98: Ovid: Metamorphoses - 8. Irony

The theme today is Irony.

Ovid is one of antiquity’s most ironic poets, using humor, contrast, reversal, and understatement to create tension between appearance and reality, expectation and outcome. Unlike Homer’s straightforward heroism or Vergil’s solemn grandeur, Ovid often undermines traditional myths, exposing human folly, divine capriciousness, and the instability of identity and fate.

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### 1. The Irony of Midas

• 11.89–204 Midas
  Midas, wishing for limitless wealth, is granted the power to turn everything he touches into gold—including his food and daughter. Later, he judges Pan a better musician than Apollo and is punished with donkey ears.

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### 2. Additional Passages from Metamorphoses

• Phaethon’s Ride (Book 2.1–356) – The irony of divine favor and of a god locked in by an oath.
• Pentheus (Book 3.553–806) – A warrior rejects the Bacchic rites whereupon his mother is driven into a Bacchic frenzy and dismembers him with her bare hands, thinking he is a boar.
• Actaeon (Book 3:217-240) – The Catalogue of Dogs. Compare with Homer’s The Catalogue of Ships (Iliad 2.494–759) and the Hesiodic, The Catalogue of Women
• Narcissus and Echo (Book 3.432–552) – Narcissus, who rejects all lovers, becomes a victim of unrequited self-love.
• Myrrha’s Incestuous Love (Book 10.325–566) – Love Becomes a Curse
• The Debate of Ajax and Ulysses (Book 13.1–430)
• Ovid’s Description of the God of Sleep (Book 11.637–697)

### 3. Artistic Reflections on Irony

• Renaissance Art: The Flaying of Marsyas by Titian (1570s)
• The contrast between Apollo’s calmness and Marsyas’s suffering heightens the ironic cruelty of divine punishment.
• Post-1800 Art: The Golden Touch by Thomas Waterman Wood (1880s)
• Depicts Midas in despair, unable to eat his own golden food, highlighting the ironic cost of greed.

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### 4. Musical Works

• Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927)
• Based on the greatest ironic tragedy—Oedipus seeks to avoid his fate, yet ensures it.
• "Stravinsky called Oedipus Rex an “opera-oratorio” and instructed that it be staged with minimal movement; the principal singers are to wear masks. Crucial to the work’s aesthetic was the decision to set a Latin text - a choice, Stravinsky wrote, with “the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead but turned to stone and so monumentalized as to have become immune from all risk of vulgarization.” The impersonal grandeur of Stravinsky’s retelling is signaled by the opening chorus. At the same time, Oedipus’ downfall is vividly delineated by the gradual defoliation of his vocal line. The musical trajectory - a throbbing engine of fate - is as undeflectable as the drama. Despite Stravinsky’s principles and pronouncements - that music “is powerless to express anything at all” - the opera culminates in catharsis. Sophocles’ great tale of submission to fate resonates with Stravinsky’s religious sensibility: of submission to God."
• Semele (1744) is a 'musical drama by George Frideric Handel.
• Semele is the mother of Dionysus/Bacchus/Liber. (Myth of Pentheus)

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### 5. Poem

• The Ovide Moralisé (c. 1316–1328)
• About the work: A substantial French poem that translates and “Christianizes” Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Each myth is followed by a moral or allegorical commentary, reframing pagan transformations through a medieval Christian lens.
• Ovidian influence & irony: The entire text is explicitly based on the Metamorphoses. The ironic element comes from the juxtaposition of pagan stories—rich in erotic and often violent transformations—forced into pious Christian allegory. The poet’s attempts to extract moral lessons out of, say, the tale of Narcissus or Jupiter’s many seductions can strike modern readers as both fascinating and inadvertently humorous.

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### 6. Pantone Color

• Pantone 14-0955 Golden Glow
• A color that represents wealth and power, yet also foolish excess and unintended consequences.

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### 7. Fragrance

• Jo Malone’s Mimosa & Cardamom
• A scent that seems simple at first but evolves unexpectedly, like many of Ovid’s ironic reversals.

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### 8. Tree

• Fig Tree
• The Fig Tree carries a dual symbolism,(Buddha vs Judas) deceptive nature (the wasp!), and historical irony in mythology and culture.

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### 9. Country

• France
• Known for wit, satire, and irony in literature (Voltaire’s Candide, Molière’s comedies), much like Ovid’s tone in Metamorphoses.

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### 10. The USA Fit

• American Satire and Irony in Politics
• Figures like Mark Twain, The Onion, and The Daily Show reflect Ovid’s tradition of irony and mockery of power.

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### 11. Greek and Roman Influences on Irony

1. Homer’s Odyssey (Hermes helps Odysseus deceive others)
2. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (using humor to critique war)
3. Plato’s Gorgias (Socrates exposing rhetorical irony)
4. Seneca’s Thyestes (revenge, irony, and fate)
5. Juvenal’s Satires (mocking Roman society, much like Ovid)

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### 12. Nut

• Cashew
• Looks like a nut but is actually a seed, symbolizing things not being what they seem—just like many of Ovid’s ironic transformations.

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We're using a new translation of this wide ranging masterpiece that covers the history of the world, from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar in 42 BC in a mythico-historical framework comprising over 250 myths, 15 books, and 11,995 lines. The translation is by Stephanie McCarter, a Classics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee: Metamorphoses (A Penguin Classics) – Published November 8, 2022.

This will take us well into 2025. BCE read the Metamorphoses before in 2020/2021.

A Latin text is online at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.02.0029 (Hugo Magnus. Gotha (Germany). Friedr. Andr. Perthes. 1892).