Man-into-Beast Changes in Ovid

ONE of the first things that strike a classical student who in mature life rereads Ovid's Metamorphoses is the poet's wonderful power of differentiation. Very seldom indeed does one metamorphosis seem a mere repetition of another. But this ability to be new, varied, and different, has already been so thoroughly studied that I shall not expatiate upon it here.' Another point, less commonly realised, is that Ovid is not trying to present the animal point of view as distinct from the human. Whatever thoughts he represents the man-turned-beast as possessing, they are nearly always something retained from the creature's earlier human state. The change to animal means not so much new thoughts as new or intensified passions. To Ovid, thought is what separates the human from the animal as it separates the Greek and the Roman from the barbarian. No doubt this is a mental snobbery from which no child of man can entirely escape. Ovid, at any rate, shows no desire to do so. At least, he has the Roman sense ofjustice: if the man-turned-beast possesses repulsive qualities, they are due not so much to his transformation as to what was in him while he was still human. Lycaon, changed to a wolf, still keeps his murderous ferocity (Met. 1. 232ff.); Daedalion, turned to a falcon, retains his fierce bitterness, since what he suffered as a human being incites him to inflict hurt himself (11.345); Picus, angry at Circe, who has changed him into a bird, savagely stabs the bark of a tree-the first of the new-born race of woodpeckers (14.390). On the other hand, softer and pleasanter human tendencies can also survive the change, as when the bird that was Alcyone tries to kiss the corpse of her husband Ceyx (11. 738), and when the aged couple, Cadmus and Harmonia, now in serpent-form, lovingly intertwine, and, still remembering their previous human shape, remain harmless to mankind (4. 602). Perdix, changed by Minerva into a partridge to save him from treacherous death, retains a very natural fear of high places (8. 259). The nymph Ocyrhoe finds her transformation into a mare made more tolerable because of a strange longing, divinely sent upon her before the change, to eat grass and to course the wide plains (2. 662); as a child of the Centaur Chiron, she recognises, with a most engaging if rueful frankness, that a certain horsy tendency has run in her family. Ovid, perhaps, comes nearest to showing a change of mentality when he describes how the animals acted that Odysseus's men met near Circe's

Art · Classical Antiquity Studies

• Noua … corpora

  Open Access•Alison Sharrock•Dictynna•2020

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