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 grove ...