Ovid's Metamorphoses Research Articles

Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England

The history of commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses reveals that Ovid's bold speech and erotic themes influenced political thought as well as poetic form in early modern England. As the poem's later editors respond to earlier editions, they leave a suggestive record of poetic and political interpretation. At stake in James's analysis is the relationship of political ideas -- just governance, parliamentary counsel, and the liberties of subjects -- to the erotic themes and wandering form of Ovid's poem. After considering the commentary tradition and especially the work of George Sandys, James identifies ways in which Ovid's poem influences the form of political thought in poetry.

The Deukalion and Pyrrha Myth in Paul Celan and Christoph Ransmayr

AbstractThis article examines the rewriting of Ovid's version of the Deukalion and Pyrrha myth by Paul Celan and Christoph Ransmayr. The myth relates how Jupiter destroys the world by deluge and how Deukalion and Pyrrha repopulate the earth. This myth of destruction and renewal finds resonance in the poetry of Celan and the novel Die letzte Welt by Ransmayr, one at the start of the literature of the post‐war years, the other closing the second half of the century. In the case of Celan, this article highlights a connection to the classical tradition little noticed in the critical literature. In turn, it also helps lift a corner of the veil on some of his enigmatic poetry. Ransmayr's version of the myth is embedded in his rewriting of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The analysis of that version also elucidates the sparse reference to the Holocaust in the novel. There are similar metaphoric responses to the myth in both contemporary writers. Furthermore, the critical response to both writers reflects the tumultuous relationship of German‐language literature and history since 1945.

The Old Man of Crete

The Old Man of Crete, which appears in Inferno XIV, 94–120, is one of the more puzzling figures in Dante's Comedy. Noting allusions to the dream of Nebuchadnezzar and to Ovid's Metamorphoses and its location the middle of the world as known to medieval Europeans have done little to illuminate it. One does better by elaborating on the fact that it is supported by two feet that represent the temporal and spiritual realms and on its relation to Rome and Damietta. That is, it should recall Dante's points in On World Government that peace and the careful separation of the temporal and spiritual realms are necessary for the fulfillment of human potential. Rome's prime condition during Augustus' reign, its current degeneration, due in large part to the Papacy's meddling in temporal affairs, and the blurring of the boundary between the two realms during the battle that occurred at Damietta during the Fifth Crusade all help to explain the statue. The themes of peace and the separation of the temporal and the spiritual realms also are prominent in all the scenes that occur on or next to the rivers of hell, which flow from the statue. That confirms the importance of those themes in the cantiche as a whole and in the scene in which the Old Man appears.

Collapsing Authority and ‘Arachnean’ Gods in Ovid's Baucis and Philemon (Met. 8.611-724)

Among the many delightful stories woven into Ovid's Metamorphoses, the tale of Baucis and Philemon in Book 8—not found before Ovid—has long proven a favourite with many readers. Narrated by the elderly Lelex, the story goes that Jupiter and Mercury are wandering on earth from door to door in need of shelter; they are received by a pious old couple, Baucis and Philemon, who entertain them with their utmost hospitality; the gods later reveal themselves, punish the inhospitable neighbourhood and reward the pious couple with everlasting life by turning them into sacred trees. This popular story has been the subject of at least two lighthearted operas, by Joseph Haydn (18th century) and Charles-François Gounod (19th century); both Rubens (c.1620) and Rembrandt (1658) have depicted scenes from the story on canvas; elegant poetic translations have been written by John Dryden (1693) and Jonathan Swift (1709). It is not difficult to understand why this story has provided particular enjoyment for the reader. In a poem which too often presents the gods as indifferent to justice and indulgent in their basest desires, here is a story which celebrates the proper relationship between divine and mortal, and pulls on moral, almost Christian heart-strings. Many might agree with G. Karl Galinsky's observation that the story has the effect of ‘radiating so obviously the sort of kindly warmth which some of Ovid's readers would like to find in more of [Ovid's] myths and, one suspects, in their daily lives.’

The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes. Sarah Annes Brown

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes. Sarah Annes Brown Richard MaxwellRichard Maxwell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 100, Number 2Nov., 2002 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493182 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 2002 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Chaos in Ovid's Metamorphoses and its Neronian Influence*

Like so much else in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the concept of chaos that opens the poem is inherited rather than invented. The notion of a primordial chaos of some kind is at least as old as Hesiod, and Ovid probably had a Hellenistic precedent for using chaos as the starting point of a collective poem, 1 but among literary descriptions of this state, Ovid’s account both is the most detailed and has been the most broadly influential. Its influence on Latin poets of late antiquity is one theme of Michael Roberts’s article elsewhere in this volume. At a much later time and in a different medium, Ovid’s description almost certainly lies behind the astonishing “Representation of Chaos” (“Vorstellung des Chaos”) that serves as the prelude to Haydn’s Creation. The title of this paper reflects its twofold aims. The first is to argue that chaos in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is not limited to the poem’s opening episode but has a pervasive presence in the poem, both in the physical world and, more significantly, in the moral lives of human beings. My second * Some of the material in this paper has been presented to audiences in Princeton, Palermo, Lexington, Virginia, and New York. I am grateful to my listeners on those occasions for many helpful comments and suggestions. 1 Both the song of Silenus in Virgil Ecl. 6.31ff. and the song of Clymene in G. 4.345–47 combine a number of mythological episodes with an opening section on chaos (this seems the natural import of G. 4.347: “aque chao densos diuum numerabat amores,” “she was relating the numerous loves of the gods from chaos onward”), and it seems likely that these references reflect the structure and content of a lost Hellenistic or neoteric poem or poems.

Lucan's Reception of Ovid's Metamorphoses

Two new trends emerged in Latin literary studies at the close of the last millennium. One was the surge of interest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an Augustan-age alternative to Vergil’s Aeneid; the other was the revaluation of the post-Augustan epics written by Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. Both trends helped lift the fortunes of these poets, which reached bottom as classicism and romanticism peaked in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. It is consequently tempting—and partly correct—to ascribe the rehabilitation of the Metamorphoses, on the one hand, and Neronian and Flavian epic, on the other, to a set of common causes. But more significant recently may have been the methodological tendency to dissociate Ovid from his followers in the epic genre. It used to

Creation in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Latin Poets of Late Antiquity

In the Latin poetry of late antiquity, the influence of Virgil is all pervasive. Ovid, typically, comes second, though a distant second. But Ovidian references and allusions recur with sufficient frequency throughout the period from the fourth to the sixth centuries to leave no doubt that both poets and readers were familiar with and continued to derive inspiration from his poetry: to take three examples, in the fifth century (probably), an anonymous poet, writing of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, compares those cities’ fall to the crash of Phaethon—the metamorphosis of the Heliads provides a counterpart to the transformation of Lot’s wife; in the last decade of the same century, the African poet Dracontius, it has been persuasively argued, employs language from the Ovidian Pygmalion story to describe the creation of Eve; finally, in the second half of the sixth century, Venantius Fortunatus, the “last poet of antiquity,” shows an affinity for the Ovidian persona of the Heroides, a woman mourning for her separated beloved, though, in Fortunatus’s case, the mourner may be a mother for a daughter traveling to a far country to be married (and soon to die), a Christian virgin for her divine bridegroom, or the queen and saint Radegund for her childhood companion and cousin, Amalfrid, in distant Constantinople. In the present paper, though, I shall concentrate on an Ovidian passage that has special resonance for Christian readers, the account of creation at the beginning of the Metamorphoses.

Love and allegory

In an image from the 1495 illustrated Venetian edition of the Liber ruralium commodorum, the pleasure garden is shown as a garden of love (see figure 7). This small garden is enclosed by a low wall and culminates in an elaborate fountain placed in the niche of a pergola constructed of living trees. At the center of the garden, on a grassy turf, stands a noblewoman holding a flower. A young man seated on a wall and playing a lute is serenading her. On either side of the garden space are small beds planted in orderly rows and bounded by low fences. A rabbit, which is a symbol of fertility, is shown rooting around in the soil. Although the fifteenth-century artist saw no problem in depicting Crescenzi's pleasure garden as a garden oflove, scholars have rarely made connections between Crescenzi's gardens and the existing poetic and literary discourse. For although Crescenzi refers to the pleasure garden as a locus amoenus, he neither directly invokes the literary and iconological tradition of the pleasure garden, nor avails himself of overtly poetic language. He does refer to the poetry of Virgil and even makes references to the Carmina Burana and Ovid's Metamorphoses, but he mines these sources for their practical value not their poetry.71 Given the interconnectedness of function and meaning in the garden, however, the relationship between Crescenzi's description and the use of gardens in medieval literature warrants re-examination. A careful reading of Crescenzi's descriptions of pleasure gardens reveals a deep connection to the existing literary tropes and conventions. The practical emphasis of Crescenzi's treatise, however, forces him to modify the ideal terms of literary and pictorial representations of gardens. In this way, comparing Crescenzi's practically oriented text to poetical and literary evocations opens up the possibility of exploring the interaction between the ideal and the real, the topos and the locus, the dreamable and the realizable. It is probably somewhere in the space between these two modalities that the truth of gardens resides, since the realisability of dreams and ideals is tangibly restricted by the actuality of climate, soils, water supply, pests, the passage of time and financial restrictions.

Penelope in Ovid's Metamorphoses 14.671

Penelope in Ovid's Metamorphoses 14.671 Mark Possanza In a passage in Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 14, the god Vertumnus, who has transformed himself into an old woman, is speaking to the orchardist nymph Pomona, who finds plants and trees more companionable than the opposite sex:1 concubitusque fugis nec te coniungere curas.atque utinam uelles! Helene non pluribus essetsollicitata procis nec quae Lapitheia mouitproelia nec coniunx +timidi aut+ audacis Vlixei. (668-71) timidi aut codd. Vertumnus offers three mythological exempla, Helen, Hippodamia, and Penelope, to persuade the nymph that if she did show an interest in men, she would attract more suitors than those illustrious heroines. Although the reference to Penelope in 671 is obvious and the epithet audacis looks genuine, it is not clear whether what lies hidden under the corrupt +timidi aut+ has to do with Penelope or Ulysses.2 Most of the proposed [End Page 89] emendations are based on the assumption that the words after coniunx belong to an epithet phrase that describes Ulysses.3 Of these, timidis audacis Vlixei, adopted by Heinsius from Vaticanus Barberinianus Lat. 70 (13th cent.),4 seems by far the least implausible, although the super fi cial attractions of the collocation timidis audacis begin to fade when one considers that the addition of timidis fits neither Ulysses nor the context. If we take audax as an epithet expressing a permanent quality of the hero, then timidus unduly limits the range of that quality embodied in audax, a quality that allowed Ulysses to best foes, the Cyclops, for example, who certainly cannot be called timidus. If, on the other hand, we are to interpret the combination of timidus and audax as the speaker ' s jibe at Ulysses' pretensions to heroic valor,5 it must be pointed out that such a jibe, while appropriate in the mouth of an Ajax, is completely out of place here where suitors, courtship, and sex are uppermost in the speaker's mind, not the ranking of Achaean warriors.6 Moreover, the [End Page 90] epithet phrase timidis audacis, by virtue of its riddling quality (are we to think of the encounter with Dolon? the slaughter of the suitors?) distracts attention from Penelope herself, who is, after all, the exemplum. In short, the addition of timidus either disparages the heroic stature of Ulysses in a context where such disparagement is clearly out of place or undercuts the force of the Penelope exemplum by giving prominence to the husband, when in fact it is Penelope who is the more important of the two. I want, therefore, to suggest that in its original form the line contained an epithet for Penelope, prudens, which can be taken as the equivalent of the Homeric epithet most often applied to Penelope, 7: line 671 would then read "proelia nec coniunx prudens audacis Vlixei." It may be coincidence that prudens, corresponding to Homeric , identifies the unnamed coniunx through her characteristic trait, which associates her with Pomona, who exhibits that same trait in shunning suitors. And it may be coincidence that prudens produces with audacis a pleasing iunctura that is worthy of our poet, bringing together the distinctive and contrasting traits of husband and wife that helped to make possible their reunion.8 But that both of these coincidences should occur within the metrical space () occupied by the corruption timidi [End Page 91] aut is one coincidence too many, especially in a context where Penelope ' s prudentia and Ulysses' audacia are relevant to the situation of Pomona and Vertumnus. There is more to these epithets than the clever collocation of contrasting traits. When a lover in disguise (Vertumnus), speaking to his beloved (Pomona), cites Penelope as an example of a woman much sought after by suitors, the poet achieves a heightening of the erotic tension through the Penelope exemplum because the meeting between Pomona and the disguised Vertumnus recalls the meetings between Ulysses, disguised as a beggar, and his wife, Penelope, in the Odyssey. In its present context the exemplum suggests that the revelation of identity, though long delayed (Odysseus' by his taking revenge on the suitors and Vertumnus' by his telling of the Iphis-Anaxarete tale), will bring the two...

Dead Parrots Society

Statius' Silvae 2.4 is ostensibly written as a consolation poem to the poet's friend and benefactor Atedius Melior on the death of his pet parrot. But Statius also uses the opportunity provided by the poem's subject matter to engage in a dialogue with his literary predecessors. I will argue here that Statius both inserts himself into and distinguishes himself from the Latin literary tradition through the use of two catalogues of birds, the first at 2.4.16-23 and the second at 2.4.26-28. Statius plays these catalogues off several stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses that also feature birds in order to comment on his own work, to locate it within the Latin tradition (particularly the poetry of Ovid), and to com? ment on the changing role of the poet under the emperors. Statius uses the form of, or at least certain elements of, the consolatio or epicedion1 for many of the Silvae (1.4,2.1,2.4,2.5,2.6,2.7,3.3, 5.1,5.3, 5.5), but these poems are concentrated in the second book whose overarching theme is death.2 Two of the poems in book 2 are explicitly marked by Statius as consolationes: Silvae 2.1 (on the death of Melior's slave boy Glaucias) and 2.6 (on the death of Ursus' slave boy Philetus) are strikingly similar in form and content.3 Although Silvae 2.4 is not specifically called a consolatio or epicedion by Statius in the preface, many scholars classify it as a consolatio because of its similarity to 2.1 and 2.6.4 The poem begins with the poet's address to the parrot and a

Learning about Dying: Mutability and the Classics in the Poetry of Michael Longley

Michael Longley has frequently been spoken of as a Indeed, Long ley studied classics at university, and revealed an interest in Odyssey in his first volume, No Continuing City (1969). Occasional classical references can be found in Longley's next three volumes, but description of Longley as a clas sicist has seemed particularly appropriate in last decade, as Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995) demonstrated an extended engagement with such classical texts as Iliad, Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Longley's most recent collection, no individual classical author or text finds centrali ty that Iliad, Odyssey and Metamorphoses did in two previous books, but there are many poems in The Weather in Japan (2000) that draw on classical contexts, including several that draw on Homer and several that overt ly place Longley as poet in a tradition. Cheeky and ironic, Remem bering Poets imagines personal relationships with a cluster of classical authors, before claiming a place for poet himself as the last of singing line.1 The classicist label, however, is frequently used to gesture toward more fundamental and general characteristics of Longley's writing, and it is this that provides a useful way of approaching more general theme of Longley's rela tionship to mutability, dislocation, and loss.

Mary Wroth's Poetics of the Self

Like Arachne of Ovid's Metamorphoses, challenging Minerva's weaving skill, Wroth defied Jacobean constraints upon women as producers of culture. And, like Arachne, Wroth suffered for her bold interventions. But she wove her prose and poetry of strong stuff, attaching it to life at all four corners, and, while not deceiving all, still telling her owne desires with skill that readers are only beginning to understand. So convincing is Wroth's poetic mapping of her interior world that the strong corners attaching Wroth's poetry to her social world have received less attention. I argue, however, that the more profoundly interior our reading of Wroth's poetry, the more her writing reveals its complicity in the negotiations between humanist poetic traditions and the Jacobean social world. This essay accepts Nancy K. Miller's invitation in Arachnologies, to attend to the enabling subjectivity of . . . a poetics attached to gendered

Gilbert White and the Natural History of Vergilian Echoes

The one element apparently missing from Selborne's rich acoustical environment was what White called polysyllabical, articulate echo,' the echo of a human voice. Such an echo, White relates, was eventually discovered, quite by accident, by a young gentleman who became separated from his companions on a summer evening walk. When he called after his companions, he was answered by a curious sound, which he recognized as an echo of his own voice. White prefaces his account of the echoes of Selborne with a quotation from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which gives a remarkably similar account of the mythological discovery of Echo by Narcissus:

Justice and Moral Regeneration: Lessons from the Treaty of Versailles

n the opening pages of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the hopes and promise of a new world are stillborn as it suffers steady moral degeneration in four successive ages. The golden age is defined by moral purity: law / and no compulsion then were needed; all / kept faith; the righteous way was freely willed. With the introduction of natural and human adversity in the silver age, this utopia gives way to the third age of bronze, prone / to cruelty, more quick to use fierce arms, and culminates in the final age of iron, when earth becomes a vast cabal of crime. Consumed by righteous anger over this decline, Jove, the divine ruler, is able to effect moral renewal only by decreeing the destruction of humanity through a global flood.2 From Ovid's tale to the contemporary world, moral regeneration is a persistent theme in human affairs. Jove's response mirrors a common human reaction to moral violation: outrage accompanied by the drive to recreate a morally coherent world. In the aftermath of violent domestic and international conflicts, aspirations for justice and reconciliation dominate the political agenda. Victims and their loved ones typically seek ways to right the wrongs that they have suffered. Political leaders must respond to this demand at the same time that they seek to effect peaceful political transition and social reconciliation. The path to regeneration seems fraught with moral difficulty, partly due to a conflictual model of the relationship between justice and reconciliation. On the one hand, demands for justice typically involve a backward-looking process of moral accounting that assigns responsibility for wrongdoing, which is the basis of determining punishments for perpetrators and reparations to victims. The process of reconciliation, on the other hand, is a forward-looking endeavor aimed

The Blackboard or Virtual Reality

Instructional technology used effectively can enhance significantly what we do in the classroom. Used thoughtlessly, it can confuse and annoy the student. This article presents a series of specific examples and caveats while exploring the creation and use of electronic resources in a variety of classes. The electronic resources covered in this article include Web pages, virtual reality (specifically, a MOO), and interactive exercises. While examples are drawn primarily from the author's experience teaching Classics, the lessons learned apply to all fields. The article concludes with a case study of how to develop materials for a class on the story of Baucis and Philemon from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Shakespeare’s Ovid: <i>The Metamorphoses</i> in the Plays and Poems

Notes on contributors List of abbreviations and note on the text Introduction Part I. The Background to Shakespeare's Ovid: 1. Myths exploited: the metamorphoses of Ovid in early Elizabethan England Robert Maslen 2. Ovid 'renascent' in Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander John Roe Part II. The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems: 3. 'And love you 'gainst the nature of love': Ovid, rape, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona William C. Carroll 4. Animals in 'manly shape as too the outward showe': moralizing and metamorphosis in Titus Andronicus A. B. Taylor 5. Venus and Adonis and Ovidian indecorous wit Pauline Kiernan 6. Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare's Sonnets Gordon Braden 7. Pyramus and Thisbe in Shakespeare and Ovid Niall Rudd 8. Niobe and the Nemean Lion: reading Hamlet in the light of Ovid's Metamorphoses Yves Peyre 9. The Winter's Tale: Ovid transformed A. D. Nuttall 10. Ovid, Golding, and the 'rough magic' of The Tempest Raphael Lyne 11. Ovidian v(o)ices in Marlowe and Shakespeare: the Actaeon variations Francois Laroque Part III. Shakespeare's Ovid in the Twentieth Century: 12. Shakespeare's Ovid in the twentieth century: a critical survey John Velz List of works cited 13. Shakespeare's Ovid, Ovid's Shakespeare: a methodological postscript Charles Martindale Index.

Vivae dixisses virginis ora: the discourse of color in Hendrick Goltzius's Pygmalion and the Ivory Statue

The Pygmalion and Galatea or, more accurately, Pygmalion and the Ivory Statue, invented, engraved, and published by Hendrick Goltzius in 1593, depic ts an early episode from the story told by Orpheus in Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses (figure I).1 Repelled by the shameless Propoetides, who had lost the power to blush, having been compelled by Venus to prostitute themselves, Pygmalion fashions a female effigy more beautiful and chaste than any mortal woman. With wondrous art he carves her from snowwhite ivory, giving her the features of a true virgin, whom, Ovid avows, “you would think living and desirous of being moved, were she not so modest.2 The splendor of her feigned body, its seeming ruddiness (simulati corporisignes), her implied ability to blush astonishes and enflames him. Deceived by the art that conceals art (ars adeo latet arte sua), he succumbs to his enlivening artifice, falling in love with the statue whose ivory substance he declines to accept (nec adhuc ebur esse fatetur), addressing it with a lover's blandishments, proffering many-colored flowers, and adorning it with a necklace and robes. Ovid insists that Pygmalion's desire operates at the very threshold of artifice, where the sculptor's art, embodied by the ivory maid (eburnea virgo), takes on the appearance of nature, and nature is heightened by the art to which no natural woman can aspire; and so, Pygmalion must constantly assure himself that the statue is no statue, kissing, addressing, and touching it.

An Allegorical Mirror: The Pool of Narcissus in Guillaume de Lorris’ Romance of the Rose

Borrowing from allegorical tradition of dream narratives figure of cheminement, Romance of Rose stages an who from very beginning of dream walks. This walk is no aimless wandering. The in dream (a persona to which I shall refer for sake of convenience as Lover) is indeed beckoned, without his knowledge, toward pool of Narcissus that Romance of Rose excises from narrative to which it apparently belongs, Ovid's Metamorphoses, in order to graft it at very core of its own oneiric space. While Ovidian pool was site of deadly self-reflection, such is not its function in Romance of Rose. As he looks into pool, Lover discovers two crystals where garden is reflected, as in mirror. The crystalline mirror of Romance of Rose substitutes for reflecting surface that silvery water provided in Ovid's text. It becomes speculum mundi where Lover sees entire garden reflected. But since Lover has already searched and l'afere et tot l'estre, the entire condition and nature of garden, when he comes upon fountain: (1) Mes j'alai tant destre et senestre que j'oi tot l'afere et tot l'estre dou vergier cerchie et veu. [1415-17--emphasis mine] (I wandered to right and to left until I had seen whole garden and explored all its features. [p. 23]) Why should he see this estre one more time reflected in pool? As we shall see, mirror of pool does not provide mere reflection of garden. The pool takes on new function, which has not so far been sufficiently recognized: it becomes site where text reflects its own allegorical vision. This self-reflection is critical in several respects for it implicitly calls into question distinction between perception and allegory as well as status of lyric as source of allegorical vision that text claims to be. Critics have proposed varied interpretations of crystals that Romance of Rose, in rather provocative move, grafts onto Ovidian pool. For C.S. Lewis, they figure poetic image of lady's eyes; for others, they figure lover's eyes, or reflection of his own eyes in those of lady. (2) Pursuing this line of investigation, more recent interpretations have read crystals as an allegory for speculum that eye is supposed to be. According to medieval optics, eye provides reflective surface upon which images of world are received, reflected and imprinted. As to part of eye which reflects shape, medieval optics will mostly localize it in crystalline humor; that is, in glass-like lens suspended in watery substance which, according to Aristotle, makes up eye. As Knoespel points out, existence of crystalline lens (that Galen called crystalline humor) was known to Latin West since beginning of 12th century, thanks to Hunain ibn Ishaq's Liber de oculis. (3) According to Liber de oculis: (4) The eye is composed of many different parts. Vision, however, arises from only one of these parts which is called crystalline humor. The rest of humors and small tissues exist only to aid crystalline humor. [...] The crystalline humor is white and luminous. It is not completely round, however, because it is somewhat flat. It is situated in middle of eye. It is white and shiny so that it may quietly receive variety of colors. With its white and shiny quality, it rapidly reflects colors just as we find in clear glass. A receptacle of images, fountain is, according to Knoespel, a representation of human eye, (5) and more specifically, of crystalline humor which functions as receptacle for color and form as well as means by which they are conveyed to optical nerve and brain: Hunain's description of eye's structure provides an important detail for our understanding of Guillaume's fountain, for it indicates that crystals beneath water, with their ability to receive color from sun's rays, are most likely physical allegory of crystalline humor situated within watery substance of eye. …

S. M. Wheeler, A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. x + 272. ISBN 0-8122-3475-8. £38.95/US$49.95.

S. M. Wheeler, A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. x + 272. ISBN 0-8122-3475-8. £38.95/US$49.95. - Volume 90