‘I Shall Live On’
The Roman poet Ovid remains our contemporary despite a gap of two millennia.
Everywhere I turn, it seems, there is Ovid and his Metamorphoses, the youngest of the great epics of the Classical world. Its tales – of Diana and Actaeon, of Danaë, of Venus and Adonis – are brought to life in works displayed in two exhibitions, devoted to Artemesia Gentileschi and Titian, that currently grace London’s National Gallery. But Ovid’s influence extends far beyond Renaissance painting and the sculpture of Bernini.
Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare all stole from him, and his influence on literature shows no sign of waning: James Joyce called upon him, as did Ted Hughes and Margaret Atwood, while Jeffrey Eugenides cites him as the major influence on his 2002 novel Middlesex. Even Enid Blyton adopted him for her Tales of Ancient Greece. (Metamorphoses’ stories, as Llewelyn Morgan points out in his beautifully conceived new book, Ovid: a Very Short Introduction, are so ubiquitous and definitive that they are often referred to as simply ‘Greek mythology’, as if they had escaped their author.)
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