Ovid, Metamorphoses (3.511–733)

Latin Text with Introduction, Commentary, Glossary of Terms, Vocabulary Aid and Study Questions

Ingo Gildenhard, Andrew Zissos

• Publisher: Studium Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9788027246632
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

This part of Ovid's 'Theban History' recounts the confrontation of Pentheus, king of Thebes, with his divine cousin, Bacchus, the god of wine. Notwithstanding the warnings of the seer Tiresias and the cautionary tale of a character Acoetes (perhaps Bacchus in disguise), who tells of how the god once transformed a group of blasphemous sailors into dolphins, Pentheus refuses to acknowledge the divinity of Bacchus or allow his worship at Thebes. Enraged, yet curious to witness the orgiastic rites of the nascent cult, Pentheus conceals himself in a grove on Mt. Cithaeron near the locus of the ceremonies. But in the course of the rites he is spotted by the female participants who rush upon him in a delusional frenzy, his mother and sisters in the vanguard, and tear him limb from limb. This course book offers a wide-ranging introduction, the original Latin text, study aids with vocabulary, and an extensive commentary. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Gildenhard and Zissos's incisive commentary will be of particular interest to students of Latin at AS and undergraduate level. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Ovid's poetry and discussion of the most recent scholarly thought.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Symbols and Terms

Reference Works

Grammatical Terms

Ancient Literature

INTRODUCTION

1. Ovid and His Times

2. Ovid’s Literary Progression: Elegy to Epic

3. The Metamorphoses: A Literary Monstrum

3a. Genre Matters

3b. A Collection of Metamorphic Tales

3c. A Universal History

3d. Anthropological Epic

3e. A Reader’s Digest of Greek and Latin Literature

4. Ovid’s Theban Narrative

5. The Set Text: Pentheus and Bacchus

5a. Sources and Intertexts

5b. The Personnel of the Set Text

6. The Bacchanalia and Roman Culture

TEXT

COMMENTARY

511–26 Tiresias’ Warning to Pentheus

527–71 Pentheus’ Rejection of Bacchus

531–63 Pentheus’ Speech

572–691 The Captive Acoetes and his Tale

692–733 Pentheus’ Gruesome Demise

APPENDICES

1. Versification

2. Glossary of Rhetorical and Syntactic Figures

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

The present volume joins other commentaries in the OBP Classics Textbook Series, which is designed to offer support and stimulation to student-readers. We would like to express our gratitude to Alessandra Tosi for her patience throughout a longer gestation period than she must have initially hoped for and Inge Gildenhard for supplying the illustrations. A special thanks goes to John Henderson, who twice, virtually overnight, supplied us per litteras with copious notes of nonpareil insight. We have incorporated a number of his notes into the Introduction and the Commentary, attributing these simply to ‘John Henderson’ (to be distinguished from A. A. R. Henderson, whose commentary on Metamorphoses 3 we occasionally cite as ‘Henderson 1979’). He tried his best to inject the project with an appropriate dose of Dionysiac spirit, and if readers don’t find the final product as tipsy as it ought to be, the blame’s on us.

* * *

Note on translations : unless indicated otherwise, translations of Greek and Latin texts are from the Loeb Classical Library, often somewhat modified.

Statue of Ovid in Constanţa, Romania. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Constanta_-_Ovid-Platz_-_Statue_des_Ovid.webp

Abbreviations

Table of Contents

Symbols and Terms

Table of Contents

§	Indicates a section (e.g. of the Introduction or of a reference work).
*	Indicates a term defined in either Appendix 1 (Versification) or Appendix 2 (Glossary of Rhetorical and Syntactic Figures).
⌣	Indicates a syllable that scans short (for details of scansion, see Appendix 1).
—	Indicates a syllable that scans long (for details of scansion, see Appendix 1).
CE/BCE	Common Era/Before Common Era (a designation for the calendar year, equivalent to AD/BC). In this volume CE should be assumed when no indication is provided.
Comm.	Refers to the Commentary in this volume.
Intro.	Refers to the Introduction (normally with following section specification).
n.	Refers to an entry in the Commentary (normally with preceding line specification).

Reference Works

Table of Contents

AG	Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges , edited by J. B. Greenough, G. L. Kitteredge, A. A. Howard, and B. L. D’Ooge (Boston, 1903).
CIL	Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1862).
L-S	A Latin Dictionary, edited by C. T. Lewis and C. Short (Oxford, 1879).
LSJ	A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edition, with Supplement, edited by H. J. Liddle and R. Scott, revised by H. S. Jones (Oxford, 1968)
OLD	Oxford Latin Dictionary, edited by P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1968–82).
TLL	Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig, 1900).

Grammatical Terms

Table of Contents

abl.	ablative (similarly nom. = nominative; gen. = genitive; dat. = dative; acc. = accusative)
act.	active voice (similarly pass. = passive voice)
fut.	future tense (similarly perf. = perfect; pres. = present; etc.)
indic.	indicative (similarly subjunct. = subjunctive)
part.	participle
pers.	person
pl.	plural (similarly sing. = singular)

Ancient Literature

Table of Contents

Apollod.	Apollodorus, Bibliotheca (Library)
Ap. Rhod.	Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica
Apul.	Apuleius
	Met.	Metamophoses (or Golden Ass)
Arat.	Aratus
	Phaen.	Phaenomena
Cat.	Catullus, Carmina (Poems)
Cic.	Cicero
	Fam.	Epistulae ad Familiares (Letters to his Friends)
	Leg.	De Legibus (On the Law)
	Nat. D.	De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods)
Enn.	Ennius
	Ann.	Annales (Annals)
Eur.	Euripides
	Bacch.	Bacchae
Hdt.	Herodotus, Histories
Hes.	Hesiod
	Op.	Opera et Dies (Works and Days)
Hom.	Homer
	Il.	Iliad
	Od.	Odyssey
Hor.	Horace
	Carm.	Carmina (Odes)
	Epod.	Epodes
Hyg.	Hyginus
	Fab.	Fabulae
Hymn. Hom.	Homeric Hymns
Liv.	Livy, Ab urbe condita
Luc.	Lucan, Bellum Civile (Civil War)
Lucr.	Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Mart.	Martial
	Ep.	Epigrams
Ov.	Ovid
	Am.	Amores
	Ars	Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)
	Fast.	Fasti
	Her.	Heroides
	Met.	Metamorphoses
	Trist.	Tristia
Plaut.	Plautus
	Cas.	Casina
	Merc.	Mercator
Plin.	Pliny (the Elder)
	NH	Naturalis Historia (Natural History)
Plut.	Plutarch
	Caes.	Caesar
Prop.	Propertius, Carmina (Poems)
Sen.	Seneca (the Younger)
	Oed.	Oedipus
Serv.	Statius
	Ach.	Achilleid
	Silv.	Silvae
	Theb.	Thebaid
Suet.	Suetonis
	Aug.	Divus Augustus (Life of Augustus)
Theoc.	Theocritus
	Id.	Idylls
Val. Max.	Valerius Maximus
Val. Flacc.	Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica
Varr.	Varro
	Ling.	De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language)
Virg.	Virgil
	Aen.	Aeneid
	Ecl.	Eclogues
	G.	Georgics

INTRODUCTION

Table of Contents

1. Ovid and His Times

Table of Contents

Ovid, or (to give him his full Roman name) Publius Ovidius Naso, was born in 43 BCE to a prominent equestrian family in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), a small town about 140 km east of Rome. He died in banishment, a resident of Tomi on the Black Sea, in 17 CE. Ovid was one of the most prolific authors of his day, as well as one of the most controversial.1 He had always been constitutionally unable to write anything in prose — or so he claims in his autobiography (composed, of course, in verse). Whatever flowed from his pen was in metre, even after his father had told him to put an end to such nonsense:

saepe pater dixit ‘studium quid inutile temptas?
Maeonides2 nullas ipse reliquit opes’.
motus eram dictis, totoque Helicone3 relicto
scribere temptabam verba soluta modis.
sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
et quod temptabam dicere versus erat.
(Trist. 4.10.21–26)
My father often said, ‘Why try a useless
Vocation? Even Homer left no wealth’.
So I obeyed, all Helicon abandoned,
And tried to write in prose that did not scan.
But poetry in metre came unbidden,
And what I tried to write in verses ran.
(tr. Melville)

Students of Latin may well be familiar with Naso senior’s banausic attitude: classics graduates, some wrongly assume, have similarly dismal career prospects. But eventually Ovid would shrug off paternal disapproval in pursuit of his passion. After dutifully filling certain minor offices, he chose not to go on to the quaestorship, thereby definitively renouncing all ambition for a senatorial career. In his case, the outcome was an oeuvre for the ages. For quick orientation, here is a time-line with the basics:4

Battle of Actium

Secular Games; Augustus adopts Gaius and LuciusAugustus dies; Tiberius accedes

Time-line	Historical Events	Ovid's Biography	Literary History
50s BCE			Catullus, Lucretius
44	Julius Caesar murdered
43	Cicero murdered	Ovid born
30s			[Gallus Amores 1-4 (lost)], Horace Epodes
35			Virgil Eclogues Horace Satires 1
31
29			Virgil Georgics
27	Octavian becomes 'Augustus'
Early 20s			Livy 1-10
20s			Propertius 1-3, Tibullus, 1, Horace Odes 1-3, Epistles 1
19			Virgil Aeneid, Tibullus 1-2
18	Leges Iuliae (initial Augustan marriage legislation)
17			Horace Carmen Saeculare
16			Propertius 4
10s-0s		Amores 1-3, Heroides, Medicamina faciei femineae, Medea (a lost tragedy)	Horace Ars Poetica, Epistles 2, Odes 4
2 BCE		Ars Amatoria 1-2
1 CE	Birth of Jesus
2		Ars Amatoria 3 and Remedia Amoris
4	Augustus adopts Tiberius
8	Scandal at court; Augustus relegates Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea	Finished just before the relegation (?): Metamorphoses 1-15, Fasti 1-6
8-17		Tristia 1-5, Epistulae ex Ponto 1-4, Ibis, Double Heroides
14
			Manilius Astronomica
		Ovid dies	Livy dies

Ovid was born when the Republic, the oligarchic system of government that had ruled Rome for centuries, was in its death throes. He was a teenager at the time of the Battle of Actium, the final showdown between Mark Antony and Octavian that saw the latter emerge victorious, become the first princeps, and eventu...

Table of contents

• Ovid, Metamorphoses (3.511–733)
• Table of Contents