{"id":19169,"date":"2023-11-14T10:23:11","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T09:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19169"},"modified":"2025-10-19T17:15:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T16:15:06","slug":"elizabeth-vandiver-gods-are-useful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19169","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Vandiver &#8211; Gods Are Useful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>23 &#8211; <strong>Gods Are Useful &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 24) by Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Run time: 30:32 \/ 2011-01-04<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 640px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-19169-1\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"video\/mp4\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume24\/23.godsAreUseful_512kb.mp4?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume24\/23.godsAreUseful_512kb.mp4\">https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume24\/23.godsAreUseful_512kb.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong> &#8211; Hello and welcome back to lecture 23. In the previous lecture, we began discussing the way Roman culture adopted and transformed Greek myth to fit its own cultural needs. In this lecture, we&#8217;re going to focus directly on the author Ovid and his work Metamorphoses, to which we&#8217;ve referred throughout the course, and try to discover exactly what kind of work metamorphoses is and what the implications of its nature might be for our understanding of the myths Ovid recounts in it. Now, metamorphoses is Ovid&#8217;s great mythological work. <\/p>\n<p>He wrote many other books as well, but in Metamorphoses he focuses on classical myth as it is inherited by the Romans from the Greeks. And Metamorphoses is our primary source and many times our only source for some of the best known, most famous classical myths. Just to give three examples, Metamorphoses gives us the fullest accounts that we have of the stories of Apollo and Daphne, of Phaeton, and of Narcissus. Apollo and Daphne is a story that&#8217;s frequently shown in art and that&#8217;s I think still quite well known. <\/p>\n<p>Daphne was a nymph. Now, nymphs are beings who are sort of intermediate between gods and humans. They personify trees, rivers or lakes and caves or mountains. And they are, if not immortal, at least very long lived. But a tree nymph or dryad would die when her tree was cut down, for instance. A water nymph would die if her stream dried up and so forth. Daphne is a nymph and the daughter of a river god. <\/p>\n<p>Apollo is struck with desire for her when he&#8217;s shot by an arrow of his younger brother Cupid, eros in Greek terminology, and wants to marry her, or at least wants to mate with her, But Daphne has vowed to remain forever a virgin. And so Apollo chases Daphne, trying to catch her. As Daphne runs away, she prays for help to her father, the river god, and she&#8217;s turned into a laurel tree.<\/p>\n<p>Apollo then makes the laurel his sacred tree and takes a wreath of laurel leaves to wear on his head and that becomes one of his common attributes in art afterwards. So clearly this myth is mainly ideological. Why does Apollo use the laurel wreath? Why is the laurel tree sacred to Apollo? Daphne in Greek just means laurel.<\/p>\n<p>The point here is, as I said, Ovid is the author who gives us the fullest account of this story. Another such story that we know mainly from Ovid is the story of Phaeton.<br \/>\nPhaeton was the son of Apollo in Apollo&#8217;s aspect as sun god. By the time Ovid writes, Apollo has taken over from Helios as the god of the sun. And in his role as sun god, Ovid tends to call him Phoebus. That&#8217;s another name for Apollo, which basically just means bright or shining. So Phaeton is the son of Phoebus, and a mortal mother. <\/p>\n<p>And Phaeton wants to find out if the sun god, Phoebus, really is his father. So he journeys to the palace of the sun god in the remote east and asks the god, if you truly are my father, promise on the river Styx that you will grant me my one request. Apollo or Phoebus makes the promise, and Phaeton&#8217;s one request is to be allowed to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky for a single day. <\/p>\n<p>Now, his father, Apollo, knows that such an attempt will be fatal. He tries to reason with the boy, tells him that not even another god, not even Jupiter himself, can drive this chariot. But Phaeton insists, and since Apollo has promised by the river Styx he can&#8217;t go back on his word, he lets the boy drive the chariot, and of course Phaeton is, in fact, killed.<\/p>\n<p>A third story, very famous, that we know mainly through Ovid, is the story of Narcissus. Narcissus was a youth too proud to yield to any lover. Though many people desired him, he did not think any of them were worthy of his affection or attention. As a punishment, he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and starved to death, staring into the pool, unable to tear himself away from his beloved, whom he thought apparently was a water nymph, long enough even to eat and of course this is where psychology gets the term narcissism from the name Narcissus. <\/p>\n<p>Now those are just three examples there are many many more of myths that we know existed in Greek mythology because we have passing references to them in other authors.<br \/>\nBut it&#8217;s Ovid who preserves the fullest versions of the stories that we have, who allows us to recognize the story behind the other fleeting versions. I suppose the best example of all might be Niobe, who is referred to throughout Greek literature, but whose story is recounted for us in full by Ovid.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s Ovid doing in it? Why did he write it?<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll remember that Rome was founded, supposedly by Romulus, in 753 BC.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s death was Octavian, Caesar&#8217;s great nephew and adopted son.<\/p>\n<p>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<br \/>\nwas awarded the title Augustus, which means the revered one. And historians usually refer to him as Octavian while he&#8217;s still engaged in the power struggle with Marc Antony and refer to him as Augustus once he&#8217;s established himself as the sole ruler of Rome. In fact, most histories will refer to Augustus as the first emperor of Rome.<\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t work.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<br \/>\nAugustus 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&#8217; patronage. So what was it about Ovid and Ovid&#8217;s work that kept Augustus from being his patron? <\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>Well, Ovid&#8217;s overall could hardly have been less calculated to appeal to an emperor who wanted to encourage respect for the traditional gods and a return to traditional sexual morality. Metamorphoses, as I mentioned before, is the work in which Ovid pays most attention to mythology, but most of his work concentrates on amatory poetry, on poetry written about love affairs. <\/p>\n<p>His first published work, Amores, that&#8217;s a title that basically just means loves or love affairs, was written, was published rather, around 16 BC, i.e. two years after Augustus had passed his moral legislation, and Amores is a collection of short love elegies to Ovid&#8217;s mistress whom he calls Corinna. <\/p>\n<p>Now, in these poems, Ovid makes it quite clear that he is not married to Corinna and has no intention or desire of marrying her, is quite happy having an affair with her. His second work, Arsamatoria, which means more or less the art of loving or perhaps the seducer&#8217;s art would be a better way to translate it, was published around 1 BC, and if Amores was calculated to annoy Augustus, Arsamatoria would have infuriated him, because it contains advice for both men and women, mostly for men, but some for women as well, on how to find and attract lovers.<\/p>\n<p>He gives very practical advice, such as telling young men that a good way to find a lover is to go to the circus, to the entertainment, and sit next to an attractive woman. And while everybody else is watching the races, put your foot on top of hers and rub your knee against hers and so forth. And the rest will just happen on its own. He also advises young men specifically to have affairs with older married women, partly because they&#8217;re so grateful to you for paying them any attention and partly because they can&#8217;t make a fuss when you dump them. <\/p>\n<p>So in Ars Amatoria, Ovid is specifically advocating, although in a very ironic, playful and humorous manner, he is specifically advocating adulterous affairs of precisely the kind that Augustus has outlawed, has made criminal offenses. Ovid&#8217;s third main work, on amatory matters is called Remedia Amoris, which means the cure of love. This was written and published probably between 1 B.C. and A.D. 2, and it advises the reader on how to get out of a love affair. Once you&#8217;ve attracted a lover, what do you do when you&#8217;re tired of her or him and want to move on to somebody else?<\/p>\n<p>Here his advice consists in practical suggestions such as thinking of one of your lover&#8217;s flaws. Everybody has something wrong with them, some flaw. Think of the flaw, concentrate on it, don&#8217;t allow yourself to think of anything else. And he says fairly soon you&#8217;ll find that you&#8217;re not attracted to the person anymore after all. He also wrote books about makeup for women, all sorts of this kind of thing.<\/p>\n<p>These, obviously, were not going to get him into the Emperor Augustus&#8217; good graces. What about metamorphoses itself? Metamorphoses was written probably between AD 4 and AD 8 and in it Ovid takes myth as his stated subject specifically myths about transformations that of course is what metamorphoses means he says in the opening lines that he&#8217;s going to sing or write about bodies transformed into other shapes about transformations such as Daphne into a laurel tree that kind of thing and that is the ostensible link between all the stories he tells throughout Metamorphoses. <\/p>\n<p>Every story he tells includes some sort of transformation, though some of them are pretty minor transformations and are mentioned so briefly that you could almost overlook them. But even here, even in a work of mythology, of recounting mythological stories, and of talking about transformations of bodies into other shapes, most of the stories Ovid tells contain some element of sexuality, sexual adventure, sexual perversion very frequently. <\/p>\n<p>Even when he is supposedly writing about myth, he&#8217;s really writing about strange sexual encounters as much as he&#8217;s writing about myth. In the story of Daphne, for instance, Ovid lays much less emphasis on the ideological aspects of the story and concentrates on Apollo&#8217;s passion and Daphne&#8217;s revulsion. <\/p>\n<p>And as I already mentioned in many of the stories of Metamorphoses, the transformation, the change of form seems to be added almost as an afterthought so that Ovid will have an excuse to tell the story that he wants to tell. and a lot of them are pretty shocking stories indeed. Metamorphoses is a fascinating work. I wish we had time to spend several lectures on it alone because it runs the whole gamut from really horrifyingly violent and grotesque stories through some of the most emotionally charming and attractive stories that have survived from classical antiquity. <\/p>\n<p>He runs the whole gamut of emotions and of possibilities of human interaction. In it, he includes stories of men in love with women, men in love with men, women in love with women, men in love with animals, women in love with their fathers, a man in love with a statue. Just about anything you can think of, Ovid has got somewhere in Metamorphoses.<\/p>\n<p>So the sexual side of metamorphoses, the emphasis on strange sexual adventures, is one aspect that would have made it unlikely to please Augustus. Another aspect of this work that also probably annoyed Augustus is that in it the treatment of the gods and of the traditional stories about the gods is done very humorously and anything but seriously. For instance, often makes a great deal of fun of the anthropomorphism of the gods in Metamorphoses, as I&#8217;ll get back to in a few minutes.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>Ovid was, in fact, exiled by Augustus in 8 A.D. He was sent away from Rome. He was sent to exile in a place called Thomas on the Black Sea, a place that Ovid absolutely hated. He wrote some poetry while in exile, addressed in part to Augustus begging to be allowed to come back home, and in part to Ovid&#8217;s own wife in Rome, so Ovid had married at some point.<\/p>\n<p>He was exiled for reasons that we do not precisely know. In the poetry he writes from exile, Ovid himself says that his banishment from Rome was for, as he puts it, carmen et error, a poem and a mistake. Now the poem is almost undoubtedly Arisamatoria. Of all his works, that one, The Seducer&#8217;s Art, is the one that would have been most calculated to enrage Augustus. But that poem was written in or around 1 BC and Ovid was not exiled until 8 AD. There&#8217;s a gap of nine years. <\/p>\n<p>So there was something else that happened, some catalyst for his exile that must be what he means when he says it was an error, a mistake. About that, what it was, we simply don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s one of the great frustrating unsolved mysteries of Roman antiquity. Elsewhere in his poetry of exile Ovid hints that it was because of something he saw or something he overheard and the most common theory about this is that somehow Ovid became privy to some embarrassing or dangerous secret about the imperial family that he found something out of about Augustus or Augustus&#8217; family or Augustus&#8217; plans for the state or something like that that made him dangerous to keep at Rome. <\/p>\n<p>But we don&#8217;t know and we probably never will know unless there&#8217;s some discovery of some heretofore unexpected diary that Ovid wrote or something like that which I don&#8217;t think we can really hope for. In any case, ovid died in exile it&#8217;s a very sad ending to the story of this extremely urbane sophisticated city person if ever there was a city person ovid loved rome and he hated his place of exile. <\/p>\n<p>But even after the death of augustus ovid lived another four years or so he was still not allowed to come home augustus&#8217;s successor tiberius also did not allow ovid to return to rome and he died in exile now like ovid&#8217;s other works Metamorphoses is a highly polished, very literary, and self-consciously ironic production. This has profound implications for our using metamorphoses as a source of classical myth.<\/p>\n<p>We do this a great deal. Anytime anyone teaches a course on classical mythology or anyone writes about classical mythology, they very probably are using Ovid&#8217;s Metamorphoses as a source for at least some of the myths they discuss. And yet that is a proceeding that&#8217;s absolutely fraught with danger because of the tone, the presentation, and the kind of work that Metamorphoses is. <\/p>\n<p>First of all, we can&#8217;t ever assume that ovid is giving us the straight version so to speak of any myth as opposed to altering the myth significantly for effect his overall tone is playful and almost always ironic so for instance as i mentioned a few moments ago the anthropomorphism of the gods is pointed out and used for comic effect, or at least for, how can I put it, the effect of making it clear that nobody could really believe in such anthropomorphic gods. Let me give you just one example. <\/p>\n<p>In the story of Phaeton, which I already mentioned, when Phaeton is trying to drive the chariot of the sun, the horses are entirely out of control and at one point the chariot of the sun comes much too close to the earth over the continent of Africa. That, Ovid says, is when the deserts appeared in Africa and when the peoples of Africa became dark-skinned because the sun was so close to the earth.<\/p>\n<p>But the point I want to concentrate on here is the description of Earth herself, Gaia in Hesiodic terms, Terra in Latin. We&#8217;re told that she, Earth herself, looks up towards Jupiter and shading her brow with her hand cries out to Jupiter and asks why she&#8217;s being burned to death, what she has ever done to deserve so terrible a fate. <\/p>\n<p>Now, when we were discussing Hesiod, I talked about the problems of trying to picture Gaia the difficulty in having an entity that is the great mother goddess who gives birth to other gods but is at the same time the earth the ground that we walk on and I talked about the fact that this is difficult to say Gaia is either one or the other she&#8217;s both and yes Hesiod says that she has a body she has bodily parts bodily appetites and so forth but Hesiod does not force you to contemplate the implications of that in as direct a sense as Ovid does. <\/p>\n<p>Hesia doesn&#8217;t talk about Gaia&#8217;s hands. Hesia doesn&#8217;t talk about Gaia raising a hand to shade her forehead from the light of the sun. When Ovid does this, I think he is intentionally forcing his readers to look at anthropomorphism and see how silly a concept or how unworkable a concept it is when you&#8217;re talking about actual sublime gods. Or forcing his readers, sounds like I think his readers didn&#8217;t want to do this, perhaps asking his readers to share the joke would be a better way of putting it.<\/p>\n<p>Assuming that his readers are witty and sophisticated and urbane as he is and will agree that these traditional stories of the gods are there to have fun with more than to show respect and belief to. Another problem with using the myths in Metamorphoses is, as I&#8217;ve already mentioned, there are many unusual sexual permutations throughout them. Ovid may have added some of those for his own purposes. When we have no other version to compare with, we can&#8217;t ever be sure what Ovid has put into the story and what was there in the story to begin with.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, we can&#8217;t assume that all of the myths Ovid mentions in Metamorphoses were well-known or important myths. Some of them were. Again, Niobe is an example. And we can be pretty sure that the myth of Niobe was indeed quite important because her name pops up and little snippets of her myth are mentioned in so many ancient Greek writers.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217; body and kills herself.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s the metamorphosis. Pyramus and Thisbe is not attested anywhere else in classical literature before Ovid.<\/p>\n<p>Now it&#8217;s mentioned a few times after Ovid, but that doesn&#8217;t prove anything because those references could simply be references to Ovid himself. It&#8217;s mentioned nowhere else. Ovid may very well have invented it. He says that it&#8217;s a Babylonian story, but there&#8217;s no evidence at all to think that it is. The names certainly are not Babylonian. So we simply don&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>We can see that process beginning in Ovid&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s very very problematic to take the words of an author&#8217;s written text as evidence for that author&#8217;s own personal belief system. <\/p>\n<p>But as far as I can read it or judge it, Ovid&#8217;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&#8217;re useful, let&#8217;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&#8217;s useful to have gods, so let&#8217;s say we have them.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>But it seems fairly clear that Ovid&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve just seen, very definitely separated from myth as a living and believed-in force. It&#8217;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&#8217;s to that influence of metamorphoses on later European culture that we&#8217;ll turn in our final lecture.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>23 &#8211; Gods Are Useful &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 24) by Elizabeth Vandiver Run time: 30:32 \/ 2011-01-04 https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume24\/23.godsAreUseful_512kb.mp4 &nbsp; (Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023) Elizabeth Vandiver&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19169\" class=\"more-link\">Lexo <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-extracted"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}