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Our December 2021 Old School Classics read is Metamorphoses by Ovid

This is the No Spoiler Thread
The Spoiler Thread will open on the 1st.

This early posting of the No Spoiler thread is to discuss any non-plot issues pertaining to the book.

Appropriate Posts can contain:
1. Information about the author.
2. Compare editions/translations.
3. Any historical or background information
4. Are you familiar with this author’s work? Do you have any expectations going into the book?
5. What made you decide to read this book?
6. Any fan fiction that you have read or would like to read? Just link the books.
7. If you loved the book and want others to share in that experience, use this thread to motivate others, again save plot specifics for the Spoiler thread
8. If you hated the book, it would be best to keep that for the spoiler page

The most important thing to remember is no plot discussion. Any post that contains plot information or spoilers will be deleted.

I so need to read this book. I may be able to start in December and continue on. Probably best to just take my time to try to remember/to mentally file more of these stories.

Ha, yet another rendition of the group choosing a book I've already read. Convenient when my read count increases without much effort on my part.

First I want to apologize to any Classics fans for nominating this in December, a month that leaves little time for reading due to holidays. I wasn't thinking about the month when I nominated and since it wasn't getting many seconds, I did not withdraw it, thinking it would not win. It may actually work out well since Metamorphoses is episodic, just right for reading a few pages before breaking to take on a holiday activity.

One of my pleasures is to read and compare translations. For this reading I will probably only have time to focus on one and it will Humphries, but I will cross reference the Melville and Martin as time allows. I will also listen to an audio version though I don't think I can access any recordings the translator's above. I also intend to read Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses Ted Hughes which doesn't cover the whole poem but is wonderful nonetheless.

Here are a couple of links on translations with samples.

/topic/show/...

Thanks for the Ted Hugh’s link. I will start reading right away because I need two months to read it , that is 2 books per week.

I was thinking of reading this again, so this is lucky :)

I'm going to do my best and fit this in for Dec

Would be interesting to read, but December....

I was looking into Ovid and found this

I wasn't sure if this would be an interest to you all :)

I'm with Michaela. I like the idea of reading this, but not sure it's a book I can take on in December.

I've started it and it's great, but it's to be enjoyed slowly. T'would be a miracle to finish it on time!

Natalie wrote: "I'm with Michaela. I like the idea of reading this, but not sure it's a book I can take on in December."

I am reading parts now. If you haven't read the book before it actually can work quite well because of its episodic nature. This is actually a collection of stories or myths, most of which you are familiar though not from Ovid. So you can have interruptions without disturbing the flow of the whole very much. The first book is contains a creation myth that is quite fascinating compared to Christian creation and what we presently know of cosmology.But then it becomes story after story with new stories being told within stories. It is almost like reading the old testament. Ovid wrote in verse so I recommend a verse translation.

I am starting in December and continuing on for as long as it takes. This may be the last time I will make to read Metamorphoses, so I want to read thoughtfully.

I'm seriously considering joining in come December, although I have some other reading commitments for the month.

If I do, I will probably be using the Rolfe Humphries translation (1955)-- my first encounter with Metamorphoses a great many years ago, but is now in an annotated Kindle edition (2018), which l haven't been able to locate on ŷ������. For the Amazon page, see

I also have on hand the Kindle edition of the much more recent (1993) Allen Mandelbaum translation The Metamorphoses of Ovid, which is probably worth the effort to try, based on some of his other translations

Both of these are expensive enough that I'm not urging anyone else to get both.

On the bargain side, Delphi Classics has a very inexpensive Kindle edition, Delphi Complete Works of Ovid (Illustrated), with both a prose and a verse translation, both old, and neither of which I particularly like. But it does have the Latin text. (Not that my Latin was ever up to reading Ovid, but I can sometimes figure why translations differ, and which is the more literal, by consulting the passage in question, and using a Latin-English dictionary.)

I've just finished Book 3 and I'm amazed at how good this is.

Roman Clodia alerted me to a ŷ������ Group whose members looked at the work and its interpretation through history from the perspectives of their own specialties in art, music, history and classics, as well as some ordinary punters like myself. It's not an active group -- the posts are 3 years old -- but it's well worth a look as you read through the text.

ŷ������ Metamorphoses Group

Ben wrote: "I've just finished Book 3 and I'm amazed at how good this is.

Roman Clodia alerted me to a ŷ������ Group whose members looked at the work and its interpretation through history from the perspect..."

Thanks Ben. Excellent link.

I have been listening to a Blackstone audiobook recording translated by Frank Justus Miller and narrated by Barry Kraft. The narrator is very spirited and delivers a highly dramatized narration which I am enjoying because of the strength of Ovid's writing. The translation is that of the Loeb Library translation. There are a lot of audio versions of the poem but tuiswill be the only one I will sample.

I agree with Ben that I am really enjoying reading this.

Thank you Ben. So using that thread to have a multi-perspective of the text.

I just ordered and received the Penguin edition translated by Mary M. Innes



If you are looking for a woman's translation, this book may be for you. If you looking for a more accessible prose translation, this may be the book for you. If you are looking to read the narrative poem, this is not it. Just depends on what looking for.

Hmmm I plan to seek out a low-cost narrative poem to read as the more serious part of the read--and keep this prose translation for accessible enjoyment. . . . maybe.

If anyone is interested in treatments of the stories by other hands than Ovid:

I'm preparing, and will post here if requested, a list of inexpensive ($1.99-$2.99) Kindle editions of translations of other primary sources of classical, mostly Greek, mythology, in the Delphi Classics reprints (from, mainly, the Loeb Classical Library).

I'm also putting together a list of more expensive, but still relatively cheap, Kindle translations from other publishers, mainly the Oxford World's Classics and Hackett.

There are a great many compendious retellings of classical mythology, which I will not work on at this time, although I am open to working up a list of reliable (and some unreliable) more-or-less popular, handbooks, again by request.

I'll keep the lists handy, in case anyone wants them at a later date.

I will make one exception, because the Kindle edition is, at the moment, remarkably low priced for a 680-page book ($13.17), and it contains samples of all the rest. See
Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation, 2nd Edition, by Stephen M. Trzaskoma (Editor), R. Scott Smith (Editor), Stephen Brunet (Editor)

Please do post the list.

Ben wrote: "Please do post the list."

Probably this afternoon (Pacific Coast time) or early tomorrow: I'm still sorting through some of the Delphi titles (it is an enormous list, and I think I have missed a couple of items). And maybe in installments: I've known ŷ������ to choke on too many Amazon links. (I think that all the Delphi titles are also on Nook and Kobo, but I haven't checked to be sure.)

Another exception, this time because I'm not sure how long it will be available.

Jenny March's enormous (830 pages), and correspondingly comprehensive, Cassell's Dictionary of Classical Mythology (1995, 2001) is out of print, but Archive.org (the Internet Archive) has a copy of the second edition for free download at

If you aren't familiar with this free resource: Scroll down to the list of formats, and click on one of them: I strongly suggest getting the PDF, because transfers tend to garble Greek and Latin names, and disrupt the formatting. And others aren't always actually available when you ask for them.

As I intended to mention later, Archive.org also has most of the older Loeb Classical Library volumes available free, but the Delphi editions are in general more readable -- some of the original scans are less than reader-friendly, being discolored or blurred.

Another free resource for classical literature is the enormous Perseus Digital Libary website, at .

But it is sluggish and difficult to use -- or at least it was when I last tried it: the last update seems to have been in 2019, so it probably hasn't improved recently. You also need to know what you are looking for.

DELPHI CLASSICS MYTHOLOGY (A-B): A Provisional list

Please note that these are all out of copyright, meaning old translations, but that they include the Latin or Greek text.

I have excluded the main epics, that is, Homer and Hesiod, and the major Greek tragedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), nor Old Comedy (Aristophanes), although they are extremely important. Also omitted are the Homeric Hymns (included with Hesiod in the old editions of the Loeb Classical Library). There are a great many translations to choose from for all of them, and I am not too happy with the Delphi/Loeb translations of most of them. I will probably work up a list of translations of the Hymns, but not immediately.

Also excluded are the Latin tragedies and comedies (Seneca, Plautus(, which often have mythological content.

The anonymous “Vatican Mythographers�� (First, Second, and Third), so named for the location of the main manuscripts, are also omitted: they are mainly important as records of how confused matters were by the Middle Ages, which is out of our range (although it might be relevant for, say, Chaucer), and the only available translation is expensive.

The Library of Apollodorus (Delphi Classics)

This is the heavily annotated Frazer translation, which is invaluable as a resource, but there are other translation: see my review


Delphi Complete Works of Apollonius of Rhodes

The story of the Argonauts: several other translations are available.

Delphi Complete Works of Bacchylides

There is a modern translation by Robert Fagles.

DELPHI CLASSICS, CONTINUED (C-D)

Delphi Complete Works of Callimachus

A learned Alexandrian scholar-poet, whose short narratives probably influenced Ovid a lot.

Delphi Complete Works of Claudian

A very late Latin writer, with some influence in the Middle Ages, not of great use for understanding Ovid, but his unfinished "Rape of Proserpina" (i.e., Persephone) may reflect how Ovid was read in later times.

Complete Works of Diodorus Siculus (Delphi Classics)

"Rationalized" myth as early history. Not the most enchanting writer, but with interesting details not found elsewhere, e.g. in his Life of Herakles (Hercules).

DELPHI CLASSICS, CONTINUED (P)

Delphi Complete Works of Parthenius
by Parthenius of Nicaea (Author), Delphi Classics (Editor), S. Gaselee (Translator)

Love stories: an example of a themed collection, possibly a model for Ovid.

Delphi Complete Works of Pindar

There are a great many translations of Pindar, and, thanks to later discoveries, this one is no longer quite complete. As a rule the clearer they are, the less well they represent this very convoluted poet, but he is an important, if painfully allusive, source for a number of major and minor myths. I’m going to take a look at the translations I have available, as it has been several years since I read any of them, and I can no longer tell them apart off-hand.

MORE SOURCES FOR CLASSICAL MYTHS

I’ll start with a very select list from the Oxford World’s Classics, in Kindle editions:

.The Library of Greek Mythology (Oxford World's Classics) by Apollodorus (Author), Robin Hard (Translator)


There are other translations. For this one. see my review (it is buried):


.Constellation Myths: with Aratus's Phaenomena (Oxford World's Classics)
by Eratosthenes (Author), Hyginus (Author), Aratus (Author), Robin Hard (Translator)


Contains some of the most famous myths (the ones you may remember if you had Classical Mythology in school), but there is considerable doubt as the authenticity of some of them �� they seem to have been entirely literary, that is, written to order, without previous traditional, oral, circulation.

.The Complete Odes (Oxford World's Classics)
by Pindar (Author), Stephen Instone (Editor), Anthony Verity (Translator)


A well-edited translation, with very helpful notes, but Pindar is not to everyone’s taste, and apparently a lot of the poetry doesn’t translate well into English meters. And his sudden shifts of subject are annoying. To top it off, these, almost all that remains of a large body of lyrics, are a sort of sports commentary: they were composed to honor victors in the major Games of Classical Greek (the Olympian, and three others).

HOMERIC HYMNS: SOME TRANSLATIONS IN KINDLE EDITIONS (part one)

The first thing to know about the Homeric Hymns is that the are not by Homer: they are in the same as the Iliad and the Odyssey, and consist of fairly short myths, and simple hymns of praise. Some of the them are very entertaining.

The second thing is that this is an abbreviated list: there are other translations in Kindle editions, but I restricted myself to ones I have actually read, and in some cases reviewed.

You will notice that I have not tried to italicize the titles, which are pretty much the same anyway.

In no particular order:

The Homeric Hymns, by Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Translator)

A recent revision (third edition). Excellent notes to a good translation (although I had a correspondence with the translator on some slips in the commentary). I reviewed the first edition, at
I still plan to review this version, although I've tapered off reviewing on both ŷ������ and Amazon.

The Homeric Hymns A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological, by Andrew Lang

Victorian. There are a lot of other Kindle editions: this one is very cheap, in fact free.

The Homeric Hymns: A Verse Translation, by Thelma Sargent

A good, plain translation, but without notes.

HOMERIC HYMNS, KINDLE EDITIONS (part two)

The Homeric Hymns (Penguin Classics) by Homer (Author), Nicholas Richardson (Introduction), Jules Cashford (Translator)

Also really good. For my buried review, see

The Homeric Hymns (Oxford World's Classics), by Michael Crudden (Author, Translator)

Very good notes. See my (buried) review,

The Homeric Hymns (Focus Classical Library), by Susan C. Shelmerdine (Translator)

Excellent running commentaries, with attention to the story-telling. Scroll down the page for my review

The Homeric Hymns: A Translation, with Introduction and Notes (Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature), by Diane J. Rayor (Author, Translator)

Scroll down the page for my review

A break from bibliography, looking at the very small, decontextualized, picture.

I've been reading the Mandelbaum translation, and I am generally impressed with it.

However, the Kindle transfer (probably) seems to have been less than perfect, with, for example, a name starting with Aeg- becoming Alg-, which makes a reference book pretty useless if you don't already know what the name should be. I deciphered it using another translation, so I didn't have to resort to the Latin.

At another point, however, the primeval sea-goddess Tethys (in the Latin -- this time I checked) is replaced by the sea-nymph Thetis, best known as the mother of Achilles, and having no connection to the immediate context.

This may have been the result of automatic formatting, but it seems too close to accurate to be a random garble substitution. So I suspect an over-active copy-editor or spellchecker at some stage changing the well known for the obscure and puzzling, perhaps assuming a transfer error that needed to be corrected.

Of course, this is just two mistakes in the first two books, no reason not to read it. But those are the ones I actually noticed.

(Tethys is extremely rare, but Thetis is common enough to be in many relevant databases, so the spellchecker originally at fault need not have been human -- I've seen a book on early Judaism where Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was called Elixir Ben Harkens, a garble I was able to reproduce using an early Apple spellchecker..... But someone still should have caught it.).

Kindle editions of a few more classical works relevant to Metamorphoses:

Another translation of Pindar:

Odes for Victorious Athletes (Johns Hopkins New Translations from Antiquity), by Pindar (Author), Anne Pippin Burnett (Translator)


Ancient compendiums of myths, and a modern counterpart:

.Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology (Hackett Classics), by Stephen M. Trzaskoma (Author, Translator), R. Scott Smith (Author, Translator)


This contains complete versions of two works excerpted in Trzaskoma and Scott, Anthology of Classical Myth, mentioned in #19. Apollodorus, or, frequently, pseudo-Apollodorus, is a nearly complete ancient systematic treatment of Greek (but not Roman) mythology: another Kindle version is from the Oxford World's Classics, by Robin Hard, and it has better notes, but both translations are good. The text of "Hyginus" is a mess, and the myths sometimes garbled or truncated, but in places valuable. The same (probably) "Hyginus" also wrote a collection of Star Myths, available from the OWC, also translated by Hard. Both of Hard's translations are in #25, above: for another translation of Apollodorus, see below.

By the way, in case anyone was wondering, the word "Library" in reference to (Pseudo-)Apollodorus is an ancient way of referring to a digest containing the essential contents many works, and so a whole "library."

A modern handbook, while we are on the subject.

The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology 8th Edition, by Robin Hard (Author) (originally H.J. Rose) revised 2004, 2019)


I mention this because it is important, and in Kindle, but it is very expensive, so I don't recommend buying it: it may circulate from libraries to which you have access. You can then make an informed decision of whether you want a copy permanently.
The "Handbook" (originally without a publisher's name) is a thorough updating of a standard manual for students by H.J. Rose, from the early twentieth century, which went through several editions in his lifetime, It was pretty thorough, but Rose was sometimes tedious.

To round out the list, a version of the "Library" not in Kindle:

Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The "Library" of Apollodorus, by Michael Simpson (translation, introduction and notes, with illustrations by Leonard Baskin, 1976

Out of stock, but both the hardcover and paperback (shown) are available, used. from dealers.
See my review at
(Briefly, the accuracy of the translation has been challenged, but the notes are excellent, and often refer to modern literary works of relevance.)

Thank you for these recommendations, Ian. This was quite a lot of work!

What do you think of the more modern summaries by Edith Hamilton and Robert Graves?

Hamilton is a good introduction, but rather Greek-chauvinist: her chapter on non-classical mythologies is worthless.

It used to (and may still) dominate the market for Jr. High and High School classes which include a sections on classical mythology (usually English classes in my experience, although maybe supplementary reading for Latin, if it is offered). This is partly because it is very careful about issues like sex. And it is shorter, and therefore less expensive than Bulfinch (who is very nineteenth-century prudish, and aimed largely at explaining classical allusions in literature, but worth a look).

If you have a copy of Robert Graves' Greek Mythology, use it with care. I advise against buying it, at least new, because it has many problems.

It looks like a good investment, but, besides his absurd "interpretations" of the stories in terms of his theory of poetry, the copious source annotations are unreliable in detail, and can send you chasing a non-existent passage in a given title, just from garbling section numbers. And the summaries from time time contain details that are not in the sources he cites, nor anywhere else. (I've experienced both problems, going back to the 1960s).

(Some of the problems are alleged to be due to his working method (or non-working method). Hen already knew a great deal of classical mythology, but he was living on the island of Majorca at the time, a place not know for the cultivation of classical literature. Instead of returning to England to use its vast collections of classical source material, some in obscure eighteenth or nineteenth-century editions, he hired assistants, who mostly used nineteenth-century German handbooks and encyclopedias, and they passed on the information in them, in a state perhaps confused by multiple translation issues, and without checking that the references they gave were accurate, or had been copied correctly.)

An equally comprehensive alternative is The Gods of the Greeks and The Heroes of the Greeks, by Károly Kerényi (aka, Karl Kerenyi, Carl, Carlos, and some other variants).

They are strictly summaries with detailed source notes, which have been reliable whenever I have used them. Unfortunately for our purposes, they cover strictly Greek mythology, not Roman.

The Gods of The Greeks, as by Károly Kerényi, is available in a Kindle edition:
Two dingy pdfs can be found on archive.org (the Internet Archive), at and

The Heroes of the Greeks is out of print, but a clean pdf can be found on archive.org,

Kerényi, also wrote a whole bunch of books on various Greek Gods, some in collaboration with Jung, which are at least interesting. His views aren't imposed on the reader just looking for descriptions of the gods and heroes, and a bit about their stories.

I'm still working up a list of other introductory and reference works. A lot of older ones are now available in Kindle, many pitched to nineteenth-century schoolchildren, and not very informative, so I may mention some of them as bad examples.

For those of us coming to Greco-Roman mythology for the first time, or who have only dim memories about it, dictionary-style reference books may be more immediately valuable than slogging all the way through a narrative retelling in search of a detail about a god, goddess, or mortal that shows up unexplained in Ovid. Of course, some translations contain annotations to supply the information, but a good many of them don't even try.

Some other translations via the Internet Archive

The Mary M. Innes prose translation (Penguin, 1955), with an index but no notes, is available in PDF format (and maybe others) at
The PDF is available plain and as "text" (that is, searchable). The latter file is much smaller, but the unprocessed image version may be more reliable in handling the strange names.

For those interested in the history of Ovid in English, see especially the pioneering Elizabethan verse translation by Arthur Golding. It is available in Kindle forms, relatively cheaply, but there are three Internet Archive copies of the standard edition, which are free. See Shakespeare's Ovid. Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, edited by W.H.D. Rouse, You can choose the one that looks best on your screen.






Golding' translation is into "fourteeners," a ballad meter later supplanted by iambic pentameter (under the influence of Shakespeare and Milton in particular). Ezra Pound loved it, and claimed that it was the greatest English poem. C.S. Lewis, who knew Elizabethan literature as thoroughly as anyone is ever likely to (see his "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century'), was much less enthusiastic.

It has been pointed out -- perhaps by Lewis, although I can't find the reference -- the Pound seems to have imposed his own guesses on the meaning of words in the poem, because he did not understand sixteenth-century English as well as he thought. And, apparently, he couldn't be bothered to check the Latin to find out what Golding probably meant.

How influential Golding was on Shakespeare is debated. There are passages which seem to suggest that he borrowed from it, which is inherently likely, but Ben Jonson's statement that Shakespeare had only "small Latin" may conceal a basic knowledge, so he may not have been dependent entirely on Golding. It should be remembered that Ben Jonson was, in his own estimation, an outstanding Latinist, and was claiming that Shakespeare's native genius overcame a defective education.

There is an excellent prose translation, with a very good commentary, by Michael Simpson, as, predictably, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, which I should have remembered to mention.

Unfortunately, the in-print paperback is rather pricier than I like to recommend, although free shipping may be available.
(I'm willing to invest in it, myself, now that I know that it is in stock.)

Used copies of the hardcover are in some cases cheaper, but the corrected paperback is probably to be preferred. Used copies of either edition may include shipping, so the price break has to be checked.


For an assessment (very positive) by a professionally-qualified Latinist with experience teaching the poem, see Sara Mack's review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, at

(The Bryn Mawr Classical Review is a free service, reviewing books related to ancient Greece and Rome at a professional level. You can sign up for e-mails of new reviews, and search their archive of older reviews -- if you have title or author in mind.)

The review pointed out, by way of comparison, that there are more problems with the Rolfe Humphries translation than I remembered: a lot of tampering with, and simplifying, Ovid's text, in the interest of "readability" and English verse. So I may skip the annotated Kindle edition of it for reading purposes, but try to remember to check its notes.

Getting back to my projected list of introductory and reference works on Classical Mythology (by which I mean Greek and/or Roman):

A shorter alternative to Jenny Marsh's "Dictonary" (see above, #21) is Edward Tripp's "Handbook of Classical Mythology," under various titles, also in easy-to-use dictionary format. It has very good summaries of the classical sources, which are briefly identified for each major point. I used to have a copy on my (physical) desktop, along with dictionaries and grammars.

This used to be in print in paperback, as "The Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology," but it is now available, at least from Amazon, only at extortionate prices.

Fortunately, the original hardcover edition, as "Crowell's Handbook...." (named for a different publisher) is available, at least for the moment in reasonably-priced used copies: I just ordered one, since I never got my paperback edition back from loaning it (if memory serves). See

On the other hand, Richard P. Martin's "Myths of the Ancient Greeks" is recent, and in print, but I can't recommend it to the novice. It retells the major myths, and "retells" is the major factor. He admits to adding details and dialogue, which makes for easier reading and clarifies obscurities. But expecting the novice reader to sort this out from his sources seems to me to ask too much. (If he wanted to retell them expansively, he could have done it wholesale as a series of fantasy novels -- there is a demonstrable market for them.)

I mentioned Thomas Bulfinch in reference to Edith Hamilton's "Mythology." Bulfinch, a Victorian-era American writer, compiled three volumes of myths and legends: "The Age of Fable" (Greek and Roman, and some Norse and "Eastern" stories); "The Age of Chivalry" (largely Arthurian); and "Legends of Charlemagne" (heavily dependent on the Italian renaissance epics by Boiardo and Ariosto, rather than medieval French originals).

"The Age of Fable" is available in a great many editions, some enhanced with notes or illustrations. I haven't tried to sort through them.

Bulfinch can be helpful with Ovid, particularly because he still used the Roman, not Greek, names for the gods (when available). And he was very conscious of the uses of the myths in later literature, especially English poetry.

But his versions are pre-digested for children, and will strike the modern adult reader who knows some of the stories as prudish.

Thanks for all this great information Ian! It’s kind of you to put it together and share.

This is the edition that I have to read: ; translated by A. D. Melville

I didn't do any research on best editions to read, so I'll be going into this one blindly as far as the translator goes. It is an Oxford World's Classic edition, so should be okay.

Katy wrote: "This is the edition that I have to read: ; translated by A. D. Melville

I didn't do any research on best editions to read, so I'll be going into this one blindly a..."

That's the edition I picked up on a whim in case the one I already had wasn't the greatest, and I ended up being very glad I did. Hopefully you like it as well, Katy.

Katy wrote: "This is the edition that I have to read: ; translated by A. D. Melville

I didn't do any research on best editions to read, so I'll be going into this one blindly a..."

I don't think anyone will go wrong no matter what translation you choose given the strength of Ovid's writing,. I am presuming you pick a full translation from a recognized source. And I am talking a translation of Ovid, not a collection of myths. One thing that is standing out in my reading is that the work is more than just a collection of myths. Thanks again to Ian's work in providing alternative sources for the myths. One work I intended to recommend was Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century edited by Charles Martindale but it does not seem to be as accessible as it was a few years ago. I am presuming something has replaced it. The thought was to publish essays that compiled the vast influence of Ovid on European art, music, and literature. I have not researched what replaced this volume but hope that our discussion may reference some cross discipline works. For example, I'll link Artsy's essay on Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, which is a wonderful sculptural representation of the Ovid interpretation.



We are all going to be approaching the discussion from a variety of perspectives so I hope we can appreciate and support each other's specific interests with encouragement and enthusiasm.

Katy wrote: "This is the edition that I have to read: ; translated by A. D. Melville

I didn't do any research on best editions to read, so I'll be going into this one blindly a..."

So far as I can recall (I haven't seen a copy in years), the Melville translation is quite good, so you probably made a right choice, unless you develop a dislike for the translator's style, which is always a risk.

I can recall finding Kenny's introduction a bit abrasive as regards other translations: but his notes were helpful. On the whole, I preferred Simpson's commentary at the time -- but that translation gets expensive.

(Correction: the abrasive passage was in the Translator's Note, so I should have blamed Melville for dissing the competition.)

Poking around the Internet Archive, I discovered that they have copies of E.K. Rand's 1925 .Ovid and His Influence, which still shows up in recent bibliographies. The cleanest copy is The others are dingy, if you use the PDF, which is the most reliable format.

It has been a great many years since I read it, and, of course, it does not contribute much to understanding the Metamorphoses as Ovid may have intended the poem, but concerns what others have found in his work. Which is an interesting study all by itself.

A more recent (1994: English translation 1997) book available there is The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse,
at
I haven't had a chance to read it, but its free. Again, I suggest the PDF download.

Note: I forgot to mention that important thing about the book is that it does NOT concern the Metamorphoses, but Ovid's next large-scale work, Fasti, concerning the annual rites of ancient Rome, in calendrical order.

This was an implicitly political topic: Julius Caesar had given Rome a perpetual calendar, instead of the unpredictable one decreed by politically-minded priests almost at whim, with a month named for himself. Augustus corrected its leap-year, and "allowed" a month to be named for himself.

The poem only covers the first six months: there is some dispute over whether Ovid planned this, or it was the result of his death while working on it.

For the curious, there is a very nicely annotated Penguin Classics translation, and a skimpier one from Oxford World's Classics. It is of great interest if you are interested in Roman religion, and contains several myths that look to be genuinely Roman, rather than Greek, plus a few others that are Greek, but if you aren't intrigued by such things, it is probably pretty tedious.

Thanks for the recommendation Ian.

Ian, thank you for your sharing all this worthwhile infirmation. f there is only one other book/text that we read while reading Ovid, what would the best book/text be?

Cynda wrote: "Ian, thank you for your sharing all this worthwhile infirmation. f there is only one other book/text that we read while reading Ovid, what would the best book/text be?"

After thinking about this for a while, i decided that I would have to give different answers, depending on your main interest in a supplemental reading.

A couple of titles that came to mind are probably too demanding for novice readers of mythology, and several others are really aimed at the children/YA market, so I'm skipping over them.

You might have a problem getting a handle on the noticeably ungodly Greco-Roman Pantheon, Unfortunately, a couple of the best introductions for adults to the Greek gods (and the bulk of Ovid's stories are originally Greek, despite his handling of them) seem to be out of print, like Guthrie's The Greeks and Their Gods. (And it is out of date on a couple of important issues.)
Offered at an extortionate price on Amazon is Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion by Walter Friedrich Otto. I found it fascinating, although it has many critics.

Fortunately, neither of these is of pressing importance for Ovid's distinctly Roman take on the stories.

Also off the top of my head: if you want a literary approach to Ovid, the commentary in the Michael Simpson translation is pretty alert to what he is doing in the poem, identifying lots of implications that can go right past the modern reader. As I recall, the very thorough "notes" are almost as long as the translation. Unfortunately, it is kind of expensive, unless you can find a used copy in decent condition. Preferably the paperback, which apparently is somewhat revised.

Simpson was apparently planning a separate book on the Metamorphoses, but so far as I can determine it has never appeared.

If it is the nature of mythology, not the individual deities to which you want answers, there is a work by a distinguished scholar, not too long (264 pages), which also includes a history of interpretation, which is very valuable to the novice: Fritz Graf's Greek Mythology: An Introduction. You can read the Amazon write-up, which seems to me a fair presentation


Again it is expensive,* especially for the size, but used copies are available.

I can't give Graf's book a whole-hearted recommendation, however. I took a whole lot of folklore and mythology classes, some on the Graduate level, and, based from what I took away from them, I find myself on the opposite side from Graf on several issues. I haven't seen the revised edition: maybe he changed his mind on some of them.

*My sense of book prices is way out of date, but I can remember buying the same books for a third or less of the current asking price. And I tend to be budget-minded in my suggestions.

Thank you Ian for your thoughtful answer.

I am glad to report that I found copies of the Fritz Graf book at budget prices at

I have just ordered my paperback copy.

I am choosing this book as I have a fair grasp on the major stories of mythology and some of the minor. I am rereading Metamorphoses. I would be interested in the nature of mythology book. I am okay with some error in thought. Just more informed thought for the sake of dialogue.

Glad to help.

It belatedly struck me that a topic I missed completely was Ovid's Roman background, which is taken for granted in a lot of the literature about Ovid.

He was born, and lived most of his life, during the "Principate," i.e., the Roman Empire while Augustus was calling himself Princeps, "First Citizen," instead of being honest about being a de facto dictator. The personalities and events of Augustus' reign are thought by many scholars to be important for understanding Ovid's portrayals of the gods. And the climax of the whole "Metamorphoses" is Roman, and probably fraught with unspoken implications for contemporary issues.

Those unfamiliar with that era of Roman history can get a kind of fun crash-course in the period from Robert Graves' long novel I, Claudius, the bulk of which deals with Augustus and his family. (The sequel,Claudius the God, is not relevant for this purpose.)

See, for the Kindle edition,
There are always used copies available of one or another paperback edition, too, although of course you have to watch out for shipping costs.

Graves made full use of Senatorial-class gossip in the Roman historians, the asides of the encyclopedic Pliny the Elder (the "Natural History" of just about everything), and other ancient sources, and also drew on his imagination to resolve contradictions in the sources, and to make characters more vivid.

For a more sober, considerably shorter, but less entertaining, book, I can suggest Augustus (Ancient Culture and Society), by A. H M Jones, in paperback


Again, there are usually used copies available much more cheaply. The book, which runs about 200 pages, including maps and index, was published in 1970 (in the UK: US edition 1971), and is probably out of date in terms of trends in scholarship, but not at a level that should concern us.

Ovid gets a couple of paragraphs, as do some of the other poets of the time, but it carefully identifies the major political players, and the political, social, and cultural issues.

In case anyone gets interested, and wants ancient, as against modern, accounts of the reign of Augustus Caesar, I know of three important sources.

One is the "official autobiography," known as .Res Gestae Divi Augusti (The Deeds of the Divinized Augustus), originally an inscription authorized by the Emperor himself, if not composed by him, and in any case pure propaganda.

The original Latin version does not survive, but at least three Greek cities in Asia Minor put up a Greek translation, and these copies have been pieced together to form a whole document.

Unfortunately, it is not readily available in an inexpensive but reliable edition, one which includes comments decoding what the document doesn't say directly.

This is the only account that Ovid might have known.

The standard ancient short account, read by just about everyone dabbling in Roman history, is in "The Twelve Caesars," by Suetonius, often translated, and usually expurgated, which is about a century later. It mostly holds up Augustus as "The Good Emperor," against whom all successors are to be judged, but also include some anti-Augustan stories from his now-lost sources.

The old Robert Graves translation of Suetonius for Penguin Classics has been revised by James B. Rives, and one or the other edition can be found used fairly cheaply. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have made it into Kindle. (I suggest the revision: Graves took some liberties in his translation, such as substituting modern "equivalents" for Latin terms, such as "France" for "Gaul" -- or maybe I am thinking of his practice in the Claudius novels.)


A good, much more recent, but more expensive, translation is "The Caesars" (Hackett Classics), translated by Donna W. Hurley.

The paperback is available used, at a lower price, but the shipping charges usually add up to about the same amount as the Kindle edition.

There is a Delphi Classics Kindle edition of Suetonius, which is very cheap, but can't be navigated, so I consider it a waste of time (and a little money).

Its biography of Augustus was quite influential in the MIddle Ages: it served as a model for a Life of Charlemagne by Einhard, a contemporary, and some passages may reflect the Roman model more than the real life of the Frankish emperor. Either Suetonius directly or Einhard's adaptation, or both, likewise was the model for Asser's Life of Alfred the Great, so untangling reality from literary posturing in it is quite a problem.

Much more substantial, and not for the merely curious, is the "Roman History," compiled (in Greek) by Cassius Dio. It originally ran to 80 books, but only a portion of them have survived. Fortunately, his account of Augustus in books 50-56 is substantially complete. The Delphi Classics Kindle edition, from the older volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, is usable, and cheap:

Relatively expensive new, but often available used, is The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus. by Cassius Dio (Penguin Classics, 1987). translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, with an introduction by John Carter, and with extensive notes.

In passing: Augustus was a title, not originally a personal name. He was originally named Gaius Octavius, but was adopted by Gaius Julius Caesar, and thereafter called himself "Gaius Julius Caesar, son of Gaius Julius Caesar." This appealed to the legions which had followed his "father," and who probably knew nothing of the real genealogy. He should have included "Octavianus" in that name, signalling that he was adopted, but didn't. It was supplied by later writers, and this accounts for Shakespeare's use of "Octavian," often found in modern writers as well, because it is less confusing. than the real situation.

Being the sole son and heir of Julius Caesar was of extreme importance: he ordered the execution/murder of Ptolemy Caesar, also known as Caesarion, the real son of Julius Caesar, by Cleopatra. His excuse was that Cleopatra and Mark Antony had conferred adult honors on him, so there was no reason to treat him as the child he was....

Hey all,

I have found the translated version by Horace Gregory. It is alright to read this one?

Translated by Horace Gregory
With a New Introduction by Sara Myers

Didi wrote: "Hey all,

I have found the translated version by Horace Gregory. It is alright to read this one?

Translated by Horace Gregory
With a New Introduction by Sara Myers"

I'm sure no one will object: we're not doing "the latest translation" bit, which can be fun, but is a bit limiting.

I would only warn that, as it is a verse translation, it may drop (or add) something to meet the demands of the meter, so you might find that our references don't quite match what you have before you. Rolfe Humphries, for example, although I found him fun to read, sometimes doesn't tell you what Ovid wrote, but something shorter. I once thought that it was my Latin at fault, at least some of the time, but a Latin-qualified reviewer who had taught from it had the same complaint.

But they are often more entertaining (if you like verse) than the plain prose of, for example, Mary Innes (the old Penguin Classics version), or the well-annotated version of Michael Simpson (my copy of which is still in transit, but should arrive by early December).

I've enjoyed the Humphries translation, and it has copious notes that were very helpful.

Not being a reader of Latin I can't comment on its accuracy but it was used in my university reading of Ovid in translation so it must have passed some tests.

Yes I appreciate Humphries translation of the Aeneid. It does vary from other translations I've read, but solid solid annonation. . . .I will see if I can find a reasonably priced ediition.