Chaos and the Four Ages

The fun of pasting this site up is that I end up reading bits of the Metamorphoses text that I had never read before. There are a few stand-alone stories (eg Pyramus and Thisbe) but much of the narrative is fragmented and interlinked so that you just have to keep going backwards to understand why people are in the situation they are in and of course who is telling the story and why.

It seems that I had entirely skipped the beginning where Ovid describes the creation of the Known Universe and how our happy primal state of lounging around in the Golden Age evolved, or rather Devolved, into the Age we are living in now.
Spoiler Alert – technology, metals and foreign travel leading to Colonialism are to blame for a lot, according to Ovid.

It would be interesting to know if his Worldview was typical of Romans generally or even of Greeks .. but I don’t have an answer to that question.

He definitely knew there was ice at the South pole but I have just realised that doesn’t necessarily mean he knew the Earth is a sphere – although it does seem likely. The text is simply fabulous writing (Chaos, Four Ages) and makes up for eg/ the creepy stories that Orpheus’ tells to the trees

Oh, the other good thing is reading poems that I had pasted links to but had either not read in the first place or had forgotten about and I love this one so much, ‘Persephone writes a letter to her mother‘ by A E Stallings 1997, and thank goodness for the Internet or I’d never have found it at all X

Also I will park this here, it is Kline’s alphabetical index to every single character and place mentioned in the Metamorphoses. It is on his homepage but you have to scroll a long way down to find it and of course I want it where I can find it easily because I use it All the Time

2023

Enough with the excuses for not updating this website. I never lose interest in the Metamorphoses, just get distracted onto other projects, but having done a Zoom about the Metamorphoses with the wonderful Anactoria Clarke of the Open Universty (via the equally wonderful Helen McVeigh of her Classics Academy and also CANI) and the possibility that someone else might possibly look at it, I find myself suddenly motivated to sort it out.

Also, since we talked a lot about the politics behind the text, it is no longer just about poetry but any kind of writing, analysis or response at all. It will take ages to change all the pages so please read “poems” as being a shortcut for “anything”

There are new pages on Achelous (actually a river) and on Lycaon, the original werwolf.

Some others are on the way but still nowhere near one for each of the something like 500 stories. This remains a very distant aspiration but what is wrong with having one of those?

It has also become a useful place to put things as there is almost nothing that does not connect in some way, even if slightly tenuously, to one or another story in the Metamorphoses. Having said that, an essay about John Donne is a bit of a reach but it’s HERE anyway.

2022

Hello. It is the summer of 2022 and, having neglected it when there seemed to be plenty of time all through the Covid lockdown, this site is finally getting a bit of an update.

The aim is of course to have a page for every story in the Metamorphoses with the text, a synopsis that is better/or at least more fun/ than the one in Wikipedia, some pictures and links to any poems we have written or are floating around on the Web.

This … is the distant aim. Meanwhile I have listed the pages that are already at least partly done in alphabetical order

… and also in the order they appear in the text as they do run into each other, that is when they are not nested or clustered or stacked in some other weird way. I saw a flow chart once which made a great attempt at mapping the connections between the stories and if I find it again I will paste the URL here.

I’m also working on a map. This is just a hunch but it is my feeling that while we tend to read the stories as psychodrama, to the original ears they were as much a kind of illustrated geography of the known world

At the moment it is mainly (totally) me doing this which is absolutely fine. But if anyone would like to join in with pictures, poems, stories or with writing synopses then do get in touch with me, anitagreg at gmail.com, and I will paste them into the site … or I would happily link to any other related blog or site

Meanwhile, I will go work on a page for Achelous. Bye for now, x AG

larval stage of sea squirts

Sometimes I get so depressed by the awfulness of the lives of most women in the society potrayed in the Metamorphoses that I wonder if this text is what I really want to think about – and then realise again how relevant it is and in such unlikely ways

Last week I realised that we are descended from animals that go through a cycle of metamorphoses. Very distantly descended, but we are.
These animals are sea squirts, technically known as Tunicates, whose adult stage is a bioluminescent tube that lives stuck to a rock but which, before it finds its rock and eats its own brain, has a larval stage something like a tadpole with eyes and a spinal column

And it would appear to be the case that we – and all other vertebrates – are descended from the larval sage of a tunicate (sea squrt) More about tunicates HERE

I also came across (admittedly only Online) a creature called a Suave Slug which shoots love darts at its intended partner

So subjects for this month might as well be Erysichthon – who (spoiler alert) ends up eating himself

and Cupid

Books

hello – whatever about Ovid – I am only slowly learning how WordPress works but the the Homepage is now separate from the Blog – which this page is – and the stories are now mostly listed under the Books they appear in as it is gradually becoming obvious that they are in the order they were written in for a reason

Diary

Alcyone – March

Actaeon -April

but of course if you like to write about anything else or have something already written – a synopsis or a poem that relates even slightly to a story in the Metamorphoses – send it in and I’ll paste up a page for the story and put it under ” Other “

next meeting – Crescent coffee bar – 6pm to 8pm on Thurs 2nd of May …and yes – I think this IS the voting day … is this a problem for anyone ? let me know if it is , A.G.