Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Cambridge Latin Anthology – Echo et Narcissus

In this course, Professor Llewelyn Morgan (University of Oxford) explores the Echo and Narcissus episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It will be particularly useful for those the ‘Echo and Narcissus’ set text for OCR Latin GCSE (J282). In the first lecture, we think about Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a whole, before turning the second lecture to consider the extent to which the Echo and Narcissus episode follows the rules of epic poetry (which the Metamorphoses ostensibly is). In the third lecture, we think about Ovid’s wit and intelligence in the Echo and Narcissus episode, including his use of humour, and his playfulness with language.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

In this lecture, we think about Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a whole, focusing in particular on: (i) what happens in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the story from the creation of the world to Rome at the end of the 1st century BC; (ii) Ovid’s interest in ‘changes’ or ‘transformations’, the meaning of the word ‘metamorphoses’; (iii) the immense influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the extent to which what we refer to as ‘Greek myth’ is actually Ovid’s version of these myths; (iv) Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an epic poem, and the extent to which Ovid plays by the rules of epic poetry (e.g. by writing in dactylic hexameter) but also breaks those rules (e.g. his mischievousness and playfulness); (v) the ease with which one can get lost in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the (apparent) lack of logic behind why one stories follows another; and (vi) the figure of Augustus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.