Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE METAMORPHOSES
to new things' — a proclamation of the novelty of his literary undertaking. In
what follows the reader is undeceived:
in noua fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora,
my inspiration carries me to tell of shapes changed into new bodies;
yet the ambiguity remains and must be deliberate. In a declaratory proem of
only four verses every phrase and every word must have been carefully weighed;
by allowing himself this verbal sleight of hand at the outset Ovid was showing
his readers something of what was in store for them, as well as emphasizing
two points: that nothing like the Metamorphoses had ever been attempted
before and that he was coming before the public in a totally new guise. The very
obliquity and allusiveness of the communication is an implicit act of homage
to Callimachus.
In what follows the innuendo becomes more specifically Callimachean.
Ovid continues
di, coeptis (nam uos mutastis et ilia) 1
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
Gods, favour my undertaking —for it was you who changed that too — and bring down
from the beginning of the world to my own times a continuous song.
First, the conventional plea for divine assistance is manipulated so as to represent
the poem itself, the Metamorphoses, as the product of a metamorphosis.
As with the opening words this can be understood on two levels. The obvious
sense is that Ovid has been metamorphosed from elegist into epicist. But if
the original sense of coepta as 'beginnings' is pressed, the phrase reflects on the
character of the poem as well. Just as Apollo had intervened to turn Callimachus
and Virgil from epic (Virg. Eel. 6.3—5, Callim. fr. 1.21—8 Pf-), so the gods have
saved Ovid from setting his hand to some less auspicious plan. 2 Still with
Callimachus in mind he asks the gods to further his intention of writing a
perpetuum carmen, a ' continuous song'. This is precisely what Callimachus had
disavowed and had been criticized for not producing. 3 So a wilful paradox is
propounded. Though metamorphosis was a specifically Alexandrian subject
(Nicander's Heteroeumena, 'Things changed', must have been quite well
known), Ovid's treatment is not to be Callimachean but conventionally epic,
for this is the obvious implication of perpetuum.* The paradox is underlined
discreetly by the use of the word deducite. In the context this seems to mean no
more than 'bring down', 'carry through'; but its use with the gods rather than
» ilia P. Lejay: Mas MSS. Cf. Kenney (1976) 47-9.
1 Cf. Galinsky (1975) 103—7j contra Wilkinson (1955) 214—18.
3 Callim. fr. I.J Pf. Sv fitiaiaa 5IT)VCK£; 'one continuous song*.
* Cf. Hor. Odes 1.7.6 and Nisbet—Hubbard (1970) ad toe.
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