Ovid’s Metamorphoses

About the lecture

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.

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.