But while there are many myths like the myth of Niobe in Metamorphoses, myths that are attested elsewhere and that we can vouch for from elsewhere, there are also several myths that are attested only one or two other places and therefore may not have been terribly important or are attested only in Ovid. For example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, that sort of proto-Romeo and Juliet story that I mentioned a few lectures back, in which the two young lovers are forbidden to marry by their parents. They run away together. Pyramus thinks that his beloved Thisbe is dead and kills himself. Thisbe comes back, finds Pyramus’ body and kills herself.
And by the way, the metamorphosis in that story is tacked on at the very end. They kill themselves under a mulberry tree. Their blood splashes up onto the berries, and the berries that had always previously been white turn purple and stay that way forever after. There’s the metamorphosis. Pyramus and Thisbe is not attested anywhere else in classical literature before Ovid.
Now it’s mentioned a few times after Ovid, but that doesn’t prove anything because those references could simply be references to Ovid himself. It’s mentioned nowhere else. Ovid may very well have invented it. He says that it’s a Babylonian story, but there’s no evidence at all to think that it is. The names certainly are not Babylonian. So we simply don’t know. Is Pyramus and Thisbe actually a traditional myth? Or is it a nice little story that Ovid made up and put into the book for his own purposes and his own reasons?
Some of the stories Ovid tells in Metamorphoses that are very obscure are probably included to demonstrate just how well-read and just how erudite he is. Just as I mentioned in his creation story, his story of the creation of the world, Ovid runs through just about every scientific, philosophical, and religious theory of his time, I think in part to demonstrate that he knows them all.
So he may include some very obscure little-known myths both to entertain his readers and again to demonstrate just how widely read and knowledgeable he himself is. So in sum, Ovid’s use of myth anticipates in many ways the use that later authors will make of classical myth when the myths themselves survive as literary tropes but no longer as part of an active belief system.
We can see that process beginning in Ovid’s own work, that the myths are now being used as literary devices as entertainment value stories but are not at least I think for Ovid part of a living belief system now here I’m treading on some extremely dangerous ground because the question of what a particular author does or does not believe as determined from the work that the author has written is a notoriously dangerous and difficult question to try to determine it’s very very problematic to take the words of an author’s written text as evidence for that author’s own personal belief system.
But as far as I can read it or judge it, Ovid’s attitude throughout Metamorphoses seems close to a statement he makes in one of his other works where he says that gods are useful and since they’re useful, let’s say they exist. That is, I think, a kind of cynical and detached attitude towards using gods as a literary device that is not the statement of someone who has any kind of living religious belief, but rather referring to the gods simply as useful for our purposes in this particular work. It’s useful to have gods, so let’s say we have them.
Now undoubtedly Roman society like any other society showed a whole range of beliefs and degrees of belief. I would imagine if we could transport ourselves back to first century BC Rome and talk to various different people on the street we would probably find a whole range of religious belief from people who took every word of the traditional myths literally all the way up to flat out atheists and where any particular person including Ovid falls on that continuum is not easy to determine.
But it seems fairly clear that Ovid’s target audience was the highly educated, very sophisticated Roman elite who would be able to read and enjoy his tales of the gods as literary stories. In other words, that Ovid was writing for a target audience who it’s probably safe to assume did not believe in these gods in any literal sense and may not have believed in them even as representations of a more sublime kind of god.
Now, given the separation of metamorphoses from living myth, the fact that metamorphoses is our source for a great many myths, but is also, as we’ve just seen, very definitely separated from myth as a living and believed-in force. It’s a very ironic twist of history, as ironic as anything Ovid could have thought up, in fact, that metamorphoses exercised an extraordinary degree of direct influence on later European literature and art. And it’s to that influence of metamorphoses on later European culture that we’ll turn in our final lecture.
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)