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

ACHIEVEMENT AND CHARACTERISTICS
in a new and timeless synthesis; in the Metamorphoses Greek myth is translated
and transposed into a contemporary idiom. The two poems demand from the
reader a fundamentally different response. Without firsthand knowledge of
(at least) Homer innumerable and essential resonances and implications in the
Aeneid will simply be missed. The reader of the Metamorphoses, though he
may relish in passing the contrast between Ovid's sources (if he chance to
recognize them) and what Ovid made of them, does not depend on such
recognition for the understanding and enjoyment of the poem. In this sense the
Metamorphoses is more autonomous and more universal than die Aeneid; Ovid
has rendered his models (almost) expendable. It is here that Ovid stands in
truth between two worlds: his response to the riches of the Greek poetic
imagination bore fruit, paradoxically, in a self-sufficient work of art that could
serve, and in the Middle Ages perforce did serve, as a substitute for direct
access.
This is the most important respect in which Ovid is ' un-Augustan \ A man
of his sceptical and rationalist disposition growing up in the generation after
Actium was bound, it might be surmised, to react against the Augustan 'myth'
which was developing at this time and which depended heavily on an implicit
and of course highly selective appeal to the authority of the past. Overt resistance
is hardly to be detected in his work on any significant scale before the
Tristia; the pin-pricks administered to official pomposity in the Ars amatoria 1
are hardly sufficient to identify its author as a dissident. So far as his poetry is
concerned his reaction took the form of simply going his own way, which was
the way of a poet to whom what mattered were individual human beings. It
is this confidence in his fellow creatures, expressed with an exuberance and
gaiety to which extant Latin literature offers no counterpart, that has chiefly
recommended Ovid to the posterity on the ultimate Tightness of whose judgement
he has told us that he relied.
1 Rudd (1976) 13—29; but cf. Holleman (1971).
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