Ovid’s Metamorphoses is all about mothers

Even if you haven’t heard of Ovid, you almost certainly know some of his stories. His most famous work, the Metamorphoses, is a Latin epic poem composed of hundreds of tales of mythical transformations, many of which are still being told and retold today.

Take Ovid’s story of the sculptor Pygmalion, who crafted an impossibly beautiful woman from ivory. After falling in love with his own creation, he prayed to the goddess Venus and she brought the statue to life. You can trace the echoes of this story through the centuries – from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913), which recast the sculptor as a speech therapist and became the musical My Fair Lady (1956), to Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), which reimagines the tale for the AI generation.

The Pygmalion story was also recently retold from the statue’s perspective by Madeline Miller in her novella Galatea (2013), the name given to Pygmalion’s statue by later writers. With its unflinching descriptions of sexual abuse, Miller’s novella brings the darker aspects of Ovid’s tale into sharp focus.

Indeed, the Metamorphoses as a whole has had its own #MeToo moment in recent years. In 2015, Columbia undergraduates even argued that the book should have trigger warnings due to its many brutal rape scenes. However, while authors, journalists and academics are now all reckoning with Ovid’s disturbing fondness for scenes of rape, there is another, striking aspect of the Metamorphoses that we’re still overlooking – Ovid’s fascination with motherhood.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

Mothers don’t normally belong in Latin epics, which were meant to be devoted to warriors and warfare. When mothers do pop up in epic poems, they’re immediately pushed away.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance, Aeneas escapes from the ruins of Troy with his father and son – but tells his wife to follow behind, where she is lost and killed. Later, a grieving mother is hidden away in her tent, in case her tears dishearten the soldiers. But in the Metamorphoses, mothers are everywhere, even in the most epic of myths.

The 12 labours of Hercules is one of the most famous legends of the classical world – but Ovid spends far longer recounting the labours of Hercules’ mother, Alcmene. What is more, Alcmene narrates her labours herself, to her daughter-in-law Iole.

Latin literature expert Mairéad McAuley argues that this unusual first-person account of pregnancy and birth reimagines the epic tradition as an intimate exchange of knowledge between women, and it plays with both the idea of epic heroism and the question of what kinds of stories properly belong in the epic canon.

On an even more fundamental level, the world of the Metamorphoses is rooted in motherhood. After a great flood, the human race is renewed from “the bones of our great mother” – the stones of our mother earth. She then “gave birth” to all other animals, which grew in warm, wet mud “as though in the womb of a mother”.

Later, Mother Earth herself appears as a character in the poem, when the world is burning and she begs the king of the gods to save the earth from the devouring flames. It’s a passage that perhaps has even more resonance for us now than in Ovid’s time.

The transformation of motherhood

Motherhood is also present in the Metamorphoses in more subtle ways. =Alison Sharrock, a professor of Latin, has pointed out that Ovid uses the vocabulary of fertility and childbirth to describe Pygmalion crafting his statue. The story then ends with the newly alive statue giving birth to a daughter, Paphos, who gave her name to the Greek island.

Miller picks up on this in her novella, where Pygmalion creepily insists that he is Galatea’s “mother”, as well as “husband, and father”. However, Pygmalion can neither understand nor control Galatea’s true maternal love for her daughter. It is this love that drives her to escape, so that her daughter might be free from Pygmalion’s abusive power.

While Ovid gives a surprising amount of space to mothers, that doesn’t mean he was some sort of proto-feminist. His mothers are certainly powerful, complex characters – but they are also often figures of violence and destruction.

Medea, infamous killer of her own children, was one of Ovid’s favourite characters, and the star of the only play he ever wrote. While this play has unfortunately been lost over the millennia, he devotes half a book of the Metamorphoses to her – and Medea is far from the only murderous mother of the poem.

After Procne’s husband rapes her sister and tears out her tongue, she kills their son and serves the meat to her husband at the dinner table – a gruesome plot that inspired Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1588).

In the final book of the poem, Ovid equates birth and metamorphosis, when the Greek philosopher Pythagoras preaches a doctrine of reincarnation, claiming that “what is called being born, is just beginning to be something else”.

This speech of Pythagoras looks back to the very beginning of the poem, when Ovid says that he will tell of “bodies changed into new forms”. And what change is more dramatic than pregnancy and childbirth, when the mother’s body metamorphoses, and one body becomes two?

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Frances Myatt’s suggestion:

The stand-out modern poet of motherhood and metamorphosis is unquestionably Fiona Benson. Her collection Vertigo & Ghost was awarded both the Forward Prize and the Roehampton Prize in 2019.

The first half of the collection explicitly reworks tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Here, motherhood offers moments of loving care and affection amid the sickening brutality of Ovid’s repeated rapes, reimagined in modern settings.

While the second half of the collection doesn’t overtly rewrite Ovidian myths, it is nonetheless equally Ovidian in character. Benson glides seamlessly between the human and animal worlds, with childbirth acting as a key thread that links the poems together.

In Wildebeest, particularly, motherhood is unambiguously portrayed as a form of metamorphosis. Benson describes how “I became beest” while giving birth, slipping between human, animal, water, metal and star, in a glorious profusion of transformation, as dramatic and poetic as any Ovidian metamorphosis.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Frances Myatt, University of Cambridge

Read more:

• The story of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses needs a new translation for the #MeToo era
• Guide to the classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reading rape
• Kaos’s Caeneus is part of a long tradition of queer and trans characters in retellings of ancient myths

Frances Myatt has received research funding from the University of Cambridge and the Caroline Fitzmaurice Trust.