Ovid. Week 10. REQUIRED. (1) Lycaon;
(2) Jupiter's Dilemma. due Wed., Oct.
20
Answer the following highlighted questions:
1. The story of Lycaon serves as the first narration of human metamorphosis
in Ovid's epic, and we might expect it to be paradigmatic. It is in some ways,
but not all. An important feature here is the narrator, a very biased Jupiter.
Thus, when he makes the tale very moral, of a crime and a punishment that
fits the crime, we might expect that all cases of metamorphoses could be so
easily moralized and rationalized.
Why is that not the case, considering the
metamorphoses reported in the remainder of Book 1, when Ovid has turned
narrator?
2. At 1.860 (Martin's line numbers) Ovid describes Jupiter's dilemma in terms
of a distinction between "shame" and "love." He has mockingly translated
Jupiter's motives into morally serious Roman ethical terms. To quote
William Anderson: "A supposedly right sense of shame (
pudor
) urges him to
bit the bullet, suffer a bit, but give the gift; a supposedly full awareness of
what love entails (
amor
) impels him to refuse. The conflict between these
two values was traditional in Roman comedy, Roman elegy, and in Hellenistic
epic. Vergil had thus defined Dido's inner conflict in
Aeneid
4.27-28 and 4.54-
55."
How does Jupiter (through Ovid's indirect discourse) distort and debase
the serious ethical terms here? What does this show about his
character? Quoting Anderson again: "It is no accident that Ovid earlier
described the act of rape as the violation of Io's
pudor
." The Latin line
translated at 1.832 ends
rapuitque pudorem
, which Martin nicely translates
as "and dishonored her."
