Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Ovid: Pyramus and Thisbe (Met. 4.55-166)

In this course, Professor Llewelyn Morgan (University of Oxford) explores the Pyramus and Thisbe episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It will be particularly useful for those reading this section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for OCR Latin GCSE (J282). In the first lecture, we think about Ovid’s Metamorphoses at a while, before turning in the second lecture to consider the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe in particular. In the third lecture, we think about Ovid’s mischief in the telling of the Pyramus and Thisbe episode. Finally, in the fourth lecture we provide some close reading and analysis of the passage, looking in particular at four sets of lines.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

In this lecture we provide an introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, focusing in particular on: (i) the meaning of the poem’s title: ‘changes’ or ‘transformations’; (ii) the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, especially in the visual arts; (iii) the extent to which the Metamorphoses might be considered an epic poem – its length, its metre, its lack of a core central story, etc. (iv) the extent to which the stories in the Metamorphoses are connected, including the themes of transformation and of love; (v) the overarching structure of the Metamorphoses: from the beginning of time to the Ovid’s own day, from the periphery of the Greek world to the city of Rome; and (vi) the extent to which the narrative of the Metamorphoses is confused by having stories within stories, as with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, set in ancient Babylon, but narrated in the Metamorphoses by one of the daughters of Minyas in Thebes.