, Adonis among others. The nifty way he recounts it is with ekphrasis, a narrative technique where a poet incorpates stories within stories. In book 10, Ovid represents the singer Orpheus secluded in a grove where he (Orpheus) sings off those boys. There's even a further layer in that the story of Adonis contains the story of Atalanta, recounted by Aphrodite to Adonis. It is after this sequence of myths recounted by Orpheus, that the poet focusses on Orpheus...

Introduction It was in my third year of secundary education (I believe that's the end of junior high school) when I first encountered this myth. Funnily enough, it was during a Latin exam, which tested our knowledge of the participle present. The exam consisted of some excersises that made us change verbs to their participle equivalents and vice versa, and it ended with a translation exercise. The text that we had to translate was a simplified version of this text, though it skipped to the part where Orpheus has already sung to Hades and Persephone. I don't remember what I got for that test, but the simplified Latin text, filled with present participles, is still in my mind when I think of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was a bummer to find out that Ovid's version was not so visually narrated as that simple text had been, but I was still enamoured by his style. Enfin, we are not here to recollect old school stories. We are here because we want to know how Ovid represents the myth...