Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses as World Literature

Abstract

Among the many poetic accomplishments of the Augustan age, two stand out and tower over the rest: Vergil's Aeneid (written between 29 and 19 B.C.) and Ovid's Metamorphoses (published around A.D. 8). The reason is not just their epic length - 12 books for the Aeneid , 15 for the Metamorphoses - but their richness and scope of defining the human experience. It is for that reason they have become, deservedly, world literature, a dimension that is fully borne out by their reception in later literature, art, and music, a reception that has lasted to our days in both the old world and the new. The term 'world literature' also characterizes the roots of these poems in the Augustan milieu and their contributions to that milieu. On a very literal level, they encompass a world that was not limited any longer to Rome and Italy but a world that had been opened up into what the Romans called the orbis terrarum ; Ovid would designate Augustus as pater orbis (“father of the world”; Fasti 2.130). The special and enduring quality of Vergil's and Ovid's poems is that they extended this universal perspective to their treatment of the human condition. As all works of world literature, then, the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses are both products of their own culture-specific time and transcend it. Given the special character of the Augustan age, these two aspects are not dichotomous, but complementary. One further aspect of interplay needs to be stressed before I take up some particulars. Poets like Vergil and Ovid do not simply “reflect” the spirit of their age. Rather, they contributed to shaping it because they saw the creative possibilities.