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THE METAMORPHOSES
another catalogue of suffering heroines and star-crossed lovers; that it did not
is due to Ovid's prodigious fertility of invention, his wit, and his masterful
way with the Latin language. In treating the original stories freely he availed
himself of a traditional licence, but being Ovid used the licence to the full.
As he found it the story of Pygmalion was a smoking-room anecdote; its
charming and innocently sensuous character as one of the great stories of wishfulfilment
is entirely his achievement. Just as he had transformed Acontius from
a love-sick youth into a man with an obsession bordering on the psychopathic,
so the credibly middle-class Erysichthon of Callimachus* Hymn to Demeter
becomes in the Metamorphoses (8.738—878) a fairy-tale monster. Conversely
the Iliadic Odysseus is downgraded in the wrangle over the arms of Achilles
(13.1-398) into a contemporary committee-man, public relations expert, and
smart-aleck lawyer. Ingenious combination brings familiar or less familiar
figures into new and piquant situations. In the story of Cyclops and Galatea
(13.735—897) the pastoral setting of the Alexandrian treatment (Theoc. 6, 11)
is retained, but Theocritus' rustic booby is reinvested with the horrendous
attributes of the original Homeric Cyclops; and the theme of Beauty and the
Beast is accentuated by the introduction of Acis in the character of the successful
rival. But the episode has something of a pantomime quality; Acis is crushed
under a rock hurled, in Homeric fashion, by the monster, but all ends happily
with a transformation scene and tableau in which he emerges as a river-god,
equipped with the typical attributes of his new status, the whole being rounded
off with an ait ion (13.887—97). By skilful assimilation of elements from several
literary sources (including Virgil, who had also drawn on the story in the
Eclogues') Ovid constructs a grotesque-idyllic episode of a unique kind, burlesque
of a high poetic order, which was to bear its full fruit only after some
seventeen centuries in the collaboration of Gay and Handel:
Galatea, dry your tears!
Acis now a god appears.
This example, which could be multiplied a hundredfold, of the reception and
exploitation of the Metamorphoses by later European writers and artists, is the
strongest possible testimony to Ovid's importance, already referred to apropos
of the story of Hero and Leander, as mediator between the old world and the
new.
Even in his moments of inspired nonsense Ovid's preoccupation with abnormal
psychological states is not forgotten. In his version of the story Galatea
hears the lament of the Cyclops with her lover lying in her arms. This is
characteristically Ovidian, a touch of sexual cruelty to emphasize the unbridgeable
gulf between Beauty and the Beast; and the passion of the Cyclops, like
that of Acontius, is a type of the love that will destroy if it cannot possess. The
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