A second didactic poem, Medicamina faciei feminae, is a fragment of a longer work that Ovid describes as parvus (Ars amatoria 3.206). The passage that survives, which justifies the use of makeup and provides recipes for it, originally stood at the beginning of the poem. It is unclear whether this was a serious guidebook to cosmetics, a parody of didactic works, or Ovid’s attempt to demonstrate his virtuosity as a poet by taking on an unpromising topic.
Fasti is a didactic poem on the Roman calendar in elegiac couplets. It focuses on myths and festivals, but also includes information on astronomy and on Augustus and his family. The broad learning that it contains is reminiscent of the scholarship of the Hellenistic period, particularly Callimachus’ Aetia. Six books (January through June) were completed before Ovid’s exile and were subsequently revised. It appears that books on the remaining six months were not written.
Ovid continued to write even after his exile. Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto are elegiac poems addressed primarily to his wife and to anonymous individuals in Rome. The poems addressed to Augustus are pleas for a commutation of his sentence. Others are bleak descriptions of his new home and sorrowful reflections on his past, present, and future.
Ibis, which was modeled on a poem of the same name by Callimachus, is an invective in elegiac couplets instead of the iambics traditionally associated with this genre. In it, Ovid rails against an anonymous enemy who is trying to damage his reputation in Rome during his exile. This poem is replete with references to punishments inflicted on mythic figures that Ovid wishes upon his adversary. Here the unwarlike poet of love transforms himself into a soldier who threatens violence against his enemy through verse. Because Ovid cannot carry out his vengeance from Tomis, Ibis expresses his frustration with the situation in which he finds himself: helpless, in the middle of nowhere. In the end, however, the extreme punishments that he conjures up for his enemy are so ridiculous that the poem devolves into humor.
There are references to other works that have not survived. Quintilian (10.1.98) holds up the tragedy Medea as an example of Ovid’s unrealized potential. This is his only work that is not in elegiac couplets or in dactylic hexameter. There was also a translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena, a poem on the stars. Ovid refers in Ex Ponto (1.2.131, 1.7.30, 3.4, 4.6.17, 4.9.131) to occasional poems that would have focused on particular events. One of these was in Gaetic, the language spoken in Tomis (4.13.19–36).
iii. Metamorphoses
With Metamorphoses, Ovid exchanges the elegiac couplets of his love poetry for the dactylic hexameter of epic. Superficially, this poem fits the broad definition of an epic: it is in the traditional meter of epic (dactylic hexameter), it is a long work (15 books), and its main characters are gods and heroes. But Ovid departs from this definition in fundamental ways. While Metamorphoses is a carmen perpetuum (“continuous poem,” 1.4) that begins with the creation of the earth and ends in Ovid’s time, it is not a long story on one topic, like the Iliad or the Aeneid. Instead, it is a collection of shorter stories, some of which occupy a fraction of a book, while others are so long that they are categorized as epyllia (“mini-epics”). These tales are bound together not so much by chronology as by devices such as family relationships or similarities between metamorphoses, and these provide a segue from one story to the next. Not all the myths are about heroes; the story of Arachne, for example, is about a talented woman of the lower class. Moreover, Ovid incorporates nearly every imaginable genre into this work: epyllion, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, hymn, erotic poetry, pastoral poetry, historical myth, and philosophy (Lafaye 1904: 141–159). Metamorphoses may be an epic poem, but it does not fit the traditional definition of an epic.
Ovid’s sources for the nearly two hundred and fifty stories that comprise his Metamorphoses span the history of Greek and Latin literature from Homer to his own time. Many date from the Hellenistic period, when mythological compendia such as Boios’ poem on bird metamorphoses and Nicander’s work on mythic transformations were popular. The poems of Callimachus provided inspiration as well. It is likely that Ovid used the lost work About Cyprus, by the geographer Philostephanus, for many of the myths in Book 10. He also used contemporary poems such as Vergil’s Aeneid and Cinna’s Myrrha, and perhaps two separate Metamorphoses, one by Parthenius and another by Theodorus. But Ovid was not a slavish copier of his sources. He created variants of myths that would allow his educated audience to make comparisons between traditional versions of these stories and his adaptations. Like Pygmalion, he fashioned raw material into something that was uniquely his.
Metamorphoses was completed shortly before Ovid’s exile. Although he burned his copy of the manuscript before departing for Tomis, he says that several others survived. Indeed, there were so many of them that Ovid asked that a preface be added that begged his audience’s pardon for the unpolished state of the poem (Tristia 1.7.13–40). The sheer number of times that Metamorphoses was copied in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (nearly four hundred manuscripts survive today) testifies to its popularity throughout the ages.
iv. Summary of Book 10
Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the story of the mythic bard Orpheus, whose wife died just after their wedding from the bite of a snake. Thereupon he travels to the underworld to persuade its rulers to release her. Pluto agrees, on the condition that he not look back at her until he reaches the earth. When Orpheus violates this agreement at the last possible moment, she is forced to return to the underworld, and he is denied a second chance to rescue her. Because of this tragic experience, he renounces the love of women and devotes himself to a life of pederasty. Orpheus expresses his attitude toward sexuality in a song that recounts various stories about the love of the gods for boys and the punishment meted out to women who indulged their illicit lusts. This song consists of the myths of Ganymede, Hyacinthus, the Cerastae, the Propoetides, Pygmalion, Myrrha, Venus and Adonis, and Atalanta and Hippomenes. Book 10 ends with the conclusion of Orpheus’ song; Book 11 begins with his death at the hands of the Thracian women and his subsequent reunion with Eurydice in the Elysian Fields.
v. Scansion
The meter of English poetry is determined by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables:
Ón the Moúntains óf the Praírie,
Ón the greát Red Pípe-stone Quárry …
The meter of Latin poetry, by contrast, is determined by the arrangement of long and short syllables.
1 A syllable can be long by nature or long by position:A syllable that is long by nature contains a long vowel (lēgis) or a diphthong (arae).A syllable that is long by position contains a short vowel followed by two consonants (such groups include the sounds rendered by the letters “x” and “z,” namely “ks” and “ds”). These two consonants can occur in the same word (āttrāctam) or at the end of one word and the beginning of the next (fortēm virum). Note that “ch,” “ph,” and “th” do not count as two consonants because they represent the Greek letters χ, φ, and θ (Pērsĕphŏnēn). Moreover, an “h” at the beginning of the word does not make a vowel long by position (dĕŭs horum).
2 A short syllable contains a short vowel that has not been made long by position (e.g. tŏt aves).
3 A vowel followed