Now, since Metamorphoses is our primary source for these and for several other myths, we need to have some idea of that works overall tone and purpose before we can talk about how safely we can reconstruct myth from the accounts Ovid gives in Metamorphoses. So what sort of book is Metamorphoses? What’s Ovid doing in it? Why did he write it?
To answer that question, I need to give you some background on Ovid. And to give you some background on Ovid, I have to give you a little more background on Roman history to set everything in context. So a very brief little excursus into a little bit of Roman history. You’ll remember that Rome was founded, supposedly by Romulus, in 753 BC.
From about 509 BC onwards, Rome was a republic governed by elected officials. For the first couple of hundred years of its existence, it was ruled by kings. But the kings were thrown out in or around 509 BC. Rome became a republic and it was ruled by elected officials. And the Romans became very suspicious of anyone who seemed to want to set himself up as a king.
It was under the republican form of government that Roman power expanded from the city of Rome itself throughout Italy and then into other areas as we talked about a little bit in the previous lecture. Rome really came into its own as an international power after a series of three wars with its rival state Carthage situated in Africa.
But while Rome was gaining external power, its internal situation was anything but stable. And particularly in the second and first centuries BC, Rome was plagued by a series of social upheavals which often broke into full-scale civil war, and the social unrest of the second and first centuries BC came to a crisis with the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15th, 44 BC. Caesar’s assassins claimed that Caesar had wanted to establish himself as a king. Historians are still hotly divided. This is still strongly debated among ancient historians whether Caesar did or did not want to set himself up as a king.
Some think yes, some think no, but his assassins thought that he did and that was why they killed him. After the death of Julius Caesar there was an open power struggle for many years. Ironically Caesar was assassinated to prevent him from setting himself up as a king and yet after his death it pretty quickly became obvious that what was going to happen to Rome was one man rule. It was just a question of who that one man should be.
So there was an open power struggle with two primary contenders. The first was named Marcus Antonius, better known to English speakers as Mark Antony, who was Caesar’s trusted friend and confidant. Mark Antony was also involved with, living with, perhaps in his own mind, married to and allied with Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt. And the other major contender for power after Caesar’s death was Octavian, Caesar’s great nephew and adopted son.
When things came to a head in 31 BC at a battle called the Battle of Actium off the coast of Greece, Octavian defeated the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra and thereafter Octavian was really established as the sole ruler of Rome. This was in 31 BC again. In 27 BC, Octavian
was awarded the title Augustus, which means the revered one. And historians usually refer to him as Octavian while he’s still engaged in the power struggle with Marc Antony and refer to him as Augustus once he’s established himself as the sole ruler of Rome. In fact, most histories will refer to Augustus as the first emperor of Rome.
Now, Augustus was, in all but name, a king. He was a one-man ruler. He had supreme power in Rome, but he was very, very careful and very clever in not using any of the terms of kingship. We call him the first emperor, and looking back with hindsight at the system of government Rome had after Augustus, we can see that he was, in fact, the first of a series of one-man rulers who might as well be called emperors. But he himself said that what he wanted to do was restore the old republic.
So he put back into place the appearance of old style republican government. For our understanding of Ovid, there are three crucial aspects to what Augustus did in his new government, which again he claimed just the old government reconstituted. First of all, Augustus wanted to reestablish old-style religious ceremonies and reverence for the gods. He built new temples, he refurbished old temples, he thought that Rome needed to return to old-fashioned old-style religion and reverence for the gods.
Secondly, he also wanted to reestablish what he saw as old-style morality. He thought that Rome in his time was extremely decadent, that sexual mores in particular were out of control, and he thought that Rome needed to return to a more old-fashioned, old-style system of values and morality. In 18 BC, Augustus passed laws regulating marriage, making adultery a criminal offense, which it had never been before. It had been a private matter.
Now it was a criminal offense, an offense against the state with very stiff penalties. And he also passed laws that penalized men for not marrying and that penalized married couples for not having children. So he was trying to encourage marriage and fertility. By the way, it didn’t work.
His laws, which are often called his social reform, seem to have had very little effect on either the marriage, the divorce, or the fertility rate. But the point here is that this was what he wanted to do, that he saw sexual immorality as a real problem for Roman culture and wanted to try to get back to old-fashioned family values, if I may coin a phrase.
Augustus was also a patron of the arts, including poetry. During his reign, Roman literature entered what is still referred to frequently as its golden age. It was during this time that Virgil wrote the Aeneid, that Horace wrote his poems, that Livy wrote his history of Rome, and so forth.
Augustus was a patron of many poets and his patronage extended to Virgil and Horace, but Ovid was very definitely not among those who received Augustus’ patronage. So what was it about Ovid and Ovid’s work that kept Augustus from being his patron?