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he had no such wish. In nouafert animus: the whole scope of his poem demanded
that he reshape and reinterpret the myths. Critics differ as to whether the reshaping
was purely in the interests of entertainment value, the imparting of a modern
verve and piquancy to the traditional tales through the free play of Ovid's
iconoclastic wit, or whether the treatment did in truth deepen their significance.
This question has a bearing on that of unity, if it can be shown that Ovid's
treatment of his mythical material was guided by some principle which in this
sense informed the poem.
That these are not straightforward questions is shown by the difficulty
experienced by critics when they try to define the Metamorphoses. Clearly it is
a special kind of epic, an epos sui generis, but of what kind? What most interested
Ovid and provided him with a limitless field for exploration (in the end,
tnost tragically, in his own case) was human behaviour under stress. The
Metamorphoses is above all an epic of the emotions. Given both Ovid's own
predilections and the basic facts of human nature the predominant emotion is,
predictably, love. By taking his plots from traditional mythology and creating
a special world for his characters to inhabit Ovid released himself from the
need to respect certain aspects of probability. The premisses of the situations
in which his characters found themselves could, as in the Heroides, be taken for
granted; what mattered was their reactions. Of these premisses the most
fundamental is the almost absolute power of the gods and their lack of moral
scruple in its use. Like the human actors in the drama the gods are the slaves,
though less frequently the victims, of their passions. Granted all this, however
improbable or even outrageous the particular circumstances, the interest lay
in following out the consequences. As a literary formula this was not new: it
had been brilliantly used by Aristophanes and it was of the essence of the
declamatory exercises on which Ovid and his generation cut their literary
teeth. But by contrast with this attitude to the given premisses, in Ovid's
development of the story therefrom probability, or at all events conviction,
was paramount; all the poet's art was applied to achieve credibility (fides)'and
to persuade the reader that in the circumstances described people must have
behaved so. Callimachus had put the matter in a nutshell: 'let me so lie as to
convince my hearer'. 1 In reading the story of Pygmalion (10.242-97) we forget
that in the real world statues do not come to life; we know only that if they did
this is how it would be. In principle no situation was too bizarre or morally
reprehensible (incest is the subject of two episodes) to qualify for this poetical
analysis.
The formula in itself carries no guarantee of the success which it achieves in
Ovid's hands. Simply to ring rhetorical and emotional changes on traditional
material was not enough. The Metamorphoses might have emerged as yet
1 Hymn 1.65 v^ufioi^Tiv 6!OVTO$ & KEV TreirlGoiev dKoui*|v.
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