Hesiod Versus Ovid
Philosophy versus Cosmology
A Comparison of Creation in Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses
By Catherine Franklin
To fully understand the poems; Metamorphoses and Theogony, one needs to understand more about the writers. Hesiod was a greek poet, who lived around 700BC, and was inspired by muses to write epic poetry. Theogony is considered one of earliest works and concerns itself with the cosmogony, or the origins of the world and theogony, or the gods, and pays specific detail to genealogy (West, 1996: 521). Ovid, on the other hand, was a Roman poet, born in 43 BC – the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar and lived during Augustus’s reign. It’s said that his father took him to Rome to become educated in the ways of a public speaker or a politician, but instead Ovid used his education to write poetry (Gill, 2013). Ovid wrote in a time called the Neoteric period, and the goal of the neoteric poets was to revitalise Latin poetry, to write about new things but in a completely original style. They didn’t want to to imitate other poets, such as Homer. Ovid’s metamorphoses is classified as an epyllion (little epic), almost as though Ovid was imitating a god himself by giving history some form. Ovid is the author of Metamorphoses.
Secondly, one must be made familiar with the poems written by Ovid and Hesiod. The word theogony means birth of the Gods, and this is almost exactly what Hesiod does in his poetry – he speaks about the birth and life of the Gods. However, in this essay I will purely be focusing on the creation or birth of the Gods in Theogony. To Hesiod, the birth of the Gods and the creation of the world is the same thing, where the Gods actually form the world, with a giant emphasis on Zeus. However, Metamorphoses by Ovid takes on a slightly different approach. It describes the history of the world from the time of its creation until Caesar is assassinated and goes through apotheosis. While Hesiod’s poem follows a chronological order,
A Comparison of Creation in Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses
By Catherine Franklin
To fully understand the poems; Metamorphoses and Theogony, one needs to understand more about the writers. Hesiod was a greek poet, who lived around 700BC, and was inspired by muses to write epic poetry. Theogony is considered one of earliest works and concerns itself with the cosmogony, or the origins of the world and theogony, or the gods, and pays specific detail to genealogy (West, 1996: 521). Ovid, on the other hand, was a Roman poet, born in 43 BC – the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar and lived during Augustus’s reign. It’s said that his father took him to Rome to become educated in the ways of a public speaker or a politician, but instead Ovid used his education to write poetry (Gill, 2013). Ovid wrote in a time called the Neoteric period, and the goal of the neoteric poets was to revitalise Latin poetry, to write about new things but in a completely original style. They didn’t want to to imitate other poets, such as Homer. Ovid’s metamorphoses is classified as an epyllion (little epic), almost as though Ovid was imitating a god himself by giving history some form. Ovid is the author of Metamorphoses.
Secondly, one must be made familiar with the poems written by Ovid and Hesiod. The word theogony means birth of the Gods, and this is almost exactly what Hesiod does in his poetry – he speaks about the birth and life of the Gods. However, in this essay I will purely be focusing on the creation or birth of the Gods in Theogony. To Hesiod, the birth of the Gods and the creation of the world is the same thing, where the Gods actually form the world, with a giant emphasis on Zeus. However, Metamorphoses by Ovid takes on a slightly different approach. It describes the history of the world from the time of its creation until Caesar is assassinated and goes through apotheosis. While Hesiod’s poem follows a chronological order,
Bibliography: Gill, N. S. (2013). Ovid - The Roman Poet. Retrieved February 2013, from About.com: http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/ovid.htm Hesiod. (1914). The Theogony of Hesiod. (H. G. Evelyn White, Trans.) Lilburne. (2000). An Analysis of the Theogony of Hesiod. Ovid. (1922). Metamorphoses. (B. More, Trans.) Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co. Stephen, W. (1995). Imago Mundi: Another View of the Creation in Ovid 's Metamorphoses. The American Journal of Philogy , 116, 95-121. West. (1996). Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.). (S. Hornblower, & A. Spawforth, Eds.) Oxford.