METAMORPHOSES. Ovid's 'Meta morphoses,' or 'Transformations,' were pub lished in the year 8 A.B., when the poet was 50 years old. They were finished just before the issue of the imperial order which consigned Ovid to banishment at Tomi on the Black Sea for the remaining eight years of his life. In consternation at the punishment which had overtaken him, he elsewhere tells us that he consigned to the flames his own copy of the poem. But other copies were already in the hands of his friends; it is to these that we are indebted for the preservation of the work.
The poem consists of 15 books in hexa meter verse descriptive of the various transfor mations through which various men and women were conceived to have gone. In the conception of the Greeks almost every river, rock, spring, tree and mountain had attached to it the legend of some such wonderful meta morphosis. Thus the poplar trees are the weeping sisters of Phaethon; the laurel is Daphne; a spring is Arethusa; etc. The source of this multitude of transformations found in ancient legends is doubtless to be sought in the ancient conception of inanimate objects as ani mate. Each rock and tree and hill with the Greeks and Romans was a personal being en dowed with a spirit. Thus the poplar trees and the fountain and the laurel were regarded as animate to start with; they had not merely become so by receiving the souls of certain men and women. To the vivid imagination of the Greek the waving form of rustling tree or shrub, the moving mass of bubbling or falling water suggested life and individual spirit. The problem was to account for the present form. The inanimate objects represented as the result of transformations had, accordingly, been con ceived as animate from the outset, and the sto ries of their transformations are merely later inventions devised to account for their primi tive conception as personal beings.
Some 250 of the stories belonging to the body of Greek and Roman legend and mythol ogy receive treatment in Ovid's work, which thus becomes a fairly complete treatise on -the classic myths. Among the most important of these are the stories of Deucalion and Pyrrha, Daphne, Phaethon, Cadmus, Semele, Echo, Narcissus, Pentheus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Ino, Perseus and Andromeda, Niobe, Procne and Philomela, Medea, Theseus, Scylla, Daedalus, Philemon and Baucis, Hercules, Orpheus, Adonis, Thetis.
Relatively little space is devoted to the ac tual metamorphosis in Ovid's poem. The transformation is simply the culmination of a story, generally one of some length. Thus after detailing with great fullness the adven tures of the ill-fated Phaethon with the horses of Phoebus, the poet finally concludes by briefly recounting the transformation of Phaethon's mourning sisters into poplar trees. So with the other stories; the transformation holds an in conspicuous place, being simply the feature common to all. The different narratives are woven together most ingeniously. There is no break. Each is connected with the preceding and following by some natural link, so that we have one continuous narration from the trans formation of the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha into men to the transformation of Julius Caesar into the comet which appeared after his death. By the poet's fiction, therefore, the treatment is made to assume the illusion of chronological sequence. In the last books Ovid approaches the legends of the Trojan cycle and of early Roman history, gradually bringing the reader to the events of his own day.
With great artistic skill the poet varies the manner of presentation. The larger part of the stories are his own narration, hut monotony is avoided by resort to other devices. Thus a number of legends are put in the mouth of Orpheus. Others are recounted by the three daughters of Minyas to while away the time as they sit at their spinning.
The 'Metamorphoses' is Ovid's masterpiece and has always enjoyed high favor. The poet's own faith in his work is indicated by the con cluding verses of the final hook, in which he gives free expression to his confidence in the immortality which he feels it has won for him: "Over the stars his name shall soar; as far as the Roman dominion reaches his work shall be read, and it shall live for all eternity?' The most recent translation is by F. J. Mil ler in the Loeb Library.