Ovid’s Metamorphoses

About the lecture

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.

About the lecturer

Llewelyn Morgan is a Classicist, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. The focus of most of his research is Roman literature and culture, and he is the author of the well-received study of Roman poetic form, Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010).

But he also has a longstanding fascination for Afghanistan, contemporary and historical, which he traces to his discovery, at an impressionable age, of a Russian samovar inscribed “Candahar 1881”. He has made several visits to Afghanistan in recent years, and his most recent book, The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2012), traces the history of these remarkable monuments from their Buddhist origins 1,400 years ago, through their celebrity in Islamic wonder literature and European travel writing, up until their destruction in 2001.

Morgan is a regular public speaker, on many aspects of Classics and Afghanistan, appears occasionally on BBC Radio 4, and writes slightly less occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement.