24 – From Ovid to the Stars – Classical Mythology (Vol 25) by Elizabeth Vandiver
Run time: 29:47 / 2011-01-05
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)
Elizabeth Vandiver – Hello and welcome back to the final lecture on classical mythology. In the previous lecture, we talked about Ovid’s place in Roman history and his use of myth in Metamorphoses, the type of work it is and what Ovid was doing with myth.
In this last lecture, I want to look at the enormous influence that Ovid’s work exercised on later European culture from about the 11th century AD onward. Now to get from Ovid to the 11th century AD, we need to do a little recapping of history from the period in which the Roman Empire became Christian onward.
Classical civilization, the belief in the classical gods, like the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations before it, did not simply disappear all of a sudden. Rather, it waned over a period of time with the growing influence of Christianity playing a very strong role in that waning. In the fourth century AD, with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, often called Constantine the Great, Christianity became the primary religion of the Roman Empire and from that time onward belief in the pagan gods began to disappear from European culture.
It’s impossible to tell, of course, when the final transition came, when no one any longer believed in the traditional gods of Greece and Rome. We know that after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, there was a later emperor called Julian the Apostate, who reigned from 361 to 363 AD, who tried to return the Roman Empire to the traditional pagan gods, and Julian supposedly was the last person ever to receive an oracle from Apollo’s oracle at Delphi.
Julian sent to Delphi and got the answer that said, tell the king, to the messengers Julian had sent, tell the king that Apollo’s hall has fallen, the sacred spring speaks no longer, he has no prophetic laurel any longer, there’s no one here, in other words. But Julian was not successful in returning roman culture to worship of the pagan gods and christianity remained the primary religion of roman culture now between the fourth century the time of constantine and julian and the 11th centuries a.d and later on in fact latin was the main language of communication in western Europe.
But literary evidence for these centuries is relatively sparse, and most literature that does survive from this time period is specifically Christian-oriented. It’s specifically about church matters, lives of saints, that sort of thing. It is in the late 11th century and onward, the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that we see classical literature and particularly Ovid coming back into play as major influences on European culture.
And Ovid’s influence, or I should say the influence of Metamorphoses because his amatory poetry was much less important, the influence of metamorphoses on European culture from the late 11th century onward was surprisingly large. In fact, the 12th century AD has even been called by some scholars an Eitas Ovidiana or Ovidian age, an age that models itself on Ovid.
Why should metamorphoses have suddenly become so important a model, so important a text in the 12th century in Western Europe? Well, there are a few reasons. First, the growth of cathedral schools in this time period increased the knowledge of Ovid’s work.
Classical literature in general survived after the conversion of classical civilization to Christianity. Classical literature survived mainly in copies held in the libraries of monasteries, convents, and great churches. Classical literature, like all literature before the invention of the printing press, was preserved by being copied laboriously by hand manuscript to manuscript.
Many works were lost in this time period, in these centuries from the fourth century onward, not out of any malicious intent, but simply because the labor required to copy works that were no longer considered important was too great to justify. But primary classical works, Virgil, Ovid, the historian Levy, and so forth, were copied and continued to exist, therefore, in monastery, convent, and cathedral libraries.
Thus, when cathedral schools became a force to be reckoned with, in the 12th century in particular, more people were able to gain knowledge of Ovid’s work. Those who attended those schools would encounter Ovid along with the other classical and ecclesiastical works that they would find in the libraries associated with their schools.