Lecture 22 Flashcards
1
Q
Ovid
A
- Born the year after Caesar’s assassination
- Wealthy family
- Trained as a lawyer, but abandoned law to become a poet
- Best known for his erotic poetry (exp. to lover Corinna who may or may not be real)
- Also mock didactic poems: The Art of Love, The Cures for Love
- Exiled by Augustus to the Black Sea: “A poem (The Art of Love) and a mistake”
2
Q
Mock didactic poems
A
- Chauvenistic
- Facetious/Sarcastic
- Subversive
- overturn them
- show them in a different light as not true
3
Q
Why is Ovid’s description amoral?
A
- Encouraging sexuality before marriage
- Ancient world
- marriages are political
- women are really young (13 or 14), not women, girls
- Ovid when talking about a premarital relationship he’s talking about extramarital affairs because the marriage material girls are too young
- Any sexually eligible woman is already married
4
Q
The Metamorphoses
A
- Ovid’s Epic Poem
- Dactylic Hexameter: meter of Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid
- Sometimes considered a “mock-epic”
- 15 books 250 myths
- Primary source of ancient myth
- One of the most popular and influential works of all time
- Major themes: changes, love, gods vs. humans
5
Q
The Prologue’s similarities
A
- Tells us what the books about
- the history of the world
- changes and the gods involvement
- Invokes the muses
- Starts in the beginning like the Theogony
6
Q
In The Beginning
A
First is Chaos
|
with influence of “a god” and “nature”
|
V
Elements:
Fire, Air, Earth, Water
| | |
(the earth, sky, sea) (stars, planets) (animals, man)
7
Q
Different from Theogony
A
-all these things come before the gods and not from the gods
8
Q
Four Ages of Man
A
- Golden
- Silver
- Bronze
- Iron
9
Q
Golden
A
- Saturn
- No laws, courts
- No travel by sea
- No fortifications or battles
- No farming
10
Q
Silver
A
- Jupiter’s rule
- Seasons of the year
- People live in houses
- Agriculture begins
11
Q
Bronze
A
- Crueler than previous
- War
12
Q
Iron
A
- No loyalty, truth, conscience
- Sea-faring begins
- Property ownership
- Mining begins
- War, theft, cheating
- No safety for guests or family
- Justice abandons the earth
13
Q
The Palatine Hill, Rome
A
- Home of Augustus and other members of the super-elite
- Comparing Augustus to Jupiter
- Jupiter is about to destroy everything and kill everyone
- Flattering or nah?
14
Q
Lycaon
A
- Lycaon boiled his guest and cooked him violating xenia and tried to feed him to Jupiter to test his omniscience
- Recognized what happened and Jupiter turns him into a wolf
- Worlds first werewolf
- Sends down the flood to punish all the humans
15
Q
Deucalion and Pyrrha
A
- only humans left after the flood
- Deucalion is son of Prometheus
- Pyrrha is daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora
- Land at Delphi and get an oracle by Themis
16
Q
Themis
A
- Oracle at Delphi
- Pick up the bones of their mother and throw them over their shoulders to repopulate the earth
- Throw rocks over their shoulders and rebuild earth with new humans
17
Q
Apollo and Daphne
A
- Daughter of river god–>Nymph
- Apollo falls in love with her and she runs away
- Apollo chases her and she attempts to escape and is turned into a laurel tree (bay)
- Sacred tree of Apollo
- Transformed by her father
- Not even able to give away even though she loses her humanity and is still possessed by him.
- Physically: kissing and embracing
- also makes the laurel tree his symbol
- What emperors and royalty wear
- Augustus had a wreath of this over his door
- Ovid makes Apollo seem creepy and pervy and this violation is associated with Augustus
18
Q
Jupiter and Io
A
- Jupiter sees Io and decides he wants to rape her
- She fled and was unable to escape
- Juno figures it out so Jupiter turns Io into a cow
- Juno thinks it’s beautiful and takes it for herself, she is not tricked
- Juno locks Io the cow up and has a monster (Argus) watch her
- Jupiter has Mercury kill the monster and frees Io
- Jupiter doesn’t turn Io back into a human
- In the end she is turned into Isis
- Etiology for this Egyptian goddess
- This whole story makes Jupiter look bad and we should remember that earlier Ovid had compared Augustus to Jupiter
